Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  Less well-known now are Nesbit’s adult novels and short story collections, a number of which were horror stories. “The Pavilion,” which first appeared in The Strand (Nov. 15, 1915), was one of Nesbit’s last works, but has the delicacy, ambiguity, and edge of earlier classics like “From the Dead” (1893) and “The Five Senses” (1909).

  THERE WAS NEVER a moment’s doubt in her own mind. So she said afterwards. And everyone agreed that she had concealed her feelings with true womanly discretion. Her friend and confidant, Amelia Davenant, was at any rate completely deceived. Amelia was one of those featureless blondes who seem born to be overlooked. She adored her beautiful friend, and never, from first to last, could see any fault in her, except, perhaps, on the evening when the real things of the story happened. And even in that matter she owned at the time that it was only that her darling Ernestine did not understand.

  Ernestine was a prettyish girl with the airs, so irresistible and misleading, of a beauty; most people said that she was beautiful, and she certainly managed, with extraordinary success, to produce the illusion of beauty. Quite a number of plainish girls achieve that effect nowadays. The freedom of modern dress and coiffure and the increasing confidence in herself which the modern girl experiences, aid her in fostering the illusion; but in the sixties, when everyone wore much the same sort of bonnet, when your choice in coiffure was limited to bandeaux or ringlets, and the crinoline was your only wear, something very like genius was needed to deceive the world in the matter of your personal charms. Ernestine had that genius; hers was the smiling, ringleted, dark-haired, dark-eyed, sparkling type.

  Amelia had blonde bandeaux and kind appealing blue eyes, rather too small and rather too dull; her hands and ears were beautiful, and she kept them out of sight as much as possible. In our times the blonde hair would have been puffed out to make a frame for the forehead, a little too high; a certain shade of blue and a certain shade of boldness would have made her eyes effective. And the beautiful hands would have learned that flowerlike droop of the wrist so justly and so universally admired. But as it was, Amelia was very nearly plain, and in her secret emotional self-communings told herself that she was ugly. It was she who, at the age of fourteen, composed the remarkable poem beginning:

  I know that I am ugly: did I make

  The face that is the laugh and jest of all?

  and goes on, after disclaiming any personal responsibility for the face, to entreat the kind earth to “cover it away from mocking eyes,” and to “let the daisies blossom where it lies.”

  Amelia did not want to die, and her face was not the laugh and jest, or indeed the special interest, of anyone. All that was poetic licence. Amelia had read perhaps a little too much poetry of the type of ‘Quand je suis morte, mes amies, plantez un saule au cimetière’; but really life was a very good thing to Amelia, especially when she had a new dress and someone paid her a compliment. But she went on writing verses extolling the advantages of The Tomb, and grovelling metrically at the feet of One who was Another’s until that summer, when she was nineteen, and went to stay with Ernestine at Doricourt. Then her Muse took flight, scared, perhaps, by the possibility, suddenly and threateningly presented, of being asked to inspire verse about the real things of life.

  At any rate, Amelia ceased to write poetry about the time when she and Ernestine and Ernestine’s aunt went on a visit to Doricourt, where Frederick Powell lived with his aunt. It was not one of those hurried motor-fed excursions which we have now, and call weekends, but a long leisurely visit, when all the friends of the static aunt called on the dynamic aunt, and both returned the calls with much state, a big barouche and a pair of fat horses. There were croquet parties and archery parties and little dances, all pleasant informal little gaieties arranged without ceremony among people who lived within driving distance of each other and knew each other’s tastes and incomes and family history as well as they knew their own. The habit of importing huge droves of strangers from distant counties for brief harrying raids did not then obtain. There was instead a wide and constant circle of peasant people with an unflagging stream of gaiety, mild indeed, but delightful to unjaded palates.

  And at Doricourt life was delightful even on the days when there was no party. It was perhaps more delightful to Ernestine than to her friend, but even so, the one least pleased was Ernestine’s aunt.

  “I do think,” she said to the other aunt whose name was Julia–“I daresay it is not so to you, being accustomed to Mr. W. Frederick, of course, from his childhood, but I always find gentlemen in the house so unsettling, especially young gentlemen, and when there are young ladies also. One is always on the qui vive for excitement.”

  “Of course,” said Aunt Julia, with the air of a woman of the world, “living as you and dear Ernestine do, with only females in the house . . .”

  “We hang up an old coat and hat of my brother’s on the hat stand in the hall,” Aunt Emmeline protested.

  “. . . The presence of gentlemen in the house must be a little unsettling. For myself, I am inured to it. Frederick has so many friends. Mr. Thesiger, perhaps, the greatest. I believe him to be a most worthy young man, but peculiar.” She leaned forward across her bright-tinted Berlin woolwork and spoke impressively, the needle with its trailing red poised in air. “You know, I hope you will not think it indelicate of me to mention such a thing, but dear Frederick . . . your dear Ernestine would have been in every way so suitable.”

  “Would have been?” Aunt Emmeline’s tortoise-shell shuttle ceased its swift movement among the white loops and knots of her tatting.

  “Well, my dear,” said the other aunt, a little shortly, “you must surely have noticed . . .”

  “You don’t mean to suggest Amelia . . . I thought Mr. Thesiger and Amelia . . .”

  “Amelia! I really must say! No, I was alluding to Mr. Thesiger’s attentions to dear Ernestine. Most marked. In dear Frederick’s place I should have found some excuse for shortening Mr. Thesiger’s visit. But, of course, I cannot interfere. Gentlemen must manage these things for themselves. I only hope that there will be none of that trifling with the most holy affections of others which . . .”

  The less voluble aunt cut in hotly with: “Ernestine’s incapable of anything so unladylike.”

  “Just what I was saying,” the other rejoined blandly, got up and drew the blind a little lower, for the afternoon sun was glowing on the rosy wreaths of the drawing-room carpet.

  Outside in the sunshine Frederick was doing his best to arrange his own affairs. He had managed to place himself beside Miss Ernestine Meutys on the stone steps of the pavilion; but then, Mr. Thesiger lay along the lower step at her feet, a very good position for looking up into her eyes. Amelia was beside him, but then it never seemed to matter whom Amelia sat beside.

  They were talking about the pavilion on whose steps they sat, and Amelia who often asked uninteresting questions had wondered how old it was. It was Frederick’s pavilion after all, and he felt this when his friend took the words out of his mouth and used them on his own account, even though he did give the answer in the form of an appeal.

  “The foundations are Tudor, aren’t they?” he said. “Wasn’t it an observatory or laboratory or something of that sort in Fat Henry’s time?”

  “Yes,” said Frederick, “there was some story about a wizard or an alchemist or something, and it was burned down, and then they rebuilt it in its present style.”

  “The Italian style, isn’t it?” said Thesiger; “but you can hardly see what it is now, for the creeper.”

  “Virginia creeper, isn’t it?” Amelia asked, and Frederick said: “Yes, Virginia creeper.” Thesiger said it looked more like a South American plant, and Ernestine said Virginia was in South America and that was why. “I know, because of the war,” she said modestly, and nobody smiled or answered. There were manners in those days.

  “There’s a ghost story about it surely,” Thesiger began again, looking up at the dark closed doors of the pavilion.r />
  “Not that I ever heard of,” said the pavilion’s owner. “I think the country people invented the tale because there have always been so many rabbits and weasels and things found dead near it. And once a dog, my uncle’s favourite spaniel. But of course that’s simply because they get entangled in the Virginia creeper—you see how fine and big it is—and can’t get out, and die as they do in traps. But the villagers prefer to think it’s ghosts.”

  “I thought there was a real ghost story,” Thesiger persisted.

  Ernestine said: “A ghost story. How delicious! Do tell it, Mr. Doricourt. This is just the place for a ghost story. Out of doors and the sun shining, so that we can’t really be frightened.”

  Doricourt protested again that he knew no story.

  “That’s because you never read, dear boy,” said Eugene Thesiger. “That library of yours. There’s a delightful book—did you never notice it—brown tree calf with your arms on it; the head of the house writes the history of the house as far as he knows it. There’s a lot in that book. It began in Tudor times—1515 to be exact.”

  “Queen Elizabeth’s time.” Ernestine thought that made it so much more interesting. “And was the ghost story in that?”

  “It isn’t exactly a ghost story,” said Thesiger. “It’s only that the pavilion seems to be an unlucky place to sleep in.”

  “Haunted?” Frederick asked, and added that he must look up that book.

  “Not haunted exactly. Only several people who have slept the night there went on sleeping.”

  “Dead, he means,” said Ernestine, and it was left for Amelia to ask: “Does the book tell anything particular about how the people died? What killed them, or anything?”

  “There are suggestions,” said Thesiger; “but there, it is a gloomy subject. I don’t know why I started it. Should we have time for a game of croquet before tea, Doricourt?”

  “I wish you’d read the book and tell me the stories,” Ernestine said to Frederick, apart, over the croquet balls.

  “I will,” he answered fervently, “you’ve only to tell me what you want.”

  “Or perhaps Mr. Thesiger will tell us another time—in the twilight. Since people like twilight for ghosts. Will you, Mr. Thesiger?” She spoke over her blue muslin shoulder.

  Frederick certainly meant to look up the book, but he delayed till after supper; the half-hour before bed when he and Thesiger put on their braided smoking-jackets and their braided smoking-caps with the long yellow tassels, and smoked the cigars which were, in those days still, more of a luxury than a necessity. Ordinarily, of course, these were smoked out of doors, or in the smoking-room, a stuffy little den littered with boots and guns and yellow-backed railway novels. But tonight Frederick left his friend in that dingy hutch, and went alone to the library, found the book and took it to the circle of light made by the colza lamp.

  “I can skim through it in half an hour,” he said, and wound up the lamp and lighted his second cigar. Then he opened the shutters and windows, so that the room should not smell of smoke in the morning. Those were the days of consideration for the ladies who had not yet learned that a cigarette is not exclusively a male accessory like a beard or a bass voice.

  But when, his preparations complete, he opened the book, he was compelled to say “Pshaw!” Nothing short of this could relieve his feelings. (You know the expression I mean, though of course it isn’t pronounced as it’s spelt, any more than Featherstonehaugh or St. Maur are).

  “Pshaw!” said Frederick, fluttering the pages. His remark was justified. The earlier part of the book was written in the beautiful script of the early sixteenth century, that looks so plain and is so impossible to read, and the later pages, though the handwriting was clear and Italian enough, left Frederick helpless, for the language was Latin, and Frederick’s Latin was limited to the particular passages he had “been through” at his private school. He recognized a word here and there, mors, for instance, and pallidus and pavor and arcanum, just as you or I might; but to read the complicated stuff and make sense of it . . . ! Frederick said something just a shade stronger than “Pshaw!”—“ Botheration!” I think it was; replaced the book on the shelf, closed the shutters and turned out the lamp. He thought he would ask Thesiger to translate the thing, but then again he thought he wouldn’t. So he went to bed wishing that he had happened to remember more of the Latin so painfully beaten into the best years of his boyhood.

  And the story of the pavilion was, after all, told by Thesiger.

  There was a little dance at Doricourt next evening, a carpet dance, they called it. The furniture was pushed back against the walls, and the tightly stretched Axminster carpet was not so bad to dance on as you might suppose. That, you see, was before the days of polished floors and large rugs with loose edges that you can catch your feet in. A carpet was a carpet in those days, well and truly laid, conscientiously exact to the last recess and fitting the floor like a skin. And on this quite tolerable surface the young people danced very happily, some ten or twelve couples. The old people did not dance in those days, except sometimes a quadrille of state to “open the ball.” They played cards in a room provided for the purpose, and in the dancing-room three or four kindly middle-aged ladies were considered to provide ample chaperonage. You were not even expected to report yourself to your chaperone at the conclusion of a dance. It was not like a real ball. And even in those far-off days there were conservatories.

  It was on the steps of the conservatory, not the steps leading from the dancing-room, but the steps leading to the garden, that the story was told. The four young people were sitting together, the girls’ crinolined flounces spreading round them light huge pale roses, the young men correct in their high-shouldered coats and white cravats. Ernestine had been very kind to both the men—a little too kind, perhaps, who can tell? At any rate, there was in their eyes exactly that light which you may imagine in the eyes of rival stags in the mating season. It was Ernestine who asked Frederick for the story, and Thesiger who, at Amelia’s suggestion, told it.

  “It’s quite a number of stories,” he said, “and yet it’s really all the same story. The first man to sleep in the pavilion slept there ten years after it was built. He was a friend of the alchemist or astrologer who built it. He was found dead in the morning. There seemed to have been a struggle. His arms bore the marks of cords. No; they never found any cords. He died from loss of blood. There were curious wounds. That was all the rude leeches of the day could report to the bereaved survivors of the deceased.”

  “How sunny you are, Mr. Thesiger,” said Ernestine with that celebrated soft low laugh of hers. When Ernestine was elderly, many people thought her stupid. When she was young, no-one seems to have been of this opinion.

  “And the next?” asked Amelia.

  “The next was sixty years later. It was a visitor that time, too. And he was found dead with just the same marks, and the doctors said the same thing. And so it went on. There have been eight deaths altogether—unexplained deaths. Nobody has slept in it now for over a hundred years. People seem to have a prejudice against the place as a sleeping apartment. I can’t think why.”

  “Isn’t he simply killing?” Ernestine asked Amelia, who said: “And doesn’t anyone know how it happened?” No-one answered till Ernestine repeated the question in the form of: “I suppose it was just an accident?”

  “It was a curiously recurrent accident,” said Thesiger, and Frederick who throughout the conversation had said the right things at the right moment, remarked that it did not do to believe all these old legends. Most old families had them, he believed. Frederick had inherited Doricourt from an unknown great-uncle of whom in life he had not so much as heard, but he was very strong on the family tradition. “I don’t attach any importance to these tales myself.”

  “Of course not. All the same,” said Thesiger deliberately, “you wouldn’t care to pass a night in that pavilion.”

  “No more would you,” was all Frederick found on his lips. />
  “I admit that I shouldn’t enjoy it,” said Eugene, “but I’ll bet you a hundred you don’t do it.”

  “Done,” said Frederick.

  “Oh, Mr. Doricourt,” breathed Ernestine, a little shocked at betting ‘before ladies.’”

  “Don’t!” said Amelia, to whom, of course, no-one paid any attention, “don’t do it.”

  You know how, in the midst of flower and leafage, a snake will suddenly, surprisingly rear a head that threatens? So, amid friendly talk and laughter, a sudden fierce antagonism sometimes looks out and vanishes again, surprising most of all the antagonists. This antagonism spoke in the tones of both men, and after Amelia had said, “Don’t,” there was a curiously breathless silence. Ernestine broke it. “Oh,” she said, “I do wonder which of you will win. I should like them both to win, wouldn’t you, Amelia? Only I suppose that’s not always possible, is it?”

  Both gentlemen assured her that in the case of bets it was very rarely possible.

  “Then I wish you wouldn’t,” said Ernestine. “You could both pass the night there, couldn’t you, and be company for each other? I don’t think betting for such large sums is quite the thing, do you, Amelia?”

  Amelia said No, she didn’t, but Eugene had already begun to say, “Let the bet be off then, if Miss Meutys doesn’t like it. That suggestion was invaluable. But the thing itself needn’t be off. Look here, Doricourt, I’ll stay in the pavilion from one to three and you from three to five. Then honour will be satisfied. How will that do?”

  The snake had disappeared.

  “Agreed,” said Frederick, “and we can compare impressions afterwards. That will be quite interesting.”

  Then someone came and asked where they had all got to, and they went in and danced some more dances. Ernestine danced twice with Frederick and drank iced sherry and water and they said good-night and lighted their bedroom candles at the table in the hall.