And once more it was, I suppose, a ruminative rather than an observant perambulation. On the previous day my mind had lingered on the complete unaccountability of Lucius Senderhill’s experience; now, I constructed more or less to my own satisfaction a rational explanation of it, or at least an explanation in which nothing supernatural need be posited. If Hartsilver’s recollection was accurate, and if Senderhill had dealt candidly with Hartsilver, the story of Bertrand Senderhill’s drowning in 1832 was something of which Lucius Senderhill was completely ignorant. There was nothing impossible about this; young Bertrand had been a person of no note in his family’s history; the scanty record of him which Holroyd had turned up might quite conceivably have escaped Lord Lucius. In fact, I told myself, it certainly had; and the same certainty was applicable to Bertrand’s diary. For Lucius, having resolved to tell his friend the vicar of his long-past experience, could simply not have mingled his confidence with deliberate misstatement. To do so, I acknowledged, would have been totally out of character, and wholly pointless as well.
But it by no means followed that what Lucius did not know at the time of his apparitional experience, or again when he recounted that experience to Hartsilver so many years later, was something he had never known. I had presented Holroyd with what seemed to me not a bad hypothesis here. The story of a kinsman’s drowning, and even a hint of that kinsman’s love affair, might have come to Lucius as a child – perhaps as a family legend of no great consequence, lingering in the mind of some old nurse or servant. It might have frightened him to such a degree that he quickly repressed all memory of it. Such acts of mental burial are said to be so common as scarcely to merit inclusion within the bounds of abnormal psychology. And the buried trauma – if that be the word – might later have seized a favourable opportunity to reassert itself in the form of that momentary illusion of tempest and shipwreck.
This speculation of mine reeked, perhaps, of strangeness and unlikelihood, but at least it didn’t make large demands upon the ghostly or magical. And having arrived at my picture, I found that my interest in Lucius Senderhill and his vision of a spectral barque was for the time being exhausted. My mind turned to something more simply human and a good deal more moving: the star-crossed love of two young people who had called themselves Florizel and Perdita. Once upon a time – yet in a certain definite year which had seen, I could recall, the Reform Bill and the death of Goethe – they had walked together where I was walking now. They had made love in places round about me, and also in a small boat out there on the lake. Their love had been (I somehow told myself with confidence) all that it should have been, and nothing that it should not. Then they had got on a ship called the Gloriana, by which time Perdita had conceivably been bearing Florizel’s child. And then, quite promptly, they had been drowned.
I tried to imagine them. I tried to imagine them not in their passion and hope, an exercise beyond the tether of a middle-aged solicitor, but simply in their persons and clothing as they had walked or sailed here together during some six weeks of early autumn weather long ago. Perdita, or Joan Stickleback, I saw clearly enough, although perhaps anachronistically by several decades. Gainsborough’s daughters went to my vision of her, and great ladies whose muslin gowns, following the Revolution which had swept so much away, were high and lightly girdled affairs combining rural simplicity with Arcadian elegance. But I also imported, I believe, a strong dash of Opie (I am fond of the English painters), thus preserving for Perdita something of what was presumably Joan’s peasant type, and at the same time setting her in a strongly accented light and shade which lent a touch of the dramatic appropriate to her history.
This was a very idle occupation – but at least, as I say, I did seem to see the girl. Bertrand Senderhill was more elusive. Would a young aristocrat of a poetic and egalitarian turn of mind dress out of Bulwer-Lytton, or like Count D’Orsay? It seemed improbable. When at Vailes did Bertrand affect the country gentleman’s sporting rig of buckskins tailored to an unnatural tightness – or did he walk abroad in almost equally constricting white duck trousers strapped under the instep? Was he soberly suited in the subfusc of his advancing century, without scope for extravagance except in the shape of an outsize cravat? I didn’t know the answers.
And again I was at the end of the lake without having noticed the fact, and now I turned to survey it. This morning the still expanse was as blue as our earth seems to be when viewed from the heavens, and it was of course quite empty. I say ‘of course’ because I had seen nothing except wild-fowl on its surface yet; it looked as if nobody cared, or had permission, to fish in it; probably the dinghy I had spied in the boathouse was the only craft kept anywhere on its shore. Nor, apart from Mrs Uff, had I encountered anybody near it. In many places of the sort, even securely within the ring-fence of a private park, the surrounding rural inhabitants go prescriptively to and fro about their occasions.
There was no sign of this. The lake at Vailes was a secluded scene. It must have been additionally so more than a hundred years ago.
It was no part of my plan to revisit the ruined cottage. If I was to conduct Holroyd to it in the afternoon there was no point in a further reconnaissance now. But I did feel drawn—am I right in thinking rather mysteriously drawn?—into the surrounding beech-wood. The ground was dry beneath my feet; the undergrowth was in no way troublesome; I was presently pleasing myself with the thoroughly childish amusement of deliberately getting lost. And this was how I again came upon the ruined cottage, after all.
This time, however, it was from rising ground which lay behind it, and in which alone the slightest vestige of any former cultivation lingered. There had been an orchard here, and the remaining trees, although they could scarcely date back to the Sticklebacks’ time, had certainly endured a barren old age in gnarled and lichened petrifaction. They stood like strange emanations of a rocky earth, writhing in muted and defeated gestures towards the sky. Beyond this the crumbled walls of the cottage showed square and straitened, as if here had been no more than a fold for some diminished race of sheep. Beyond that again was an abandoned well – perhaps of some depth still, since its mouth had been covered with a graceless sheet of galvanised iron on top of which had been piled for security a heap of earth and stones. I wondered whether children came to play in this place, and if so where lay the cottages in which they lived. On the farther side of the well, where once there might have been a vegetable and flower garden of some extent, a hawthorn thicket, with here and there a white poplar, had established itself like a marauding band poised for final incursion upon the last traces of human habitation. A single thorn, indeed, as if carrying an insolent ultimatum, stood firmly planted within what must have been the door of the dwelling.
I had become aware of all this before I became aware of Martha Uff.
She had not been in my mind since I had bidden her good morning at breakfast. Her reply, if respectful, had been dull and ungracious; she presented me with a coffee-cup swimming in its saucer; it was my impression that she had even contrived to plant a thumb on the rasher of bacon she placed before me a moment later. I told myself that Mrs Uff did wrong thus to attempt to employ her daughter at all; that she would do best to leave the child to whatever withdrawn and dreaming life she led, and that breakfast would be a more agreeable affair if she herself placed it briskly before us at her kitchen table. And I don’t suppose that I recalled at this time my earlier impression (based, as I have recorded, upon an imponderable quality in the girl’s voice) that there lurked in Martha some potentiality for a less sluggish response to experience.
But at least she must have been unwontedly nippy thus to get to the ruin before me – and to have been established here, I somehow felt, for some little time. Because of the configuration of the ghost-orchard in which I stood and the hazel-copse beyond the ruin, I was in a position to see without being seen, and for some moments I watched Martha at leisure. She had with her a basket which I supposed must contain those articles of plain sewing, mention
ed a little defensively by her mother, which were one day to be so useful in Africa. But she had set this down unopened, and her only occupation seemed to be to gaze at the cottage, or rather at the vacant air where the cottage had once stood. For this purpose she had disposed herself on the stump of a tree with a curious effect of what I can only call frontality in relation to some proposed spectacle. She might have been, so to speak, in the centre of the third row of the stalls – and awaiting with impatience the rise of the curtain. There was about her an intentness which can scarcely have been a matter of her expression, since I was too far away to distinguish that. But, however communicated, the quality was there. Keeping to my image of a theatre-goer (or cinema patron), I can best express it by asserting how far she plainly was from that placid approach to the pleasures of dramatic entertainment which expresses itself in the contented opening of a box of chocolates.
Whether this thought was actually in my head at the time, I don’t know. Certainly it cannot have harboured there for long. Only some seconds after I had become aware of this picture of Martha, it had vanished and another had taken its place. The girl had got to her feet – not in any such surprise or perturbation as to make her neglect to pick up her basket – and walked towards me. She was walking, that is to say, towards the ruin, and I, on higher ground beyond, was to be seen if she cared to see me. But her gaze, as she came to a halt again, was on something else. It was upon the single thorn-tree that I have described as growing immediately within the cottage’s vanished door. Or it was upon the place (to be plainer) upon which that tree stood.
And now her expression was legible to me. I had never seen it on her face before. Instead of being apathetic it was grave. And something – perhaps a light parting of the lips – had oddly transformed Martha Uff. Almost, it was as if she were beautiful.
The direction of her gaze shifted, I thought, to near the well, and then to the spot where a garden gate might once have stood. Seconds passed, and she turned and walked slowly down the bridle-path towards the lake. There was nothing covert about her movements. She might simply have known that the time had come to go and meet somebody: a somebody whom there was joy rather than mere pleasure in encountering. So much, once more, a single glimpse of her face told me.
I ought to have been delighted that the lumpish and somewhat sullen Martha had a lover, and what appeared to be an irradiating lover at that. This response, indeed, did momentarily rise up in me. And then it was checked in a curious way. I scarcely know how to describe this, or for that matter a good deal that must follow.
Nor do I know (it occurs to me) what sort of impression I have given of myself in this narrative so far. I may have exhibited myself as being as dull as Martha herself, or perhaps as being muddle-headed, credulous, and impulsive. I just can’t tell. But what I certainly have to record of myself now is that I jumped to a conclusion. My satisfaction in the thought of Martha Uff’s attachment was checked by the knowledge – it was the kind of knowledge that comes suddenly in a dream – that it was an attachment to, or a trafficking with, something not of this world. Martha’s kindled gaze was for a wraith or revenant.
I felt quite unsurprised by this. It represented simply an unsatisfactory addition to my knowledge. A real-life lover (such was my thought) would be an altogether better proposition.
It will be apparent that my mental processes had taken on a curious cast; they were those of a man in some hypnoidal or hypnagogic state; I was seeing sense and nonsense as compatible with each other. And my impression of tune was also confused. I had supposed myself to have walked past the ruined cottage and taken, at an oblique angle, a few indecisive steps after the girl. Actually, I must have followed her briskly and without any more thought of concealment than she was showing on her own part. For suddenly we were both standing, and standing close together, beside the lake.
Nothing had changed in the scene. The unbroken water reflected the sky’s clear blue, and among the trees at its farther end one could glimpse enough of Vailes to recognise a mansion of major consequence. To our left the bridle-path continued along the western shore; to our right the lesser path, now thrice my own chosen route, sometimes hugged the bank and sometimes disappeared behind encroaching thickets. The air was still. And not a sound met the ear.
I glanced at the girl beside me, and saw that she was unaware of my presence. This wasn’t natural, any more than was the intentness with which her gaze was fixed upon mere vacancy, or at least upon mere inanimate nature, somewhere to our right. I felt powerfully impelled to recall her to herself, and I spoke her name sharply. Without turning her head, she put out a hand to me. It was, I now believe, a gesture to command silence. But at the time I misinterpreted it – perhaps as an appeal for support, for something that would draw her back from some perilous verge. This is why I took her hand in mine, and held it firmly through some succeeding moments.
It was in the first of these – and with an effect, I have now to record, such as succeeds the flicking of a switch – that I noticed my immediate surroundings as not quite unaltered. Only a few yards from me there floated on the verge of the lake a small empty boat. The bank here, perhaps a foot high, would have rendered laborious an attempt to haul it to land. So the painter had been used to secure it – but in a fashion casual or impatient enough. The rope had simply been brought ashore and a sizable stone placed on top of it. Nothing more was necessary on this windless day.
I had scarcely known myself to be agitated until I detected a sense of reassurance in this commonplace circumstance. I now looked farther afield, and saw that the prospect was not, after all, wholly untenanted. Some way up the path on our right, and walking away from us, was a lad in jeans and a nondescript sweater. He had emerged from the trees, I supposed, and it wasn’t unaccompanied. With him was a barefoot girl who, in the classless fashion of the time, showed no sign of being dressed in anything but a cotton frock coming something less than halfway down her thighs. This rural couple were chattering to each other gaily. I was rather surprised that no sound of their talk reached me. But what I did presently hear was a deep sigh from Martha. There could be no doubt of what had occasioned it. The pair of lovers in the near-distance had halted, turned to one another, and passionately embraced.
I can recall that I wanted to laugh – to laugh at the absurdities I had been imagining for the girl beside me. Poor Martha was, after all, given to voyeurism – but in relation not to the dead but the living, and in a fashion surely romantic and innocent enough. She was projecting her whole soul into the happiness of some more fortunate village girl.
The lovers were walking on again, hand in hand and with a movement, perhaps a mere swing of the arms or turn of the head, which affected me suddenly and indescribably. Am I absurd in calling it noble and splendid? It seemed to declare that the sensuous, the sensual, moment which had just passed was at once an all but extreme ecstasy and something of no account save as a symbol of an immeasurable and supersensible thing. But the apprehension of this – of the total vitality of the moment – was no sooner in my mind, or somewhere else inside me, than I had to cope with a new development in the small drama.
Another figure had appeared on the scene: a man who had rounded a corner of the path the rustic lovers were following, and who was now approaching them. It was Hartsilver. I recognised him at once, and I should have identified at least his calling at a farther hundred yards’ distance from the fact of his wearing the old-fashioned form of clerical head-gear known as a shovel hat. He and the lovers were within a few paces of each other. They met and passed.
Suddenly it was very cold – so cold that I glanced up at the heavens, expecting some preternatural change. But I was dazzled by a blazing sun, so that when I looked along the verge of the lake again I could see nothing at all. But I knew what I had seen. It had been the sight of a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, in the midst of a rural solitude, almost brushing past two persons – whether parishioners or strangers – with no faintest acknowled
gement of their existence. It was a small thing. But it was an impossibility, all the same.
I dropped Martha’s hand, I believe to pass my own across my eyes. Then I looked again at the scene before me. The lovers had disappeared—was it, once more, among the trees?—and only Hartsilver remained visible. Something made me turn my glance to the spot, not ten yards away, where the little boat had been moored to the bank.
The little boat had vanished too.
PART THREE
1
‘A wool-gathering old chap, Hartsilver,’ Holroyd said. ‘And, in any case, he may have given them a nod you didn’t notice.’
‘But I tell you I spoke to him!’ The scepticism my friend was deploying as we ate our lunch irritated me considerably. ‘It was rather awkward, as a matter of fact.’
‘Awkward?’
‘It seems absurd. It was Hartsilver himself, after all, who told us a good deal. But somehow I didn’t want to explain to him – or not straightaway – what I’d seen. I simply asked him if he was acquainted with the couple who had walked past him three minutes before. He replied that nobody had walked past him. And he gave me an odd look.’
‘Ho-ho! So it is socially embarrassing to have hob-nobbed with ghosts. Which is a good reason for not believing in them – or not in the full ghostly sense.’ Holroyd reached placidly for the cheese. ‘And what about the girl – what did she say?’
‘Nothing. She just ran away – after not admitting to seeing a thing.’
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