Chapter VIII: Part 8

“After I had seen to his burying I felt miserable and went for a long trip. When I returned I instinctively made my way to Monte Carlo. I could not change my thoughts or get my friend out of my mind, so I decided to return to the scenes of our long companionship. I immediately found that my luck had improved at the tables. Then a very strange thing happened. I sent for my guns and entered for the _grand prix_ at pigeon-shooting. I found myself in winning fettle. You always know at the tables or on the green if you are in a successful mood. On the first day I killed fourteen pigeons out of fifteen. The second day saw me in the running for the championship. If you miss five birds you have to withdraw from the shooting, and soon only four guns were left. In the end two of us were left. We had each shot twenty-four out of twenty-six. Then the other missed and I only had to kill one bird to win. Seconds are long on such occasions and my eye was caught by a little sailing-boat out to sea. I could not get my eye off it and out flew the pigeon, not like an easy owl but like a flighting snipe. Ping! I missed my first shot and he swerved. Then I fired to the other side. Ping! I thought, in fact I was sure, I had missed, but no, I had just done the trick. As he flew over the fence he suddenly shot low as though something rose in his path, struck the top of the fence, and fell stone-dead on the right side of the line. I was heartily congratulated by everyone on my prowess. I can tell you it was one of the good moments of my life and as the retriever brought back my last bird I strolled to the man in charge to see where I had hit my lucky bird. The dog man was handling the pigeon all over. I asked him if I hit the head or the body. He began plucking the feathers. When the bird was bare he looked up with a perplexed grin and said: ‘_C’est drôle, pas un grain de plomb!_’ As soon as I heard the fatal words I walked away feeling sick. I did not shoot a pigeon again for many a long day, not until I was absolutely in want of money. And for months I tried to get those words out of my head.

“Years passed, but I never would let my mind dwell too long on the reason why that last pigeon could have shied and knocked its brains on the fence for my special benefit. It was possible that my last shot passed close overhead and drove it downward with the shock it caused in the air. I have heard of duck being killed by the sheer force of a gun’s explosion without being struck by the pellets. So I attributed my good fortune to a combination of natural reasons and my own skill. And the years passed. I went on gambling and gambling, and I must say I had begun to forget my companion of other days. But one evening at Monte Carlo sitting at a table I caught sight of a face opposite which instantly telegraphed my friend back to me. It was the scoundrel who had cheated him at dice of all his money and indirectly of his life. He was obviously down on his luck, shabbily dressed and playing small stakes with furtive apprehension. I know that look so well. A man often has it the first time he throws a stake. He generally has it when he throws his last. I could see that he had not recognised me, but to my horror, when I had a run of luck, he took special notice and came up to address me. He began talking about a system of his own in which he suggested that I should take a share. However, my own was working very well that day and I played on till I had won five thousand francs.

“When I came back to my hotel I was surprised to be told that a friend of mine was waiting in my room for me, and even more so to find that this ugly customer had followed me out of the Casino and somehow discovered where I was staying, for while I strolled home he had skipped ahead and imposed on the concierge with some trumped-up tale. Anyhow, he had been admitted and was there, staking his life and liberty on the chance of making me disgorge a little of my winnings. As he had a revolver pointing at me from the moment I entered my room, I would have been inclined to buy him off as cheaply as I could. But I remembered, what he did not, that I had a blood feud with him of many years’ standing. My revolver was in my outside pocket and we fired about simultaneously. I missed him, shattering the window behind, but he hit me in the shoulder. His pellet ran under my shoulder-blade like a knife. We stood facing each other and aiming. I was trying to fire, but something held me like a vice, and I could not. Every second I expected he would shoot me through the head. I could see his fingers twitching round the stock of his gun. But as I covered him I noticed a horrible look come into his features, and, if I was held, he was held doubly. Though I had missed him clean, a look of fear shot through his eyes, not the fear of a coward or a fool, or even the fear of one man of another, but the veritable fear of the evil for the Evil One when he cheats them at the end. He was staring over my shoulder into the empty bedroom behind me with glazed eyes and a tremor running through his body. He never said a word but fell back dead!

“Just then the concierge and the police threw open the door and I found myself arrested. I declined to tell my story except in the presence of a British consul, and was taken first to a doctor, who found my wound slight, and then to the guard-house, where I was detained for the night, but I must confess I never slept with a lighter conscience. In the morning there was an inquiry before the authorities and I saw from the first that I had matters in my own hand. It was shown that I had left the Casino a winner and my assailant a heavy loser, that he had made his way on a false excuse into my room and that I had been found wounded. There was every suspicion that he had provoked the quarrel. I was only anxious that the affair should be taken down in black and white for my future good name, and I was quite ready to be accused and saddled with an act of justifiable manslaughter. The magistrates after consultation with the police said that they would be delighted to release me, but that they would be much obliged if for the purposes of their report I would tell them exactly how I had killed the deceased. I pointed to my revolver lying on the commissary’s desk. ‘No, _monsieur_,’ I was politely told, and they all shook their heads mysteriously. ‘No, _monsieur_, you may have fired, but you must have killed him in some other way.’ I looked bewildered. Then the commissary went on in a quiet voice to say that they had found no bullet-hole, and he ended: ‘_C’est drôle, pas un grain de plomb!_’ But, whether from loss of blood or excitement, I had fainted.”

AT THE HIGH TABLE

The port was passing at the High Table of St. Zacchaeus’ College in the University of Cambridge, port not as diners at Claridge’s or the Ritz know port, but grand old College port that deceased Bursars, untroubled by wife or work, had spent time and taste laying down in the College cellars in the fifties and sixties. Nobody knew how much of the best survived there, but regularly at the great College Feasts of St. Zacchaeus, such as his _Nativitas_ or the anniversary of the Translation of his Relic from the local Cathedral to the mediæval College founded in his name, as well as on the day marked curiously in the Calendar of the late or pseudo-Lincoln Use, “_Sanctus Zacchaeus inter sycamoris_,” the best and most wonderful of ports appeared at the High Table. Each of the older Dons sipped the cloistered nectar as though it was his last glass, and guests made gentle inquiry of its abundancy or likelihood of appearance at the Feasts of the following year. There was no certainty, but it was rumoured that a Junior Bursar had boasted--in his cups--that enough remained to flood the front court of the College unto one and three-quarter inches deep. But he was not a mathematician!

The port was passing and three times the hospitable Master of St. Zacchaeus’ had filled his glass and mine. Since the War the College Feasts had been kept very quietly, and the younger Fellows elected since that sanguine deluge were already rising and asking the Master’s leave to return to their studies. They were an entirely new type compared to the mottle-faced old Dons; less human and far more efficient. The Master contemplated their departure good-humouredly. “They are a far harder working lot than we ever were,” he mentioned, “though they do rather resemble hair-dressers’ assistants. Praiseworthy young men and very concentrated in their ways. That young gentleman who has refused port, was, I believe, once a Canadian cowboy, but after a distinguished service in the Army took advantage of the call to ‘Hands across the Sea’ to study Law with us, and so successfully that we made him a Fellow. Though he keeps his hands off the port he is no milkmaid. In fact, I believe he came to one of his colleagues, who had been kind and lent him books, and offered to arrange the disappearance of any person to whom he had most objection in the University.”

The Master was in talking mood and several of us collected round him. “Strange times are upon us, gentlemen, but no doubt we seemed just as strange to the generation that went before us. I have lived to see a race of Undergraduates who do not go to Chapel, and of Dons who have invested their Fellowships in wives or motor-cars. I really feel that the Don who cranks his own car has forded the Rubicon.” And he laughed pleasantly at his own little joke. We laughed hugely.

We sat back against the old red-leathered chairs on the dais under the solemn dust-laden pictures of the holy or unholy founders (according as politics or religion might move the mind of the spectator) and watched the last flicker of the sunset stir through the coloured oriel-window and reflect itself in the great West window of the Chapel. For modern glass it was very beautiful. The Chapel was of course mediæval, but the old stained glass, together with the Relic of Saint Zacchaeus, had been barbarously destroyed by the infamous iconoclast Dowsing in the seventeenth century. But it was piously held that the big sycamore growing in the Fellows’ Garden had sprung from the ashes of the saint and it was solemnly watered and secretly cherished as a rival to Milton’s mulberry and Newton’s apple tree in neighbouring colleges. With the era of Gothic revivals and restorations the glass had been replaced in the mullioned windows. The West window was certainly very magnificent, but the choice of subjects had always puzzled me as an Undergraduate. They seemed such an incongruous selection, but there they were in their full Munich blazonry! Like most Undergraduates it had not been for me to inquire or question. But as the dying light threw them into rainbow splendour, I ventured to ask the Master whether the subjects had been chosen by the Donor or by the College. I always understood the window had been given by some old retired Fellow long deceased. For answer the Master merely passed the port again and asked me whether I had a sufficiently low opinion of Royal Commissioners, who had come to harrow his last years upon earth. I replied that when Commissioners began to inquire into the finances and statutes of Colleges like St. Zacchaeus I regarded them as somewhat above the common run of burglars, but infinitely lower, morally and socially, than the Familiars of the Inquisition. With which reply he seemed far from displeased.

About ten minutes later he gave me a signal proof of his pleasure, for he took up my previous question concerning the West window and said: “Yes, they are very curious and unexpected subjects to find in a College Chapel. It can only be said of them that they are scriptural. But their display there is not meaningless,” and he began unweaving one of those curious stories which lie in the experience or recollection of the wisest and most venerable of us. Beneath the outer crust of stratified anecdote and ordinary gossip there lies some story in almost every man’s life, which he is generally as reluctant to dispense as a cellarer his best port. It is often a ghost story, and most men are unwilling to confess that the inexplicable has ever crossed their plain path of life. Or, like much in Heaven and earth, a streak of the so-called indelicate gives it a taste that is not always agreeable. But in Life and in Literature, in books sacred or profane, in dealing with God or with mankind, these matters must be accepted as an essential part of the Divine dispensation or of human nature. It is not necessary to make them seem the sole circumstance or interest of our minds, but it is difficult to go far in Life or Literature without realising and if possible understanding them. Sex is the quintessence of the Body just as ghosts are distillations of the spirit.

Wise is the man who without seeking either is prepared to meet them spadewise, that is to say knowing how to recognise and describe a spade as a spade. And the old Master from whom I had never heard a word touching either the weird or the sexual side of life began quite simply to talk about both.

“In the old days, before the last Royal Commission interfered with the working of University life, I must admit that a great deal required reform, though reform is one of the words I dislike most in the language. For instance, this was a College of unmarried men entirely; and at the time of the Dissolution, for how else can I describe an era when our Fellows were, not entirely owing to their own fault, very dissolute, I am sorry to say that this College provided not a Boathouse on the River or a Cricket Pavilion nearer home, but frankly a brothel in Barnwell--for the elder members of course.”

The last light of evening sank into the unrecognisable panes of the Chapel window and the porters were lighting the gas jets in the Court. The Master’s words seemed a bitter commentary on the history of this home of peace and learning and spiritual refreshment. It seemed incredible that it could have been so, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries all things were possible in an English University. I waited a little expectantly for him to continue. “Men came up from the great public schools and settled down upon the bounty of the past. There was little competition among them either here or in the outside world. They lived lives of leisure in College like their relations in family livings and squires’ pews, and both their minds and bodies went to seed. Occasionally there was a great flash of scholarship in the void, like Porson--a rare flash in the Academic pan. For the most part they turned queer or stagnant or ridiculous. There was nothing to occupy them. Some sank under the college wines like a rich-flowing river of Lethe. Statutes hedged them and custom prescribed them a rut, which was stupid as well as narrow. But before they became decayed curios they were men like us all, and when they came up and settled down to celibacy without idealism, and study without enthusiasm, and manhood without athletics, well, what could you expect without a certain amount of moral wreckage? The College, which always enjoyed a noble income, allowed them to overstep certain Statutes both human and divine, and handsomely too. Young and vigorous men, cut off from life by rule, were, so to speak, initiated into the mysteries of life by their colleagues. Frankly our Fellows often lived in sin.

“It was all very irregular. Of course, it was not common or general, but no doubt Barnwell had its convenience in saving us from scandal within the College. Whether it was regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the College afforded it. Again I say that those days were far from being our days. Englishmen were freer of speech and action then. I appreciate the great change that has now come for the better. It is right that Dons should be allowed to marry.”

Darkness had fallen upon the beautiful pile of pinnacles and towers outside, and the silver candlesticks on the High Table threw but a feeble and ironical little light into the court so lately deluged with successive hours of sunlight, stark, golden or rubicund in turn. But the hours of sun and sundial had passed, and we were sitting into the hours that are illumined by electric bulbs and counted upon the mechanical faces of clocks. The Master was trying to bring himself back into a forgotten era. His speech flowed precisely. His choice of words did not fail. He was reckoned an accomplished after-dinner speaker, and there were few College Halls whose rafters and gilded lanterns had not rung at some time to laughter and applause evoked by his rich store of the academical anecdote.

He continued: “When the Dons were compelled to be celibate, matters were strangely arranged, as I say. In those days there came to this College one of the finest spirits that have ever been cased in a human body. He was a Greek in body and mind, and he knew his Greek as few of his generation. He came here conquering and to conquer. Mentally and athletically he was capable of anything. But we did not encourage him. If he wished to read for the University prizes, well and good. Nobody prevented him. And if he wished to row in the University boat, well and good. As a matter of fact he did neither. Whatever he touched, we saw him take up with tremendous enthusiasm. And then unfortunately, when it seemed likely that he would remain as a Fellow with us and pass permanently into our Society, he was taken by one of us to this house in Barnwell--not that it was anything unnatural or strange in those days, nor do I suppose that it would be unnatural at any time, but it would be thought nowadays stranger than fiction.

“I believe it was his best friend who took him and introduced and initiated him to those mysteries of creation with which the Creator invested the human race. There he made a liaison with a woman who matched him, not in learning, but certainly in intelligence, and surpassed him in physical powers. When he returned to College he was far from quiescent, and related his adventure rapturously to his friends, concluding with the mediæval snatch, ‘_Mihi est propositum in taberna mori_.’ He said this several times as though he meant it. He was one of those men who carry out what they take up with all their might. He threw himself into his liaison with the energy of one sex and the intensity of the other. And our College life sped upon its way.

“One night at a very late hour the College porter was roused by the bell at the outside gates, and admitted a member of the College whom he was too sleepy himself to identify. But he was sure that it was the only time the bell was rung after twelve during that night. Under subsequent question no member of the College confessed returning late that night. The College has never been one to retire or rise early, and that night at two o’clock I crossed the Court, and I met the man I have been speaking of. He was walking quietly towards his rooms. His fine brow and athletic tread stamped the encounter in my mind. I was not mistaken, and I never doubted that it was he, and I was afterwards able to swear that I had seen him at that hour. It was about the same hour that the porter opened the front gate.

“The next morning we were informed that our bright companion was lying dead in Barnwell, and that the Borough Police were taking possession of his body. Armed with our special privileges and statutes, several of us, including the dead man’s friend, made our way into that suburb which has never ceased to hold sad associations for me. We identified him lying there with a rapt and, I thought, slightly mocking expression on his face. There was a terrible beauty written upon it, and his friend was deeply affected, for he knelt down and began praying aloud, at least we imagined they were prayers he uttered, though from time to time we overheard like a cruel antiphon the words ‘_Mihi est propositum in taberna mori_.’ Suddenly we realised how the dead man’s idle wish had come true and smitten him to dust.

“There was no time for weeping and, as we learnt that, after all, the police had not yet been apprised, we decided to cut scandal down in its roots and to transfer the body in a trusty cab to the College. I will never forget our solemn progression through the half-awakening streets of Cambridge with the corpse sitting between us bolt upright, or our arrival at the front gate, which as a rule was only swung open for the Master or the Sovereign--but which was opened full to admit the cab driven by a discreet cabman. As soon as we had laid the body in his rooms we availed ourselves of one of our mediæval privileges to hold the inquest within our own walls. But the police heard rumours, or perhaps the five pounds we gave the discreet cabman led to indiscretions on his part in a public-house, for the scandalised Borough endeavoured to lay sacrilegious hands upon the rights of the College, and demanded the body. Evidence was given that the deceased had returned to the College late the previous night, and presumably had died within academic walls. This, of course, was the curious part of the story. The porter was certain that he had heard the bell at two because it coincided with the striking of the bell in Great St. Mary’s Church, and also that he had admitted a tall gentleman whose name he had omitted to take. There he was at fault. The rest of the College (and we were very small in numbers then) were prepared to swear that they were within the walls of the College before midnight, and finally there was my affirmation that I actually saw the deceased cross the court that night. The Magistrates and police were a good deal troubled, but they had no evidence and only rumours on the other side. The porter’s evidence carried the most weight. The word of the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity might be doubted and even the oath of the Regius Professor of Law might be found to be unsound, but the statement of the Head Porter of St. Zacchaeus stood.

“We held the inquest in the College precincts, and had no difficulty in returning a verdict of heart failure, which was the medical truth. But the wings of scandal began to beat round our academic calm, and it was thought better that the friend of the deceased, who was perhaps answerable for leading him into temptation in the beginning, should go down from the University as quickly and as quietly as the body of his poor friend.... He went, and disappeared. A quarter of a century later he presented the great West window to the College as a peace offering to the living and a secret memorial to the dead. Remembering the circumstances which I have told you in outline, and not forgetting the remarkable vision which I saw in the College court, you may be able to guess for the first time why the subjects in the window were chosen.”

There was a deep silence at the High Table, and the shadows of fifty years seemed to descend upon the gas-lit court and to fill the hall even into the recesses of the great gilded lanterns rising out of the roof. In the distance the outline of the chapel darkened the very night, and I was only sorry that I should have to wait till morning in order to gaze at the coloured glass in the West window with a thrill and a wonder that I had never yet thought possible in contemplating a religious or symbolic object. I could not help asking the Master whose was the mediæval mind that had dared choose the subjects. “I chose them,” he said simply.

A SAINT

The first time that I was really impressed by the possibility of supernatural power working outside the common or beaten path of materialism was in a Devon country-house. I always believed material things or ordinary events could be affected by the spirit, for instance that it was quite useful to pray for or against rain, and that a fine afternoon generally rewarded the Vicar’s prayers before a Bazaar or School-treat. But that quite extraordinary things were liable to happen out of the blue because of unseen and unknown forces used to be beyond my reasonable expectation. It is not so with me now.

I was staying in a beautiful but nameless old Manor House in Devonshire, cut off from road and rail. The only approach was down a breakneck hill, a kind of gravelly toboggan run into the smiling valley below. Coombes of red, red terracotta earth enclosed the landscape and over the hill-tops floated a glimpse of distant sea. A Devonshire coombe is a pretty piece of landscape pretending to be a switchback railway. It was spring, and spring in Devon gives a springier feeling than anywhere else in England, whether it is the beauty of the Devonian maids or the wonderful red colour of the earth.

The Manor House was Tudor, dating from the time when Englishmen took up home, beer and bowls and gave up Castles, archery and the San Graal. It was built on monastic ground and had passed through the hands of a succession of families, each of which had fulfilled the curse attached to Abbey lands by slowly extinguishing their seed and silver and cellar through the several and appropriate means of drink, debauch and lawyers.

The Manor was inhabited by what are known as Devon worthies, which means folk who are worthier of Devon than other folk, or perhaps that Devon is worthier of them. Every day I wandered out between showers. As a matter of fact I had hit the comparative lull between the vernal deluges and the summer rainy season. It was delicious though wet work watching the patches of gorse, which clung like the rags of a golden fleece to the hill-sides, while the white bloom of the bird-cherry trees lay on the twig-tops like a late snowstorm that had forgotten itself and dried instead of melting in the sun. The harebells ran like blue ink through the wood-bottoms. An occasional bee-orchis sanguified the hedge, like a bluebell whose stalk had been soaked and its leaf spotted with red wine, though from closer it looked like a purple-hooded cobra in the green grass; and splotches of delicate primrose never ceased to advertise the purity and colour of Devonshire cream.

The house was in the possession of the hereditary Lord of the Manor, Sir Petronille Pawkins, Bart., a very robust and pugnacious gentleman with the usual collateral relationship with Sir Francis Drake, a violent temper behind his shirt and plenty of good wine in his cellar. All were in evidence during the party. His mother, the Dowager Lady Pawkins, had never been put out to grass, and had subsided into a rather cheery kind of housekeeper. Certainly she took the place of the pale silent wife everywhere except in the Oratory. The old lady came of Catholic stock and, though frankly she had taken to drink, she had not lost the Faith, which she had handed on to her rowdy son. The terrible undercurrent and possible moral of this story will excuse my saying anything so brutal about a lady who is dead and, I am certain, now with the Blest.

She lived in the house, rather terrorising the wax-pale wife. The Dowager had a reputation for enjoying the cellar as much as her son, so that the two hostesses were a great contrast. The Dowager was fat, cheerful and, to my regret, generally tipsy. She had married the last Baronet as a convent girl and, beyond adding a modern Chapel and a Catholic heir to the family, gave no further example of piety. The beautiful Flemish tapestry in the drawing-room of the adoring Magi was an heirloom, not an evidence of devotion.

She was mixing cocktails for the guests before dinner when I arrived. She explained that this domestic duty fell to her because the present Lady of the Manor did not approve of drinking at all, and was always trying to induce Sir Petronille to take the pledge. This Sir Petronille declined to do on the curious grounds that his father had died of drink and that he owed something to his memory. She too was of Catholic stock, from some forgotten sanctuary behind the Fens. She was young and preferred to leave the brunt of entertainment to her mother-in-law. They were too unlike for any rivalry to rise between them. She reminded me of a candle burning away in the daylight to an unseen flame. Life itself was hardly apparent in her eyes, which seemed to look backwards into her inner self and not upon the wicked world into which she had been given in marriage.

The house party was various. As they sat round the dinner table the first night, I could not help dividing them into the two categories of Bottles and Barrels. It is an amusing game to play with oneself at a dull dinner party. In the first place so many people are shaped like a Barrel or a Bottle. And so often the mental contents are similar. Bores are simply empty barrels, except (what is worse) when they are overflowing ones. Social bottles seldom run to more than conversational soda-water. Very rare is the sparkling vintage, and it is one that needs to be deftly uncorked. I am afraid the Dowager was a typical barrel. The human bottles did not strike me as worth tapping, even Sir Petronille. There were two talkative Americans who could only have been tolerated under the rule of Trappists and even then might have proved unbearable to the Trappists. They were rather like people who had stepped out of books with very little to say worth putting back into books. Their flow of soul was as soda water without the water. There were some neighbours who provided the news of Exeter and even from as far as Torquay, which is the English Deauville, only more so. And there were a few literary men and a budding politician from London who talked rubbish. Naturally we pattered the Metropolitan movies, a cursory list of which may help to date this story twenty years hence. We said all there was to be said about Wembley, about the Labour Parties, the Opposition Parties and Lady Colefax parties; about Steve Donoghue’s riding; about the Rodeo riding; and Lord Dudley’s marriage.

It was the last party that the unexpected might be expected to happen. But good port covers much ordinary conversation, whereas _vin ordinaire_ is difficult to conceal with the brightest chat. We had reached the stage between the first and second glass of port when the servants suddenly disappeared apparently with a scuffle. Our host followed with an oath. Something had gone wrong below stairs. We would have carried on polite conversation until relieved, had not a drift of pungent smoke crossed the doorway. We left the room and hurried to the staircase in time to hear an alarm of fire. The customary scenes at an English country-house fire followed. The unselfish shifted furniture. The selfish shifted for themselves. The budding politician assumed a mediæval helmet and gave loud and continued orders from the stairs with some such caption in his mind’s eye for the next day’s _Mirror_ as “Young statesman acts as fireman!” The men servants stood in different corners of the library, which was found to be in flames, discharging Minimax squirts at each other. The chemicals slowly changed the colour of their livery, but not the stolid cast of their countenances. The ladies rushed up and down stairs impaled on the dilemma of saving the hats in their rooms or leaving their evening wraps in the hall. The rest of the party brought buckets and jugs of water which did as much damage to the carpets as the Minimax to the shelves and curtains. But true to its classical derivative the Minimax minimised the maximum of fire. Amid much hissing and smoking the flame was quenched and the damaged furniture carried into the garden, to wit: a gutted sofa, two charred chairs and a stinking carpet. Everybody congratulated each other on delivery from atrocious death, a telephone call was sent to the Insurance Company, and beer was provided for the expected and expectant firemen of the neighbouring Borough, who arrived in the early morning.

During the rest of that evening the fire supplied an agreeably thrilling note to the conversation. The escape of the party was celebrated with duplication and even multiplication of the port wine. The Americans were shocked and then delighted and even unpersuaded to uphold the reputation of a dry country against the enticements of a drinking Baronet and a wet spring. Lady Pawkins was terribly upset, whether by the fire or the drinking. She hardly appeared at all during the next three days, leaving the house affairs almost entirely to her mother-in-law.

It was remembered that Sir Petronille had only remarked that the smoke had spoilt the port left on the table, and that it was a damnable nuisance the fire had not started a quarter of an hour later. The insurance agent arrived and a cheque for damages was paid. All was as it should be. Sir Petronille’s wife looked a little paler, and nothing happened for three days....

We were returning to tea in the late afternoon when we found the servants extinguishing a fire in an empty bedroom. There was nothing but smoke and smell left by the time we arrived. It was a horrible nuisance. Our host’s oaths took the sheepish grins off the servants’ faces. The insurance agent arrived again and re-estimated damages. It was curious that there had been no grate fire in the room, but it was generously attributed by the agent to forgotten cigarette ends. Everybody looked at each other foolishly, and then somebody blurted out that it was only the ladies who smoked cigarettes. The men smoked cigars and pipes. The agent bowed and smiled; “I have no doubt some lady was forgetful,” he suggested. He was anxious to turn the incident into a good advertisement for the company. “But they don’t smoke in empty bedrooms!” shouted the Dowager. The agent bowed again and withdrew with his report. There was a general laugh, I don’t know why.

A second fire was excessively unlucky, and the only consolation which could be offered to the host was that he had surely exhausted his share of bad luck for a life-time. That evening the party kept sober and, when towards ten o’clock the butler entered and with a very scared face reported that a third fire had just been extinguished in the Chapel itself, the party resembled so many aldermen and church-wardens proceeding to view the site of municipal disaster.

It turned out to be a slight outbreak and only a few smouldering hangings had to be removed. It was promptly attributed to one of the altar candles or to the blue light which Lady Pawkins kept burning before the statue of the Lourdes Madonna, now generally taking the place of the mediæval Mother and Child in the shrines of the Catholic community. But it was proved that no candle had been lit since Mass was said on the previous Sunday, and that only the supernatural could have caused the hangings to be ignited from the lamp. Lady Pawkins had been in the Chapel until just before the dinner gong, so all scent was once more at fault. There was no scent in fact except the obvious and unpleasant smell of burnt cloth.

Three fires within four days was incomprehensible indeed. Either it was an amazing coincidence, and by the law of chances could not possibly recur, or it was the work of a firebug--more politely called a pyromaniac. There must be somebody in the house with a Freudian fancy for setting random fire to the furniture in broad daylight. Even so, it was impossible to strike a cause. The staff was old and warranted. Many had been reared under the family they served. A fire in the Manor House was unheard of. Guests and servants were anxious equally to prove alibis for themselves. The odd thing was that nobody had been alone when any of the fires had started, except Lady Pawkins praying in the Oratory; and the Oratory fire occurred while she was out. It was more than strange. That evening the ladies were as voluble as the men were thoughtful. The budding politician said he owed it to his constituents not to expose himself to suffocation in his bed. The Americans rehearsed endlessly the great fire in Boston, the greater fire in Chicago and the greatest of all in San Francisco. And there was talk of the disaster to the _General Slocum_ and much other cheerful and appertaining matter.

Nobody slept that night, and the gentlemen took turns to patrol the passages. Nothing happened, nor during the next day, which was a Saturday. There arrived detectives from one of the great London agencies, and a Benedictine priest from the neighbouring monastery, who came regularly to hear the confessions of the Ladies Pawkins. On this occasion only the younger of the two was available. I regret to say that the Dowager had, under the strain of three fires, become amusingly drunk. I watched the younger woman pass into the Oratory and kneel, paler-faced than ever. An hour later the monk passed out of the house. She had apparently made up for the absence of other penitents, but what on earth, I thought, could she have had to tell her confessor? But, then, there are more things in Heaven and earth than.... Most of her time was spent in the chapel praying, and the hours spared from her devotions were lavished on the comfort of her guests. Her hospitality was humble rather than brilliant. She was found one morning making her mother-in-law’s bed, and nobody had any doubt of the unseen hands that changed and rearranged the flowers in the rooms every afternoon. She lived in the house, but she hardly seemed to be of the house party. Yet she was indefatigable at every meal and in her care for the guests. For their vinal welfare alone she showed indifference, if not abhorrence. And, like most model hostesses, she made no attempt to add to the gaiety of the party, though she never allowed a trace of tiredness or boredom to cross her face. But her smile was worth more than much laughter from the drunken.

Meantime the sleuth-hounds had arrived--one in the impenetrable disguise of a valet, who spent long mornings and discreet evenings brushing the threads out of our evening trousers. Another was ambushed as literary adviser to Sir Petronille Pawkins, and it was given out that the Baronet, who was almost illiterate, intended editing some chapters of his very obscure family history. While we ate, they sought clues and found them not. The sole result of their search was the finding of a number of private letters in coat pockets, which letters were surrendered to those least intended to see them. A number of unpaid bills, addressed to the Dowager Lady Pawkins, were handed by mistake to Lady Pawkins. And a letter from an Inebriates’ Home, directed to Sir Petronille, gave the Dowager the shock of her life. She, poor soul, had remained in a very intoxicated state owing to reaction from the incendiarism. I surprised her one evening mumbling to herself. It was a long rigmarole about trying to fight it (I presume she meant the firebug), about her failure and what a disgrace it was, and finally how good Alice was (Alice was the daughter-in-law). “She won’t give in. She’ll beat it,” and the old lady burst into hysterics.

The local police carried out a portentous investigation of footprints and thumbmarks to substantiate a theory of malicious arson from without. The local constable found and rightly measured the inspector’s bootmark in the garden clay, and the inspector found a finger-print on a window-pane a few hours later which might or might not have been the constable’s. The clues discovered by means of the house party would have filled a shelf in the Scotland Yard museum.

Nevertheless, there were comic variations in the house-party life, and people became quite amusing against the tragic background, though a certain amount of discreet panic took place. Fear of the unknown hushed the rowdiness of the party. The second fire had sobered them. After the third few dared to take their normal rest. It was obvious to material minds that, if fire could break out on a sofa or among hangings for no reason during the daytime, it might do so during the night-time for a better reason. Nobody cares to be roasted in bed, so we broke the party into night patrols and relieved one another in watching the passages and hunting for the most likely places for the spontaneous combustion to occur which had been solemnly adduced by one of the theorists. The leader of each watch was armed with the dinner-gong, on which he was urged to sound the alarm. The next night was unquiet. The alarm was given on two occasions, needlessly. One of the Americans dropped a lighted cigarette into his bed, while trying to keep awake until his time for watch. He promptly gave the alarm himself, and the presence of half the household was required to satisfy his conscience that by sitting on the sparks he had averted a catastrophe. The second alarm was caused by the officer of the early morning watch tripping on the stairs and falling, gong and all, to the bottom. The next morning the representative of the Fire Insurance arrived and, after making investigations on his own account, announced that the Insurance Company had decided not to renew the policy as they were convinced that the fires could not be accidental. He was convinced that fire had been ignited, especially in the case of the chapel curtains, by the use of paraffin or petrol. For the rest of that day everybody searched for combustibles. But during this time no oil had been permitted in the house, and even a box of firelighters, thanks to their specific name, had been buried in the garden.

There was, of course, nothing to talk about at meals except these strange happenings. The Devon Worthies could rake up no analogy except rick-burning, and were inclined to lay the trouble to gipsies or poachers, whom they classed with Bolshevists as the enemies of all mankind. The Americans continued to talk with consummate fluency about the San Francisco fire, with variations on the Boston fire and the great Chicago fire, which was traced to an Irish widow’s cow. The servants became so alarmed that they would only work in pairs. Everything was done to facilitate the work of the detectives. Their finds continued to be irrelevant, to say the least of it. They discovered a secret staircase, which had been walled up a century previously. They also discovered a cupboard full of empty bottles, to which cupboard no member of the family could or would produce a key. The next discovery was mine.

I was sitting in the drawing-room studying the Literary Supplement to _Vogue_, when suddenly I saw the old Flemish tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi stretched across the wall move! There was no draught or motion of the air at the time. I thought it must be an ocular delusion caused by my glasses. Nobody was pulling or even touching the tapestry. But the threads in its texture were moving and wriggling like ashen-coloured worms. The nimbus above the Virgin’s head was trembling and crackling and the white elbow of her arm was twisting and slowly blackening in front of my eyes. It was all happening in perfect silence and for no apparent cause. That was the terror of it, and I dragged myself out of my chair and forced myself to examine the tapestry closer. The woof was crisping and crumbling under the action of intense heat, though it was not yet on actual fire. I stared in a foolish and fascinated sort of way until the sudden spurt of pungent smell roused me to what senses were left to me, and I began feebly sounding the alarm. At this moment Lady Pawkins came down the stairs and entered the room. When I pointed out what was happening, she became deathly white and rang the bell three times, the concerted signal for a fire in any part of the house. Detectives and servants arrived almost immediately and quickly extinguished the sparks running through the threads of the tapestry before beginning an exhaustive inquiry, of which I was the chief butt. The tapestry was handled, fingered and almost dissected. All my words were taken down, and I was even searched for matches, but in vain. I did not describe, a very curious sensation which had been growing upon me, which was the ridiculous idea that Lady Pawkins was somehow responsible for what had happened. The official theory was that the oriel glass had acted like a magnifying glass in setting fire to the tapestry.

After this, the atmosphere in the house became not only serious but rather strained. It was like living in a crematorium with no honourable chance of escape, a crematorium in charge of unseen and probably insane attendants. Were we the victims of an abominable practical joke? Or was there an invisible criminal or an unknown madman amongst the guests? We had stopped suspecting the wretched servants. We grew more inclined to look round among ourselves. Everybody laid what had happened to his neighbour, but how to associate one iota of proof with any individual was a hopeless difficulty. In vain, mental traps were set and the most innocently seeming inveiglements devised. Nobody gave himself away by deed or word or thought.

The atmosphere became quite impossible towards the end of the week. It was far worse than the presence of a ghost or a supernatural phenomenon. A White Lady or an immured nun or chained monk would have afforded welcome relief. We could have slept peacefully amid spectral rattles and death-warnings. But the menace hanging over the house seemed to combine the terrors of the earthly and the unearthly. The firebug that flieth by day giveth no warning, and, whatever was the cause of the incendiarism, there was no comfort in the night. The house party continued to its appointed end rather like a comic funeral, at which the skeleton sat at every feast and lurked in every cupboard. At night the house was watched by night-watchmen with instructions to fire upon anybody attempting to fire the house. And all the while out of doors the beautiful spring was bursting into moist melody. As for the landscape, it was red, red earth all the way, with jerks of blue sea over the hills and far away. The hedges burst into flowerage. Devon is the only county rhymed with Heaven, but it has Paradisal parallels.

It seemed incongruous to see Nature so happy and busy, spinning the loves of flowers and birds, while within the walls of the old house the lords of creation sat in moody and suspicious silence. I must admit that it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life, and certainly I would never have missed the experiences: the uncanny supernatural sensations, the actual personal knowledge of a fire and the study of human psychology reacting to strain. On the whole everybody had improved as human beings. People ceased to be boring or selfish. Everybody became anxious to protect or reassure everybody else. The common fear made us all friends, and we felt we would have something to talk to each other about, whenever we met, for the rest of our lives. The only person who seemed to show not the least change was Lady Pawkins. Her time-table was totally unaffected by what had happened. She still rose at an earlier hour than her servants and prayed in her Oratory. On Sundays and Feast days she remained praying most of the day. Even on weekdays she read the whole Office of the Church to herself. She ordered the meals, and though she left the entertainment to her cheery and collapsible mother-in-law, her personality none the less penetrated the whole house. I was never more conscious of it than at each outbreak of fire. Guests and detectives seemed to look upon her as a phantom and of no importance in the search for the mystery, and yet I reiterate the extraordinary impression I had received in the subconscious part of my soul that she was somewhere at the origin of all this trouble.

At last Saturday dawned and the visit was over for guests, who had been struggling between an intense desire to depart and the thrill of remaining. Most of them had recovered their balance at the prospect of going. There were three extra detectives by the end of the week and the very meals we ate were cooked under Scotland Yard supervision. The Americans were drawing plans of the central heating system, which would be necessary before they paid a second visit. We had long given up trying to affix the deed to any particular person. It was all too complicated.

But two things happened that Saturday morning, which I have not disclosed until to-day. The Benedictine chaplain arrived as usual and, after hearing the news of the week from Sir Petronille, made his way into the Chapel where he was joined by Lady Pawkins. As he descended the stairs an hour later, the tension precipitated us into conversation. He talked about the untoward occurrences and the ladies of the family with the simplest gravity. He spoke with the kindest benevolence and pity of the Dowager: “She put up such a strong fight. But the holy have no peace in this house. She is at peace since she ceased struggling with all her body and soul. Not so Lady Pawkins.” As he spoke, I had the curious feeling in my mind that he had no doubt either as to the source of the fires. When I described the horror of the igniting tapestry to him, he was tremendously interested and asked me to show him the exact place. The tapestry had not been put away and still hung in the drawing-room with an ugly scar upon the Virgin’s arm. He was really excited beyond measure when he saw the mark of the flame, and I heard him muttering to himself: “Poor lady, poor lady! How could she bear it?” Then he flung himself on his knees and began to pray. I made allowance for his nerves and for his deep affection for the Pawkins family and began re-examining the tapestry. I noticed for the first time that the fire had been confined to the imagery of the Blessed Virgin and to her arms alone. The Holy Child and the Magi had not been touched. Something in the thread had kept the flame to the same section of colour in the web. The good monk was very much moved, and remained some time on his knees. I suppose he thought that there was something sacrilegious in even the singeing of the Virgin’s likeness.