Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories

by Hugh Ealpole

  ‘I turn up here,’ said Tubby.

  ‘Oh, do you?’

  The stranger looked disappointed. He smiled and held out his hand.

  Then Tubby did another extraordinary thing. He said:

  ‘Come in and have a cup of tea. Our place is only five yards up the street.’

  ‘Certainly,’ the stranger said. ‘Delighted.’

  As they walked up Berkeley Street, he went on confidentially:

  ‘I haven’t been in London for a long time. All these vehicles are very confusing. But I like it—I like it immensely. It’s so lively, and then the town’s so quiet compared with what it was when I lived here.’

  ‘Quiet!’ said Tubby.

  ‘Certainly. There were cobbles, and the carts and drays screamed and rattled like the damned.’

  ‘But that’s years ago!’

  ‘Yes. I’m older than I look.’

  Then, pointing, he added:

  ‘But that’s where Dorchester House was. So they’ve pulled it down. What a pity!’

  ‘Oh, everything’s pulled down now,’ said Tubby.

  ‘I acted there once—a grand night we had. Fond of acting?’

  ‘Oh, I’d be no good,’ said Tubby modestly, ‘too self-conscious.’

  ‘Ah, you mustn’t be self-conscious,’ said the stranger. ‘Thinking of yourself only breeds trouble, as the man said to the hangman just before they dropped him.’

  ‘Isn’t that bag a terrible weight?’ Tubby asked.

  ‘I’ve carried worse things than this,’ said the stranger. ‘I carried a four-poster once, all the way from one end of the Marshalsea to the other.’

  They were outside the house now and Tubby realised for the first time his embarrassment. It was not his way to bring anyone into the house unannounced, and his mother could be very haughty with strangers. However, here they were and it was snowing hard and the poor man was without a coat. So in they went. The Winsloe mansion was magnificent, belonging in all its features to an age that was gone. There was a marble staircase and up this the stranger almost ran, carrying his bag like a feather. Tubby toiled behind him but was, unhappily, not in time to prevent the stranger from entering through the open doors of the drawing-room.

  Here, seated in magnificent state, was Lady Winsloe, a roaring fire encased with marble on one side of her, a beautiful tea-table in front of her, and walls hung with magnificent imitations of the great Masters.

  Lady Winsloe was a massive woman with snow-white hair, a bosom like a small skating-rink, and a little face that wore a look of perpetual astonishment. Her dress of black-and-white silk fitted her so tightly that one anticipated with pleasure the moment when she would be compelled to rise. She moved as little as possible, she said as little as possible, she thought as little as possible. She had a very kind heart and was sure that the world was going straight to the devil.

  The stranger put his bag on the floor and went over to her with his hand outstretched.

  ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘I’m delighted to meet you!’

  By good fortune, Tubby arrived in the room at this moment.

  ‘Mother,’ he began, ‘this is a gentleman—’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said the stranger, ‘you don’t know my name. My name’s Huffam,’ and he caught the small white podgy hand and shook it. At this moment, two Pekinese dogs, one brown and one white, advanced from somewhere violently barking. Lady Winsloe found the whole situation so astonishing that she could only whisper:

  ‘Now, Bobo—now, Coco!’

  ‘You see, Mother,’ Tubby went on, ‘Mr Huffam was nearly killed by a motor-car and I rescued him and it began to snow heavily.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Lady Winsloe said, in her queer husky little voice that was always a surprise coming from so vast a bosom. Then she pulled herself together. For some reason Tubby had done this amazing thing, and whatever Tubby did was right.

  ‘I do hope you’ll have some tea, Mr—?’ She hesitated.

  ‘Huffam, ma’am. Yes, thank you. I will have some tea!’

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘All of it!’ Mr Huffam laughed and slapped his knee. ‘Yes, milk and sugar. Very kind of you indeed. A perfect stranger as I am. You have a beautiful place here, ma’am. You are to be envied.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ said Lady Winsloe, in her husky whisper. ‘Not in these days—not in these terrible days. Why, the taxes alone! You’ve no idea, Mr—?’

  ‘Huffam.’

  ‘Yes. How stupid of me! Now, Bobo! Now, Coco!’

  Then a little silence followed and Lady Winsloe gazed at her strange visitor. Her manners were beautiful. She never looked directly at her guests. But there was something about Mr Huffam that forced you to look at him. It was his energy. It was his obvious happiness (for happy people were so very rare). It was his extraordinary waistcoat.

  Mr Huffam did not mind in the least being looked at. He smiled back at Lady Winsloe, as though he had known her all his life.

  ‘I’m so very fortunate,’ he said, ‘to find myself in London at Christmas-time. And snow, too! The very thing. Snowballs, Punch and Judy, mistletoe, holly, the pantomime—nothing so good in life as the pantomime!’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ said Lady Winsloe faintly. ‘I can’t, I’m afraid, altogether agree with you. It lasts such a very long time and is often so exceedingly vulgar!’

  ‘Ah, it’s the sausages!’ said Mr Huffam, laughing. ‘You don’t like the sausages! For my part I dote on ’em. I know it’s silly at my age, but there it is—Joey and the sausages. I wouldn’t miss them for anything.’

  At that moment a tall and exceedingly thin gentleman entered. This was Sir Roderick Winsloe. Sir Roderick had been once an Under-Secretary, once a Chairman of a Company, once famous for his smart and rather vicious repartees. All these were now glories of the past. He was now nothing but the husband of Lady Winsloe, the father of Tubby, and the victim of an uncertain and often truculent digestion. It was natural that he should be melancholy, although perhaps not so melancholy as he found it necessary to be. Life for him was altogether without savour. He now regarded Mr Huffam, his bag and his waistcoat, with unconcealed astonishment.

  ‘This is my father,’ said Tubby.

  Mr Huffam rose at once and grasped his hand.

  ‘Delighted to meet you, sir,’ he said.

  Sir Roderick said nothing but ‘Ah’—then he sat down. Tubby was suffering now from a very serious embarrassment. The odd visitor had drunk his tea and it was time that he should go. Yet it seemed that he had no intention of going. With his legs spread apart, his head thrown back, his friendly eyes taking everyone in as though they were all his dearest friends, he was asking for his second cup.

  Tubby waited for his mother. She was a mistress of the art of making a guest disappear. No one knew quite how she did it. There was nothing so vulgarly direct as a glance at the clock or a suggestion as to the imminence of dressing for dinner. A cough, a turn of the wrist, a word about the dogs, and the thing was done. But this guest, Tubby knew, was a little more difficult than the ordinary. There was something old-fashioned about him. He took people naïvely at their word. Having been asked to tea, he considered that he was asked to tea. None of your five minutes’ gossip and then hastening on to a cocktail-party. However, Tubby reflected, the combination of father, mother and the drawing-room, with its marble fireplace and row of copied Old Masters, was, as a rule, enough to ensure brief visitors. On this occasion also it would have its effect.

  And then—an amazing thing occurred! Tubby perceived that his mother liked Mr Huffam, that she was smiling and even giggling, that her little eyes shone, her tiny mouth was parted in expectation as she listened to her visitor.

  Mr Huffam was telling a story—an anecdote of his youth. About a boy whom he had known in his own childhood, a gay, enterprising, and adventurous boy who had gone as page-boy to a rich family. Mr Huffam described his adventures in a marvellous manner, his rencontre with the second footman,
who was a snob and Evangelical, of how he had handed biscuits through the pantry window to his little sister, of the friendship that he had made with the cook. And, as Mr Huffam told these things, all these people lived before your eyes, the pompous mistress with her ear-trumpet, the cook’s husband who had a wooden leg, the second footman who was in love with a pastry-cook’s daughter. The house of this young page-boy took on life, and all the furniture in it, the tables and chairs, the beds and looking-glasses, everything down to the very red woollen muffler that the footman wore in bed, because he was subject to colds in the neck. Then Lady Winsloe began to laugh and Sir Roderick Winsloe even laughed, and the butler, a big, red-faced man, coming in to remove the tea, could not believe his parboiled eyes, but stood there, looking first of all at his mistress, then at his master, then at Mr Huffam’s bag, then at Mr Huffam himself, until he remembered his manners and, with a sudden apologetic cough, set sternly (for himself this disgraceful behaviour of his employers was no laughing matter) about his proper duties.

  But best of all perhaps was the pathos at the end of Mr Huffam’s story. Pathos is a dangerous thing in these days. We so easily call it sentimentality. Mr Huffam was a master of it. Quite easily and with no exaggeration he described how the sister of the little page-boy lost some money entrusted to her by her only too bibulous father, of her terror, her temptation to steal from her aged aunt’s purse, her final triumphant discovery of the money in a band-box!

  How they all held their breaths! How vividly they saw the scene! How real was the sister of the little page-boy! At last the story was ended. Mr Huffam rose.

  ‘Well, ma’am, I must thank you for a very happy hour,’ he said.

  Then the most remarkable thing of all occurred, for Lady Winsloe said:

  ‘If you have not made any other arrangements, why not stay here for a night or two—while you are looking about you, you know? I’m sure we should be delighted—would we not, Roderick?’

  And Sir Roderick said:

  ‘Ah—ah—certainly.’

  II

  On looking back, as he so often did afterwards, into the details of this extraordinary adventure, Tubby was never able to arrange the various incidents in their proper order. The whole affair had the inconsequence, the coloured fantasy, of a dream—one of those rare and delightful dreams that are so much more true and reasonable than anything in one’s waking life.

  After that astounding invitation of Lady Winsloe’s, in what order did the events follow the cynical luncheon-party, the affair of Mallow’s young woman (Mallow was the butler), the extraordinary metamorphosis of Miss Allington? All of these were certainly in the first twenty-four hours after Mr Huffam’s arrival. The grand sequence of the Christmas Tree, the Mad Party, the London Vision, were all parts of the tremendous climax.

  At once, Tubby realised, the house itself changed. It had never been a satisfactory house; always one of those places rebelliously determined not to live. Even the rooms most often inhabited—the drawing-room, the long, dusky dining-room, Sir Roderick’s study, Tubby’s own bedroom—sulkily refused to play the game. The house was too large, the furniture too heavy, the ceilings too high. Nevertheless, on the first evening of Mr Huffam’s visit, the furniture began to move about. After dinner on that evening there was only the family present. (Miss Agatha Allington, an old maid, a relation with money to be left, an unhappy old woman, suffering from constant neuralgia, had not yet arrived.) There they were in the drawing-room and, almost at once, Mr Huffam had moved some of the chairs away from the wall, had turned the sofa with the gilt, spiky back more cosily towards the fire. He was not impertinent nor officious. Indeed, on this first evening, he was very quiet, asking them some questions about present-day London, making some rather odd social enquiries about prisons and asylums and the protection of children. He was interested, too, in the literature of the moment and wrote down in a little note-book an odd collection of names, for Lady Winsloe told him that Ethel M. Dell, Warwick Deeping, and a lady called Wilhelmina Stitch who wrote poetry, were her favourite writers, while Tubby suggested that he should look into the work of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. They had, in fact, a quiet evening which ended with Mr Huffam having his first lesson in Bridge. (He had been, he told them, when he had last ‘tried’ cards, an enthusiastic whist player.) It was a quiet evening, but, as Tubby went up the long, dark staircase to his room, he felt that, in some undefined way, there was excitement in the air. Before undressing he opened his window and looked out on to the roofs and chimney-pots of London. Snow glittered and sparkled under a sky that quivered with stars. Dimly he heard the recurrent waves of traffic, as though the sea gently beat at the feet of the black, snow-covered houses.

  ‘What an extraordinary man!’ was his last thought before he slept. Before he had known that he would have Mr Huffam as his guest, Tubby had invited a few of his clever young friends to luncheon—Diana, Gordon Wolley, Ferris Band, Mary Polkinghorne. Gathered round the Winsloe luncheon-table, Tubby regarded them with new eyes. Was it because of the presence of Mr Huffam? He, gaily flaunting his tremendous waistcoat, was in high spirits. He had, all morning, been revisiting some of his old haunts. He was amazed. He could not conceal, he did not attempt to conceal, his amazement. He gave them, as they sat there, languidly picking at their food, a slight notion of what East London had once been—the filth, the degradation, the flocks of wild, haggard-eyed, homeless children—Mary Polkinghorne, who had a figure like an umbrella-handle, an Eton crop and an eye-glass, gazed at him with bemused amazement.

  ‘But they say our slums are awful. I haven’t been down there myself, but Bunny Carlisle runs a Boys’ Club and he says . . . !’

  Mr Huffam admitted that he had seen some slums that morning, but they were nothing, nothing at all, to the things he had seen in his youth.

  ‘Who is this man?’ Ferris Band whispered to Diana.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘Someone Tubby picked up. But I like him.’

  And then this Christmas!

  ‘Oh dear,’ young Wolley sighed, ‘here’s Christmas again! Isn’t it awful! I’m going to bed. I shall sleep, and I hope dream, until this dreadful time is over.’

  Mr Huffam looked at him with wonder.

  ‘Hang up your stocking and see what happens,’ he said.

  Everyone screamed with laughter at the idea of young Wolley hanging up his stocking. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, they discussed literature.

  ‘I’ve just seen,’ Ferris Band explained, ‘the proofs of Hunter’s new novel. It’s called Pigs in Fever. It’s quite marvellous. The idea is, a man has scarlet fever and it’s an account of his ravings. Sheer poetry.’

  There was a book on a little table. He picked it up. It was a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit bound in purple leather.

  ‘Poor old Dickens,’ he said. ‘Hunter has a marvellous idea. He’s going to rewrite one or two of the Dickens books.’

  Mr Huffam was interested.

  ‘Rewrite them?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Cut them down to about half. There’s some quite good stuff in them hidden away, he says. He’ll cut out all the sentimental bits, bring the humour up to date, and put in some stuff of his own. He says it’s only fair to Dickens to show people that there’s something there.’

  Mr Huffam was delighted.

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ he said. ‘It will make quite a new thing of it.’

  ‘That’s what Hunter says,’ Band remarked. ‘People will be surprised.’

  ‘I should think they will be,’ Mr Huffam remarked.

  The guests stayed a long time. Mr Huffam was something quite new in their experience. Before she went, Diana said to Tubby:

  ‘What a delightful man! Where did you find him?’

  Tubby was modest. She was nicer to him than she had ever been before.

  ‘What’s happened to you, Tubby?’ she asked. ‘You’ve woken up suddenly.’

  During the afternoon, Miss Agatha Allington arrived
with a number of bags and one of her worst colds.

  ‘How are you, Tubby? It’s kind of you to ask me. What horrible weather! What a vile thing Christmas is! You won’t expect me to give you a present, I hope?’

  Before the evening, Mr Huffam made friends with Mallow the butler. No one knew quite how he did it. No one had ever made friends with Mallow before. But Mr Huffam went down to the lower domestic regions and invaded the world of Mallow, Mrs Spence, the housekeeper, Thomas the footman, Jane and Rose the housemaids, Maggie the scullery-maid. Mrs Spence, who was a little round woman like a football, was a Fascist in politics, said that she was descended from Mary Queen of Scots, and permitted no one, except Lady Winsloe, in her sitting-room. But she showed Mr Huffam the photographs of the late Mr Spence and her son, Darnley, who was a steward on the Cunard Line. She laughed immeasurably at the story of the organ-grinder and the lame monkey. But Mallow was Mr Huffam’s great conquest. It seemed (no one had had the least idea of it) that Mallow was hopelessly in love with a young lady who assisted in a flower shop in Dover Street. This young lady, apparently, admired Mallow very much and he had once taken her to the pictures. But Mallow was shy. (No one had conceived it!) He wanted to write her a letter, but simply hadn’t the courage. Mr Huffam dictated a letter for him. It was a marvellous letter, full of humour, poetry and tenderness.

  ‘But I can’t live up to this, sir,’ said Mallow. ‘She’ll find me out in no time.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Mr Huffam. ‘Take her out to tea tomorrow, be a little tender. She won’t worry about letters after that!’

  He went out after tea and returned powdered with snow, in a taxi cab filled with holly and mistletoe.

  ‘Oh dear,’ whispered Lady Winsloe, ‘we haven’t decorated the house for years. I don’t know what Roderick will say. He thinks holly so messy.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Mr Huffam. He did, with the result that Sir Roderick came himself and assisted. Through all this, Mr Huffam was in no way dictatorial. Tubby observed that he had even a kind of shyness—not in his opinions, for here he was very clear-minded indeed, seeing exactly what he wanted, but he seemed to be aware, by a sort of ghostly guidance, of the idiosyncrasies of his neighbours. How did he know, for instance, that Sir Roderick was afraid of a ladder? When he, Mallow, Tubby and Sir Roderick were festooning the hall with holly, he saw Sir Roderick begin timidly, with trembling shanks, to climb some steps. He went to him, put his hand on his arm, and led him safely to ground again.