by Jack Mann
“Daddy’s told me you don’t like fuss, Mr. Gees,” she said, “so—just that I know you realise what it means to me to be free, and what it means to him and mother too. For all you have done for them in finding the way out for me, I can say thank you. For myself, I don’t think any words exist to tell you how glad I am to see you here.”
She was perfectly self-possessed, and said what she wished to say as easily and fluently as Doctor Haverstock himself. Gees held her hands long enough to perceive that she was steady nerved, quite at her ease, and then released them to shake hands with Norris.
“I find myself glad to be here,” he said, “but with a confession to make to you all, for a beginning. Gees is only a business alias, built up of the first letter of all my names—Gregory George Gordon Green. It was fastened on me at prep school, and stuck, but I’m nothing but a plain Shropshire Green from the other side of the county.”
“Your home county too, is it?” Norris observed rather than questioned.
“It is,” Gees said, “but I kept out of it to dodge estate management, which my father wanted me to take up. I—well, I don’t like work!”
“But—you don’t mean to say Sir George Green—the general—is a relation of yours, surely?” Norris sounded quite excited over it.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to own he is,” Gees said. “It’s not my fault, but his. He’s my father. I generally keep it dark for his sake.”
“Bless my soul, it’s one of his farms I’ve hired from Michaelmas!” Norris exclaimed. “Well, sir, this is a pleasant surprise!”
“Which farm?” Gees asked interestedly.
“A man named Moore farmed it—died last March, and the
widow got the general to let her get out under the year,” Norris said.
“Moore’s—I know it. Clay subsoil to the west of the house—keep that part well drained and you’ve got the best farm on the estate.”
“But I shall go on calling you Mr. Gees,” May Norris said softly.
“And I shall go and get the teapot,” her mother said practically.
“ No—please don’t get up, Mr. Gees—Mr. Green, I mean.” And she went out from the room, while Gees resumed his seat.
“The wheat looked as strong and healthy as any I ever grew at Nightmare, and it’s splendid pasture,” Norris remarked.
Gees nodded assent, and glanced at May to see how mention of that name effected her. But she shook her head at him and laughed.
“Daddy will talk shop!” she exclaimed. “Please, Mr. Gees, I’ve been out of the world for six months, and there’s such a lot of leeway to make up. I know you’ve got to drain when it’s a clay subsoil, but not on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, it was you who said that, though, and not daddy at all! But he is trying to lead you into the wheat.”
“Oh, May blossom!” Norris said softly—for him—“you shall talk about whatever you like, and old daddy will be glad to hear your voice!”
“He will call himself old, Mr. Gees, and he’s still good at tennis and can run like a—like a charging rhinoceros. Yes, I said rhinoceros, daddy. I read once that it’s faster than a galloping horse.”
“And you play tennis too?” Gees suggested, as a subject for talk.
“She will again when she’s stronger,” Norris interposed.
“They will persist that I’ve been physically ill, Mr. Gees,” the girl said seriously, “but I know I haven’t. I was utterly exhausted yesterday after I wakened to hear Mr. Perivale speak that benediction over me, and I must have been a little dazed too, because daddy tells me you were there, and I didn’t see you. But I wasn’t physically ill, or my body would have lost weight—more than the pound or two it did lose. And I’m not physically ill now, though they won’t believe it.”
“And you didn’t see me? “ Gees asked curiously.
She shook her head. “This is the first time I have seen your face,” she answered. “At some point in the dream I knew you would come here, and through you I should get release. You were not here then, nowhere near here, and not even on your way, but in the dream I knew. I saw—” she broke off in a rather embarrassed way, her first sign of discomposure.
“That I had big hands and feet,” he completed for her with a smile.
“Yes,” she admitted, “but I didn’t like to say it. And that—that other knew something had given me hope, and would have killed—”
“May,” Norris broke in, “I don’t want you to talk about it. You’ll only upset yourself, and it was only a dream, you know.”
“All right, daddy,” she assented—Gees heard a note of yielding to what seemed to her a totally unnecessary command—“but I know perfectly well what it was, and so do you. And if I talked about it all day—Mr. Gees, if you’d been captured by brigands and sentenced to be shot, wouldn’t you even like talking about it to the one who took the bandage off your eyes and told you you were free again?”
He shook his head, and glanced at Norris. “I dunno,” he said.
“Never tried it. But I think it quite probable that those who cared most for me, and had to see me in the hands of the brigands, wouldn’t want me to talk in a way that would recall their awful anxiety over me.”
“Peccavi!” she exclaimed, with a rueful little smile. “Daddy, I’m a selfish little pig. And you said Moore’s farm was clay subsoil to the west of the house, Mr. Gees—what’s the rest of it?”
“Good, honest loam, not too sandy,” he answered. “And there’s one thing I think will interest you—one collective thing, that is. My father keeps one of the few surviving herds of aurochs in the country—the old-time wild cattle of Britain, survivors from pre-Roman days.”
All three of them, he found, were keenly interested, and his description of the shaggy little beasts and other matters connected with the home to which they would go in the autumn provided subject matter for talk until tea was finished and he declared that he must be going if he were to reach London in reasonable time that night. He bade good-bye to Mrs. Norris and May, and Norris accompanied him to the outer door.
“I suppose, Mr. Green, all I can do is wish you a good journey,”
the big man said as he stopped outside the house and held out his hand.
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” Gees answered, and did not take the offered hand. “In fact, before we say good-bye—remember you said I had only to ask, if there were anything you could do for me?”
“Well, it holds good,” Norris answered, “and I’d be glad if there is anything. You mean—you can find some way for me to repay you?”
“For the present, just this,” Gees told him gravely. “Get me a pickaxe, a pointed crowbar, and a claw-ended crowbar, and keep them handy till I call for them—and for you too, I think. Can you do that?”
“A pickaxe, a claw-ended and a pointed crowbar,” Norris repeated. “Why, certainly I will. That means you’re coming back here, sir?”
“I surely am coming back—on the day you send me a wire to say that Stukeley has left and Nightmare farmhouse is empty,” Gees answered. “Or at the latest, the day after I get the wire, you may expect me.”
“It shall be sent,” Norris promised, “and—and one man can’t use a pickaxe and crowbar both at once, Mr. Green. You’ll need help.”
Gees held out his hand, then, with a laugh. “Good man!” he said.
“It looks as if I don’t even need to ask for that help.”
“It’s waiting for you, sir. I shall be ready.”
With that, Gees left him and got into the car, turning it about by the farm gateway to drive back through Denlandham. Beyond the end of the orchard and garden combined he sighted May Norris, standing beside the road and holding up her hand as a signal. He pulled in and stopped, and, instead of coming beside him to speak, she went round to the near side of the car, opened the door, and got in and seated herself beside him, all without a word of explanation. He stared at her, and she smiled back, quite composedly.
&nbs
p; “The fare,” he said, “is a pound a mile. How far do I take you?”
“To the end of Nightmare roadway,” she answered “and then—I had to talk to you, Mr. Gees, and it would only upset them if I had gone on trying while they could hear. Will you stop at the end of the roadway?”
He drove on, and stopped as she had asked, with the hawthorn-shrouded tunnel abreast of the car, so that they could see the light at its far end. The girl got out and stood waiting beside the car.
“Won’t you get out too, please?” she asked.
“But—here?” he demurred. “The last place, I should think.”
“But—oh, don’t you see!” she pleaded. “I’m immune, to use a silly-sounding simile, but the only one I can think of, it’s as when one has had measles. They can’t harm me again. I can’t tell you why, but it is so. I’m perfectly safe from them, and know it. That benediction, perhaps.”
“They?” Gees asked, and did not move from the driving seat.
“They,” she insisted. “Please get out. I want you to go with me, there.” She pointed along the roadway. “I want to see the house again, and we can talk as we go. Won’t you go with me—please?”
He got out, then, and opened the sagging gate. They passed into the gloom and silence of the roadway and he knew it empty of the influences that had made it a place of fearful mystery when he had been here before. It was no more, now, than an ordinary way to a farmhouse—perhaps that house was ordinary too, but of that he was not sure.
“To see it once more—I grew up there,” she said. “And I’m glad you consented, glad you let me talk to you for a little while. To tell you—if I never see you again, it won’t alter my caring for you.”
He stopped, and she, too, perforce stopped and faced him.
“But that’s—what would they?” he began and stopped, but could not voice the words until the colour had begun to flood her face.
“No—don’t misunderstand like that!” she begged, in a distressed way. “I don’t mean—not the caring a girl keeps to herself till it’s asked of her. More as I care for my father, but deeper, more intense. Of the spirit—some tie between you and me that will never loosen again as far as I am concerned, though you may not feel it. If I’d had a twin brother, say, and cared for him intensely. Is it strange?”
“Sudden, call it,” he answered, rather grimly.
She shook her head, and smiled as she gazed full at him. He felt that he had never seen lovelier eyes than hers, violet and deep, here in the gloom that enlarged their pupils and darkened them.
“Not in the least sudden, for I have known you quite a long time,” she said. “I was in a state where time lengthens out, terribly. Do you know—let us walk on, because they will miss me,
soon—do you know a nightmare where something terrible is hiding, waiting to clutch you, a horror that makes you wake and thank heaven you were not caught?”
“I have had that experience,” he admitted as they walked on.
“Well, it caught me,” she said soberly. “The horror was ten times intensified, a torture beyond imagining. And then—you, somewhere ahead in that awful state. You, meaning release. I knew it. In all that horror and darkness, that agony which was hell itself—I knew it. Through a time that was longer than years, because it was out of time and every moment of it was agony—I knew you would come to set me free. So—do you wonder that I care for you in the way I do?”
“You make it sound almost reasonable,” he admitted.
“Almost?” she echoed, with a tinge of amusement. “I don’t expect you to understand entirely, or to feel for me any of what I feel for you. You with your many interests, your totally different life from mine—from any that I can ever have. But let me try to make clear all I mean, as nearly as I can. If you’d seen me drowning, say, and plunged into the water and saved my life, I might reasonably say that life really belonged to you, mightn’t I? Admit that much.”
“I suppose you might say that, if you wished,” he half-agreed.
“Well, then, don’t you see? If you hadn’t found my way back to freedom for me, this voice might have gone on talking, and this body might have, been capable of walking as it walks with you now, but the real me, that me which my father and mother love, the reason and emotion that make up me—the soul, call it if you will—would have been prisoned away from expressing itself by means of my physical body. You found the way back to freedom for the real me, rescued it as surely as ever anyone was physically rescued from drowning, and so I look on it as belonging to you, just as my physical self would belong—my physical life, if you had saved it. You saved infinitely more.”
“Well, I’ll admit there’s something in your line of reasoning, if you don’t embarrass me by making too much of my part in—in what after all I could never have done myself,” he said seriously, “and in the way you claim to care for me, I believe I care for you, though—well, less, if you’ll forgive my bluntness over it. But naturally there’s a bond, for we’re sharers in something nobody else can realise quite as completely as we do—unless perhaps that good man Perivale realises it and is one with us. And now you feel quite safe, even here?”
“Even here, where it caught and overpowered me,” she answered. “I am safe. They can never harm me, never touch me again. Not through my own strength or anything I can do, but through what has been done for me. Immunised, call it. Beyond their power, for as long as I live.”
“Again—they, and their power,” he observed. “More than one?”
“Legion—remember where I have been,” she said. “Not that the darkness which made my prison was caused by more than one being, but I know now that we are surrounded by them always, some strong, and some weak, but all trying to get human beings, to be them.”
“Then why don’t they succeed more often?” he asked—merely to hear what she would say, rather than for knowledge.
“Because their intelligences are so small,” she said, and so confirmed his own belief. “They are less than human, which is why they try to possess human beings—to achieve humanity. Which doesn’t mean they are weak, for obviously the thing that caught me must have been stronger in the spirit sense than I am, or else it could never have held me as it did. Stronger as physically a horse or an ox is stronger, but having less intelligence as an ox or a horse has. Either of them might catch and conquer me physically, but it wouldn’t alter the fact that I am more intelligent than either of them. I can’t put it more clearly.”
“You needn’t,” he said. “Put in another way, it means that evil is a less thing than good, though at times it may prevail.”
“I’m so glad of this talk with you!” she exclaimed. “You say so easily what I mean. But—no farther. Just to see it.”
They stood, then, at the exit from the roadway, with Nightmare farmhouse, its buildings, and the mere to the right, all plain before them in the afternoon sunlight. Except that the four big shire horses still grazed on the far side of the mere, there was no sign of life about the place. No smoke rose from the big chimney, now.
“I grew up here, and was very happy here,” the girl said softly,
“and so—to see it just once more, like this. With you. Better so than in any other way, because of the bond. That upstairs window on the left was my room window. I used to go up there when I came back from school holidays and feel so glad to be home again.”
Gees remembered the little, soiled blue bow he had found, thrown down in the angle caused by the chimney’s projection. Stukeley kept that room locked, he knew: had it no terrors for her?
“It was not till last autumn that the change came,” she went on, as if answering his unspoken question. “The end of September, it would be. I began to have terrible dreams, nightmares, and would think I could hear laughter when I wakened. Strange, uncanny laughter, but never so loud that I could tell who laughed, or where. I tried to tell myself it was not laughter, but the bats in the attics—there are swarms of bats up the
re. And I grew to dread the room, and yet to be fascinated by it—I can’t explain that. And an odd feeling—it was never empty. Some other beside myself was there, but I was tongue-tied about it, mustn’t speak of it to anyone. I think now it was the growing power over me, the sweeping and garnishing of the chamber that being wanted to inhabit—or a gradual unlocking of the door that now, through you, is locked against any such possession for evermore.”