The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  Though Aunt Hilda could not but revere her dear Amathea’s husband and have a strong attachment for Hamilcar Hellup, neither of these noblemen, with wife or daughter, had happened to be at Rackham on the same occasions as her nephew. She had learnt in roundabout ways that the Hellups knew John and liked him, though she had not a suspicion of the growing affair with Bo. As for Lord and Lady Mere de Beaurivage—either they had not come across the young man at all in the Great World, or if they had, they had forgotten it: he was no apparent help to climbing folk. To put it in Lady Mere de Beaurivage’s simple English phrase, when Hilda had cast out a feeler about it, “Your nevvy? Not as I knows of, Ilda dear. But there, bless you! faces I knows, but names I disremember.” Or as his lordship had put it with equal simplicity, “John Miple? Wot? Sime nime as yer own? Not as I can call to mind. But lor! There’s so many of ’em!” A sound judgment.

  Such was the ambiguous situation—John on the fringes of Aunt Hilda’s push; Aunt Hilda wishing that she was really received as John was received. So John was asked with sincere affection to Rackham, but not too often. When he came he played up, and he even helped Mrs. Maple when she came to London in her abhorrent task of adding further and more heavily to the Catchings—for some purpose of her own which as yet John could not divine. It intrigued him.

  That fixed idea of his that he would be master of Rackham sooner or later led him to tolerate every grotesque purchase and addition, and to help her whole-heartedly. It made him know more about the place … and he was free to be rid of the whole mass of that rubbish when he should reign.

  He accompanied her when she went to Burton’s studio to inspect the absurd carved animals that were to appear on the stone pillars of the new gate. He gravely approved her choice of the new gate itself, when it was foisted upon her in the Euston Road—a sham Venetian horror in new iron, and (oh! my God!) not even forged, but cast.

  He did more. He helped her to buy the Ancestor.

  The Maples, as he knew, had ancestors of a sort. They had the cattle dealer. They had his son, the worthy Georgian squire who had sat for the county. Indeed, they had a portrait of him in his wig extraordinarily badly done by an artist of the local town whom the gentry patronised in those days.

  There were even other ancestors at Rackham, as ancestors go—for ancestors in such houses do not mean real ancestors, but any collaterals. One was a captain of Nelson’s in his uniform and the other was a very rich lady whom that captain had had the good fortune to marry after the wars. There was also a horrible dingy thing which used to hang in the schoolroom, and which John could vaguely remember someone having told him as a child was “your great-aunt Jane.”

  These had been good enough for Rackham. But they were not good enough for Rackham Catchings, and Hilda Maple sailed forth in quest of something more worthy. She set out on the uncharted sea to discover Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight.

  She sought him, just in that place where Oxford Street merges into Holborn, in a shop where she had had the good fortune to find many things already: a shop belonging to a gentleman of Esthonian extraction called Curzon; at any rate, this gentleman (who appeared in person) had the selling of the goods, and, on this occasion, after so many others sold to Aunt Hilda, of the Ancestor. And a very good Ancestor he was. Aged in time, though newly cleaned, painted on canvas which an expert would have ascribed to our own day, but set in the proper kind of old frame and duly sooted, fumed, and with nothing to give him away.

  He had a square, solid face, not unlike a pig’s, well pleased with itself, and a square beard to match; and he was dressed in a period which was either the very last days of Elizabeth or the very first days of James: a man of about the same age as Shakespeare, but without his genius. He cost Aunt Hilda surprisingly little, though surprisingly more than he was worth. Whatever name he may have had in real life he was now, for her, Sir Harry Murtenshaw, and she was always very careful to explain that he was not a real Maple. Which was indeed the case.

  He was, for her, the founder of the family in this sense; that it was through his daughter, the heiress of Rackham, that the Maples had come into the property: a touching piece of family history. It had been a love match; and that was very touching too.

  Then, to the unconcealed annoyance of her nephew, she tacked a ghost on to Sir Harry. At first a vague ghost, it turned more precise and became a young relative of the knight’s, who had died a romantic political death.

  In a fine innocence upon the date of that eminent Hun, Hilda Maple accepted the assurance that the portrait was by Holbein, and Sir Harry Murtenshaw, bluff Englishman that he was, and stout supporter of the Elizabethan (or Jacobean) settlement, was carried out by two assistants of Mr. Curzon’s to be packed for delivery to Rackham Catchings. He was heavy. He was large. He had to go out sideways. He travelled, finally, upside down: but it in no way affected his imperturbable humour.

  John Maple had helped his aunt to choose the picture; had warned her that Sir Harry was no ancestor of his, whatever he might be of his aunt’s husband; had received the naturally sharp reply of that lady to such a comment; and later, when the great founder of the fortunes of Rackham was unwrapped, had helped to choose the part of the panelling into which he was to be incongruously forced, frame and all. He presided over the dining-room, as an ancestor should, the new dining-room—which was also the old. For though it was the new dining-room in Corton’s phrase, and in John Maple’s the sham dining-room, everything had been done to make it the oldest dining-room in Sussex. When Hilda Maple told her guests that the picture dated with the room, and that the panelling built around it was its contemporary, she was not strictly truthful. For whereas the panelling was of early 1918, Sir Harry (as I have established by deep research) was painted by a starving Frenchman in Soho as long a time back as 1893.

  Anyhow, there he beamed over the Refectory table, the antique chairs and all the caboodle, with virile if somewhat vacuous determination in his contented eyes. It was men such as he, Aunt Hilda would explain to her guests, who made us what we are. And God have mercy upon us all! For we also are liars, my readers, yourselves not excepted.

  Pray let my reader remember this also (if I may so burden her memory) that the Ancestor was but the last of Aunt Hilda’s purchases—and she had outrun the constable.

  The gentleman of Esthonian extraction, Mr. Curzon, had let the Ancestor go cheap—at thirty-seven times what he paid for him. But he had sold Aunt Hilda valuable expert advice, panelling and chairs as well, and tapestries which were not tapestries, and Jacobean silver of the last few years (with Hall Marks let in) and Elizabethan four-posters, Victorian on the carpenter’s side, and even bibelots and fraudelquins; not to speak of franfreluches and negligeables. And for a long time past Mr. Curzon, the Esthonian, had not been selling these to Aunt Hilda for cash, but for sundry promises of cash in time to come. And these bore interest. For of such is the Kingdom of the Esthonians—or, at any rate, of the Curzon sort.

  * * * * *

  I have digressed. I have been misled by the contemplation of Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight (from the brush of Holbein—with a Jacobean ruff and trunk hose).

  Let me return to the adventures of John, and these shall be brief.

  Chapter IV

  John had started with his little nest egg of £352, but it would not last for ever. He had had the wisdom to begin earning at once. He first took chance jobs at writing for next to nothing. Then he helped a friend to read proofs. Then he catalogued a library (extremely badly), but at any rate with a good knowledge of French and German—which was useful—at 30s. a week. Then he put in a short time, through the kindness of one of his father’s friends, as assistant to the agent of an estate; but there he was paid no wages, the experience was held to be a sufficient reward, so that could not last. Then he spent a rather longer time, under an assumed name, in a curious little venture with a chance acquaintance of his, a man of the stage who had a tiny capital; it immediately dissipated in a cabaret show which failed. It was bad,
but it would have failed even sooner had it been better.

  At last, having earned in rather less than a year somewhat under two hundred pounds and having spent at least two hundred and fifty, he put in three splendid weeks at sea without wages, but lodged and fed and gaining time to think things over. He had come across the poor owner of a small, old and ill-found ketch which traded with odd cargoes in and out of London River, pottering up the creeks of the East Coast, and sometimes standing across for the Hook or Ostend. John had a way with him, and persuaded this acquaintance to let him sign on for a round voyage across the North Sea and home by the East Coast ports, picking up chance ladings and making what she could for her owner: her Mate and Captain sharing. He was to grub with those officers in the after-cabin, under one of those many odd titles whereby they excuse a supernumerary on board. His presence delighted neither. He found the Old Man surly and the Mate hostile. Yet he enjoyed himself hugely; and there it was—of all places in the world!—that he discovered his talent and his earning power, for we each of us have a talent—a saleable talent, I mean—and happy is the man who discovers his while he is yet young.

  The Mate and he were together in the cabin of that aged ketch during a long wait outside Harwich for the tide. The old man was smoking on deck watching for the turn. The Mate was more sour than ever that evening, jealous of such a super-cargo, with his white hands and gentleman’s accent. Yet it was the Mate who, there and then, brought John his good fortune, as enemies often do. John Maple was standing by in the dark corner of the little stuffy place, lit only by a swinging oil lamp, with no sound but the dull plash of the shallow water outside, and in his exasperation at something worse than usual which the Mate had just grumbled at him, he muttered to himself a word not polite, but said in such a low tone that he hoped it could provoke no quarrel. What it did provoke in the Mate was an attitude quite unexpected. That worthy looked up with a sudden startled air, and said in an awed tone, “What was that? Didn’t you hear summat?” and with that he peered furtively askance into the darkness.

  “What was what?” said John Maple, rather surlily, thinking he had been challenged.

  “I ’eard a voice!” said the Mate in scared religious tones, and John, looking at him, saw that he had gone quite white.

  Those of the Unseen Powers who were looking after John’s affairs shot into his head the right thing to do, though he hardly knew why it was the right thing to do. He turned his face round again slowly away from the Mate, put his hand to his temple, to cover his features, and again gave that slight muttering; to be correct, it was the word “Swine!”

  He heard something like a muffled shriek from the Mate:

  “There it goes again! It said “Mine,” moaned the Mate, now glaring wide eyed at the darkest corner of the cabin, where the reflector of the lamp threw a deep shadow behind its smoky light.

  “Whose? Eh? ’ose? Am I ’is? What’s ’ee mean?” The Mate may have been drinking or may have knocked off, which is worse still for the nerves. But there was no doubt as to his mistaking the direction of the slight sound which had terrified him.

  John Maple had discovered in those five minutes how easy it was—for him at least, or in the right surroundings—to ventriloquise.

  “I dursn’t hear it again,” whispered the Mate.

  John Maple could not refuse to oblige, and he obliged for the third time. The Mate sprang up all tense and said, trembling, that he didn’t like it.

  “What don’t you like?” said John Maple, pleasant and friendly, to show that the quarrel was forgotten.

  “Voices,” said the Mate scratching the little swinging table with his nails nervously. “Don’t you ’ear nothin’?”

  John Maple paused.

  “Yes, I think I did,” he said slowly—which was true enough.

  It was the First Episode, and a very slight one. It had no immediate sequel.

  On the return voyage (they carried bricks) John Maple was again successful, not only in the cabin, but once at night on deck, when the Mate and he had gone forward together; and again, when he had helped to see whether there was any shifting in the hold (for a cargo of bricks can work wonders if it shifts), the Mate heard voices. This time the voices had something to say worth saying. They touched the Mate on his immortal soul, the immediate perils of life, and advanced a strong premonition of death. The Mate had fled up and aft, steadied himself with a glass, and sworn at the end of the ordeal by all the gods below London Bridge he would not sign on that vessel again.

  The Old Man was not superstitious. He had many of the qualities of wood: not only its toughness, endurance and colour, but also its lack of sensibility. John wondered whether this new-found talent would work on the non-superstitious.

  Well, it had not that fine “first night” success which the Mate had enjoyed; but it was beyond expectation all the same.

  The Old Man heard very clearly a voice from his own bunk. He was on the other side of the cabin at the time, though, it is true, his attention had been directed to the couch. The voice, far off, ghostly in the darkness, reminded him of the day when be had so nearly drowned (through no fault of his own, but rather of Islington port), and warned him of approaching trials. Had the Old Man remembered to whom he had lately recounted that drowning episode (the only adventure of his life) he might have had suspicions. As it was, he had none, for he told the story so often that he could not remember who last had heard it. All he knew now was that a whisper from the other world—from A Spirit that knew his past—had bidden him remember and beware. It affected him damnably.

  His face did not go as white as the Mate’s had done, for it started with a handicap of fixed mahogany, but it was changed when he looked round at John and asked him, as the Mate had asked him, those few days before, whether he had heard anything; and once more John truthfully said he had. Then the Old Man asked him point-blank whether he minded—as after all, he had done him the favour of taking him aboard, and he was only a young chap—whether he minded sleeping in his, the Captain’s, bunk that night, and giving him his own bunk. And John had accepted with all the goodwill in the world. He even said it was an honour.

  When John Maple landed from his short but memorable and very happy cruise (for he had loved the sea, though it was his first experience of it), he had no idea that there was a living in the talent he had discovered—if talent it were. At first he only thought it amusing that by suggesting to another person where a voice was likely to come from, and then keeping one’s features still and talking within one’s mouth, one could make the voice seem to come from out of nothingness. Then when he tried it on with chance Bohemian friends in London he found that not everybody could do it as well as he: and most of his friends could not do it at all. Then came the day when Percy Spegel (so he chose to spell his name for the moment), hearing him practising the trick during a little supper at the Lord Milner in Puffin Lane, watched him with fixed eyes, wherein any expert demon might have discovered avarice, tenacity, fraud, and other varied characters consonant with his enormous tie-pin.

  Percy Spegel appealed to his constant parasite, whether John Maple had not a marvellous talent? To which the parasite agreed. Whether it was not a pity that such talent should be wholly untrained? To which the parasite also agreed. Whether it would not be a dreadfully expensive thing to train that talent? To which the parasite abundantly agreed. Whether he would not probably be a loser if he attempted to put John Maple on the Halls? To which the parasite said, he certainly would be. Whether one was not foolish, out of mere enthusiasm, to risk such loss? Which the parasite said was only what one would expect of a good fellow like Percy.

  The upshot of it was that John Maple found himself prepared to sign a contract of a sort he had never seen before, but familiar enough to those who live and die by the Halls, wherein he was to earn nothing for so long—a short period enough—and after that what looked like a very large sum every week.

  John Maple knew nothing of what the out-goings of this profession ar
e, or of its temptations. He very luckily accepted, and that was why his first steady employment—about a year after his return to England from his father’s death-bed—was in the singular capacity of Lieutenant Allegri, the world-famed ventriloquist. But such is the gulf between the two worlds that no one among the rich whom he saw at his leisure had an idea of the escapade; and no one among the Bohemians had an idea of his acquaintance with the rich. He had fewer nights in which he could go out, but he did go out sufficiently. He kept his contract free; he would not be bullied: and he was so good that he could make his own terms and times.

  The truth is, that if John Maple had been what young men of family in this situation never are, and that is, devoted to his one talent, he might have become rich. There are small fortunes made in these things. He might have bought back Rackham after God knows how many years, if he had cut himself right away from everything but slaving, and forgotten every name but his own false one on the Halls.

  It was after a very short time as Lieutenant Allegri that he bought for his own pleasure a couple of dogs and trained them to do tricks. Then he had added to their number and taught them more tricks. Then (since he now knew the trade) he determined to change over, and in spite of Spegel’s passionate appeals to heaven, he convinced that expert, who knew human nature if he knew nothing else, that he must take his choice between losing his own profit, which was considerable, or accepting John Maple in the future as Don Herado de Madeira and his Troupe of Performing Dogs.