Quite proper instincts, you see, despite that appraising eye; out in the snow I was promoted from puppy to guardian St Bernard at once. So I edged myself into the spot-light and looked uncommonly responsible and grave.
It had been snowing off and on all afternoon but at the moment – and apart from the fact that darkness had fallen – visibility was good. And as I edged myself I saw, far away but unmistakable, a single light. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we’ll make for the house straight ahead. Have you a small suitcase?’
It is unlikely – don’t you think? – that Sybil was unimpressed; with just such brevity do the heroes speak. And, anyway, I thought I was saying the right thing; the village couldn’t well be less than six miles, whereas the light – though lights can be enormously deceptive at night – could scarcely be more than two. Would you have dubitated or debated, Diana? Sybil just made a dive and yanked a suitcase – a small suitcase – out of the remains of her car. ‘Hieronimo,’ she said,
‘’tis time for thee to trudge.’ A pleasant literary lady – as a Sybil should be.
The light must represent a dwelling and some sort of shelter; the danger was that we should lose it as we advanced. I left my spotlight on and directed it at a pretty prominent tree – which gave us a base we could probably get back to in an emergency – and then we set off. But not before the admirable Sybil had produced a healthy electric torch. Really, she might have come prepared for the whole affair.
What ensued was a sort of vest-pocket version of The Worst Journey in the World. It was dark, it was cold and there was, of course, snow. Indeed, ‘I’ll say this is snow’ was the only remark Sybil made en route. Sometimes we fell into it in all sorts of diverting ways, like people in the Christmas number of Punch. One would think it was a passive sort of stuff, snow. I assure you that time and again it positively surged up and buffeted us.
There were anxious periods while a hill or a line of trees was screening the light; there was a more anxious moment still when the light began to rise oddly in the air and I felt it might be twenty miles away after all and on top of a mountain range. Fifty yards further, however, and a blackness gathered round it more lustreless than the blackness of the sky. A vague bulk was defining itself; a few seconds more and we had succeeded in interpreting it. What was before us was a solitary light burning near the top of a high tower.
‘Childe Roland,’ I said, ‘to the dark tower came.’
It was a trifle obvious – not at all up to Hieronimo – and I was quite glad that the words were drowned, somewhat alarmingly, by a sudden tremendous baying of hounds. But at that the obvious came to Sybil also. ‘Sir Leoline,’ she said, ‘the baron rich–’
‘Hath a toothless mastiff bitch–’
‘Which,’ Sybil said severely.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Which, not bitch.’
‘We’ll look it up.’
In the circumstances, you will say, a fantastic and foolish colloquy. And at this moment, as if to mark disapproval, the light went out. The hounds, however, carried on.
Rather nicely and chastely Sybil felt for my hand. ‘Mr Gylby,’ she said – we had exchanged names – ‘I’m just a mite disheartened.’ So I gave a firm clasp – not the vulgar and suggestive thing you’d call a squeeze – and said in my brief way it was lucky the light hadn’t gone out half an hour earlier. At that it appeared again for a moment, lower down and to the left. It vanished again and reappeared yet lower to the right. Someone was coming down a winding staircase.
I took a few steps forward and flashed the torch about the building; it gave sufficient light to show we had come upon something pretty sizeable. I was cheered by that; on such a night the gentry ought to do us proud; and I lowered the torch to see if we had been stumbling through a garden or along a carriage drive. What I saw made me give a little yelp: I was standing on the edge of an abyss. ‘Moat,’ said Sybil. She put a hand on the torch and flashed it to the left. ‘Drawbridge.’ I think she was rather thrilled; it was my turn to be a mite disheartened. I knew these castles: there would be icicles depending from the noses of the trophies in the hall – just as in the one I’d escaped from that morning. ‘Will you dreadfully mind,’ I asked, ‘sleeping in the haunted room?’ To which she replied briskly: ‘I’m not psychic, Mr Gylby,’ and added: ‘Look!’
Low down and over to the right there had appeared a crack of light. Cautious exploration along the edge of the moat revealed a second bridge – non-drawable – and over this a little postern door had been opened an inhospitable inch. We crossed, our feet crunching in the snow. At our nearer approach the hounds revved up, but still no more than an inch of candlelight showed through the door. So I knocked. Whereupon a plebian voice said: ‘Is that the doctor?’
They’d got us wrong. ‘We are two people,’ I explained to the chink of candle-light, ‘that have had a motor accident.’ For it seemed fair enough to put it as strongly as that and I was all out to strike the note of pathos. But the information was not a success. The chink vanished. The door shut.
Sybil said: ‘I’ll say!’ I won’t say what I said. But as I was saying it there came a development – nothing less than a great clanking of chains. Sybil said: ‘The Ghost!’
You will agree, Diana, that the days of keeping women in happy ignorance are over. I said: ‘The dogs.’
But hard upon this agitating situation things ameliorated rapidly. A gentleman’s voice made itself heard – presumably rebuking the churlish custodian – and then the door was flung open and the same voice said: ‘Please come in.’
So in we went, each clutching a suitcase as if the place were a hotel. Our host had hold of Sybil’s in a flash and said with the sort of heavy courtesy distinguished old persons can manage: ‘Welcome to Erchany. My name is Guthrie.’
Said Sybil in her most fetching American: ‘How strange! My name is Guthrie too.’
Mr Guthrie of Erchany gave her a quick look with an eye that gleamed in the candle-light. ‘An additional occasion,’ he said, ‘for such hospitality as we can contrive. First, we must find you rooms and a fire.’
All just as it should be and hardly worth so lengthily writing home about (darling, darling Diana!). All as it should be – and strange therefore that I received the immediate impression that this Mr Guthrie is mad. I think he is mad, and what’s more I thought he was mad before I had really viewed his Mad-as-a-Hatter’s Castle.
It was something in his eye, I believe, as he first looked us over in that uncertain glimmer from his candle. Perhaps it is merely that he is a mathematician or a chess-player, for I had the oddest feeling as he looked at us that he was really plotting us on an invisible graph or giving us our places on an invisible board. Perhaps, again, I was just feeling a bit of a pawn: one does after all that snow. But whatever the cause of my first impression, the feeling has grown on me since. And the dogs were the next thing that helped.
Of course one is careful to keep one’s dogs in good condition through the winter and all that, but these dogs – the two that accompanied us in search of rooms and a fire – are starving: something quite out of the way in a country gentleman’s house. I was devoutly thankful their less domesticated companions – still giving tongue in some court nearby – hadn’t been loosed off at us as first planned. And at that I glanced round for the retainer who had so unkindly received us. For a moment the laird of Erchany seemed to be quite alone, and then I became aware of a ruffian skulking in the shadows. This proved presently to be the Hardcastle I’ve mentioned; he looked ready and willing to brain us for our small change, and he was introduced with ceremony as the laird’s factor. A factor, you know, means an agent, and his employment usually implies considerable estates. So it is odd that the laird’s factor is undoubtedly a sort of butler and odd man as well – and odd that the laird himself appears to be in the deepest poverty.
Erchany is the strangest place. A wind had been rising during our walk, a really cold night wind that added considerably to the general d
iscomfort. But when there is one wind outside there are about twenty winds in Erchany. One was blowing straight up the long corridor we were first led down, and on the floor a worn and tattered carpet was working like a sea, flowing towards us in little billows like some surface in a dream. A crosswind was blowing snowflakes through broken panes in a long line of windows, and these were caught by some further current and quite weirdly sucked up the staircase we presently ascended. It is a beautiful staircase, stone and with a great balustrade of fretted stone that must be the work of French medieval craftsmen, on each landing rampant monsters in stone with what I take to be the Guthrie motto: Touch not the Tyger. Not, Sybil whispered, homey – but impressive in a gloomy way. And that, incidentally, might describe our host, a tall, gaunt, aloof person, with strongly marked features and heavy – haunted, I was going to write – lines round the mouth and eyes; an intimidating old man even to a back view, which was all we had at the moment as he led us down a rather windier upper corridor, the cut-throat Hardcastle padding along with the suitcases behind. We met nobody – unless a scuttling rat or two be worth mentioning – until we came to a couple of facing doors: Miss Guthrie to the right, Mr Gylby to the left. And on the threshold the laird of Erchany paused: Was I, by chance, related to Horatio Gylby? It always pleases me to acknowledge great-uncle Horatio, that eminent fin-de-siècle professor of bad living and worse verse – so I said Yes, and that I had been his favourite great-nephew. Whereupon old Mr Guthrie looked at me with a sort of absent interest, and murmured that once they had exchanged their compositions. So I suppose he is a poet. One wouldn’t think of Erchany as a canary cage, or that the local owls have anything in the way of rivals as melodists. I now conclude that when the good laird gives me that peculiar chess-player’s look he is simply searching for a rhyme for Gylby.
Sybil’s room is rather nice; it seems to stand ready as a guest-room, which is somehow unexpected. A bed as broad as a battlefield, snowy sheets – not the right association for our comfort at the moment, this – and everything tolerably shipshape, with the only broken window pane neatly patched with brown paper. But in my quarters the establishment crashes badly: flutterings in the gloom of the ceiling; scamperings in the dirt of the floor; the bed undraped but not, alas, untenanted; the Erchany winds here playing unaccountably at slow motion and eddying in a stately saraband about the room. Guthrie, it must be said, did look round a little doubtfully. ‘Hardcastle,’ he called, ‘get your wife.’
Diana, Mrs Hardcastle; Mrs Hardcastle, Miss Diana Sandys! Don’t mind staring, Diana – I think the old lady’s next to blind. And isn’t she a beauty? No doubt Hardcastle, who can’t be more than fifty, took her for the sake of her old-age pension – or perhaps she made a little fortune as the Bearded Lady in a circus. If these appear brutal remarks think of a fine gentlemanlike Renaissance poet having a good go at describing a witch; that will serve for the rest. Come to think of it, Laird Guthrie may very well be an enchanter and keep a witch or two on hand. I wouldn’t put it beyond him indeed. But I suspect Mrs Hardcastle has a kind heart: in a fumbling sort of way she made fires, brought really hot water, brought towels, even thought to bring soap – albeit of the kitchen variety – and a certain amount of bedding for my uninviting couch. And after that Guthrie said with a bow that we should meet for supper at nine.
We met – and at this point you meet Christine. I haven’t at all got Christine yet, but in her way she is as striking as Guthrie, who seems to be her uncle. Striking perhaps in a temporary fashion – by which I mean that last night at our curious supper she was a pretty girl looking beautiful. And than that there is only one more absolutely beautiful thing: a plain girl looking beautiful. But don’t worry, Diana, if you’re out of the running for the absolute degree. You’ll do. Indeed you will.
A pretty girl, as shy as a village girl and with a soft Scottish accent that chimes charmingly with Sybil’s; a shy, smouldering girl with the manners – or manner – of an old-fashioned fine lady and seemingly quite without acquaintance with the world: this is Christine. A Scottish Miranda I thought as I watched her at that meal. And the notion grew on me – for she was Miranda in Miranda’s first great scene, listening dutifully enough to the talk of Prospero, but the whole of her far away, straining out it might be over a stormy sea where she knew that fate was working for her. If this is rhapsodical or extravagant remember I am writing – at break of dawn – from an enchanter’s castle.
In a lofty hall – like the staircase, it is on a scale that would make you think Erchany a much bigger place than it really is – the enchanter sat at one end of a tremendous great table and Christine at the other, Sybil and I islanded one on each side, and all of us in need of much more warmth than came from the small fire in the fireplace – a fireplace within which we might all have huddled round the embers and been a good deal more comfortable than we were. The villain Hardcastle had withdrawn – the Hardcastles, it seems, live in a separate part of the house – and the meal was served partly by his decrepit old wife and partly by Christine; so I was confirmed in my impression that the domestic resources of Erchany are limited. And indeed there are everywhere signs of either the most improbable poverty or a pathological parsimony. For instance, the whole of these proceedings were lit by a quite inadequate tallow candlepower; I think Guthrie may have looked the more sinister, Christine the more beautiful and Sybil the more enigmatic – did I tell you Sybil looks enigmatic? – as a result of being never out of a half shadow. I was just preparing to accept the theory that the land owners in these parts are unusually picturesque examples of the new poor when Mrs Hardcastle tottered in with the first course. Diana dear, it was caviare, and served on silver plate.
This was what the North Britons appear to call a scunner – and the whole meal was equally surprising: it was much as if the Guthries, having prospered in the city, had returned to hold an expensive picnic amid the ruins of their former feudal greatness. I am afraid I looked from the tumbledown hall to the lavish canned eats, and from the eats to the emaciated dogs, and from the dogs to Mr Guthrie of Erchany with ill-concealed bewilderment, for I noticed Christine regarding me with the same sort of absent interest her uncle had displayed in Horatio Gylby’s kinsman – absent interest tinged with amusement. She was speculating, I imagine, on just how well or ill the polite young Englishman would carry off the peculiar situation in which he found himself.
For it was not, you will apprehend, a very comfortable meal. Guthrie occasionally uttered a courteous remark or inquiry: what was the state of our cars; had we friends near, and would they know we had come up the Erchany road? But in the main he was silent, either staring over our heads in some profound abstraction, or occasionally dropping and narrowing that chess-player’s eye on us in a way I found myself liking less and less. I believe Sybil was aware of it; as you know she has an eye of her own, and I had a feeling she was beginning to pay him back in his own coin – anyway, she was studying him thoughtfully enough. It was Christine who chiefly bore the social burden: very nicely in her shy way. But she too had an eye, Miranda’s eye, dilated in search of things to come. It was her eye, no doubt, directed my ear to the clock.
It is a big grandfather clock, nearly old enough to be in keeping with the hall, and with a loud and – as you would think – peculiarly slow tick. You know how competent actors can build up an illusion of overwhelming suspense, of mere, sheer waiting? I suddenly found the clock doing all that for me. In other words I found myself projecting upon an elderly and impersonal scientific instrument a mounting and urgent sense of impending catastrophe. A trick of fatigue and insufficient nourishment, I told myself – and turned conscientiously to tinned plum pudding and a generous brandy sauce. But the clock still ticked in the same menacing way. By the time Christine had taken Sybil out of the hall I was next to hypnotized by it: had it suddenly gesticulated with both its hands and cried out Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep! I should have been scared indeed but not surprised. And though suggestible, you know, I
’m not wantonly goofy. It was Erchany was all strung up and waiting, and I was just getting the vibrations.
But presently I had what you may think a lucid interval – a simple and rational explanation of the tension in the air. Somewhere in the house there must be someone pretty seriously ill. Had not Hardcastle, when he opened his little door so cautiously, called out to ask if we were the doctor? What they were waiting for was medical aid through these appalling snows, and our arrival must be a disappointment which had been politely masked. There seemed only two objections to this: first, the grudging and almost conspiratorial way in which Hardcastle had opened that inch of door (but that might be just his nature); second, if the emergency were sufficient to cause marked strain, it would have been natural to inquire whether Sybil or I was by any chance surgically given (but perhaps we look rather young). This idea lasted me about five minutes, and was shattered by Guthrie himself. ‘Mr Gylby,’ he said as we rose from table, ‘the snow may detain you some time and you must excuse our very simple way of living. Apart from a lad out in the offices, my niece and myself with the two Hardcastles form our entire household.’
I made suitable noises about the trouble to which Miss Mathers – Christine, that is – was being put. Whereupon Guthrie foraged an unbroken box of cigars, held open a door and said with gravity: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’
I am not sure whether the inner jolt I felt at that moment was mysteriously occasioned by these innocent words, or whether it was the result of the simultaneous appearance of the unspeakable Hardcastle, who seemed to have been hovering on the other side of the door, and who now came shambling forward much like one of the less pleasing devils of Hieronymus van Bosch. He appeared to be on the spot by arrangement; perhaps he comes every night at this hour for orders – certainly Guthrie wasted no time in giving him an order now. ‘Hardcastle,’ he said peremptorily, ‘if the lad Lindsay comes – though I don’t think he can get up in the snow – you must let him in. I’ll see him once again.’
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