Hag's Nook dgf-1

by John Dickson Carr

  "Eh?" said Dr. Fell, looking up blankly.

  Mrs. Fell stated a grievance. "Tea, Gideon! And I wish you'd let that horrible beer alone, though goodness knows the butter-cakes are bad enough, and it's so stuffy in there, and I see the rector and Miss Starberth coming up the road as it is." There was the sound of a deep breath being drawn, whereupon Mrs. Fell summed it up saying, "Tea!"

  The doctor rose with a sigh, and they heard her fluttering down the passage, repeating, "Bother, bother, bother!" like the exhaust of an automobile.

  "We'll save it," said Dr. Fell.

  Dorothy Starberth was coming up the lane, moving with her free stride beside a large and bald-headed man who was fanning himself with his hat. Rampole felt a momentary qualm. Easy! - Don't act like a kid, now! He could hear her light, mocking voice. She was wearing a yellow jumper with a high neck, and some sort of brown skirt and coat into whose pockets her hands were thrust. The sun glimmered on her rich black hair, caught carelessly round her head; and as she turned her head from side to side you could see a clear profile, somehow as poised as a bird's wing. Then they were coming across the lawn, and the dark-blue eyes were fixed on him under long lashes... .

  "I think you know Miss Starberth," Dr. Fell was saying. "Mr. Saunders, this is Mr. Rampole, from America. He's staying with us."

  Rampole found his hand grasped with the vigour of muscular Christianity by the large and bald-headed man. Mr. Thomas Saunders was smiling professionally, his shaven jowls gleaming; he was one of those clergymen whom people praise by saying that they are not at all like clergymen. His forehead was steaming, but his bland blue eyes were as alert as a scoutmaster's. Mr. Saunders was forty years old, and looked much younger. He served his creed, you felt, as clearly and unthinkingly as he had served Eton (or Harrow, or Winchester, or whatever it was) on the playing-fields. Round his pink skull a fringe of fair hair fluffed like a tonsure, and he wore an enormous watch-chain.

  "I am delighted to make your acquaintance, sir," the rector boomed, heartily. "I – ah - was pleased to know many of your countrymen during the war. Cousins over the sea, you know; cousins over the sea!"

  He laughed, lightly and professionally. This air of professional smoothness and ease irritated the American; he murmured something and turned towards Dorothy Starberth....

  "How do you do?" she said, extending a cool hand. "It's jolly seeing you again!- How did you leave our mutual friends, the Harrises?"

  Rampole was about to demand, "Who?" when he caught the expectant innocence of her glance and the half-smile which animated it.

  "Ah, the Harrises," he said. "Splendid, thank you, splendid." With a startling burst of inspiration he added. "Muriel is cutting a tooth."

  As nobody seemed impressed by this intelligence, and he was a trifle nervous about the ring of authenticity he had put into it, he was about to add further intimate details of the Harris household when Mrs. Fell suddenly shot out of the front door in another of her cuckoo-like appearances, to take charge of them all. She made a variety of unintelligible remarks which seemed to be chiefly concerned with beer, butter-cakes, and the dear thoughtfulness of the rector; and had he quite recovered from being drenched by that horrible water-sprinkler; and was he sure he hadn't got pneumonia? Mr. Saunders coughed experimentally, and said he hadn't.

  "Dear me ... bother!" said Mrs. Fell, walking into some plants. "So near-sighted, blind as a bat, dear Mr. Saunders. ... And my dear," whirling on the girl, "where is your brother? You said he'd be here."

  Momentarily the shade was back on Dorothy Starberth's face, as Rampole had seen it last night. She hesitated, putting a hand to her wrist as though she would like to look at her watch; but taking it away instantly.

  "Oh, he'll be here," she said. "He’s in the village-buying some things. He'll be along directly."

  The tea table was set out in the garden behind the house; it was shaded by a large lime tree, and a singing stream ran a few yards away. Rampole and the girl lagged behind the other three on the way.

  "Baby Eadwig," said Rampole, "is down with mumps-"

  "Smallpox. Ugh, you beast! I thought you were going to give me away. And in a community like this-I say, how did they know we'd met?"

  "Some old fool of a lawyer saw us talking on the platform. But I thought you were going to give me away."

  At this extraordinary coincidence they both turned to look at each other, and he saw her eyes shining again. He felt exhilarated, but prickly. He said, "Ha!" rather like Dr. Fell, and noticed the dappling of shadows that trembled on the grass, and they both laughed. She went on in a low voice:

  "I can't tell you-I was feeling desperately low last night, what with one thing and another. And London is so big, and everything was wrong. I wanted to talk to somebody. And then you bumped into me and you looked nice, so I did."

  Rampole felt a desire to give somebody a joyous poke in the jaw. In imagination he lashed out triumphantly. He had a sensation as though somebody were pumping air into his chest.

  He said, not wittily, but be honest with yourself, sneering peruser! - very naturally:

  "I'm glad you did."

  "So am I."

  "Glad?"

  "Glad."

  "HAH!" said Rampole, exhaling the air in triumph.

  From ahead of them rose Mrs. Fell's thin voice. "Azaleas, petunias, geraniums, hollyhocks, honeysuckle, and eglantine!" she shrilled, as though she ' were calling trains. "I can't see 'em, on account of being so nearsighted, but I know they're there." With a beaming if somewhat vague smile she grasped the newcomers and urged them into chairs. "Oh, Gideon, my love, you're not going after that horrible beer, are you?"

  Dr. Fell was already bending over the stream. Puffing laboriously, he extracted several beaded bottles and hauled himself up on one cane.

  "Notice, Mr. Rampole," said the rector, with an air of comfortable tolerance. "I often think," he continued, as though he were launching a terrible accusation but slyly smiling to mitigate it-"I often think that the good doctor can't be English at all. This barbarous habit of drinking beer at tea-time my dear sir! It isn't-well, it isn't English, you know!"

  Dr. Fell raised a fiery face.

  "Sir," he said, "it's tea that isn't English, let me inform you. I want you to look at the appendix of my book, Note 86, Chapter 9, devoted to such things as tea, cocoa, and that unmentionably awful beverage known as the ice-cream soda. Tea, you will find, came into England from Holland in 1666. From Holland, her bitter enemy; and in Holland they contemptuously called it hay-water. Even the French couldn't stand it. Patin calls tea l’impertinente nouveaute du siecle,' and Dr. Duncan, in his Treatise on Hot Liquors-"

  "And in front of the rector, too!" said Mrs. Fell, wailing.

  "Eh?" said the doctor, breaking off with some vague idea that she thought he was swearing. "What, my dear?" "Beer," said Mrs. Fell.

  "Oh, hell!" said the doctor, violently. "Excuse me, excuse me." He turned to Rampole. "Will you have some beer with me, my boy?"

  "Why, yes," the other answered, with gratitude. "Thanks, I will."

  "-and coming out of that cold water, it'll probably give you both pneumonia," Mrs. Fell said, darkly. She seemed to have an idee fixe on the subject of pneumonia. "What it's coming to I don't know-more tea, Mr. Saunders, and there are the cakes beside you with everybody catching pneumonia the way they are, and that poor young man having to sit up in that draughty governor's place tonight; he'll probably have pneu -"

  There was an abrupt silence. Then Saunders began talking very smoothly and easily about the flowers, pointing to a bed of geraniums; he seemed to be trying to alter their minds by altering the direction of their gaze. Dr. Fell joined in the discussion, glowering at his wife. She was quite unconscious of having opened that forbidden subject. But constraint had come upon the party under the lime tree, and would not go away.

  A soft pink afterglow had crept across the garden, though it would be yet light for several hours. In silver flakes through the tree branches the
west glowed clear and warm. All of them, even Mrs. Fell, were silent, staring at the tea-service. A wicker chair creaked. Distantly they could hear the clank and jangle of bells; and Rampole pictured the cows, somehow lonely in a vast meadow, being driven home through mysterious dusk. A deeper hum pulsed in the air.

  Dorothy Starberth rose suddenly.

  "Stupid of me!" she said. "I'd almost forgot. I must go in to the village and get some cigarettes before the tobacconist closes." She smiled at them, with an affected ease which deceived nobody; the smile was like a mask. She glanced with elaborate carelessness at her watch. "It's been divine being here, Mrs. Fell. You must come over to the Hall soon. I say," with an air of inspiration, to Rampole,

  "wouldn't you like to walk along with me? You haven't seen our village yet, have you? We've rather a good early Gothic church, as Mr. Saunders would tell you."

  "Yes, indeed." The rector seemed to hesitate, looked at them in a heavily paternal way, and waved his hand. "Go along, do. I'll have another cup of tea, if Mrs. Fell doesn't mind. It's so comfortable here," he beamed on his hostess; "makes one ashamed of being lazy."

  He sat back with a smug air, as of one who murmurs, "Ah, I was young once!" but Rampole had the impression that he didn't like it at all. It suddenly struck the American that this patronizing old bald-head (sic, in Rampole's inflamed thoughts) had a more than clerical interest in Dorothy Starberth. Why, damn the man-! Come to think of it, the way he had hung over her shoulder, smoothly, as they walked down the lane....

  "I had to get out of there," the girl said, half breathlessly. Their quick footsteps rustled in the grass. "I wanted to walk, fast."

  "I know."

  "When you're walking," she explained, in that same breathless voice, "you feel free; you don't feel you have to keep things in the air, like a juggler, and strain yourself not to drop one Oh!"

  They were going down the shadowed lane, where the grass muffled their footsteps. Its junction with the road was hidden by the hedgerows, but they became aware of feet scuffling in the dust out there, and a murmur of conversation. Abruptly one voice rose. It came twitching through the soft air, alive and ugly.

  "You know the word for it right enough," the voice said. "The word is Gallows. Yes, and you know it as well as I do."

  The voice laughed. Dorothy Starberth stopped, and her face-sharp against the dark-green hedge-was a face of fear.

  Chapter 4

  "I SHALL have to hurry to catch that tobacconist," the girl declared, instantly. Her small voice was raised, insistent to be heard. "Good Lord! it's past six o'clock!-But then he always reserves a box of my special brand, every day, and if I'm not there ... I say! Hullo, Martin!"

  She stepped out into the road, motioning Rampole to follow. The murmur of voices had frozen. Standing in the middle of the road, still with his hand half lifted, a slightly built young man had twisted round to face her. He had the spoiled, self-conscious face of one who generally gets his way with women, with dark hair and a contemptuous mouth; and he was a little drunk. He swayed a little now. Behind him Rampole could see a crooked track in the white dust to show his progress.

  "Hello, Dot!" he said, abruptly. "You can certainly sneak up on a fellow. What's the idea?"

  He spoke with a strong attempt at an American accent. Laying a hand on the arm of the person with him, he assumed dignity. This latter was obviously a relation; his features were blunt where the other's were delicate, his clothes rode high on him, and his hat did not have the same careless curve as Martin Starberth's, but there was an undeniable resemblance. He looked embarrassed, and his hands seemed too big.

  "Been - been in to tea, Dorothy?" he asked, fumbling. "Sorry we're late. We - we were detained."

  "Of course," the girl said, impassively. "May I present: Mr. Rampole, Mr. Martin Starberth, Mr. Herbert Starberth. Mr. Rampole's a countryman of yours, Martin."

  "You an American?" demanded Martin, in a brisk manner. "That's good. Whereya from? New York? That's good. I just left there. I'm in the publishing business. Whereya staying? - Fell's? That old codger. Look here, come on up to the house and I'll give you a little drink."

  "We're going to tea, Martin," Herbert said, with a sort of stolid patience.

  "Ah, yell with that tea stuff. Listen, you come up to the house-"

  "You'd best not go to tea, Martin," said his sister; "and, please, no more to drink. I wouldn't care, but you know why."

  Martin looked at her. "I'm going to tea," he said, sticking out his neck, "and, what's more, I'm going_ to have another little drink. Come on, Bert."

  He had forgotten Rampole, for which the American was grateful. He adjusted his hat. He brushed his arms and shoulders, though there was no dust on him, and straightened up, clearing his throat. As the stolid Herbert guided him on, Dorothy whispered: "Don't let him go there, and see that he's all right by dinner-time. Do you hear?"

  Martin heard it, too. He turned, put his head on one side; and folded his arms.

  "You think I'm drunk, don't you?" he demanded, studying her.

  "Please, Martin!"

  "Well, I'll show you whether I'm drunk or not! Come on, Bert."

  Rampole quickened his step beside the girl as they moved off the other way. As they turned a bend in the road he could hear the cousins arguing, Herbert in a low voice, and Martin vociferously, his hat pulled down on his eyebrows.

  For a time they walked in silence. That momentary encounter had jarred against the fragrance of the hedgerows, but it was swept away by the wind over the grass in the meadows that surrounded them. The sky was watery yellow, luminous as glass, along the west; firs stood up black against it, and even the low bog water had lights of gold.

  Here were the lowlands, sloping up into wolds; and from a distance the flocks of white-faced sheep looked like toys out of a child's Noah's ark.

  "You mustn't think," the girl-said, looking straight ahead of her and speaking very low - "you mustn't think he's always like that. He isn't. But just now there's so much on his mind, and he tries to conceal it by drinking, and it comes out in bravado."

  "I knew there was a lot on his mind. You can't blame him." '

  "Dr. Fell told you?"

  "A little. He said it was no secret."

  She clenched her hands. "Oh no. That's the worst of it. It's no secret. Everybody knows, and they all turn their heads away. You're alone with it, do you see? They can't talk about it in public; it isn't done. They can't talk about it to me. And I can't mention it either. . . ."

  A pause. Then she turned to him almost fiercely.

  "You say you understand, and it's nice of you; but you don't! Growing up with the thing... I remember, when Martin and I were tiny children, mother holding us each up to the window so that we could see the prison. She's dead now, you know. And father."

  He said, gently, "Don't you think you're making too much of a legend?"

  "I told you - you wouldn't understand."

  Her voice was dry and monotonous, and he felt a stab. He was conscious of searching desperately for words, feeling his inadequacy every time he found one; yet groping after a common point with her, as he might have groped after a lamp in a haunted room.

  "I'm not intelligent about practical things," he said, blankly. "When I get away from books or football, and up against the world, I'm just mixed up. But I think that, whatever you told me, I would understand it, provided it concerned you."

  Across the lowlands drifted a clangor of bells. A slow, sad, ancient clangor, which-swung in the air and was a part of it. Far ahead, the church-spire among the oaks caught the last light. Birds twittered into flight from its belfry as the bell notes clashed with iron weariness, and a rook was cawing. They had stopped by a stone bridge over a broad stream. Dorothy Starberth turned and looked at him.

  "If you can say that," she said, "it's all I could ask."

  Her lips moved slowly, with a faint smile, and the breeze was smoothing her dark hair.

  "I hate practicality," she went on, with s
udden vehemence. "I've had to be practical ever since father died.

  Herbert's a good old dependable horse, with about as much imagination as that hayrick over there. And there's Mrs. Colonel Granby, and Leutitia Markley, and Mrs. Payne who uses the ouija board, and Miss Porterson who almost gets round to reading the new books. There's Wilfrid Denim, who comes to pay me attentions every Thursday night at nine P.M. precisely, runs out of new conversational matter at nine five, and continues to talk about a play he saw in London three years ago, or else illustrates tennis strokes till you think he's jolly well got St. Vitus' dance. Oh yes - and Mr. Saunders. St. George for Merrie England, and if Harrow beats Eton this year the country's in the hands of the Socialists. Woof!"

  She wound up breathlessly, again shaking her head with vehemence until she had to smooth back the cloudy hair. Then she smiled, rather shame-facedly. "I don't know what you'll think of me for talking like this-"

  "I think you're absolutely right!" Rampole returned, enthusiastically. He had particularly relished that crack about Mr. Saunders. "Down with ouija boards. A bas le tennis. I hope Harrow knocks Eton for a row of brick-ahem! What I mean to say is, you're absolutely right and long live Socialism."

  "I didn't say anything about Socialism."

  "Well, say something about it, then," he offered, magnanimously. "Go on, say something about it. Hurrah for Norman Thomas! God bless-"

  "But why, silly? Why?"

  "Because Mr. Saunders wouldn't like it," explained Rampole. The thesis seemed to him a good one, if vague. But another idea struck him, and he inquired, suspiciously: "Who is this Wilfrid person who comes round to see you every Thursday night? 'Wilfrid' is a lousy name, anyway. It sounds like somebody with marcelled hair."

  She slid off the coping of the bridge, and she seemed somehow set free in the strength of her small body laughter-real and swashbuckling, as he had heard it the night before-had got out of its prison, too.

  "I say! We'll never get those cigarettes if we don't hurry. . . . I feel the way you talk. D'you want to run for it? But take it easy; it's a quarter of a mile."

  Rampole said, "What ho!" and they clipped out past the hayricks with the wind in their faces, and Dorothy Starberth was still laughing.