by Ashby, R. C.
‘T’owld docthor’s bad,’ he told me. ‘Bin bad for months. T’young felly’s up to Crouchbothom while t’neight.’
It didn’t look hopeful; however, I was turning away when he suggested that if my trouble was urgent I might go to the mad doctor. Village folks had been known to do so in an emergency. I thought he meant a kind of local wizard with a matted beard and a bunch of nasty-smelling herbs, but he assured me that this was a real doctor, though touched. Daft, he called it. He pointed out a small house shrouded in bushes, so I thought I’d take my chance.
I know these country doctors. They always wear farm corduroys and smell of whisky, and you don’t have to look at the state of their hands; they’ve got the kindest hearts in the world, will regale you for hours with ghoulish stories of local cancers, and keep their instruments loose in the tool-drawer with the dog’s collar and the harness-oil.
So Ingram came as a shock when I was expecting something quite different. He opened the door himself, heard what I had to explain, took me in—all without a word—and pushed a fan-backed chair in front of the log fire for me while he went to fetch his tool-bag. All this time he hadn’t spoken, but he was as lean and clean as a greyhound and there was nothing rough or rustic in his movements. When he came back he looked at me and his eyes were dog-sad but quite sane.
‘What made you come to me?’ he said. A cultured voice. A north-country voice musically modulated.
‘I understand the village doctor is ill,’ I said, ‘and the locum has gone to some distant case. They told me that you sometimes——’
‘Yes. Of course, I don’t practise. They pay—well, a friendly visit, you might say. Can’t you get that coat off? Wait . . .’
He took his hammer and chisel, as you might say, and began. Efficiency. Marvellous hands. I didn’t feel any pain in the absorbing interest of seeing an expert at work. An artist or an artisan, it thrills me if it’s skilled labour. This man was an artist.
When he had finished I said: ‘Please. What do I owe you?’
He looked slightly shocked. ‘Of course—nothing! I thought I’d made that clear. You had better look in again to-morrow.’
I murmured something, rather confused, and he misunderstood me.
‘Do you mean you’re only passing through?’ he asked.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’m here for a short time. I’m staying at Colonel Barr’s house—The Broch.’
Then his eyes went mad, and I knew what the village gossip meant. He stood quite still, his hands hanging, and those smouldering brown eyes searching me—red-brown, flickering, narrowing, crazy.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
I sat down. I was interested in the man.
‘What are you doing there?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Cataloguing the Colonel’s library,’ I replied, with perfect and full truth.
‘He’s still alive?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Ill—but he has a good nurse.’
‘Ah.’ He seated himself opposite me. ‘We’ll have some tea. You’d like tea.’ He rang a brass hand-bell, and putting it down hurled at me the amazing question: ‘Has Vitellius Gracchus come back?’
‘Yes,’ I replied calmly; ‘he came back the night before last and slashed a picture to ribbons. It was an old Barr portrait.’
Ingram fidgeted with his long, fine hands.
‘Have they got into touch? So easy! What fortune!’
I didn’t know what he meant, so I was quiet. The tea came, in the hands of a dour-faced native woman of middle age. China tea. The doctor poured. Only his eyes were mad, I assure you. Suddenly he poured out a torrent of words, the gist of which was to this effect: why didn’t the Barrs have the case investigated? The creature, whatever it was, was so near; it did tangible and visible deeds. It would be so easy to get into touch with it, by means of a séance, a medium. Couldn’t I induce Charlie Barr to have a séance and arrange for Ingram to be present?
What I couldn’t understand was why all this was so vital to poor Ingram with his mad eyes. As I told you, while he was working on my arm he was as sane as you are. The explanation I’ll tell you briefly now, though I didn’t know it myself until later. He was constantly striving, without results, to get into communication with his dead wife and children; he thought that if his neighbour could arrange an effective séance with such promising material as ‘Gracchus’ to start off with, his own pathetic desire might be realized.
So after he’d pleaded for a while, and I’d promised to carry a message to Charlie, he got me to tell him again all about the slashing of the portrait.
‘That’s bad,’ he said; ‘that’s bad. They’d better watch the Colonel carefully.’
‘Miss Goff is most watchful,’ I said. ‘Nobody is allowed to see Colonel Barr. She keeps his door locked and hardly ever leaves him.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Quite necessary. But what does young Barr think about it?’
‘He has very little to say about it,’ I said. ‘When he does speak he makes nothing of it, but I think that’s a gesture. I suppose he’s rather brave?’ Sheer fishing for information on my part.
He took no notice, leaning forward and stretching his hands to the fire. The cottage room was plainly furnished; a round table in the centre with a red cloth, and on it an old-fashioned paraffin lamp burning like a little moon and throwing a circle of light which barely reached us as we sat by the log fire. The curtains were not drawn, and outside the night looked dark and wild. But silent. I remember noticing how silent it was that night, because for the first time since I came to the moor I was undisturbed by elemental noises, particularly the drone of the eerie wind. Something moved in the shadows of the room and came pattering unsteadily to the fireside. It was an old, blind dog, grey-faced and toothless and with long claws that clicked on the flagged floor. I touched its ear and it bared its jaws at me.
Ingram sat back suddenly. ‘It’s a long time since I was in that house,’ he said.
‘At The Broch?’
‘Yes. How did it strike you?’
‘Gloomy,’ I said, ‘and cold. Perhaps—haunted. I don’t know. I’ve tried to analyse my impressions without great success. I’ve never been in such a situation before.’
‘In such a situation?’ he repeated; ‘Oh, you mean V. G.! There isn’t anyone quite like him, is there? Did you feel when you first went into the house . . . but there, you wouldn’t understand. I knew what to expect, so the last time I was in the house, which was on the occasion of Ian’s funeral—not so very long ago, after all—I prepared myself for the chill, and it came. A slight brain-shock.’ He put his hand to his head with a puzzled gesture. ‘Or it may have been physical. I get so confused. You see, it’s doubtful whether V. G. would have been present on that occasion. . . .’
He became silent again, while I listened to the heavy, monotonous tick-tock of a grandfather clock, the sound above all others that speaks to you of country peace and nodding sleep in an old arm-chair.
Ingram said suddenly: ‘I’ve got some good books. I can lend you books if you’ve nothing to do in your spare time. That mixed collection of Barr’s—terrible.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I’m hoping not to stay long enough to need your kind help in that direction. At present when I sit down to read I take up a History of Northumberland, which runs to about three hundred thousand words. It’s Victorian, but quite interesting.’
‘I could write a better,’ he said. ‘I wonder . . . perhaps some day. But it wouldn’t be official, you understand. The unofficial history of Northumberland. An ill-fated county. Do you remember how Mary landed—poor soul—from Scotland, only a few miles from here? As soon as her foot touched the shore she was doomed. There were ghosts in the heather watching that boat; the Border dead and the Roman dead who cursed the soil
in their dying and made it barren and cruel for all time. In Yorkshire now, in jolly Yorkshire, she might have been safe. Who knows? And you remember Flodden? Only a few miles from here. If they had fought on Scottish soil the flower of Scotland would never have been trampled into a bloodstained moor. The ghosts of Northumberland paralysed their sword-arms! An ill-fated county. And yet when I was a young rascal at Holney I never used to think about these things. Loneliness means too much thinking. . . . But go on telling me about The Broch.’
I laughed uncomfortably and said in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘The broch? The latest news is that the spirits have departed from that unlucky watch-tower. A young shepherd—Blaik, they call him—is using it as a sheep-fold. He reads Karl Marx, hates the bourgeoisie, and doesn’t believe in ghosts. So he’s justified of his convictions and his ewes survive the cold nights.’
‘I heard about him,’ said Ingram; ‘my housekeeper was interested.’
‘At his temerity?’ I said. ‘So, I gather, is the whole village.’
Ingram replaced the tea-things on the table with scrupulous care. It was a joy to watch him handle anything, so deft and noiseless. He took up the hand-bell to ring for the dour woman, but thought better of it and put it down again.
‘What were you saying about young Barr?’ he asked, with one of his quick transitions of subject. ‘Something about his being . . . brave, was it? I forget the context.’
‘His careful carelessness,’ I said, ‘gave me that impression.’
Ingram repeated, ‘Brave. Yes. He’s the last of them, and if V. G. gets him before the Colonel the fortune will go into Chancery.’
‘The Colonel is rich?’ I said, ignoring the horrid suggestion underlying the sentence.
‘Over a million,’ he said. ‘The Colonel’s not a miser, but what they call in these parts canny. The fortune came out of the coal-pits. I lived in the county when I was a boy.’ He stared into the fire as he was speaking, and the mad look faded out of his eyes to be replaced with something wistfully reminiscent, likeable. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘was Rector of Holney-on-the-Wall.’
‘“Mithras, god of the morning, our trumpets waken the Wall,”’ I quoted, drowsy with heat and China tea.
‘That’s it!’ he almost shouted. ‘How did you know? The Wall, and the chariots, and the sandalled soldier in his embrasure! The nearest analogy in present-day warfare is a desert fort of the French Foreign Legion—sentries on the watch for a savage horde closing in across the wilderness of sand . . . I mean . . . the frozen moor.’ His eyes darted again, crazy, into mine. ‘You must make young Barr agree to—you know; what I said! It’s to his advantage. He can be too high-handed.’
‘He’s rather American,’ I said; ‘new to this old country.’
‘Old country,’ he repeated, brooding. Then he suddenly shot at me, ‘Tell me, is it true that Mackie saw V. G.?’
‘Mackie?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘The doctor,’ he said. ‘The night that Ian Barr died.’
I felt I was on the verge of something. I tried to light a cigarette with a glowing fragment from the log, but my fingers shook and I dropped it.
‘Have you been to see Mackie?’ Ingram went on.
‘No,’ I said, puzzled. His vague and eccentric mind travelled too quickly for me and left his meaning always just ungrasped.
‘It cost him a dead mare, a fractured thigh, and a cerebral hæmorrhage,’ Ingram went on. ‘If it wasn’t V. G., then tell me what made the mare shy? She was skittish, I’ll admit, but she’d been that road often before. Right up into the air she leapt, and came down with the shaft in her breast. Alec Shawn shot her when he came on the scene, and there was poor Mackie like a pulp in the roadway. I went to see him when he came back from the hospital. ‘Ingram,’ he said, ‘the mare saw him, that deevil of a Roman soldier.’ You’ll understand that Mackie’s a bit broad in his speech. Then he told me how he’d seen something flash, and he got an impression of a man by the moorside—not a man in the normal sense, you’ll understand—and he wasn’t even thinking of V. G., but of a pneumonia case he’d lost. And then the mare gave a squeal and shot up into the air, and it was all over. . . .’
He was silent for such a long time that I guessed the weird story was done.
‘And was it V. G.?’ I said.
He gave me his queer glance. ‘It was the night,’ he said, ‘when Ian Barr—— But you’ll have heard all about that.’
‘No,’ I protested; but either he didn’t or wouldn’t hear me. He roughened his grey hair with his hand, uneasily, as though his temples ached.
‘I ought to go——’ I began. Instantly he stopped me. His face became normal, friendly, quizzical.
‘Oh, please!’ he said. ‘Need you? Mackie used to come and talk to me for hours. I’ve been lonely, since. Do stop. Where do you come from? What’s your business in life?’
‘I come from London,’ I said. ‘I’m a sort of glorified auctioneer.’
‘London!’ He laughed with a note of eager excitement. He didn’t look mad then, only interested. ‘Tell me!’ he demanded; ‘everything you can think of.’
I told him all about post-War London, the struggle for existence, good fellows—brave officers of the War—down on their uppers and selling lavender in Bond Street, the new rich without breeding or education lording it in Society, all the political clap-trap and the talk of the town.
‘I shall never go back,’ he said; and then the light of reason flickered out of his eyes, and I looked away because I had taken to the fellow, and it was painful to see him like that. He touched my shoulder gravely. ‘Somebody I know is here!’ he said. I nodded, just to please him. He couldn’t have been more than fifty, a little past my own generation.
‘Were you in the War?’ I asked suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, quite unmoved; ‘I don’t remember.’
Of course, Charlie told me why, afterwards.
He suddenly went back to the old subject. ‘You’ll help me?’ he said, with the utmost seriousness. ‘You’ll try and arrange that séance? I’m almost certain that young Barr could get into touch with V. G.’
I took a new line. ‘But what about Charlie Barr?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it just hurling him into danger? I believe myself that V. G., as you call him, is a thoroughly bad character.’
‘We should all be there,’ said Ingram.
‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘what have the Barrs done to annoy V.G.? He seems positively spiteful. Can you tell me why?’
‘I suppose it’s something to do with the house,’ he said. ‘V. G. considers himself entitled to that piece of land. At least that’s what I’ve always supposed. Of course, they’ve talked about V. G. in this district for a century, but we never thought he’d do any damage . . . until he seemed to concentrate on the Barrs. Even so, Bourdon’s death was undoubtedly due to pneumonia. And he had a valvular lesion for years. . . .”
I got a cigarette lit at last.
‘I know very little about these things,’ I said; ‘so tell me this. I always understood that a poltergeist was harmless. Just mischievous; not malevolent. How did I get that wrong idea?’
‘Wrong idea?’ he said. ‘You’re right. But why a poltergeist?’
‘Well!’ I exclaimed. ‘What about the one you call V. G.?’
‘A poltergeist!’ he repeated. ‘Of course they’re queer little things. Thinkers have been studying them for centuries. In England, too. They rap, and throw things about, and play silly jokes; the irresponsible children of the spirit world. There was the Tedworth Drummer in the seventeenth century, a famous little fellow; and of course the well-known poltergeist of Epworth Rectory—you’ve heard of him? The Wesleys were intelligent and responsible people, but unfortunately they didn’t know how to investigate, or what we
re the significant points to which to direct their attention. And nowadays the responsible investigator is never able to arrive on the scene until a crowd of enterprising journalists and sensation-hunters have queered the pitch. But why are we talking about poltergeists? Was it you who began it?’
‘V. G.,’ I said; ‘Barr told me he was a poltergeist. He played tricks with hats and breakfast dishes.’
‘Possibly,’ said Ingram grimly; ‘but if young Barr thinks he’s a harmless poltergeist . . . but of course he doesn’t! He knows all there is to know about V. G. I suppose he had to tell you the simplest story for your own sake. He wouldn’t want to scare you off, or to give himself away.’
‘Why do you call him V. G.?’ I asked.
For the first time a faint smile twisted his well-cut lips.
‘Vitellius Gracchus, if you prefer it,’ he said; ‘but it’s a slipshod age. You had better ask young Barr. Ask him to show you the stone. And I’m relying on you to arrange that séance.’
This made me uncomfortable, and soon after I left, promising to call again next day to show my arm. In the last two minutes I spent with him he was completely sane and rather admirable.”
vii
“Now that was a queer conversation, you’ll agree, and a queer character to find in the middle of a moor. It all added to my sense of unreality. Unreality. I was by then living in another world, and by and by all other worlds faded. When I came back to London two days ago I had the most curious feeling that I was still there, in the North. It won’t leave me; I feel now as though I’d been forcibly disembodied. I’m not myself, so you’ll have to be indulgent.
