The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  It was not as good as the ventriloquist show, but it drew better, for the public is fond of dogs, and Spegel had put it about that it was all done by kindness, not to say coddling: and the little brutes certainly looked very happy as they ran about wagging their tails and doing things which proved them wholly indifferent to pomposity. They barked also, most winningly, to order, and grinned in the most endearing fashion.

  There, then, was John Maple’s singular situation at the moment when, in that other life of his, he and Bo had met and made certain one of the other. He had told her secretly of his profession; and he had given her useful tips about Lovey-Lad, for he had become an expert upon dogs. That Lovey-Lad had recognised in him a mysterious Master of Hounds raised him enormously in Bo’s eyes. It is to be believed that one of Don Herado’s troupe met Lovey-Lad in the park and had loyally exalted the powers of his lord. For certainly John was the only male human being to whom Lovey-Lad deferred; and Lovey-Lad was the only being on earth whose opinion Bo respected.

  * * * * *

  But why had Aunt Hilda taken all this enormous trouble about the Catchings? Why the new beam let into the ceiling, adzed, blackened and chipped and dated 1487? Why the Ancestor? Why the panelling? Why the antique chairs? Why the heraldic animals? Why anything? Why, why the new family ghost? It’s true that cost nothing, but the more solid stuff cost a great deal. Why all this expenditure?

  Had John Maple known more of the world, and wholly lost his innocence, he could have answered, as you and I can answer, that there are only two explanations of such feverish changes, when an old house is pulled about and made vulgar. Either the Vandal has more money to spend than she knows what to do with, or the Goth is embarrassed. Either the barbaric hand is filled with the ruining gold, or the savage heart is tortured by perpetual demands for payment from creditors and is salting for a sale.

  Either Aunt Hilda was spending money wantonly, or she was desperate for money.

  Well, it was the latter. Aunt Hilda was up to the neck in worry. She didn’t know which way to turn.

  When people change and rechange, and pull down and destroy and theatricalise, you can tell which of the two motives is at work by a simple test. If they act spasmodically, first putting this up and then taking it down, changing an ornament from one place to another, pulling out a wall and then regretting it and putting it back, they have too much money. If they pursue one plan, continuously, and load it with detail they are fighting debt.

  Aunt Hilda was fighting debt.

  Aunt Hilda was making a new Rackham and a new Catchings for the sake of some purchaser heaven might send her. For Aunt Hilda must find a purchaser or burst. And that was the truth.

  William Maple, that careful business man, had left things in order when he died. He had added appreciably to the value of the house and the estate. He had allowed his wife to cover the brick part of the front with a false veneer of half-timber because that at least gave it uniformity with the older part; and he had allowed the new fake to be toned down artificially so as to marry with the old. That also seemed reasonable. More he had not allowed. But Hilda Maple, even before his death, was already talking to her occasional guests about the antiquity of the place, and what wonders would be revealed when all the old wood could be uncovered and the later work which hid it could be taken away.

  Her husband had not been dead two months when, in spite of all the difficulties in getting work done during those last days of the war, Aunt Hilda lashed out. Even then—my reader will remember, if she is old enough—people with a pull could get things done. It was the moment when one of the most luxurious of the new houses near the south coast in Kent was being built by a politician. The difficulties of life were not with the rich in those spring days of 1918, and though Hilda Maple was not in the heart of that old gentry which had once governed England, she was already close in touch with some of the new vulgarians who were now beginning to govern England. Her friendship with Amathea de Beaurivage alone was enough to get her the necessary labour. It was enormously expensive, of course, but she was full of her new fortune, and she began to tear down the structure of the house within, and to ornament, and to build.

  At the same time she did another thing, not unusual in women suddenly possessed of capital, still less unusual in times when all values are jumping up and down like the little ball in the circle of the roulette. She gambled.

  But Hilda Maple, like thousands of others in those days, was gambling against the politicians, the peace-makers, the bankers, and the international spouters of the millennium. They could see what was in the game, for they held and stacked the cards. She—and the thousands of others—could only see the backs of those cards.

  There had come a moment—and that in a few months—when all was lost and she had nothing to fall back on but Rackham itself, and Rackham she must sell. Perhaps when she had spoken to her dying brother-in-law she had honestly intended not to sell; but necessity knows no law, and she excused herself to herself by the memory of what she had told him; that she had a legal right to sell. But the selling of a house, like the selling of a boat or the selling of one’s own soul, depends on external effects. We “go on our clothes,” as a great American Leader of Modern Thought has said. A boat sells on its paint and its brasswork. A house sells by what furniture and faked wood and “period” front it can show.

  Rackham might barely fetch its £20,000, for its own true worth; but let it become Rackham Catchings and be varnished and vulgarised enough (not that Hilda Maple thought it vulgarised—she thought it vastly ennobled) and there was no knowing what it might fetch—especially from the right kind of purchaser in these extraordinary times, when men stepped out of the gutter on New Year’s Day and were in the House of Lords before Christmas.

  Therefore it was that Aunt Hilda had gone on building, pulling down, ageing new wood, owing increasing sums for expert advice and goods from the antique dealers, and in general playing the devil with Rackham.

  She had got the house into the illustrated papers three times already; first under “Our Elizabethan Heritage”; then under “The Quiet Homes of England,” and then under “Minor Great English Houses, No. 51: Rackham.” She herself had haggled a little over the “Minor.” But there she was wrong; they ought to have haggled over the “Great.”

  Aunt Hilda was not without commercial sense. She had on the occasion of the last photographing purchased two peacocks and chivvied them on to the lawn before the people from London snapped the front. She had even borrowed from one of her few really important friends an enormous photograph of a Royalty, in a vast silver frame leaning backwards, which she draped and propped up on a little table, to go nicely into the picture of the boudoir—little knowing that the word boudoir had long sunk out of use. But if it comes to that, each of us is out of fashion to others. Our English society has divided into something like those moving ways at the old Paris Exhibition of 1889: one stream is moving at one pace, one at another; and there still survive gentlefolk who say “napkin,” side by side with those masters of our modern world who say “serviette.”

  Let me leave the boudoir and the photographs and all the rest of it and get back to the Debt.

  Aunt Hilda was embarrassed. Damnably! Hence the purchases in London; hence the antiques; hence the Ancestor. That activity of hers which had intrigued poor John Maple was plain enough. He would have been less angry with his aunt had he known the causes of her perpetual extravagances.

  If you desire to know the amount of Aunt Hilda’s embarrassment, I can tell it you simply enough. It was, at the moment when she was adding her last efforts to Rackham, £17,000—and a little more. She had the cunning common to those who lose money—and make it. She picked up ideas on sharp dealing by listening to conversation around her. She had learnt the tricks of the share-shufflers. Therefore she had continued recklessly. Money was never made to-day by work or saving. The bigger the overdrafts the better, and loans raised in Jermyn Street were quicker and handier than mortgages. She would
make Rackham Catchings glorious in the eyes of possible purchasers—Jew, Rastaqouère, new War Lord, Yankee millionaire—anybody. Then she could sell it, untrammelled, for three times its worth and five times what she had spent on it. The money-lenders would get back their loans and interest. There would still be a large balance over, and with that balance she could buy herself a sufficient annuity to live the life she desired. But she must act quickly. Interest mounted up and heavy pressure had begun.

  It is unfortunately true that men pursuing various trades will conceal their activities under various names. The Esthonian gentleman, Mr. Curzon, who had sold Aunt Hilda her Ancestor and so much more, had already (as plain Charles Blunt of Bristol) advanced her money on note of hand, and as Mr. de Vere of Jermyn Street advanced her more money to satisfy the clamourings of plain Charles Blunt. Now Mr. de Vere of Jermyn Street was beginning to press. But she would sell Rackham and all would be well.

  Such is the heart of woman that she told herself all this was quite fair to John. He would be her heir—the fact that she would have nothing to leave him did not alter that. She had made him an honourable offer to send him to Oxford, and he had refused. She was perpetually asking him down to Rackham, and wasn’t that kind of her? Indeed, he did not come half enough. Well, perhaps John was too proud. She respected him for that. It was the Maple blood—Aunt Hilda by this time had come to believe that she herself was a Maple.

  So there it was. Aunt Hilda with the hot breath of the pursuer on her neck; John hating these insane renovations and gewgaws; the purchasers advancing with open mouths and simple smiles.

  For purchasers Aunt Hilda had—or believed she had. And in these her faith held fast.

  I have told how dear a friend she had become of Amathea Lady Mere de Beaurivage, and of her husband, late Sir George Huggins; and now there was something even warmer in her heart (and certainly something warmer in his) for that first-rate man of business, Lord Hellup. To neither, she believed, would Rackham be indifferent now that it had the Catchings. And as competition is the soul of commerce, she hoped for sixty—she made certain of fifty—thousand pounds, from the one or from the other. Even fifty thousand, for what was, at the most, a twenty thousand pound proposition, was Good Business.

  * * * * *

  Meanwhile John Maple was pegging away, irregularly but lucratively, with the performing dogs for a livelihood, and with an increasing circle of rich friends for a life.

  He had three names. He was John Maple in that world of the people who do nothing and have pale love affairs and go their weary round of the Riviera and the Country Houses and all know each other by their Christian names. He was Don Herado de Madero on the Halls. He was Henry Pelton—a name like any other—for his Bohemian world, including Spegel. One might have thought that it would be worth Spegel’s while to track him down and find what he did in the big gaps which he left in his engagements; and so it would have been worth Spegel’s while. Later on there might have been blackmail, and blackmail is a staple of the Spegels. Yet Spegel did not take the trouble, simply because he accepted a too facile an explanation of John Maple’s absences and disappearances.

  His judgment was that the Pelton whom he knew, the Herado de Madero of the Dogs, suffered from quite incurable drinking bouts. His experience of quite incurable drinking bouts—it was extensive, for it covered about half the people he had exploited in his wicked little life—was that they must be left alone. So when Don Herado (or Pelton) told him that the dogs would not appear next week; that he must cut out next Friday; or that Saturday and Monday were washed, Spegel made all his arrangements accordingly. For Pelton was a great asset, however irregular. Old ladies who still vote Tory will tell me, no doubt, that John Maple was thus necessary on the Halls at his own terms because “blood tells”—the blood of the original cattle-dealer and smith. Their twin brethren who make money as Labour leaders in the House of Commons will say, on the platform at least, that John Maple was privileged and favoured because he had gentle blood—the blood, again, of the smith and cattle-dealer. But I say that he could do what he liked, cut out days, shift engagements and live in two worlds because he had talent, and because on the top of that he was determined to have his own way. Also because Spegel only cared for money, and because people who only care for money will give any amount of rope to those whose genius they can tap.

  Here, then, was John Maple these few years after the war, making good in his curious way; earning much more than he spent, leading two lives, proud, and possessing already a solid balance at the bank, firmly affianced in soul to a great heiress who had as firmly affianced him, and neither of the children really appreciating where money came into such affairs.

  In John Maple’s mind, more prominent even than Bo, stood dominating and overwhelming a figure—the figure of Twenty Thousand Pounds—the Lump that would redeem Rackham. In the mind of Bo there stood John Maple. Anyone might have told these two children that all was at sixes and sevens with their lives. On which account, the wise, might foretell that these two lovers would win, and that the enormous incongruities of their lives would be triumphantly reconciled.

  Chapter V

  At this very unfinished phase in John Maple’s affairs, with none of the slats joined and no apparent possibility of making things fit in, but with a very successful prospect in the only thing that matters to a boy of his age, and a double talent and the chance of using it, there came yet another of those invitations to Aunt Hilda’s. He had been there quite often enough at week-ends during the last year, and it had been impossible to hide from her that he was earning his living in some obscure fashion upon the minor stage. Though no one else in her world knew it. She had shuddered, and refused to hear any details. He would get over this craze of independence, and anyhow, he was her nephew, and he knew everybody and he could behave himself.

  She told him to come down on the Friday if he could. He let Spegel know his wish, for Spegel needed him more than he needed Spegel. So he made it the Friday. But first he appointed to meet Bo and talk it over, because he had been told that Lord Hellup was going to Rackham Catchings.

  They met in her club, where they might talk in peace.

  “Bo, you’re going down with your father to Rackham again, and this time I’m to be there.”

  “Sure,” said Bo, stroking Lovey-Lad’s head with an intense affection and gazing into his eyes.

  “Did they tell you?”

  “Yup,” said the beautiful girl.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Didn’t see you; didn’t want to; didn’t have to,” was the sufficient reply.

  “I’m not complaining; only you see, I should have been startled if I had got to Rackham and found you there and not known.”

  “I was looking for that startle,” said Bo.

  “Yes,” said John, rather masterfully, “but you’ve got to think of me. She doesn’t know that I know you or your father.”

  “She will,” said Bo simply. “He tells her everything.”

  “I go the day before you,” said John.

  She nodded. He pulled his aunt’s letter out of his pocket.

  “Look here, Bo, who’s this other person—this Amathea she speaks of? D’you know her?”

  “Nix,” said the young lady simply.

  “Same here,” answered her lover.

  “We pass,” Bo concluded, and sighed.

  “Well, she’s to be there, and her husband—God knows who. And there’s Lord Hambourne—I think that’s all. I know all about him. He was the psychology expert during the war. He’s a don at Oxford.”

  Bo put both her elbows on the table of the corner where they sat apart, framed her large face in her hands, and gazed largely on her lover. Then recollection came into her eyes.

  “Amathea?” she said. “That’s old Mother Bruvvish.”

  “What?” answered John. “Do you mean to tell me that Aunt Hilda has fallen to that?”

  Bo nodded.

  “That’s her,” she said. �
��I remember now. She’s the only Amathea in London. She’s gotten a sausage neck.”

  “What on earth makes it worth their while to go to Rackham for?” said he.

  “They’re hunting,” said she.

  “Who’s hunting?”

  “Mother Bruvvish and Pop are: both hunting.”

  “Hunting what?” asked John, a little startled. “Not Aunt Hilda?”

  Bo’s mouth became more quizzical.

  “One of them is,” she said, “but they ‘re both hunting. Leastways, one’s fishing.”

  “Fishing for what?” said John Maple again, a little tired.

  “Fishing for Rackham, that’s Amathea,” said Bo, dropping her voice and leaning backwards.

  “Good God!” said John.

  “You’re right,” said Bo. “Appeal to Him. Call on Him. He might hear.”

  John’s face was crossed by a look of pain, and Bo responded at once.

  “It’s up to you, Dog-Man,” she said.

  “What’s up to me?” asked the Dog-Man.

  “The bluff,” said Bo, nodding. “It’s not a mammoth bluff, neither.”

  “What bluff?” said John.

  Bo grew impatient.

  “Why, you cough in with your third offer,” she said. “You know you’re famished for the place.”

  “Bo,” said John, too seriously, and almost tragically, “I had meant to save every penny, to work myself old, and then to go to Aunt Hilda with the money. When you tell me that your father and Old Huggins are after it …”

  Bo held up her finger.