The Double Eye

by William Fryer Harvey

  The manifestations had been going on over a period of three weeks. They consisted apparently of rappings, noises like those made by the dropping of very heavy weights, unaccountable movements of tables and articles of furniture, the mysterious locking and unlocking of doors, and, perhaps strangest of all, the throwing about, apart from any observed human agency, of all sorts of miscellaneous objects, ranging from chessmen and gramophone needles to lumps of coal and metal candlesticks.

  ‘With a little luck it looks as if I should be in for an interesting evening,’ said Saxon to his wife. ‘If I were to hazard a guess, I should say that the servant-girl is somehow connected with it.’

  Certainly the evening was interesting. In the drawing-room at Meadowfield Terrace Saxon was introduced by Clinton to Parke and Mrs Parke and Miss Cornelius. At his suggestion Parke recapitulated the happenings of the last three weeks, his wife and Miss Cornelius from time to time adding or correcting details. The account was given in a straightforward manner that impressed Saxon, nor could he see in any of the three traces of hysteria. All were obviously disturbed at what they had witnessed; Mrs Parke indeed looked worn and harassed; but neither she nor Miss Cornelius had lost their sense of humour.

  ‘Let us agree on one thing,’ he said, ‘before we go any further. I know very little about poltergeist manifestations—I have an open mind on the subject—but we must not presume an abnormal (I use the word in preference to supernatural) explanation, until we have excluded conscious or unconscious fraud. Apart, too, from the question of fraud, what has been seen may be connected in some way with human agency. We must all watch each other; we must even be suspicious of each other. Anything for a peaceful life. That’s right, isn’t it, Mrs Parke?’

  They all agreed.

  ‘What about the maids?’ said Clinton.

  There was no difficulty there. It was the girl’s night out, and the cook had been given leave to spend the evening with a friend.

  Miss Cornelius suggested that they should lock both doors, and that two of the party should make a careful search in all the rooms, to make certain that there was no one hiding to play tricks.

  ‘You had better go with Mr Clinton,’ said Mrs Parke, laughing nervously. ‘I’d almost rather anything happened than find a man under my bed.’

  They sat in the drawing-room while Clinton and Miss Cornelius made the round of the house. Saxon looked at his watch. ‘It’s just half-past eight,’ he said. ‘And that’s about the time that things begin to look lively,’ said Parke. ‘Listen! The rappings have begun already.’

  There could be no doubt about the noises, low and muffled, as if someone were striking a rubber pad with a hammer; but it was impossible to locate them, to say whether they came from beyond the walls or the ceiling. They were quite distinct from the footsteps of Clinton and Miss Cornelius, who could be heard moving about in one of the rooms above. A minute or two later the voices of the two were heard in conversation, as they came down the stairs. Then there was a crash, and Miss Cornelius called out: ‘What was that?’ Parke and Saxon ran out into the hall. A wooden horse, belonging to the children, which Clinton declared that he had seen on the landing outside the nursery door, was lying with its head broken at the foot of the stairs. The evening’s programme had commenced.

  It was a full and varied programme, and the intervals between the items were short, filled with a tense, almost exhilarating, feeling of excitement as to what in the world would happen next. Saxon and Clinton, who had both previously agreed to take notes of what they saw, were kept busy writing. A little before half-past nine there was a lull in the proceedings.

  ‘They usually close down about now,’ said Parke with a rather forced laugh. ‘What about some coffee, Maisie?’

  ‘I wonder if you would mind Mr Clinton and me running over our notes together in the dining-room?’ Saxon asked. ‘I don’t think we shall detain you very long.’

  They went into the adjoining room, and Clinton noticed with surprise that his companion turned the key in the lock.

  ‘Well, what about it?’ said the bank manager. ‘I confess the whole thing baffles me.’

  Saxon was silent for a moment, and then broke out petulantly: ‘I wish to goodness you had never brought me here, Clinton. We have got landed in the very deuce of a mess, and that is why you and I have got to come to some decision.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘I’ll put a question to you. From what you have seen this evening do you suspect anyone?’

  Clinton looked troubled and was silent.

  ‘Parke?’ went on Saxon. ‘Do you suspect him?’

  ‘No, oh, no!’

  ‘Mrs Parke?’

  ‘No, certainly not.’

  ‘Miss Cornelius, then?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No.’

  ‘You don’t think so. Well, I do. Mind you, three quarters of what I have seen I can’t account for at present. Why the rocking-chair should go on moving as it did, for example. I searched in vain for a thread of black cotton—I even looked for a hair. On the other hand, when that lump of coal flew across the room, I am almost positive that it came from the hand of Miss Cornelius. She had been standing by the coal-box only a minute before. If you noticed, she was constantly fidgeting with different articles on the table and mantelpiece. Her hands were never still. It seemed almost that she had to hold her itching fingers down. I did see—and that I am prepared to swear to—her throw the pen that stuck in the ceiling. The whole thing was suspicious. It’s unusual, to say the least of it, to find pens lying about on the mantelpiece. There is one in this room, you will notice; put there, I suggest, by Miss Cornelius to await the opportune moment. In the case I’m speaking of she held it in her hand behind her back, and gave it a curious little flick with her thumb. I believe with practice I could do the same myself.’

  He took the pen from the mantelpiece and repeated the action he had described.

  ‘There!’ he cried triumphantly, ‘I told you it could be done. It’s stuck in the sofa cushion instead of the ceiling, for which I was aiming; but you must admit that my hand was behind my back, for not more than a fraction of a second. Why did you hesitate when I mentioned Miss Cornelius’s name, when you were emphatic in denying that you suspected the Parkes?’

  ‘A good many of the objects certainly seemed to come from her direction,’ said Clinton slowly, ‘and it struck me that once or twice she called attention to them almost too soon. You know the quick, startled way she had of exclaiming: “What’s that?” so that all of us looked in the direction she was looking in. Well, it struck me as a bit fishy—that was all.’

  ‘Look at your notes a minute,’ Saxon went on. ‘Things have happened this evening on the stairs, in this room, and in the drawing-room; while we have been sitting all together, and while some of us have been here and some in the drawing-room; but you will notice that the manifestations other than the noises and rappings only took place in the presence of Miss Cornelius.’

  ‘And you suggest—?’

  ‘That the sole invariable antecedent is probably the cause.’

  ‘Then what the deuce are we to do about it?’

  ‘The only thing we can do,’ said Saxon—‘I say we, but I mean I, because I don’t see why you need be dragged into it—is to go into that other room and be perfectly frank with them. These things have got to stop. Apart altogether from the strain on Mrs Parke, there are the children to be considered. There will be an unholy row, possibly sleepless nights for some of us, but we’ve got to take the bull by the horns. Let’s go in and get it over. It’s like striking an old woman,’ he added, after a pause. ‘My God! Clinton, I wish you had never brought me here.’

  ‘And what do you make of it all?’ asked Miss Cornelius with a smile, when they were all assembled in the drawing-room. ‘I do so hope you are going to set our fears at rest.’

  Saxon looked her straight in the face. He saw the false fringe, the wrinkles, and the eyes, dark and chall
enging, in which cruelty lurked.

  ‘Mrs Parke,’ he began, ‘I am more sorry than I can say, and I hate what I am going to say, but I believe that Miss Cornelius is closely concerned with what we have witnessed tonight. Miss Cornelius, won’t you be frank with us? What is said now need go no farther than this room.’

  They were all looking at her. Her face was the colour of old ivory.

  ‘Maisie,’ she said, ‘this is an outrage! What right has this man, who has been talking to me this evening as if he were my friend, to turn suddenly round and try to blacken my character in the presence of people whom I have known intimately for years? I know nothing of what he has been saying. I am as guiltless of fraud or trickery as those two little children asleep upstairs.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Saxon interrupted, ‘it is only fair to remind you all that we did agree to see this matter through and to disregard the personal factor. I said I was going to be suspicious of everyone, and I have been.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Parke reluctantly. ‘But what is it you accuse Miss Cornelius of?’

  ‘I don’t accuse her of anything. But I do say that I saw her throw a pen; on several occasions I almost saw objects leaving her hand; and that the phenomena we have witnessed this evening—I should be the first to admit that I cannot at present explain them all—have always occurred in her presence. One word more and I have done. I want to be charitable in what I say and think. I do not say that Miss Cornelius has consciously deceived us. I think that probably unknown to herself she has developed unusual powers of legerdemain, and that she has used it to foster that extraordinary, exhilarating feeling of excitement and suspense which we have been conscious of this evening. And now I think I will go.’

  ‘He thinks he will go!’ said Miss Cornelius, speaking with pent-up fury. ‘He sprinkles me with pitch and then he thinks he can clear off. But let me tell you, Mr Saxon, an old woman speaking to a comparatively young man, that you will live to be sorry for this day. You will know what it is to pray that your tongue might have withered at its roots rather than it should have said the things it has said tonight.’

  ***

  ‘I may have been too abrupt,’ said Saxon, as he walked back home with Clinton. ‘My wife tells me that I have no tact; but it struck me that the only thing to do was to cut quickly and deeply, and not waste time over the anaesthetic.’

  ‘The fault is mine,’ the other replied, ‘in having dragged you into it. Though I’m sorry for the Parkes, I’m almost more sorry for you. I think you did the right thing, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s more than I could have done.’

  Saxon found his wife sitting up for him. ‘Were the spooks genuine after all?’ she said. ‘I’m longing to hear all about it.’

  ‘I think I’d rather leave it over until tomorrow. It’s not been exactly a pleasant evening, and I am afraid I have made one enemy for life—Miss Cornelius.’

  ***

  He told her all about it next morning at breakfast.

  ‘I don’t know whom to pity most,’ she said, ‘you or the poor old lady. I’ve always thought of her as one of those quiet, inoffensive old dears, that give the atmosphere to the drawing-rooms of South Coast boarding-establishments. Anyhow, I’m not going to have you worried about it. Why not get off to Flinton for a long week-end of golf? You were going to sometime during the holidays, you know.’

  Saxon hummed and hawed, and raked about half-heartedly for excuses, but she could see that the idea appealed to him, and by noon she had seen him off.

  That was on a Friday afternoon. It was certainly very jolly down at Flinton. They were an usually congenial little party at the Dormie House. MacAllister of Trinity was there with a young biochemist from King’s, with whom he crossed swords to good purpose in the evenings. And he was on top of his form as well. Monday morning brought a long letter from his wife:

  Dear Old Alfred [she wrote], I’m quite sure you did the right thing in getting away. The clouds—metaphorical—are blowing over. You’ll hardly believe me when I tell you what I’ve done. I’ve bearded the lion and taken the bull by the horns. In other words, I’ve seen and spoken with Miss Cornelius. Now don’t call me rash or foolish, until you hear how it all came about. Somehow I didn’t feel like going to church this morning—the new half-warmed fish curate was preaching—and went for a walk instead down by the river. I saw Miss Cornelius in the distance, sitting on a seat, and looking lonely and withered, and to cut a long story short, I went up to her and told her how sorry I was that all this should have happened. At first I could see that she did not quite know what to make of me, but she soon began, if not to blossom out, at least to burgeon, and was really very kind. She admitted that she was inexcusably rude to you, and thought you would understand that the provocation was great. She says that she is entirely innocent of any attempt at deceit, and if she did throw the pen, that she knew nothing about it. She still believes that the manifestations are the work of some Poltergeist—I don’t know if that’s the way you spell it—and the utmost she will admit is that there is an element of infection about these things and that, unknown to herself, she may have got infected. I gather that the Parkes were very nice about it all, and that, as her house was practically finished apart from the outside painting, they mutually agreed—is that a right use of the word mutual, you old pedant?—that she should go back there. And there she is: and that’s that.

  There was a postscript too:

  Don’t come back until Wednesday, and get all the golf and exercise you can. In fact, you can’t very well come back before then, because I have decided to spring-clean the study. It ought to have been done at Easter. I’ll take care of your papers.

  ‘Molly at her best,’ thought Saxon, with affectionate pride, ‘clearing up her husband’s messes without his leave and making no fuss about it.’

  When, after enjoying his days of grace to the full, he returned home on the Wednesday, the events of the previous week appeared strangely remote. It seemed indeed that, whatever his relations with Miss Cornelius were to be in the future, his wife had gained from his encounter a new acquaintance.

  ‘Not only did I beard the lion, as I told you in my letter,’ said Molly, ‘but since then I have braved the lion, or rather lioness, in her den. And it really is the most charming old house, Andrew. I’d no idea Cornford could boast such a place. I’ve got some photographs somewhere that Miss Cornelius gave me. They make you quite covetous and uncharitable, like the illustrated advertisements of houses for sale in Country Life.’

  The week that followed passed without incident. Miss Cornelius called one afternoon when he was out, and brought with her a new stereoscopic camera to show his wife. The old lady, curiously enough, was an ardent photographer—Saxon already had revised Molly’s South Coast boarding-house picture of her—and offered to take some views of the house. Mrs Saxon jumped at the proposal. They would be just the thing to send to her sister in New Zealand, with the vivacious Molly in the foreground.

  The prints were excellent.

  ‘Now, if only you had married an actress, Old Alfred,’ she said, ‘we could turn an honest penny by making this into an illustrated article. Me in the garden—yes, I adore flowers; me in the study—I don’t know what I should do without my books; me in the kitchen—I always make my own omelettes; me in my boudoir—yes, I picked up that old mirror in Spain.’

  ‘My dear,’ said Saxon, ‘it’s really wonderful the amount of unmitigated nonsense you can talk.’

  Miss Cornelius sent, too, a few photographs of the interior of her own house. No one would have taken them for the work of an amateur, and when seen through the stereoscope an impression of solidity and depth was obtained, ‘as if,’ Mrs Saxon said, ‘you were really inside the rooms.’

  Then, as August drew to a close in a week of sultry heat and thunder, things began to happen, strange and purposeless things, that brought into the little house an atmosphere of tension that was completely foreign to it. At first they laughed when the
y found the toast-rack lying at the top of the stairs. Then one evening Molly’s bedroom slippers moved across the room and landed neatly together in the empty fire-grate. On another occasion Saxon’s pyjamas disappeared from underneath his pillow and, after a long search, were found tightly knotted together on the top of the wardrobe. The papers in his study were disarranged. One morning a jumper Molly had been knitting lay in the coal-box, unravelled, the wool wound in inextricable tangles around the legs of the tables and chairs. They could make nothing of it.

  ‘It almost looks,’ said Molly, with a forced laugh, ‘as if spooks were trying to convince us that we had been too hasty in our judgment of Miss Cornelius.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, my dear,’ replied Saxon, testily. ‘It’s far more likely that that woman has been getting at the maids. My advice for the moment is to keep our eyes open and to say nothing to any one about it.’

  But he himself was deeply disturbed. Though professing an open mind on matters supernatural, he was hardly prepared for this cold and most unpleasant draught of doubt. He found himself thinking, more often than he liked to acknowledge, of Miss Cornelius and that venomous outburst of hate. What if she—? But of course, there must be some natural explanation. And so the week dragged by.

  It was Sunday morning. They had finished their breakfast and Saxon, rising from the table, stood looking out of the window, when, turning round suddenly, he saw his wife fingering the handle of the bread-knife. Next moment it flashed through the air and knocked over a vase on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Andrew!’ she cried. ‘Where ever did that come from? Oh, I can’t bear it. Andrew, don’t you realise it might have hit me? Don’t. Don’t!’

  He ran to her and put his arms round her. ‘Molly, darling, it’s all right. You mustn’t be alarmed. We must pull ourselves together and not allow our nerves to get on edge. Let’s go into the garden. We can talk better there.’