Cucumber Sandwiches

by J. I. M. Stewart

‘No more she did, perhaps. You yourself may have been the only percipient on the job.’

  ‘Absolute nonsense!’ My impatience mounted. ‘What I first saw was Martha seeing something. The impression of that was overwhelming. Moreover, she was seeing something that she had been waiting to see. And what I saw, I saw only because I had happened to take her hand. It was like an electric circuit closing. When I let go, the lovers vanished.’

  ‘And the boat as well.’

  ‘Yes, the boat as well. No, thank you.’ I had rather crossly refused the cheese. It was as if the boat were being exploited by Holroyd to make my tall story yet taller, and from a professional investigator of psychical phenomena I found this hard to take. ‘Well, there they were,’ I said, with what must have been something like truculence. ‘Bertrand Senderhill and Joan Stickleback.’

  ‘In modern dress.’

  ‘Why not in modern dress? You can have Hamlet and Ophelia in modern dress – or, for that matter, Othello and Desdemona. So why not Florizel and Perdita?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ To my increased annoyance, Holroyd contrived to intimate a sense that feeble jokes were to be deprecated. ‘Of course this girl – Martha – would see modern dress. Any other sort must be virtually unknown to her.’

  ‘It isn’t unknown to me. As a matter of fact, I was trying, shortly before this thing happened, to imagine just how these two young people would have been dressed in the year 1832.’

  ‘So at least they were in your head.’

  ‘Of course they were in my head. And it’s equally certain that they are pretty constantly in yours. First Hartsilver’s account of Lucius Senderhill’s hallucination, and then, hard upon that, we come on the story of Florizel, Perdita, and the Gloriana preserved in the lad’s diary. It’s a perfect explosion of the uncanny under our noses, and we shall neither of us think of much else for some time.’

  ‘Ho-ho! And now you’ve had the lion’s share of the bang. By the way, about that boat—’

  ‘It wasn’t the dinghy from the boathouse. That hasn’t been in the water. I’ve looked. And real dinghies don’t vanish in a flash.’

  ‘That’s undeniable.’ Holroyd was now busying himself with a small coffee percolator provided by Mrs Uff. Martha had not put in an appearance at this meal. ‘Don’t suppose me to deny that you and the girl between you have cooked up something very pretty indeed.’

  ‘Not pretty.’ There was in my own voice a conviction that surprised me. ‘I mean, not merely pretty: Swan Lake stuff, romantic idyll – that kind of thing. Think, Holroyd! It has been going on for quite some time.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘This haunting of the spot where their love grew and was consummated. Drain the lake, and it would still go on. Isn’t that—well, how one has to read the thing? There was once so fierce and clear a flame, so deep and true a vibration, that now, one has to suppose, it’s forever. There forever – in whatever other or further mode of existence I’ve had my peep at.’

  ‘My dear chap! You get this from—how shall I put it?—that?’

  ‘Not from what I saw. One can’t see the quality of a passion. But from what I felt, in the girl.’

  ‘Perdita?’

  ‘No, no. Martha. What it meant to her.’ I paused on this for a moment, I suppose soberly enough. ‘Holroyd,’ I asked, ‘can you produce a view, an interpretation, of this mystery?’

  ‘Only a very partial one. You have experienced what it’s not unreasonable you should experience: a hallucination generated by things we’ve been hearing and reading about. But, unless you’re uncommonly unreliable, I give it to you that Martha has experienced the same thing – even has been in the habit of experiencing the same thing – without any prompting knowledge at all. Unless, of course, Lucius Senderhill did know Bertrand’s story, and communicated it to Martha at the time he took it into his head that she might have psychic powers. If that’s so – and it isn’t wholly unlikely – we might persuade the girl to tell us about it. But the interesting possibility remains that something was messengered to Martha before that something was known to any living mind. Such phenomena are recorded from time to time.’

  ‘No doubt.’ I found myself resenting Holroyd’s prosaic note. ‘But it is always hallucination, and is most reasonably explained as a basically telepathic affair? That’s what you mean by “messengered”?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Holroyd poured me out my coffee. ‘At least I don’t judge it helpful to suppose that there actually was something out there – so many yards from Martha and yourself, who saw it, and so many from Hartsilver, who did not. I don’t mean more than that, you know, by saying that I don’t believe in ghosts.’ Holroyd drank his own coffee at a gulp, having splashed into it sufficient cream to make this impatient act feasible. I saw that it had been obtuse in me not to realise that he was in a state of some excitement. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I suggest a division of labour. For we have to discover what more we can.’

  ‘Are we obliged to do that?’ Although I had just been demanding light from my friend, this straight proposition made me strangely uncomfortable. Obscurely in my mind, perhaps, was the thought that our activities – if we did effectively contrive any – might result in some sort of laying of ghosts or exorcising of demons. Until this very morning it looked as if Florizel and Perdita had been, so to speak, Martha Uff’s exclusive property. Had they perhaps come to represent something she would be the poorer for losing? I didn’t pretend I knew the answer. ‘Are we obliged to do that?’ I reiterated.

  ‘Certainly we are. Ho-ho! Are you thinking, my dear chap, that all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?’ Holroyd glanced at me. ‘Why ever do you look so startled?’

  ‘Because it came into my head lately that you have a touch of Keats’s Apollonius yourself – or might have. He gave a nasty look, you remember, and a whole fabric of beautiful illusions crumpled up and vanished.’

  ‘I hope I don’t deal in nasty looks.’ I saw that I had been stupid, and that Holroyd was displeased. ‘But I continue to pray for clear ones.’ Perhaps seeing that I was chagrined, my friend produced his most robust laugh.

  ‘You’re the one,’ he said, ‘who has begun to gain that girl’s confidence. Try to have a talk with her. And I’ll have yet another go in those attics.’

  ‘Surely you don’t expect to find anything more there – relevant, I mean, to Bertrand Senderhill?’

  ‘One can’t tell till one has tried.’ And Holroyd’s gaze glinted on me in its most disturbing brilliance. ‘So here goes.’

  I found Mrs Uff – for I judged it necessary to do that – in her kitchen. Not that it was her kitchen. This was evident from the fact that there had plainly been moved into it, with an effect as of mere encampment, certain objects rather of ornament than utility, such as are appropriate, I suppose, to a housekeeper’s room. Having a little lost my way in the abounding offices of Vailes, I penetrated to this only through a vast and antiquely comfortless servants’ hall – never again, I told myself, to be haunted by so much as a knife-boy. Perhaps, indeed, numerous boys of roughly similar endowments and proclivities might soon be accommodated here, but they would be known as juvenile delinquents, and the original home of the Senderhills would be mysteriously denominated an approved school.

  The kitchen had an ancient and enormous range, which ought to have been scrapped long ago, but which had, instead, been expensively adapted to consume electricity. Opposite this was an answeringly enormous dresser, and on this Mrs Uff had disposed a line of framed photographs. One represented the façade of the Hotel Continental as viewed from the Garden of the Tuileries, and presumably commemorated some early phase of Mrs Uff’s employment as a lady’s maid. Others were group photographs of ranked domestics posed either in kitchen gardens or before majestic porticos according to the whim of their employer; and in these I was sure that the career of Mrs Uff could have been traced from obscurity to eminence. But what was going to happen to her now? No doubt she had a little put by, and no dou
bt there would be some decent mention of her in Lucius Senderhill’s will. But where would she go, and what would become of her daughter? I put these speculative questions aside in favour of something more practical.

  ‘Mrs Uff, I wonder if I might speak to Martha?’

  Mrs Uff, who was expertly trussing a fowl, had decorously set aside this employment as I entered the kitchen. She seemed, not unreasonably, a little startled at my request’Martha, sir! Has she done anything wrong?’

  ‘Dear me, no – nothing of the kind.’ I took this to be an honest reply, even although there have been times, no doubt, in which it was held highly blameworthy to hold sustained commerce with the dead. ‘It is simply that I met her when out walking this morning, and that she seemed almost to run away from me. I want to make sure that I have not frightened or offended her in any way.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, sir.’ Mrs Uff produced these words distinguishably by way of gaining time, and she took a freshly appraising glance at me before going on. ‘Would it have been beside the ruined cottage that you came up with her?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Martha is in the laundry, sir. That’s at the end of the corridor.’ Mrs Uff had given something like a resigned sigh. ‘I told her I’d clear the lunch, while she got on with her own washing. I try to keep her nice about herself. You’re certainly welcome to speak to her. She’s quite taken to you, sir, if you’ll pardon the familiarity. A proper gentleman, she called you last night. And there’s not many she has that much favour for.’

  This was an unexpected testimonial, although I don’t think it took me with any marked increase of confidence into Martha’s presence. She was standing before a robot-like machine which, having arrived at some crisis of the laundering process, was rocking and quivering in a frenzy of hopelessly shackled energy. The whole place seemed to shake under its efforts to break free. But Martha regarded it only with a kind of dull attentiveness, picking her nose the while. It would have been hard to imagine her as capable of vivid interest in anything.

  ‘Good afternoon, Martha.’ I had to raise my voice to contend with the throb and thump of the mechanism. ‘Do you remember telling me this morning that you couldn’t see anybody except ourselves beside the lake? That wasn’t quite true, was it?’

  ‘Mr Hartsilver, – ‘e was there.’ Martha got this out with an effort – but rapidly, as if hoping it would end the matter. She had turned round and backed against the washing-machine, plainly afraid that I was going to grab and shake her. The result of this was that the washing-machine shook her instead, and she thus presented the displeasing spectacle of a person trembling in abject terror. ‘There was nobbut parson,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not quite right, Martha. Try to remember. Wasn’t there a courting couple as well?’

  Suddenly the washing-machine gave a final jerk and became immobile, and I saw that the girl really was shaking on her own account. But she was looking straight at me now, and in her gaze there showed something that might be a spark of defiance.

  ‘You seen nothing!’ she said violently. ‘Why should yer? A foreigner, you are, with no call to. Why, ‘e couldn’t ‘is self – so why should you?’

  ‘Mr Hartsilver?’

  ‘’Is lordship. Talked to me about perhaps seeing great signs and wonders – like what parson talks on in pulpit – out on the lake one day. But, all the time, what could ‘e not see? ‘Im! ‘E could see nobbut tip of ‘is own nose.’ Martha’s voice had turned scornful. But now she checked herself abruptly, and was staring at me in dismay, as if dimly conscious of having betrayed something. ‘I seen nothing,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘So you said, Martha, on the day I arrived. But isn’t it other people who see nothing? Lord Lucius saw nothing. Did he ever tell you any story which might make you expect to see what you do see?’

  ‘’Is lordship tell me things?’ There was unmistakable incredulity in Martha’s voice. ‘Not telling me was ‘is line – not even about what great thing was going to ‘appen-like on the lake.’

  ‘I see. Well, now, Mr Hartsilver saw nothing this morning, even although the couple were almost touching him as they went past. He gave no sign. Wouldn’t you have expected him at least to say good morning to them?’

  ‘Foreigners they’d be. From beyond Lindop or Doddington, like enough. I don’t take no account of such – nor would ‘e.’

  ‘You mean that when you say there was only Mr Hartsilver beside the lake this morning it’s because you don’t count the young man and girl, since they are just foreigners and not worth bothering about?’ I hope I felt some compunction about seeking virtually to trap Martha in this way.

  Looking back now, I can see that I was myself in a confused state of mind, neither wanting to press on nor able to hold back. It must be remembered that, in this girl’s company, something very surprising had befallen me only a few hours before. ‘But,’ I continued, ‘you do agree that they were there? And that they’ve often been there before?’

  ‘Nobody never seen nothing afore! What yer mean, saying as you did?’ Martha’s strangely attractive voice – condemned to hideous articulations part rustic and part vulgarly urban – was now touched by desperation. ‘What yer mean coming to the ‘ouse, if yer not police?’

  ‘Martha, I’m not your enemy. And I’m as puzzled as perhaps you are. Perhaps only a very few people do see—well, what you and I were seeing this morning. Perhaps I might not have done so myself, if we hadn’t taken each other’s hands. You remember?’

  Suddenly I saw that something was happening to Martha Uff’s face, and it was a moment before I realised that it was at least nothing more dreadful than a storm of weeping that had distorted it. I believe I made a movement towards her. But she had flung herself face-down upon a long table – an ironing-table, it must have been – and was sobbing convulsively.

  ‘They’re mine, they’re mine, they’re mine!’ she cried out. ‘Yer not to take them from me. They’re mine!’

  And her violent weeping renewed itself.

  2

  ‘I’ve given her a kind of promise,’ I said. ‘That they won’t be taken away from her.’

  It was an hour later, and I had joined Holroyd in the muniment room. In the sunbeams streaming through its former windows the dust was dancing madly – and delusively too, since every mote of the grubby stuff had the gleam of fine gold.

  ‘Taken away? Ho-ho!’ For what was, I believe, the first time, my friend’s robust laugh jarred on me. ‘Does she still suppose you to be a policeman?’

  ‘Whether she does or not, she feels her only cherished possession to be under threat.’

  ‘I see.’ Holroyd’s voice was at once gentle. Although fanatically given to investigating whatever can be investigated, he is far from being an insensitive man. ‘What’s the poor girl doing now?’

  ‘She’s gone out of doors again, which is only sensible on an afternoon like this.’ I had walked to a window – where I had to stand on tiptoe to see anything except the sky. ‘And what about ourselves – shall we do that walk to the ruined cottage?’

  ‘By all means – but just let me have another half-hour.’ Holroyd was glancing round the already pervasively rifled archives of Vailes in a baffled and almost angry way. It was as if he knew in his bones – I found myself reflecting – that there was something still to find, and yet didn’t know where to search further. ‘I’ve been in there,’ he said, as if reading my mind, and gestured towards the half-open door through which we had remarked the feathers come drifting. ‘There’s only the junk. I thought there might be documents, but I’ve drawn a blank.’ He turned back with a seeming effort to consider what I had been talking about. ‘The girl’s apparitions are safe enough,’ he said.

  ‘My apparitions too.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But, in any case, they’re not a commodity one can walk off with. You wouldn’t want to take them home with you?’

  ‘Heaven forbid!’

  ‘It’s j
ust as well. Anything of the sort is most unusual. There are records of ghosts travelling round with people, but on the whole they stay put. Just as they do in popular lore. It’s places, and not people that are haunted. By the way, what is Martha’s view of the thing?’

  ‘Her view?’ The question took me by surprise. ‘I don’t know that the child is to be thought of as having speculated about it at all.’

  ‘But she must at least have a notion as to what order of beings she goes spying on.’

  ‘Holroyd, I honestly don’t think we should speak of her as going spying. It’s the wrong image. I know you feel that she in some sense creates these lovers for herself, and has been able momentarily to create them for me. Even so, she draws a kind of wonder and awe just from this trick of her own mind.’ I paused. ‘But there’s another thing I must emphasise to you. I’m now virtually certain that she got no hint of Bertrand Senderhill and his mistress from anything Lucius Senderhill said to her. She really was – as we’ve conjectured – seeing these apparitions when there was no knowledge of their existence, let alone of their association, existent in any living mind.’

  ‘She would have her niche in the history of science, poor girl, if we could really prove it to be so. But let me go back to my point. Does Martha believe that she sees living people, or does she believe that she sees ghosts? Even an almost half-witted girl must comprehend categories as simple as that.’

  ‘I doubt whether she has asked herself the question. She knows that they are safe so long as nobody sees them except herself, and that my having seen them spells danger. It is very likely that there have been occasions upon which other people ought to have seen them, and didn’t. But she might think of this as no more than a marvellous preservation of her secret. That’s what they are: her secret. And her mind doesn’t travel further.’

  ‘It’s our minds which have to do that!’ There was such a sharp and sudden passion in Holroyd’s voice that I was greatly startled. ‘Don’t let anything in my manner, my dear chap, make you feel I don’t find this affair staggering. Florizel and his Perdita are coming precious near, I admit, to vindicating themselves as honest-to-God phantasms of the dead. But perhaps there’s a soft spot somewhere in the picture. A couple of days ago I’d have said there always is. And there must be something more to find out. I tell you there must!’ My friend was silent for a moment – a moment in which I received a vivid impression of some extraordinary concentration of his will. ‘Don’t you agree?’ he asked.