 The Tomb of Sarah by F.G. Loring My father was the head of a celebrated firm of church restorers and decorators about sixty years ago. He took a keen interest in his work, and made in a special study of any old legends, or family histories, that came under his observation. He was necessarily very well read and thoroughly well posted in all questions of folklore and medieval legend. As he kept a careful record of every case he investigated, the manuscripts he left at his death have a special interest. From amongst them I have selected the following as being a particularly weird and extraordinary experience. In presenting it to the public I feel it is superfluous to apologise for its supernatural character. My Father's Diary 1841 June 17th Received a commission from my old friend Peter Grant to enlarge and restore the chancel of his church at Hagueston in the wilds of the West Country. July 5th Went down to Hagueston with my headman Summers. A very long and tiring journey. July 7th Got the work well started. The old church is one of special interest to the antiquarian, and I shall endeavour while restoring it to alter the existing arrangements as little as possible. One large tomb, however, must be moved bodily ten feet at least to the southward. Curiously enough there is a somewhat forbidding inscription upon it in Latin, and I am sorry that this particular tomb should have to be moved. It stands amongst the graves of the Kenyans, an old family which has been extinct in these parts for centuries. The inscription on it runs thus, Sarah 1630 For the sake of the dead and the welfare of the living, let this sepulchre remain untouched and its occupant undisturbed till the coming of Christ. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. July 8th Took counsel with Grant concerning the Sarah tomb. We are both very loath to disturb it, but the ground has sunk so beneath it that the safety of the church is in danger. Thus we have no choice. However, the work shall be done as reverently as possible under our own direction. Grant says there is a legend in the neighbourhood that it is the tomb of the last of the Kenyans, the evil Countess Sarah, who was murdered in 1630. She lived quite alone in the old castle, whose ruins still stand three miles from here, on the road to Bristol. Her reputation was an evil one even for those days. She was a witch or a were-woman, the only companion of her solitude being a familiar in the shape of a huge Asiatic wolf. This creature was reputed to seize upon children, or failing these, sheep and other small animals, and convey them to the castle, where the Countess used to suck their blood. It was popularly supposed that she could never be killed. This, however, proved a fallacy, since she was strangled one day by a mad peasant woman who had lost two children, she declaring that they had both been seized and carried off by the Countess's familiar. This is a very interesting story, since it points to a local superstition very similar to that of the vampire, existing in Slavonic and Hungarian Europe. The tomb is built of black marble, surmounted by an enormous slab of the same material. On the slab is a magnificent group of figures. A young and handsome woman reclines upon a couch. Round her neck is a piece of rope, the end of which she holds in her hand. At her side is a gigantic dog with bared fangs and lolling tongue. The face of the reclining figure is a cruel one. The corners of the mouth are curiously lifted, showing the sharp points of long canine or dog teeth. The whole group, though magnificently executed, leaves a most unpleasant sensation. If we move the tomb, it will have to be done in two pieces, the covering slab first, and then the tomb proper. We have decided to remove the covering slab tomorrow. July 9th, 6 p.m. A very strange day. By noon everything was ready for lifting off the covering stone, and after the men's dinner we started the jacks and pulleys. The slab lifted easily enough, though it fitted closely into its seat and was further secured by some sort of mortar or putty, which must have kept the interior perfectly airtight. None of us were prepared for the horrible rush of foul, mouldy air that escaped as the cover lifted clear of its seating, and the contents that gradually came into view were more startling still. There lay the fully dressed body of a woman, whizzened and shrunk and ghastly pale as if from starvation. Round her neck was a loose cord, and, judging by the scars still visible, the story of death by strangulation was true enough. The most horrible part, however, was the extraordinary freshness of the body, except for the appearance of starvation. Life might have been only just extinct. The flesh was soft and white, the eyes were wide open, and seemed to stare at us with a fearful understanding in them. The body itself lay on mould, without any pretense to coffin or shell. For several moments we gazed with horrible curiosity, and then it became too much for my workmen who implored us to replace the covering slab. That, of course, we would not do, but I set the carpenters to work at once to make a temporary cover while we moved the tomb to its new position. This is a long job, and will take two or three days at least. July 9th, 9 p.m. Just at sunset we were startled by the howling of, seemingly, every dog in the village. It lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, and then ceased as suddenly as it began. This, and a curious mist that has risen round the church, makes me feel rather anxious about the Sarah tomb. According to the best-established traditions of the vampire-haunted countries, the disturbance of dogs or wolves at sunset is supposed to indicate the presence of one of these fiends, and local fog is always considered to be a certain sign. The vampire has the power of producing it for the purpose of concealing its movements near its hiding place at any time. I dare not mention, or even hint, my fears to the rector, for he is, not unnaturally perhaps, a rank disbeliever in many things that I know, from experience, are not only possible, but even probable. I must work this out alone at first, and get his aid without his knowing in what direction he is helping me. I shall now watch till midnight at least. 10.15 p.m. As I feared and half expected, just before ten there was another outburst of the hideous howling. It was commenced most distinctly by a particularly horrible and blood-coddling wail from the vicinity of the churchyard. The chorus lasted only a few minutes, however, and at the end of it I saw a large dark shape like a huge dog emerge from the fog and lope away at a rapid canter towards the open country. Assuming this to be what I fear, I shall see it returned soon after midnight. 12.30 p.m. I was right. Almost as midnight struck, I saw the beast returning. It stopped at the spot where the fog seemed to commence, and lifting up its head gave tongue to that particularly horrible long-drawn wail that I had noticed as preceding the outburst earlier in the evening. 12.30 p.m. Tomorrow I shall tell the rector what I have seen, and if, as I expect, we hear of some neighbouring sheepfold having been raided, I shall get him to watch with me for this nocturnal marauder. I shall also examine the seratum for something which he may notice without any previous hint from me. 13.10 p.m. I found the workman this morning much disturbed in mind about the howling of the dogs. We don't like it, sir, one of them said to me. We don't like it. There was some at a broad last night that was unholy. They were still more uncomfortable when the news came round that a large dog had made a raid upon a flock of sheep, scattering them far and wide, and leaving three of them dead with torn throats in the field. When I told the rector of what I had seen and what was being said in the village, he immediately decided that we must try and catch, or at least identify, the beast I had seen. 13.10 p.m. Of course, said he. It is some dog lately imported into the neighbourhood, for I know of nothing about here nearly as large as the animal you describe, though its size may be due to the deceptive moonlight. This afternoon I asked the rector, as a favour, to assist me in lifting the temporary cover that was on the tomb, giving as an excuse the reason that I wished to obtain a portion of the curious mortar with which it had been sealed. After a slight demure he consented, and we raised the lid. 14.10 p.m. If the sight that met our eyes gave me a shock, at least it appalled Grant. Great God! he exclaimed. The woman is alive! 15.10 p.m. And so it seemed for a moment. The corpse had lost much of its starved appearance, and looked hideously fresh and alive. It was still wrinkled and shrunken, but the lips were firm, and the rich red hue of health. The eyes, if possible, were more appalling than ever, though fixed and staring. At one corner of the mouth I thought I noticed a slight dark-coloured froth, but I said nothing about it then. 16.10 p.m. Take your piece of mortar, Harry! gasped Grant, and let us shut the tomb again. God help me! Pass on though I am! Such dead face is frighten me! Nor was I sorry to hide that terrible face again, but I got my bit of mortar, and I have advanced a step towards the solution of the mystery. This afternoon the tomb was moved several feet towards its new position, but it will be two or three days yet before we shall be ready to replace the slab. 10.15 p.m. Again the same howling at sunset, the same great fog enveloping the church, and at ten o'clock the same great beast slipping silently out into the open country. I must get the rector's help and watch for its return. But precautions we must take, for if things are, as I believe, we take our lives in our hands when we venture out into the night to waylay the vampire. Why not admit it at once? For that the beast I have seen is the vampire of that evil thing in the tomb. I can have no reasonable doubt. Not yet come to its full strength, thank heaven! After the starvation of nearly two centuries, for at present it can only maraud as wolf, apparently. But in a day or two, when full power returns, that dreadful woman, in new strength and beauty, will be able to leave her refuge. Then it would not be sheep merely that would satisfy her disgusting lust for blood, but victims that would yield their lifeblood without a murmur to her caressing touch, victims that, dying of her foul embrace, themselves must become vampires in their return to prey on others. Mercifully my knowledge gives me a safeguard, for that little piece of mortar that I rescued today from the tomb contains a portion of the sacred host, and who holds it, humbly and firmly believing in its virtue, may pass safely through such an ordeal as I intend to submit myself and the rector to, to-night. 12.30pm. Our adventure is over for the present and we are back safe. After writing the last entry recorded above, I went off to find Grant and tell him that the marauder was out on the prowl again. But, Grant, I said, before we start out to-night, I must insist that you will let me prosecute this affair in my own way. You must promise to put yourself completely under my orders, without asking any questions as to the why and wherefore. After a little demure and some excusable chaff on his part, at the serious view I was taking of what he called a dog-hunt, he gave me his promise. I then told him that we were to watch tonight and try and track the mysterious beast, but not to interfere with it in any way. I think, in spite of his jests, that I impressed him with the fact that there might be, after all, good reason for my precautions. It was just after eleven when we stepped out into the still night. Our first move was to try and penetrate the dense fog round the church, but there was something so chilly about it and a faint smell so disgustingly rank and loathsome that neither our nerves nor our stomachs were proof against it. Instead we stationed ourselves in the dark shadow of a yew-tree that commanded a good view of the wicked entrance to the churchyard. At midnight the howling of the dogs began again, and in a few minutes we saw a large gray shape, with green eyes shining like lamps, shambles swiftly down the path towards us. The rector started forward, but I laid a firm hand upon his arm and whispered a warning, Remember! Then we both stood very still and watched as the great beast cantered swiftly by. It was real enough, for we could hear the clicking of its nails on the stone flags. It passed within a few yards of us and seemed to be nothing more nor less than a great gray wolf, thin and gaunt, with bristling hair and dripping jaws. It stopped where the mist commenced and turned round. It was truly a horrible sight and made one's blood run cold. The eyes burnt like fires. The upper lip was snarling and raised, showing the great canine teeth, while round the mouth, clung and dripped a dark-coloured froth. It raised its head and gave tongue to its long wailing howl, which was answered from afar by the village dogs. After standing for a few moments, it turned and disappeared into the thickest part of the fog. Very shortly afterwards the atmosphere began to clear, and within ten minutes the mist was all gone, the dogs in the village were silent, and the night seemed to reassume its normal aspect. We examined the spot where the beast had been standing, and found, plainly enough upon the stone flags, dark spots of froth and saliva. Well, Rector, I said, will you admit now, in view of the things you have seen today, in consideration of the legend, the woman in the tomb, the fog, the howling dogs, and, last but not least, the mysterious beast you have seen so close, that there is something not quite normal in it all? Will you put yourself unreservedly in my hands and help me, whatever I may do, to first make assurance doubly sure, and finally take the necessary steps for putting an end to this horror of the night? I saw that the uncanny influence of the night was strong upon him, and wished to impress it as much as possible. Needs must, he replied, when the devil drives, and in the face of what I have seen I must believe that some unholy forces are at work. Yet how can they work in the sacred precincts of a church? Shall we not call rather upon heaven to assist us in our need? Grant, I said solemnly, that we must do each in his own way. God helps those who help themselves, and by his help and the light of my knowledge we must fight this battle for him and the poor lost soul within. We then returned to the rectory and to our rooms, though I have sat up to write this account while the scene is fresh in my mind. July 11th. Found the workman again very much disturbed in their minds, and full of a strange dog that had been seen during the night by several people who had hunted it. Farmer Stotman, who had been watching his sheep, the same flock that had been raided the night before, had surprised it over a fresh carcass and tried to drive it off, but its size and fierceness so alarmed him that he had beaten the hasty retreat for a gun. When he returned the animal was gone, though he found that three more sheep from his flock were dead and torn. The serratum was moved to its new position, but it was a long, heavy business, and there was not time to replace the covering slab. For this I was glad, as in the prosaic light of day the rector almost disbelieves the events of the night, and is prepared to think everything to have been magnified and distorted by our imagination. As, however, I could not possibly proceed with my war of extermination against this foul thing without assistance, and as there is nobody else I can rely upon, I appealed to him for one more night to convince him that it was no delusion, but a ghastly, horrible truth which must be fought and conquered for our own sakes, as well as that of all those living in the neighbourhood. Put yourself in my hands, rector, I said. For to-night, at least, let us take those precautions which my study of the subject tells me are the right ones. Tonight you and I must watch in the church, and I feel assured that to-morrow you will be as convinced as I am, and be equally prepared to take those awful steps which I know to be proper, and I must warn you that we shall find a more startling change in the body lying there than you noticed yesterday. My words came true, for, on raising the wooden cover once more, the rank stench of a slaughterhouse arose, making us feel positively sick. There lay the vampire, but how changed from the starved and shrunken corpse we saw two days ago for the first time? The wrinkles had almost disappeared, the flesh was firm and full, the crimson lips grinned horribly over the long-pointed teeth, and a distinct smear of blood had trickled down one corner of the mouth. We set our teeth, however, and hardened our hearts. Then we replaced the cover, and put what we had collected into a safe place in the vestry. Yet even now Grant could not believe that there was any real or pressing danger concealed in that awful tomb, as he raised strenuous objections to any apparent desecration of the body without further proof. This he shall have to-night. God grant that I am not taking too much on myself! If there is any truth in old legends, it would be easy enough to destroy the vampire now, but Grant will not have it. I hope for the best of this night's work, but the danger in waiting is very great. Six p.m. I have prepared everything, the sharp knives, the pointed steak, fresh garlic, and the wild dog roses. All these I have taken and concealed in the vestry, where we can get at them when our solemn vigil commences. If either or both of us die with our fearful task undone, let those reading my record see that this is done. I lay it upon them as a solemn obligation, let the vampire be pierced through the heart with the steak, then let the burial service be read over the poor clay, at last released from its doom. Thus shall the vampire cease to be, and a lost soul rest. July 12. All is over. After the most terrible night of watching in horror, one vampire at least will trouble the world no more. But how thankful should we be to a merciful providence that that awful tomb was not disturbed by any one, not having the knowledge necessary to deal with its dreadful occupant. I write this with no feelings of self complacency, but simply with a great gratitude for the years of study I have been able to devote to this special subject. And now to my tale. Just before sunset last night, the rector and I locked ourselves into the church and took up our position in the pulpit. It was one of those pulpits, to be found in some churches, which is entered from the vestry, the preacher appearing at a good height through an arched opening in the wall. This gave us a sense of security, which we felt we needed, a good view of the interior, and direct access to the implements which I had concealed in the vestry. The sunset and the twilight gradually deepened and faded. There was, so far, no sign of the usual fog, nor any howling of the dogs. At nine o'clock the moon rose, and her pale light gradually flooded the aisles, and still no sign of any kind from this seratune. The rector had asked me several times what he might expect, but I was determined that no words or thought of mine should influence him, and that he should be convinced by his own senses alone. By half past ten we were both getting very tired, and I began to think that perhaps, after all, we should see nothing that night. However, soon after eleven we observed a light mist rising from the seratune. It seemed to scintillate and sparkle as it rose, and curled in a sort of pillar or spiral. I said nothing, but I heard the rector give a sort of gasp as he clutched my arm feverishly. Great Heaven! he whispered. It is taking shape! And true enough, in a very few moments we saw standing erect by the tomb, the ghastly figure of the Countess, Sarah. She looked thin and haggard still, and her face was deadly white. But the crimson lips looked like a hideous gash in the pale cheeks, and her eyes glared like red coals in the gloom of the church. It was a fearful thing to watch as she stepped unsteadily down the aisle, staggering a little as if from weakness and exhaustion. This was perhaps natural, as her body must have suffered much physically from her long incarceration, in spite of the unholy forces which kept it fresh and well. We watched her to the door and wondered what would happen, but it appeared to present no difficulty, for she melted through it and disappeared. Now, Grant, I said, do you believe? Yes, he replied, I must. Everything is in your hands, and I will obey your commands to the letter, if you can only instruct me how to rid my poor people of this unnameable terror. By God's help I will, said I, but you shall be yet more convinced first, for we have a terrible work to do, and much to answer for in the future, before we leave the church again this morning. And now to work, for in its present weak state the vampire will not wander far, but may return at any time, and must not find us unprepared. We stepped down from the pulpit and, taking dog roses and garlic from the vestry, proceeded to the tomb. I arrived first, and, throwing off the wooden cover, cried, Look, it is empty! There was nothing there, nothing except the impress of the body in the loose damp mould. I took the flowers and laid them in a circle round the tomb, for legend teaches us that vampires will not pass over these particular blossoms if they can avoid it. Then, eight or ten feet away, I made a circle on the stone pavement, large enough for the rector and myself to stand in, and within the circle I placed the implements that I had brought into the church with me. Now, I said, from this circle, which nothing unholy can step across, you shall see the vampire face to face, and see her afraid to cross that other circle of garlic and dog roses to regain her unholy refuge. But on no account step beyond the holy place you stand in, for the vampire has a fearful strength not her own, and, like a snake, can draw her victim willingly to his own destruction. Now, so far my work was done, and, calling the rector, we stepped into the holy circle to await the vampire's return. Nor was this long delayed. Presently a damp, cold odour seemed to pervade the church, which made our hair bristle and flesh to creep. And then, down the aisle with noiseless feet, came that which we watched for. I heard the rector mutter a prayer, and I held him tightly by the arm, for he was shivering violently. Long before we could distinguish the features, we saw the glowing eyes and the crimson, sensual mouth. She went straight to her tomb, but stopped short when she encountered my flowers. She walked right round the tomb, seeking a place to enter, and as she walked she saw us. A spasm of diabolical hate and fury passed over her face, but it quickly vanished, and a smile of love, more devilish still, took its place. She stretched out her arms towards us. Then we saw that round her mouth gathered a bloody froth, and from under her lips long pointed teeth gleamed and champed. She spoke a soft, soothing voice, a voice that carried a spell with it, and affected us both strangely, particularly the rector. I wished to test as far as possible without endangering our lives, the vampire's power. Her voice had a soporific effect, which I resisted easily enough, but which seemed to throw the rector into a sort of trance. More than this, it seemed to compel him to her in spite of his efforts to resist. Come, she said, come, I give sleep and peace, sleep and peace, sleep and peace. She advanced a little towards us, but not far, for I noted that the sacred circle seemed to keep her back like an iron hand. My companion seemed to become demoralised and spellbound. He tried to step forward, and finding me detain him, whispered, Harry, let go, I must go. She is calling me, I must, I must. Oh, help me, help me. And he began to struggle. It was time to finish. Grant! I cried in a loud, firm voice, in the name of all that you hold sacred, have done and play the man. He shuddered violently and gasped, where am I? Then he remembered, and clung to me convulsively for a moment. At this a look of damnable hate, changed the smiling face before us, and with a sort of shriek she staggered back. Back, I cried, back to your unholy tomb, no longer shall you molest the suffering world, your end is near. It was fear that now showed itself in her beautiful face, for it was beautiful in spite of its horror, as she shrank back, back, and over the circlet of flowers, shivering as she did so. At last, with a low, mournful cry, she appeared to melt back again into her tomb. As she did so, the first gleams of the rising sun lit up the world, and I knew all danger was over for the day. Taking Grant by the arm, I drew him with me out of the circle, and led him to the tomb. There lay the vampire once more, still in her living death, as we had a moment before seen her in her devilish life. But in the eyes remained that awful expression of hate, and cringing, appalling fear, Grant was pulling himself together. Now, I said, will you dare the last terrible act, and rid the world forever of this horror? By God, he said solemnly, I will, tell me what to do. Help me to lift her out of her tomb, she can harm us no more, I replied. With averted faces we set to our terrible task, and laid her out upon the flags. Now, I said, read the burial service over the poor body, and then let us give it its release from this living hell that holds it. Reverently the Rector read the beautiful words, and reverently I made the necessary responses. When it was over I took the stake, and, without giving myself time to think, plunged it with all my strength through the heart. As though really alive the body for a moment rived and kicked convulsively, and an awful heart-rending shriek woke the silent church, then all was still. Then we lifted the poor body back, and thank God, the consolation that legend tells us is never denied to those who have to do such awful work as ours, came at last. Over the face stole a great and solemn piece, the lips lost their crimson hue, the prominent sharp teeth sank back into the mouth, and for a moment we saw before us the calm, pale face of a most beautiful woman, who smiled as she slept. A few minutes more, and she faded away to dust before our eyes, as we watched, we set to work, and cleaned up every trace of our work, and then departed for the Rectory. Most thankful were we to step out of the church with its horrible associations into the rosy warmth of the summer morning, with the above end the notes in my father's diary, though a few days later this further entry occurs. July 15th Since the twelfth everything has been quiet and as usual, we replaced and sealed up the seratum this morning. The workmen were surprised to find the body had disappeared, but took it to be the natural result of exposing it to the air. One odd thing came to my ears today. It appears that the child of one of the villages, strayed from home the night of the eleventh inst, and was found asleep in a coppice near the church, very pale and quite exhausted. There were two small marks on her throat, which have since disappeared. What does this mean? I have, however, kept it to myself as, now that the vampire is no more, no further danger either to that child or any other is to be apprehended. It is only those who die of the vampires in brace that become vampires at death in their turn. End of The Tomb of Sarah by F. G. Lawring. Recording by Rafe Ball. The Tree by Walter Delamere encased in his dingy and faded first-class railway carriage, the prosperous fruit merchant sat alone. From the collar of his thick, freeze-great coat stuck out a triangular nose. On each side of it, a small, bleak, black eye gazed absently at one of the buttons on the empty, blue upholstered seat opposite him. His breath spread a fading vapour in the air. He sat bolt upright, congealed in body, heated in mind, his unseeing eye fixed on that cloth button, that stud. There was nothing else to look at, for the simple reason that his six narrow windows were whitely sheeted with whore frost. Only his thoughts were his company, while the coach, the superannuated coach, bumped dally on over the metals. And his thoughts were neither a satisfaction nor a pleasure. His square hard head under his square hard hat was nothing but a pot, seething with vexation, scorn and discontent. What had invited him out so far, in weather so dismal, on a line so feebly patronised? Anger all but sparkled in his mind as he considered the intention of his journey and what was likely to be the end of it. Twelve solid, yet fleeting years divided him from his last meeting with his half-brother, ship-load on ship-load of exotic oranges and lemons, pineapples, boxed figs and blushing pomegranates. At this very moment, three more or less sea-worthy ocean tramps were steaming across the watery channels of the world laden with cargos of which he was the principal consignee. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet. He was a substantial man. There was nothing fantastic about him. To put on airs when you couldn't afford them, to meet a friendly offer with ranking gratitude, to quarrel with the only relative on earth who had kept you out of the work-house, he had sworn never to set foot in the place again. Yet here he was, and nothing but a fool for his pains. Having washed his hands of the whole silly business, he should have kept them washed, instead of which he thrust them deeper into his capacious pockets and wandered to God when his journey was to come to an end. No, it was with no charitable, no friendly, no sentimental motive that he was being glided joltingly on. A half-brother, and particularly if he owes you a hundred pounds and more, need not be even fractionally a being one smiles to think of for the sake of old Langsine. There was nothing in common between the two except a father, now twenty-five years in his grave and a loan that would never be repaid. That was one galling feature of the situation. There was another. In plain print, in his own morning newspaper, the fruit merchant had chanceed only a week or two ago on the preposterous fact that a mere woodcut of a mere bird and flower, initialed P.P., had brought at Christie's ninety-seven guineas. Ninety-seven guineas! Sixty-eight crates of excellent denier oranges at thirty shillings of crate! What the devil! His small eyes seemed to congest and yet at the same time to protrude from their sockets. P.P. Perfect pest, paltry poser, plaguey parasite! And yet hardly a parasite. You couldn't dish a half-brother who hadn't sent you a single word of greeting for twelve solid, fleeting, prosperous years with a term like that, even if he did owe you a hundred pounds, even if he hadn't the faintest wish to remind you of the fact. Not that the fruit merchant wanted his hundred pounds. He was not a debt collector. It was the principle of the thing. If half an hour's silly scratching over a little lump of wood could bring you ninety-seven guineas, about twenty-nine and a half minutes would bring in around one hundred. And there were more birds and more flowers in that infernal tree than Noah could have found room for in his ark. The tree. The very thought of it swept a pulsating cloud of rage over his eyes. Cool, quiet insolence he could have forgiven and almost forgotten. But the nearest reminder of that talk about the tree never failed to infuriate him. It infuriated him now almost beyond endurance simply because he knew, even if he wouldn't confess it openly to himself, that this was the decoy which was dragging him on these fifty-three interminable miles on a freezing hideous country afternoon. The tree. Never in all his life had he met with such an exhibition of sheer stark Midsummer madness. And yet with every inch of his journey the recollection grew on him. He couldn't get it out of his head. Curiosity. Resentment. Vindictiveness. A cold, creeping cunning. A score of conflicting emotions zigzagged to and fro in his mind. He glared through them at the walls of his cage. But worst outrage of all was the creeping realisation and his body stiffened at the thought that he was even now, and perhaps a little more than ever, afraid of the tree. When you finally deal with a relative who has been a pest to you all your life, the one thing you do not look for is an interference of that kind. He could not deny it. The tree had impressed him. The moment he thought of his brother, of the country, even of his boyhood, there it was. It had impressed him so much that the upholstered button had now completely disappeared and he seemed to be actually in the presence of the tree again. He saw it as vividly as if its image hung there before his very eyes in the slightly self-warmed air of his solitary compartment. The experience filled him with so sudden a flood of aversion and resentment that the voice of the guard chanting the name of his destination reached him only just in time to set him frantically pulling down on his frozen window and ejecting himself out of the train. One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day, the furs that flanked the dreary passenger shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night. He was elderly. He was obese. His heart was none too sound, at least as compared with his head. Yet, if he intended to catch the last train home, he had scarcely two hours in which to reach his half-brother's wretched little house to congratulate him on his guineas, to refuse to accept repayment of his loan, to sneer at his tree, and to return to the station. A bark at a weedy young porter in mittens with mouth or jar over his long teeth sent him ambling off for a conveyance. The fruit merchant stood under the shed in his freeze coat and square hard hat and watched the train glide out of the station. The screech of its engine hauling up into the windless air had exactly expressed his own peculiar sentiments. There was not a living being in sight whereon to breathe a curse. Only himself, a self he had been vaguely cursing throughout his tedious journey. The frozen landscape lay white in the dying day. The sun hung like the yoke of an egg above the still horizon. Some menace in the very look of this sullen object hinted that P.P. might long since have crossed the borne from which no belated draft on any earthly bank had ever been known to come. Thought diverted into more rugged channels the current of talk which he had intended to engage with his half-brother. In other words, he would give the silly fool a bit of his mind. The fact was, their last quarrel, if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel, had tinctured the fruit merchant's outlook on the world a good deal more densely than he would until now have confessed. No living creature, no sound stirred the air. The fair country lay cold, as if in a swoon. Like a shallow inverted saucer, a becalmed sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the fields. His broad cleft chin thrust into his muffler, his hands into his pockets the stranger to these parts stood waiting, just stood there with his small black eyes staring desolately out of his clothes. Why, you might as well be marooned in a foreign land or on a stage, sterile, cold, vacant, with not a single soul in the audience. At the sound of wheels and hoofs he coughed as if in uncontrollable indignation, and turned smartly on his heel. With a gesture of disdain the fruit merchant's sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy porter's immense knuckle hand and mounted into the ancient cab that had somehow been excavated from the countryside stagnating all about them. The man on the box was like some cautious and obscure little animal that had been dug up out of the earth. When given his direction his face had fallen into an indescribable expression beneath its whiskers. An expression, it appeared, which was its nearest approach to a smile. And don't spare your horse, had barked his fare slamming the rickety door behind him. A railway carriage, even of the most antique description when its glass is opaque with rhyme, is a little less like a prison cell than a four-wheeled cab. For which reason, perhaps, as the vehicle ground on beneath the misty leafless elms, the frigid air was allowed to beat softly in from the open window upon its occupants slightly in the purple face. And still, on and on memory retrieved for him, now here, now there, every incident of his last experience on this self-same road. It had been summer time, June. He had been twelve years younger, a good gross of years less prosperous, and perhaps not quite so easily fanned into a peculiar helpless state of rage. Indeed, his actual meeting with his half-brother at the little white garden gate had been almost friendly. So friendly that it would hardly have been supposed they were in any way unpleasingly related to one another, or that the least responsibility of each to each could have caused any kind of festering recrimination. Not that P.P. was even then the kind of person one hastens to introduce to one's friends. You not only never knew how he would look, or what he would say, he weren't even certain what he might do. A rolling stone that merely fails to gather moss is a harmless object in comparison with one that appears to gather momentum. And even the most trifling suggestion, not so much of vexentricity as of an alien and crooked gleam in the eye, is apt to make the most respectable company a little uneasy. Not that the two half-brothers had ever discussed together their aims and intentions and ideas about life, their desires or motives or hopes or aversions or apprehensions or prejudices. The fruit merchant had his fair share of most of these human incentives, but he also had principles, and one of them was to keep his mouth shut. They had met, had shaken hands, had exchanged remarks on the weather. Then P.P., in his frayed jacket and slippers, had aimlessly led him off with an expressionless face into the garden, had aimlessly dropped a few distant remarks about their common past, and then, surrounded as they were by the scenery, sense, and noises of summer, had pushed his knotted hands into his trousers' pockets and fallen silent, his gray, vacant eyes fixed on the tree. Apart from a clump of elms in the distance, there was nothing in view even to challenge it for beauty, growth, and station. From its station, all but at the foot of the broken hedged, straggling garden, it rose to heaven, a prodigious, spreading, ascendant cone with its long, dark, green-pointed leaves. It stood from first springing branched apex, emotionless, somnolent fountain of flowers. If his half-brother had taken the fruit merchant into a dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an ailing plant that with care, water, and guano had been raised from some far-fetched seed—well, that might have been something to boast about. He himself was in the trade. He knew a jaffa orange from a mandarin. The stuff had to grow, of course, and he was broad-minded enough to approve of rural enterprise. Giant mangolds and prized pumpkins did no harm. He had stared broodingly about him. The garden was a waste. The hedges untrimmed, a rank, lusty growth of weeds flaunted their flowers at the sun. And this tree—it must have been flourishing here for centuries past, a positive eye-sore to any practical gardener. P.P. couldn't even put a name to it. Yet by the fixed, idiotic, dreamy look on his face, you might have supposed it was a gift from heaven, that, having waved his hands about like those coloured humbugs with the mango, the thing had sprung up out of the ground by sheer magic. Nor that the fruit-merchant had denied that it was unique. He had never seen, nor would he ever want to see, its double. The sun had beaten down upon his head. A low, enormous drone filled the air. The reflected light dazed his eyes. A momentary faintness had stolen over him as he had turned once more and glanced again into his half-brother's long, bony face—the absent eyes, the prominent cheek, the graying hair dappled with sunlight. How do you know it's unique? he had asked. It may be as common as blackberries in other parts of the country, or abroad. One of the officers on the catamaran was telling me, I don't know, his half-brother had interrupted him, but I have been looking at trees all my life. This resembles all, reminds me of none. Besides, I'm not going abroad, at least for the present. What had he meant by that? The fruit-merchant hadn't inquired, had merely stood there in the flowers and grasses, staring up into the spreading branches, almost involuntarily shaking his head at the pungent sweetness that hung dense and sickly in the air. And the old familiar symptoms began to stir in him—symptoms which his intimates could have described in one word—fuming. He was not denying it, not he. The tree was remarkable, as trees go. For one thing it bore two distinct kinds and shapes of blossom—the one circular and full and milky, in a dark, cup-like calyx, with clusters of scarlet-tipped pistols. The other a pale yellow oval, three-petalled, with a central splash of orange. He had surreptitiously squeezed a couple of the fallen flowers into his pocketbook, had taken them out at his office the next morning to show them to the partner he had afterward brought out of the business, only to find them black, slimy and unrecognizable, and to be laughed at for his pains. What's the use of the thing, he had next inquired of his half-brother? Is it edible? At which, with the faint smile on his face that had infuriated the fruit-merchant, even as a boy, the other had merely shrugged his shoulders. Why not try it on the pigs? I don't keep pigs. Keep pigs, indeed. There wasn't the faintest symptom that he would ever be able to keep himself. Well, aren't there any birds in these parts? It had been a singularly false move. It has brought its own. Had been his half-brother's muttered retort. There was no denying it, at least so far as the fruit-merchant's small ornithological knowledge went. At that very moment birds of a peculiarly vivid green sheeniness were hovering and dipping between the deep blue of the sky and the mountainous blossoming. Little birds, with unusually long and attenuated bills, playing, fluttering, lisping, courting, and apparently sucking the heady nectar from the snowy and ivory cups, while poised like animate gems on the wing. He had once again opened his mouth, but his half-brother had laid a lean, tingling hand on his sleeve. Listen, he said. Half stifled, jetting, delirious bursts of song twinkled. Bell, rose, died, overflowed from the tented depths of the tree, like the yells and laughter of a playground of children suddenly released for an unexpected half-holiday. Listen, indeed. The noise of the creatures was still echoing in his ears as he sat there, bulkily swaying, his eyes fixed on the pallid, gliding hedgerow from his fusty cab. P.P. had not positively claimed that every single chorister in the chorus was an extiginous visitant. He had gone further. He had gently bent down a low-lying fan of leaves and bloom, and not content with exhibiting one by one living specimens of a spotted blue, iridescent little beetle, a horned kind of cockchafer, and a dappled black-and-yellow mottled ladybird, all of them following their lives in these surroundings. He had also chased, in vain, a couple of exotic butterflies down the slope of the garden, and had pointed out little clumps of saffron and sky-blue flowers and a rank ungainly weed with a cluster of black helmet-shaped florets at its tips, asserting that these were as rare as unprecedented in those parts as the tree itself. You don't mean to say, because the things brought its own vermin, that it's any better for that? We can do that in the fruit trade. It's bought me, said the other, moaning meanwhile in the opposite direction. And where do you raise your potatoes and artichokes and scarlet runners? It looks to me like a damn waste of soil. The wandering greenish gray eyes had rested for a moment on the puffy, contemptuous face a few inches beneath them without the faintest symptom of intelligence. Empty eyes, yet with a hint of danger in them, like a bright green pool of water in an old quarry. You shall have a basket of the fruit, if you'll risk it. It never really ripens. Queer-looking seeds. You eat it yourself, then? The eyes slid away. The narrow shoulders lifted little. I take things as they come. It was precisely how he had afterward taken the check. Seated there, on each side of the deal-table, in the bare, uncarpeted, uncurtained living room of the cottage, over a luncheon of bread and dry cheese and onions, with the reflected light of the tree on his half-brother's face, the talk between the two of them had gradually degenerated into an altercation. At length the fruit merchant, with some little relief, had completely lost his temper. A half-empty jam-pot buzzing with bees was no more appetizing an object because the insects were not of the usual variety. He had literally been stung into repeating a few semi-fraternal truths. To submit to being half-starved, simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look at your bits of drawings, to sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in your back garden twenty times more useless because there wasn't its like for miles around, even if there wasn't, to be content to hang like a blood-sucker on the generosity of a relative half-blood and half-water. Well, he had given P. P. a bit of his mind. The fruit merchant instinctively drew a cold, fat hand down his face as a more and more precise recollection of the subsequent scene recurred to him. Mere silence can be insulting, and there was one thing about his half-brother worse than all the rest of his peculiarities put together that had never failed to reduce him to a helpless indignation—his eyes. They didn't see you even when they were fixed on you across two feet of deal-board. They saw something else, and with no vestige common cursacy. And those hands! You could swear at a glance they had never done a single on his day's work in their owner's life. Every sight of them had made it easier for the fruit merchant to work himself up into a blind, refreshing rage. The cottage had fairly shaken his abuse. The raw onions had danced under his fist on the table, and twining in and out between his rawings and shoutings had meandered on that other low, groping, dispassionate voice his brothers. He had found his own place, and there he intended to remain. Rather than sit on a stall in a counting-house writing invoices for crates of oranges and pineapples, he would hang himself from the topmost branches of the tree. You had your own life to lead, and it didn't matter if you died of it. He was not making any claims. There was nothing the same in this world for any two persons, and the more different everything was, the more closely you should cling to the difference. Oh, yes, it was mere chance—or whatever you like to call it—that had brought him here, mere chance that the tree had not even been charged for in the rent. There it was, and it would last him his lifetime, and when that was over he wouldn't complain. He had whacked his skimpy beard a pencil between his fingers. No, he wouldn't complain if they just dug a hole in the garden and shoveled his body in under the grass within reach of the rootlets. Watch your body. They'll bury me all right when I'm safely dead. Try it, it's a fair speculation. Try what? The fruit-merchant's countenance had suddenly set like a gargoyle in cast iron. His half-brother had nodded towards a dingy portfolio that stood leaning against a half-empty bookcase, and at that his guest had laid about him with a will. So that's the kind of profit you are hoping to make out of your old bee-bush! That's your profit! That's your fine-airs! Your miserable scribblings and scragglings! He had once more slammed down his huge fist on the table and delivered his ultimatum. See here, I give you a hundred pounds here and now. There's no claim on me, not a shred. We don't even share the same mother, even if we share the same dad. You talk this abject rubbish to me. You have never earned a decent penny in your life. You never will. You are a fool and a loafer. Go to the parish and go for good. I'm sick of it. Do you hear? Sick of it. You sit there, whiffling that I have an eyes in my head, that I don't know, black from white, that you'd rather hang your miserable carcass in your wretched old tree than take a respectable job. Well, hang it there. It won't break the branches if this is the only kind of meal you can give a visitor. I'm done with you. I wash my hands of you. He had, inaccurately, pantomime to the operation, sweeping over the jam pot as he did so, and now drew in his breath a cold breath too, as, with eyes fixed on the ever-lightening hedgerows beyond his oblong window, he remembered the renewed red-hot stab of pain that transfixed the ball of his thumb. It recalled him instantaneously to his surroundings. Scrambling up from his seat, he ejected his head out of the cab into the open. Whoa, there! Jeheir! I'm getting out. The horse was dragged up onto its horses. The cab came to a standstill, and to the roaring suspirations of the animal, the fruit merchant alighted on the tinkling ice of a frozen wayside puddle of water. He turned himself about. Time and the night had not tarried during his journey. The east was a blaze of moonlight. The moon glared in the gray heavens like a circular, flat little window of glass. Wait here, the fruit merchant baited his cabman at the desolation. You've pretty near shaken the head of my body. The cabman ducked his own small head in reply and saluted his fare with a jerk of his whip. You won't be long, he sang out between his whiskers. What did he mean by that? Was the fruit merchant's quarrelous question to himself as he mounted the few remaining yards of bilane toward the crest of the slope. He was tired and elderly and cold. A pathetic look, one almost of sadness came into his face. He pushed up his muffler and coughed. There replied the faintest echo from the low cops that boarded the lane. Grass, crystal'd with hoarfrost, muffled his footsteps. What had he meant by that? Repeated self to self, but not as if expectant of an answer. When well out of sight of the cabman and his vehicle beneath the slope of the hill, the fruit merchant paused, lifting his eyes. League beyond league beneath him, as if to the confines of the world, the countryside spread on, frost beclad meadow, wood, and winding lane. And one sole house in sight. A small, tumble-down, like-less, huddling cottage, its ragged thatch and walls, checkered black with shadow and dazzling white with wash of moonshine. And there, lifting itself into the empty skies, its twigs and branches sweeping the stars, stood the single, naked, gigantic tree. The fruit merchant gazed across at it, like an obese, minute belial on the ramparts of Eden. He had been fooled then, tricked. He might have guessed the fortuity of his enterprise. He had guessed it. The house was empty. The bird had flown. Why, for a single instant had he dreamed otherwise. Simply because all these years he had been deceived into believing there was a kind of honesty in the fellow. Just that something chaotic, stupid, stubborn, dense, dull, demented witch. Nothing but lies then. That bee in his bonnet. That snake in his grass. Nothing but lies. There was no principle by which you could jut a man like that. And yet, well, after all, he was like anybody else. Give him a taste of the sweets of success, and his boasted solitude, his contempt for the mere decencies of life, his pretended disgust at men more capable and square-headed than himself, had vanished into thin air. There were fools in the world, he had discovered, who would pay 97 guineas for a second or third hand scrabble of a drawing. Right you are, hand over the dibs, and I am off. A scornful, yet legubrious smile stole over the fruit merchant's purplish features. He would be honest about it. He positively enjoyed acknowledging when a rival had bested him over a bargain. He would even agree that he had always nursed his own little superstitions. And now all that fine, silly talk sheer fudge. He had been childish, fool enough to be impressed by it. Yes, and have been even a little frightened by a tree. He eyed it there, that gaunt prodigious weed, and then, with one furtive glance over his round shoulder toward the crest of the slope behind which lay his way of escape from this wintry landscape and from every memory of the buffoon who had cheated him, he slowly descended the hill, pushed open the broken gate, and entered the icy, untended garden. Once more, he came to a standstill in his freeze coat, and from under the brim of his hard hat stared up into the huge, frigid branches. There were a subtle lift and ease in the twigs of a tree asleep in winter. Green, living buds are everywhere huddling close in their drowsy defences. Even the fruit merchant could distinguish between the dreaming and the dead, or at any rate between the unripe and the rotten. And as he looked, two thoughts scurried like rats out of the wainscot of his mind. Those lean, shrunken twigs, those massive vegetable bones. The tree was dead. And up there, he shifted rapidly to and fro in order to secure an uninterrupted view of a kind of huddling shape, upper loft there, an object that appeared to be stooping crazily forward as if on a similar quest in respect to himself. But no. He took a deep breath. The sudden knocking against the wall of his head ceased. He need not have alarmed himself. An optical illusion. Nothing. The tree was dead. That was clear. A gaunt, black, sapless nightmare. But the ungainly clump and shape hoisted midway among its boughs was not a huddling human body. It was only another kind of derelict parasite. Withered mistletoe. And that gentle skeleton-like rattling high overhead was only the fingering of a faint breeze in the moonlight, clacking twig against twig. Maybe it would have simplified matters if—but no need to dwell on that. One corpse at a time was enough for any man on a night like this, and in a country as cheerless as the plains of Gomorrah. A phrase or two out of his familiar bills of lading recurred to the fruit merchant's mind. The act of God. There was something so horrific in the contorted set of the branches out thrust in ungainly menace above his head that he was reminded of no lesser depravity than the devil himself. Thank the Lord! His half-brother had not remembered to send him a parcel of the fruit. If ever poison showed in a plant, it haunted every knot and knuckle of this derelict. Judgment had overtaken it. The act of God. That's what came of boasting. That's what came of idling a useless life away in a daydream at other people's expense. And now the cunning bird was flown. The insult of his half-brother's triumph stabbed the fruit merchant like a sword. A sudden giddiness, the roar as of water, caused in part no doubt by the posture of his head swept over him, reverberated in his ears. He thrust a cautious hand into the breast of his coat and lowered his eyes. They came to a stay on the rugged, moonlit bowl, and there, with hardly less intensity of gaze, they once more fixed themselves. The natural living bark of the tree had been of a russet gray resembling that of the beach. Apart from a peculiar shimmering-ness due to the frost that cycled over it, and as the skin of a dead thing, that bark now suggested the silveriness of leprosy. So far, so good. But midway up the unbranched bowl, at the height of, from five to six feet from the ground, appeared a wide, peculiar cicatris. The iridescent grayness here abruptly ended. Above it stretched a clear, blank ring of darker color, knobbed over, in and out, with tiny, gaudy clusters of fungi. The fruit merchant stole in a pace or two. No feat of the inhuman this. Cleanly and precisely, the thick rind of the tree must sometimes since have been cut and paired away in a wide, equal ring—a ring too far from the ground to have been the work of pigs or goats, too smooth and sharp-edged to have been caused by the gnawings of cattle. It was perfectly plain. The sap-protecting skin of the thing had been deliberately cut and hacked away. The tree had been murdered. High in the moonlit heavens it gloated there, a victim. Not until then did the fruit merchant stealthily turn and once more survey his half-brother's house. The slow and almost furtive movement of his head and shoulders suggested that the action was involuntary. From this garden side the aspect of the hovel was even more abject and disconsolate. Its one ivy-clustered chimney-stack was smokeless. The moon-beams rained softly and mercilessly on the flint-walls, the boarded windows, the rat-and-bird-ravaged thatch. Only a spectre could be content with such a dwelling, and a guilt-stricken ratchet that. Yet without any doubt in the world the house was still inhabited, for a slender amber beam of light leaned out at an obtuse angle from some crevice in the shuttering wood into the vast bath of moonshine. For a moment the fruit merchant hesitated. He could leave the garden and regain his cab without nearing the house. He could yet once more wash his hands. Certainly after sight of the maniac's treacherous work on this unique, God-given tree he had not the faintest vestige of a desire to confront his half-brother. Quite the reverse. He would far rather fling a second hundred pounds after the first than be once more contaminated by the creature. There was something vile in his surroundings. In shadows as black as pitch like these any inconceivable evil creature might lie in covert. If the tree alive could decoy an alien fauna to its succulent nectar, the tree dead might well invite even less pleasing administrations. Come what would. He was prepared. It might startle him, but he was dead cold already, and when your whole mind is filled with disgust and disquiet, there is no room for physical fear. You merely want to shake yourself free, edge out, and be off. Nevertheless the human intruder in this inhuman wilderness was already, and with great caution, making his way toward the house. On a pitch-black night he might have hesitated. Had venomous serpents the habit of stealing for their winter slumber into the crannies and hollows of fallen wood. Might not even the lightest northern zebra bring down upon his head another vast bulk of timber from the withered labyrinth above. But so bright was the earth's lantern, so still the starry sky, that he could hear and even see the seeds from the humbler winter weeds scattering out from their yawning pods, as with exquisite care he brushed on through detangling growths around him. And having at length closely approached the walls, standing actually within a jutting shadow, he paused yet again, and took a deep breath into his body before, gently lifting himself, he set his eye to the crevice from which poured out that slender shaft of light. So artificially brilliant was the room within by comparison with the full moonlight of the fruit merchant's natural world without, that for an instant or two he saw nothing. But he persevered, and after a while his round, protruding eye found itself master of at least half the space on the other side of the shutters. Stilled through and through, his fingers clutching the frosted sill, he stood there, half suspended on his toes, and as if hypnotized. For scarcely more than a yard distant from his own, there stooped a face, his half-brothers, a face to haunt you to your dying day. It was surmounted by a kind of nightcap, and was almost unrecognizable. The unfolding of the hours of twelve solitary years had played havoc with the once familiar features. The projecting brows above the angular cheekbones resembled polished stone. The ear stood out like the vans of a bat on each side above the corded neck. The thin, unkempt beard on the narrow jaw brushed the long, gnarled hand that was moving with a great and tedious care on the bare table beneath it. Motionlessly, the hanging paraffin lamp poured its radiance upon this engrossed, cadaverous visage, revealing every line and bone, hollow and wrinkle. Nevertheless, its possessor, this old man, shrunken and hideous in his frame of abject poverty, his arms drawn close up to his fallen body, worked sedulously on and on. And behind and around him showed the fruit of his labours. Pinned to the scaling walls, propped on the ramshackle shelf above his fireless hearthstone, and even against the stale remnant of a loaf of bread on the cracked blue dish beside him, was a litter of pictures. And everywhere, lovely and marvellous in all its guises, the tree—the tree in spring's delight, in summer's quiet wonder, in autumn's garish decline, in naked, slumbering, wintry grace. The colours glowed from the old, fine, rough paper, like lamps and gems. There were drawings of birds, too. Birds of dazzling plumage, of flowers and butterflies, their crimson and emerald, rose and saffron, seemingly shimmering and astir, their every mealy and feathery and pollened boss and petal and plume, on fire with hoarded life and beauty, and there a viper with its sinuous molten scales, and there a face and shape looking out of its nothingness, such as would awaken even a dreamer in a dream. Only three sounds in that night quiet, and these, scarcely discernible, stirred in the watcher's ear. The faint shrill sing-song of the flame in the lamp, the harsh, wheezing breath of the artist, and the noise of rats or mice. This austere and dying creature must have come in at last from the world of nature and mankind a long time ago. The arm that had given the tree its quietess had now not the strength to lift an axe. Yet the ungainly fingers toiled assiduously on, the fruit merchant spying in on the old half-starved creature that sat there burning swiftly away among his insane gugaws as nearly broke out crying as laughing. He was frightened and elated, mute and bursting with words. The act of God! Rather than even remotely resemble that old scarecrow in his second childhood pushing that tiny bladed knife across the surface of a flat of wood, he would an empty and resolute look stole into the gazing eye. Not that he professed to understand. He knew nothing. His head was completely empty. The last shred of rage and vindictiveness had vanished away. He was glad he had come, for now he was going back. What little of the present and future remained would soon be the past. He too was aging. His life also was coming to an end. He stared on, oh yes, and not even a nephew to inherit his snug little fortune. Worldly goods, ship-load on ship-load. Well, since he could not take it away with him, he would leave it behind. He would bequeath it to charity, to the WFMCA, perhaps, and he would make a note of the hundred pounds. Not in malice, only to leave things businesslike and in order, to do your duty by a greedy and ungrateful world even though you were soon to be washing your hands of that, too. All waste, nothing but waste. But he thanked the Lord, he had kept his sanity, that he was respected, that he wasn't in the artificial fruit trade the stuff your grandmother belled under glass. He thanked the Lord, he was not foul to look at, foul probably to smell, and a poison even to think about. Yet still he peeped on, this old Tom, though at no Lady Godiva. They would buy right enough, there's no doubt of that. Christie's would someday be humming with the things. He didn't deny the old lunatic that. He knew a bird when he saw it, even on paper. Ninety-seven guineas! At that rate there was more money swimming about in this pestilent hovel than ever he himself could lay his practised hands on. And there were fools in plenty, rich, dabbling, affected, silly fools, dilettants, you call them, who would never know that their lying, preposterous pee-pee had destroyed the very life of the tree that had given it all for him. And why? And why? The fruit merchant was almost tempted to burn down the miserable cabin over his half-brother's head. Who could tell? A gust of wind stirred in the bedraggled thatch, feebly wind in the keyhole. And at that moment, as if an angry and helpless thought could make itself audible even above the hungry racketing of mice and the melancholic whistling of a paraffin lamp, at that moment the corpse-like countenance, almost within finger-touch on the other side of the table, slowly raised itself from the labour of its regard, and appeared to be searching through the shutter's cranny as if into the fruit-merchant's brain. The glance swept through him like an avalanche. No. No. But one instantaneous confrontation, and he had pushed himself back from the empires' walls as softly as an immense sack of hay. These were not eyes in that abominable countenance. Spec-pupiled, greenish-grey, unfocused under the protuberant mat of eyebrow, they remained as still as a salt and stagnant sea. And in their uplifted depths, stretching out into endless distances, the fruit merchant had seen regions of a country whence for neither love nor money he could ever harvest one fruit, one pip, one cankerd bud. And blossoming there beside a glassy stream in the mid-distance of far mountains swore a tree, in after years, an old, fat, vulgar and bronchitic figure, muffled up in a pathetic shawl, would sometimes be seen seated in a place of honour, its hard square hat upon its thick bald skull, within positive reach of the jovial auctioneer's ivory hammer. To purchase every pee-pee that came into the market was a dream beyond even a multimillionaire's avarice. But small beetles or grubs or single feathers drawn from the life were within the scope of the fruit merchant's purse. The eye that showed not the faintest vestige of reflected glory from the orange of the orange, the gamboge of the lemon, or the russet bronze of the pomegranate in their created myriads would fitfully light up a while as, one by one, and with reiterated grunts of satisfaction, he afterward, in the secrecy of his home, consigned these indifferent and early works of art to the flames. But since his medical man had warned him that any manifestation of passion would almost unquestionably prove his ultimate manifestation of anything, he steadily avoided thinking of the tree. Yet there it remained, unexercisable, ineradicable in his fading imagination. Indeed, he finally expired in the small hours one black winter's morning, and as peacefully as a child, having dreamed that he was looking through a crevice into what could not be hell, but might be limbo, or purgatory, the place of departed spirits. For there sat his half-brother, quite, quite still, and all about him to be seen, gay and painted birds, and crystal flowers, and damasked butterflies, and, as it were, silphs and salamanders, shapes of an unearthly beauty. But all of them, strangely, preternaturally still, as if in a peep-show, as if stuffed, end of the tree. Recording by Rafe Ball. Recording by Anne Erickson, Toronto. The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, by Rhoda Broughton. Mrs. De Wint to Mrs. Montresor. 18 Eccleston Square, May 5th. My dearest Cecilia, talk the friendships of Orestes and Pilates, of Julie and Claire, what are they, two hours? Did Pilates ever go ventre à terre, half over London, on a day more broiling than any but an âme d'année could even imagine, in order that Orestes might be comfortably housed for the season? Did Claire ever hold sweet converse with from fifty to one hundred house agents, in order that Julie might have three windows to her drawing room, and a pretty portiere? You see, I am determined not to be done out of my full need of gratitude. Well, my friend, I had no idea till yesterday how closely we were packed in this great smoky beehive, as tightly as herrings in a barrel. Don't be frightened, however. By dint of squeezing and crowding, we have managed to make room for two more herrings in our barrel, and those two are yourself, and your other self, i.e., your husband. Let me begin at the beginning. After having looked over, I verily believe every undesirable residence in West London, after having seen nothing intermediate between what was suited to the means of a duke and what was suited to the needs of a chimney sweep, after having felt bed-ticking and explored kitchen ranges till my brain reeled under my accumulated experience, I arrived at about half past five yesterday afternoon, at 32 Blank Street, Mayfair. Failure number 253, I don't doubt, I said to myself as I toiled up the steps, with my soul a thirst for afternoon tea, and feeling as ill-tempered as you please. So much for my spirit of prophecy. Fate, I have noticed, is often fond of contradicting as flat, and giving the lie to our little predictions. Once inside, I thought I had got into a small compartment of heaven by mistake, fresh as a daisy, clean as a cherry, bright as a seraph's face, it is all these and a hundred more, only that my limited stock of similes is exhausted. Two drawing-rims as pretty as ever woman crammed with people she did not care two straws about, white curtains with rose-colored ones underneath festooned in the sweetest way, marvelously, immorally becoming my dear, as I ascertained entirely for your benefit in the mirrors, of which there are about a dozen and a half. Persian mats, easy chairs, and lounges suited to every possible physical conformation, from the Apollo Belvedere to Miss Biffin, and a thousand of the important little trivialities that may cut the sum of a woman's life. Ormaloo garden gates, handle-less cups, naked boys, and decollete shepherdesses, not to speak of a family of china pugs with blue ribbons around their necks, which ought of themselves to have added fifty pounds a year to the rent. Apropos, I asked in fear and trembling, what the rent might be. Three hundred pounds a year, a feather would have knocked me down. I could hardly believe my ears, and made the woman repeat it several times that there might be no mistake. To this hour it is a mystery to me. With that suspiciousness which is so characteristic of you, you will immediately begin to hint that there must be some terrible, unaccountable smell, or some odious, inexplicable noise haunting the reception rooms. Nothing of the kind, the woman assured me, and she did not look as if she were telling stories. You will next suggest, remembering the rose-coloured curtains, that its last occupant was a member of the demi-monde. Wrong again. Its last occupant was an elderly and unexceptionable Indian officer, without a liver, and with a most lawful wife. They did not stay long, it is true, but then as the housekeeper told me, he was a deplorable old hypochondriac, who never could bear to stay a fortnight in any one place. So lay aside that skepticism, which is your besetting sin, and give unfeigned thanks to St. Brigitte, or St. Guingolfa, or St. Catherine of Siena, or whoever is your tutular saint, for having provided you with a palace at the cost of a hovel, and for having sent you such an invaluable friend as your attached Elizabeth DeWint. Yes, I am so sorry I shall not be in town to witness your first raptures, but my dear Artie looks so pale and thin and tall after the hooping cough, that I am sending him off at once to the sea, and as I cannot bear the child out of my sight, I am going into banishment likewise. Mrs. Montorzor to Mrs. DeWint. 32 Blank Street, Mayfair, May 14th. Dearest Bessie, why did not dear little Artie defer his whooping cough convalescence, etc., till August? It is very odd to me the perverse way in which children always fix upon the most inconvenient times and seasons for their diseases. Here we are, installed in our paradise, and have searched high and low in every hole and corner for the serpent, without succeeding in catching a glimpse of his spotted tail. Most things in this world are disappointing, but 32 Blank Street, Mayfair, is not. The mystery of the rent is still a mystery. I have been for my first ride in the row this morning. My horse was a little fidgety. I am half afraid that my nerve is not what it was. I saw heaps of people I knew. Do you recollect Florence Watson? What a wealth of red hair she had last year. Well, that same wealth is black as the raven's wings this year. I wonder how people can make such walking impositions of themselves, don't you? Adella comes to us next week. I am so glad. It is dull driving by oneself of an afternoon, and I always think that one young woman alone in a brome, or with only a dog beside her, does not look good. We sent round our carts a fortnight before we came up and have been already deluged with callers. Considering that we have been two years exiled from civilized life, and that London memories are not generally of the longest, we shall do pretty well, I think. Ralph Gordon came to see me on Sunday. He is in the blankth hussars now. He has grown up such a dear fellow and so good-looking. Just my style, large and fair and whiskerless. Most men nowadays make themselves as like monkeys or scotch terriers as they possibly can. I intend to be quite a mother to him. Dresses are gored to as indecent an extent as ever. Short skirts are rampant. I am so sorry, I hate them. They make tall women look lank and short ones insignificant. A knock. Peace is a word that might as well be expunged from one's London dictionary. Yours affectionately, Cecilia Montresor. Mrs. DeWint to Mrs. Montresor, the Lord Warden, Dover, May 18th. Dear Cecilia, you will perceive that I am about to devote only one small sheet of note paper to you. This is from no dearth of time, heaven knows. Time is a drug in the market here, but from a total dearth of ideas. Any ideas that I ever have come to me from without. From external objects. I'm not clever enough to generate any within. My life here is not an eminently suggestive one. It is spent in digging with a wooden spade and eating prawns. Those are my employments, at least. My relaxation is going down to the pier to see the Calais boat come in. When one is miserable oneself, it is decidedly consolatory to see someone more miserable still and wretched and bored and reluctant vegetable as I am. I am not seasick. I always feel my spirits rise after having seen that peevish, draggled, procession of blue, green, and yellow fellow Christians while past me. There is a wind here always in comparison of which the wind that behaved so violently to the corners of Job's house was a mere zephyr. There are heights to climb which require more daring perseverance than ever wolf displayed with his poultry heights of Abraham. There are glaring white houses, glaring white roads, glaring white cliffs. If anyone knew how unpatriotically I detest the chalk cliffs of Albion. I have been grumbled through my two little pages. I have actually been reduced to writing very large in order to fill even them. I will send off my dreary little BA. How I wish I could get into the envelope myself, too, and whirl up with it to dear, beautiful, filthy London. Not more heavily could Madame de Stael have sighed for Paris from among the shades of cockpit. Your disconsolate Bessie. Mrs Montresor to Mrs De Wint. 32 Blank Street, May Fair, May 27th. Oh, my dearest Bessie, how I wish we were out of this dreadful, dreadful house. Please don't think me very ungrateful for saying this after you're taking such pains to provide us with a heaven on earth, as you thought. What has happened could, of course, have been neither foretold nor guarded against by any human being. About ten days ago, Benson, my maid, came to me with a very long face and said, if you please, did you know that this house was haunted? I was so startled, you know what a coward I am. I said, good heavens, no, is it? Well, I'm pretty nigh, sure it is, she said. And the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker's. And then she told me that Cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighborhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, No, 32 Blank Street, eh? I wonder how long you'll stand at. Last lot held out just a fortnight. He looked so odd that she asked him what he meant. But he only said, Oh, nothing, only that parties never did stay long at 32. He had known parties go in one day and out the next. And during the last four years, he had never known any remain over the month. Feeling a good deal of alarm by this information, she naturally inquired the reason. But he declined to give it, saying that if she had not found it out for herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits. And on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him that the house had such a villainously bad name that the owners were glad to let it for a mere song. You know how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them, anything material, tangible that I can lay hold of, anything of the same fiber, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough. But the mere thought of being brought face to face with the bodyless dead makes my brain unsteady. The moment Henry came in, I ran to him and told him. But he poo-pooed the whole story, laughed at me, and asked whether we should turn out of the prettiest house in London at the very height of the season because a grocer said it had a bad name. Most good things that had ever been in the world had had a bad name in their day, and moreover, the man had probably a motive for taking away the house's character, some friend for whom he coveted the charming situation and a low rent. He derided my babyish fears, as he called them, to such an extent that I felt half ashamed. And yet not quite comfortable, either. And then came the usual rush of London engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak and act and look for the moment then present. Adele was to arrive yesterday, and in the morning our weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived from home. I always dressed the flower vases myself, servants are so tasteless, and as I was arranging them it occurred to me, you know Adele's passion for flowers, to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and sit it on her toilet table as a pleasant surprise for her. As I came downstairs I had seen the housemaid, a fresh round-faced country girl, go into the room which was being prepared for Adele, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. I went upstairs very slowly, as my cornucopia was full of water, and I was afraid of spilling some. I turned the handle of the bedroom door and entered, keeping my eyes fixed on my flowers to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over me, and feeling frightened, I did not know why, I looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid. Every nerve tense, her eyes wide open, starting out of her head, and a look of unutterable, stony horror in them. Her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died a while ago in mortal pain. As I looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least, said, Oh my God, I have seen it. And then she fell down suddenly, like a log with a heavy noise. Hearing the noise, loudly audible all through the thin walls and floors of a London house, Benson came running in, and between us we managed to lift her onto the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by rubbing her feet and hands, and holding strong salt to her nostrils. And all the while we kept glancing over our shoulders in a vague, cold terror of seeing some awful shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile, Harry, who had been down to his club, returned. At the end of the two hours we succeeded in bringing her back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Harry and Phillips, our butler, to hold her down in the bed. Of course we said tough instantly for a doctor, who on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a cab to his own house. He has just been here to tell us that she is now pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. We are of course utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings are far too disconnected and unintelligible to afford us this lightest clue. I feel so completely shattered and upset by this awful occurrence, that you will excuse me, my dear, I'm sure, if I write incoherently. One thing I need hardly tell you, and that is that no earthly consideration would deduce me to allow Adela to occupy that terrible room. I shudder and run by quickly as I pass the door. Yours in great agitation, Cecilia. Mrs. DeWint to Mrs. Montresor, the Lord Warden, Dover, May 28. Dearest Cecilia, yours has just come how very dreadful, but I am still unconvinced as to the house being in fault. You know I feel a sort of godmother to it, and responsible for its good behaviour. Don't you think that what the girl had might have been a fit? Why not? I myself have a cousin who is subject to seizures of the kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body becomes rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in the case you describe. Or, if not a fit, are you sure that she has not been subject to fits of madness? Please be sure and ascertain whether there is not insanity in her family. It is so common nowadays, and so much on the increase that nothing is more likely. You know my utter disbelief and ghosts. I am convinced that most of them, if run to earth, would turn out about as genuine as the famed Cock Lane one. But even allowing the possibility, may the actual unquestioned existence of ghosts in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which you, after three weeks in the house, have never caught a glimpse of? According to your hypothesis, your whole household ought by this time to be stark, staring mad. Let me implore you not to give way to a panic, which may, possibly, probably, prove utterly groundless. Oh, how I wish I were with you, to make you listen to reason. Artie ought to be the best prop every woman's old age was furnished with, to indemnify me, for all he and his whooping cough have made me suffer. Write immediately, please, and tell me how the poor patient progresses. Oh, had I the wings of a dove, I shall be on wires till I hear again, yours, Bessie. Mrs. Montresor to Mrs. DeWint. Number five, Bolton Street, Piccadilly, June 12th. Dearest Bessie, you will see that we have left that terrible, hateful, fatal house. How I wish we had escaped from it sooner. Oh, my dear Bessie, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred. Let me try to be coherent, and to tell you, connectedly, what has happened. And first, as to the housemaid, she has been removed to a lunatic asylum, where she remains in much the same state. She has had several lucid intervals, and during them has been closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw, but she has maintained an absolute hopeless silence, and only shutters, moans, and hides their face in her hands when the subject is broached. Three days ago I went to see her, and on my return was sitting resting in the drawing room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Adela about my visit when Ralph Gordon walked in. He has always been walking in the last ten days, and Adela has always flushed up and looked happy, poor little cat, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just come in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, lavender gloves, and a gardenia. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as skeptical as even you could be, as to the ghostly origin of Sarah's seizure. Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room, to Mrs. Montresor, he said, looking very eager and excited. With the gas lid and a poker, I'll engage to exercise every demon that shows his ugly nose, even if I should find seven white ghostesses sitting on seven white postesses. You don't mean really, I asked incredulously. Don't I? That's all, he answered emphatically. I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain? Adela turned quite pale. Oh, don't, she said hurriedly. Please, don't. Why should you run such a risk? How do you know that you might not be sent mad, too? He laughed very hardly, and culled a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. Never fear, he said. It would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones with the old gentleman at their head to send me crazy. He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that I yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Adela's blue eyes filled with tears, and she walked away hastily to the conservatory, and stood picking bits of heliotrope to hide them. Nevertheless, Ralph got his own way. It was so difficult to refuse him anything. We gave up all our engagements for the evening, and he did the same with his. At about ten o'clock he arrived, accompanied by a friend and brother officer, Captain Burton, who was anxious to see the result of the experiment. Let me go up at once, he said, looking very happy and animated. I don't know when I felt in such good tune. A new sensation is a luxury not to be had every day of one's life. Turn the gas up as high as it will go, provide a good stout poker, and leave the issue to Providence and me. We did as he bid. It's already now, Henry said, coming downstairs after having obeyed his orders. The room is nearly as light as day. Well, good luck to you, old fellow. Goodbye, Miss Bruce, Ralph said, going over to Adela and taking her hand with a look, half laughing, half sentimental. Fare thee well, and if forever, then forever, fare thee well. That is my last dying speech and confession. Now, mind, he went on, standing by the table, addressing us all. If I ring once, don't come. I may be flurried and lay hold of the bell without thinking. If I ring twice, come. Then he went, jumping up the stairs, three steps at a time, in humming a tune. As for us, we sat in different attitudes of expectation and listening about the drawing room. At first, we tried to talk a little, but it would not do. Our whole soul seemed to have passed into our ears. The clock-sticking sounded as loud as a great church bell close to one's ear. Adi lay on the sofa, with her dear little white face hidden in the cushions. So we sat for exactly an hour. But it seemed like two years, and just as the clock began to strike eleven, a sharp ting, ting, ting ran clear and shrill through the house. Let us go, said Adi, starting up and running to the door. Let us go, I cried to, following her. But Captain Burton stood in the way and intercepted our progress. No, he said decisively. You must not go. Remember Gordon told us distinctly. If he rang once, not to come. I know the sort of fellow he is, and that nothing would annoy him more than having his directions disregarded. Oh, nonsense, Adi cried passionately. He would never have rung if he had not seen something dreadful. Do, do, let us go. She ended, clasping her hands. But she was overruled, and we all went back to our seats. Ten minutes more of suspense, next door to unendurable. I fell to lump in my throat, agasping for breath. Ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries on our hearts. Then again, loud, sudden, violent, the bell rang. We made a simultaneous stash to the door. I don't think we were one second flying upstairs. Adi was first. Almost simultaneously, she and I burst into the room. There he was, standing in the middle of the floor. Richard petrified with that same look, that look that has burnt into my heart in letters of fire, of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus, then stretching out his arms stiffly before him. He groaned in a terrible husky voice. Oh my God, I have seen it. And fell down. Dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Fainly we tried to bring back the life in that strong young heart. It will never come back again till that day when the earth and the sea give up the dead that are therein. I cannot see the page for the tears that are blinding me. He was such a dear fellow. I cannot write any more today. You're brokenhearted Cecilia. This is a true story. End of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, by Rhoda Broughton. Recording by Ann Erickson, Toronto.