Night Terrors

  The vividness of his own indignation rather startled him. He had really felt himself to be not a dual personality, but the same Peter Graham at different periods of his existence. One of them, the chairman of the British Tin Syndicate, had protested against young Peter Graham being put to sleep in so damp and dripping a room, and the other (oh, the ecstatic momentary glimpse of him!) was indeed young Peter back in his lovely attic again, just home from school and now looking round with eager eyes to convince himself of that blissful reality, before bouncing downstairs again to have tea in the children’s room. What a lot of things to ask about! How were his rabbits, and how were Sybil’s guinea-pigs, and had Violet learned that song ‘Oh ’tis nothing but a shower’, and were the wood-pigeons building again in the lime-tree? All these topics were of the first importance . . .

  Peter Graham the elder sat down on the window-seat. It overlooked the lawn, and just opposite was the lime-tree, a drooping lime making a green cave inside the skirt of its lower branches, but with those above growing straight, and he heard the chuckling coo of the wood-pigeons coming from it. They were building there again then: that question of young Peter’s was answered.

  ‘Very odd that I should just be thinking of that,’ he said to himself: somehow there was no gap of years between him and young Peter, for his attic bridged over the decades which in the clumsy material reckoning of time intervened between them. Then Peter the elder seemed to take charge again.

  The house was a sad affair, he thought: it gave him a stab of loneliness to see how decayed was the theatre of their joyful years, and no evidence of newer life, of the children of strangers and even of their children’s children growing up here could have overscored the old sense of it so effectually. He went out of young Peter’s room and paused on the landing: the stairs led down in two short flights to the storey below, and now for the moment he was young Peter again, reaching down with his hand along the banisters, and preparing to take the first flight in one leap. But then old Peter saw it was an impossible feat for his less supple joints.

  Well, there was the garden to explore, and then he would go back to the agent’s and return the keys. He no longer wanted to take that short cut down the steep hill to the station, passing the pool where Sybil and he had caught the stickleback, for his whole notion, sometimes so urgent, of coming back here, had wilted and withered. But he would just walk about the garden for ten minutes, and as he went with sedate step downstairs, memories of the garden, and of what they all did there began to invade him. There were trees to be climbed, and shrubberies – one thicket of syringa particularly where goldfinches built – to be searched for nests and moths, but above all there was that game they played there, far more exciting than lawn-tennis or cricket in the bumpy field (though that was exciting enough) called Pirates . . . There was a summer-house, tiled and roofed and of solid walls at the top of the garden, and that was ‘home’ or ‘Plymouth Sound’, and from there ships (children that is) set forth at the order of the Admiral to pick a trophy without being caught by the Pirates. There were two Pirates who hid anywhere in the garden and jumped out, and (counting the Admiral who, after giving his orders, became the flagship) three ships, which had to cruise to orchard or flower-bed or field and bring safely home a trophy culled from the ordained spot. Once, Peter remembered, he was flying up the winding path to the summer-house with a pirate close on his heels, when he fell flat down, and the humane pirate leaped over him for fear of treading on him, and fell down too. So Peter got home, because Dick had fallen on his face and his nose was bleeding . . .

  ‘Good Lord, it might have happened yesterday,’ thought Peter. ‘And Harry called him a bloody pirate, and Papa heard and thought he was using shocking language till it was explained to him.’

  The garden was even worse than the house, neglected utterly and rankly overgrown, and to find the winding path at all, Peter had to push through briar and thicket. But he persevered and came out into the rose-garden at the top, and there was Plymouth Sound with roof collapsed and walls bulging, and moss growing thick between the tiles of the floor.

  ‘But it must be repaired at once,’ said Peter aloud . . . ‘What’s that?’ He whisked round towards the bushes through which he had pushed his way, for he had heard a voice, faint and far off coming from there, and the voice was familiar to him, though for thirty years it had been dumb. For it was Violet’s voice which had spoken and she had said, ‘Oh, Peter: here you are!’

  He knew it was her voice, and he knew the utter impossibility of it. But it frightened him, and yet how absurd it was to be frightened, for it was only his imagination, kindled by old sights and memories, that had played him a trick. Indeed, how jolly even to have imagined that he had heard Violet’s voice again.

  ‘Vi!’ he called aloud, but of course no one answered. The wood-pigeons were cooing in the lime, there was a hum of bees and a whisper of wind in the trees and all round the soft enchanted Cornish air, laden with dream-stuff.

  He sat down on the step of the summer-house, and demanded the presence of his own common sense. It had been an uncomfortable afternoon, he was vexed at this ruin of neglect into which the place had fallen, and he did not want to imagine these voices calling to him out of the past, or to see these odd glimpses which belonged to his boyhood. He did not belong any more to that epoch over which grasses waved and headstones presided, and he must be quit of all that evoked it, for, more than anything else, he was director of prosperous companies with big interests dependent on him. So he sat there for a calming five minutes, defying Violet, so to speak, to call to him again. And then, so unstable was his mood today, that presently he was listening for her. But Violet was always quick to see when she was not wanted, and she must have gone, to join the others . . .

  He retraced his way, fixing his mind on material environments. The golden maple at the head of the walk, a sapling like himself when last he saw it, had become a stout-trunked tree, the shrub of bay a tall column of fragrant leaf, and just as he passed the syringa, a goldfinch dropped out of it with dipping flight. Then he was back at the house again where the climbing fuchsia trailed its sprays across the window of his mother’s room and hot thick scent (how well-remembered!) spilled from the chalices of the great magnolia.

  ‘A mad notion of mine to come and see the house again,’ he said to himself. ‘I won’t think about it any more: it’s finished. But it was wicked not to look after it.’

  He went back into the town to return the keys to the house-agent.

  ‘Much obliged to you,’ he said. ‘A pleasant house, when I knew it years ago. Why was it allowed to go to ruin like that?’

  ‘Can’t say, sir,’ said the man. ‘It has been let once or twice in the last ten years, but the tenants have never stopped long. The owner would be very pleased to sell it.’

  An idea, fanciful, absurd, suddenly struck Peter.

  ‘But why doesn’t he live there?’ he asked. ‘Or why don’t the tenants stop long? Was there something they didn’t like about it? Haunted: anything of that sort? I’m not going to take it or purchase it: so that won’t put me off.’

  The man hesitated a moment.

  ‘Well, there were stories,’ he said, ‘if I may speak confidentially. But all nonsense, of course.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Peter. ‘You and I don’t believe in such rubbish. I wonder now: was it said that children’s voices were heard calling in the garden?’

  The discretion of a house-agent reasserted itself.

  ‘I can’t say, sir, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘All I know is that the house is to be had very cheap. Perhaps you would take our card.’

  Peter arrived back in London late that night. There was a tray of sandwiches and drinks waiting for him, and having refreshed himself, he sat smoking awhile thinking of his three days’ work in Cornwall at the mines: there must be a directors’ meeting as soon as possible to consider his suggestions
. . . Then he found himself staring at the round rosewood table where his tray stood. It had been in his mother’s sitting-room at Lescop, and the chair in which he sat, a fine Stuart piece, had been his father’s chair at the dinner-table, and that book-case had stood in the hall, and his Chippendale card-table . . . he could not remember exactly where that had been. That set of Browning’s poems had been Sybil’s: it was from the shelves in the children’s room. But it was time to go to bed, and he was glad he was not to sleep in young Peter’s attic.

  It is doubtful whether, if once an idea has really thrown out roots in a man’s mind, he can ever extirpate it. He can cut off its sprouting suckers, he can nip off the buds it bears, or, if they come to maturity, destroy the seed, but the roots defy him. If he tugs at them something breaks, leaving a vital part still embedded, and it is not long before some fresh evidence of its vitality pushes up above the ground where he least expected it. It was so with Peter now: in the middle of some business-meeting, the face of one of his co-directors reminded him of that of the coachman at Lescop; if he went for a week-end of golf to the Dormy House at Rye, the bow-window of the billiard-room was in shape and size that of the drawing-room there, and the bank of gorse by the tenth green was no other than the clump below the tennis-court: almost he expected to find a tennis ball there when he had need to search it. Whatever he did, wherever he went, something called him from Lescop, and in the evening when he returned home, there was the furniture, more of it than he had realised, asking to be restored there: rugs and pictures and books, the silver on his table all joined in the mute appeal. But Peter stopped his ears to it: it was a senseless sentimentality, and a purely materialistic one to imagine that he could recapture the life over which so many years had flowed, and in which none of the actors but himself remained, by restoring to the house its old amenities and living there again. He would only emphasise his own loneliness by the visible contrast of the scene, once so alert and populous, with its present emptiness. And this ‘butting-in’ (so he expressed it) of materialistic sentimentality only confirmed his resolve to have done with Lescop. It had been a bitter sight but tonic, and now he would forget it.

  Yet even as he sealed his resolution, there would come to him, blown as a careless breeze from the west, the memory of that boy and girl he had seen in the town, of the gay family starting for their river-picnic, of the faint welcoming call to him from the bushes in the garden, and, most of all, of the suspicion that the place was supposed to be haunted. It was just because it was haunted that he longed for it, and the more savagely and sensibly he assured himself of the folly of possessing it, the more he yearned after it, and constantly now it coloured his dreams. They were happy dreams; he was back there with the others, as in old days, children again in holiday time, and like himself they loved being at home there again, and they made much of Peter because it was he who had arranged it all. Often in these dreams he said to himself ‘I have dreamed this before, and then I woke and found myself elderly and lonely again, but this time it is real!’

  The weeks passed on, busy and prosperous, growing into months, and one day in the autumn, on coming home from a day’s golf, Peter fainted. He had not felt very well for some time, he had been languid and easily fatigued, but with his robust habit of mind he had labelled such symptoms as mere laziness, and had driven himself with the whip. But now it might be as well to get a medical overhauling just for the satisfaction of being told there was nothing the matter with him. The pronouncement was not quite that . . .

  ‘But I simply can’t,’ he said. ‘Bed for a month and a winter of loafing on the Riviera! Why, I’ve got my time filled up till close on Christmas, and then I’ve arranged to go with some friends for a short holiday. Besides, the Riviera’s a pestilent hole. It can’t be done. Supposing I go on just as usual: what will happen?’

  Dr Dufflin made a mental summary of his wilful patient.

  ‘You’ll die, Mr Graham,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Your heart is not what it should be, and if you want it to do its work, which it will for many years yet, if you’re sensible, you must give it rest. Of course, I don’t insist on the Riviera: that was only a suggestion for I thought you would probably have friends there, who would help to pass the time for you. But I do insist on some mild climate, where you can loaf out of doors. London with its frosts and fogs would never do.’

  Peter was silent for a moment.

  ‘How about Cornwall?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, if you like. Not the north coast of course.’

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ said Peter. ‘There’s a month yet.’

  Peter knew that there was no need for thinking it over. Events were conspiring irresistibly to drive him to that which he longed to do, but against which he had been struggling, so fantastic was it, so irrational. But now it was made easy for him to yield and his obstinate colours came down with a run. A few telegraphic exchanges with the house-agent made Lescop his, another gave him the address of a reliable builder and decorator, and with the plans of the house, though indeed there was little need of them, spread out on his counterpane, Peter issued urgent orders. All structural repairs, leaking roofs and dripping ceilings, rotted woodwork and crumbling plaster must be tackled at once, and when that was done, painting and papering followed. The drawing-room used to have a Morris-paper; there were spring flowers on it, blackthorn, violets, and fritillaries, a hateful wriggling paper, so he thought it, but none other would serve. The hall was painted duck-egg green, and his mother’s room was pink, ‘a beastly pink, tell them,’ said Peter to his secretary, ‘with a bit of blue in it: they must send me sample by return of post, big pieces, not snippets.’ . . . Then there was furniture: all the furniture in the house here which had once been at Lescop must go back there. For the rest, he would send down some stuff from London, bedroom appurtenances, and linen and kitchen utensils: he would see to carpets when he got there. Spare bedrooms could wait; just four servants’ rooms must be furnished, and also the attic which he had marked on the plan, and which he intended to occupy himself. But no one must touch the garden till he came: he would superintend that himself, but by the middle of next month there must be a couple of gardeners ready for him.

  ‘And that’s all,’ said Peter, ‘just for the present.’ ‘All?’ he thought, as, rather bored with the direction of matters that usually ran themselves, he folded up his plans. ‘Why, it’s just the beginning: just underwriting.’

  The month’s rest-cure was pronounced a success, and with strict orders not to exert mind or body, but to lie fallow, out of doors whenever possible, with quiet strolls and copious restings, Peter was allowed to go to Lescop, and on a December evening he saw the door opened to him and the light of welcome stream out on to his entry. The moment he set foot inside he knew, as by some interior sense, that he had done right, for it was not only the warmth and the ordered comfort restored to the deserted house that greeted him, but the firm knowledge that they whose loss made his loneliness were greeting him . . . That came in a flash, fantastic and yet soberly convincing; it was fundamental, everything was based on it. The house had been restored to its old aspect, and though he had ventured to turn the small attic next door to young Peter’s bedroom into a bathroom, ‘after all,’ he thought, ‘it’s my house, and I must make myself comfortable. They don’t want bathrooms, but I do, and there it is.’ There indeed it was, and there was electric light installed, and he dined, sitting in his father’s chair, and then pottered from room to room, drinking in the old friendly atmosphere, which was round him wherever he went, for They were pleased. But neither voice nor vision manifested that, and perhaps it was only his own pleasure at being back that he attributed to them. But he would have loved a glimpse or a whisper, and from time to time, as he sat looking over some memoranda about the British Tin Syndicate, he peered into corners of the room, thinking that something moved there, and when a trail of creeper tapped against the window he got up and looked out. But
nothing met his scrutiny but the dim starlight falling like dew on the neglected lawn. ‘They’re here, though,’ he said to himself, as he let the curtain fall back.

  The gardeners were ready for him next morning, and under his directions began the taming of the jungly wildness. And here was a pleasant thing, for one of them was the son of the cowman, Calloway, who had been here forty years ago, and he had childish memories still of the garden where with his father he used to come from the milking-shed to the house with the full pails. And he remembered that Sybil used to keep her guinea-pigs on the drying-ground at the back of the house. Now that he said that Peter remembered it too, and so the drying-ground all overgrown with brambles and rank herbage must be cleared.

  ‘Iss, sure, nasty little vermin I thought them,’ said Calloway the younger, ‘but ’twas here Miss Sybil had their hutches and a wired run for ’em. And a rare fuss there was when my father’s terrier got in and killed half of ’em, and the young lady crying over the corpses.’