All Souls'
Queer and inexplicable as the business was, on the surface it appeared fairly simple — at the time, at least; but with the passing of years, and owing to there not having been a single witness of what happened except Sara Clayburn herself, the stories about it have become so exaggerated, and often so ridiculously inaccurate, that it seems necessary that someone connected with the affair, though not actually present — I repeat that when it happened my cousin was (or thought she was) quite alone in her house — should record the few facts actually known.
In those days I was often at Whitegates (as the place had always been called) — I was there, in fact, not long before, and almost immediately after, the strange happenings of those thirty-six hours. Jim Clayburn and his widow were both my cousins, and because of that, and of my intimacy with them, both families think I am more likely than anybody else to be able to get at the facts, as far as they can be called facts, and as anybody can get at them. So I have written down, as clearly as I could, the gist of the various talks I had with cousin Sara, when she could be got to talk — it wasn’t often — about what occurred during that mysterious weekend.
I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling, in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject. As between turreted castles patrolled by headless victims with clanking chains and the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong, give me the latter for sending a chill down the spine! And, by the way, haven’t you noticed that it’s generally not the high-strung and imaginative who see ghosts, but the calm, matter-of-fact people who don’t believe in them, and are sure they wouldn’t mind if they did see one? Well, that was the case with Sara Clayburn and her house. The house, in spite of its age — it was built, I believe about 1780 — was open, airy, high-ceilinged, with electricity, central heating and all the modern appliances; and it mistress was, well, very much like her house. And, anyhow, this isn’t exactly a ghost story, and I’ve dragged in the analogy only as a way of showing you what kind of woman my cousin was, and how unlikely it would have seemed that what happened at Whitegates should have happened just there — or to her.
When Jim Clayburn died the family all thought that, as the couple had no children, his widow would give up Whitegates and move either to New York or Boston — for being of good Colonial stock, with many relatives and friends, she would have found a place ready for her in either. But Sara Clayburn seldom did what other people expected, and in this case she did exactly the contrary: she stayed at Whitegates.
“What, turn my back on the old house — tear up all the family roots, and go and hang myself up in a birdcage flat in one of those new skyscrapers in Lexington Avenue, with a bunch of chickweed and a cuttlefish to replace my good Connecticut mutton? No, thank you. Here I belong, and here I stay till my executors hand the place over to Jim’s next of kin — that stupid fat Presley boy … Well, don’t let’s talk about him. But I tell you what — I’II keep him out of here as long as I can.” And she did — for being still in the early fifties when her husband died, and a muscular, resolute figure of a woman, she was more than a match for the fat Presley boy, and attended his funeral a few years ago, in correct mourning, with a faint smile under her veil.
Whitegates was a pleasant, hospitable-looking house, on a height overlooking the stately windings of the Connecticut River; but it was five or six miles from Norrington, the nearest town, and its situation would certainly have seemed remote and lonely to modern servants. Luckily, however, Sara Clayburn had inherited from her mother-in-law two or three old stand-bys who seemed as much a part of the family tradition as the roof they lived under; and I never heard of her having any trouble in her domestic arrangements.
The house, in Colonial days, had been four-square, with four spacious rooms on the ground floor, an oak-floored hall dividing them, the usual kitchen-extension at the back and a good attic under the roof. But Jim’s grandparents, when interest in the “Colonial“ began to revive in the early eighties, had added two wings, at right angles to the south front, so that the old “circle“ before the front door became a grassy court, enclosed on three sides, with a big elm in the middle. Thus the house was turned into a roomy dwelling, in which the last three generations of Clayburns had exercised a large hospitality. But the architect had respected the character of the old house, and the enlargement made it more comfortable without lessening its simplicity. There was a lot of land about it, and Jim Clayburn, like his fathers before him, farmed it, not without profit, and played a considerable and respected part in state politics. The Clayburns were always spoken of as a “good influence“ in the county, and the townspeople were glad when they learned that Sara did not mean to desert the place — “though it must be lonesome, winters, living all alone up there atop of that hill“, they remarked as the days shortened, and the first snow began to pile up under the quadruple row of elms along the common.
Well, if I’ve given you a sufficiently clear idea of Whitegates and the Clayburns — who shared with their old house a sort of reassuring orderliness and dignity — I’ll efface myself, and tell the tale, not in my cousin’s words, for they were too confused and fragmentary, but as I built it up gradually out of her half-avowals and nervous reticences. If the thing happened at all — and I must leave you to judge of that — I think it must have happened in this way . . .
I
The morning had been bitter, with a driving sleet — though it was only the last day of October — but after lunch a watery sun showed for a while through banked-up woolly clouds and tempted Sara Clayburn out. She was an energetic walker, and given, at that season, to tramping three or four miles along the valley road, and coming back by way of Shaker’s Wood. She had made her usual round, and was following the main drive to the house when she overtook a plainly dressed woman walking in the same direction. If the scene had not been so lonely — the way to Whitegates at the end of an autumn day was not a frequented one — Mrs. Clayburn might not have paid any attention to the woman, for she was in no way noticeable; but when she caught up with the intruder my cousin was surprised to find that she was a stranger — for the mistress of Whitegates prided herself on knowing, at least by sight, most of her country neighbours. It was almost dark, and the woman’s face was hardly visible, but Mrs. Clayburn told me she recalled her as middle-aged, plain and rather pale.
Mrs. Clayburn greeted her, and then added: “You’re going to the house?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman answered, in a voice that the Connecticut valley in old days would have called “foreign”, but that would have been unnoticed by ears used to the modern multiplicity of tongues. “No, I couldn’t say where she came from,” Sara always said. “What struck me as queer was that I didn’t know her.”
She asked the woman, politely, what she wanted, and the woman answered: “Only to see one of the girls.” The answer was natural enough, and Mrs. Clayburn nodded and turned off from the drive to the lower part of the gardens, so that she saw no more of the visitor then or afterwards. And, in fact, a half-hour later something happened which put the stranger entirely out of her mind. The brisk and light-footed Mrs. Clayburn, as she approached the house, slipped on a frozen puddle, turned her ankle and lay suddenly helpless.
Price, the butler, and Agnes, the dour old Scottish maid whom Sara had inherited from her mother-in-law, of course, knew exactly what to do. In no time they had their mistress stretched out on a lounge, and Dr. Selgrove had been called up from Norrington. When he arrived, he ordered Mrs. Clayburn to bed, did the necessary examining and bandaging, and shook his head over her ankle, which he feared was fractured. He thought, however, that if she would swear not to get up, or even shift the position of her leg, he could spare her the discomfort of putting it in plaster. Mrs. Clayburn agreed, the more promptly as the doctor warned her that any rash movement would prolong her immobility. Her quick, imperious nature made the prospect trying, and she was annoyed with herself for having been so clumsy. But the mischief was done, and she immediately thought what an opportunity she would have for going over her accounts and catching up with her correspondence. So she settled down resignedly in her bed.
“And you won’t miss much, you know, if you have to stay there a few days. It’s beginning to snow, and it looks as if we were in for a good spell of it,” the doctor remarked, glancing through the window as he gathered up his implements. “WeIl, we don’t often get snow here as early as this; but winter’s got to begin sometime,” he concluded philosophically. At the door he stopped to add: “You don’t want me to send up a nurse from Norrington? Not to nurse you, you know; there’s nothing much to do till I see you again. But this is a pretty lonely place when the snow begins, and I thought maybe –”
Sara Clayburn laughed. “Lonely? With my old servants? You forget how many winters I’ve spent here alone with them. Two of them were with me in my mother-in-law’s time.”
“That’s so,” Dr. Selgrove agreed. “You’re a good deal luckier than most people, that way. Well, let me see; this is Saturday. We’ll have to let the inflammation go down before we can X-ray you. Monday morning, first thing, I’ll be here with the X-ray man. If you want me sooner, call me up.” And he was gone.
II
The foot, at first, had not been very painful, but towards the small hours Mrs. Clayburn began to suffer. She was a bad patient, like most healthy and active people. Not being used to pain she did not know how to bear it; and the hours of wakefulness and immobility seemed endless. Agnes, before leaving her, had made everything as comfortable as possible. She had put a jug of lemonade within reach, and had even (Mrs. Clayburn thought it odd afterwards) insisted on bringing in a tray with sandwiches and a thermos of tea. “In case you’re hungry in the night, madam.”
“Thank you; but I’m never hungry in the night. And I certainly shan’t be tonight — only thirsty. I think I’m feverish.”
“Well, there’s the lemonade, madam.”
“That will do. Take the other things away, please.” (Sara had always hated the sight of unwanted food “messing about” in her room.)
“Very well, madam. Only you might–”
“Please take it away,” Mrs. Clayburn repeated irritably.
“Very good, madam.” But as Agnes went out, her mistress heard her set the tray down softly on a table behind the screen which shut off the door.
Obstinate old goose! she thought, rather touched by the old woman’s insistence.
Sleep, once it had gone, would not return, and the long black hours moved more and more slowly. How late the dawn came in November! “If only I could move my leg,” she grumbled.
She lay still and strained her ears for the first steps of the servants. Whitegates was an early house, its mistress setting the example; it would surely not be long now before one of the women came. She was tempted to ring for Agnes, but refrained. The woman had been up late, and this was Sunday morning, when the household was always allowed a little extra time. Mrs. Clayburn reflected restlessly: I was a fool not to let her leave the tea beside the bed as she wanted to. I wonder if I could get up and get it? But she remembered the doctor’s warning, and dared not move. Anything rather than risk prolonging her imprisonment ...
Ah, there was the stable-clock striking. How Ioud it sounded in the snowy stillness! One — two — three — four — five . . .
What? OnIy five? Three hours and a quarter more before she could hope to hear the door-handle turned . . . After a while she dozed off again, uncomfortably.
Another sound aroused her. Again the stable-clock. She listened. But the room was still in deep darkness, and only six strokes fell . . . She thought of reciting something to put her to sleep; but she seldom read poetry and, being naturally a good sleeper, she could not remember any of the usual devices against insomnia. The whole of her leg felt like lead now. The bandages had grown terribly tight — her ankle must have swollen . . . She lay staring at the dark windows, watching for the first glimmer of dawn. At last she saw a pale filter of daylight through the shutters. One by one the objects between the bed and the window recovered first their outline, then their bulk, and seemed to be stealthily regrouping themselves, after goodness knows what secret displacements during the night. Who that has lived in an old house could possibly believe that the furniture in it stays still all night? Mrs. Clayburn almost fancied she saw one little slender-legged table slipping hastily back into its place.
lt knows Agnes is coming, and it’s afraid, she thought whimsically. Her bad night must have made her imaginative, for such nonsense as that about the furniture had never occurred to her before . . .
At length, after hours more, as it seemed, the stable-clock struck eight. Only another quarter of an hour. She watched the hand moving slowly across the face of the little clock beside her bed . . . Ten minutes . . . five . . . only five! Agnes was as punctual as destiny . . . in two minutes now she would come. The two minutes passed, and she did not come. Poor Agnes — she had looked pale and tired the night before. She had overslept herself, no doubt — or perhaps she felt ill, and would send the housemaid to replace her. Mrs. Clayburn waited.
She waited half an hour; then she reached up to the bell at the head of the bed. Poor old Agnes — her mistress felt guilty about waking her. But Agnes did not appear — and after a considerable interval Mrs. Clayburn, now with certain impatience, rang again. She rang once, twice, three times — but still no one came.
Once more she waited; then she said to herself: There must be something wrong with the electricity. Well — she could find out by switching on the bed-lamp at her elbow (how admirably the room was equipped with each practical appliance!). She switched it on — but no light came. Electric current cut off; and it was Sunday, and nothing could be done about it till the next morning. Unless it turned out to be just a burned-out fuse, which Price could remedy. Well, in a moment now someone would surely come to her door.
lt was nine o’clock before she admitted to herself that something uncommonly strange must have happened in the house. She began to feel a nervous apprehension; but she was not the woman to encourage it. If only she had had the telephone put in her room, instead of out on the landing! She measured mentally the distance to be travelled, remembered Dr. Selgrove’s admonition, and wondered if her broken ankle would carry her there. She dreaded the prospect of being put in plaster, but she had to get to the telephone, whatever happened.
She wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, found a walking stick and, resting heavily on it, dragged herself to the door. In her bedroom the careful Agnes had closed and fastened the shutters, so that it was not much lighter there than at dawn; but outside in the corridor the cold whiteness of the snowy morning seemed almost reassuring. Mysterious things — dreadful things — were associated with darkness; and here was the wholesome prosaic daylight come again to banish them. Mrs. Clayburn looked about her and listened. Silence. A deep nocturnal silence in that daylit house, in which five people were presumably coming and going about their work. lt was certainly strange . . . She looked out of the window, hoping to see someone crossing the court or coming along the drive. But no one was in sight, and the snow seemed to have the place to itself: a quiet steady snow. lt was still falling, with a business-like regularity, muffling the outer world in layers on layers of thick white velvet, and intensifying the silence within. A noiseless world — were people so sure that absence of noise was what they wanted? Let them first try a Ionely country house in a November snowstorm!
She dragged herself along the passage to the telephone. When she unhooked the receiver she noticed that her hand trembled.
She rang up the pantry — no answer. She rang again. Silence — more silence! lt seemed to be piling itself up like the snow on the roof and in the gutters. Silence. How many people that she knew had any idea what silence was — and how loud it sounded when you really listened to it?
Again she waited; then she rang up “Central”. No answer. She tried three times. After that she tried the pantry again . . . The telephone was cut off, then; like the electric current. Who was at work downstairs, isolating her thus from the world? Her heart began to hammer. Luckily there was a chair near the telephone, and she sat down to recover her strength — or was it her courage?
Agnes and the housemaid slept in the nearest wing. She would certainly get as far as that when she had pulled herself together. Had she the courage? Yes, of course she had. She had always been regarded as a plucky woman; and had so regarded herself. But this silence —
lt occurred to her that by looking from the window of a neighbouring bathroom she could see the kitchen chimney. There ought to be smoke coming from it at that hour; and if there were she thought she would be less afraid to go on. She got as far as the bathroom and looking through the window saw that no smoke came from the chimney. Her sense of loneliness grew more acute. Whatever had happened below stairs must have happened before the morning’s work had begun. The cook had not had time to light the fire; the other servants had not yet begun their round. She sank down on the nearest chair, struggling against her fears. What next would she discover if she carried on her investigations?
The pain in her ankle made progress difficult; but she was aware of it now only as an obstacle to haste. No matter what it cost her in physical suffering, she must find out what was happening below stairs — or had happened. But first she would go to the maid’s room. And if that were empty — well, somehow she would have to get herself downstairs.
She limped along the passage, and on the way steadied herself by resting her hand on a radiator. lt was stone-cold. Yet in that well-ordered house in winter the central heating, though damped down at night, was never allowed to go out, and by eight in the morning a mellow warmth pervaded the rooms. The icy chill of the pipes startled her. lt was the chauffeur who looked after the heating — so he, too, was involved in the mystery, whatever it was, as well as the house-servants. But this only deepened the problem.
III
At Agnes’s door Mrs. Clayburn paused and knocked. She expected no answer, and there was none. She opened the door and went in. The room was dark and very cold. She went to the window and flung back the shutters; then she looked slowly around, vaguely apprehensive of what she might see. The room was empty; but what frightened her was not so much its emptiness as its air of scrupulous and undisturbed order. There was no sign of anyone having lately dressed in it — or undressed the night before. And the bed had not been slept in.
Mrs. Clayburn leaned against the wall for a moment; then she crossed the floor and opened the cupboard. That was where Agnes kept her dresses; and the dresses were there, neatly hanging in a row. On the shelf above were Agnes’s few and unfashionable hats, rearrangements of her mistress’s old ones. Mrs. Clayburn, who knew them all, looked at the shelf, and saw that one was missing. And so was also the warm winter coat she had given to Agnes the previous winter.
The woman was out, then; had gone out, no doubt, the night before, since the bed was unslept in, the dressing and washing appliances untouched. Agnes, who never set foot out of the house after dark, who despised the movies as much as she did the wireless and could never be persuaded that a little innocent amusement was a necessary element in life, had deserted the house on a snowy winter night, while her mistress lay upstairs, suffering and helpless! Why had she gone, and where had she gone? When she was undressing Mrs. Clayburn the night before, taking her orders, trying to make her more comfortable, was she already planning this mysterious nocturnal escape? Or had something — the mysterious and dreadful Something for the clue of which Mrs. Clayburn was still groping — occurred later in the evening, sending the maid downstairs and out of doors into the bitter night? Perhaps one of the men at the garage — where the chauffeur and gardener lived — had been suddenly taken ill, and someone had run up to the house for Agnes. Yes — that must be the explanation . . . Yet how much it left unexplained.
Next to Agnes’s room was the linen-room; beyond that was the housemaid’s door. Mrs. Clayburn went to it and knocked. “Mary!” No one answered, and she went in. The room was in the same immaculate order as her maid’s, and here, too, the bed was unslept in, and there were no signs of dressing or undressing. The two women had no doubt gone out together — gone where?
More and more the cold unanswering silence of the house weighed down on Mrs. Clayburn. She had never thought of it as a big house, but now, in this snowy winter light, it seemed immense, and full of ominous corners around which one dared not look. Beyond the housemaid’s room were the back stairs. lt was the nearest way down, and every step that Mrs. Clayburn took was increasingly painful; but she decided to walk slowly back, the whole length of the passage, and go down by the front stairs. She did not know why she did this; but she felt that at the moment she was past reasoning, and had better obey her instinct.
More than once she had explored the ground floor alone in the small hours, in search of unwonted midnight noises; but now it was not the idea of noises that frightened her, but that inexorable and hostile silence, the sense that the house had retained in full daylight its nocturnal mystery, and was watching her as she was watching it; that in entering those empty, orderly rooms she might be disturbing some unseen confabulation on which beings of flesh and blood had better not intrude.
The broad oak stairs were beautifully polished, and so slippery that she had to cling to the rail and let herself down tread by tread. And as she descended, the silence descended with her — heavier, denser, more absolute. She seemed to feel its steps just behind her, softly keeping time with hers. lt had a quality she had never been aware of in any other silence, as though it were not merely an absence of sound, a thin barrier between the ear and the surging murmur of life just beyond, but an impenetrable substance made out of the worldwide cessation of all life and all movement.
Yes, that was what laid a chill on her: the feeling that there was no limit to this silence, no outer margin, nothing beyond it. By this time she had reached the foot of the stairs and was limping across the hall to the drawing-room. Whatever she found there, she was sure, would be mute and lifeless; but what would it be? The bodies of her dead servants, mown down by some homicidal maniac? And what if it were her turn next — if he were waiting for her behind the heavy curtains of the room she was about to enter? Well, she must find out — she must face whatever Iay in wait. Not impelled by bravery — the last drop of courage had oozed out of her — but because anything, anything was better than to remain shut up in that snowbound house without knowing whether she was alone in it or not. “I must find that out, I must find that out,” she repeated to herself in a sort of meaningless singsong.
The cold outer light flooded the drawing-room. The shutters had not been closed, nor the curtains drawn. She looked about her. The room was empty and every chair in its usual place. Her armchair was pushed up by the chimney, and the cold hearth was piled with the ashes of the fire at which she had warmed herself before starting on her ill-fated walk. Even her empty coffee cup stood on a table near the armchair. lt was evident that the servants had not been in the room since she had left it the day before after luncheon. And suddenly the conviction entered into her that, as she found the drawing-room, so she would find the rest of the house: cold, orderly — and empty. She would find nothing, she would find no one. She no longer felt any dread of ordinary human dangers lurking in those dumb spaces ahead of her. She knew she was utterly alone under her own roof. She sat down to rest her aching ankle and looked slowly about her.
There were the other rooms to be visited, and she was determined to go through them all — but she knew in advance that they would give no answer to her question. She knew it, seemingly, from the quality of the silence which enveloped her. There was no break, no thinnest crack in it anywhere. lt had the cold continuity of the snow which was still falling steadily outside.
She had no idea how long she waited before nerving herself to continue her inspection. She no longer felt the pain in her ankle, but was only conscious that she must not bear her weight on it, and therefore moved very slowly, supporting herself on each piece of furniture in her path. On the ground floor no shutter had been closed, no curtain drawn, and she progressed without difficulty from room to room: the library, her morning-room, the dining-room. In each of them, every piece of furniture was in its usual place. In the dining-room, the table had been laid for her dinner of the previous evening, and the candelabra, with candles unlit, stood reflected in the dark mahogany. She was not the kind of woman to nibble a poached egg on a tray when she was alone, but always came down to the dining-room, and had what she called a civilized meal.
The back premises remained to be visited. From the dining-room she entered the pantry, and there, too, everything was in irreproachable order. She opened the door and looked down the back passage with its neat linoleum floor-covering. The deep silence accompanied her; she still felt it moving watchfully at her side, as though she were its prisoner and it might throw itself upon her if she attempted to escape. She limped on towards the kitchen. That, of course, would be empty, too, and immaculate. But she must see it.
She leaned a minute in the embrasure of a window in the passage. It’s like the Mary Celeste — a Mary Celeste on terra firma, she thought, recalling the unsolved sea-mystery of her childhood. No one ever knew what happened on board the Mary Celeste. And perhaps no one will ever know what has happened here. Even I shan’t know.
At the thought her latent fear seemed to take on a new quality. lt was like an icy liquid running through every vein, and Iying in a pool about her heart. She understood now that she had never before known what fear was, and that most of the people she had met had probably never known either. For this sensation was something quite different . . .
lt absorbed her so completely that she was not aware how long she remained leaning there. But suddenly a new impulse pushed her forward, and she walked on towards the scullery. She went there first because there was a service-slide in the wall, through which she might peep into the kitchen without being seen; and some indefinable instinct told her that the kitchen held the clue to the mystery. She still felt strongly that whatever had happened in the house must have its source and centre in the kitchen.
In the scullery, as she had expected, everything was clean and tidy. Whatever had happened, no one in the house appeared to have been taken by surprise; there was nowhere any sign of confusion or disorder. lt looks as if they’d known beforehand, and put everything straight, she thought. She glanced at the wall facing the door, and saw that the slide was open. And then, as she was approaching it, the silence was broken. A voice was speaking in the kitchen — a man’s voice, low but emphatic, and which she had never heard before.
She stood still, cold with fear. But this fear was again a different one. Her previous terrors had been speculative, conjectural, a ghostly emanation of the surrounding silence. This was a plain everyday dread of evil-doers. Oh, God, why had she not remembered her husband’s revolver, which ever since his death had lain in a drawer in her room?
She turned to retreat across the smooth slippery floor but halfway her stick slipped from her and crashed down on the tiles. The noise seemed to echo on and on through the emptiness, and she stood still, aghast. Now that she had betrayed her presence, flight was useless. Whoever was beyond the kitchen door would be upon her in a second . . .
But to her astonishment the voice went on speaking. lt was as though neither the speaker nor his listeners had heard her. The invisible stranger spoke so low that she could not make out what he was saying, but the tone was passionately earnest, almost threatening. The next moment, she realized that he was speaking in a foreign language, a language unknown to her. Once more her terror was surmounted by the urgent desire to know what was going on, so close to her yet unseen. She crept to the slide, peered cautiously through into the kitchen, and saw that it was as orderly and empty as the other rooms. But in the middle of the carefully scoured table stood a portable wireless, and the voice she heard came out of it . . .
She must have fainted then, she supposed; at any rate she felt so weak and dizzy that her memory of what happened next remained indistinct. But in the course of time she groped her way back to the pantry, and there found a bottle of spirits — brandy or whisky, she could not remember which. She found a glass, poured herself a stiff drink and, while it was flushing through her veins, managed, she never knew with how many shuddering delays, to drag herself through the deserted ground floor, up the stairs and down the corridor to her own room. There, apparently, she fell across the threshold, again unconscious . . .
When she came to, she remembered, her first care had been to lock herself in; then to recover her husband’s revolver. It was not loaded, but she found some cartridges and succeeded in loading it. Then she remembered that Agnes, on leaving her the evening before, had refused to carry away the tray with the tea and sandwiches, and she fell on them with a sudden hunger. She recalled also noticing that a flask of brandy had been put beside the thermos, and being vaguely surprised. Agnes’s departure, then, had been deliberately planned, and she had known that her mistress, who never touched spirits, might have need of a stimulant before she returned. Mrs. Clayburn poured some of the brandy into her tea, and swallowed it greedily.
After that (she told me later), she remembered that she had managed to start a fire in her grate and, after warming herself, had got back into her bed, piling on it all the coverings she could find. The afternoon passed in a haze of pain, out of which there emerged now and then a dim shape of fear — the fear that she might lie there alone and untended till she died of cold, and of the terror of her solitude. For she was sure by this time that the house was empty — completely empty, from garret to cellar. She knew it was so, she could not tell why; but again she felt that it must be because of this peculiar quality of the silence — the silence which had dogged her steps wherever she went, and was now folded down on her like a pall. She was sure that the nearness of any other human being, however dumb and secret, would have made a faint crack in the texture of that silence, flawed it as a sheet of glass is flawed by a pebble thrown against it . . .
IV
“Is that easier?” the doctor asked, lifting himself from bending over her ankle. He shook his head disapprovingly. “Looks to me as if you’d disobeyed orders, eh? Been moving about, haven’t you? And I guess Dr. Selgrove told you to keep quiet till he saw you again, didn’t he?”
The speaker was a stranger, whom Mrs. Clayburn knew only by name. Her own doctor had been called away that morning to the bedside of an old patient in Baltimore, and had asked this young man, who was beginning to be known at Norrington, to replace him. The newcomer was shy, and somewhat familiar, as the shy often are, and Mrs. Clayburn decided that she did not much like him. But before she could convey this by the tone of her reply (and she was past-mistress of the shade of disapproval) she heard Agnes speaking — yes, Agnes, the same, the usual Agnes, standing behind the doctor, neat and stern-looking as ever. “Mrs. Clayburn must have got up and walked about in the night instead of ringing for me, as she’d ought to,” Agnes intervened severely.
This was too much! In spite of the pain, which was now exquisite, Mrs. Clayburn laughed. “Ringing for you? How could I, with the electricity cut off?”
“The electricity cut off?” Agnes’s surprise was masterly. “Why, when was it cut off?” She pressed her finger on the hell beside the bed, and the call tinkled through the quiet room. “I tried that bell before l Ieft you last night, madam, because if there’d been anything wrong with it I’d have come and slept in the dressing-room sooner than leave you here alone.”
Mrs. Clayburn lay speechless, staring up at her. “Last night? But last night I was all alone in the house.”
Agnes’s firm features did not alter. She folded her hands resignedly across her trim apron. “Perhaps the pain’s made you a little confused, madam.” She looked at the doctor, who nodded.
“The pain in your foot must have been pretty bad,” he said.
“lt was,” Mrs. Clayburn replied. “But it was nothing to the horror of being left alone in this empty house since the day before yesterday, with the heat and the electricity cut off, and the telephone not working.”
The doctor was looking at her in evident wonder. Agnes’s sallow face flushed slightly, but only as if in indignation at an unjust charge. “But, madam, I made up your fire with my own hands last night — and, look, it’s smouldering still. I was getting ready to start it again just now, when the doctor came.”
“That’s so. She was down on her knees before it,” the doctor corroborated.
Again Mrs. Clayburn laughed. Ingeniously as the tissue of lies was being woven about her, she felt she could still break through it. “I made up the fire myself yesterday — there was no one else to do it,” she said, addressing the doctor, but keeping her eyes on her maid. “I got up twice to put on more coal, because the house was like a sepulchre. The central heating must have been out since Saturday afternoon.”
At this incredible statement Agnes’s face expressed only a polite distress; but the new doctor was evidently embarrassed at being drawn into an unintelligible controversy with which he had no time to deal. He said he had brought the X-ray photographer with him, but that the ankle was too much swollen to be photographed at present. He asked Mrs. Clayburn to excuse his haste, as he had all Dr. Selgrove’s patients to visit besides his own, and promised to come back that evening to decide whether she could be X-rayed then, and whether, as he evidently feared, the ankle would have to be put in plaster. Then, after handing his prescriptions to Agnes, he departed.
Mrs. Clayburn spent a feverish and suffering day. She did not feel well enough to carry on the discussion with Agnes; she did not ask to see the other servants. She grew drowsy, and understood that her mind was confused with fever. Agnes and the housemaid waited on her as attentively as usual, and by the time the doctor returned in the evening her temperature had fallen; but she decided not to speak of what was on her mind until Dr. Selgrove reappeared. He was to be back the following evening, and the new doctor preferred to wait for him before deciding to put the ankle in plaster — though he feared this was now inevitable.
ïV
That afternoon Mrs. Clayburn had me summoned by telephone, and I arrived at Whitegates the following day. My cousin, who looked pale and nervous, merely pointed to her foot, which had been put in plaster, and thanked me for coming to keep her company. She explained that Dr. Selgrove had been taken suddenly ill in Baltimore, and would not be back for several days, but that the young man who replaced him seemed fairly competent. She made no allusion to the strange incidents I have set down, but I felt at once that she had received a shock which her accident, however painful, could not explain.
Finally, one evening, she told me the story of her strange weekend, as it had presented itself to her unusually clear and accurate mind, and as I have recorded it above. She did not tell me this till several weeks after my arrival; but she was still upstairs at the time, and obliged to divide her days between her bed and a lounge. During those endless intervening weeks, she told me she had thought the whole matter over; and though the events of the mysterious thirty-six hours were still vivid to her, they had already lost something of their haunting terror, and she had finally decided not to reopen the question with Agnes, or to touch on it in speaking to the other servants. Dr. Selgrove’s illness had been not only serious but prolonged. He had not yet returned, and it was reported that as soon as he was well enough he would go on a West Indian cruise, and not resume his practice at Norrington till the spring. Dr. Selgrove, as my cousin was perfectly aware, was the only person who could prove that thirty-six hours had elapsed between his visit and that of his successor; and the latter, a shy young man, burdened by the heavy additional practice suddenly thrown on his shoulders, told me (when I risked a little private talk with him) that in the haste of Dr. Selgrove’s departure the only instructions he had given about Mrs. Clayburn were summed up in the brief memorandum: “Broken ankle. Have X-rayed.”
Knowing my cousin’s authoritative character, I was surprised at her decision not to speak to the servants of what had happened; but on thinking it over I concluded she was right. They were all exactly as they had been before that unexplained episode: efficient, devoted, respectful and respectable. She was dependent on them and felt at home with them, and she evidently preferred to put the whole matter out of her mind, as far as she could. She was absolutely certain that something strange had happened in her house, and I was more than ever convinced that she had received a shock which the accident of a broken ankle was not sufficient to account for; but in the end I agreed that nothing was to be gained by cross-questioning the servants or the new doctor.
I was at Whitegates off and on that winter and during the following summer, and when I went home to New York for good early in October l Ieft my cousin in her old health and spirits. Dr. Selgrove had been ordered to Switzerland for the summer, and this further postponement of his return to his practice seemed to have put the happenings of the strange weekend out of her mind. Her life was going on as peacefully and normally as usual, and I left her without anxiety, and indeed without a thought of the mystery, which was now nearly a year old.
I was living then in a small flat in New York by myself, and I had hardly settled into it when, very late one evening — on the last day of October — I heard my bell ring! As it was my maid’s evening out, and I was alone, I went to the door myself, and on the threshold, to my amazement, I saw Sara Clayburn. She was wrapped in a fur cloak, with a hat drawn down over her forehead, and a face so pale and haggard that I saw something dreadful must have happened to her. “Sara,” I gasped, not knowing what I was saying, “where in the world have you come from at this hour?”
“From Whitegates. I missed the last train and came by car.” She came in and sat down on the bench near the door.
I saw that she could hardly stand, and sat down beside her, putting my arm about her. “For heaven’s sake, tell me what’s happened.”
She looked at me without seeming to see me. “I telephoned to Nixon’s and hired a car. lt took me five hours and a quarter to get here.” She looked about her. “Can you take me in for the night? I’ve left my luggage downstairs.”
“For as many nights as you like. But you look so ill.”
She shook her head. “No; I’m not ill. I’m only frightened — deathly frightened,” she repeated in a whisper.
Her voice was so strange, and the hands I was pressing between mine were so cold, that I drew her to her feet and led her straight to my little guest-room. My flat was in an old-fashioned building, not many storeys high, and I was on more human terms with the staff than is possible in one of the modern Babels. I telephoned down to have my cousin’s bags brought up, and meanwhile I filled a hot-water bottle, warmed the bed and got her into it as quickly as I could. I had never seen her as unquestioning and submissive, and that alarmed me even more than her pallor. She was not the woman to let herself be undressed and put to bed like a baby; but she submitted without a word, as though aware that she had reached the end of her tether.
“lt’s good to be here,” she said in a quieter tone, as I tucked her up and smoothed the pillows. “Don’t leave me yet, will you — not just yet.”
“I’m not going to leave you for more than a minute — just to get you a cup of tea,” I reassured her; and she lay still. I Ieft the door open, so that she could hear me stirring about in the littIe pantry across the passage, and when I brought her the tea she swallowed it gratefully, and a little colour came into her face. I sat with her in silence for some time, but at last she began: “You see it’s exactly a year —”
I should have preferred to have her put off till the next morning whatever she had to tell me; but I saw from her burning eyes that she was determined to rid her mind of what was burdening it, and that until she had done so it would be useless to proffer the sleeping-draught I had ready.
“A year since what?” I asked stupidly, not yet associating her precipitate arrival with the mysterious occurrences of the previous year at Whitegates.
She looked at me in surprise. “A year since I met that woman. Don’t you remember — the strange woman who was coming up the drive that afternoon when I broke my ankle? I didn’t think of it at the time, but it was on All Souls’ Eve that I met her.”
Yes, I said, I remembered that it was.
“Well — and this is All Souls’ Eve, isn’t it? I’m not as good as you are on Church dates, but I thought it was.”
“Yes. This is All Souls’ Eve.”
“I thought so . . . Well, this afternoon I went out for my usual walk. I’d been writing letters and paying bills, and didn’t start till late; not till it was nearly dusk. But it was a lovely clear evening. And as I got near the gate, there was the woman coming in — the same woman . . . going towards the house . . .”
I pressed my cousin’s hand, which was hot and feverish now. “If it was dusk, could you be perfectly sure it was the same woman?” I asked.
“Oh, perfectly sure; the evening was so clear. I knew her and she knew me; and I could see she was angry at meeting me. I stopped her and asked: ‘Where are you going?’ just as I had asked her last year. And she said, in the same queer half-foreign voice: ‘Only to see one of the girls,’ as she had before. Then I felt angry all of a sudden, and I said: ‘You shan’t set foot in my house again. Do you hear me? I order you to leave.’ And she laughed; yes, she laughed — very low, but distinctly. By that time it had got quite dark, as if a sudden storm was sweeping up over the sky, so that though she was so near me I could hardly see her. We were standing by the clump of hemlocks at the turn of the drive, and as I went up to her, furious at her impertinence, she passed behind the hemlocks, and when I followed her she wasn’t there . . . No, I swear to you she wasn’t there . . . And in the darkness I hurried back to the house, afraid that she would slip by me and get there first. And the queer thing was that as I reached the door the black cloud vanished, and there was the transparent twilight again. In the house everything seemed as usual, and the servants were busy about their work; but I couldn’t get it out of my head that the woman, under the shadow of that cloud, had somehow got there before me.” She paused for breath, and began again: “In the hall I stopped at the telephone and rang up Nixon, and told him to send me a car at once to go to New York, with a man he knew to drive me. And Nixon came with the car himself . . .”
Her head sank back on the pillow, and she looked at me like a frightened child. “lt was good of Nixon,” she said.
“Yes; it was very good of him. But when they saw you leaving — the servants I mean . . .”
“Yes. Well, when I got upstairs to my room I rang for Agnes. She came, looking just as cool and quiet as usual. And when I told her I was starting for New York in half an hour — I said it was on account of a sudden business call — well, then her presence of mind failed her for the first time. She forgot to look surprised; she even forgot to make an objection — and you know what an objector Agnes is. And as I watched her I could see a little secret spark of relief in her eyes, though she was so on her guard. And she just said: ‘Very well, madam,’ and asked me what I wanted to take with me. Just as if I were in the habit of dashing off to New York after dark on an autumn night to meet a business engagement! No, she made a mistake not to show any surprise — and not even to ask me why I didn’t take my own car. And her losing her head in that way frightened me more than anything else. For I saw she was so thankful I was going that she hardly dared speak, for fear she should betray herself, or I should change my mind.”
After that Mrs. Clayburn lay a long while silent, breathing less unrestfully; and at last she closed her eyes, as though she felt more at ease now that she had spoken, and wanted to sleep. As I got up quietly to leave her, she turned her head a little and murmured: “I shall never go back to Whitegates again.” Then she shut her eyes, and I saw that she was falling asleep.
*
I have set down above, I hope without omitting anything essential, the record of my cousin’s strange experience as she told it to me. Of what happened at Whitegates that is all I can personally vouch for. The rest — and, of course, there is a rest — is pure conjecture, and I give it only as such.
My cousin’s maid, Agnes, was from the Isle of Skye, and the Hebrides, as everyone knows, are full of the supernatural — whether in the shape of ghostly presences, or the almost ghostlier sense of unseen watchers peopling the long nights of those stormy solitudes. My cousin, at any rate, always regarded Agnes as the — perhaps unconscious, at any rate irresponsible — channel through which communications from the other side of the veil reached the submissive household at Whitegates. Though Agnes had been with Mrs. Clayburn for a long time without any peculiar incident revealing this affinity with the unknown forces, the power to communicate with them may all the while have been latent in the woman, only awaiting a kindred touch; and that touch may have been given by the unknown visitor whom my cousin, two years in succession, had met coming up the drive at Whitegates on the eve of All Souls’. Certainly the date bears out my hypothesis; for I suppose that, even in this unimaginative age, a few people still remember that All Souls’ Eve is the night when the dead can walk — and when, by the same token, other spirits, piteous or malevolent, are also freed from the restrictions which secure the earth to the living on the other days of the year.
If the recurrence of this date is more than a coincidence — and for my part I think it is — then I take it that the strange woman who twice came up the drive at Whitegates on All Souls’ Eve was either a “fetch”, or else, more probably, and more alarmingly, a living woman inhabited by a witch. The history of witchcraft, as is well known, abounds in such cases, and such a messenger might well have been delegated by the powers who rule in these matters to summon Agnes and her fellow servants to a midnight “Coven” in some neighbouring solitude. To learn what happens at Covens, and the reason of the irresistible fascination they exercise over the timorous and superstitious, one need only address oneself to the immense body of literature dealing with these mysterious rites. Anyone who has once felt the faintest curiosity to assist at a Coven apparently soon finds the curiosity increase to desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, which, when the opportunity presents itself, breaks down all inhibitions; for those who have once taken part in a Coven will move heaven and earth to take part again.
Such is my — conjectural — explanation of the strange happenings at Whitegates. My cousin always said she could not believe that incidents which might fit into the desolate landscape of the Hebrides could occur in the cheerful and populous Connecticut valley; but if she did not believe, she at least feared — such moral paradoxes are not uncommon — and though she insisted that there must be some natural explanation of the mystery, she never returned to investigate it. “No, no,” she said with a little shiver, whenever I touched on the subject of her going back to Whitegates, “I don’t want ever to risk seeing that woman again . . .” And she never went back.[1]
[1] The short story was copied word for word, indent for indent from Edith Wharton, “All Souls’,” in: The Demanding Dead – More Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Peter Haining (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2007), 183 -207.