Читать книгу Q's Mystery Stories - Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch - Страница 7

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JUST outside the small country station of M—— in Cornwall, a viaduct carries the Great Western Railway line across a coombe, or narrow valley, through which a tributary trout-stream runs southward to meet the tides of the L—— River. From the carriage window as you pass you look down the coombe for half a mile perhaps, and also down a road which, leading out from M—— Station a few yards below the viaduct, descends the left-hand slope at a sharp incline to the stream; but whether to cross it or run close beside it down the valley bottom you cannot tell, since, before they meet, an eastward curve of the coombe shuts off the view.

Both slopes are pleasantly wooded, and tall beeches, interset here and there with pines—a pretty contrast in the spring—spread their boughs over the road; which is cut cornice-wise, with a low parapet hedge to protect it along the outer side, where the ground falls steeply to the water-meadows, that wind like a narrow green riband edged by the stream with twinkling silver.

For the rest, there appears nothing remarkable in the valley: and certainly Mr. Molesworth, who crossed and recrossed it regularly on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, on his way to and from his banking business in Plymouth, would have been puzzled to explain why, three times out of four, as his train rattled over the viaduct, he laid down his newspaper, took the cigar from his mouth, and gazed down from the window of his first-class smoking carriage upon the green water-meadows and the curving road. The Great Western line for thirty miles or so on the far side of Plymouth runs through scenery singularly beautiful, and its many viaducts carry it over at least a dozen coombes more strikingly picturesque than this particular one which alone engaged his curiosity. The secret, perhaps, lay with the road. Mr. Molesworth, who had never set foot on it, sometimes wondered whither it led and into what country it disappeared around the base of the slope to which at times his eyes travelled and almost always wistfully. He had passed his forty-fifth year, and forgotten that he was an imaginative man. Nevertheless, and quite unconsciously, he let his imagination play for a few moments every morning—in the evening, jaded with business, he forgot as often as not to look—along this country road. Somehow it had come to wear a friendly smile, inviting him: and he on his part regarded it with quite a friendly interest. Once or twice, half-amused by the fancy, he had promised himself to take a holiday and explore it.

Years had gone by, and the promise remained unredeemed, nor appeared likely to be redeemed; yet at the back of his mind he was always aware of it. Daily, as the train slowed down and stopped at M—— Station, he spared a look for the folks on the platform. They had come by the road; and others, alighting, were about to take the road.

They were few enough, as a rule: apple-cheeked farmers and country-wives with their baskets, bound for Plymouth market; on summer mornings, as likely as not, an angler or two, thick-booted, carrying rods and creels, their hats wreathed with March-browns or palmers on silvery lines of gut; in the autumn, now and then, a sportsman with his gun; on Monday mornings half a dozen Navy lads returning from furlough, with stains of native earth on their shoes and the edges of their wide trousers.... The faces of all these people wore an innocent friendliness: to Mr. Molesworth, a childless man, they seemed a childlike race, and mysterious as children, carrying with them like an aura the preoccupations of the valley from which they emerged. He decided that the country below the road must be worth exploring; that spring or early summer must be the proper season, and angling his pretext. He had been an accomplished fly-fisher in his youth, and wondered how much of the art would return to his hand when, after many years, it balanced the rod again.

Together with his fly-fishing Mr. Molesworth had forgotten most of the propensities of his youth. He had been born an only son of rich parents, who shrank from exposing him to the rigours and temptations of a public school. Consequently, when the time came for him to go up to Oxford, he had found no friends there and had made few, being sensitive, shy, entirely unskilled in games, and but moderately interested in learning. His vacations, which he spent at home, were as dull as he had always found them under a succession of well-meaning, middle-aged tutors—until, one August day, as he played a twelve-pound salmon, he glanced up at the farther bank and into a pair of brown eyes which were watching him with unconcealed interest.

The eyes belonged to a yeoman-farmer’s daughter: and young Molesworth lost his fish, but returned next day, and again day after day, to try for him. At the end of three weeks or so, his parents—he was a poor hand at dissimulation—discovered what was happening, and interfered with promptness and resolution. He had not learnt the art of disobedience, and while he considered how to begin (having, indeed, taken his passion with a thoroughness that did him credit), Miss Margaret, sorely weeping, was packed off on a visit to her mother’s relations near Exeter, where three months later, she married a young farmer-cousin and emigrated to Canada.

In this way Mr. Molesworth’s love-making and his fly-fishing had come to an end together. Like Gibbon, he had sighed as a lover, and (Miss Margaret’s faithlessness assisting) obeyed as a son. Nevertheless the sequel did not quite fulfil the hopes of his parents, who, having acted with decision in a situation which took them unawares, were willing enough to make amends by providing him with quite a large choice of suitable partners. To their dismay it appeared that he had done with all thoughts of matrimony: and I am not sure that, as the years went on, their dismay did not deepen into regret. To the end he made them an admirable son, but they went down to their graves and left him unmarried.

In all other respects he followed irreproachably the line of life they had marked out for him. He succeeded to the directorate of the Bank in which the family had made its money, and to those unpaid offices of local distinction which his father had adorned. As a banker he was eminently ‘sound’—that is to say, cautious, but not obstinately conservative; as a Justice of the Peace, scrupulous, fair, inclined to mercy, exact in the performance of all his duties. As High Sheriff he filled his term of office and discharged it adequately, but without ostentation. Respecting wealth, but not greatly caring for it—as why should he?—every year without effort he put aside a thousand or two. Men liked him, in spite of his shyness: his good manners hiding a certain fastidiousness of which he was aware without being at all proud of it. No one had ever treated him with familiarity. One or two at the most called him friend, and these probably enjoyed a deeper friendship than they knew. Every one felt him to be, behind his reserve, a good fellow.

Regularly four times a week he drove down in his phaeton to the small country station at the foot of his park, and caught the 10.27 up-train: regularly as the train started he lit the cigar which, carefully smoked, was regularly three-parts consumed by the time he crossed the M—— viaduct; and regularly, as he lit it, he was conscious of a faint feeling of resentment at the presence of Sir John Crang.

Nine mornings out of ten, Sir John Crang (who lived two stations down the line) would be his fellow-traveller; and, three times out of five, his only companion. Sir John was an ex-Civil Servant, knighted for what were known vaguely as ‘services in Burmah,’ and, now retired upon a derelict country seat in Cornwall, was making a bold push for local importance, and dividing his leisure between the cultivation of roses (in which he excelled) and the directorship of a large soap-factory near the Plymouth docks. Mr. Molesworth did not like him, and might have accounted for his dislike by a variety of reasons. He himself, for example, grew roses in a small way as an amateur, and had been used to achieve successes at the local flower-shows until Sir John arrived and in one season beat him out of the field. This, as an essentially generous man, he might have forgiven; but not the loud dogmatic air of patronage with which on venturing to congratulate his rival and discuss some question of culture, he had been bullied and set right and generally treated as an ignorant junior. Moreover, he seemed to observe—but he may have been mistaken—that, whatever rose he selected for his buttonhole, Sir John would take note of it and trump next day with a finer bloom.

But these were trifles. Putting them aside, Mr. Molesworth felt that he could never like the man who—to be short—was less of a gentleman than a highly coloured and somewhat aggressive imitation of one. Most of all, perhaps, he abhorred Sir John’s bulging glassy eyeballs, of a hard white by contrast with his coppery skin—surest sign of the cold sensualist. But in fact he took no pains to analyse his aversion, which extended even to the smell of Sir John’s excellent but Burmese cigars. The two men nodded when they met, and usually exchanged a remark or two on the weather. Beyond this they rarely conversed, even upon politics, although both were Conservatives and voters in the same electoral division.

The day of which this story tells was a Saturday in the month of May 188-, a warm and cloudless morning, which seemed to mark the real beginning of summer after an unusually cold spring. The year, indeed, had reached that exact point when for a week or so the young leaves are as fragrant as flowers, and the rush of the train swept a thousand delicious scents in at the open windows. Mr. Molesworth had donned a white waistcoat in honour of the weather, and wore a bud of a Capucine rose in his buttonhole. Sir John had adorned himself with an enormous glowing Sénateur Vaisse. (Why not a Paul Neyron while he was about it? wondered Mr. Molesworth, as he surveyed the globular bloom.)

Now in the breast a door flings wide——

It may have been the weather that disposed Sir John to talk to-day. After commending it, and adding a word or two in general in praise of the West-country climate, he paused and watched Mr. Molesworth lighting his cigar.

‘You’re a man of regular habits?’ he observed unexpectedly, with a shade of interrogation in his voice.

Mr. Molesworth frowned and tossed his match out of the window.

‘I believe in regular habits myself.’ Sir John, bent on affability, laid down his newspaper on his knee. ‘There’s one danger about them, though: they’re deadening. They save a man the bother of thinking and persuade him he’s doing right, when all the reason is that he’s done the same thing a hundred times before. I came across that in a book once, and it seemed to me dashed sound sense. Now here’s something I’d like to ask you—have you any theory at all about dreams?’

‘Dreams?’ echoed Mr. Molesworth, taken aback by the inconsequent question.

‘There’s a Society—isn’t there?—that makes a study of ’em and collects evidence. Man wakes up, having dreamt that a friend whom he knows to be abroad is standing by his bed; lights his candle or turns on the electric-light and looks at his watch; goes to sleep again, tells his family all about it at breakfast, and a week or two later learns that his friend died at such-and-such an hour, and the very minute his watch pointed to. That’s the sort of thing.’

‘You mean the Psychical Society?’

‘That’s the name. Well, I’m a case for ’em. Anyway, I can knock the inside out of one of their theories, that dreams are a sort of memory-game, made up of scenes and scraps and suchlike out of your waking consciousness—isn’t that the lingo? Now, I’ve never had but one dream in my life; but I’ve dreamt it two or three score of times, and I dreamt it last night.’

‘Indeed?’ Mr. Molesworth was getting mildly interested.

‘And I’m not what you’d call a fanciful sort of person,’ went on Sir John, with obvious veracity. ‘Regular habits—rise early and to bed early; never a day’s trouble with my digestion; off to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. You can’t call my dream a nightmare, and yet it’s unpleasant, somehow.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Well’—Sir John seemed to hesitate—‘you might call it a scene. Yes, that’s it—a scene. There’s a piece of water and a church beside it—just an ordinary-looking little parish church, with a tower but no pinnacles. Outside the porch there’s a tallish stone cross—you can just see it between the elms from the churchyard gate; and going through the gate you step over a sort of grid—half a dozen granite stones laid parallel, with spaces between.’

‘Then it must be a Cornish church. You never see that contrivance outside the Duchy: though it’s worth copying. It keeps out sheep and cattle, while even a child can step across it easily.’

‘But, my dear sir, I never saw Cornwall—and certainly never saw or heard of this contrivance—until I came and settled here, eight years ago: whereas I’ve been dreaming this, off and on, ever since I was fifteen.’

‘And you never actually saw the rest of the scene? the church itself, for instance?’

‘Neither stick nor stone of it: I’ll take my oath. Mind you, it isn’t like a church made up of different scraps of memory. It’s just that particular church, and I know it by heart, down to a scaffold-hole, partly hidden with grass, close under the lowest string-course of the tower, facing the gate.’

‘And inside?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been inside. But stop a moment—you haven’t heard the half of it yet! There’s a road comes downhill to the shore, between the churchyard wall—there’s a heap of greyish silvery-looking stuff, by the way, growing on the coping—something like lavender, with yellow blossoms——Where was I? Oh yes, and on the other side of the road there’s a tall hedge with elms above it. It breaks off where the road takes a bend around and in front of the churchyard gate, with a yard or two of turf on the side towards the water, and from the turf a clean drop of three feet, or a little less, on to the foreshore. The foreshore is all grey stones, round and flat, the sort you’d choose to play what’s called ducks-and-drakes. It goes curving along, and the road with it, until the beach ends with a spit of rock, and over the rock a kind of cottage (only bigger, but thatched and whitewashed just like a cottage) with a garden, and in the garden a laburnum in flower, leaning slantwise’—Sir John raised his open hand and bent his forefinger to indicate the angle—‘and behind the cottage a reddish cliff with a few clumps of furze overhanging it, and the turf on it stretching up to a larch plantation....’

Sir John paused and rubbed his forehead meditatively.

‘At least,’ he resumed, ‘I think it’s a larch plantation; but the scene gets confused above a certain height. It’s the foreshore, and the church and the cottage that I always see clearest. Yes, and I forgot to tell you—I’m a poor hand at description—that there’s a splash of whitewash on the spit of rock, and an iron ring fixed there, for warping-in a vessel, maybe; and sometimes there’s a boat, out on the water....’

‘You describe it vividly enough,’ said Mr. Molesworth as Sir John paused and, apparently on the point of resuming his story, checked himself, tossed his cigar out of the window, and chose a fresh one from his pocket-case. ‘Well, and what happens in your dream?’

Sir John struck a match, puffed his fresh cigar alight, deliberately examined the ignited end, and flung the match away. ‘Nothing happens. I told you it was just a scene, didn’t I?’

‘You said that somehow the dream was an unpleasant one.’

‘So I did. So it is. It makes me damnably uncomfortable every time I dream it; though for the life of me I can’t tell you why.’

‘The picture as you draw it seems to me quite a pleasant one.’

‘So it is, again.’

‘And you say nothing happens?’

‘Well’—Sir John took the cigar from his mouth and looked at it—‘nothing ever happens in it, definitely: nothing at all. But always in the dream there’s a smell of lemon verbena—it comes from the garden—and a curious hissing noise—and a sense of a black man’s being somehow mixed up in it all....’

‘A black man?’

‘Black or brown ... in the dream I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him. The hissing sound—it’s like the hiss of a snake, only ten times louder—may have come into the dream of late years. As to that I won’t swear. But I’m dead certain there was always a black man mixed up in it, or what I may call a sense of one: and that, as you will say, is the most curious part of the whole business.’

Sir John flipped away the ash of his cigar and leant forward impressively.

‘If I wasn’t, as I say, dead sure of his having been in it from the first,’ he went on, ‘I could tell you the exact date when he took a hand in the game: because,’ he resumed after another pause, ‘I once actually saw what I’m telling you.’

‘But you told me,’ objected Mr. Molesworth, ‘that you have never actually seen it.’

‘I was wrong then. I saw it once, in a Burmese boy’s hand at Maulmain. The old Eastern trick, you know: palmful of ink and the rest of it. There was nothing particular about the boy except an ugly scar on his cheek (caused, I believe, by his mother having put him down to sleep in the fire-place while the clay floor of it was nearly red-hot under the ashes). His master called himself his grandfather—a holy-looking man with a white beard down to his loins: and the pair of them used to come up every year from Mergui or some such part, at the Full Moon of Taboung, which happens at the end of March and is the big feast in Maulmain. The pair of them stood close by the great entrance of the Shway Dagone where the three roads meet, and just below the long flights of steps leading up to the pagoda. The second day of the feast I was making for the entrance with a couple of naval officers I had picked up at the Club, and my man, Moung Gway, following as close as he could keep in the crowd. Just as we were going up the steps, the old impostor challenged me, and, partly to show my friends what the game was like—for they were new to the country—I stopped and found a coin for him. He poured the usual dollop of ink into the boy’s hand, and, by George, sir, next minute I was staring at the very thing I’d seen a score of times in my dreams but never out of them. I tell you, there’s more in that Eastern hanky-panky than meets the eye; beyond that I’ll offer no opinion. Outside the magic I believe that whole business was a put-up job, to catch my attention and take me unawares. For when I stepped back, pretty well startled, and blinking from the strain of keeping my attention fixed on the boy’s palm, a man jumped forward from the crowd and precious nearly knifed me. If it hadn’t been for Moung Gway, who tripped him up and knocked him sideways, I should have been a dead man in two twos—for my friends were taken aback by the suddenness of it. But in less than a minute we had him down and the handcuffs on him; and the end was, he got five years’ hard, which means hefting chain-shot from one end to another of the prison square and then hefting it back again. There was a rather neat little Burmese girl, you see—a sort of niece of Moung Gway’s—who had taken a fancy to me; and this turned out to be a disappointed lover, just turned up from a voyage to Cagayan in a paddy-boat. I believed he had fixed it up with the venerable one to hold me with the magic until he got in his stroke. Venomous beggars, those Burmans, if you cross ’em in the wrong way! The fellow got his release a week before I left Maulmain for good, and the very next day Moung Gway was found, down by the quays, dead as a haddock, with a wound between the shoulderblades as neat as if he’d been measured for it. Oh, I could tell you a story or two about those fellows?’

‘It’s easily explained, at any rate,’ Mr. Molesworth suggested, ‘why you see a dark-skinned man in your dream.’

‘But I tell you, my dear sir, he has been a part of the dream from the beginning ... before I went to Wren’s, and long before ever I thought of Burmah. He’s as old as the church itself, and the foreshore and the cottage—the whole scene, in fact—though I can’t say he’s half as distinct. I can’t tell you in the least, for instance, what his features are like. I’ve said that the upper part of the dream is vague to me; at the end of the foreshore, that is, where the cottage stands; the church tower I can see plainly enough to the very top. But over by the cottage—above the porch, as you may say—everything seems to swim in a mist: and it’s up in that mist the fellow’s head and shoulders appear and vanish. Sometimes I think he’s looking out of the window at me, and draws back into the room as if he didn’t want to be seen; and the mist itself gathers and floats away with the hissing sound I told you about....’

Sir John’s voice paused abruptly. The train was drawing near the M—— viaduct, and Mr. Molesworth from force of habit had turned his eyes to the window, to gaze down the green valley. He withdrew them suddenly, and looked around at his companion.

‘Ah, to be sure,’ he said vaguely; ‘I had forgotten the hissing sound.’

It was curious, but as he spoke he himself became aware of a loud hissing sound filling his ears. The train lurched and jolted heavily.

‘Hallo!’ exclaimed Sir John, half rising in his seat, ‘something’s wrong.’ He was staring past Mr. Molesworth and out of the window. ‘Nasty place for an accident, too,’ he added in a slow, strained voice.

The two men looked at each other for a moment. Sir John’s face wore a tense expression—a kind of galvanized smile. Mr. Molesworth closed his eyes, instinctively concealing his sudden sickening terror of what an accident just there must mean: and for a second or so he actually had a sensation of dropping into space. He remembered having felt something like it in dreams three or four times in his life: and at the same instant he remembered a country superstition gravely imparted to him in childhood by his old nurse, that if you dreamt of falling and didn’t wake up before reaching the bottom, you would surely die. The absurdity of it chased away his terror, and he opened his eyes and looked about him with a short laugh....

The train still jolted heavily, but had begun to slow down, and Mr. Molesworth drew a long breath as a glance told him that they were past the viaduct. Sir John had risen, and was leaning out of the farther window. Something had gone amiss, then. But what?

He put the question aloud. Sir John, his head and shoulders well outside the carriage-window, did not answer. Probably he did not hear.

As the train ran into M—— Station and came to a standstill, Mr. Molesworth caught a glimpse of the station-master, in his gold-braided cap, by the door of the booking-office. He wore a grave, almost a scared look. The three or four country-people on the sunny platform seemed to have their gaze drawn by the engine, and somebody ahead there was shouting. Sir John Crang, without a backward look, flung the door open and stepped out. Mr. Molesworth was preparing to follow—and by the cramped feeling in his fingers was aware at the same instant that he had been gripping the arm-rest almost desperately—when the guard of the train came running by and paused to thrust his head in at the open doorway to explain.

‘Engine’s broken her coupling-rod, sir—just before we came to the viaduct. Mercy for us she didn’t leave the rails.’

‘Mercy, indeed, as you say,’ Mr. Molesworth assented. ‘I suppose we shall be hung up here until they send a relief down?’

The guard—Mr. Molesworth knew him as ‘George’ by name, and by habit constantly polite—turned and waved his flag hurriedly, in acknowledgment of the shouting ahead, before answering——

‘You may count on half an hour’s delay, sir. Lucky it’s no worse. You’ll excuse me—they’re calling for me down yonder.’

He ran on, and Mr. Molesworth stepped out upon the platform, of which this end was already deserted, all the passengers having alighted and hurried forward to inspect the damaged engine. A few paces beyond the door he met the station-master racing back to dispatch a telegram.

‘It seems that we’ve had a narrow escape,’ said Mr. Molesworth.

The station-master touched his hat and plunged into his office. Mr. Molesworth, instead of joining the crowd around the engine, halted before a small pile of luggage on a bench outside the waiting-room and absent-mindedly scanned the labels.

Among the parcels lay a fishing-rod in a canvas case and a wicker creel, the pair of them labelled and bearing the name of an acquaintance of his—a certain Sir Warwick Moyle, baronet and county magistrate, beside whom he habitually sat at Quarter Sessions.

‘I had no idea,’ Mr. Molesworth mused, ‘that Moyle was an angler. It would be a fair joke, anyway, to borrow his rod and fill up the time.—How long before the relief comes down?’ he asked, intercepting the station-master as he came rushing out from his office and slammed the door behind him.

‘Maybe an hour, sir, before we get you started again. I can’t honestly promise you less than forty minutes.’

‘Very well, then: I’m going to borrow Sir Warwick’s rod, there, and fill up the time,’ said Mr. Molesworth, pointing at it.

The station-master apparently did not hear; at any rate he passed on without remonstrance. Mr. Molesworth slung the creel over his shoulder, picked up the rod, and stepped out beyond the station gateway upon the road.