The Dreadful Hollow

  Nigel offered no views.

  “You see dissatisfaction,” Joe went on. “Stands to reason. The wages our village lads—and lasses, too—can get in the factory tempts them off the land. Them that stays on the land, which is where they ought to be, are restless, knowing they could get better money in Moreford. And them as goes into the factory, why, after a bit Moreford isn’t good enough for them, and they start pining to be in London or some such.”

  “You don’t approve of the younger generation becoming more independent?”

  Joe Summers had the landlord’s acquired characteristic of deference to the customer’s opinion.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong, sir. Independence is a very good thing in its way. But take India.” He proffered Nigel the continent on the palm of a large hand. “You must give people independence gradual like, else it chokes ’em. We clears out of India, bag and baggage, all of a sudden; and what happens? The natives start up massacring each other. Take another case. Prior’s Umborne. They’re what you might call a backward lot here too. My contention is, they wasn’t ripe for independence, if you take my meaning. That factory of Mr. Blick’s has gone to their heads. So we get trouble.”

  “Anonymous letters, for instance?”

  “In my job,” pronounced Joe with all the evasiveness of an oracle, “you learn to be tactful. I may have my ideas, but I keep them to myself. Mum’s the word, like the third monkey said. Gossip today is grief tomorrow. Johnny Smart now—they’re saying he got into trouble during the war, and it caught up with him. I’m not expressing any opinion on that, though he was a foreigner, poor b——. What I do say is, these anonymous letters are a symptom, not the disease itself.”

  The landlord paused only to pour himself another mug of treacle-colored tea.

  “The old order changeth,” he resumed, “giving place to new. That’s the root of the trouble, sir.”

  “I suppose you knew Mr. Chantmerle well?”

  “You’ve said it. Now he was a gentleman. We always thought of him as the Squire, long after Sir Archibald came to the Hall. Not that I’ve anything against Sir Archibald, mind you—not personally. It’s the principle of the thing. To my way of thinking, landlords ought to live on their property.”

  “But his elder son lives here, doesn’t he?”

  “Mr. Stanford?” said the landlord, temporarily deflected. “Ah, he’s a queer card, if ever there was one. He’s brainy as they come, mind you; but you never know what he’ll be up to next. Soon after he come to live here permanent—that’d be in 1932 or thereabouts—he took a fancy to start a bus service between here and Moreford; said the regular service was too slow. So what does he do? Damn me if he doesn’t buy a bus, and square the authorities—the Blicks’ve got influence all right—and drive it himself! It didn’t last long, of course.”

  “He got tired of the new toy?”

  “’Twasn’t that. Not on your life, sir. What happened was he scared the passengers into fits. Drove that old bus so lickety-split, he had the old women squawking all the way into Moreford. Turned out he’d been a racing-car driver at one time. No, Mr. Stanford isn’t cut out to be Squire, though he’s a good customer of mine.”

  “Still, you’ve always got Miss Chantmerle. I believe she’s the real power in the village, isn’t she?”

  Joe Summers gave Nigel a portentous look. “Miss Celandine is a great little lady, and I don’t care who hears me say it. She’s too good for this place. But now, wait a moment”—he tapped the table oratorically—“this is where we come back to my contention. In the old days, I’ll lay there was hardly a man, woman or child in the village didn’t go to her with their troubles. Why, she used to hold court up at the Manor, almost like a queen, you might say. But it’s different now. Since the war and the evacuees and now this factory have unsettled the village, things are changed. The younger generation don’t look up to her, not like they used to. They goes their own way. And, of course, we have a stronger parson now—more active-like.”

  “Mr. Raynham seems an excellent man.”

  “He’s straight enough; though he does put some people’s backs up. Be the better for what our old parson used to call a helpmeet.”

  “He’s a bachelor, is he, or a widower?”

  “Never been married, not to my knowledge. Do you mind if I put on a pipe, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Joe Summers ruminatively began to fill a heavy briar. “Mr. Chantmerle was a great pipe-smoker. Soothed his nerves, he used to say. He was a sad loss to the village, no two ways about it. And Miss Celandine—she’s never quite got over it, I reckon. He and she were inseparable. The mother died, you know, when Miss Rosebay was born. Mr. Chantmerle and Miss Celandine went everywhere together—walking, riding, bicycling.”

  “She’s not always been a cripple, then?”

  “Bless you, no. It happened when her father killed himself. May have been coming on for some time before, but we didn’t see no signs of it. If you ask me, she wore herself out nursing him—that was after the crash, when the poor old gentleman went a bit queer in the head. And then, in her weakened condition, she was fair game for one of them dirty bacilluses, see? Of course it was finding him dead put the cap on it. Our old doctor said it was a tumor of the spine she had, so I believe.”

  “It was she who found the body, you mean?”

  “Yes. And so happen, it was me who found her. I’ll never forget it. Thought there was two dead ’uns down in the quarry.”

  “The quarry? Not that one beyond the wood, just over the hill from the Little Manor?”

  “The very same, sir.”

  It was Nigel’s experience that in each of his cases there was a moment when the drama took on a third dimension and became fully alive for him, as when on the stage the entrance of a character, the delivery of a key line, or it may be only a single consummate gesture, a moment of stillness or a change in the lighting, grips the spectator so that he is no longer a spectator but a participant deeply involved with the tragedy enacted before him. Such a moment was this. The problem which had brought him to Prior’s Umborne suddenly transformed itself, at the mention of the quarry, from an abstract, diagrammatic proposition into something full-bodied and real. Nigel felt, with the force of an infallible intuition, that the daffodils he had seen shivering on the quarry’s brink had been planted there in memory of her father by Celandine Chantmerle. From the account Joe Summers now gave of that day twenty-one years back, Nigel’s imagination constructed and colored the scene. . . .

  When Celandine took up her father’s breakfast that summer morning in 1930, she found his bed empty. She was then a girl of twenty, on edge with the strain of nursing him during the weeks of illness which had followed the financial crash. Edric Chantmerle had fallen into a melancholiac condition, but latterly seemed to be picking up a little. However, when the girl could find him nowhere in house or garden, fearing he might have lost his memory and wandered farther off, she telephoned to the doctor and the village constable, then set off to look for him herself.

  In the meantime Joe Summers, taking his wonted constitutional between breakfast and opening time, happened to be walking up the track by which Nigel and the vicar had climbed the hill this afternoon. He was almost at the top when he heard a woman moaning. He ran toward the sound, and looking down into the quarry, saw the bodies of Celandine Chantmerle and her father. It had been a dry month, so there was little water in the quarry bottom. But Celandine was unconscious now, and Joe at first thought they were both dead. However, he scrambled down the precipitous face of the quarry, splashed out to where the bodies lay, and seeing that Edric Chantmerle’s neck was broken, began lifting the girl out of the water. As he did so, she recovered consciousness.

  “My legs won’t work,” was the first thing she said. Then presently: “I saw him lying here. I climbed down. Tried to drag him out of the water. But something’s gone wrong with my legs. He’s dead, isn’t he?” She burst into a wild fit of sobbing, hysterically crying
out: “They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him! I knew it would happen!”

  Joe Summers’s shouts for help brought the gardener from the Little Manor. Unfortunately they brought Rosebay too, a girl of eight then. Joe remembered her small face, shocked into blank expressionlessness (“She didn’t seem able to take in what had happened,” was how he put it), gazing solemnly down at them from the edge of the quarry as they prepared ropes to haul up her sister and her father’s body.

  After this, Celandine was gravely ill for some weeks. Rosebay was sent away to stay with relatives. Sir Archibald Blick, who was at the Hall with his son Charles for a holiday, had engaged nurses to look after Celandine. At the inquest on Edric, they brought in a verdict of “suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.”

  “It was a bad summer for Miss Celandine. Lost everything, she did. But she always had pluck. It’d have killed many another woman,” said Joe Summers now. There was a faraway, sentimental look in Joe’s eye which prompted Nigel to say:

  “Her father, her health, and the family money. Did she lose anything else?”

  “Funny you should ask that, sir. The summer I’m talking of, Miss Celandine and Mr. Charles were very thick. They was thrown together, as you might say, their families being the only gentry in the parish, except for our old vicar. We all thought they was going to make a match of it. Charles Blick was on holiday from Cambridge University, and they went about together a lot, particularly when Sir Archibald wasn’t here—he only came down for week ends. Pretty as a picture she was, with her golden hair and blue eyes and winsome ways.”

  Joe sighed sentimentally, and fell into a sort of reminiscent stupor.

  “But, after she became paralyzed—?”

  “Ah, that’s the long and the short of it. Mind you, I never held with the folk who swore Mr. Charles had behaved bad to her. I said to them: ‘Look,’ I said, ‘human nature isn’t a matter of black or white. We don’t know what may have happened between them.’ Maybe she sent him away when she knew she could never make him a proper wife. Maybe they’d never clicked at all, if you’ll excuse the expression, sir.”

  “No judgment without full evidence?”

  “Eh? Ah, yes, I get you. That’s right. Of course, it looked bad, his going off like he did. But there was wheels within wheels in that quarter.”

  The landlord paused to relight his pipe. Nigel gave what he felt to be a grossly exaggerated representation of a listener who is all ears.

  Lowering his voice, Joe Summers said: “My old woman’s sister happened to be working up at the Hall just then. I remember her telling us she’d overheard Mr. Charles telling his father that Miss Celandine wouldn’t take no money from the Blicks. I should explain, this was when she was recovering from her illness, and the old doctor thought she was fit for the operation on her tumor. It’d be an expensive operation, and of course she couldn’t afford it herself, not after the crash.”

  “But why shouldn’t she accept money from the Blicks, if Charles and she—?”

  “That’s exactly what we asked ourselves at the time. And I’ll tell you my theory. Putting two and two together, I came to this conclusion: Miss Celandine must have quarreled with Mr. Charles and broke it off, either soon before her father’s death or after it. So she wasn’t going to be beholden to him for money. Too proud to take it from the Blicks. But wait a minute.” Joe held up a huge forefinger. “Where do we go from there? Mr. Charles did at least offer to get the money for her operation; so he couldn’t ’ve been wholly bad and heartless, could he now?”

  “No. It might have been conscience money, though.”

  “I don’t rightly get your meaning, sir.”

  “Well, if it was Charles who’d broken it off, because of her having become a cripple, he’d be feeling rather a heel, wouldn’t he, and he might try to salve his guilty conscience with a cash payment.”

  “You may be right,” said Joe dubiously. “But I can’t quite see Charles Blick letting her down like that. Don’t believe it’d be in his nature.”

  “Was there any other reason why Miss Chantmerle should have come to hate the Blicks? Who was she talking about when you rescued her and she said: ‘They’ve killed him’?”

  “Oh, I don’t reckon she meant anyone particular. Maybe the gang of politicians who started the slump and lost Mr. Chantmerle his money. She was proper dazed, anyway—didn’t know what she was saying.”

  “Yes, but in that state of mind she’d be liable to put the blame on the handiest person. And Sir Archibald, I’m told, was her father’s financial adviser.”

  “That’s news to me, sir. You’d hardly credit it! Why, I thought Sir Archibald was one of these what-they-call financial wizards.”

  “Even experts can slip up.”

  “Too true they can. I recall—hey, hey, look, it’s just on six. I must go and open up. Make yourself at home, sir. My missus’ll put on the grub at eight.”

  Quarter of an hour later Nigel went into the public bar. It held only one occupant, who was eating out of a packet of crisps at the elm table, his back to the window. This individual—his face was in shadow, but he seemed to be a workman of some kind—raised a perfunctory hand to Nigel’s “Good evening,” and went on devouring crisps. Presently he said, in a surprisingly cultured voice: “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes. Where’s the landlord?”

  “What’ll you have?”

  “A pint of bitter. But—”

  The individual laid a finger to the side of his nose, went behind the bar, and drew Nigel a pint.

  “Thanks very much.”

  “That’ll be one and twopence. And I’ll have a gin and peppermint with you, if I may. Another half-crown. Much obliged.”

  As this unorthodox person mixed his drink, Nigel studied him with fascination. He looked like a cross between a defrocked priest and a leprechaun. Short and tubby, he wore a stained mackintosh open over a dark, lay-reader’s kind of suit. His nails were filthy; so were his cloth cap and the muffler round his neck. He had a roundish, mobile face, with bad teeth but remarkable eyes—brown, lustrous, a permanent twinkle in them.

  “Cheers, old fellow,” this stranger said. “First I’ve had today—on you. Down the hatch.” His voice was a rich baritone, slightly hoarse and drawling, and sounded as if at any moment it might break into a fat chuckle.

  “Mine host,” he said, resuming his seat by the window, “has just nipped over to the garage for some paraffin. I love oil lamps—don’t you? The best period is the Birmingham 1860 standard. Quite unquestionably. Ah, brasswork was brasswork in those days.” He emptied the bag of crisps into his mouth.

  Nigel could think of no conversational follow-up to this. None, however, proved necessary, for the stranger rose abruptly to go.

  “Must get back to my rural slum. Ta-ta.”

  Halfway to the door, he snapped his fingers, turned round and, advancing within a few inches of Nigel, remarked: “I say, old top, are you by any chance Strangeways?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “How lucky. Might have missed you. Come along up to my shack tonight, eh? About nine P.M. I have my feed at eight. Up past the church. A white gate. You can’t miss it.” He gave Nigel a theatrically conspiratorial look, and muttered huskily: “I’ve got some things to show you: you might be interested in them. Well, cheeribye for now.”

  Only when the door had shut did Nigel, bemused by the stranger’s personality, realize that he did not know his name.

  4 The Squire’s Hobbies

  HE STILL DID not know it when, at nine o’clock, he went out to find the white gate beyond the church. As soon as Joe had returned, the village constable came in, wanting a private talk with Nigel. Then there was the enormous meal laid on by Mrs. Summers. And after it, when Nigel put his head in at the bar, he saw a crowd of villagers taking up all Joe’s attention.

  P. C. Clotworthy turned out no more promising than Sir Archibald had predicted. Slow of speech, and slower of thought, he was evidently to
rn between professional suspicion of the amateur and compelled respect for the Londoner who had arrived under Sir Archibald’s aegis. However, by showing a somewhat fulsome deference to the constable’s official status, and by inquiring after his garden, Nigel contrived to break the ice a little.

  Obtaining information from P. C. Clotworthy was a thing which required patience rather than finesse. He had to issue himself a permit, as it were, signed in triplicate, before answering each of Nigel’s questions. This slow-motion dialogue did, however, produce a few facts. There had been the inevitable difficulty with the postal authorities over interception and examination of letters at the Prior’s Umborne post office. The police had obtained the requisite authority from the P.O. Divisional Headquarters, after some delay, yesterday morning—too late to have stopped the letter which made Templeton’s cowman attempt suicide. The cowman was recovering, but still refused to let his girl visit him. No anonymous letters had come to the post office since police surveillance started—none, that is, unless the writer had altered his habit of addressing the envelopes in capital letters, for the police were not as yet checking those addressed in ordinary script. Clotworthy had worked round the whole parish, inquiring at each house whether an anonymous letter had been received, and warning the householder that, if he did receive one, it should be taken at once to the police. The result, so far, was meager. Although Clotworthy had fair reason to believe that quite a few more letters must have gone out with the first batch from the poison pen, only farmer Templeton and a girl who worked as typist in Charles Blick’s factory office acknowledged having received one. Templeton said he had torn up his letter, and he was extremely evasive about its contents. The Moreford Inspector had finally coaxed him into admitting that it accused him—“all damned lies, mind you”—of falsifying his returns. The typist had a nervous breakdown, and the doctor refused to allow her to be questioned yet. She had not destroyed her letter: it was “very unsavory,” said Clotworthy, handing Nigel a copy, and blushing brick-red. Perusing it, Nigel thought the epithet an understatement; this letter was abominable, and frightening too.