“I do hope they won’t,” Amelia said as the girls sat brushing their hair at the two large white muslin frilled dressing-tables in the room they shared.
“Won’t what?” said Ernestine, vigorous with the brush.
“Sleep in that hateful pavilion. I wish you’d ask them not to, Ernestine. They’d mind, if you asked them.”
“Of course I will if you like, dear,” said Ernestine cordially. She was always the soul of good nature. “But I don’t think you ought to believe in ghost stories, not really.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, because of the Bible and going to church and all that,” said Ernestine. “Do you really think Rowland’s Macassar has made any difference to my hair?”
“It’s just as beautiful as it always was,” said Amelia, twisting up her own little ashen-blonde handful. “What was that?”
That was a sound coming from the little dressing-room. There was no light in that room. Amelia went into the little room though Ernestine said: “Oh, don’t! How can you? It might be a ghost or a rat or something,” and as she went she whispered: “Hush!”
The window of the little room was open and she leaned out of it. The stone sill was cold to her elbows through her print dressing-jacket.
Ernestine went on brushing her hair. Amelia heard a movement below the window and listened. “Tonight will do,” someone said.
“It’s too late,” said someone else.
“If you’re afraid, it will always be too late or too early,” said someone. And it was Thesiger.
“You know I’m not afraid,” the other one, who was Doricourt, answered hotly.
“An hour for each of us will satisfy honour,” said Thesiger carelessly. “The girls will expect it. I couldn’t sleep. Let’s do it now and get it over. Let’s see. Oh, damn it!”
A faint click had sounded.
“Dropped my watch. I forgot the chain was loose. It’s all right though; glass not broken even. Well, are you game?”
“Oh, yes, if you insist. Shall I go first, or you?”
“I will,” said Thesiger. “That’s only fair, because I suggested it. I’ll stay till half-past one or a quarter to two, and then you come on. See?”
“Oh, all right. I think it’s silly, though,” said Frederick.
Then the voices ceased. Amelia went back to the other girl.
“They’re going to do it tonight.”
“Are they, dear?” Ernestine was placid as ever. “Do what?”
“Sleep in that horrible pavilion.”
“How do you know?”
Amelia explained how she knew.
“Whatever can we do?” she added.
“Well, dear, suppose we go to bed,” suggested Ernestine helpfully. “We shall hear all about it in the morning.”
“But suppose anything happens?”
“What could happen?”
“Oh, anything,” said Amelia. “Oh, I do wish they wouldn’t! I shall go down and ask them not to.”
“Amelia!” the other girl was at last aroused. “You couldn’t. I shouldn’t let you dream of doing anything so unladylike. What would the gentlemen think of you?”
The question silenced Amelia, but she began to put on her so lately discarded bodice.
“I won’t go if you think I oughtn’t,” she said.
“Forward and fast, auntie would call it,” said the other. “I am almost sure she would.”
“But I’ll keep dressed. I shan’t disturb you. I’ll sit in the dressing-room. I can’t go to sleep while he’s running into this awful danger.”
“Which he?” Ernestine’s voice was very sharp. “And there isn’t any danger.”
“Yes, there is,” said Amelia sullenly, “and I mean them. Both of them.”
Ernestine said her prayers and got into bed. She had put her hair in curl-papers which became her like a wreath of white roses.
“I don’t think auntie will be pleased,” she said, “when she hears that you sat up all night watching young gentlemen. Goodnight, dear!”
“Goodnight, darling,” said Amelia. “I know you don’t understand. It’s all right.”
She sat in the dark by the dressing-room window. There was no moon, but the starlight lay on the dew of the park, and the trees massed themselves in bunches of a darker grey, deepening to black at the roots of them. There was no sound to break the stillness, except the little crackling of twigs and rustlings of leaves as birds or little night wandering beasts moved in the shadows of the garden, and the sudden creakings that furniture makes if you sit alone with it and listen in the night’s silence.
Amelia sat on and listened, listened. The pavilion showed in broken streaks of pale grey against the wood, that seemed to be clinging to it in dark patches. But that, she reminded herself, was only the creeper. She sat there for a very long time, not knowing how long a time it was. For anxiety is a poor chronometer, and the first ten minutes had seemed an hour. She had no watch. Ernestine had—and slept with it under her pillow. The stable clock was out of order; the man had been sent for to see it. There was nothing to measure time’s flight by, and she sat there rigid, straining her ears for a footfall on the grass, straining her eyes to see a figure come out of the dark pavilion and across the dew-grey grass towards the house. And she heard nothing, saw nothing.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the grey of the sleeping trees took on faint dreams of colour. The sky turned faint above the trees, the moon perhaps was coming out. The pavilion grew more clearly visible. It seemed to Amelia that something moved along the leaves that surrounded it, and she looked to see him come out. But he did not come.
“I wish the moon would really shine,” she told herself. And suddenly she knew that the sky was clear and that this growing light was not the moon’s cold shiver, but the growing light of dawn.
She went quickly into the other room, put her hand under the pillow of Ernestine, and drew out the little watch with the diamond “E” on it.
“A quarter to three,” she said aloud. Ernestine moved and grunted.
There was no hesitation about Amelia now. Without another thought for the ladylike and the really suitable, she lighted her candle and went quickly down the stairs, paused a moment in the hall, and so out through the front door. She passed along the terrace. The feet of Frederick protruded from the open French window of the smoking-room. She set down her candle on the terrace—it burned clearly enough in that clear air—went up to Frederick as he slept, his head between his shoulders and his hands loosely hanging, and shook him.
“Wake up,” she said—“Wake up! Something’s happened! It’s a quarter to three and he’s not come back.”
“Who’s not what?” Frederick said sleepily.
“Mr. Thesiger. The pavilion.”
“Thesiger!—the . . . You, Miss Davenant? I beg your pardon. I must have dropped off.”
He got up unsteadily, gazing dully at this white apparition still in evening dress with pale hair now no longer wreathed.
“What is it?” he said. “Is anybody ill?”
Briefly and very urgently Amelia told him what it was, implored him to go at once and see what had happened. If he had been fully awake, her voice and her eyes would have told him many things.
“He said he’d come back,” he said. “Hadn’t I better wait? You go back to bed, Miss Davenant. If he doesn’t come in half an hour . . .”
“If you don’t go this minute,” said Amelia tensely, “I shall.”
“Oh, well, if you insist,” Frederick said. “He has simply fallen asleep as I did. Dear Miss Davenant, return to your room, I beg. In the morning when we are all laughing at this false alarm, you will be glad to remember that Mr. Thesiger does not know of your anxiety.”
“I hate you,” said Amelia gently, “and I am going to see what has happened. Come or not, as you like.”
She caught up the silver candlestick and he followed its wavering gleam down the terrace steps and across the grey dewy grass.
Halfway
she paused, lifted the hand that had been hidden among her muslin flounces and held it out to him with a big Indian dagger in it.
“I got it out of the hall,” she said. “If there’s any real danger. Anything living. I mean. I thought . . . But I know I couldn’t use it. Will you take it?”
He took it, laughing kindly.
“How romantic you are,” he said admiringly and looked at her standing there in the mingled gold and grey of dawn and candlelight. It was as though he had never seen her before.
They reached the steps of the pavilion and stumbled up them. The door was closed but not locked. And Amelia noticed that the trails of creeper had not been disturbed, they grew across the doorway, as thick as a man’s finger, some of them.
“He must have got in by one of the windows,” Frederick said. “Your dagger comes in handy, Miss Davenant.”
He slashed at the wet sticky green stuff and put his shoulder to the door. It yielded at a touch and they went in.
The one candle lighted the pavilion hardly at all, and the dusky light that oozed in through the door and windows helped very little. And the silence was thick and heavy.
“Thesiger!” said Frederick, clearing his throat. “Thesiger! Hullo! Where are you?”
Thesiger did not say where he was. And then he saw.
There were low seats to the windows, and between the windows low stone benches ran. On one of these something dark, something dark and in places white, confused the outline of the carved stone.
“Thesiger,” said Frederick again in the tone a man uses to a room that he is almost sure is empty. “Thesiger!”
But Amelia was bending over the bench. She was holding the candle crookedly so that it flared and guttered.
“Is he there?” Frederick asked, following her; “is that him? Is he asleep?”
“Take the candle,” said Amelia, and he took it obediently. Amelia was touching what lay on the bench. Suddenly she screamed. Just one scream, not very loud. But Frederick remembers just how it sounded. Sometimes he hears it in dreams and wakes moaning, though he is an old man now and his old wife says: “What is it, dear?” and he says: “Nothing, my Ernestine, nothing.”
Directly she had screamed: “He’s dead,” and fell on her knees by the bench. Frederick saw that she held something in her arms.
“Perhaps he isn’t,” she said. “Fetch someone from the house, brandy—send for a doctor. Oh, go, go, go!”
“I can’t leave you here,” said Frederick with thoughtful propriety; “suppose he revives?”
“He will not revive,” said Amelia dully, “go, go, go! Do as I tell you. Go! If you don’t go,” she added suddenly and amazingly, “I believe I shall kill you. It’s all your doing.”
The astounding sharp injustice of this stung Frederick into action. “I believe he’s only fainted or something,” he said. “When I’ve roused the house and everyone has witnessed your emotion you will regret . . .”
She sprang to her feet and caught the knife from him and raised it, awkwardly, clumsily, but with keen threatening, not to be mistaken or disregarded. Frederick went.
When Frederick came back, with the groom and the gardener (he hadn’t thought it well to disturb the ladies), the pavilion was filled full of white revealing daylight. On the bench lay a dead man and kneeling by him a living woman on whose warm breast his cold and heavy head lay pillowed. The dead man’s hands were full of the green crushed leaves, and thick twining tendrils were about his wrists and throat. A wave of green seemed to have swept from the open window to the bench where he lay.
The groom and the gardener and the dad man’s friend looked and looked.
“Looks like as if he’d got himself entangled in the creeper and lost ’is ’ead,” said the groom, scratching his own.
“How’d the creeper get in, though? That’s what I says,” it was the gardener who said it.
“Through the window,” said Doricourt, moistening his lips with his tongue.
“The window was shut, though, when I come by at five yesterday,” said the gardener stubbornly. “’Ow did it get all that way since five?”
They looked at each other, voicing, silently, impossible things.
The woman never spoke. She sat there in the white ring of her crinolined dress like a broken white rose. But her arms were round Thesiger and she would not move them.
When the doctor came, he sent for Ernestine who came, flushed and sleepy-eyed and very frightened, and shocked.
“You’re very upset, dear,” she said to her friend, “and no wonder. How brave of you to come out with Mr. Doricourt to see what happened. But you can’t do anything now, dear. Come in and I’ll tell them to get you some tea.”
Amelia laughed, looked down at the face on her shoulder, laid the head back on the bench among the drooping green of the creeper, stooped over it, kissed it and said quite quietly and gently: “Goodbye, dear, goodbye!”—took Ernestine’s arm and went away with her.
The doctor made an examination and gave a death-certificate. “Heart failure,” was his original and brilliant diagnosis. The certificate said nothing, and Frederick said nothing, of the creeper that was wound about the dead man’s neck, nor of the little white wounds, like little bloodless lips half-open, that they found about the dead man’s neck.
“An imaginative or uneducated person,” said the doctor, “might suppose that the creeper had something to do with his death. But we mustn’t encourage superstition. I will assist my man to prepare the body for its last sleep. Then we need not have any chattering woman.”
“Can you read Latin?” Frederick asked. The doctor could, and, later, did.
It was the Latin of that brown book with the Doricourt arms on it that Frederick wanted read. And when he and the doctor had been together with the book between them for three hours, they closed it and looked at each other with shy and doubtful eyes.
“It can’t be true,” said Frederick.
“If it is,” said the more cautious doctor, “you don’t want it talked about. I should destroy that book if I were you. And I should root up that creeper and burn it. It is quite evident, from what you tell me, that your friend believed that this creeper was a man-eater, that it fed, just before its flowering time, as the book tells us, at dawn; and that he fully meant that the thing when it crawled into the pavilion seeking its prey should find you and not him. It would have been so, I understand, if his watch had not stopped at one o’clock.”
“He dropped it, you know,” said Doricourt like a man in a dream.
“All the cases in this book are the same,” said the doctor, “the strangling, the white wounds. I have heard of such plants; I never believed.” He shuddered. “Had your friend any spite against you? Any reason for wanting to get you out of the way?”
Frederick thought of Ernestine, of Thesiger’s eyes on Ernestine, of her smile at him over her blue muslin shoulder.
“No,” he said, “none. None whatever. It must have been an accident. I am sure he did not know. He could not read Latin.” He lied, being, after all, a gentleman, and Ernestine’s name being sacred.
“The creeper seems to have been brought here and planted in Henry the Eighth’s time. And then the thing began. It seems to have been at its flowering season that it needed the . . . that, in short, it was dangerous. The little animals and birds found dead near the pavilion . . . But to move itself all that way, across the floor! The thing must have been almost conscient,” he said with a sincere shudder. “One would think,” he corrected himself at once, “that it knew what it was doing, if such a thing were not plainly contrary to the laws of nature.”
“Yes,” said Frederick, “one would. I think if I can’t do anything more I’ll go and rest. Somehow all this has given me a turn. Poor Thesiger!”
His last thought before he went to sleep was one of pity.
“Poor Thesiger,” he said, “how violent and wicked! And what an escape for me! I must never tell Ernestine. And all the time there was Amelia . . . Er
nestine would never have done that for me.” And on a little pang of regret for the impossible he fell asleep.
Amelia went on living. She was not the sort that dies even of such a thing as happened to her on that night, when for the first and last time she held her love in her arms and knew him for the murderer he was. It was only the other day that she died, a very old woman. Ernestine who, beloved and surrounded by children and grand-children, survived her, spoke her epitaph: “Poor Amelia,” she said, “nobody ever looked the same side of the road where she was. There was an indiscretion when she was young. Oh, nothing disgraceful, of course. She was a lady. But people talked. It was the sort of thing that stamps a girl, you know.”
NOT ON THE PASSENGER LIST
Barry Pain
(1864–1928)
Barry Pain is in some ways a cautionary tale about what happens when a talented writer is forced to churn out commercial work to survive. Pain’s catalogue of work—sixty novels and short story collections—is more than respectable, and his best work continues to entertain and chill readers, but one can’t help but wonder what might have been, what stories he could have produced if he’d stuck to his strength—horror stories—instead of the comedic work he produced to live on.
Pain wrote romances, detective stories, and horror stories, but it was his comedies—breezy parodies and send-ups of the English middle-class—that earned him the most money. The five “Eliza” novels were his best-known work and are perhaps his best comedic work, being reprinted several times, most recently in 2002. But for the most part Pain’s comic work and parodies uncomfortably show their age, lacking the technical quality that makes P. G. Wodehouse’s work immortal.
Pain’s horror stories, conversely, are only a little dated now, and stories like “The Moon-Slave” (1901), “Rose Rose” (1910), and “Not on the Passenger List,” which first appeared in The Illustrated Sunday Magazine (Aug. 1, 1915), retain their ability to terrify when called upon to do so.
I HAD NOT slept. It may have been the noise which prevented me. The entire ship groaned, creaked, screamed, and sobbed. In the staterooms near mine the flooring was being torn up, and somebody was busy with a very blunt saw just over my head—at least it sounded like that. The motion, too, was not favourable for sleep. There was nothing but strong personal magnetism to keep me in my bunk. If I had relaxed it for a moment I should have fallen out.
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