While he talked he gave me his card, and I read his name was L. Maxwell M’Leod, Esq., of Holmescroft. A City address was tucked away in a corner.
‘My business,’ he added, ‘used to be furs. If you are interested in furs – I’ve given thirty years of my life to ’em.’
‘You’re very kind,’ I murmured.
‘Far from it, I assure you. I can meet you next Saturday afternoon anywhere in London you choose to name, and I’ll be only too happy to motor you down. It ought to be a delightful run at this time of year – the rhododendrons will be out. I mean it. You don’t know how truly I mean it. Veryprobably – it won’t affect you at all. And – I think I may say I have the finest collection of narwhal tusks in the world. All the best skins and horns have to go through London, and L. Maxwell M’Leod, he knows where they come from, and where they go to. That’s his business.’
For the rest of the voyage up-channel Mr M’Leod talked to me of the assembling, preparation, and sale of the rarer furs; and told me things about the manufacture of fur-lined coats which quite shocked me. Somehow or other, when we landed on Wednesday, I found myself pledged to spend that week-end with him at Holmescroft.
On Saturday he met me with a well-groomed motor, and ran me out in an hour-and-a-half to an exclusive residential district of dustless roads and elegantly designed country villas, each standing in from three to five acres of perfectly appointed land. He told me land was selling at eight hundred pounds the acre, and the new golf links, whose Queen Anne pavilion we passed, had cost nearly twenty-four thousand pounds to create.
Holmescroft was a large, two-storied, low, creeper-covered residence. A verandah at the south side gave on to a garden and two tennis courts, separated by a tasteful iron fence from a most park-like meadow of five or six acres, where two Jersey cows grazed. Tea was ready in the shade of a promising copper beech, and I could see groups on the lawn of young men and maidens appropriately clothed, playing lawn tennis in the sunshine.
‘A pretty scene, ain’t it?’ said Mr M’Leod. ‘My good lady’s sitting under the tree, and that’s my little girl in pink on the far court. But I’ll take you to your room, and you can see ’em all later.’
He led me through a wide parquet-floored hall furnished in pale lemon, with huge cloisonné vases, an ebonised and gold grand piano, and banks of pot flowers in Benares brass bowls, up a pale oak staircase to a spacious landing, where there was a green velvet settee trimmed with silver. The blinds were down, and the light lay in parallel lines on the floors.
He showed me my room, saying cheerfully: ‘You may be a little tired. One often is without knowing it after a run throughtraffic. Don’t come down till you feel quite restored. We shall all be in the garden.’
My room was rather close, and smelt of perfumed soap. I threw up the window at once, but it opened so close to the floor and worked so clumsily that I came within an ace of pitching out, where I should certainly have ruined a rather lop-sided laburnum below. As I set about washing off the journey’s dust, I began to feel a little tired. But, I reflected, I had not come down here in this weather and among these new surroundings to be depressed, so I began to whistle.
And it was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated.
Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving bell, and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without, and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also that at any moment the darkness might come down anew; and while I dwelt on this speculation precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his tongue, it ebbed away into the little grey shadow on the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph to every quarter for help, release, or diversion.
The door opened, and M’Leod reappeared. I thanked him politely, saying I was charmed with my room, anxious to meet Mrs M’Leod, much refreshed with my wash, and so on and so forth. Beyond a little stickiness at the corners of my mouth, it seemed to me that I was managing my words admirably, the while that I myself cowered at the bottom of unclimbable pits. M’Leod laid his hand on my shoulder, and said: ‘You’ve got it now already, ain’t it?’
‘Yes,’I answered, ‘it’s making me sick!’
‘It will pass off when you come outside. I give you my word it will then pass off. Come!’
I shambled out behind him, and wiped my forehead in the hall.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I expect the run tired you. My good lady is sitting there under the copper beech.’
She was a fat woman in an apricot-coloured gown, with a heavily powdered face, against which her black long-lashed eyes showed like currants in dough. I was introduced to many fine ladies and gentlemen of those parts. Magnificently appointed landaus and covered motors swept in and out of the drive, and the air was gay with the merry outcries of the tennis players.
As twilight drew on they all went away, and I was left alone with Mr and Mrs M’Leod, while tall men-servants and maidservants took away the tennis and tea things. Miss M’Leod had walked a little down the drive with a light-haired young man, who apparently knew everything about every South American railway stock. He had told me at tea that these were the days of financial specialisation.
‘I think it went off beautifully, my dear,’ said Mr M’Leod to his wife; and to me: ‘You feel all right now, ain’t it? Of course you do.’
Mrs M’Leod surged across the gravel. Her husband skipped nimbly before her into the south verandah, turned a switch, and all Holmescroft was flooded with light.
‘You can do that from your room also,’ he said as they went in. ‘There is something in money, ain’t it?’
Miss M’Leod came up behind me in the dusk. ‘We have notyet been introduced,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you are staying the night?’
‘Your father was kind enough to ask me,’ I replied.
She nodded. ‘Yes, I know; and you know too, don’t you? I saw your face when you came to shake hands with mamma. You felt the depression very soon. It is simply frightful in that bedroom sometimes. What do you think it is – bewitchment? In Greece, where I was a little girl, it might have been; but not in England, do you think? Or do you?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ I replied. ‘I never felt anything like it. Does it happen often?’
‘Yes, sometimes. It comes and goes.’
‘Pleasant!’ I said, as we walked up and down the gravel at the lawn edge. ‘What has been your experience of it?’
‘That is difficult to say, but – sometimes that – that depression is like as it were’ – she gesticulated in most un-English fashion – ‘a light. Yes, like a light turned into a room – only a light of blackness, do you understand? – into a happy room. For sometimes we are so happy, all we three, – so very happy. Then this blackness, it is turned on us just like – ah, I know what I mean now – like the head-lamp of a motor, and we are eclipsed. And there is another thing –’
The dressing gong roared, and we entered the over-lighted hall. My dressing was a brisk athletic performance, varied wi
th, outbursts of song – careful attention paid to articulation and expression. But nothing happened. As I hurried downstairs, I thanked Heaven that nothing had happened.
Dinner was served breakfast fashion; the dishes were placed on the sideboard over heaters, and we helped ourselves.
‘We always do this when we are alone, so we talk better,’ said Mr M’Leod.
‘And we are always alone,’ said the daughter.
‘Cheer up, Thea. It will all come right,’ he insisted.
‘No, papa,’ She shook her dark head. ‘Nothing is right while it comes.’
‘It is nothing that we ourselves have ever done in our lives – that I will swear to you,’ said Mrs M’Leod suddenly. ‘And wehave changed our servants several times. So we know it is not them.”
‘Never mind. Let us enjoy ourselves while we can,’ said Mr M’Leod, opening the champagne.
But we did not enjoy ourselves. The talk failed. There were long silences.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, for I thought some one at my elbow was about to speak.
‘Ah! That is the other thing!’ said Miss M’Leod. Her mother groaned.
We were silent again, and, in a few seconds it must have been, a live grief beyond words – not ghostly dread or horror, but aching, helpless grief – overwhelmed us, each, I felt, according to his or her nature, and held steady like the beam of a burning-glass. Behind that pain I was conscious there was a desire on somebody’s part to explain something on which some tremendously important issue hung.
Meantime I rolled bread pills and remembered my sins; M’Leod considered his own reflection in a spoon; his wife seemed to be praying, and the girl fidgeted desperately with hands and feet, till the darkness passed on – as though the malignant rays of a burning glass had been shifted from us.
‘There,’ said Miss M’Leod, half rising. ‘Now you see what makes a happy home. Oh, sell it – sell it, father mine, and let us go away!’
‘But I’ve spent thousands on it. You shall go to Harrogate next week, Thea dear.’
‘I’m only just back from hotels. I am so tired of packing.’
‘Cheer up, Thea. It is over. You know it does not often come here twice in the same night. I think we shall dare now to be comfortable.’
He lifted a dish-cover, and helped his wife and daughter. His face was lined and fallen like an old man’s after debauch, but his hand did not shake, and his voice was clear. As he worked to restore us by speech and action, he reminded me of a grey-muzzled collie herding demoralised sheep.
After dinner we sat round the dining-room fire – the drawing-room might have been under the Shadow for aught we knew – talking with the intimacy of gipsies by the wayside, or of wounded comparing notes after a skirmish. By eleven o’clock the three between them had given me every name and detail they could recall that in any way bore on the house, and what they knew of its history.
We went to bed in a fortifying blaze of electric light. My one fear was that the blasting gust of depression would return – the surest way, of course, to bring it. I lay awake till dawn, breathing quickly and sweating lightly, beneath what De Quincey inadequately describes as ‘the oppression of inexpiable guilt.’ Now as soon as the lovely day was broken, I fell into the most terrible of all dreams – that joyous one in which all past evil has not only been wiped out of our lives, but has never been committed; and in the very bliss of our assured innocence, before our loves shriek and change countenance, we wake to the day we have earned.
It was a coolish morning, but we preferred to breakfast in the south verandah. The forenoon we spent in the garden, pretending to play games that come out of boxes, such as croquet and clock golf. But most of the time we drew together and talked. The young man who knew all about South American railways took Miss M’Leod for a walk in the afternoon, and at five M’Leod thoughtfully whirled us all up to dine in town.
‘Now, don’t say you will tell the Psychological Society, and that you will come again,’ said Miss M’Leod, as we parted. ‘Because I know you will not.’
‘You should not say that,’ said her mother. ‘You should say, “Goodbye, Mr Perseus. Come again.”’
‘Not him!’ the girl cried. ‘He has seen the Medusa’s head!’
Looking at myself in the restaurant’s mirrors, it seemed to me that I had not much benefited by my week-end. Next morning I wrote out all my Holmescroft notes at fullest length, in the hope that by so doing I could put it all behind me. But the experience worked on my mind, as they say certain imperfectly understood rays work on the body.
I am less calculated to make a Sherlock Holmes than anyman I know, for I lack both method and patience, yet the idea of following up the trouble to its source fascinated me. I had no theory to go on, except a vague idea that I had come between two poles of a discharge, and had taken a shock meant for some one else. This was followed by a feeling of intense irritation. I waited cautiously on myself, expecting to be overtaken by horror of the supernatural, but my self persisted in being humanly indignant, exactly as though it had been the victim of a practical joke. It was in great pains and upheavals – that I felt in every fibre – but its dominant idea, to put it coarsely, was to get back a bit of its own. By this I knew that I might go forward if I could find the way.
After a few days it occurred to me to go to the office of Mr J. M. M. Baxter – the solicitor who had sold Holmescroft to M’Leod. I explained I had some notion of buying the place. Would he act for me in the matter?
Mr Baxter, a large, greyish, throaty-voiced man, showed no enthusiasm. ‘I sold it to Mr M’Leod,’ he said. ‘It ’ud scarcely do for me to start on the running-down tack now. But I can recommend—’
‘I know he’s asking an awful price,’ I interrupted, ‘and atop of it he wants an extra thousand for what he calls your clean bill of health.’
Mr Baxter sat up in his chair. I had all his attention.
‘Your guarantee with the house. Don’t you remember it?’
‘Yes, yes. That no death had taken place in the house since it was built. I remember perfectly.’
He did not gulp as untrained men do when they lie, but his jaws moved stickily, and his eyes, turning towards the deed boxes on the wall, dulled. I counted seconds, one, two, three – one, two, three – up to ten. A man, I knew, can live through ages of mental depression in that time.
‘I remember perfectly.’ His mouth opened a little as though it had tasted old bitterness.
‘Of course that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me.’ I went on. ‘Idon’t expect to buy a house free from death.’
‘Certainly not. No one does. But it was Mr M’Leod’s fancy – his wife’s rather, I believe; and since we could meet it – it wasmy duty to my clients – at whatever cost to my own feelings – to make him pay.’
‘That’s really why I came to you. I understood from him you knew the place well.’
‘Oh yes. Always did. It originally belonged to some connections of mine.’
‘The Misses Moultrie, I suppose. How interesting! They must have loved the place before the country round about was built up.’
‘They were very fond of it indeed.’
‘I don’t wonder. So restful and sunny. I don’t see how they could have brought themselves to part with it.’
Now it is one of the most constant peculiarities of the English that in polite conversation – and I had striven to be polite – no one ever does or sells anything for mere money’s sake.
‘Miss Agnes – the youngest – fell ill’ (he spaced his words a little), ‘and, as they were very much attached to each other, that broke up the home.’
‘Naturally. I fancied it must have been something of that kind. One doesn’t associate the Staffordshire Moultries’ (my Demon of Irresponsibility at that instant created ’em), ‘with – with being hard up.’
‘I don’t know whether we’re related to them,’ he answered importantly. ‘We may be, for our branch of the family comes from the Midlands.’
I give this talk at length, because I am so proud of my first attempt at detective work. When I left him, twenty minutes later, with instructions to move against the owner of Holmescroft with a view to purchase, I was more bewildered than any Doctor Watson at the opening of a story.
Why should a middle-aged solicitor turn plover’s eggcolour and drop his jaw when reminded of so innocent and festal a matter as that no death had ever occurred in a house that he had sold? If I knew my English vocabulary at all, the tone in which he said the youngest sister ‘fell ill’ meant that she had gone out of her mind. That might explain his change of countenance, and it was just possible that her dementedinfluence still hung about Holmescroft; but the rest was beyond me.
I was relieved when I reached M’Leod’s City office, and could tell him what I had done – not what I thought.
M’Leod was quite willing to enter into the game of the pretended purchase, but did not see how it would help if I knew Baxter.
‘He’s the only living soul I can get at who was connected with Holmescroft,’ I said.
‘Ah! Living soul is good,’ said M’Leod. ‘At any rate our little girl will be pleased that you are still interested in us. Won’t you come down some day this week?’
‘How is it there now?’ I asked.
He screwed up his face. ‘Simply frightful!’ he said. ‘Thea is at Droitwich.’
‘I should like it immensely, but I must cultivate Baxter for the present. You’ll be sure and keep him busy your end, won’t you?’
He looked at me with quiet contempt. ‘Do not be afraid. I shall be a good Jew. I shall be my own solicitor.’
Before a fortnight was over, Baxter admitted ruefully that M’Leod was better than most firms in the business. We buyers were coy, argumentative, shocked at the price of Holmescroft, inquisitive, and cold by turns, but Mr M’Leod the seller easily met and surpassed us; and Mr Baxter entered every letter, telegram, and consultation at the proper rates in a cinematograph-film of a bill. At the end of a month he said it looked as though M’Leod, thanks to him, were really going to listen to reason. I was many pounds out of pocket, but I had learned something of Mr Baxter on the human side. I deserved it. Never in my life have I worked to conciliate, amuse, and flatter a human being as I worked over my solicitor.
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 57