‘The deuce she has!’ As I uttered this exclamation I felt – it is honest to record – a certain frisson down my spine. It was occasioned, I believe, by the odd conjunction in Holroyd of an icy scepticism about human survival with a matter-of-fact acceptance of modes of mental operation unacknowledged by orthodox science. But his voice here was coming to sound like that of orthodox science. I wondered for a moment what very odd verities even an elderly person like myself might be obliged to acknowledge before he died.
‘I have to look out for other things as well – with an account of which I needn’t trouble you. It may all take some time.’ Holroyd picked up the teapot, the spout of which was defective. ‘I shall have a word with Mrs Uff,’ he said. ‘She must be apprised of our consequence.’
‘I shall be interested to see if you succeed.’ Although my friend had not accompanied his remark with his familiar laugh, it didn’t occur to me that he was serious. ‘Are your small expectations of anything significant turning up a matter of your impression of Lucius Senderhill? I have a notion you knew him quite well.’
‘It wasn’t really a close acquaintance. But I have my picture of the man.’
‘He lived to a notable old age.’ I hesitated – and when I went on it was with Martha Uff’s imperfect revelation in my mind. ‘Did he become any sort of nuisance in his last years?’
‘Not that I’ve ever heard of.’ Holroyd looked at me in surprise. ‘Although it’s likely enough that he was tiresome in some ways. You must ask Mrs Uff.’
‘I don’t know that it would be very proper to do that.’
‘Then you must ask Tommy Hartsilver. He’s the local padre, and I’ve invited him to dinner. Mrs Uff has taken it quite well. Hartsilver and I were at King’s together. He saw a lot of Senderhill, I believe. We must pump him hard.’
‘I’ll be delighted to meet him.’ I had put down my cup and walked to a window, and it was only inattentively that I produced this conventional response. Nor did I much heed Holroyd’s vision of the two of us as remorseless investigators. What occupied me was the prospect with which the late Lord Lucius’s steward had been in a position to refresh himself. There was nothing about it that could be described as in any grand manner – by which I mean contrived vistas closed by artificial ruins, or classical belvederes, or bridges of Palladian elaboration conducting over artificial waters to columns and obelisks commemorating forgotten grandees. The hand of man was not immediately evident either upon the margins of the lake which lay before me or in the glades which opened amid the woods surrounding it. Here and there a simple wooden structure crossed a small tributary stream, and in the foreground there was a boathouse so plain that it could scarcely be described even as of rustic character. In some of the gentle declivities leading to the water a mist was gathering – for the greater part transpicuous and faintly luminous, but in places thickening to a texture not penetrable by the low light of late afternoon. ‘It’s hard to see where art comes in,’ I said to Holroyd, who had joined me. ‘But such compositions aren’t just achieved by chance.’
‘Behind that sort of thing, I suppose, are the painters called the Romantiques. Corot, eh? The indifferent tranquillity of nature is very much a creation of the mind. But wait till after dinner, when you see it as a nocturne. Not that it isn’t extremely pleasing now.’ Holroyd’s appreciative note was a shade perfunctory. ‘Attractive, I agree.’
‘Precisely that. It draws one. If one had once known it well, one would always want to return to it.’
‘Ho-ho! Haunt it, would you say? Let us be off to the library, my dear chap, and decide where to begin.’
‘Very well.’ But for a moment I lingered by the window – chiefly because in a clearing beyond the lake (which lay some eighty yards from the house, and was itself at this point perhaps eighty yards wide) there had appeared a couple of fallow deer, delicately grazing. They were, I think, does, and in the fading light their still unspotted winter coats made their presences scarcely distinguishable. They too were romantique, and I wondered whether they belonged to a considerable herd. I also wondered whether there was a practicable path round the lake. I would explore it, I told myself, on the following day.
3
Dinner happened in a candle-lit dining-room, after all, and I wondered what Holroyd had done to bring this about. I suspected him of having amused himself by communicating to Mrs Uff not his own respectable connections but what he could invent of mine. However this may have been, the change of plan was far from conducing to our comfort, since the dining-room at Vailes proved predictably vast, chilly, and bleakly august. Nor, I imagine, did it conduce to Martha Uff’s comfort either. She had conceivably been admitted at times to wait upon the late Lord Lucius’s steward, but it is improbable that she had so much as been inside the awesome room in and out of which she now had to scurry with plates and dishes. The poor child had been bereft of her carpet slippers, and had even been thrust without verisimilitude or impressiveness into an apron and cap. It was hard not to let some feeling for her sufferings – although these indeed continued to be of a sullen and unappealing sort – impose a note of constraint upon the meal.
Fortunately Holroyd’s friend Hartsilver turned out to be a conversable man. He even extracted a word or two from Martha – whom it was no doubt incumbent upon him to acknowledge as a parishioner as well as a servant. And when the girl had brought in some tolerable coffee and departed for good, and Holroyd had mysteriously produced cigars, I found myself much at ease with the vicar.
‘You must have realised,’ I said, ‘that Holroyd and I are both here more or less as what are called private enquiry agents. It’s a lowly calling. Holroyd says we must pump you hard.’
‘He was the most unscrupulous man of his year.’
‘Ho-ho! What about your grandmother’s funeral on Derby Day, Tommy?’
I had to listen for some time to exchanges of this sort, but eventually the talk came round to Lucius Senderhill. I cannot imagine that he could have been in any sense a believing Christian, and indeed within Vailes itself there was a totally derelict private chapel to prove the point. It appeared however that some inherited feudal feeling had made him exact in public observances; that he had from Hartsilver’s first appearance in the parish shown him what Jane Austen would have called every proper attention; and that in his last years the vicar had been as close a companion as he had. I couldn’t very well – or not yet – enquire whether Senderhill had latterly formed the undesirable habit of taking young girls into dark places. But I could find out something about the general character of the man.
‘Psychical research,’ I said, ‘isn’t my affair. But Senderhill’s addiction to it does interest me. What made him go in for it?’
‘I can answer that one.’ Holroyd, who had been very scandalously investigating sundry sideboards, commodes, wine cases and spice cabinets, triumphantly flourished a bottle of brandy. ‘Tommy,’ he said, ‘will you get some glasses from over there? The answer is straight intellectual curiosity. Senderhill was one of the ablest men of his time, and he took all sorts of speculative and experimental interests in his stride.’
‘I question whether that’s the whole story,’ Hartsilver said. Quite as unblushing as Holroyd in his depredations, he had set three substantial goblets on the table. ‘Are individuals any longer described as psychic, Arthur? It used to be a common term when I read about such things.’
‘It’s a perfectly useful one, no doubt. The jargon changes. The ‘psi-factor’ is all the go now. How’s your psi-factor this morning? Ho-ho! But some people are undoubtedly more susceptible to paranormal experiences than others. Not Lucius Senderhill, though. His interest was entirely objective and from the outside.’
‘Are you quite sure of that?’ It seemed to me that the vicar was faintly amused by his old friend’s dogmatism.
‘Certainly I am – unless he prevaricated about it. He always insisted that no psychic experience had ever come his way.’
‘Then he was pre
varicating – unless he once prevaricated to me.’ Hartsilver hesitated. ‘He hasn’t been long in his grave. Is there almost a breach of confidence in this talk?’
‘My dear Tommy, we’ll drop it if you think we ought. It’s just that one wants to get, if one can, at the truth of certain matters.’
‘To be sure. And, after all, there’s no scandal in the thing.’ Hartsilver consulted his goblet contentedly. ‘I suppose that with all of us there are things that used to happen, and that now happen no more.’
‘Wordsworth,’ Holroyd said.
‘Yes, yes – a very good illustration. But what about something happening to a man just once? There are plenty of records of that too – some of them carrying the highest spiritual significance.’ The vicar was silent for a moment. ‘And other perceptions, other ecstasies. Just once.’
‘Um,’ Holroyd said cautiously.
‘Or something, not clearly meaningful in itself, the mere isolation of which in a man’s experience renders it tantalising, haunting, over the rest of a lifetime. One might readily turn cagey about such a thing, and be reluctant to acknowledge it as motivating – well, say intellectual enquiry into the nature of apparitions, hallucinations, ghosts, and so on. Arthur, you would agree?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Holroyd was almost in danger of letting his cigar go out. ‘And you’re describing Senderhill – on the strength of something you know about him?’
‘On the strength of something he told me, and apparently never told anybody else. Which makes this a little awkward for me, Arthur.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Holroyd controlled himself. ‘It’s a subject that you might perhaps think of coming back to another time.’
‘Well, say just a little later.’ Hartsilver turned to me. ‘Do you feel, may I ask, the present emptiness of this vast house? Almost, I mean, as a physical oppression?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘If there’s a soul beside the Uffs, it will be merely a woman brought in from one of the cottages to wash up. Of course, when Senderhill was alive, there were other servants as well – and a number of outdoor people whom I used to think – particularly in any sort of bad weather – rather largely indoor too. Still, there’s been this empty feel about the place for a long time. Senderhill himself became aware of it.’
‘I don’t know why he should,’ Holroyd said. ‘Not with a whole staff running around, even if no longer on an Edwardian scale.’
‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘he didn’t count servants. When he was without relatives or guests here, he regarded himself as quite alone.’
‘The empty palace,’ Holroyd said a shade informatively, ‘is a potent symbol in the unconscious mind. But so is a commonplace empty house. I believe it’s easier to feel menaced by solitude in an untenanted building than in a desert. But, Tommy, has this anything to do with some psychic experience Senderhill had – once and once only? That’s what you were getting round to.’
‘Yes, indeed. But the lonely mansion is only relevant, as a matter of fact, to his having confided in me. That, I think, was a matter of his sense of solitude here. The time had come when he was too old and ill to retain old associations on an intellectual plane, or much in the way of social associations either. An extreme old age without family ties is bound to be a solitary affair, and living on in a great place like this can only enhance the condition. That’s why Senderhill took to talking to me a good deal. He was uninterested in religion, I’m sorry to say, and he was reticent on personal matters, so we tended to discuss literature and philosophy. We weren’t at all up-to-date. Bradley, Moore, Whitehead. Gissing’s novels, Meredith’s poetry. Then – quite suddenly one evening, and in this very room – he made me a curious confidence. Which was very personal!’ The vicar paused, and remembered his brandy. Then he glanced across the room. ‘Arthur,’ he went on, ‘do you know, I’ve a fancy to have those curtains drawn back? The moon must be up by now. Let us add its illumination to that of Mrs Uff’s candles.’
Buried in Hartsilver, I can now see, was a certain instinct for the theatre, and the next few minutes were given up to a kind of innocent stage management. We had been permitted a little warmth from an ancient electric radiator on a trailing cord, and Holroyd so arranged this that it continued its office when we disposed our chairs in a half-circle near the window. Before us now was a great sheet of glass in which the candle-flames behind us were reflected only as small smears of light: they might have been phosphorescent streaks, fire-drakes, Jack-o’-Lanterns far out on the surface of the lake. Holroyd had promised me a nocturne, and here was his friend the vicar providing me with it. These faint lights which seemed to hover deep in a silvery greyness ought to have provided, indeed, a nocturne in the manner of Whistler. Yet the effect was not at all of minor artistic delectation. It was mysteriously disturbing, as if the scene were oriented not quite within the spatial dimensions of common experience. I can only think that the mere disposition of its planes – the horizontality of the lake, the several obliquities of glade and valley and beech-wood as the moonlight softly bathed them beyond – fortuitously built up a formal relationship having the power to create some out-of-the-way, perhaps some atavistic, reverberation in the mind. Even so, the prospect remained by night, as it was by day, steeped in a tranquil beauty.
‘A peaceful spot,’ Hartsilver said, much as if echoing my thought. And then he added, ‘which makes Senderhill’s experience the more surprising.’
‘Speak up, Tommy. There’s no going back on it now.’ Holroyd appeared to cast round in his mind for further encouragement. ‘And it sounds like something that my highly respectable Society should know.’
‘He didn’t think to communicate it to you, all the same. Perhaps that was because it begins with a love story.’
‘A love story! Senderhill?’
‘Yes, indeed. I know what you are going to say, Arthur. Lord Lucius was tolerably well known to his own circle as having kept clear of women except at the level of—well, call it cold pleasure. But that was a consequence – this is the gist of what he told me – of the burnt child dreading fire. As a young man, and only shortly after he came to live at Vailes, he fell very much in love. Who the girl was, or what the circumstances, I don’t know. Even in this sudden confidence he made me, he managed to preserve a great deal of reticence. What he insisted on was the force and depth of his passion, and the absolutely catastrophic manner in which the affair was brought to an end.’
‘The girl jilted him – or died?’
‘Once again, I don’t know. But he was a man of powerful intellect, as you have said, and also with what one imagines to have been a strength of character that would stand up to a good deal. So one must suppose something pretty stiff, since it had the effect of never again letting him risk giving his heart away. It induced immediately an acute nervous illness – the kind of attack which in those days was called brain fever. When he emerged from that it was into a deeply depressed state. So he was sent round the world – it was the regular thing – and either that or the mere healing touch of time got him reasonably straight again. A year after his calamity he was back at Vailes and leading a normal life. And not yet a lonely life; his political career was opening before him, and he was making his way impressively among the savants as well. A sister came and presided over his household from time to time, so that he was able to do a good deal of entertaining on the scale judged appropriate in a house like this before the Kaiser’s War.
‘The second anniversary approached – the anniversary, I mean, of that death, betrayal, dire revelation, or whatever it may have been. Senderhill took it into his head to confront it alone, here at Vailes. His sister was abroad, he emptied his house of bachelor guests, the very day came round.’
‘So there was an actual day?’ Holroyd asked. ‘His disaster could be pinpointed like that?’
‘Apparently so. The day came round, and it closed with Lucius Senderhill sitting where we are sitting now – looking out over that lake, which was illuminated b
y just that moon.’
‘Really, Tommy—’
‘Please listen. I’m not, I promise you, telling a tall story. It was a calm night with a clear sky, and in the air there was still the warmth from what had been a hot summer day. Senderhill got up and threw this window wide open, stood looking out for some moments, and then sat down again. He became aware of a deep nervous perturbation, which reminded him of the onset of his illness two years before. He told himself that he was in a fever – and then suddenly he felt very cold. It was very cold. He had a curious certainty of this as an objective fact, and there flitted through his mind the prosaic idea of summoning his butler to discuss with him so unusual a climatic phenomenon. Then he saw that he was no longer looking at the lake – or not at the lake as it had been a moment before, or as it is for us now. He was looking at a sea-storm, at a tempest, at waves which could be called mountains high.’
‘Was it a noisy storm?’ Holroyd asked. His tone was casual, but his blue eyes had even more than their accustomed brightness. ‘A howling gale?’
‘Nothing of the kind. It was like, he said, a silent movie. There was obviously a great hullabaloo, but you had to imagine it on your inner ear. He rather thought that the sky had darkened, or that clouds were scudding across it and casting a dramatically changing chiaroscuro over the scene. But he couldn’t be sure. Because, after a first couple of seconds, his attention was entirely riveted on the ship.’
‘The ship!’ I exclaimed. My gaze had happened to be on the little boathouse, which was in part outlined against the motionless and moon-blanched water beyond. It might contain, I supposed, a dinghy, a punt. ‘He saw a ship?’
‘A barque, he called it – and he intended the word in its technical, not its poetic sense. Its mizen mast was down, and on the fore and main masts there was only a tatter of canvas. Suddenly the barque’s stern went up in air, and she sank rapidly beneath—well, call it the sea, the lake, or what you will. Senderhill believed that he cried out, or tried to cry out. And then it was all over. He was looking again at what we are looking at now.’
Cucumber Sandwiches Page 3
