She dreamed she heard a drum beating and never knew afterwards whether this was a dream or real. Thrum, thrum, thrum it went, reaching into all parts of her head. It might even have come from inside her head. And she thought she heard someone laughing and someone else crying. Then, without seeming to move, she found herself standing beside a boy who beat the drum. Its gold and green stripes were bright; its soft top vibrated; it sounded not only like a drum, but also like a roaring airplane, and it made lights as well as sounds, beams like searchlights dazzling at every stroke. She was begging the boy to stop. “Oh, please, Arthur, please, you’ll wake everyone up. Papa will hear you, oh please.”
The boy wore bandages on his head under a cricketer’s hat, and he laughed and went on beating the drum. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked, making the drum go thrum, roll like an airplane, the sound growing against her head. And she was Miss Agnes in the short humped skirt that the doll had worn, the feather of the doll’s hat tickling on her cheek. She began crying bitterly, could not stop, and so at last woke up.
It was very silent, also darkish. Yet there was light, too. At first, so sleepy, her eyes barely open, Charlotte had merely an impression of it, of a dazzling, or more, perhaps, a kind of shine, but when she opened her eyes properly at last, she found it the reflection of light on glass. The glass must have been on the picture, “Mark of the German Beast”; the light certainly was moonlight.
Yet it was odd. There was a difference somewhere. Something in the room had changed. Charlotte lay quite still, with her eyes open, and sensed that, not knowing why or by which sense—sight, smell, hearing. After a moment she turned her head slowly toward Emily’s bed and felt the difference still more strongly, yet as intangibly. Moonlight fell on the end of the bed, bleaching all color from the dark red counterpane. Charlotte turned her head away from it at once—and as quickly wanted to look back again, to reassure herself that nothing was different after all. And yet she could not, would not look. The simple turning of her head seemed to need as much effort, as much resolve, as a dive into water or a climb up a long wall. She stared at the ceiling instead, which looked blank and ordinary enough.
She dragged at her head, dragged it round at last. But she was not reassured at all. She sat up quickly, trembling violently, for the bed was flat, the counterpane smooth. There was no Emily. And when she looked at the wall, at the picture glass, it looked quite empty, as if a mirror hung there, not a picture after all. She slid down again, buried herself in bed, huddled the blankets round her, trembling, but not only from the cold.
For a while she might have slept again. What stirred her next was sound; a creak, footfalls. It was Emily, she thought in huge relief, out of bed, hence the empty bed, now coming back. She opened her eyes, peering out of the covers to find the moonlight much diminished. She did not yet want, dare, to see more, so she shut them again before they had begun to be able to decipher the rest of her surroundings.
“Emily,” she said. “Emily, is that you?” Her voice came in a kind of croak, which demonstrated to herself how frightened she was.
There was no reply. “Emily?” she said again, screwing her eyes more tightly shut than ever. This time a voice came, barely discernible, making whisperings that she could only gradually begin to recognize, rather desperate, pleading, frightened whisperings.
“Ag . . .” she heard, then “Ag . . . Aggie. Are you awake? Aggie, Aggie, Aggie! Wake up, Aggie.”
Charlotte was digging herself into the bed, rigid all over, clutching sheets and blankets. She could not, would not look.
“I’m not Aggie,” she was crying out, not knowing if aloud or in her head. “I’m not Aggie. Go away! I’m not her. I’m Clare, I’m Clare. No, I’m not, I’m Charlotte. I’m Charlotte, I’m Charlotte.” She was screaming it at last, again and again. “I’m Charlotte.”
The next thing she knew was Emily sitting up in bed, saying, “Clare, did you have a bad dream or something?”
“I think so,” Charlotte said, dazed and shivering, not knowing whether it had been a dream or not. There came a knock on the door and Miss Agnes’s little whispering voice.
“Are you all right, dear? Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry. I just had a bad dream,” Charlotte explained. She was still shivering all over and did not stop shivering till she fell asleep again.
The next day was the séance. Charlotte wanted nothing to do with it now. She was thinking such terrible thoughts, growing more frightened even than she had been in the night, understanding or perhaps fearing more. “Suppose,” she thought, “suppose it wasn’t a dream I had? Suppose I did go back again in time and I was Miss Agnes for a little while, and it was really Arthur whispering? Suppose another time I changed with her properly like I changed with Clare? It was her room then, after all, the one we’re in, and maybe I’m sleeping in her bed. Suppose I grew up like Miss Agnes? Oh, no,” she thought, horrified. “Oh, no.”
She only half believed in it. So many things were different. She did not look like Miss Agnes, and she could not believe she would look like Miss Agnes when grown up. But she did not feel she could be sure of anything. The séance seemed the more dangerous because so unknown and unknowable. And yet eventually, almost inevitably, she let Emily persuade her to hide in the window bay. It was as if she could not help herself.
Chapter 15
THE MEDIUM was a little brown, dumpy woman with skirts almost to the floor and a hat like a basin, pulled well down. Except for a purple wispy scarf about her neck, she looked as indeterminately round and ordinary as a loaf of bread.
“I thought she’d be different from that. I thought she might wear special clothes, you know, like fortune-tellers do.” Emily sighed disappointedly as they waited hidden in the alcove behind the brown velvet curtains.
“Perhaps she’s got better clothes on underneath her coat, and we’ll see them when she takes it off,” Charlotte suggested.
But the medium took off nothing save her gloves, revealing podgy, shapeless hands with a plain gold band on the wedding finger, and no such huge amethyst or topaz or turquoise rings as both Charlotte and Emily thought would be appropriate. Her hat hung over her eyes like continuous brows, from under which she peered morosely. She did not smile and almost did not speak, arranging the room as matter-of-factly as a doctor or lawyer arranging a consulting room.
The dim side lamps were unlit today. The center lamp was pulled right down over the table, which normally stood beside Mrs. Chisel-Brown’s armchair near the fireplace to hold her photographs. Now moved to the middle of the room, it held only one photograph, a large one of Arthur in uniform, at which Charlotte looked with interest from between the curtains, her face and mouth pressed to their thick and yielding pile. Arthur’s face was set as sternly as in the photograph upstairs, but did not grimace this time. His eyes gazed out as if they passed the photographer without noticing him. The moustache was different, too, clipped very neat and small.
The medium sat down at last, folding her hands over her fat brown bag, and beckoned to Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown to do the same; for though it was their house, they seemed uncertain, hesitant. They lowered themselves silently, and afterwards Miss Agnes came forward and took the farthest chair from Charlotte and Emily, the one that faced them across the table. She twisted her fingers together nervously and twisted and turned her head. She touched her throat sometimes with a gesture that Mr. Chisel-Brown also used for touching his moustache. The medium gazed at Miss Agnes for a minute; and then suddenly she turned and gazed at the curtains behind which stood Charlotte and Emily. Charlotte felt as if her eyes stared straight into the medium’s beneath that basin hat; but the medium’s face changed not at all, remained quite blank and still. After a moment she turned back to the table, to the light, to the three Chisel-Browns, and setting her bag beside her with a surprisingly large sound, she laid her hands out flat on the table. She nodded to the others, and they did the same, so that there were eight flat starfish hands.
; Nothing happened for a long time. Emily fidgeted and sucked the curtains and sighed with such loud sighs that Charlotte thought she would be heard. She herself wanted to cough. The velvet tickled her nose, and one of her feet started to go numb. Her eyes swam with gazing at the light. It felt like gazing into the bright center of a dim flower, the opposite of a sunflower, the hands like part of the flower, not part of the people.
Suddenly the medium spoke, making them jump after the long silence. She spoke slowly at first, then a little faster, though her voice kept its same flat tone.
“A . . . I get . . . I seem to get A. . . . Does anyone here know someone whose name begins with A?”
Mr. Chisel-Brown touched his moustache again and nodded sharply. Mrs. Chisel-Brown bent her head and left it bent. Miss Agnes said, “Yes,” very quietly.
“A wants to get in touch with someone else—A again—is that right?”
This time Miss Agnes nodded. No one else moved. The medium sat on solidly, hunched, and for another moment dumb. Then she spoke again, and her voice was changing, becoming deeper, fuller, faster, if still as monotonous.
“I have a message from A . . . to A . . . to Ag . . . Agnes—is that right? All right, all right, all right. Aggie, soldier, soldiers, soldiers—no soldiers, eyes blind—Aggie.”
The three Chisel-Browns were watching the medium, eyes fixed, faces tense. Charlotte realized she had never seen Mrs. Chisel-Brown concerned before about anything except food.
Again there was a pause, a long one, seeming longer at such a time.
The voice returned, deeper but getting higher, shriller as it went on.
“No soldiers, no soldiers, Aggie, eyes blind, eyes blind, Aggie, Aggie, Aggie.”
Miss Agnes leaned forward. She cried out, twisting, twisting with her hands. “Arthur, Arthur, is that really you . . .?”
But at the same instant the voice began to die to a mutter, an incoherent mumble. “Eyes blind, eyes blind . . .”
And suddenly everything had changed. The medium became rigid, staring, and remained so for a long moment, her rounded back turned straight as wood. Then all at once she started to shiver, to shake, like a brick wall shivering in an earthquake. Sounds were coming out of her very fast, but no words or no words they could comprehend. Charlotte found herself choked on the nap of the curtain, gripping it and staring, scarcely bothering any more to keep herself fully hidden.
The sounds turned into a regular panting; the movement became a regular rocking back and forth. A voice came, quite high this time, a child’s voice or a girl’s.
“Emily,” it cried. “Emily, Emily, Emily, are you there? Are you all right? I can’t find you, Emily, where are you? There’s so much noise, Emily, Emily.”
Emily had cried out before Charlotte could stop her and was running out into the room.
“Clare, oh, Clare,” she called, her voice excited at first, then almost immediately desperate. “Oh, Clare, where are you, Clare?” Coming face to face with the dumpy medium, she stared at her uncomprehendingly and burst into the most bitter tears—turning back uncertainly to Charlotte and, seeing only Charlotte, crying more bitterly than ever and rushing out of the room.
Chapter 16
ALL THAT night and day Charlotte was full of remorse and guilt. She thought she had forgotten or rather had not bothered to remember how wretched Clare must be away from her own time without even an Emily to be confided in. Also she had let herself be lulled by Emily’s apparent casualness into thinking she did not mind too much about the real Clare being gone, and so had not spent nearly as much time as she should have done in thinking of ways of escape, of ways for them to change back again to their proper times. She thought hard now to make up for it. She thought all night and day but found no ideas she had not already had, and none of them any good.
That Sunday was one of the unhappiest days she had ever spent, much worse even than the first days at Flintlock Lodge. Everyone seemed so unhappy. It was a gray, sooty, drizzling day, and the evergreens in the garden were black with rain. In the morning Charlotte and Emily were called by Mr. Chisel-Brown for a ceremonial lecture on how disgracefully, how deceitfully they had behaved, hiding in the alcove. But the lecture contained no proper fire, nor was Emily even faintly rebellious at receiving it. Having cried most of the night, she now scarcely spoke at all. At lunchtime no one else spoke either, except Miss Agnes now and then, who swam up from her own gloom to a trembling, jarring brightness that cheered no one, least of all Miss Agnes. It made Charlotte feel guilty about her, too, because the séance had been spoiled by herself and Emily.
After tea Emily said, “I’m going upstairs to bed now.”
“Shall I come up with you?”
“I think I’d like to be by myself, if you don’t mind,” replied Emily in a remote, polite, unfamiliar voice. Charlotte would not have minded going to bed then herself, for she felt heavy and sleepy after so little sleep the night before. However, she felt obliged now to stay downstairs in the dining room playing patience without interest. A short time later Miss Agnes came, and they played ludo together, which as a game of chance, not skill, was suited to their heavy minds that day. Miss Agnes looked like someone drowned.
“That voice,” she said at last, in a tone that veered uncertainly between a whisper and a cry, “that voice—was it a friend of yours, Clare?”
“Well, sort of,” Charlotte said.
“Who’d passed over, of course.”
“Well—yes—sort of,” said Charlotte again, for it was true, if not quite in the sense that Miss Agnes meant. “I’m sorry we spoiled it for you,” she said in a rush. “I’m awfully sorry. You might have heard more from your brother if it hadn’t been for us.”
“I’m not sure, dear,” said Miss Agnes, in a voice that was little and tight and precise, “I’m not sure I wanted to hear very much more. To tell you the truth, dear, I had not expected to hear anything. I’m not such a believer in spiritualism myself, but Mother insisted we have a séance here. She was so very upset about dear Arthur’s death.”
Miss Agnes shook the dice and threw a six and so set another counter on its way. No more was said for the moment. But later she added, in a similar voice, “To tell you the truth, dear, I was pleased not to hear more. I was, well, a little afraid of what he might have to tell.”
Charlotte could not think why Miss Agnes should have been afraid, but did not like to ask, so she said nothing. And in a while Miss Agnes began again, her voice very fast, while she stared at the ludo board and not at Charlotte at all.
“Arthur always wanted to be a soldier you know. He always wanted it; he dreamed of battles. Oh, I’ve told you both so many times, and you saw the books he had; you saw the stories that he tried to write, didn’t you, Clare dear? And you know he climbed the monkey puzzle tree; I told you that. He was always doing things like that, dear Arthur; he was so brave and foolhardy. But then he did not know how to finish what he began. That day he climbed the tree, he climbed right to the top, and then he could not get down. He could not move; he clung to the trunk and cried. Even on the ground I could see him crying. He cried and cried and cried. And he was so angry with me for seeing it, he would not speak to me for days.”
“How did he get down in the end?” asked Charlotte across a long silence. She was thinking that Arthur was like she was after all, for she had done that herself, got to the top of trees and then been afraid to move. But she had not thought Arthur was like her.
“A ladder, the gardener. It was all quite safe. But I’m not trying to tell you about the tree, Clare dear. Though why you should want to hear. . . . Come to think of it, I don’t know why I’m telling you; it’s a past story. You don’t really want to hear it, do you, dear?”
Charlotte did not know what Miss Agnes wanted her to say—yes, no, or neither. She did not even know what Miss Agnes wanted to talk about. In the end, she said nothing, and Miss Agnes went on talking regardless, hesitating at first, but quickly growing faster.
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��Well, it was like that, like the tree. He joined the army, I told you, dear, and I’d never seen him look so happy as the day he joined up, marching in his office clothes, with his hat and umbrella, but marching like a soldier with all the other men; not smiling, very stern, but so happy I could see. And so it was all the time he trained. He was happier, he said, than he had been all his life, serving his king and country. But when he went to France, it changed. I could scarcely recognize him when he came back on leave for the first time. I couldn’t persuade him to tell me why, to tell me anything except about the mud.
“Next time it was still worse. One night I heard him cry out in his sleep, and when I went in to his room, he was awake but trembling, trembling, and he said, ‘Aggie, Aggie,’ and that it was so terrible I could not imagine, and he was afraid he might run away if he went back, and they shot people who ran away. The guns were so noisy, he said, and asleep or awake he kept on hearing them when there were no guns. He broke down. He said he could not, would not go back. I said he must, of course, and he knew that, too, and, of course, he did go. After that night he did not even suggest not going; he did not mention it.
“Then, when he went, I waited and waited. But no letter, no news came, nothing till the telegram to say he had been killed.”
“But the letter,” said Charlotte. “You had that letter to say he had been brave, from the colonel, you said.”
“I believe, dear, they sent such letters anyway. To spare relatives’ feelings, so it is said.”
“Well, I don’t believe he wasn’t brave. I don’t believe it.”
“Dear,” said Miss Agnes stiffly, growing pinker in the cheeks, her hands tight and trembling, “dear, of course he was brave. Arthur always was, even if afraid. Now is it not your turn to play? It is really getting to your bedtime, and I’ve been talking much too long—and such nonsense, too.” At which she shook the shaker wildly, so wildly that the die skidded out, across the table, to the floor, where both of them crawled to look for it, flustered, apologetic, but glad of the diversion, in a way.
Charlotte Sometimes Page 11