There was a momentary silence in which, having withdrawn my gaze from the lake, I glanced curiously at Hartsilver. It was certainly true that he had been without the intention of telling us a tall story. But what about Senderhill himself – had he perhaps been amusing himself by pulling his vicar’s leg? I judged it improbable. Senderhill might conceivably have fabricated a tale of the supernatural; it was impossible to think of him beginning it with the avowal of a non-existent – or even existent – tragic love affair.
‘Well?’ I heard Holroyd say.
‘That was Senderhill’s entire narrative.’ Hartsilver sounded puzzled. ‘Do you expect a sequel to it?’
‘Yes, of course. The experience bears all the marks of what is called a crisis-apparition. One would expect it to prove to have been coincidental with some actual shipwreck somewhere around the globe, probably involving a person or persons known to Senderhill.’
‘He made that point himself. But nothing of the kind was ever heard of.’
‘Then we are in the region of fairy-tales. Some family legend of a stock supernatural manifestation, intermittently turning up in an unvarying form for centuries, and presaging sudden death or what-have-you.’
‘There is no family legend. Senderhill could connect it with nothing at all. And nothing whatever succeeded upon it.’
‘It ought to have been investigated at the time.’ Holroyd had shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing can be done about it now.’
‘But, speaking of investigation,’ I asked, ‘was this vision the prompting occasion of Senderhill’s interesting himself in psychical research?’
‘Certainly it was,’ Hartsilver said. ‘Even although some deep reserve made him refrain from bringing forward the actual circumstance to his fellow investigators. And I come back to what I said earlier. That isolated and utterly unaccountable experience haunted him for the rest of his days. He craved more of the same thing. He felt entitled to more of the same thing, and yet he couldn’t come by it. Does that sound a little mad?’
‘Not in the least. It’s common enough.’ Holroyd had got up and was pacing restlessly about the large tenebrous dining-room. ‘Only it doesn’t often express itself in wide-ranging intellectual enquiry and experiment.’
‘Like the composing of your blessed heroic couplets,’ I said. ‘There’s not much connection between that and a spectral shipwreck.’
‘Perfectly true.’ Holroyd halted abruptly. ‘I suppose there were still plenty of barques sailing the seven seas when Senderhill was a young man?’
‘Good Lord, yes!’ I said. ‘Barques and schooners and clippers and whatever you like.’
‘Looking much as they’d looked for centuries?’
‘I wouldn’t quite say that.’ I realised what was in Holroyd’s mind. ‘No doubt if a ghost turns up in doublet and hose one notes the fact as having chronological significance. And if it had been, say, a seventeenth-century shipwreck that appeared to Senderhill he’d probably have been conscious of the craft as belonging to a past age. But nothing of the sort might be apparent if his marine drama belonged even to the earlier nineteenth century.’ I turned to Hartsilver. ‘This affair made Lucius Senderhill a foundation member of the Parapsychological Society. But do you happen to know whether he went in for enquiry and experiment in a purely private way? And locally?’
‘Well, to the end of his life the lake held a fascination for him. There can be no doubt about that. He was forever prowling restlessly round it. He regarded it as numinous, I suppose, or as a spot where some mysterious revelation was peculiarly likely to take place. He would have wished to believe that if he gazed out over it long enough – and particularly at night – a second and more meaningful preternatural experience might be granted him. But it wasn’t. So he came to believe that he himself commanded only a very limited responsiveness to such things – or perhaps with the passing of the years had ceased to command any at all. He just wasn’t psychic in the sense we were speaking of. And he very much wanted to find somebody who was.’
‘Do you mean,’ I asked, ‘that he would bring down mediums and other psychically well-accredited persons to gorp and gape at that lake by moonlight?’
‘He well may have done. But it was rather his idea – he explained this to me – that somebody with the right sensitiveness should have a spontaneous experience here, just as he himself had done, long ago. He thought, for example, that an adolescent—’ Hartsilver broke off in perplexity. ‘My dear sir,’ he said to me, ‘have I been so very amusing?’
It was true that I had produced a laugh not much less explosive than Holroyd’s own – for I was oddly relieved at having a small squalid notion thus dissipated.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But it happens that you have restored the late Lord Lucius in my regard. I now know why he took Mrs Uff’s daughter into the dark, with vague promises of showing her something.’
‘Showing her something?’
‘Yes – but she never see’d nothing.’ I controlled my hilarity, and glanced at Holroyd. ‘Poor Martha’s psi-factor is negligible.’ I paused, rather expecting that my friend would be as amused as myself. But his response surprised me.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘and I speak as what you might call an expert in such things, that I’d rather suppose it wasn’t that way with the girl at all?’
‘My dear Holroyd, you’ve scarcely had a word with her.’
‘Very true.’ Again Holroyd shrugged his shoulders. ‘But one gains these impressions rather rapidly at times.’
‘I must be off to the vicarage.’ Hartsilver had got to his feet. ‘How fortunate that I don’t have to cross the lake! I’d hate to be tempest-tossed after so very tolerable a dinner.’
We saw the vicar through the saloon, past the blind gaze of the toga’d Senderhills in the chilly hall, down the hazardous steps beneath the portico, and into his modest Mini car. Then we watched him down the drive, and returned into the house.
‘Tomorrow,’ Holroyd said a little grimly as we parted for the night, ‘we get to work.’
4
And indeed we went to work faithfully enough. For my own part, I quickly came to see that I should remain long at Vailes only under false pretences. The papers left by Lord Lucius Senderhill bore no reference to his private life; they were exclusively scientific, or philosophical, or of a sort to interest political historians of the earlier twentieth century; and they were destined for the library of Senderhill’s old college at Cambridge, where they would be available to all properly qualified persons. Lord Melchester’s apprehensiveness was entirely unjustified.
Arthur Holroyd, too, looked like drawing a blank or near-blank. The poem in heroic couplets had never got itself written, and a brief jotting in one of Senderhill’s scientific notebooks simply gave reasons (of which Holroyd approved) for abandoning the project as invalid. I am bound to say that I was amused at the thought of Mrs Gladwish conjuring her decasyllables from the void in vain.
This particular negative result did not quite license my friend to pack up and go. There is a theory, it seems, that the mind or personality may survive for a short time – disintegrating slowly, so that its final dissolution is postponed weeks or months beyond the period of bodily death. For some reason which did not become clear to me, this made desirable an immediate and rapid survey of such of Senderhill’s papers as were devoted to psychic matters. The task was going to take several days. Perhaps I may so far run ahead as to say that here, too, nothing material was to emerge – or nothing beyond those marginally and dubiously significant data with which I understand the annals of psychical research overflow.
It is, in fact, fair to warn the reader that I have reached a point in my narrative at which Lord Lucius Senderhill must a little retreat into its background – although to make way, indeed, for other, and earlier, Senderhills. His sole substantial link with what I have now to reveal is the vision once mysteriously granted to him through his dining-room window.
That vision – or the vic
ar’s account of it – had increased my own disposition to explore the lake, but Holroyd’s very proper insistence on ‘work’ had the consequence of a couple of days having passed before I was able to do so. On a bright and rather blowy spring morning the scene, naturally enough, held nothing of the haunting quality that moonlight had shed on it. There was now a sparkle over the surface of the water, which was stirred by the breeze to a semblance of tiny breakers feeling their way, not quite noiselessly, through the pebbles which here and there lay in a tumble below the bank. I wondered whether, if one lay flat on the turf and cultivated a Lilliputian eye, one could magnify this into such a sea-storm as Senderhill had glimpsed, and even see as cliffs of foam the willows whitening on the farther shore, and as great inland mountains the beech woods lying beyond.
The path I followed was to some extent overgrown; there was meadow-sweet to trample down, and here and there a trail of bramble trammelled the foot. Yet I saw signs of recent passage, so that I wondered who now came this way, and whether even in the last days of his life Lucius Senderhill had managed to frequent the lakeside. There was a beguiling abundance of water-fowl: coot, mallard, pintail duck – some with their young already in their wake, progressing with the just perceptible jerkiness of small mechanical toys. Ahead of me endlessly distraught lapwings quartered the air, wildly crying.
I saw that the lake, although narrow, was not much less than a mile long, and that the mansion, with its offices, outbuildings, and little boathouse, lay at one end of it. There was no reason why, if the path permitted, I should not make the complete circuit in an hour’s stroll, so I put the unconvincing Gothic front of the house behind me, and set off.
I have sketched the scene, and I have no doubt that my appreciation of it was lively enough. Yet I was not halfway down the lake before I had fallen into an abstraction effectively diverting my attention from my surroundings. At breakfast Holroyd had said something about the Census of Hallucinations, by which I supposed him to mean an ordered and classified record, no doubt compiled by his Society, of just such experiences as Senderhill had recounted to Hartsilver. I wondered just how common such visitations were. I had myself never contrived to do more than (as I think Shakespeare has it) suppose a bush a bear, nor could I recall anyone recounting to me anything more than momentary aberrations of a similar trivial kind. I wondered whether by any chance Senderhill himself had ever been on a sinking ship, or whether perhaps some ancestor of his had been lost at sea. There was scope for enquiry here, I thought, and I resolved to discuss the matter with Holroyd.
I tried to create for myself the experience of suddenly being confronted with a tempest more magical than Prospero’s. What would one chiefly feel? I recalled reading somewhere that supernatural apparitions seldom rouse terror – and sometimes not even surprise, let alone disbelief – at the actual time of their occurrence. But surely Senderhill must have been unnerved – and not least by the unnatural silence in which the fated ship went down? Yet, I remembered, such is supposed to be the general way with hallucinations; they are seldom accompanied by auditory phenomena. What about olfactory sensations? There is something peculiarly primitive about the sense of smell which one might rather expect to be exploited in psychical experience. Through that dining-room window, and in that balmy summer night, had Lucius Senderhill’s nostrils been suddenly assailed by the tang of a salt ocean air?
I had got so far in these mere ruminations when I found myself abruptly at a halt. Something sharp-scented had caught at my breath, and for a second I really believed that it was the odour of the sea.
In fact, it was quite different. I had passed the end of the lake unnoticing; the terrain had in consequence slightly changed; the smell was of wild mint crushed beneath my feet. There is nothing briny about wild mint, and I was amused by the false association my absorption had prompted. Turning round, I had a view up the length of the lake, with the small boathouse just visible in the distance, and behind it one wing of Vailes itself – the greater part of the house being from here invisible behind a clump of trees in the park. I saw that the route by which I might return along the farther bank was a regular bridle-path, which in the other direction wound away through beech woods on a line approximately continuing that of the lake itself. I was now as far afield as I had intended to go, but the continuing path somehow invited further enterprise. So I left the lake behind me, and plunged into the wood.
Wherever the trees thinned a little there was a carpeting of bluebells and pink campion, and at one point the path passed through a hawthorn copse in which the buds were still sealed close amid a foliage of brilliant green. Presently I was aware of a larger clearing, the ruins of a cottage in the middle of it, and a woman riding past it, rather bumpily, on a bicycle. I was a good deal surprised to find that my encounter was with Mrs Uff.
She dismounted as I approached, and I saw that she proposed to speak to me – a civility which I took as a further token of the success with which Holroyd had persuaded her of what he called our consequence. I made a remark about the quality of the day, and Mrs Uff further indicated her respect by precisely concurring in my estimate of it. I then said something about the trouble we must be giving her in view of the fact that she and her daughter were now virtually unsupported at Vailes. She replied to the effect that she relished a little professional labour, since it helped to occupy her mind in this melancholy period after his lordship’s decease. And she volunteered the information that her present expedition had been a marketing one in the interest of that evening’s dinner.
Although a full basket on the handlebars of Mrs Uff’s bicycle substantiated this claim, I found myself oddly persuaded that here was not, at least, the sole explanation of the housekeeper’s presence on the spot at which I had come upon her. Wherever she had been collecting her poultry and fruit, it seemed improbable that so rough a path represented her best return route. Rather more than by this, however, I was struck by a certain constraint in the woman, as if she were uneasy at having been encountered where she had. And there was something yet further. One cannot have worked for long as a solicitor without coming to know when a client or acquaintance is hesitating on the verge of making a confidence or seeking counsel in a difficulty. And some instinct told me in what general direction any problem of Mrs Uff’s was likely to lie.
I remarked that a capable girl like Martha must be a great support to her, and then offered the sage conjecture that the girl was no doubt holding the fort for her at Vailes at that moment.
‘No,’ Mrs Uff said, ‘she’s not at the house.’ And suddenly she added, ‘As a matter of fact, sir, I have an eye open for her now.’
‘Ah, Martha likes rambling? Well, it’s a very pleasant part of the country for that.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Mrs Uff hesitated, as if uncertain whether to construe this casual rejoinder favourably. ‘She goes off, and that’s the fact,’ she said. ‘Sometimes by day, and sometimes in the dark.’
‘And it worries you, I see.’ The word dark had naturally put me in mind of Martha Uff’s recent history: both my suspicions about Lucius Senderhill’s nocturnal occasions with her, and the respectable if eccentric explanation these had proved to carry. I hadn’t the least idea whether Mrs Uff knew that her late employer had cherished the hope that her daughter might possess psychical or preternatural powers. But it was possible that she might be attributing Martha’s unsettled behaviour to Senderhill’s concern with her – and if this were so it seemed to me that she ought to have made clear to her what the nature of that concern had been. So I resolved on a certain measure of frankness. ‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that Lord Lucius had anything to do with setting Martha wandering?’
‘Yes and no.’ Mrs Uff, although startled by my question, rose to it with what I could see was relief – the relief of having taken a plunge. ‘It may be he ended by putting things in her head, sir. But she was a strange girl before that. And it was her being strange that made him interested like.’
‘I see.’ I noted,
as rather touching, that the idiom of the folk was likely to return to the superior Mrs Uff under stress of strong feeling. ‘But just how was Martha strange in the first place?’
‘She wasn’t right at school, sir, for a start. They said that if she was to learn her reading and ciphering, it would have to be at some special place. His lordship acted very generously, as soon as he learnt about that – and it was before he took his queer kind of special interest in her. He offered to send Martha to a boarding school that wouldn’t be any kind of national school at all. A school where the gentry send their children of Martha’s sort. He said more could be done for her in such a place, where there would be plenty of teachers and equipment and money. And it would be all at his lordship’s charge.’
‘But you didn’t agree, Mrs Uff?’
‘It would still have been a place for defectives. There would have been talk.’ Mrs Uff was silent for a moment, while I registered in myself a certain respect for her thus taking a stand firmly with her own order. ‘And I thought perhaps I could take her through a bit more than her A.B.C. myself.’
‘I quite understand your feeling, Mrs Uff. Is Martha an excitable girl?’
‘She didn’t used to be. But when her womanhood began to come to her, then she did start having her hysterical times.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s something that is likely to pass away later.’ I am no Arthur Holroyd, but I did now recognise in Martha Uff a psychological type which turns up often enough in the field in which his interest lies. ‘Would you say that Martha . . . ‘I broke off, conscious that Mrs Uff’s attention had momentarily strayed from me. And it had strayed to the small and unimposing ruin close to where we stood. ‘Is this,’ I emended, ‘one of the places Martha wanders off to?’
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