It had been their cherished custom for many years to leave their faithful readers, their burglarious clientele, their candidates for firsts in Greats, their cultured bibliophiles to their own disconsolate devices at seasons of the year convenient to them all, and to forgather at certain famous golf courses; and they had chosen that admirable links, Littleford, for their spring pilgrimage in 1924. They intended to stay a week, and had secured their rooms prudently in advance.
They travelled down together in Mr Partridge's car, and on entering the Royal Hotel were met by a flaccid specimen of the genus Small Hotel-keeper, who was chafing his palms in a deprecating manner.
Mr Partridge addressed him sternly. 'You have four rooms engaged for us in my name, which is Partridge.'
'I regret to say, sir, only three,' replied the flaccid specimen, 'but I have secured an excellent room at a boarding-establishment close at hand,' and he frotted his clammy hands again.
If Mr Partridge had a failing it was a tendency to be choleric at times — and this was one of them. As the organiser of the party it would be his painful duty to sample the boarding-establishment, and, cherishing a peculiar loathing for this type of accommodation, he wasn't having any.
'Look here,' he said with truculence, 'I have your letter stating that you had reserved four rooms, and I must ask you to keep your word.'
Something in Mr Partridge's demeanour daunted the specimen, and he shuffled off down the passage to his office.
Mr Cranmer, who is incorrigibly a man of peace, began suggesting he was rather partial to boarding-houses and wouldn't mind a bit, but Mr Partridge waved him aside and strode menacingly down the passage after the hotel-keeper, who went through the outer office into a small room at the back, which Mr Partridge saw was already occupied by a female of the Buxom Brighton Barmaid type, with whom the landlord began a colloquy, in a whisper sufficiently audible to allow Mr Partridge to catch a sentence here and there.
'Well, chance it,' murmured the female.
'But supposing——' the flaccid one — obviously a hen-pecked one — started feebly to object.
'His look-out,' replied the female. 'Anyway, you've took a room for him at Mrs Brown's, it's his look-out.'
'I don't like it,' said the flaccid one, 'honest I don't,' and then he shuffled out.
'I find,' he said shiftily, 'that I can manage the fourth room, but I assure you the boarding establishment is a clean, comfortable house.'
'No thanks,' said Mr Partridge. 'Show us the four rooms, please.'
Leading the way, the specimen unlocked in turn three rooms on the second floor, in which the others were deposited, and then he took Mr Partridge up to the third and opened a door at the end of a passage.
'This will be yours, sir,' he said, his eyes on his fingers, and a moment later Mr Partridge was alone, and receiving a sharp, vivid, yet vague impression of malaise. He had had such impressions just once or twice before — immediate, apparently causeless aversions for certain persons, places, things, rooms — yes, rooms. He experienced again this irritating, irrational distaste when that little worm closed the door of Number 39. It wasn't violently obtrusive, but it was certainly there.
He looked round the room. It was furnished with the conventional Royal Hotel properties — a chest of drawers with a couple of knobs missing, a wardrobe slightly down at one heel, one picture at a rakish angle, depicting Mr Marcus Stone's reactions to Sacred and Profane Love, a row of pegs with one missing. Mr Partridge, being an essayist of the lightest sort, was observant of detail, and he noted that a new panel had been inserted beneath one of them. Then there was the loutish wash-stand with a mirror, into which he gazed. Yes, certainly he wanted a holiday — one could almost tell a man's age from his eyebrows, his were growing wispy and errant — and then he stepped back abruptly, for it seemed to him for a moment that the image he saw reflected had changed — as if someone had peeped over his shoulder and — absurd of course! It must be because the room was so dark. He began fussing with the blind, which refused to go right up. Well, curse the thing! He started and looked back quickly over his shoulder — it was only the Boots with his bag. 'This is a damnably dark room, Boots,' he said testily. 'See if you can get the blind up a little.'
'Always seems a bit dim,' said the Boots, putting down the bag and jerking at the blind cord. 'There, sir, that's a little better.'
Mr Partridge changed quickly into his golf attire and went down to lunch. Afterwards they took sides in the traditional four-ball match which inaugurated these reunions. The play was not of a very par standard, and the balls were slyly provocative in concealing themselves, so that it was growing dusk as they entered the little garden of the Hotel. As they came through the gate William Cranmer said to Mr Partridge, 'Got a decent room, Jim?'
'No,' said the latter. 'Dark and poky, but it will do all right. It's that one, I think, next to the chimney, with the small window.'
'Well,' said Willie, 'there's someone in there, I saw him look out for a moment.'
Mr Partridge stared up for a moment. 'Probably the Boots,' he said, a little shortly.
When he went up to dress for dinner, he found his distaste for Number 39 decidedly intensified. He went to the window and looked out. Yes, it was the one next to the chimney. He could find no trace of any activity by the Boots.
In fact, there was too little activity on the part of everybody in this rotten place — no hot water, for example. He'd let his ancient friend Armitage know what he thought of R.A.C. recommended Hotels! He rang the bell viciously, which presently resulted in a timid knock — a maid with a japanned tin can — who came in with the expression of a heifer facing the pole-axe, hurried across the room, rattled down the can in the basin, and ran out again.
'Do I look as great a menace to rustic virtue as all that?' wondered Mr Partridge. 'I should like to think so, but I don't.' And he set himself to a smart piece of changing.
During dinner the conversation took the natural form of a riot of golf-shop — the usual immortality for green-finders, the usual Nirvana for shanks, tops, and flubs, but afterwards in the lounge they turned to less momentous topics. For example, Mr Partridge asked Willie Cranmer if he had secured any notable prizes in the book-market lately.
'Nothing of any great value,' he replied, 'but one thing which interests me very much. It's a privately printed — very badly printed — account of some troublesome events in an Essex Manor, dated 1754. Its abominable title-page is inscribed as follows:
THE HAUNTINGE OF MY HOUSE
BY
CHAS. SWINTON
A GENTLEMAN OF ESSEX.
'He seems to have inherited the place in 1750, but his joy at such good fortune speedily turned to foreboding and exasperation. He goes into great detail, and certainly Swinton Manor seems to have housed a disturbing company. He must have had his fair share of guts and pertinacity to have stuck it as long as he did. It's the most curious chronicle of its kind I ever read. Eventually he had the house pulled down, having endured enough.'
'It's a very curious subject, this business of hauntings,' said Mr Frith judicially. 'For one thing it is a nice instance of the scepticism of men, when they want to be skeptical — how often they prefer the greatest credulity! Looked at dispassionately, the evidence for such phenomena is far more catholic and irrefutable than is the evidence for ninety-nine things out of a hundred which are accepted without question. Read that encyclopaedic catalogue of Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, if you want to know how full and detailed that evidence is. Yet the average man mocks at the suggestion that even one out of this multiplicity is anything but an invention or an hallucination.'
'I think you have suggested the real reason,' said George Dunbar. 'They pretend to refuse to believe because they'd vastly prefer to disbelieve, and comparatively very few have ever been compelled by personal experience to face such facts. Even then, when the intimidating vision is fading, they are satisfied to mutter something about "Subjective and Objective" — leave it a
t that and change the subject.'
'If there is one certain thing,' said Mr Partridge, 'it is that they can be objective. The identical experience has been shared a thousand times, the same apparition has been viewed by dozens of different people at the same and different times. The evidence for that is beyond argument.'
'I believe in such phenomena in a certain sense,' said Willie Cranmer, 'but I am not prepared to allow them a supernatural — in the more esoteric sense of the word — existence. By some unexplained means, certain places, certain things, become impregnated, kinetic, sensitised. How or why one room, one chair, even one W.C., allows itself to be so impregnated is an utterly inexplicable mystery. One battlefield is "haunted"; a thousand are as placid as Port Meadow. Usually, I grant you, there is evidence that a potent emanation of some passion has at some time been released and operative in such disturbed areas, though not, I believe, by any means in every case. But the most singular thing to my mind about the supernatural is its caprice, its fortuitousness, its rarity — and indeed its essential lack of purpose. The eloquent and, considering its date, ingenious explanation of Lytton covers but a small percentage of the data and, even if one accepts it in its entirety, a vast legion of instances of hauntings and haunted would be left still as fortuitous, as unrelated, and as inexplicable.'
'I knew a house,' said George Dunbar, 'in which I would not spend a week alone for one thousand guineas. Not merely is it impregnated, it is dripping with horror and beastliness. It is dark and brooding and has — it seems to me — an evil life of its own. Everyone, I know, who has entered it has taken an immediate and increasing loathing for it. It has a shocking record of suicides — eight in thirty years, but I agree with Willie that I never got the impression that there was any mind or will animating those coughs one heard, the steps behind one, the dim, drawn faces one thought one saw at windows; and all the symposium of dread one experienced there. I mean that one was left convinced that there was no consciousness working in our space and time — these things seemed to be passing in and out of another dimension — that is vague, but just the impression I got. All these phenomena seemed quite purposeless, and therefore should not have been, as they were, frightening — puppets without strings — like the mechanical recording of a gramophone.'
'I think that's a better simile than mine,' said Cranmer. 'Once the record is made by the living it goes on long after the recorder is dead, repeating and repeating until it wears out, and there is evidence that the influence does wear out in certain senses. All such comparisons between affairs on one plane and on another are fallacious, but they help to clear the air of debate.'
'But someone has to put the record on,' objected Mr Partridge.
'I suggest it is never taken off,' replied Cranmer.
'What a typical ghost discussion it has been,' thought Mr Partridge, 'hopelessly inconclusive, tentative, vaguely disturbing, subjective, guess-work.'
At a quarter to twelve they decided to go to bed. Mr Partridge and Willie Cranmer went out for a breath of air.
'Did you find you had identified your room all right?' the latter asked.
'Yes,' said Mr Partridge, wondering slightly irritably why the subject seemed to have this mild fascination for his old friend.
The night was fine, with a three-quarter moon. Willie Cranmer stared up at the hard shadows round the chimney for a moment or two, and then said, 'Well, let's go to bed. You're sure you're quite comfortable?'
'Oh, quite!' said Mr Partridge in a clipped, slightly bothered tone, and they went in.
The corner of the corridor in which Number 39 was situated was so dark that Mr Partridge had to light a match before he could find the keyhole. As he was fumbling with the key he checked himself sharply and listened intently. It seemed to him that a sound, difficult to define, had come from within. He lit another match to make sure this was Number 39. Yes, it was. That little sound must have come from the next room. He went in and turned on the light, which consisted of one blinking and superannuated bulb.
'This is a rotten pub,' he thought. 'A moribund bulb, blinds not drawn, bed not pulled down! I'll tell that worm what I think of his establishment in the morning!'
He went to hang up his coat on one of those pegs when he suddenly found himself staring uncertainly at them. His subconscious mind had uttered a protest. Then he remembered. 'That's rather funny,' he thought. 'I could have sworn that one of those pegs was missing, and that one of those panels had been renewed.' Yet they were all there now, and the panels were identical. He peered at them closely; it was a quite unimportant and yet irritating little puzzle.
The room was stuffy. He went to the window and opened it. He must be getting old and unobservant. He'd never noticed that tree before — what was it? — a yew, and a very fine one. How could he have failed to see it? In how unreal, unearthly a way the moon painted the world sometimes! The view from the window, for example — how uncertain in a sense, unfamiliar, as if it were a reflection from a mind not his own; certain pictures of Cézanne gave one that tingling, groping 'let me get back to reality' feeling. Reality! What was it? And what was that? That shifty little noise. Had he heard it or just imagined it? He listened intently. No, there was nothing. An idea for an article! He began to undress, whistling a vague little tune, and pretending to concentrate on pleasant, commonplace things. He pretended to do so because he refused to confess that he had a rather poisonous sensation of being watched and waited for. When he was examining those pegs he had had to exercise considerable self-control so as not to turn round quickly to see who was looking at them too, just over his shoulder. But he had looked round sharply when he thought he'd heard that curious little noise. Well, he shouldn't have done. That way panic lay. Panic! What on earth was there to panic about?
Instead of sinking at once into that ten-fathom-deep slumber to which a flawless conscience and eighteen strenuous holes entitled him, he passed into that exasperating border state where detached and leering images come flocking into one's head, endlessly and inanely telescoping one another, composing indefinable patterns, humiliating puerilities, a state where there is neither the controlled rationality of full consciousness nor the deliciously serio-comic pantomime of the land of dreams. 'This region,' he decided, 'is the nearest approach to an understanding of that buzzing, wavering kaleidoscope called lunacy, which the sane person ever reaches. The mind can neither control, nor quite lose control of, these regurgitations of the memory — for that is what they must be.' Yet some of these images did not seem to be derived from the well-stored bins of his remembered experience. For example, he never recalled having entered long rows of figures — wild, whirling figures in a heavy ruled ledger. And that girl's face which kept getting between his eyes and the ruled lines. He did not remember having seen anyone like her before. And there she was, sitting near him in a little enclosed garden, and then back came those figures — into what a raving rigmarole was he plunged! He woke up fully and sharply for a moment, and then — his will surrendering — fell into a deep sleep. Gradually the competing images hardened, and as the confused turmoil of a swiftly rising sea settles into the orderly march of mighty combers, they took unto themselves a sequence.
Rows of figures staring out from a book, and then someone standing beside him and beckoning him. And then that long room and a table at which two men were sitting with books and papers in front of them, who looked at him searchingly. It was coming! He sat down on a chair to which one of these men motioned him. Then the other one began pointing at more rows of figures on a paper on the table. It was all over! Then one of the men put down his pencil and looked at him, and that girl's face, placid, smiling, gentle, rose and filled the room. A terrible sense of caged frustration seized him. He walked back to the door and through it, and found himself flinging clothes into a bag, and then he looked up, and there was that lovely childish face looking down so easily at him. A terrible sense of loss — and there he was walking warily and glancing back down a street beside the sea, and the
re he was on his hands and knees creeping across the floor of a moon-lit room. He reached the window, the moon was pacing rainbow clouds, but what was that — that shadow flung so silently and so still from the trees? He crawled back to the bed, and his head was in his hands, and they seemed to press and force out that girl's face, radiating love and trust. He staggered up, and a moment later he felt life choking and twisting from him.
Mr Partridge for good reasons only occasionally and reluctantly recalls his sensations at the moment when it seemed to him that at one moment he was dangling and gasping, and at the next when he was sitting up in bed watching with horror something which fluttered hideously on the wall, its tortured arms flung out as though from one crucified, its head jerking foully — something which suddenly writhed and crumpled to the floor out of the beam of the moon.
Mr Partridge shouted and leapt from the bed, overturning as he did so the table by the side. As he reached his feet the door opened, a candle flickered, and there was the manager of the Royal Hotel, in a night-shirt, with terror in his eyes. 'I know what's the matter, sir,' he mumbled, 'it's my fault, I knew it would happen, but my wife thought——'
'Knew what would happen?' cried Mr Partridge. 'Tell me, is there anything on the floor there, is there a tree with a shadow out there? Is there? Is there?' His hands went to his throat.
THEY RETURN AT EVENING Page 17