A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage—it breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dâk-bungalow-haunter:—“There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,” the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.
This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.
After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.
When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.
“By the way, khansamah,” I said, “what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?”
“There were no doolies,” said the khansamah.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.
“Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?” I asked.
“No,” said the khansamah. “Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room.”
“A how much?”
“A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul.”
“Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?”
“It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and always angry, was playing here one night, and he said to me:—‘Mangal Khan, brandy-pani do,’ and I filled the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off, and when we—the Sahibs and I myself—ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal Khan, am still living, by your favor.”
That was more than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate later on.
I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,—with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.
The door was open and I could see into the room. Click—click! That was a cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. The unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!
Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvelously like that of a fast game.
Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.
“This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the Presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!”
Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions of morality.
There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib’s tragic death in three separate stations—two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dog-cart.
If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse.
I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong “hundred and fifty up.” Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.
Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.
That was the bitterest thought of all!
THE LONG CHAMBER, by Olivia Howard Dunbar
There was perhaps no warrant for the vaguely swelling disquiet that possessed me from the moment that, late in the sultry August after noon, there arrived the delayed telegram that announced the immediate coming of Beatrice Vesper.
…Beatrice Vesper abruptly on her way to me, and alone—it was the most strangely unlikely news. Yet I had no cause for real concern. She would find ready conveyance over the three steep miles from the railroad—our pleasantly decaying village being unlinked with the contemporary world. And, as the others reminded me, it wasn’t as though the redundant spaciousness of Burleigh House didn’t seem to invite, almost to select and compel, unaccustomed guests; or as though the Long Chamber, our supreme source of pride, hadn’t that morning received the final touches that consecrated it to the utmost hospitality we could offer. As for Beatrice, she would delight in the survival of Burleigh House as unfailingly as she herself would prove its most harmonious ornament. And that matter of ornament wasn’t one that David and I could be said to have taken at all lightly. How prodigally, how passionately, we had spent our love and labor on the precious house, in the months since it had so unexpectedly fallen into our hands—only to admit to each other, at the end of it all, in almost hysterical dismay, that the stately interiors seemed always empty, however vociferously we strove to be at home in them. There were void, waiting spaces that not the sum of all our alien, cheerful presences could fill. We had achieved a background, but a background for brilliant life; and it was as though we, living in terms of the palest prose, defiled past it almost invisibly. The truth was that we had established no spiritual tenancy, and that we didn’t, ourselves, belong there. But though I was far from guessing with what mysterious tentacles the past would seize her, I knew that Beatrice Vesper would belong.
It was plain enough, however, from the first sight of my old friend, that she had come to me in no unhappy stress. Her secure and unvexed air was for an instant disconcerting; I had, in my panic, so prepared myself for haggard pathos. And indeed it was almost incredible that the hurrying, untender years should not have bruised so delicate a creature. With swiftly relaxing nerves I surrendered to the flattery of her explanation that when, only the day before, her husband had been summoned to Europe by cable—she herself being kept behind by the important final proof-reading of a technical wo
rk of Dr. Vesper’s, to be published in the early autumn—she had from all her social resources chosen Burleigh House as her temporary refuge.… So that, after all, it seemed stupid to have taken fright. Beatrice and I had been the closest companions in earlier days. And doubtless I had exaggerated those conditions of her life which, for years past, had led her friends into the way of speaking of her ruefully, reminiscently, almost as if she were dead.
It was in this latter spirit that I had been speaking of her to David, only the day before, picturing her as the only woman I knew whose marriage had been complete self-immolation. Those of us who wore our fetters with a more modern jauntiness had resented, from our ill-informed distance, what seemed to be her slavish submission. She might as well have been chained in a cave—the rest of the world had not a glimpse of her. Dr. Vesper—a mild enough tyrant in appearance—did not care for society, so they had literally no visitors. There prevailed a legend that he was the most miserable of dyspeptics; and that Beatrice devoted most of her time to preparing the unheard-of substances that fed him. His financial concerns—for important mining interests had sprung from the geological work in which he had become famous—kept him in the city throughout the year, and Beatrice had never left him for a day, even in torrid midsummer.
But David, who is sturdily unmodern, refused to be astonished. “Why not, if she’s in love with him?” he asked.
“But she’s not,” I insisted “or—she wasn’t. It’s her husband who’s in love, and with the most unheard-of concentration. He has cared for her ever since she was a child, so the thing hung over her—though I suppose that’s not a romantic way of putting it—for years before they were married. So isn’t it rather extreme for her to relinquish everything else in the world for the sake of the man she merely—likes?”
David may have submitted a discreet version of this to our old friend Anthony Lloyd, who had been with us all that summer, and I imagine that in consequence both men looked to find in Beatrice Vesper the dull, heavy-domestic type. So when, an hour after her arrival, they saw her vivid smile and smooth black hair and her young, slim figure in its mulberry-colored taffeta against the dark panels of our candle-lighted dining-room, they both bore very definite evidence of response to her loveliness. Anthony even betrayed his admiration a shade too markedly, for he had rather an assured way of paying court to women who attracted him. But his advance was deftly and unmistakably cut off. Beatrice Vesper’s wifely attitude remained true, I saw, to its severely classic pattern.
However, pitfalls of this order were easily avoided, teased as we all were by the irresistible topic of our dazzling inheritance. And David was shortly embarked upon his familiar contention that we cared much more for the place than if he had been the direct heir and we had been able to anticipate the glory of ownership.
“Oh, we’re very humble” David conceded, “but we do claim credit as resuscitators. That’s what we’ve really felt ourselves to be doing for months—breathing life into a beautiful thing that had been left for dead. And it has begun to live again, don’t you think, in a feeble way? But it’s as showmen that we’re so shockingly deficient. You see a house that Judge Timothy Burleigh built in 1723 and that was continuously lived in until they deserted it a generation ago, must—well, must have its secrets. But we have to admit we don’t know them!”
“Oh, do you think you can live here without knowing?” Beatrice broke out with an intensity that surprised us all. “You’ll divine them, if you learn them in no other way. Family traditions can never be smothered, you know—they cling too imperishably!”
“But the legend famine has already been relieved,” Anthony announced, “or we assume that it has. At least, we’ve found a group of old trunks, filled with papers, and they’ve all been assigned to me, to dig secrets from. I’m going to begin in the morning.”
“It’s not that Molly and I haven’t longed to dig for ourselves,” David hastily defended us, “but we haven’t had time. And as for divination—our imaginations lack the necessary point of departure because our cousins have kept all the portraits. That’s the really serious gap, you’ll notice, in our conscientious furnishing—that apparently we’ve sprung from the soil, that we haven’t an ancestor. Though of course we have seen the old pictures, long ago, or I have.”
“Oh, what were they—” Beatrice began.
“Mrs. Vesper, need you ask?” Anthony interrupted. “Wigged men with heavy, hawk-nosed faces—”
“And meek-eyed women,” David assented, laughing. “Yes, they do look like that, mostly. The Burleighs were a formidable race and their wives must have been unnaturally submissive.
“But that’s according to the Colonial portrait-painter’s conventions,” Anthony argued. “The very earliest of your portraits must have been painted less than two hundred years ago. Well, that’s time enough for fashions in portraits to change; but do human beings alter essentially? The old Burleighs cannot have been so different, inside their Colonial purple and fine linen, from you and Molly. Your hawk-nosed grandfathers must have enjoyed a joke, now and then, and those meek-eyed Patiences and Charities—mustn’t they have had their emotions?”
“There must be conditions so harsh that emotions remain latent,” I suggested, carelessly.
But Anthony never missed an occasion to dogmatize, after his own fashion: “I admit there are temperaments that cannot love, for instance. But to those that can the opportunity doesn’t fail.”
“But surely,” he roused me to protest, “there is a type of woman who never learns her own capacity, who remains ingenuous, undeveloped—”
“Only until her appointed time,” Anthony extravagantly persisted.
“What you are trying to express,” David flouted, “is the old-fashioned school-girlish belief in predestined lovers. And perhaps it has remained for you to explain what happens in case the predestined lover dies?”
“In that case he’ll come back from the dead to teach her!” But this point was made amid a shout of laughter, and we all conceded that the subject had been carried as far as it could be.
Almost immediately after dinner, Beatrice confessing that she was very tired, I rather self-consciously took a pewter candlestick from its stand in the lower hall and guided her upstairs. And I found myself weakly unable to bid her good night without a fond proprietary emphasis on the treasures of the Long Chamber, its ancient oaken chests and still more ancient powdering-table, its carved bed and woven counterpane, even the long mirror, faintly time-blurred, in which we had been told that Anne Burleigh, the first mistress of the house, used once to contemplate her charming face and towering head-dress.
“Then, of course, it contains her image still.” Beatrice’s smiling, confident glance seemed to penetrate with singular ease the delicate clouds with which two centuries had lightly flecked the glass. “I shall see it, of course, after she gets used to me. I wonder if this was her room?”
“That is one of the thousand things we don’t know,” I lamented. “But it may well have been. It is the finest, we think, of all the rooms. Judge Timothy’s lovely young wife should have had it!”
“Don’t you think it’s almost heartless to have preserved her mere possessions,” Beatrice admonished me, “and yet allow the memories of her life to be so scattered? We must gather them up and piece them together!”
“Reconstruction ought not to be too difficult in her case,” I laughed. “I imagine she was a simple creature.”
* * * *
It was our household custom to breakfast in our rooms, and after that to pursue our independent occupations throughout the greater part of the day. But Beatrice’s proof-sheets and documents, which were of the most inordinate bulk, and which further depressingly renewed themselves by express every few days, often consumed her evenings likewise. It had struck me that we might achieve an arid semblance of friendly intercourse if she would assign t
o me some clerkly and mechanical part of her labors. But I saw from her look that it was as though I had asked a priestess to delegate to me her hieratic function. Her fealty to her dingy religion of ink and paper and chemical symbols was inflexible. And unreasoning, I thought, since it had cost her the look of freshness and vigor she had worn on coming to us. The thing was consuming her—her altered face told the story. Two weeks, indeed, after she had come, I realized that we had not yet had a comfortable talk together. What, after all, did I know of this new Beatrice, except that her highly decorative presence justified our otherwise empty splendor, and that for her own part she was working herself into an illness. She had come to us, she said, for rest and country peace and a season of friendship, but it was patent to the point of irony that she was profiting by none of these. And I did confess to myself, I remember, a secret hurt that there were so many days when she was unable, or ostensibly so, to join us at the hour of frank idleness when we took our tea under the oak-tree on the lawn, and when we always, sooner or later, fell to talking of our somewhat shadowy guest.
“Is it I whom Mrs. Vesper is avoiding?” Anthony asked, rather wistfully, one afternoon. “I’ll admit I didn’t seize her tone directly she arrived, but I have it now—completely! She would find me irreproachable if she would only mingle with us a little. How comforting it would be if she had a human liking for tennis and riding!”
“My dear Anthony, I don’t think she knows you are under the same roof, except when she sees you at dinner,” I assured him. “But she’s under the thrall of an inhuman husband who is overworking her from the other end of the world and practically denying us any share in her.”
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 16
