Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories

by Hugh Ealpole

  I had been married for five years. I had no children. I was a writer of sorts, and lived in a little stone cottage halfway up the hill from the village of Grange on Derwentwater in Cumber-land, where I still live.

  One of the important elements of this story, if it is to be true at all, is that I shall be frank about Mary Ellen, my wife. Poor Mary! She has been dead for fifteen years, but still keeps me company, as those one has truly loved always do, however long their bodies have been dust.

  I think if Mary were to appear here now and give you an account of herself as she saw herself, she would agree very much with my estimate of her, except that she never knew as I did, how grandly unselfish, how sweetly forgiving, how beautifully maternal she was. She was above all things else, long before she had any children of her own, a mother. She mothered me, who badly needed it, with goodness, a sense of humour, and a tolerance that I’ve never known any other human being to equal. I loved her and she loved me. But there came a time, as there comes in every marriage, when we were dissatisfied, fools that we were. Yet she loved me dearly—especially the companionship that we had. She was a wonderful companion. She had a grand, even a splendid, sense of enjoyment. She loved little things. She was perfectly content on our small income—perfectly happy to be there in the country alone with me from one end of the year to the other. The only thing that she wanted that she hadn’t got was children.

  It was just a year after this strange adventure that we had our first child. We had been married, as I’ve said, five years—and suddenly everything went wrong. That is the queerest thing about any relationship between two human beings, that for no reason at all everything suddenly moves out of perspective. Little personal tricks that have meant nothing for years are in a moment exasperating.

  Mary had, I remember, a habit of leaving the room without shutting the door. And contrariwise, she would enter a room with a rush, banging the door behind her. Often she would look untidy; her soft, brown hair, which I had once thought the most beautiful thing in the world, would tumble about her forehead. She was not very clever about her clothes. She was strong, robust, rosy-faced, bright-eyed, clean like an apple. Sometimes, when she was happy, she would talk very loudly and with great excitement.

  I, on the other hand, in those days took myself rather grimly. I was determined to become a great writer, a thing, God forgive me, that I have never managed to be. I was earning a fair income at that time with my novels and stories, but I thought that I had real genius and that one day all the world would know it. Mary, I can now see on looking back, knew very well that genius I had not and would never have. Perhaps I detected, beneath her laughing praise and encouragement, this sense of disappointment. I was at that time meticulous in my habits. I liked everything to be very neat and careful about me. In fact, I took myself altogether with an absurd seriousness. I was immature for my years and she knew it. I was always a boy to her, to the very end. Perhaps that also, without my knowing it, irritated me.

  We had, however, many things in common. We were, on the whole, amazingly happy. One joy that we deeply shared was our love for this especial country. I have no wish to employ pages of description in the manner of Mr Fitz, the famous novelist, or Mrs Grundy, the writer about gardens, but it is important to my little story that I should make it clear why Mary and I were happier here on this exact spot of ground than anywhere else in the world.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t know other places. I’ve experienced the long, purple nights of Arizona—the lovely, benignant glow of the Russian white night—the tawny, boastful pride of the Pyrenees—the lakes and blossoms of Japan—the flowered valleys of Cashmere.

  I know that this small square of Cumbrian and Westmorland ground can seem like a mud patch on a wet day, like a garish coloured picture postcard on a sunny afternoon in August, can shrivel up and disappear and disappoint—do all the things that its detractors charge against it. But its beauty, when it chooses to be beautiful, no other place in the world can boast of.

  This country was, in effect, the one thing that at this time Mary and I shared best with one another. Everything else began to have an edge—an edge of suspicion, mistrust and danger. But at no time from the first to last did we lose our companionship in this country—and I had almost forgotten to mention the sign and seal of the whole affair, namely, the field with the five trees.

  I can see it now as I look from my library window, although it is closest and best visible from the windows of the bedroom Mary and I shared for so many years, and that I still inhabit. It is a field above Lodore on the way to Watendlath, formed like a half-moon. Its grass is, under sunlight, of the intensest green. The five trees that edge the ground are so alike that they resemble the brother Volsungs in Morris’s Sigurd, except that they are not so tall as those splendid heroes were.

  I remember saying to Mary when we first came to the cottage, that this field had eyes—or rather it was she, I think, who said that to me. ‘We will never,’ she said, ‘be able to do anything that we are ashamed of, because that field will always know it. It is, I am sure, looking after us.’ In any case, it became one of the great joys of our daily life, to awaken in the morning and see first thing that field and those trees, so beautiful, quiet, permanent and strong. We, both of us, clung to it the more when our troubles began.

  These troubles were at first all on my side. Which of us does not know the times when we are irritable without reason— when shame at ourselves makes us yet more irritable—and when we strike at the persons we love most because, I suppose, they will endure our tempers the most patiently? At first I thought I was ill—that it was my liver or indigestion. Then I thought it was because my work was going badly, and here I began to complain bitterly of Mary. Whatever she said about it, my work was wrong.

  Then examining myself and at heart bitterly ashamed of my unreason, I decided that I was still a young man—and was I because I had married a good English woman, to spend the rest of my days as a kind of hermit? And one dreadful evening I broke out with all this, saying so much more than I really meant, reproaching her most unfairly for things that she had never done, accusing her of being what she was not. That evening I desperately hurt her pride. She was so seldom angry, never sulky, and very, very hard to offend. But that evening I offended her. She said very little—only at the end, quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I see that you should have married someone quite different. But I can’t change, however much you might wish it. I’m myself.’ And she went out of the room.

  It was after this that Mary made her great mistake. She invited her mother to stay with us. I don’t know—I shall never know—whether she did this in a spirit of feminine revenge or whether it was simply that she thought the old lady would give her some companionship at a time when she must have been desperately lonely. Indeed, as I learned afterward, she was far more lonely and unhappy than I knew. I would say in passing that we never allow sufficiently for the loneliness of those near to us. We are aware often enough of our own loneliness and cry out bitterly against it, but we think that we are exceptional creatures in this.

  Mary knew well enough that I detested her mother, Mrs Millicent. She knew, too, that Mrs Millicent cordially disliked me.

  Physically she was unpleasant to me because she had bobbed her hair, painted her cheeks, wore dresses too young for her, and was altogether, I thought, a silly, tiresome, scandal-mongering old horror. And I did her a great injustice, as one always does when one dislikes people too much. She was courageous, had fine qualities of independence, adored Mary, and made a brave show of what life remained to her.

  She thought me idle, lazy, spoiled, and altogether unworthy of her daughter. Her hatred of Cumberland was almost fanatical.

  She was a sharp old lady and very soon discovered something was wrong between us.

  When mothers discover that their beloved daughters are unhappy and that sons-in-law whom they greatly dislike are responsible, they have only one ambition in life—to punish the sons-in-law! And my mother-i
n-law wished not only to punish me, but also Cumberland, the English countryside, and every-thing rustic. She made, at once, my field with the five trees a symbol of her attack.

  ‘I really believe, Walter,’ she would say, ‘that you could gladly sit all day and gaze at that silly field. Why don’t you buy it if you are so fond of it?’

  I have no doubt but that she also attacked Mary and tried to drag her secret from her. But there was no secret. We were moving in the dark—away, away, and knew no reason why.

  One night I caught her to me and said to her, ‘Mary, Mary, what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know—I don’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘You don’t love me any more.’

  ‘I do—I do,’ I answered her. But as I said it I thought that I did not. I lay there, listening to the rain, and longed to escape, not only from Mary, perhaps, indeed not from Mary at all, but chiefly from myself. I think that this was the first time in my life when, poor defenceless egoist that I was, I began to wonder whether I was worth anyone’s bother. But at least it was a step in the right direction! Love acts always independently of lovers. Sometimes it moves with them. Then, with a shrug of its beautiful shoulders, it moves away. ‘Catch me if you can,’ Love cries, and there is no way to recapture its company save to wait and be patient. But what lover ever was patient?

  And then the country deserted us. After all, if you worship a place, it demands, I suppose, on your part, a certain fineness of conduct.

  But we did not love the rain at that particular crisis in our lives, and oh! how old Mrs Millicent hated it! I am sure that she thought it of my providing.

  Then, as is always the way when the circumstances are ready for it, a quarrel emphasised the breach and made it appear intolerable.

  Breakfast is a dangerous meal, as many writers before me have observed. It was especially dangerous for Mrs Millicent, for she was an old lady who should never meet her fellows before midday. But there she was, as fresh as her paint and powder could make her, drinking her coffee, and thinking of her enforced, unhappy rusticity. For many a day, Mary and I each read our paper at breakfast and threw to one another little excitements from China or the latest gossip from London. Mrs Millicent did not read a paper and, therefore, quite naturally hated that others should do so. On this especial morning I glanced at the pictures of my newspaper and then stared across at my beloved field, just now almost fraudulently green, with the five trees guarding it.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Millicent, ‘I’ve always hated that field—but at least I owe it something. It’s made Walter polite at breakfast.’

  And then I lost my temper. All the misery of the last weeks came out in that moment. I told the old lady all that I thought of her, all that I had ever thought of her. I blamed her for all the trouble between Mary and me. I said that I could not work while she was in the house. I said—oh, what matters now, after all these years, the things that I said!

  Mrs Millicent rose from her seat and said, ‘Enough! Mary, I leave this house.’ And Mary, rising also, said, ‘Mother, if you go I go too.’

  And the field looked across at me and veiled its green with shadow and once again the rain began to fall. Of course, the trouble was for the moment calmed. Later in the day I apologised.

  That night Mary said, ‘Walter, what has come to you? What is it? Tell me and I will help. I must help or we’re lost—both of us.’ Which sounds melodramatic for Mary, but the word ‘lost’ was true. We were, indeed, close to some fatal and irreparable separation.

  On the following day, so pat that it seemed as though fate were taking a maliciously personal interest in my small affairs, I met a lady. Here, even after all these years, I write with hesitation. Pearl Richardson is dead. I’ve not seen her for many, many years. I feel now that I never knew her, never had any real contact with her, that she was a shadow from a world filled with shadows, and yet at this moment as I sit here, she is more vivid and actual to me than men who have been my friends for a lifetime—more vivid to me than any woman I’ve ever known, except Mary.

  I was in Keswick, miserable, without plan or purpose. It had been a wet morning, but the sun had come out, and the hills, as they so often are after rain, were sharp and brilliant as though they had received an extra coat of paint. All the little town was gleaming and glittering. In the market square where I was standing, the light was almost blinding. Into this light stepped a young woman.

  I’d been wondering what I would do. While I was hesitating the girl passed me. She was wearing, as I so vividly remember, a dress of bright green which ill suited her pale face with the light, fair eyebrows. Just after she passed me she turned and looked at me. It was a look of quiet and considering investigation. She stood there looking at me and then came toward me smiling.

  ‘Could you tell me,’ she asked, ‘where I can find the Keswick Art Shop?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s straight along in front of you—over the little bridge and you’ll find it on the left.’ And as I spoke, it seemed to me that thereafter I would move like a man in a dream. I put it in that way, because I was still pausing on the border of that dangerous country. A moment’s chance remained to me of turning around and walking away, and I knew with absolute certainty that if I did not walk away I would be a free agent no longer. I’ve never felt that with any other man or woman before or since. But I suppose on that particular day I was acutely unhappy, very lonely, with that kind of hurt pride and selfish resentment that comes from not getting one’s own way.

  She was, and it seems very odd to me now looking back, the exact opposite of Mary physically. She was pale, with rather weak grey eyes, with no cheerfulness, no sense of well-being about her at all. But my heart was thumping and I even stammered a little as I said, ‘If you will allow me, I’m going that way and I’ll show you where it is.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and she spoke as though it were no new thing for her to be escorted by a stranger.

  As we walked along we said very little to each other, but by the time that we had reached the bridge we had come to that sort of mutual agreement which strangers, who both want the same thing and want it badly, generally discover. We stood on the bridge before moving on, looking down at the little stream sparkling in the sunlight. She told me something about herself. She said that she was staying at the Station Hotel with a girl friend—that she’d never been in Cumberland before—that it had rained ever since their arrival, and that this was the first bit of sunshine that she had had—and as she said that, she looked at me.

  ‘You are so bored, I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you’ll be leaving early tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m not,’ she answered. ‘Gracie, my friend, is. She can’t stand the place, but I like it. It’s grand when it rains.’

  ‘Oh, then,’ I said, ‘this is the country for you.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I never came here before.’ Then she looked at me and said abruptly, ‘You live here? Are you married?’

  I said that I did live here and that I was married.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she said, ‘your being married, I mean.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, because we could have seen a bit of each other if you hadn’t been,’ she answered.

  ‘We can, anyway,’ I replied.

  I remember that little conversation as though the words are being spoken now in this room in front of me by two complete strangers whom I am coldly observing. I remember that I thought that I didn’t like her, and that I should like her less the more I saw of her. I remember, too, a funny fancy that I had that her green dress was like the green of my field in the sun. Yes, I remember that I didn’t like her, and that I wanted there and then to take her in my arms and cover her face with kisses. She was so different from anything that I’d known for so long that she seemed to me exactly what I desperately needed. And I suppose, too, in the low, dark cellars of my mind, there was the thought that I would teach Mary a lesson, and above all, sh
ow that nasty old woman, her mother, that there were other things in the world. I was certainly not the first man, nor the last, whom Miss Pearl Richardson tried to devour. In any case, whatever her purpose was, we succeeded in those few minutes in establishing a relationship. Before I left her I had promised to give her dinner in Keswick the following evening.

  I was no less unhappy when I went back that afternoon, but I was almost wildly excited. Why? I’m afraid I cannot say. I’ve always thought that love, in spite of modern cynicism, is the finest thing in the world. Besides, at this particular moment, although I did not then know it, I loved Mary more deeply than I had ever loved her.

  Within a very few hours, Mary discovered that I had changed, and then, as she told me afterward, she began to be very frightened.

  ‘It was that afternoon,’ she said many months later, ‘that I thought for the first time that I might really be going to lose you. Up to then I’d known something was very wrong, but I’d been sure that nothing could truly separate us. But as soon as you came in that day, and with a kind of forced geniality greeted us and talked with an empty friendliness about anything or nothing so that I knew that your mind was elsewhere, I was terrified. I knew that there was someone somewhere that I must fight, but I was fighting in the dark. I hadn’t an idea what to do.’

  I was to learn one more curious thing. Next morning, when I awoke and looked across at the field, I had a strange impression that it was nearer to me than it had ever been before. I could see every detail of it. It was almost as though I could count the blades of grass. I’d always had the absurd notion that the five trees were active—that they could move—and sometimes I would look expecting to find only three there, or two.

  I lived, I suppose, although my memory of that is very faint, in a kind of armed truce with Mary during these weeks. Everything was unreal to me except Pearl. I remember that I hated her name. I thought it foolish and affected, and her first occasion for rapping me over the knuckles was my saying so. She was deeply offended. I was detached enough about her to realise that her vanity was excessive and that everything that belonged to her—the especial kind of rouge that she used, the flower that she wore on her dress, relations of hers (although she didn’t like them), even places where she had been—were sanctified and important because she had had some connection with them. Even I took on a kind of importance because she thought that I was in love with her.