My friends, abhorring rheumatism and like complaints, refused to sleep over night in the drafty, almost paneless structure. They came over to see me on the ensuing day and begged me to return to Vienna with them. But, full of the project in hand, I would not be moved. With the house full of carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, locksmiths, tinsmiths, plumbers, plasterers, glaziers, joiners, scrub-women and chimneysweeps, I felt that I couldn’t go away and leave it without a controlling influence.
They promised to come and make me a nice short visit, however, after I’d got the castle primped up a bit: the mould off the walls of the bedrooms and the great fireplaces thoroughly cleared of obstructive swallows’ nests, the beds aired and the larder stocked. Just as they were leaving, my secretary and my valet put in an appearance, having been summoned from Vienna the day before. I confess I was glad to see them. The thought of spending a second night in that limitless bed-chamber, with all manner of night-birds trying to get in at the windows, was rather disturbing, and I welcomed my retainers with open arms.
My first night had been spent in a huge old bed, carefully prepared for occupancy by Herr Schmick’s frau; and the hours, which never were so dark, in trying to fathom the infinite space that reached above me to the vaulted ceiling. I knew there was a ceiling, for I had seen its beams during the daylight hours, but to save my soul I couldn’t imagine anything so far away as it seemed to be after the candles had been taken away by the caretaker’s wife, who had tucked me away in the bed with ample propriety and thoroughness combined.
Twice during that interminable night I thought I heard a baby crying. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that I was more than glad to see Poopendyke clambering up the path with his typewriter in one hand and his green baise bag in the other, followed close behind by Britton and the Gargantuan brothers bearing trunks, bags, boxes and my golf clubs.
“Whew!” said Poopendyke, dropping wearily upon my doorstep—which, by the way, happens to be a rough hewn slab some ten feet square surmounted by a portcullis that has every intention of falling down unexpectedly one of these days and creating an earthquake. “Whew!” he repeated.
My secretary is a youngish man with thin, stooping shoulders and a habit of perpetually rubbing his knees together when he walks. I shudder to think of what would happen to them if he undertook to run. I could not resist a glance at them now.
“It is something of a climb, isn’t it?” said I beamingly.
“In the name of heaven, Mr. Smart, what could have induced you to—”He got no farther than this, and to my certain knowledge this unfinished reproof was the nearest he ever came to openly convicting me of asininity.
“Make yourself at home, old fellow,” said I in some haste. I felt sorry for him. “We are going to be very cosy here.”
“Cosy?” murmured he, blinking as he looked up, not at me but at the frowning walls that seemed to penetrate the sky.
“I haven’t explored those upper regions,” I explained nervously, divining his thoughts. “We shall do it together, in a day or two.”
“It looks as though it might fall down if we jostled it carelessly,” he remarked, having recovered his breath.
“I am expecting masons at any minute,” said I, contemplating the unstable stone crest of the northeast turret with some uneasiness. My face brightened suddenly. “That particular section of the castle is uninhabitable, I am told. It really doesn’t matter if it collapses. Ah, Britton! Here you are, I see. Good morning.”
Britton, a very exacting servant, looked me over critically.
“Your coat and trousers need pressing, sir,” said he. “And where am I to get the hot water for shaving, sir?”
“Frau Schmick will supply anything you need, Britton,” said I, happy on being able to give the information.
“It is not I as needs it, sir,” said he, feeling of his smoothly shaven chin.
“Come in and have a look about the place,” said I, with a magnificent sweep of my arm to counteract the feeling of utter insignificance I was experiencing at the moment. I could see that my faithful retinue held me in secret but polite disdain.
A day or two later the castle was swarming with workmen; the banging of hammers, the rasp of saws, the spattering of mortar, the crashing of stone and the fumes of charcoal crucibles extended to the remotest recesses; the tower of Babel was being reconstructed in the language of six or eight nations, and everybody was happy. I had no idea there were so many tinsmiths in the world. Every artisan in the town across the river seems to have felt it his duty to come over and help the men from Linz in the enterprise. There were so many of them that they were constantly getting in each other’s way and quarrelling over matters of jurisdiction with even more spirit than we might expect to encounter among the labour unions at home.
Poopendyke, in great distress of mind, notified me on the fourth day of rehabilitation that the cost of labour as well as living had gone up appreciably since our installation. In fact it had doubled. He paid all of my bills, so I suppose he knew what he was talking about.
“You will be surprised to know, Mr. Smart,” he said, consulting his sheets, “that scrub-women are getting more here than they do in New York City, and I am convinced that there are more scrub-women. Today we had thirty new ones scrubbing the loggia on the gun-room floor, and they all seem to have apprentices working under them. The carpenters and plasterers were not so numerous today. I paid them off last night, you see. It may interest you to hear that their wages for three days amounted to nearly seven hundred dollars in our money, to say nothing of materials—and breakage.”
“Breakage?” I exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, sir, breakage. They break nearly as much as they mend. We’ll—we’ll go bankrupt, sir, if we’re not careful.”
I liked his pronoun. “Never mind,” I said, “we’ll soon be rid of them.”
“They’ve got it in their heads, sir, that it will take at least a year to finish the—”
“You tell the foremen that if this job isn’t finished to our satisfaction by the end of the month, I’ll fire all of them,” said I, wrathfully.
“That’s less than three weeks off, Mr. Smart. They don’t seem to be making much headway.”
“Well, you tell ’em, just the same.” And that is how I dismissed it. “Tell ’em we’ve got to go to work ourselves.”
“By the way, old man Schmick and his family haven’t been paid for nearly two years. They have put in a claim. The late owner assured them they’d get their money from the next—”
“Discharge them at once,” said I.
“We can’t get on without them,” protested he. “They know the ropes, so to speak, and, what’s more to the point, they know all the keys. Yesterday I was nearly two hours in getting to the kitchen for a conference with Mrs. Schmick about the market-men. In the first place, I couldn’t find the way, and in the second place all the doors are locked.”
“Please send Herr Schmick to me in the—in the—” I couldn’t recall the name of the administration chamber at the head of the grand staircase, so I was compelled to say: “I’ll see him here.”
“If we lose them we also are lost,” was his sententious declaration. I believed him.
On the fifth day of our occupancy, Britton reported to me that he had devised a plan by which we could utilise the tremendous horse-power represented by the muscles of those lazy giants, Rudolph and Max. He suggested that we rig up a huge windlass at the top of the incline, with stout steel cables attached to a small car which could be hauled up the cliff by a hitherto wasted human energy, and as readily lowered. It sounded feasible and I instructed him to have the extraordinary railway built, but to be sure that the safety device clutches in the cog wheels were sound and trusty. It would prove to be an infinitely more graceful mode of ascending the peak than riding up on the donkeys I had been persuaded to buy, especially for Poopendyke and me, whose legs were so long that when we sat in the saddles our knees either touched our chins or were spre
ad out so far that we resembled the Prussian coat-of-arms.
That evening, after the workmen had filed down the steep looking for all the world like an evacuating army, I sought a few moments of peace and quiet in the small balcony outside my bedroom windows. My room was in the western wing of the castle, facing the river. The eastern wing mounted even higher than the one in which we were living, and was topped by the loftiest watch tower of them all. We had not attempted to do any work over in that section as yet, for the simple reason that Herr Schmick couldn’t find the keys to the doors.
The sun was disappearing beyond the highlands and a cool, soft breeze swept up through the valley. I leaned back in a comfortable chair that Britton had selected for me, and puffed at my pipe, not quite sure that my serenity was real or assumed. This was all costing me a pretty penny. Was I, after all, parting with my money in the way prescribed for fools? Was all this splendid antiquity worth the—
My reflections terminated sharply at that critical instant and I don’t believe I ever felt called upon after that to complete the inquiry.
I found myself staring as if stupefied at the white figure of a woman who stood in the topmost balcony of the eastern wing, fully revealed by the last glow of the sun and apparently as deep in dreams as I had been the instant before.
CHAPTER II
I DEFEND MY PROPERTY
For ten minutes I stood there staring up at her, completely bewildered and not a little shaken. My first thought had been of ghosts, but it was almost instantly dispelled by a significant action on the part of the suspected wraith. She turned to whistle over her shoulder, and to snap her fingers peremptorily, and then she stooped and picked up a rather lusty chow dog which promptly barked at me across the intervening space, having discovered me almost at once although I was many rods away and quite snugly ensconced among the shadows. The lady in white muzzled him with her hand and I could almost imagine I heard her reproving whispers. After a few minutes, she apparently forgot the dog and lifted her hand to adjust something in her hair. He again barked at me, quite ferociously for a chow. This time it was quite plain to her that he was not barking at the now shadowy moon. She peered over the stone balustrade and an instant later disappeared from view through the high, narrow window.
Vastly exercised, I set out in quest of Herr Schmick, martialing Poopendyke as I went along, realising that I would have to depend on his German, which was less halting than mine and therefore, more likely to dovetail with that of the Schmicks, neither of whom spoke German because they loved it but because they had to,—being Austrians. We found the four Schmicks in the vast kitchen, watching Britton while he pressed my trousers on an oak table so large that the castle must have been built around it.
Herr Schmick was weighted down with the keys of the castle, which never left his possession day or night.
“Herr Schmick,” said I, “will you be so good as to inform me who the dickens that woman is over in the east wing of the castle?”
“Woman, mein herr?” He almost dropped his keys. His big sons said something to each other that I couldn’t quite catch, but it sounded very much like “der duyvil.”
“A woman in a white dress,—with a dog.”
“A dog?” he cried. “But, mein herr, dogs are not permitted to be in the castle.”
“Who is she? How did she get there?”
“Heaven defend us, sir! It must have been the ghost of—”
“Ghost, your granny!” I cried, relapsing into English. “Please don’t beat about the bush, Mr. Schmick. She’s over there in the unused wing, which I haven’t been allowed to penetrate in spite of the fact that it belongs to me. You say you can’t find the keys to that side of the castle. Will you explain how it is that it is open to strange women and—and dogs?”
“You must be mistaken, mein herr,” he whined abjectly. “She cannot be there. She—Ah, I have it! It may have been my wife. Gretel! Have you been in the east—”
“Nonsense!” I cried sharply. “This won’t do, Mr. Schmick. Give me that bunch of keys. We’ll investigate. I can’t have strange women gallivanting about the place as if they owned it. This is no trysting place for Juliets, Herr Schmick. We’ll get to the bottom of this at once. Here, you Rudolph, fetch a couple of lanterns. Max, get a sledge or two from the forge. There is a forge. I saw it yesterday out there back of the stables. So don’t try to tell me there isn’t one. If we can’t unlock the doors, we’ll smash ’em in. They’re mine, and I’ll knock ’em to smithereens if I feel like it.”
The four Schmicks wrung their hands and shook their heads and, then, repairing to the scullery, growled and grumbled for fully ten minutes before deciding to obey my commands. In the meantime, I related my experience to Poopendyke and Britton.
“That reminds me, sir,” said Britton, “that I found a rag-doll in the courtyard yesterday, on that side of the building, sir—I should say castle, sir.”
“I am quite sure I heard a baby crying the second night we were here, Mr. Smart,” said my secretary nervously.
“And there was smoke coming from one of the back chimney pots this morning,” added Britton.
I was thoughtful for a moment. What became of the rag-doll, Britton?” I enquired shrewdly.
“I turned it over to old Schmick, sir,” said he. He grinned. “I thought as maybe it belonged to one of his boys.”
On the aged caretaker’s reappearance, I bluntly inquired what had become of the doll-baby. He was terribly confused.
“I know nothing, I know nothing,” he mumbled, and I could see that he was miserably upset. His sons towered and glowered and his wife wrapped and unwrapped her hands in her apron, all the time supplicating heaven to be good to the true and the faithful.
From what I could gather, they all seemed to be more disturbed over the fact that my hallucination included a dog than by the claim that I had seen a woman.
“But, confound you, Schmick,” I cried in some heat, “it barked at me.”
“Gott in himmel!” they all cried, and, to my surprise, the old woman burst into tears.
“It is bad to dream of a dog,” she wailed. “It means evil to all of us. Evil to—”
“Come!” said I, grabbing the keys from the old man’s unresisting hand. “And, Schmick, if that dog bites me, I’ll hold you personally responsible. Do you understand?”
Two abreast we filed through the long, vaulted halls, Rudolph carrying a gigantic lantern and Max a sledge. We traversed extensive corridors, mounted tortuous stairs and came at length to the sturdy oak door that separated the east wing from the west: a huge, formidable thing strengthened by many cross-pieces and studded with rusty bolt-heads. Padlocks as large as horse-shoes, corroded by rust and rendered absolutely impracticable by age, confronted us.
“I have not the keys,” said old Conrad Schmick sourly. “This door has not been opened in my time. It is no use.”
“It is no use,” repeated his grizzly sons, leaning against the mouldy walls with weary tolerance.
“Then how did the woman and her dog get into that part of the castle?” I demanded. “Tell me that!”
They shook their heads, almost compassionately, as much as to say, “It is always best to humour a mad man.”
“And the baby,” added Poopendyke, turning up his coat collar to protect his thin neck from the draft that smote us from the halls.
“Smash those padlocks, Max,” I commanded resolutely.
Max looked stupidly at his father and the old man looked at his wife, and then all four of them looked at me, almost imploringly.
“Why destroy a perfectly good padlock, mein herr?” began Max, twirling the sledge in his hand as if it were a bamboo cane.
“Hi! Look out there!” gasped Britton, in some alarm. “Don’t let that thing slip!”
“Doesn’t this castle belong to me?” I demanded, considerably impressed by the ease with which he swung the sledge. A very dangerous person, I began to perceive.
“It does, mein herr,” sh
outed all of them gladly, and touched their forelocks.
“Everything is yours,” added old Conrad, with a comprehensive sweep of his hand that might have put the whole universe in my name.
“Smash that padlock, Max,” I said after a second’s hesitation.
“I’ll bet he can’t do it,” said Britton, ingeniously.
Very reluctantly Max bared his great arms, spit upon his hands, and, with a pitiful look at his parents, prepared to deal the first blow upon the ancient padlock. The old couple turned their heads away, and put their fingers to their ears, cringing like things about to be whipped.
“Now, one—two—three!” cried I, affecting an enthusiasm I didn’t feel.
The sledge fell upon the padlock and rebounded with almost equal force. The sound of the crash must have disturbed every bird and bat in the towers of the grim old pile. But the padlock merely shed a few scabs of rust and rattled back into its customary repose.
“See!” cried Max, triumphantly. “It cannot be broken.” Rudolph, his broad face beaming, held the lantern close to the padlock and showed me that it hadn’t been dented by the blow.
“It is a very fine lock,” cried old Conrad, with a note of pride in his voice.
I began to feel some pride in the thing myself. “It is, indeed,” I said. “Try once more, Max.”
It seemed to me that he struck with a great deal more confidence than before, and again they all uttered ejaculations of pleasure. I caught Dame Schmick in the act of thanking God with her fingers.
“See here,” I exclaimed, facing them angrily, “what does all this mean? You are deceiving me, all of you. Now, let’s have the truth—every word of it—or out you go tomorrow, the whole lot of you. I insist on knowing who that woman is, why she is here in my hou—my castle, and—everything, do you understand?”
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 231