The Ghost Feeler

by Wharton, Edith

  So well would this explain Gosling’s solicitude to see the visitor off – so completely account for the man’s nervous and contradictory behaviour – that Medford, smiling at his own obtuseness, hastily resolved to leave on the morrow. Tranquillized by this decision, he lingered about the court till dusk fell, and then, as usual, went up to the roof. But today his eyes, instead of raking the horizon, fastened on the clustering edifice of which, after six days’ residence, he knew so little. Aerial chambers, jutting out at capricious angles, baffled him with closely shuttered windows, or here and there with the enigma of painted panes. Behind which window was his host concealed, spying, it might be, at this very moment on his guest?

  The idea that that strange moody man, with his long brown face and shock of white hair, his half-guessed selfishness and tyranny, and his morbid self-absorption, might be actually within a stone’s throw, gave Medford, for the first time, a sharp sense of isolation. He felt himself shut out, unwanted – the place, now that he imagined someone might be living in it unknown to him, became lonely, inhospitable, dangerous.

  ‘Fool that I am – he probably expected me to pack up and go as soon as I found he was away!’ the young man reflected. Yes; decidedly, he would leave the next morning.

  Gosling had not shown himself all the afternoon. When at length, belatedly, he came to set the table, he wore a look of sullen, almost surly, reserve which Medford had not yet seen on his face. He hardly returned the young man’s friendly ‘Hallo – dinner?’ and when Medford was seated handed him the first dish in silence. Medford’s glass remained unfilled till he touched its brim.

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing to drink, sir. The men lost the case of Perrier – or dropped it and smashed the bottles. They say it never came. ’Ow do I know when they never open their ’eathen lips but to lie!’ Gosling burst out with sudden violence.

  He set down the dish he was handing, and Medford saw that he had been obliged to do so because his whole body was shaking as if with fever.

  ‘My dear man, what does it matter? You’re going to be ill,’ Medford exclaimed, laying his hand on the servant’s arm. But the latter, muttering: ‘Oh, God, if I’d only ’a’ gone for it myself,’ jerked away and vanished from the room.

  Medford sat pondering; it certainly looked as if poor Gosling were on the edge of a breakdown.

  No wonder, when Medford himself was so oppressed by the uncanniness of the place. Gosling reappeared after an interval, correct, close-lipped, with the dessert and a bottle of white wine. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  To pacify him, Medford sipped the wine and then pushed his chair away and returned to the court. He was making for the fig tree by the well when Gosling, slipping ahead, transferred his chair and wicker table to the other end of the court.

  ‘You’ll be better here – there’ll be a breeze presently,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch your coffee.’

  He disappeared again, and Medford sat gazing up at the pile of masonry and plaster, and wondering whether he had not been moved away from his favourite corner to get him out of – or into? – the angle of vision of the invisible watcher. Gosling, having brought the coffee, went away and Medford sat on.

  At length he rose and began to pace up and down as he smoked.

  Medford went back to his seat; but as soon as he had resumed it he fancied that the gaze of his hidden watcher was jealously fixed on the red spark of his cigar. The sensation became increasingly distasteful; he could almost feel Almodham reaching out long ghostly arms from somewhere above him in the darkness. He moved back into the living-room, where a shaded light hung from the ceiling; but the room was airless, and finally he went out again and dragged his seat to its old place under the fig tree. From there the windows which he suspected could not command him, and he felt easier, though the corner was out of the breeze and the heavy air seemed tainted with the exhalation of the adjoining well.

  ‘The water must be very low,’ Medford mused. The smell, though faint, was unpleasant. He drowsed.

  When he woke the moon was pushing up its ponderous orange disk above the walls, and the darkness in the court was less dense. He must have slept for an hour or more. The night was delicious, or would have been anywhere but there. Medford felt a shiver of his old fever and remembered that Gosling had warned him that the court was unhealthy at night.

  ‘On account of the well, I suppose. I’ve been sitting too close to it,’ he reflected. His head ached, and he fancied that the sweetish foulish smell clung to his face as it had after his bath. He stood up and approached the well to see how much water was left in it. But the moon was not yet high enough to light those depths, and he peered down into blackness.

  Suddenly he felt both shoulders gripped from behind and forcibly pressed forward, as if by someone seeking to push him over the edge. An instant later, almost coinciding with his own swift resistance, the push became a strong tug backwards, and he swung round to confront Gosling, whose hands immediately dropped from his shoulders.

  ‘I thought you had the fever, sir – I seemed to see you pitching over,’ the man stammered.

  Medford’s wits returned. ‘We must both have it, for I fancied you were pitching me,’ he said with a laugh.

  ‘Me, sir?’ Gosling gasped. ‘I pulled you back as ’ard as ever –’

  ‘Of course. I know.’

  Gosling was silent. At length he asked: ‘Aren’t you going up to bed, sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Medford, ‘I prefer to stay here.’

  Gosling’s face took on an expression of dogged anger. ‘Well, then, I prefer that you shouldn’t.’

  Medford laughed again. ‘Why? Because it’s the hour when Mr Almodham comes out to take the air?’

  The effect of this question was unexpected. Gosling dropped back a step or two and flung up his hands, pressing them to his lips as if to stifle a low outcry.

  ‘Come! Own up that he’s here and have done with it!’ cried Medford.

  ‘Here? What do you mean by “here”? You ’aven’t seen ’im, ’ave you?’ Before the words were out of the man’s lips he flung up his arms again, stumbled forward and fell in a heap at Medford’s feet.

  Medford, still leaning against the well-head, smiled down contemptuously at the stricken wretch. His conjecture had been the right one, then.

  ‘Get up, man. Don’t be a fool! It’s not your fault if I guessed that Mr Almodham walks here at night –’

  ‘Walks here!’ wailed the other, still cowering.

  ‘Well, doesn’t he? He won’t kill you for owning up, will he?’

  ‘Kill me? Kill me? I wish I’d killed you!’ Gosling half got to his feet, his head thrown back in ashen terror. ‘And I might ’ave, too, so easy! You felt me pushing of you over, didn’t you? Coming ’ere spying and sniffing –’

  Medford had not changed his position. The very abjectness of the creature at his feet gave him an easy sense of power. But Gosling’s last cry had suddenly deflected the course of his speculations. Almodham was here, then; that was certain; but just where was he, and in what shape? A new fear scuttled down Medford’s spine.

  ‘So you did want to push me over?’ he said. ‘Why? As the quickest way of joining your master?’

  The effect was more immediate than he had foreseen.

  Gosling, getting to his feet, stood there bowed and shrunken in the accusing moonlight.

  ‘Oh, God – and I ’ad you ’arf over! You know I did! And then – it was what you said about Wembley. So help me, sir, I felt you meant it, and it ’eld me back.’ The man’s face was again wet with tears, but this time Medford recoiled from them as if they had been drops splashed up by a falling body from the foul waters below.

  Medford was silent.

  Gosling continued to ramble on.

  ‘And if only that Perrier ’ad of come. I don’t believe it’d ever ’ave crossed your mind, if only you’d ’ave had your Perrier regular, now would it? But you say ’e walks – and I knew he would! Only – what was I to do with him, with you tu
rning up like that the very day?’

  Still Medford did not move.

  ‘And ’im driving me to madness, sir, sheer madness, that same morning. Will you believe it? The very week before you come, I was to sail for England and ’ave my ’oliday, a ’ole month, sir – and I was entitled to six, if there was any justice – a ’ole month in ’Ammersmith, sir, in a cousin’s ’ouse, and the chance to see Wembley thoroughly; and then ’e ’eard you was coming, sir, and ’e was bored and lonely ’ere, you understand – ’e ’ad to have new excitements provided for ’im or ’e’d go off ’is bat – and when ’e ’eard you were coming, ’e come out of his black mood in a flash and was ’arf crazy with pleasure, and said: “I’ll keep ’im ’ere all winter – a remarkable young man, Gosling – just my kind.” And when I says to him: “And ’ow about my ’oliday?” he stares at me with those stony eyes of ’is and says: “’Oliday? Oh, to be sure; why, next year – we’ll see what can be done about it next year.” Next year, sir, as if ’e was doing me a favour! And that’s the way it ’ad been for nigh on twelve years.

  ‘But this time, if you ’adn’t ’ave come I do believe I’d ’ave got away, for he was getting used to ’aving Selim about ’im and his ’ealth was never better – and, well, I told ’im as much, and ’ow a man ’ad his rights after all, and my youth was going, and me that ’ad served him so well chained up ’ere like ‘is watchdog, and always next year and next year – and, well, sir, ’e just laughed, sneering-like, and lit ’is cigarette. “Oh, Gosling, cut it out,” ’e says.

  ‘He was standing on the very spot where you are now, sir; and he turned to walk into the ’ouse. And it was then I ’it ’im. He was a heavy man, and he fell against the well curb. And just when you were expected any minute – oh, my God!’

  Gosling’s voice died out in a strangled murmur.

  Medford, at his last words, had involuntarily shrunk back a few feet. The two men stood in the middle of the court and stared at each other without speaking. The moon, swinging high above the battlements, sent a searching spear of light down into the guilty darkness of the well.

  Footnote

  * The famous exhibition at Wembley, near London, took place in 1924.

  The Looking-Glass

  I

  Mrs Attlee had never been able to understand why there was any harm in giving people a little encouragement when they needed it.

  Sitting back in her comfortable armchair by the fire, her working days over, and her muscular masseuse’s hands lying swollen and powerless on her knee, she was at leisure to turn the problem over, and ponder it as there had never been time to do before.

  Mrs Attlee was so infirm now, that when her widowed daughter-in-law was away for the day, her granddaughter Moyra Attlee had to stay with her until the kitchen girl had prepared the cold supper, and could come in and sit in the parlour.

  ‘You’d be surprised, you know, my dear, to find how discouraged the grand people get, in those big houses with all the help, and the silver dinner plates, and a bell always handy if the fire wants poking, or the pet dog asks for a drink ... And what’d a masseuse be good for, if she didn’t jolly up their minds a little along with their muscles? – as Dr Welbridge used to say to me many a time, when he’d given me a difficult patient. And he always gave me the most difficult,’ she added proudly.

  She paused, aware (for even now little escaped her) that Moyra had ceased to listen, but accepting the fact resignedly, as she did most things in the slow decline of her days.

  ‘It’s a fine afternoon,’ she reflected, ‘and likely she’s fidgety because there’s a new movie on; or that young fellow’s fixed it up to get back earlier from New York ...’

  She relapsed into silence, following her thoughts; but presently, as happens with old people, they came to the surface again.

  ‘And I hope I’m a good Catholic, as I said to Father Divott the other day, and at peace with heaven, if ever I was took suddenly – but no matter what happens I’ve got to risk my punishment for the wrong I did to Mrs Clingsland, because as long as I’ve never repented it there’s no use telling Father Divott about it. Is there?’

  Mrs Attlee heaved an introspective sigh. Like many humble persons of her kind and creed, she had a vague idea that a sin unrevealed was, as far as the consequences went, a sin uncommitted; and this conviction had often helped her in the difficult task of reconciling doctrine and practice.

  II

  Moyra Attlee interrupted her listless stare down the empty Sunday street of the New Jersey suburb, and turned an astonished glance on her grandmother.

  ‘Mrs Clingsland? A wrong you did to Mrs Clingsland?’

  Hitherto she had lent an inattentive ear to her grandmother’s ramblings; the talk of old people seemed to be a language hardly worth learning. But it was not always so with Mrs Attlee’s. Her activities among the rich had ceased before the first symptoms of the financial depression; but her tenacious memory was stored with pictures of the luxurious days of which her granddaughter’s generation, even in a wider world, knew only by hearsay. Mrs Attlee had a gift for evoking in a few words scenes of half-understood opulence and leisure, like a guide leading a stranger through the gallery of a palace in the twilight, and now and then lifting a lamp to a shimmering Rembrandt or a jewelled Rubens; and it was particularly when she mentioned Mrs Clingsland that Moyra caught these dazzling glimpses. Mrs Clingsland had always been something more than a name to the Attlee family. They knew (though they did not know why) that it was through her help that Grandmother Attlee had been able, years ago, to buy the little house at Montclair, with a patch of garden behind it, where, all through the Depression, she had held out, thanks to fortunate investments made on the advice of Mrs Clingsland’s great friend, the banker.

  ‘She had so many friends, and they were all high-up people, you understand. Many’s the time she’d say to me: “Cora” (think of the loveliness of her calling me Cora), “Cora, I’m going to buy some Golden Flyer shares on Mr Stoner’s advice; Mr Stoner of the National Union Bank, you know. He’s getting me in on the ground floor, as they say, and if you want to step in with me, why come along. There’s nothing too good for you, in my opinion,” she used to say. And, as it turned out, those shares have kept their head above water all through the bad years, and now I think they’ll see me through, and be there when I’m gone, to help out you children.’

  Today Moyra Attlee heard the revered name with a new interest. The phrase: ‘The wrong I did to Mrs Clingsland,’ had struck through her listlessness, rousing her to sudden curiosity. What could her grandmother mean by saying she had done a wrong to the benefactress whose bounties she was never tired of recording? Moyra believed her grandmother to be a very good woman – certainly she had been wonderfully generous in all her dealings with her children and grandchildren; and it seemed incredible that, if there had been one grave lapse in her life, it should have taken the form of an injury to Mrs Clingsland. True, whatever the lapse was, she seemed to have made peace with herself about it; yet it was clear that its being unconfessed lurked disquietingly in the back of her mind.

  ‘How can you say you ever did harm to a friend like Mrs Clingsland, Gran?’

  Mrs Attlee’s eyes grew sharp behind her spectacles, and she fixed them half distrustfully on the girl’s face. But in a moment she seemed to recover herself. ‘Not harm, I don’t say; I’ll never think I harmed her. Bless you, it wasn’t to harm her I’d ever have lifted a finger. All I wanted was to help. But when you try to help too many people at once, the devil sometimes takes note of it. You see, there’s quotas nowadays for everything, doing good included, my darling.’

  Moyra made an impatient movement. She did not care to hear her grandmother philosophize. ‘Well – but you said you did a wrong to Mrs Clingsland.’

  Mrs Attlee’s sharp eyes seemed to draw back behind a mist of age. She sat silent, her hands lying heavily over one another in their tragic uselessness.

  ‘What would you have done, I wonder,
’ she began suddenly, ‘if you’d ha’ come in on her that morning, and seen her laying in her lovely great bed, with the lace a yard deep on the sheets, and her face buried in the pillows, so I knew she was crying? Would you have opened your bag same as usual, and got out your coconut cream and talcum powder, and the nail polishers, and all the rest of it, and waited there like a statue till she turned over to you; or’d you have gone up to her, and turned her softly round, like you would a baby, and said to her: “Now, my dear, I guess you can tell Cora Attlee what’s the trouble”? Well, that’s what I did, anyhow; and there she was, with her face streaming with tears, and looking like a martyred saint on an altar, and when I said to her: “Come, now, you tell me, and it’ll help you”, she just sobbed out: “Nothing can ever help me, now I’ve lost it”’.

  ‘“Lost what?” I said, thinking first of her boy, the Lord help me, though I’d heard him whistling on the stairs as I went up; but she said: “My beauty, Cora – I saw it suddenly slipping out of the door from me this morning ...” Well, at that I had to laugh, and half angrily too. “Your beauty,” I said to her, “and is that all? And me that thought it was your husband, or your son – or your fortune even. If it’s only your beauty, can’t I give it back to you with these hands of mine? But what are you saying to me about beauty, with that seraph’s face looking up at me this minute?” I said to her, for she angered me as if she’d been blaspheming.’

  ‘Well, was it true?’ Moyra broke in, impatient and yet curious.

  ‘True that she’d lost her beauty?’ Mrs Attlee paused to consider. ‘Do you know how it is, sometimes when you’re doing a bit of fine darning sitting by the window in the afternoon; and one minute it’s full daylight, and your needle seems to find the way of itself; and the next minute you say: “Is it my eyes?” because the work seems blurred; and presently you see it’s the daylight going, stealing away, softlike, from your comer, though there’s plenty left overhead. Well – it was the way with her ...’