He Arrived at Dusk

by Ashby, R. C.

  ‘I should be interested,’ I said, ‘to hear the verdict of the coroner’s jury. I suppose there was an inquest?’

  ‘It was adjourned twice,’ he said, ‘and then in the end they brought in death by misadventure. An extraordinary verdict, but it was all so confusing. Some of them even tried to make it out an Act of God.’

  ‘I suppose it didn’t occur to anyone,’ I said, ‘that Ian Barr might have been dazzled by a sudden light. Supposing the beam of the lighthouse had flashed full in his eyes, it might have bewildered him sufficiently to account for a twelve-yards divergence from the path to the cliff-edge.’

  ‘It might,’ said Ingram; ‘but you didn’t see the footmarks!’

  Now that was more or less the end of that conversation, and I suppose I’d found out by this time all I wanted to know; my imagination could fill in the blanks.

  As I left the cottage I was hailed from above. Joan Hope was leaning out of an upper window, her pretty head framed by the sere ivy.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she called. ‘Where do you live?’

  So I told her, and also that I was stopping not far away.

  ‘Shall I be seeing you again soon?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  ‘Will you come for a walk to-morrow morning?’

  ‘No,’ I said; ‘I shall be working.’

  ‘To-morrow afternoon, then?’

  ‘Rather!’ said I. ‘But what about all this?’ And I waved my hand towards the ocean of snow, obliterating the paths.

  ‘Oh, that makes it more fun,’ she said promptly. ‘I’ll meet you in that comic village we came through, at two o’clock. Bung-ho!’

  ‘Bung-ho!’ said I.

  So on the whole I went back to The Broch with my mind, as they say in the best novels, in ‘a whirl of conflicting emotions.’”

  ix

  “You were asking me, what had happened to Miss Goff all this time. As a matter of fact, I’d seen very little of her. She seemed more attentive than ever to her patient. I’m bound to admit that there was something else too; whereas at the beginning she and I had seemed rather drawn together—you’ll remember the occasions from what I’ve told you—now there was a definite reserve in her manner when she happened upon me in the house. I’m sure it wasn’t my fault; it must have been hers, and I wasn’t in the least able to account for it. In fact, I didn’t try to account for it, because if I was conscious of it I wasn’t troubled by it. I do remember wondering once if she had taken offence—heavens, how women do take offence!—at my having rather allied myself with Charlie in criticizing her rigid ruling in the case of the Colonel’s seclusion. Certainly, I did think she was overdoing it, and I’d have told her so if we’d been on anything like familiar terms; but I gave her the credit for her devotion to what she thought was her duty, and for her anxiety on the Colonel’s behalf. She evidently had a great personal regard for him, and was eaten up with a superstitious fear which her profession wouldn’t allow her to admit. Poor Miss Goff. Deep down, I had a sincere liking for her. When I get to the end of my story, and you read for yourself the letter I had from her this morning, you’ll realize what a difficult job I’m having now in making an impartial estimate of her motives at this stage of the affair.

  But I must tell you about my walk with Joan. When I got to the village to keep the appointment, I found her already there, leaning against the palings of the Institute and biting the corners off one of those big blocks of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

  ‘Here!’ she said, in the last stages of impatience; ‘chop this thing up. Thanks frightfully, but bigger lumps, please. I’ve been out here half an hour and every man, woman, child, and cow in the village has been along to inspect the exhibit.’ She was worth inspection too, in nice little Harris tweeds with a yellow scarf and golden hair in smooth, gleaming waves. No hat. I told her she’d get a mastoid, or something, in that east wind, and she laughed with pure delight and said, ‘Darling, don’t be too utterly antediluvian!’ So that was that.

  ‘I’m having a heavenly time at the cottage,’ she said, as we set off briskly. ‘I thought poor Uncle Peter wasn’t quite so blue at breakfast this morning. I haven’t made him laugh yet; but if he doesn’t like me, at least he doesn’t mind me. Oh, and I must remember, that means something quite different here. It’s the biggest jape in the world. What would you say, Billy, if I asked you, “Do you mind my face?”’

  ‘I should reply,’ I said, ‘“My dear Joan, for the sake of your feelings I shall try to endure what is your misfortune rather than your responsibility.”’

  She shouted, ‘Isn’t it gorgeous! And it only means, “Do you remember me?” I’m going to try it on everybody in London.’

  She began kicking up the loose snow with her shoes and getting herself very wet, which she seemed to enjoy; and suddenly she waved her hand to the whole of that vast, desolate, bristling, snow-smothered moorland, with the cruel grey sky above, and cried: ‘Isn’t this the jolliest place you ever saw?’

  ‘If I’d just escaped from Devil’s Island,’ I said, ‘I might say yes.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ she said, very astonished.

  ‘I rather hate it,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh, but it’s so big. I never felt so free in my life. Look here! Can I smell the sea, or am I under chloroform?’

  ‘Probably you can,’ I said; ‘we’re not a mile from it.’

  ‘Oh, please let’s go where we can see it!’ She grabbed my hand. ‘“All the king’s horses, all the king’s men!”’ she sang, and laughed in my face when I told her she was quite mad.

  ‘Where’s the house where you’re staying?’ she asked.

  ‘Not far from here.’

  ‘House-party? Is it jolly?’

  ‘Heavens, no,’ I said; ‘I’m cataloguing a library for an old man who’s ill in bed.’

  ‘How divine!’ was her inappropriate comment. ‘What’s the house like? I like houses.’

  ‘Just gloomy and old,’ I said.

  ‘It sounds ripping,’ she said. ‘Is there a ghost?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, how deadly uninteresting for you!’ she said. ‘I was stopping at a house in the country last summer where they had a perfectly marvellous ghost. Lady Robinetta. Isn’t it a wonderful name? She used to walk about the garden at night, wringing her hands, with pond-weed in her hair. Of course, nobody had ever actually seen her, but it was fun to pretend you were fearfully scared when you went out in the garden alone after dark.’

  ‘That wouldn’t happen to you very often,’ I said.

  She widened her eyes, clasped her brow, and pretended to be enduring torments of concentrated thought. ‘Oh, I get you. Heavy Victorian compliment intended. Well, don’t be afraid of me. I think those old customs are rather sweet. And no, as it happens, I wasn’t particularly lonely that time. . . . My dear!’

  ‘What is it now?’

  She pointed. ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’

  ‘How terribly classical of you,’ I said.

  ‘Young brother,’ she said curtly; ‘Harrow. Bit of an ass.’ She pirouetted in the snow. ‘Look, aren’t the waves savage this morning? If it were summer I could stay up here for hours, watching the sea. In one of my lives I was a conger-eel.’

  ‘No,’ I said; ‘one of those charming rainbow fish that flick their little tails in the sunny southern seas.’

  She liked that. Her lovely eyes sparkled. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘a lighthouse. Wouldn’t I like to go! Billy . . . Billy, get a boat and take me out.’

  ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it cannot be. No visitors allowed on his Majesty’s lighthouses.’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded.

  ‘For the same reason,’ I told her, ‘that most of the things in lif
e that you most want to do are forbidden.’

  ‘That wouldn’t prevent me,’ she said, ‘if I really wanted. But things are very well as they are. I’m frightfully happy—always.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘you have everything in the world to make you happy.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ she replied quickly. ‘Of course I like fun, and clothes, and the cream-bunny side of life—but I think it’s chiefly places.’

  ‘Places?’

  ‘Well, yes. You don’t have to pay to look at sky and water. Isn’t it jolly to think of all the different places there are left for me to see, and every one a different thrill? This, for instance. And two days ago I didn’t know it existed. I think it’s glorious. Miles of lovely snow, and leagues of lovely sea. Oh, I’m so happy I could shout! Shout, Billy! Whoop—like wild Indians!’ And she actually shouted for joy, until those grim old hills seemed to shudder at the unexpected sound.

  She slipped her arm into mine in her sudden way.

  ‘Miserable, Billy? What have I said?’

  ‘Only old age,’ I said, ‘and not being able to see things through your eyes, Joan.’

  ‘Why don’t you like this place?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it’s cruel,’ I said; ‘cruel to people I rather care about.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Uncle Peter!’ she cried. ‘But I’m going to alter all that. It’s because of his wife, you know, and the two little boys and the baby. He thinks they’re here and he has to stay with them, and he talks to them in the dark. I heard him last night. She was called Cynthia and I just remember her; she was perfectly lovely. To-night I’ll make him talk to me about her, and then I guess he’ll feel better. You needn’t worry about Uncle Peter; he’ll be all right. Buck up, Billy.’

  You can guess how I ‘bucked up.’ We tramped on across that snowy moor without noticing how far we were going until we came to a small hamlet which must have been forgotten from the beginning of time. There was a tiny pub, and she dragged me in and demanded ham and eggs. The squarest woman I ever saw—she was about a quarter of an acre—brought us a huge rasher and eight eggs. Joan and I consumed this meal—honestly we did—at four o’clock of a winter’s afternoon, in a little parlour the walls of which were stiff with yellowed funeral cards. Joan ate three eggs and I ate five, and then arm in arm we read all those funereal inscriptions, the annals of a forgotten village. Then we sat by the fire and she told me ridiculous stories about the school she had been to at Lausanne and the tricks those terrible girls used to play on the German governess.

  ‘Come on,’ she said at last, quite suddenly. ‘Let’s go home.’

  It was dark now, and misty. I took her to Ingram’s door and waited until I saw her safely into the house. Rather a marvellous afternoon. It’s difficult to explain the effect it had on me. It was as though Joan’s presence was a talisman against all evil; against darkness, fear, cruelty and death. You couldn’t think of these things in connection with her. As I turned away from Ingram’s gate the picture that was clear in my mind was Joan, standing on a rock and radiant as a beam of light, and beyond her all the tossing, greedy billows of the grey North Sea. I could hear her pretty ringing voice for hours after, just like a strain of music, adorably ridiculous . . . ‘and there was old Fräulein, Billy, looking exactly like an ossified beetroot . . . a pound and a half of petits fours in her shoe locker, the pig . . . and Madame was such a mixture of heavenly piety and earthly fascination, my dear, like Saint Teresa and Mistinguett in one. . . .’ Ridiculous. Divine. Joan—just nineteen.

  Another of those terrible winter nights was closing in as I tramped back through the treacherous snow. The thaw was beginning already, and there was a noise of hidden streams. The village lights waned behind me through an encrimsoned fog. I felt like an explorer in a nightmare country, striding into the unknown. Before I was back at The Broch the old horror was on me, and I was thinking of nothing but the vivid story of Ian Barr’s death and the prints of the Roman sandal. I don’t know how it struck you, but to me all the terror of the narrative seemed to cling round that ominous print. That sandal-print seemed to give the whole story a cold veracity, whereas the tale of a sheeted figure seen slipping away from the scene of the crime would merely have made me laugh. A sandal-print, cold under the moon, and a wilderness of empty heather! Do you remember how in the old story Crusoe saw the footprint in the sand? Just a thrill of horror, and then—nothing. An empty horizon. That was how I felt about the Roman ghost. And I couldn’t forget that down in the cellar below me was the living stone. I wondered why Charlie didn’t take a load of earth and tip it into the cavity; perhaps he had more control, was less headlong, than I.

  The library was in darkness as I looked in on my way upstairs. Just as I was going on I saw someone sitting by the fire, bent, with his head buried in his hands. It was poor Charlie. He must have heard me, for he suddenly jerked up, and said savagely: ‘Don’t stand there, M‘Coul, curse you! Switch the lights on!’

  I switched them on, and when Charlie saw it was me, he averted his head quickly and pretended to be examining a book. I went away. Poor old Charlie. I don’t know to this day what had happened, or whether I had just surprised him with his brave mask off.

  That night I slept well. I was tired from my tramp in the keen moorland air, and emotionally excited. When I woke next morning, believe me, I wasn’t thinking of ghosts or of death, nor even of poor Charlie—heartless of me, that—but of Joan. Youth is exhilarating . . . young companionship.

  I worked all the morning with one idea in my mind, to see her again. I wanted to forget horror, and laugh at things as we’d laughed together in that stuffy little moorland inn.

  Charlie came in to lunch with me, and after we’d discussed the China question, and the Irish question, and the Labour Party, and the Soviet, and all the other newspaper ramps, he began to tell me about a ruined abbey five miles away to the west, and so well worth a visit that I ought to inspect it without delay. It makes me smile now to remember my state of apprehension while he went on to describe the peculiarities of the cloister and to tell monkish legends, sinister and merely rapscallion. I thought he was going to offer to take me over that afternoon; and I was making wild plans to include Ingram and Joan in the expedition—and to lose Ingram and Charlie.

  However, I soon realized that Barr hadn’t any intention of scouring the country with me. It was just a gallant effort on his part to make conversation, and when I realized what he was doing I admired him for it. I couldn’t get out of my mind the picture of him sitting there in the dark of the previous night, head in hands, and the ashes of the forgotten fire paling at his feet. So I talked easily and lightly for his sake, and summoned a laugh, and felt a hypocrite and rather hated myself that I could cheerfully leave him and his tragic house to go in search of adventure with a gay young girl.

  I said: ‘I’ve completed a large section this morning. I suppose you won’t mind if I take a breather this afternoon. I can go on with my index for two or three hours after supper.’

  ‘You’re going walking?’

  ‘Probably.’

  He smiled wearily. ‘You must be fond of walking! But do beware of the moors . . . they’re treacherous.’ He caught my eye and added, ‘I don’t mean anything sinister. But men have disappeared and from absolutely natural causes. The heath is full of pits, and the pits are full of stones, and I can’t imagine a nastier death than starvation with a broken leg in a twelve-foot hole. It has happened.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. ‘Then I have your permission to be away?’

  ‘But of course. This house is gloomy enough without your being a prisoner in it. You must think longingly of your Whitehall Club!’

  He smiled stiffly and left the room. In ten minutes I had seized cap, stick, and overcoat, and was swinging out of the drive gates on the road that led to the villag
e.

  Joan knew no conventional reticences, and I wasn’t going to be bound by any. If I couldn’t find her in the village I should go boldly to Ingram’s house and tell her I wanted her.

  But I found her, quite easily, in the village. Nobody in that village could have missed her. She was the centre of a skipping-match on the green. Two great hulking youths—pop-eyed from their unusual exertions—each held an end, and a mass of mixed juvenility between the ages of five and fifteen leapt and shrieked with delight above the whiz of a flying rope. Above those black and brown Northumbrian heads rose the blonde shingle of my girl. She was shouting louder than the loudest; she yelled as her little brown brogues cleared the rope, and her excited laughter was so full of mirth that it would have made a stone gargoyle split his sides.