I remember pulling myself together irritably and then staring round aghast at that wide, desolate world of cold grey sea and marsh and sky.
The sight of the man struggling along behind me restored my balance. The sober earth returned to me, and with it a rush of relief. I was not alone. The human race had not miraculously died out in half an hour. I stood hesitating.
It was not Bill. The newcomer was not a labourer nor a fisherman. I saw his short raincoat with satisfaction. Here, no doubt, was the rest of the Press.
I shouted at him, my voice sounding very small and shrill in the cold emptiness.
“Hullo!” I bellowed. “You from the Gazette? Come to see the ghost?”
He shouted back but I did not catch the words. His voice, too, was caught up and dispersed in the void. I heard scraps of it, unrelated notes, before it was sucked upward and devoured in that hungry air.
As he came closer I saw that he was a pale, ineffectual young man, hatless and with fair hair. His coat was buttoned up to his chin and he was blue with cold.
“Well, there’s the house,” I said as he came up.
He nodded and surveyed the decrepit cottage, which looked more shabby and less horrific now that I was not facing it alone.
I glanced at the sky.
“If we’re going to burgle the place by daylight we’d better hurry,” I said. “At first this whole thing sounded like a cock-and-bull story but down in the village they seem to have seen something.”
“Yes,” he said and regarded me with unhappy pale grey eyes. “I’ve heard them talking. They’ve seen a woman in a sun-bonnet.”
“A sun-bonnet?” That was something new to me and I felt a momentary resentment against my friend the postmaster, “I’m glad she needs it,” I said facetiously.
He did not smile.
“It’s hot down here in the summer; just as hot as it’s cold now. There’s no shade anywhere.”
The thought seemed to depress him and we ploughed on towards the house. The nearer I came to the place the more scared I grew. It was not a blind, exciting terror; rather a cold suffocating sense of disaster and frustration and despair.
I glanced at my companion and thought he must have experienced much the same reaction, for he looked wretched, and his teeth chattered slightly. The sight of his alarm gave me courage and amused me. It was a natural feminine desire to show off. I struggled against my terror and became almost hearty.
“I’m glad it’s a woman,” I said foolishly. “She’s more likely to be at home. There was a tragedy down here some years ago. You’ve heard all that, I suppose?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I know what happened. But I don’t see why the woman should come back. It was the man who had hell down here.”
“Ah,’ I said complacently, “that’s what you think because you’re a man. It’s the woman who always feels things most. She’s come back to look for the boy friend, of course.”
“Do you think so?” he said and looked so soft and sentimental that I began to lose interest in him. The discovery that he was dopy made him seem less useful as an ally and the cold began to creep up and down my spine again.
We had reached the high ground by this time and we made our ascent to that horrible cottage in silence. There was no need to climb in through the windows. The door hung crazily on one hinge and when I pushed it it clattered back with a noise that sounded like an explosion in that damp, silent greyness.
My colleague hung back.
“I don’t want to go in,” he said.
There was more than repugnance in his voice. It rose on to a note of pure terror and combined with my own unreasoning alarm to make me thoroughly irritable. I regarded him coldly.
“Do what you like,” I said, and added, with unpardonable priggishness, “if you want to do your job properly, you’ll search the house with me.”
I stood, half in, half out, of the little brick-floored hall.
There were two rooms downstairs, a kitchen and a parlour. A flight of stairs led up between them. From where I stood I could see the ground floor was deserted.
I looked at the rickety stairs, and then at the man.
“Coming?” I demanded.
He went to pieces rather horribly. His face began to work.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I can’t. I can’t. I don’t want to see… anything.”
Leaving him I clattered up the stairs making as much noise as my shoes would let me.
The two little rooms under the roof were empty and I was glad of it. They were dry and airy, too, which was queer, and they had an odd, lived-in feeling. Downstairs the place was like a tomb. Up here it was almost pleasant. I stood listening.
I thought I heard someone breathing. It was a beastly delusion and I was afraid again. There was a cupboard in one room, but I did not open it. I went back to the staircase.
Something on the top step caught my eye and I stooped to retrieve it. Then I fled.
He was waiting for me, his face pale and blue with cold and his hands deep in his pockets. Now that the ordeal was over I was inclined to swagger.
He stood staring at me with a forlorn weariness on his face.
“Nothing there?” he said, and he seemed disappointed. “No beautiful girl in a sun-bonnet and leg-o’-mutton sleeves?”
“Nothing at all,” I insisted.
He did not seem to hear me. He was looking back at the cottage and his face was twisted and disappointed. He stared so fixedly that I turned myself and looked up.
Then I screamed.
The face at the upper window was surrounded by a faded lavender sun-bonnet, the crumpled streamers hanging limply beside that pale and sunken countenance. The woman looked straight at me. I saw her eyes.
“Come,” I said hoarsely. “Come.” And I gripped the little thing I had picked up on the stairs.
It was a moment of panic, but I saw him hanging back, his face drawn and puckered like a child’s, and I remember his idiotic remark, so completely foolish in the circumstances.
“She’s old,” he said. “Oh, my God, she’s old!”
I left him. I dashed into the house, raced up the stairs, and jerked open the cupboard door in the second bedroom. An old woman crouched in the corner and remained quite still as if she were invisible.
I pulled her out violently.
“I knew you were real,” I spluttered. “I knew it. I found a new hairpin on the stairs and I knew a real woman had been here. ‘What are you doing? What are you doing, frightening people?”
She looked up at me and began to cry, and I was ashamed of myself. She was so little and old and faded. She looked silly, too, in a rough tweed coat and skirt, with the ridiculous sun-bonnet perched on her sparse grey curls.
“I didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” she said in a thin little voice. “I’m so sorry. Oh, dear, I’ve been so silly, and now I shall be late for tea. Miss Fell does get so cross if we’re late for tea.”
I pricked up my ears. I knew Miss Fell. She kept a guest house on the other side of the marsh and did a lot of entertaining in the summer.
“Are you staying at Fairview?” I demanded,
“I used to live here long ago,” she said. “At least, I once came on a holiday here, and last month I suddenly made up my mind to come and see the old place again. I took rooms with Miss Fell and I’ve been walking up here in the afternoons. I’m so sorry if I’ve frightened people. I had to see the house again. I was happy here for a little while, and then—I wasn’t.”
I looked down at her. She was very small and had once been pretty in a fluffy, unintelligent way. It was then that I had one of my rare flashes of insight.
“So you weren’t drowned?” I said.
She gave me a single frightened glance.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “No, I ran away. I was a silly, melodramatic girl. I left my scarf and my hat on the sea wall and I walked to Burbridge and went back to London. I was so young. We were both so very young. I never d
reamed that he—poor, poor boy!
“We came down here to live on love and pennies when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two,” she went on softly. “We thought we’d live on the edge of the world together and be happy. He was happy, but I couldn’t bear it after a while; it wasn’t what I’d been used to and I dared not tell him. I didn’t want to break his illusion, you see, so I did the silly thing I did do. I ran away and pretended to be drowned. My cousin took me in and hushed it up. We never told, even when it came out in the papers that he had—”
“Shot himself?” I asked brutally.
“Yes,” she whispered, and shut her eyes. “Poor boy, he was so gentle, so romantic, so much in love.”
I went over to the window. The marsh lay wild and sad and lonely in front of me. Presently I turned to her. She was so old, so pathetic, so helpless. I felt very cross with her.
“Look here,” I said, “you mustn’t come here again.”
“Oh, no—no, I won’t. I do promise that.”
I felt silly.
“You can come, I suppose,” I said. “Anybody can; but you mustn’t peer out of the window in a sun-bonnet, because you’re terrifying people. You used to wear the sun-bonnet here then, did you?”
Her lips quivered.
“He liked it,” she said. “He said it made me look so charming. Oh, dear, I have been silly. Suppose people find out? Suppose it gets in the papers?”
“You won’t be able to keep it a secret,” I said. “There’s that man downstairs as well as—”
She interrupted me.
“What man is that?”
“I think he’s from the Gazette,’ I said. “He wouldn’t come into the house. He’s the man I was with when you looked out of the window at me.”
She stepped back from me and I saw fear in her eyes.
“You were alone,” she said. “I saw you talking to someone, but no one was there. That’s why I stared at you. You were quite alone.”
Her stupidity infuriated me.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He was a boy, really. Tall and thin, with fair hair and a pale face, and a raincoat buttoned up to his chin.”
I got no further. I saw the horror grow in her eyes and in her little wizened birdlike face.
“He came,” she said, huskily. “He came.”
There was a long pause in which the world heeled over and those dreadful poignant words came back to me: “Why should the woman come? It was the man who had hell here.”
The little old lady plucked my sleeve. Her face was trembling.
“Did he see me?” she said. “Did he see me?”
I looked her full in the face and lied.
“No,” I said shakily. “No. Come along. You’ll be late for tea.”
The Correspondents
In the “eighties of the last century, when Robert Braine was a divinity student at Cambridge, Philip Dell was the only other person in the world who recognised him as a hero.
The two men parted one June day on the long, miserable station at the foot of the hill and never saw each other again, yet their curious relationship persisted for the rest of their long lives.
When Philip was ordained Robert wrote him from Paris and, doubtless because of the gravity of the occasion, forbore to give more than a hint of his own doings, which even so seemed to have a slightly romantic and worldly flavour.
But when Philip wrote a couple of years later to his friend’s home address in Wiltshire, saying that his brief curacy in the north of London was at an end and that he had been offered a remote living in the Norfolk marshes, he received a longer and more enlightening letter in return a month or two afterwards.
In his own note Philip had shyly mentioned his approaching marriage.
“Dorothy is a dear, gentle girl who has been leading our choir,” he had written, his neat hand and precise vocabulary betraying nothing of the tremendous emotional upheaval of his heart.
“I have talked to her earnestly and have warned her of the dullness, and what I fear may sometimes even be the real hardship of our new life in a vast, draughty vicarage with none of the amenities of present-day civilisation, but she, dear sweet creature that she is, is prepared to go through it all for my sake.”
Robert’s letter arrived when the Dells had settled down in their marshland fastness twenty miles from a railway station and as far from the world as if they had gone missioning to China.
I like your wife’s name, he wrote, and I trust you will give her my sincere regards. Forgive me if I say I admire your courage. Frankly, the idea of marriage terrifies me. If you lived my life, my dear fellow, you’d understand me. I almost hesitate to tell you about myself, indeed to a certain extent I am afraid I may not, for the particular branch of the service to which I now belong is devilish secretive.
You will probably be astonished to hear that I have been living in a humble part of Berlin for the past six months and am off to Belgrade in a day or so.
When I was in Germany the exigencies of my profession decreed that I should become for the time being a baker in the employ of a certain peculiarly interesting restauranteur, but in my leisure hours, which were damnably few, believe me, I used to revert to my normal character and mingle with more congenial society.
I met Irna in the house of a certain Baroness and danced with her whenever I got the chance, for beauties of her calibre do not blossom under our leaden skies, believe me. Just at the moment when I was beginning to lose my sleep over the girl, her fiancée, an insufferable Prussian in the Imperial Guard, had the disastrous notion of following me home when I left the ball given in honour of Beaconsfield, who was over for the conference. Imagine my discomfiture when he walked into the bakehouse and found me up to the elbows in dough, utterly incapable of making the true explanation.
That was the end of that romance. For a while I was heartbroken, but I gradually came to realise my Heavensent escape. I think little Greta, the laundress, may have helped matters, but you are a full-fledged parson now so I won’t tell you about her.
Mrs. Dell read the letter after her husband and blushed at it.
“An odious man,” she said. “I can’t believe he was ever a great friend of yours.”
“He not only was, but still is, my love.” Philip spoke with that mild obstinacy which grew on him in later years. “He was an extraordinary fellow, and remains so, it appears. A man like Robert was destined to have adventures. We mustn’t let ourselves get narrow down here. A man in the Secret Service has demands made upon him which are much greater than those put upon the ordinary stick-in-the-mud, like myself. A certain worldliness in Robert is inevitable.”
“A stick-in-the-mud?” Dorothy looked at her husband sharply, and her grey eyes were hurt and dubious. “I thought this was to be our great adventure, Philip?”
The Vicar of Pelham Wick swept aside the accounts of the Industrious Ladies’ Guild which littered his desk and took his wife in his arms.
“I was speaking loosely, my dear,” he said. “For me this life of ours is a tremendous adventure, the only great adventure I could ever have.”
And then because he was an honest man, albeit a tactful one, he added under his breath:
“But I am not Robert and never shall be.”
Philip replied to Robert’s letter in due course. He sent it to the old Wiltshire address and marked it “Please forward”. He wrote very simply, trying to keep any disloyal note of envy out of his quiet paragraphs.
My dear fellow,” he wrote, “I enjoyed your letter. It brought a dash of colour into this placid close. I hardly know what to tell you in return. My cat has built herself a nest like a starling twenty feet up in the ivy on the church and it took three of us—Tom, my gardener; George, the churchwarden; and myself—to get her and her family to safety. There we were, risking our necks and trembling with conscious heroism, while my wife stood below covering her eyes lest one of the tabby babes should fall to destruction. This is the kind of excitement I get down here.
&
nbsp; However, everything is relative.
My wife and I see very little company, which is perhaps just as well just now.
Philip hesitated long over this final sentence, his delicacy fighting with his great pride and the secret emotional triumph which was consuming him. In the end he left it as it was, remembering that Dorothy was sensitive.
Robert’s reply arrived nearly two years later.
‘What a mad world it is!” he wrote on the thin foreign paper whose crackling sheets brought the very stuff of romance into the shabby vicarage dining-room.
I am in Paris.
A most extraordinary thing happened to me. I met Irna again. She is now calling herself Ernestine and is the wife of a man who bids fair to make a name for himself in French politics. Apparently my famous bakery escapade put a stop to her projected marriage with the insufferable young Guardee and I was a little apprehensive at first because I had already heard most of the story.
However, she soon put me at my ease and actually thanked me for my share in the business. I must confess I find her charming. I danced with her at the Imperial Russian Embassy last night and could not help noticing that there was not a man in the room who did not envy me.
Her husband is clever but too old for her. He is the typical bourgeois politician, gross, palefaced, and volatile. I saw him glance at her once or twice last night and I wondered.
Later. Wiltshire.
I put away this note meaning to finish it in a day or so, but much water has flowed under the bridge since then—rather dirty water some of it, I am afraid. I hope I am not going to shock you by this chapter in my chronicles, but you must regard yourself as my father-confessor. Well, as you may imagine, I saw a great deal of Madame Ernestine in the days immediately following our dance, and at last, as seemed inevitable when we met, she softened noticeably towards me and I heard the true story of her monstrous marriage.
Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories Page 7
