The haunted dancers, p.3
The Haunted Dancers, page 3
He lay absolutely still, not fearful at all but listening as if every pore in his skin were a little ear.
“Go away now, Tom,” Sarah said clearly. “That’s a good soul.” She waited a minute, and then started to talk, in a rather strained way at first and then almost eagerly.
“I told Perry we’d have to explain to you. You’re a friend, or I suppose we’d never have let you come at all. These last few months, we’ve been so absorbed in this job that we’ve rather forgotten how strange it may look to people who don’t know about it. Of course, here in Askhaven everyone understands. Everyone knows Perry for the dear godly man he is. He fr a man of God, you know, Mr. Beddoes. He could be a bishop if he wished—a good bishop. But I’ve no ambition for him—and I’d be such a ninny as a bishop’s wife! And Ask-haven is his whole life. Mine, too.”
Beddoes held out a cigarette to her, and she lit it for herself and then said, “They really seem to like me, too. Vicars’ wives are often disliked. Of course, I do most of the things I’m supposed to—Girls’ Friendly, and Guild, and those ghastly boxes for the missions. And I visit. That helps Perry. I’m really a very good vicar’s wife, now I think of it.” She leaned sensuously against the couch, and let the smoke curl up her cheekbones from her slackened fine lips.
“What about Tom?” Beddoes asked it softly, as if afraid to scare her away—or into plain friendliness again.
“Oh, Tom.” She looked vaguely at him, and then shook herself. “Yes, Tom. Well—it’s rather hard to start. I do hope he is not listening. He’s so terribly sensitive lately. You see, it’s getting time for him to leave us, and he doesn’t want to. But of course Perry says he must. Oh dear! Mr. Beddoes— Mr. Beddoes, Tom is …” Sarah looked earnestly at him, as if she was praying that it was all right to hurt him in some way or frighten him, and without even knowing that he did it he took one of her hands. She smiled at him. “Tom is a lost soul. There are a lot of them, everywhere. When they’re really lost, completely, hopelessly, they’re usually what people call ghosts. They’re terribly unhappy. Mr. Beddoes, and they do mischievous things, or bad things. It’s a kind of rage they’re in. They haunt people. It’s wretched. The two at Mrs. Protheroe’s—Perry feels so depressed about them that he’s almost ill, Mr. Beddoes. Poor darling. You see, Mrs. Protheroe called him because she knows how he is helping, and of course she has to support herself and run the inn alone, and the two … They were a man and woman in about 1620 who owned the Queen’s Head and sent all the decent women who stopped there to London, doped, for the sailors. These two horrible souls have come back, and they are driving away all the trade. They just lie in that bed, which isn’t really there, of course, and …” Sarah shuddered, and threw her cigarette into the grate.
Beddoes closed his eyes for a moment. He felt nauseated and cold, remembering the waves of hatred that had risen from the blue-canopied high couch last night, and hearing his own voice heavy with prayer against the impossible whirring of the electric clock upon the wall ‘Yes, those were damned souls,” he said at last, and looked at Sarah.
“Well, Perry will try again. And he has helped many, you know. Agatha is one of the best. She came to us! Usually Perry discovers where there is trouble and goes and rescues the poor tormented thing and brings it here. But Agatha came by herself, and asked to stay. Of course, she’s more like a guest, you know. It’s a queer mess. We hardly feel that we can ask her about herself. But she’s never been sly, like some of the others, and she’s getting clearer all the time. She insists she was a cook! She’ll soon leave us, too. You see, they grow clearer as they find themselves. Some of them, even if you can’t see them, you know they’re tiny and hideous, more like ideas than things—ideas of pain, perhaps. And then as they find themselves they grow straighter and clearer until they’re almost like children, but with old minds, of course. I can see Agatha lately. Today, when she wanted so much to make the tart, she was there, Mr. Beddoes—so little and sincere that I knew she’d be honest about it It was a terrible tart, but it was a tart. Some of them, even when they promise to be good, do naughty things, and might use salt instead of sugar. Or rat poison. Or drain cleanser..
“My God!” Beddoes looked angrily at her. “You’re in danger, then!”
“Of course. It’s a risky business, really. But we must do it You could tell, couldn’t you, the dreadful suffering of those two at Mrs. Protheroe’s, caught as they were in their own evil? And Perry can save them. He has had worse. He’ll bring them here, and gradually—I think it’s probably my quiet nature, and of course Pm patient when eggs get broken because I often break eggs myself—gradually they begin to be less cruel and twisted, and I give them little jobs to do. In fact then can become very helpful. I don’t hire anyone at all now.” She smiled at him.
He could see her only dimly against the soft glow of the fire, but her eyes looked sure and steady into bis. He gave her another cigarette and then said fretfully, “But I don’t like your being in danger. I don’t like it.”
“There isn’t much, really. And of course Tom is here.”
“Yes. What about Tom?”
Sarah watched smoke rise from her cigarette towards the chimney, and then she laughed. “It’s really simple, you know. He’s been with us several months now—almost since Perry began this. But every time Perry tells him it is nearly time to go, Tom breaks something or pretends to be naughty, and then we have to start all over again. At least, he means us to. And of course I have to be stem with myself, because really I wish he could stay for ever. I depend on him—too much, I know. He should have a real home, one he could run correctly. No. 1 Boy. But he’s wonderful with the others. I told him this afternoon about the silliness outside your door. I think it must have been Lady Donfellows and the Negro girl, Odessa. They’ve only been here a few weeks. They’re not bad at all, just idiotic—completely zany. Nitwits. They got lost before they died, and then fluttered around wondering what was wrong with everybody else—for centuries, probably. I told Tom. He felt rather badly. But he’ll keep them in order. I’m sure of him.”
Once more the soft sound of falling coal ash whispered in Beddoes’ ears, and he felt a little prickly, as he had once after an injection of adrenalin. “Where is Tom now?” he whispered.
Sarah looked around. “I can’t always see him, you know,” she answered rather impatiently. “And I can only feel him here if he wants me to. Tom, are you here?” They waited for a minute, Sarah on the floor, with her soft plump hand warmly in Beddoes’, which suddenly felt rather damp. “No, he isn’t here. Or else he is but is shy with you.” She grinned. “You don’t have to hear them, you know. I know it’s annoying. It annoys me sometimes. Even Tom will tease me a little. I’ll think I’m alone and suddenly he’ll steal the last bite of a bonbon I’ve been saving for after supper.” She jerked her hand away. “Oh, Mr. Beddoes! Tea! I haven’t even told them about tea for you!”
Beddoes laughed. “I’m not used to afternoon tea,” he said. “We don’t have it much back home, except for company from England!”
“But Perry will be furious with me! Don’t tell him, eh?”
He felt delightfully secretive, and grabbed her hand hard. “In cahoots!” he cried. “The tea was delicious, Ma’am! As I live and breathe, it was indeed!”
Sarah laughed excitedly, and then bit at her lip, her eyes bemused. “Yes,” she murmured. “Today’s Saturday. I have some beautiful fresh eggs. We’ll have an egg to our tea, as Mrs. Timpkins says. And that’ll be instead of supper. And you and Perry can go down to the Golden Duck and play darts. He likes to go Saturday nights. The men are easier then. They can tell him about—”
The door into the hall opened quietly, and Mac stood dark against the light the streamed in past him Beddoes started to sit up, feeling vaguely guilty, but Sarah held his hand tighter. “Perry!” she called. “Perry, I’ve been telling him about our ghoulies. He knows about them.”
“Good,” Mac said. “That’s all right, then. Beddoes, old boy, how about a wee nip before supper? I could stand one myself.”
“And I’ll go see about things,” Sarah said. “I’ll tell Agatha about the eggs.”
The rest of Beddoes’ weekend passed in a pleasant blur. He helped clear the table after meals, at which he ate heartily of the bad food, and he never went into the kitchen, feeling shyly that Agatha and the others might not like it, but instead stacked dishes and cups with his customary neatness on the sideboard. They always disappeared soon after.
Saturday night, he played interminable darts in a crowded smoky saloon—pub, he should say. He drank an astonishing number of double Scotches, but none of them seemed to hit him, and afterwards, in a solemnly clearheaded mood, he walked home through the sleeping village with Mac. He thought a long time and finally started to say that it was queer how well he understood the garbled accent of the village men, but Mac cut into his half-formed words. “Wait here, Bed-does, eh? I’ll be but a minute.” And, in his tweeds and round white collar, MacLaren hurried into the church through the unlocked door.
Beddoes waited, leaning against the cross by the sweetly dipping fountain. He knew Mac was right to leave him; he was drunk, even if he did not feel so in the least ‘Tipsy souls must go to pray all by themselves, inside themselves, if they can find the door,” Beddoes said.
Mac came out in a few minutes, his face serene, and they went home to bed.
After morning services the next day (Beddoes did not go, feeling strangely shy about seeing his friends in vestments at the altar), they played golf a few miles from the village with a pair of fat tweedy old boys who scowled for eighteen holes and made Beddoes feel stiffly foreign and oafish, and then relaxed completely in the stuffy little clubhouse and told innumerable jokes so fast and mumblingly that he could only guess when to laugh.
He went to Evensong, rather to his surprise. The church was dim and musty, and two musty dim old women prayed alone on one side of the aisle, while he and Sarah sat, discreetly parted by an untidy pile of hymnals, in a pew across from them. At the back of the church, an ancient man—the sexton, perhaps—snuffled and creaked. Beddoes found himself following automatically the ritual that meant his childhood and then an occasional service with his wife back home. It was wonderful how some things never faded. And it was queer how little he felt at the sight of Mac up there, hunched like a great white quiet bird over the lectern. He had counted on being awed, and instead he felt only a desire to yawn. It was disappointing.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Mac was saying deeply, his voice echoing from the damp walls, “and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all, evermore.”
“Amen,” said Beddoes and Sarah and the two old dim shadows in the pew across the aisle. The invisible sexton at the back of the church cleared his throat sanctimoniously and threw open the doors as for a fine wedding. Beddoes hurried away from Sarah. He felt wildly, urgently depressed. He almost ran around the buttresses of the little church and into the twilit garden, which lay somberly between the high stone structure and the vicarage.
A few minutes later, when Sarah came slowly to join him, she found him sitting on a bench under a tall privet tree. He stared strangely at her, and she saw even in the twilight that his face was almost luminous with emotion. “What is it, my dear Mr. Beddoes? What is it?” she cried, sitting quickly down beside him.
“Mrs. MacLaren—I have just seen .Tom!”
For a minute, neither spoke, and then Sarah laughed. “But how good! That is wonderful. Tom must like you very much. As we do, Mr. Beddoes, you know. That’s really dear of Tom, I think!”
“I didn’t think it dear at all, at first,” Beddoes answered rather severely. “I was damned upset, I can tell you. I was sitting here, wondering why Perry didn’t have some of his … his …”
“His ghoulies?”
“Yes, why he didn’t have them go to church. And then Tom said—and I heard him as clearly as I’m sitting here— Tom said, ‘Because we ain’t ready yet, you damn fool!’ And damn it, Mrs. MacLaren, he’s as American as I am! He’s no Limey. What’s he doing over here?”
Sarah only shook her head, smiling softly, her eyes dark in the gentle round fullness of her face.
“And then I sat down here feeling sort of queer, and I looked up and there he stood. It’s pretty dark, but I raw him, all right. He’s short and twisted, like a little old jockey, only smaller. There was a sort of blue outline. Oh, hell!”
Sarah sighed, as if she felt tired. “Yes, he’s like that. But they all are, for a while, Mr. Beddoes. They all are. But it’s good that you saw him. He trusts you. He’s still very lost, poor ghoulie, but he’s beginning to trust Perry, and me most of the time, and now you. He’s beginning to find himself.” She sighed again, and stood up. “Let’s go in. Perry’s not coming for a time; he’s helping the doctor with a poor woman in labour. I wish I’d had children. I’d have been a fine mother, I think.”
She walked up the path, talking as if to herself, and Beddoes, following her, felt a deep wrench at his heart. Poor Sarah! She was right. All that rich fullness of her body should have fed something other than lost souls.
“Turn on the switch there, dear Mr. Beddoes,” she went on. “Right by your hand. We’ll find a plate of cold toast. I like cold toast, especially when it grows a bit chewy, don’t you?”
He had never thought about it, but now it was plain to him that he did, indeed, like cold toast I wouldn’t mind a good drink to wash it down, though, he thought
“Tom says you’d like a drink.” She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, with the toast on a blue plate in her hand. “Get a glass, then, and we’ll pour a wee bit more from the vicar’s bottle. We’ll blame it on Tom.” There was a faint sound of giggling in the hall, and she laughed, too. “He’s a canny one,” she added, and disappeared.
Beddoes found a tumbler and half filled it with water, and then followed Sarah down the narrow musty hall to the parlour. He felt, tired, but when he saw her sitting as if broken in the low chair by the hearth he wanted to cry out and fold her to him tenderly and mightily, like a cloud or a giant. Her little round arms lay down along her sides, and she looked up at him with a faint frown, as if she were trying to remember who he was and what he expected her to say. “Where is Mac’s bottle?’ he asked her.
“In the cupboard on the left—or is it on the right? On your right of his desk. Isn’t it nice there’s a fire? I think we’ll have a storm soon. Poor Perry. But he loves to drive in storms. He took the doctor in his car with him.”
Beddoes poured himself a good wallop from the bottle, and swirled the glass around. Then he walked down the long room to Sarah and said, “Here, you take a little of this.”
She smiled, and sipped generously. “I like it,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Beddoes. It’s fine now and again, I think, and I could easily do more of it There’s my position to think of, though.” She sat up, quickly refreshed. “And now, what do you think of a little music until Perry’s here again? Would you like Haydn, or are you noisy and disordered after your sight of poor Tom and ready for Tchaikovsky, perhaps?’
Beddoes felt dull “I don’t know much about music. My wife —she always goes to the Philharmonic, of course. But I haven’t had much time for music myself.”
“I’ve heard that of you American men. It’s a pity, isn’t it? I can tell, Mr. Beddoes, by the bumps on your brow, that you’ve a fine feeling for it if you’d had the chance. We’ll start with Tchaikovsky, then; he’ll stir you and not bother your brain much. That’s always best at first—not too much thought.”
She went quietly to the study end of the room, and he could hear her sliding records out of their envelopes and fussing in a measured way, and then, as she walked back through the half-lighted room nearer to the fire, the first tempestuous strains of a piano playing with an orchestra crashed against his ears. He felt his hair prickling all over his head, and even under his arms. He lay back and let himself wash like seaweed in the tide of the music. Now and then, he sipped at his Scotch, but he did not think. He didn’t even feel anything identifiable, but only a great weakness and fulfilment. Then, gradually, he began not to hear. His untrained ears were exhausted; the music became noise, and he looked about him once more. “Is it a Panotrone changer?” he whispered. “I knew a producer in Hollywood with one. It flashed red and green lights, I remember, when it was running out of records. Scared hell out of me.”
“No,” Sarah murmured. “It’s Tom. He loves to change them. But listen—this is ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.’ ” She bent her head back again, so that it rolled slowly sideways.
Instead of listening, Beddoes looked at the smooth flow of her cheek. There must be a tiny down upon it, to catch the firelight with such gold. He wished he could see it more clearly, or perhaps touch it
The music went on, with hardly a pause between records, and then there was a small crash, which sounded sharply in the peaceful room. Sarah stiffened, and Beddoes sat up nervously, the empty glass jerking in his hand.
“It’s a record, I’m afraid,” she murmured. ‘Tom, I’m coming. Never mind. Never mind, my dear!” she called out as she hurried to the other end of the room. “It will be all right,” Beddoes heard her whisper urgently. “I’ll tell Mr. MacLaren. Think no more of it, my darling, but play us the Mozart again. Then we’ll stop. Come along now, don’t mope!” She walked back to the fire again, and Beddoes, who had thoughtfully kept his eyes away from the phonograph, saw that she was shaking her head a little. “He feels dreadfully. This time it wasn’t on purpose,” she told him. “We’ll listen to just one more, to buck him up a bit, don’t you think?’
“Sure, poor fellow.” It did not seem at all queer to Beddoes to be commiserating over the hurt pride of a ghoulie.
The listened dutifully, and then sat without talking by the fire. The man watched the woman and she watched the fire. “I’m sorry you must go tomorrow,” she said finally. “Perry will have to call you at five, I’m afraid. The train leaves Carlisle early. We’ll miss you, all of us.”
