Now it happened that in the early hours of Whit Monday,
before Millie was hunted out for the day, Mr. Hall and Mrs. Hall both rose and
went noiselessly down into the cellar. Their business there was of a
private nature, and had something to do with the specific gravity of their
beer. They had hardly entered the cellar when Mrs. Hall found she had
forgotten to bring down a bottle of sarsaparilla from their joint-room.
As she was the expert and principal operator in this affair, Hall very properly
went upstairs for it.
On the landing he was surprised to see that the stranger’s
door was ajar. He went on into his own room and found the bottle as he
had been directed.
But returning with the bottle, he noticed that the bolts of
the front door had been shot back, that the door was in fact simply on the
latch. And with a flash of inspiration he connected this with the
stranger’s room upstairs and the suggestions of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. He
distinctly remembered holding the candle while Mrs. Hall shot these bolts
overnight. At the sight he stopped, gaping, then with the bottle still in
his hand went upstairs again. He rapped at the stranger’s door.
There was no answer. He rapped again; then pushed the door wide open and
entered.
It was as he expected. The bed, the room also, was
empty. And what was stranger, even to his heavy intelligence, on the
bedroom chair and along the rail of the bed were scattered the garments, the
only garments so far as he knew, and the bandages of their guest. His big
slouch hat even was cocked jauntily over the bed-post.
As Hall stood there he heard his wife’s voice coming out of
the depth of the cellar, with that rapid telescoping of the syllables and
interrogative cocking up of the final words to a high note, by which the West
Sussex villager is wont to indicate a brisk impatience. “George!
You gart whad a wand?”
At that he turned and hurried down to her. “Janny,” he
said, over the rail of the cellar steps, “’tas the truth what Henfrey
sez. ’E’s not in uz room, ’e en’t. And the front door’s onbolted.”
At first Mrs. Hall did not understand, and as soon as she
did she resolved to see the empty room for herself. Hall, still holding
the bottle, went first. “If ’e en’t there,” he said, “’is close
are. And what’s ‘e doin’ ’ithout ’is close, then? ’Tas a most
curious business.”
As they came up the cellar steps they both, it was
afterwards ascertained, fancied they heard the front door open and shut, but
seeing it closed and nothing there, neither said a word to the other about it
at the time. Mrs. Hall passed her husband in the passage and ran on first
upstairs. Someone sneezed on the staircase. Hall, following six
steps behind, thought that he heard her sneeze. She, going on first, was
under the impression that Hall was sneezing. She flung open the door and
stood regarding the room. “Of all the curious!” she said.
She heard a sniff close behind her head as it seemed, and
turning, was surprised to see Hall a dozen feet off on the topmost stair.
But in another moment he was beside her. She bent forward and put her
hand on the pillow and then under the clothes.
“Cold,” she said. “He’s been up this hour or more.”
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened.
The bed-clothes gathered themselves together, leapt up suddenly into a sort of
peak, and then jumped headlong over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if
a hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside. Immediately
after, the stranger’s hat hopped off the bed-post, described a whirling flight
in the air through the better part of a circle, and then dashed straight at
Mrs. Hall’s face. Then as swiftly came the sponge from the washstand; and
then the chair, flinging the stranger’s coat and trousers carelessly aside, and
laughing drily in a voice singularly like the stranger’s, turned itself up with
its four legs at Mrs. Hall, seemed to take aim at her for a moment, and charged
at her. She screamed and turned, and then the chair legs came gently but
firmly against her back and impelled her and Hall out of the room. The
door slammed violently and was locked. The chair and bed seemed to be
executing a dance of triumph for a moment, and then abruptly everything was
still.
Mrs. Hall was left almost in a fainting condition in Mr.
Hall’s arms on the landing. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mr.
Hall and Millie, who had been roused by her scream of alarm, succeeded in
getting her downstairs, and applying the restoratives customary in such cases.
“’Tas sperits,” said Mrs. Hall. “I know ’tas sperits.
I’ve read in papers of en. Tables and chairs leaping and dancing...”
“Take a drop more, Janny,” said Hall. “’Twill steady ye.”
“Lock him out,” said Mrs. Hall. “Don’t let him come in
again. I half guessed I might ha’ known. With them goggling eyes
and bandaged head, and never going to church of a Sunday. And all they
bottles more’n it’s right for any one to have. He’s put the sperits into
the furniture.... My good old furniture! ’Twas in that very chair
my poor dear mother used to sit when I was a little girl. To think it
should rise up against me now!”
“Just a drop more, Janny,” said Hall. “Your nerves is
all upset.”
They sent Millie across the street through the golden five
o’clock sunshine to rouse up Mr. Sandy Wadgers, the blacksmith. Mr.
Hall’s compliments and the furniture upstairs was behaving most
extraordinary. Would Mr. Wadgers come round? He was a knowing man,
was Mr. Wadgers, and very resourceful. He took quite a grave view of the
case. “Arm darmed if thet ent witchcraft,” was the view of Mr. Sandy
Wadgers. “You warnt horseshoes for such gentry as he.”
He came round greatly concerned. They wanted him to
lead the way upstairs to the room, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
He preferred to talk in the passage. Over the way Huxter’s apprentice
came out and began taking down the shutters of the tobacco window. He was
called over to join the discussion. Mr. Huxter naturally followed over in
the course of a few minutes. The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary
government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive
action. “Let’s have the facts first,” insisted Mr. Sandy Wadgers.
“Let’s be sure we’d be acting perfectly right in bustin’ that there door
open. A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door
once you’ve busted en.”
And suddenly and most wonderfully the door of the room
upstairs opened of its own accord, and as they looked up in amazement, they saw
descending the stairs the muffled figure of the stranger staring more blackly
and blankly than ever with those unreasonably large blue glass eyes of
his. He came down stiffly and slowly, staring all the time; he walked
across the passage staring, then stopped.
“Look there!” he said, and their eyes followed the direction
of his gloved finger and saw a bottle of sarsaparilla hard by the cellar
door. Then he entered the parlour, and suddenly, swiftly, viciously,
slammed the door in their faces.
Not a word was spoken until the last echoes of the slam had
died away. They stared at one another. “Well, if that don’t lick
everything!” said Mr. Wadgers, and left the alternative unsaid.
“I’d go in and ask’n ’bout it,” said Wadgers, to Mr.
Hall. “I’d d’mand an explanation.”
It took some time to bring the landlady’s husband up to that
pitch. At last he rapped, opened the door, and got as far as, “Excuse me ”
“Go to the devil!” said the stranger in a tremendous voice,
and “Shut that door after you.” So that brief interview terminated.
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