For six months Bertha Acres had travelled abroad, and then in the autumn she had bought the Gate-house at Tarleton, and settled down to the absorbing trifles which make life in a small country town so busy and strenuous.
Our modest little dwelling is within a stone’s throw of the Gate-house; and when, on the return of my wife and myself from two months in Scotland, we found that Mrs Acres was installed as a neighbour, Madge lost no time in going to call on her. She returned with a series of pleasant impressions. Mrs Acres, still on the sunny slope that leads up to the tableland of life which begins at forty years, was extremely handsome, cordial, and charming in manner, witty and agreeable, and wonderfully well dressed. Before the conclusion of her call Madge, in country fashion, had begged her to dispose with formalities, and, instead of a frigid return of the call, to dine with us quietly next day. Did she play bridge? That being so, we would just be a party of four; for her brother, Charles Alington, had proposed himself for a visit . . .
I listened to this with sufficient attention to grasp what Madge was saying, but what I was really thinking about was a chess-problem which I was attempting to solve. But at this point I became acutely aware that her stream of pleasant impressions dried up suddenly, and she became stonily silent. She shut speech off as by the turn of a tap, and glowered at the fire, rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of another, as is her habit in perplexity.
‘Go on,’ I said.
She got up, suddenly restless.
‘All I have been telling you is literally and soberly true,’ she said. ‘I thought Mrs Acres charming and witty and good-looking and friendly. What more could you ask from a new acquaintance? And then, after I had asked her to dinner, I suddenly found for no earthly reason that I very much disliked her; I couldn’t bear her.’
‘You said she was wonderfully well dressed,’ I permitted myself to remark . . . If the Queen took the Knight –
‘Don’t be silly!’ said Madge. ‘I am wonderfully well dressed too. But behind all her agreeableness and charm and good looks I suddenly felt there was something else which I detested and dreaded. It’s no use asking me what it was, because I haven’t the slightest idea. If I knew what it was, the thing would explain itself. But I felt a horror – nothing vivid, nothing close, you understand, but somewhere in the background. Can the mind have a “turn”, do you think, just as the body can, when for a second or two you suddenly feel giddy? I think it must have been that – oh! I’m sure it was that. But I’m glad I asked her to dine. I mean to like her. I shan’t have a “turn” again, shall I?’
‘No, certainly not,’ I said . . . If the Queen refrained from taking the tempting Knight –
‘Oh, do stop your silly chess-problem!’ said Madge. ‘Bite him, Fungus!’
Fungus, so called because he is the son of Humour and Gustavus Adolphus, rose from his place on the hearthrug, and with a hoarse laugh nuzzled against my leg, which is his way of biting those he loves. Then the most amiable of bull-dogs, who has a passion for the human race, lay down on my foot and sighed heavily. But Madge evidently wanted to talk, and I pushed the chessboard away.
‘Tell me more about the horror,’ I said.
‘It was just horror,’ she said – ‘a sort of sickness of the soul’ . . .
I found my brain puzzling over some vague reminiscence, surely connected with Mrs Acres, which those words mistily evoked. But next moment that train of thought was cut short, for the old and sinister legend about the Gate-house came into my mind as accounting for the horror of which Madge spoke. In the days of Elizabethan religious persecutions it had, then newly built, been in-habited by two brothers, of whom the elder, to whom it belonged, had Mass said there every Sunday. Betrayed by the younger, he was arrested and racked to death. Subsequently the younger, in a fit of remorse, hanged himself in the panelled parlour. Certainly there was a story that the house was haunted by his strangled apparition dangling from the beams, and the late tenants of the house (which now had stood vacant for over three years) had quitted it after a month’s occupation, in consequence, so it was commonly said, of unaccountable and horrible sights. What was more likely, then, than that Madge, who from childhood has been intensely sensitive to occult and psychic phenomena, should have caught, on that strange wireless receiver which is characteristic of ‘sensitives’, some whispered message?
‘But you know the story of the house,’ I said ‘Isn’t it quite possible that something of that may have reached you? Where did you sit, for instance? In the panelled parlour?’
She brightened at that.
‘Ah, you wise man!’ she said. ‘I never thought of that. That may account for it all. I hope it does. You shall be left in peace with your chess for being so brilliant.’
I had occasion half an hour later to go to the post-office, a hundred yards up High Street, on the matter of a registered letter which I wanted to despatch that evening. Dusk was gathering, but the red glow of sunset still smouldered in the west, sufficient to enable me to recognise familiar forms and features of passers-by. Just as I came opposite the post-office there approached from the other direction a tall, finely built woman, whom, I felt sure, I had never seen before. Her destination was the same as mine, and I hung on my step a moment to let her pass in first. Simultaneously I felt that I knew, in some vague, faint manner, what Madge had meant when she talked about a ‘sickness of the soul’. It was no nearer realisation to me than is the running of a tune in the head to the audible external hearing of it, and I attributed my sudden recognition of her feeling to the fact that in all probability my mind had subconsciously been dwelling on what she had said, and not for a moment did I connect it with any external cause. And then it occurred to me who, possibly, this woman was . . .
She finished the transaction of her errand a few seconds before me, and when I got out into the street again she was a dozen yards down the pavement, walking in the direction of my house and of the Gate-house. Opposite my own door I deliberately lingered, and saw her pass down the steps that led from the road to the entrance of the Gate-house. Even as I turned into my own door the unbidden reminiscence which had eluded me before came out into the open, and I cast my net over it. It was her husband, who, in the inexplicable communication he had left on his dressing-room table, just before he shot himself, had written ‘my soul sickens’. It was odd, though scarcely more than that, for Madge to have used those identical words.
Charles Alington, my wife’s brother, who arrived next afternoon, is quite the happiest man whom I have ever come across. The material world, that perennial spring of thwarted ambition, physical desire, and perpetual disappointment, is practically unknown to him. Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness are equally alien, because he does not want to obtain what anybody else has got, and has no sense of possession, which is queer, since he is enormously rich. He fears nothing, he hopes for nothing, he has no abhorrences or affections, for all physical and nervous functions are in him in the service of an intense inquisitiveness. He never passed a moral judgment in his life, he only wants to explore and to know. Knowledge, in fact, is his entire preoccupation, and since chemists and medical scientists probe and mine in the world of tinctures and microbes far more efficiently than he could do, as he has so little care for anything that can be weighed or propagated, he devotes himself, absorbedly and ecstatically, to that world that lies about the confines of conscious existence. Anything not yet certainly determined appeals to him with the call of a trumpet: he ceases to take an interest in a subject as soon as it shows signs of assuming a practical and definite status. He was intensely concerned, for instance, in wireless transmission, until Signor Marconi proved that it came within the scope of practical science, and then Charles abandoned it as dull. I had seen him last two months before, when he was in a great perturbation, since he was speaking at a meeting of Anglo-Israelites in the morning, to show that the Scone Stone, which is now in the Corona
tion Chair at Westminster, was for certain the pillow on which Jacob’s head had rested when he saw the vision at Bethel; was addressing the Psychical Research Society in the afternoon on the subject of messages received from the dead through automatic script, and in the evening was, by way of a holiday, only listening to a lecture on reincarnation. None of these things could, as yet, be definitely proved, and that was why he loved them. During the intervals when the occult and the fantastic do not occupy him, he is, in spite of his fifty years and wizened mien, exactly like a schoolboy of eighteen back on his holidays and brimming with superfluous energy.
I found Charles already arrived when I got home next afternoon, after a round of golf. He was betwixt and between the serious and the holiday mood, for he had evidently been reading to Madge from a journal concerning reincarnation, and was rather severe to me . . .
‘Golf!’ he said, with insulting scorn. ‘What is there to know about golf? You hit a ball into the air – ’
I was a little sore over the events of the afternoon.
‘That’s just what I don’t do,’ I said. ‘I hit it along the ground!’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter where you hit it,’ said he. ‘It’s all subject to known laws. But the guess, the conjecture: there’s the thrill and the excitement of life. The charlatan with his new cure for cancer, the automatic writer with his messages from the dead, the reincarnationist with his positive assertions that he was Napoleon or a Christian slave – they are the people who advance knowledge. You have to guess before you know. Even Darwin saw that when he said you could not investigate without a hypothesis!’
‘So what’s your hypothesis this minute?’ I asked.
‘Why, that we’ve all lived before, and that we’re going to live again here on this same old earth. Any other conception of a future life is impossible. Are all the people who have been born and have died since the world emerged from chaos going to become inhabitants of some future world? What a squash, you know, my dear Madge! Now, I know what you’re going to ask me. If we’ve all lived before, why can’t we remember it? But that’s so simple! If you remembered being Cleopatra, you would go on behaving like Cleopatra; and what would Tarleton say? Judas Iscariot, too! Fancy knowing you had been Judas Iscariot! You couldn’t get over it! You would commit suicide, or cause everybody who was connected with you to commit suicide from their horror of you. Or imagine being a grocer’s boy who knew he had been Julius Caesar . . . Of course, sex doesn’t matter; souls, as far as I understand, are sexless – just sparks of life, which are put into physical envelopes, some male, some female. You might have been King David, Madge, and poor Tony here one of his wives.’
‘That would be wonderfully neat,’ said I.
Charles broke out into a shout of laughter.
‘It would indeed,’ he said. ‘But I won’t talk sense any more to you scoffers. I’m absolutely tired out, I will confess, with thinking. I want to have a pretty lady to come to dinner, and talk to her as if she was just herself and I myself, and nobody else. I want to win two-and-sixpence at bridge with the expenditure of enormous thought. I want to have a large breakfast tomorrow and read The Times afterwards, and go to Tony’s club and talk about crops and golf and Irish affairs and Peace Conferences, and all the things that don’t matter one straw!’
‘You’re going to begin your programme tonight, dear,’ said Madge. ‘A very pretty lady is coming to dinner, and we’re going to play bridge afterwards.’
Madge and I were ready for Mrs Acres when she arrived, but Charles was not yet down. Fungus, who has a wild adoration for Charles, quite unaccountable, since Charles has no feelings for dogs, was helping him to dress, and Madge, Mrs Acres, and I waited for his appearance. It was certainly Mrs Acres whom I had met last night at the door of the post-office, but the dim light of sunset had not enabled me to see how wonderfully handsome she was. There was something slightly Jewish about her profile: the high forehead, the very full-lipped mouth, the bridged nose, the prominent chin, all suggested rather than exemplified an Eastern origin. And when she spoke she had that rich softness of utterance, not quite hoarseness, but not quite of the clear-cut distinctness of tone which characterises northern nations. Something southern, something Eastern . . .
‘I am bound to ask one thing,’ she said, when, after the usual greetings, we stood round the fireplace, waiting for Charles – ‘but have you got a dog?’
Madge moved towards the bell.
‘Yes, but he shan’t come down if you dislike dogs,’ she said. ‘He’s wonderfully kind, but I know – ’
‘Ah, it’s not that,’ said Mrs Acres. ‘I adore dogs. But I only wished to spare your dog’s feelings. Though I adore them, they hate me, and they’re terribly frightened of me. There’s something anti-canine about me.’
It was too late to say more. Charles’s steps clattered in the little hall outside, and Fungus was hoarse and amused. Next moment the door opened, and the two came in.
Fungus came in first. He lolloped in a festive manner into the middle of the room, sniffed and snorted in greeting, and then turned tail. He slipped and skidded on the parquet outside, and we heard him bundling down the kitchen stairs.
‘Rude dog,’ said Madge. ‘Charles, let me introduce you to Mrs Acres. My brother, Mrs Acres: Sir Charles Alington.’
Our little dinner-table of four would not permit of separate conversations, and general topics, springing up like mushrooms, wilted and died at their very inception. What mood possessed the others I did not at that time know, but for myself I was only conscious of some fundamental distaste of the handsome, clever woman who sat on my right, and seemed quite unaffected by the withering atmosphere. She was charming to the eye, she was witty to the ear, she had grace and gracefulness, and all the time she was something terrible. But by degrees, as I found my own distaste increasing, I saw that my brother-in-law’s interest was growing correspondingly keen. The ‘pretty lady’ whose presence at dinner he had desired and obtained was enchaining him – not, so I began to guess, for her charm and her prettiness, but for some purpose of study, and I wondered whether it was her beautiful Jewish profile that was confirming to his mind some Anglo-Israelitish theory, whether he saw in her fine brown eyes the glance of the seer and the clairvoyante, or whether he divined in her some reincarnation of one of the famous or the infamous dead. Certainly she had for him some fascination beyond that of the legitimate charm of a very handsome woman; he was studying her with intense curiosity.
‘And you are comfortable in the Gate-house?’ he suddenly rapped out at her, as if asking some question of which the answer was crucial.
‘Ah! but so comfortable,’ she said – ‘such a delightful atmosphere. I have never known a house that “felt” so peaceful and homelike. Or is it merely fanciful to imagine that some houses have a sense of tranquillity about them and others are uneasy and even terrible?’
Charles stared at her a moment in silence before he recollected his manners.
‘No, there may easily be something in it, I should say,’ he answered. ‘One can imagine long centuries of tranquillity actually investing a home with some sort of psychical aura perceptible to those who are sensitive.’
She turned to Madge.
‘And yet I have heard a ridiculous story that the house is supposed to be haunted,’ she said. ‘If it is, it is surely haunted by delightful, contented spirits.’
Dinner was over. Madge rose.
‘Come in very soon, Tony,’ she said to me, ‘and let’s get to our bridge.’
But her eyes said, ‘Don’t leave me long alone with her.’
Charles turned briskly round when the door had shut.
‘An extremely interesting woman,’ he said.
‘Very handsome,’ said I.
‘Is she? I didn’t notice. Her mind, her spirit – that’s what intrigued me. What is she? What’s behind? Wh
y did Fungus turn tail like that? Queer, too, about her finding the atmosphere of the Gate-house so tranquil. The late tenants, I remember, didn’t find that soothing touch about it!’
‘How do you account for that?’ I asked.
‘There might be several explanations. You might say that the late tenants were fanciful, imaginative people, and that the present tenant is a sensible, matter-of-fact woman. Certainly she seemed to be.’
‘Or – ’ I suggested.
He laughed.
‘Well, you might say – mind, I don’t say so – but you might say that the – the spiritual tenants of the house find Mrs Acres a congenial companion, and want to retain her. So they keep quiet, and don’t upset the cook’s nerves!’
Somehow this answer exasperated and jarred on me.