Scarweather

by Anthony Rolls

  I had anticipated a certain awkwardness in meeting the Reisbys, but there was none at all. Both husband and wife greeted us with apparently unalloyed cordiality.

  Reisby himself, now approaching sixty, had a grand appearance of robust age; he reminded me of a flourishing oak-tree, hardy yet venerable. His voice came rumbling and roaring out of his enormous frame, just as it had when we last met him. His ponderous jocularity was restored; he shouted; he sent out ripples of expanding mirth. Only he was a little greyer, there were flecks of pure silver among the tangles of his flaming hair.

  Hilda Reisby, I suppose, was then about twenty-eight. She had grown into the full magnificence of womanhood. I do not know how to describe women. I can only say that I never saw one who was more beautiful.

  Let it not be imagined that she was a tragic beauty, one of those forlorn creatures who move among the shadows of memory and regret. Not at all. She was grave, perhaps, but it was not in her nature to be garrulous or noisy. Neither was it in Hilda’s nature to be mopish or sentimental or flaccidly romantic. She was a woman of admirable poise, with a glorious and evident sanity, both physical and mental. I think she was happy; I am certain that she had an unruffled serenity of mind.

  The Reisby’s daughter, Frances, was now a child of eight or nine, a charming, buoyant little girl, who bullied or coaxed her father, not only with impunity but with invariable success. One could see that Reisby would never be able to oppose the will of his daughter. Indeed, the spectacle of this huge barbaric man bending so willingly to every caprice or need of the child was enough to win the heart of any sentimental observer. Had it not been for the common sense of Hilda, backed by the skill and experience of an excellent nurse, Frances would have been irredeemably spoilt.

  If Professor Reisby disliked Ellingham, he was expert in all the arts of a crafty dissembler. On the very first day of our visit, Reisby, Ellingham and myself were occupied for at least three hours in the inspection of new funereal trophies. The energetic Professor had been digging in scores of barrows, and had unearthed methodically God knows how many hundreds of skeletons and other relics. The great work—the opus monumental—was to contain, he said, a conspectus of prehistoric burials more informative and rich in detail than anything which had been attempted by any other writer. Also, there would be a corpus (I am sure that was the word!), a corpus of Northumbrian pottery that would fairly open the eyes of every archaeologist in Europe. To hear him, you would have imagined that people would greet these mouldy records, these horrible pots or bones, with a tumult of excited admiration, or with a chorus of exasperated envy.

  “Greenwell, sir?—that patient earthworm! Why Greenwell never recognised the irrefutable sequence of cinerary types! Ho, ha! La-di-dum! Kemble, Mortimer, did you say? Mere collectors—busy-bodies—ferrets—burrowing and scrubbing, and actually buying from dealers!”

  He uttered the last words as if he were describing the lowest level of decadence or imbecility.

  “Collectors are bad enough,” he roared, “but they are nothing to those complacent idiots who lick labels in museums. Ho, ha, ha, ha! Fellows like our worthy Goy, for example. Goy was unfit for active service, by the way, and so they put him into some sort of a damned agricultural company, and now, if you please, he calls himself Captain Goy! He’s back in Northport with his little bottle of gum and his box of labels. He’s married a beaky sort of woman who was a teacher at the County School. I wonder if he’s put a label on her—eh? Ah, ho, ha, ho! Never mind. I’m rather fond of Goy, you know. At least I’m not aware of any positive prejudice against the fellow.”

  We admired all the grim things in the study—I think Ellingham really did admire them—and we spent the entire morning with great good-humour.

  But I began to observe something about Reisby which made me feel uncomfortable. I cannot say precisely what it was. He was too hilarious. His explosions of titanic laughter were sometimes inappropriate. There was an exaggerated violence of gesture over trivial things.

  Also I observed that he said nothing about the disappearance of Joe Lloyd. Ellingham referred to this casually and the Professor answered:

  “Ah, yes, yes! Do you remember the poor fellow? Very odd. One of those intermittently vagrant people, coming from nowhere, going to nowhere.”

  That was all.

  I did not, until many years later, discover Ellingham’s views on the disappearance of Joe Lloyd.

  5

  On the whole, our renewed acquaintance with Aberleven was enjoyable. There were a few gloomy passages, a few unavoidable references to the death of Eric—which everyone now regarded as a bathing accident. No clue, no sign to indicate the manner of the accident, had come to light. But after the necessary, formal things had been said, we were all placidly cheerful.

  One afternoon, when the Professor had gone to Northport and Ellingham was fishing in the Kinkell, I went for a walk over Seidal Moor. I met Hilda Reisby. I had, indeed, some reason for supposing that I should meet her.

  We had not been alone together since that awful interview in 1914, and there were many things to be said which we could not very well have said in the presence of other people. It pleased me to discover that she was treating me as an intimate friend, not unworthy of confidence; but I reflected that women confide more readily in ugly men than in those who are attractive.

  Obviously it was not her intention to say much about Eric. She asked a good deal about Miss Foster and my mother, and about myself, my plans and ambitions. Her intelligence prevented her from asking about my experiences in the War. Then she began to speak of her own family and of life at Aberleven.

  “It is really splendid,” said I, “to see the Professor in such magnificent health.”

  She paused before replying.

  “Tolgen is really not so well as he appears to be.”

  “But his energy is terrific!”

  “You see only one side of the picture. The energy is there; but at times he is dreadfully depressed—so depressed, Mr. Farringdale, as to be almost unrecognisable.”

  I was profoundly shocked.

  “Nobody who met him could imagine such a state of affairs.”

  “It is quite true.”

  There was a degree of anxiety in her voice which roused at once my interest, my sympathy and my alarm. She told me with perfect candour that she herself was alarmed. When these moods of despair were upon him, the Professor withdrew from the ordinary course of his life; he sat immobile and in silence, perhaps for hours together. The immobility and the silence were terrifying—you would have been less terrified, she said, by an alternation of violence. This awful stillness implied such a reversal or lapse of the known personality that it gave the impression rather of a creeping death than of anything else. Hilda was desperately afraid of the child seeing him in such a state, but had so far prevented it by saying that her father was at work and must be left alone. As a matter of fact, it was the voice of the child that frequently roused him from these trance-like conditions and brought him back to his normal existence. He himself never referred to these periods, and it might be doubted if he was even aware of them.

  I raised the obvious question about seeing a doctor, but she said that a visit from a doctor would certainly do no good.

  “Tolgen’s opinion of doctors resembles that of most scientific men. I need not tell you what it is.”

  She smiled, in spite of her gravity.

  “But I have talked to Dr. Blacketer-Wryswater in Northport—he is a man with a big reputation up here. What he is inclined to suspect is a drug of some sort, and he has made me promise to ring up if the symptoms get worse or more frequent. Actually, I am glad to say, there has been no increase, either of intensity or frequency, during the past year. Of course… he had an awful shock… and then again when Lloyd went away so mysteriously—”

  We said nothing for a few moments. The livid grass of the moor stretche
d in front of us, bare, pale undulations roughened a little here and there by a patch of gorse.

  “And then,” she said, “do you remember that German ship?—the mystery ship we called it.”

  “The Emil Guntershausen?”

  “Yes. Apparently she is a very commonplace and respectable ship, owned before the War by an Anglo-German syndicate or something of the kind. Now she has appeared again, bringing iron ore and occasional mixed cargoes from Hamburg—at least I think it’s Hamburg. I suppose it is due to a freak of memory, but poor Tolgen always gets excited when he sees that boat, and then he often falls into these terrible moods of silence.”

  She knelt on the grass to pick a sprig of heather, and I saw that she was greatly disturbed.

  “Mrs. Reisby, I am dreadfully sorry. If ever you want any—any kind of help—if it is not an impertinence on my part—” I stuttered helplessly.

  “I do want you to be my friend,” she said.

  And she added, as we walked on together:

  “Only don’t think that I feel isolated or unhappy. That is not the case. Nor must you think that my husband is dangerously abnormal in any way. He is one of the best, one of the kindest of men.” She flushed, as if regretting for a moment her confidence. “Tolgen is a very remarkable man.”

  6

  On the way back to London I stayed for a day or two with the Ellinghams in Cambridge.

  Mrs. Ellingham was a quiet, efficient woman; the kind of woman who knows how to restrain the eccentricities of a husband and oblige him to make an occasional decent appearance in ordinary society. We do not always know how great is the debt of eminent men to these magnificently capable though unobtrusive wives. Their boy, Peter Laud Ellingham, was about twelve years old—he was not more offensive than the average boy of twelve.

  But the only significant thing about this visit was a short talk with Ellingham in his enviably comfortable study.

  After some discreet and unilluminating references to Aberleven, he said:

  “I am inspired by the work of Reisby. This digging is a rare pastime. What I propose to do is to acquire for myself an extensive, a complete knowledge of archaeology.”

  “My dear fellow!—another science?”

  “Archaeology is not a science. It is nothing so respectable. What is really known in archaeology may be put in a few pages of ordinary type. People dig up all these jolly old things, with practically no idea of their true meaning, and then, with due solemnity (to keep themselves in countenance and impose on the simple-minded), invent a system of elaborate classification.”

  “If that is your opinion—”

  “Why should I waste my time? Because I enjoy this pretentious fooling. It is a form of intellectual bluff which appeals to me. And I do like the discovery and the handling of these mysterious objects. Does it not revive our juvenile joy in treasure-trove and all that kind of thing? Is not the archaeologist a respectable pirate, an authorised body-snatcher, a privileged robber of the tombs? Again, I find a singular pleasure in the notion of human antiquity, a true philosophic pleasure. When I am told that the Negro was fully evolved in early Pleistocene times I am comforted, I find the information wonderfully soothing.”

  I was continually baffled by the vagaries of this astounding man, and I could only wonder what he was getting at.

  “Of course I can pick up the jargon quickly enough,” Ellingham continued, “and that is the main thing. Indeed, it is the main thing in many of the so-called sciences. Where every contention is unprovable, jargon is paramount. Then I shall be able to encounter Tolgen Reisby on a more equal footing, even if I cannot win his friendship and respect.”

  “So you mean to keep up your acquaintance with Aberleven?”

  He tilted his head sideways, looking like a bright, sardonic magpie.

  “I mean to have a dig, some day, in the Devil’s Hump.”

  Chapter II

  1

  Naturally I had not forgotten the death of the German student, Ludwig Mackenrode. I made certain enquiries in 1921, and I found out all that could be known about him.

  It was not, on the face of it, particularly interesting. The parents of this unfortunate lad were respectable people in Hamburg, tradesfolk who had never been prosperous but had lost their money in the year preceding the War. Ludwig was evidently intelligent and ambitious. His father wanted to put him in a shipping office, where he had influence, but the boy came to London, hoping to obtain work as the correspondent of a leading Hamburg newspaper. At the time of his death—evidently suicide—he was almost literally starving. I did not succeed in finding out how he knew Eric, or why he should have written to him. And so, at any rate for the present, my enquiries came to an end.

  2

  During the following years (from 1921 to 1926) I worked hard at my profession, and I was called to the Bar in 1925. I retained my excellent quarters in Upper Cheyne Row, and I had also chambers in the Temple.

  From time to time I saw the Reisbys. Whenever they came to London I visited them at their hotel and I entertained them in my Chelsea rooms. Our relations were those of a tranquil, sustained friendship. Between Hilda Reisby and myself there was, in addition, a relation of peculiar confidence—I can give it no other term—which I found of immense value. We wrote long letters to each other, and I often acted on her advice in settling the minor problems of my career. I think it pleased her to share those problems, to hear about my progress, and, in time, to follow my cases.

  Professor Reisby, though not entirely free from them, was becoming less liable to his alarming fits of depression. He looked as robust as ever. The first volumes of the huge work on burials had been published, and had received a great deal of attention from learned men in every part of Europe. Generally the work was admitted to be of supreme importance. But Reisby was attacked venomously by Zarakoff in Budapest, by Henkelberger of Dresden, and by Sir Thomas Bunting-Wragge of Cambridge.

  These attacks (now forgotten) were brilliantly refuted by Ellingham, who wrote a sensational article on the tumuli of the Troad in the Antiquarian Register. I well remember the tremendous excitement which was aroused by this article, and how fiercely it was discussed in the clubs and drawing-rooms of London. There was, in fact, a very painful scene at Lady Wimble’s when Sir Henry Tighe-Wilkins denounced with extraordinary bitterness the whole structure of Altendorff’s Mycenean chronology.

  Let us not revive those disturbing memories—for who can say what is Mycenean and what is not? Let me only observe that Ellingham’s defence of Reisby not only secured the gratitude and the admiration of that distinguished Professor, but enlisted on the side of Ellingham all those redoubtable men who presently overthrew Bunting-Wragge’s theory of double cremation.

  I mention this because it is very important to understand how Reisby’s attitude was modified by this frightful controversy. He became at once the friend of Ellingham. If there had ever been a shade of enmity between these eminent men, it was now (so I thought) completely dispelled. Ellingham was invited to Scarweather, and he was also invited to take an active part in the Professor’s future diggings. To this Ellingham made a cordial reply and said that he anticipated with pleasure his next expedition to the north; but he would have to wait until he was less busy.

  As far as I was concerned, I did not need a special invitation. I went up occasionally, perhaps twice a year, to the hotel at Aberleven. Undoubtedly, in spite of its tragic association, I was fond of the place, and I was also fond of Hilda Reisby. Except on one occasion between 1920 and 1926 Ellingham did not accompany me on my holidays.

  Frederick Ellingham was now a man of acknowledged eminence, and it was rumoured that he would soon be the Woolhope Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cambridge. It only depended upon the accelerated decay of the present occupant of the chair. Ellingham had received the honorary degree of Doctor from the Universities of Yale, Dublin and Leyden. He was also acqu
iring a kind of second-line eminence (which he treated as a joke) in the field of archaeology. In the capacity of assistant to no less a man than Dr. Wheelworthy, he had taken part in several important excavations, had appeared with the Doctor in a talking film, and had settled, once and for all, the difference between the sharply recurved rim of the Roman domestic pottery of pre-Flavian date and the overhanging rim of imported Belgic ware—an important problem, sensational in its implications, which had occupied the close attention of Dr. Wheelworthy for more than ten years, and had given rise to many acrimonious and unprofitable disputes. For this remarkable service to science and to British archaeology, Ellingham was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Prehistoric Society of London and a Corresponding Member of the Société des Fouilleurs Savants.

  In the back of my mind the mystery of my cousin’s death, and its possible association with Professor Reisby, was only faintly persistent.

  I noted, with considerable astonishment, that Ellingham thought a great deal more about this mystery than I did. He often alluded to it, though not in a manner which threw any light upon the workings of his mind. He was, of course, absorbed in all the complexities and all the efforts of a very useful and a very fruitful career. It was the more remarkable, therefore, that he was not content to allow the dust of memory to fall on the buried problem of the Yeaverlow Bank; not content, indeed, to regard it as a problem buried beyond all chance of revival and examination.

  He did not refer to our singular conversation in the hospital at Rouen, nor did I feel that I ought to remind him of it. With all his defences of irony and of sardonic rejoinder, he was a man of real and deep emotion, and he could not look back to that particular time without evoking the too vivid images of a terrible experience. It was a time, he told me, when he felt his reason precariously balanced upon the ultimate edge.

  Anyone could see that the news of Joe Lloyd’s disappearance had interested Ellingham profoundly. Whether he related this disappearance to anything which had previously occurred, I was unable to say; for my part, I saw no reason for doing so.