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 those 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. "Gearge! You gart what 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 ent. And the front door's
unbolted."
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 ent there," he said, "his
close are. And what's 'e doin' without his close, then? 'Tas a most
curious basness."
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. Some one 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 top-most
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, describing 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 dryly 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 these cases.
"'Tas sperrits," said Mrs. Hall. "I know 'tas
sperrits. 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 sperrits 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 ef 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 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.
