The Phantom Coach

by Michael Sims

  The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick-bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses, for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses—magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois—all hostile to motors—gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor’s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.

  I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand’s reach—a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first dry sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

  Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers—mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden—showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout “pip-pip” at the stranger.

  I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman’s hospitable tears. Jenny’s child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. “Not but what Jenny didn’t tend to Arthur as though he’d come all proper at de end of de first year—like Jenny herself.” Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst’s opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.

  “But how’s the mother?” I asked.

  “Jenny? Oh, she’ll get over it. I’ve felt dat way with one or two o’ my own. She’ll get over. She’s walkin’ in de wood now.”

  “In this weather?”

  Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.

  “I dunno but it opens de ’eart like. Yes, it opens de ’eart. Dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in de long run, we do say.”

  Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.

  “Awful weather!” I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.

  “Not so bad,” she answered placidly out of the fog. “Mine’s used to ’un. You’ll find yours indoors, I reckon.”

  Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.

  I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire—a place of good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child’s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away—to hide themselves, most like—in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing—from the soul:

  In the pleasant orchard-closes.

  And all my early summer came back at the call.

  In the pleasant orchard-closes,

  God bless all our gains say we—

  But may God bless all our losses,

  Better suits with our degree.

  She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated—

  Better suits with our degree!

  I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.

  “Is that you—from the other side of the county?” she called.

  “Yes, me from the other side of the county,” I answered, laughing.

  “What a long time before you had to come here again.” She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. “It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!”

  “I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.”

  “I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit it!”

  I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.

  “It never goes out, day or night,” she said, as though explaining. “In case any one comes in with cold toes, you see.”

  “It’s even lovelier inside than it was out,” I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.

  “Yes, it must be beautiful,” she said. “Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.”

  I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery, whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.

  “Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.” She swung a light door inward.

  “By the way, where are they?” I asked. “I haven’t even heard t
hem to-day.”

  She did not answer at once. Then, “I can only hear them,” she replied softly. “This is one of their rooms—everything ready, you see.”

  She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.

  “Surely they’ve only just gone,” I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet—quick feet through a room beyond.

  “I heard that,” she cried triumphantly. “Did you? Children, oh, children, where are you?”

  The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable—recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.

  “No, I haven’t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,” I heard her say, “but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.”

  “Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden.”

  I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child’s law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.

  “And now we’ll have some tea,” she said. “I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at manners, somehow, when one lives alone and is considered—h’m—peculiar.” Then with very pretty scorn, “Would you like a lamp to see to eat by?”

  “The firelight’s much pleasanter, I think.” We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.

  I took my chair in the direction of the screen, ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.

  “Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?” I asked idly. “Why, they are tallies!”

  “Of course,” she said. “As I can’t read or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I’ll tell you what it meant.”

  I passed her an unburnt hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.

  “This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,” said she. “I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man—very greedy, or—he wouldn’t come here after dark.”

  “Have you much land then?”

  “Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man—and a highway robber.”

  “But are you sure I sha’n’t be—?”

  “Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn’t any children.”

  “Ah, the children!” I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. “I wonder whether they’ll come out for me.”

  There was a murmur of voices—Madden’s and a deeper note—at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

  “Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin,” she said.

  “If—if you please, Miss, I’ll—I’ll be quite as well by the door.” He clung to the latch as he spoke, like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

  “Well?”

  “About that new shed for the young stock—that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in . . . but I’ll come again, Miss.” His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.

  “I think not,” she answered levelly. “The new shed—m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?”

  “I—fancied p’r’aps that if I came to see you—ma—man to man like, Miss—but—”

  His eyes rolled into every corner of the room, wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again—from without and firmly.

  “He wrote what I told him,” she went on. “You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks—even in Mr. Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.”

  “I’m—I’m getting some minerals—superphosphates—next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station tomorrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight . . . That gentleman’s not going away, is he?” He almost shrieked.

  I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

  “No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.” She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him—his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.

  I ceased to tap the leather—was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed—when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers. . . .

  The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest—a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

  Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.

  I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.

  What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.

  “Now you understand,” she whispered, across the packed shadows.

  “Yes, I understand—now. Thank you.”

  “I—I only hear them.” She bowed her head in her hands. “I have no right, you know—no other right. I have neither borne nor lost—neither borne nor lost!”

  “Be very glad then,” said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

  “Forgive me!”

  She was still, and I went
back to my sorrow and my joy.

  “It was because I loved them so,” she said at last, brokenly. “That was why it was, even from the first—even before I knew that they—they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!”

  She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

  “They came because I loved them—because I needed them. I—I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?”

  “No—no.”

  “I—I grant you that the toys and—and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but—but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little.” She pointed to the gallery. “And the passages all empty . . . And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose—”

  “Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!” I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

  “And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don’t think it so foolish—do you?”

  I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

  “I did all that and lots of other things—just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me—”

  “The butler’s wife? What?”

  “One of them—I heard—she saw—and knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn’t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because—. . . Oh, you must bear or lose,” she said piteously. “There is no other way—and yet they love me. They must! Don’t they?”

  There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

  “Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but—but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.”

  In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.