The Daffodil Affair Read online

  ‘In Ron Hudspith? Well, that’s quite right.’ Appleby’s slow and easy colonial manner dated from a careful study of Rhodes scholars long ago. ‘Too right, Mr Wine. You couldn’t have a better off-sider than Ron.’

  ‘You are close friends?’

  ‘Cobbers,’ said Appleby solemnly. ‘And our dads before us. Ron’s dad was a well-known identity Cobdogla-way. You know Cobdogla, Mr Wine?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Ah.’ Appleby contrived the kindly, if quizzical and slightly contemptuous, stare merited by one to whom Cobdogla is but a name.

  ‘What interests me is that your friend appears to be of an unusually intense and brooding nature. To a stranger it would seem to suggest – well, almost a mild mania. I hope I don’t offend you.’

  ‘Yes?’ Hearing his own richly ironical voice Appleby recalled that a pose too was necessary; he strolled forward and contrived to offer an iron pillar support. ‘Ron saw a good deal of the back-blocks as a lad. He was a jackeroo on his uncle’s station for years.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Mr Wine’s was a civil convention of understanding.

  ‘Boundary riding most of the time. It marks them, you know. Don’t see a soul for weeks on end.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ Mr Wine was enlightened. ‘The Bush.’

  ‘The Malee,’ said Appleby severely. ‘And sometimes the Spinifex.’ As he offered this refinement of fancy his glance went rather anxiously towards the companionway from the saloon. The appearance of his cobber Ron at this moment might be unfortunate. ‘You ought to meet some of the old-timers there, Mr Wine. They’re so used to solitude and silence that two of them will meet and pass a night together in a humpy without exchanging a word.’

  ‘Dear me!’ said Mr Wine, and added, ‘–in a what?’

  ‘A humpy,’ Appleby repeated firmly. ‘Sometimes they go a bit strange. Visions – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Indeed! And is your friend at all affected in that way?’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Too right, he is. You’ve seen him up there by the bows, Mr Wine? That’s where he goes when it takes him.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’ Mr Wine was now leaning forward attentively. ‘And his visions are about–?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Appleby, suddenly ironical and reticent.

  Mr Wine relaxed and offered some observation on the course of the steamer. Appleby, still supporting that steamer’s superstructure with his shoulders, had leisure to reflect on his own rashness of the past few minutes. He had hurled the unwitting Hudspith into a fantastic role – and this was far from being the less reckless because Hudspith at present really had a loopy side to him. He had taken upon himself the burden of an impersonation far trickier than was required to support a vague association with Australian wool. And he had done all this partly out of boredom and the residual sense of the Daffodil affair’s being something of a holiday; and partly as the consequence of a sudden and extravagant plan. If Beaglehole was a buyer, then Wine was a talent scout – perhaps his own talent scout. And to have a friend who would score high marks in the psychic circus might be the quickest way of getting there. Hudspith, if his mind was set on tracing Hannah and Lucy, must be prepared to put an antic disposition on. And Cobdogla would be his kindly nurse.

  At this moment Hudspith appeared and strode past them with all the glowering concentration that Appleby could desire. And Mr Wine watched him with what was surely the covert interest of the impresario. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that a sea voyage often exacerbates such conditions.’

  ‘It makes me feel a hundred per cent myself.’ Appleby endeavoured to exude the curious animal luxury that Cobdogla breeds. ‘But I’ve no doubt you’re right. Nothing to the outback, though. I’ve known plenty men turn queer there. And beasts too, for the matter of that.’

  ‘Beasts. You surprise me.’ Mr Wine’s eye was still on Hudspith as he skirted No. 1 hatch.

  ‘Horses.’

  Mr Wine’s gaze swung slowly round. ‘Horses? You have found horses go peculiar in the – the outback?’

  ‘A horse doesn’t like solitude any more than a human, Mr Wine. He gets bored just like you or me – and then he’ll do queer things. Why, I’ve known a horse teach himself his numbers just through being bored. Like counting the tiles on the lavatory floor.’

  ‘You saw the horse gradually learn to count?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. It was quite a mathematician when I saw it.’

  ‘Dear me.’ Mr Wine was looking absently at the sea. ‘It did simple multiplications – that sort of thing?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘Then it was one of the Elberfeld horses.’

  ‘Elberfeld horses? It was one of the Dismal Swamp horses, Mr Wine.’

  ‘My dear sir, it was one of the Elberfeld horses.’ Mr Wine spoke with what was at once polite decision and the liveliest interest. ‘They were dispersed, and I suppose one may have strayed even to your Dismal Swamp. Perhaps you never heard of Clever Hans, Mr Appleby? He was the first of a remarkable line of so-called thinking horses in Germany at the beginning of the present century. They caused quite a sensation in their day.’ Mr Wine smiled faintly to an irresponsive ocean. ‘Krall wrote a book about them, Denkende Tiere, and there was even a learned journal, Tierseele, taking somewhat wider ground. And now tell me: what did they think of the creature at Dismal Swamp? Were there any reactions of what might be called a superstitious sort? Old women thinking the brute inspired – that sort of thing.’

  Appleby eased himself on his pillar and looked at Mr Wine with as much appearance of inattention as he could muster. An hour ago he had believed himself a week’s steaming from any hope of contact with his quarry; and now here was detection at positively breakneck pace. ‘Superstition?’ he said. ‘You’re telling me. There were old women who thought the devil was in the horse.’

  Wine nodded. ‘The Elberfeld horses have impressed more than old women, Mr Appleby. There was Professor Claparède. And what’s more there was Maeterlinck, one of the first intellects in Europe. He was convinced that the phenomena were supernormal.’

  ‘You mean what they call psychic?’ I thought all that stuff had gone bunk years ago, same as table-turning and ouija boards.’

  ‘My dear Mr Appleby, there are appetites which are perennial.’ Wine shook a wise and indulgent head. ‘Table-turning yesterday, astrology today – and tomorrow who knows what? Possibly Denkende Tiere again.’

  ‘But surely you don’t think there’s anything supernatural about a counting horse?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Wine’s reply was dry and sharp. ‘The thing is merely paranormal.’

  ‘Yes?’ Appleby contrived a promptly ironical reception for a strange word.

  ‘These horses have one or another sense extraordinarily developed. Sometimes it is a visual hyperaesthesia; more commonly a tactual. They can be trained to act upon minute sensory impressions – imperceptible signs which a showman will give. But that is not all. They can act upon such impressions involuntarily and unconsciously given. Put your hand on such a horse’s neck, or hold it on a taut rein. Then think of a number – say five. The horse will promptly signal five, perhaps by neighing or pawing. And the explanation is very simple. You are unable to think five without at the same time acting five. Ever so faintly, your whole organism is a pulse counting five. And the horse gets the message. Various effects of calculation can, of course, be built up on that basis.’

  ‘Yes?’ Appleby, who was far from questioning this simple physiological truth, got all the arrogant agnosticism of Cobdogla into the word.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Wine was almost nettled. ‘And exactly similar mechanisms lie behind much so-called thought-reading. Look at any memoir of a Cambridge man in the eighties and you will find the phenomenon ranking somewhere between a solemn scientific experiment and a parlour game. Professors played it in each other’s drawing rooms. You leave the room and the company hides someth
ing. You return, lay a hand on the cheek or temple of someone in the know, and occasionally you are mysteriously guided or steered towards the hidden object.’

  ‘Isn’t that what they call telepathy?’

  ‘Telepathy implies a certain distance – often a distance over which it is difficult to conceive any physical agency acting. This is merely a matter of subconsciously interpreting minute muscular actions.’

  ‘Well, that’s really interesting.’ Appleby straightened up and stretched himself lazily. ‘And you seem to know a great deal about it, Mr Wine.’

  Wine smiled – so quickly that Appleby suspected something like the expunging of an involuntary frown. ‘One remembers odd scraps of information and desultory reading when one is on a voyage. Don’t you find it so? The empty ocean induces an empty mind, and much inconsequent stuff floats up. There is another flying fish landed on deck. It is astounding that they can leap so high.’

  Appleby agreed – and was inwardly convinced that more than a flying fish had been landed since luncheon. In fact he himself had landed a very queer fish indeed. A fish with most problematical innards. And he had a strong impulse to out with a knife and venture some radical incision; to go flatly on, say, from oddly endowed horses to witches. But that would be wanton. He had already gone too far with the holiday spirit – the figure of Hudspith, once more brooding in the bows, was there to attest it. So Appleby spoke of flying fish and porpoises, and when these tenuous subjects were exhausted he took his leave of Wine and strolled down the deck. Hudspith must be spoken to presently – and the interview might not be altogether easy. Undoubtedly he would particularly object to becoming Ron. Still, it might have been Stan or Les. And policemen must put up with such things.

  Twice Appleby circled the deck, and twice he passed an Emery Wine who had retreated into his habitual abstraction and reserve. But at the third time round this problematical person looked up. ‘Mr Appleby, you don’t happen to have seen Beaglehole.’

  ‘No – not since lunch time.’

  ‘I must go and find him; we have papers to look at. An excellent fellow is Beaglehole, but we have not much except our business in common. And on a long voyage it is perhaps more pleasant to have a personal friend as a companion.’ Wine rose from his deckchair. ‘I think you said that Mr Hudspith and yourself were close personal friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Intimate friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very pleasant,’ said Wine vaguely. ‘Very pleasant, I am sure.’ He looked away to the horizon – with calculation, like one weather-wise and planning to exploit a distant gale. And then he smiled his new and charming smile and walked away.

  Appleby stood for a moment by the rail and looked down at the sea. Mrs Nurse’s remark lay beyond dispute: it was calm. It was as placid, as unruffled as the small talk of Mr Emery Wine. And yet there was not an inch of its surface that was not in motion; the surface undulated and hung and slipped, gained momentum and lost it, flattened and tilted with a subtlety of movement defying analysis. And over the horizon was a great deal more of the same thing. A large complex affair…

  A large solid house, pleasantly proportioned no doubt, proclaiming still the rational good taste of the eighteenth century. Nothing in all this obscure adventure was nearly so puzzling as the theft of 37 Hawke Square. It was here that the crux would lie. And fortunately more was known about the vanished mansion than about Hannah Metcalfe or Lucy Rideout.

  Appleby went below to his cabin, took from a drawer a heavy book of severely scientific appearance and began to read.

  3

  …At its maximum in the summer of 1866, after which time the appearances became fewer, and finally ceased in 1871. Towards the end of this period the figure, which had at first looked lifelike and substantial, became shadowy and semi-transparent. There was also a gradual cessation of the phenomena that had occurred during these years, namely sounds of the dragging about of heavy weights, and unaccountable lights.

  Here it is difficult to deny considerable weight to the evidence, for the persons concerned were well-educated for the most part and – it appears – well-balanced without exception. Indeed one of them, Sir Edward Pilbeam, was a person of scientific eminence; and it may be remarked that he came to an investigation of the phenomena not through any previous interest in psychic matters such as might be held to indicate an innately suggestible mind but simply through the accident of his extended visit to Lady Morrison. It must be observed, however, that in one particular the Morrison case cannot be classified as a true ‘haunting’. Certainly the phantom appeared at different times to different persons in a particular locality. But Lady Morrison’s first experience had become matter of common talk some time before her butler related his adventure in the wine cellar; and none of those who subsequently claimed to have seen the ‘ghost’ did so in circumstances which positively exclude the hypothesis of suggestion or expectation.

  Much more remarkable – and that on several counts – is the series of supernormal events associated with the famous No. 37 Hawke Square, Bloomsbury. Here we have, what is rare in the evidential sphere, a close analogue of the traditional ‘ghost story’, like that of Pliny (see Appendix H: Phantasms of the Dead in the Classical Period, §5, Athenodorus), which connects some tragedy in a particular house or place, with the vague and often confused accounts of sights or sounds which perplex or terrify the observer. We have too, as in the Morrison case, that gradual ‘fading out’ of an apparition which some investigators – rashly, as it would appear to the present writer – take as evidence of what may be termed the ‘delayed mortality’ of the spirit; its power to survive, but only for a time, the earthly tenement from which it has passed. But what more particularly distinguishes the Hawke Square case is this: that there is well-attested record of two similar, but distinct and unconnected, hauntings of the premises, and that the second took place at a time when all record of the first had passed from any living memory. It was not until 1911, when Dr Hayball published his well-known Grub Street Gleanings, that the story of Colonel Morell was recovered from a hitherto inaccessible manuscript source. Up to that date no scholar had as much as heard of it; and we must note with amusement that Johnson (who had already suffered his unfortunate experience in Cock Lane) hid the incident from Boswell as successfully as did Mrs Morell from the rest of the world. Knowledge of the Morell haunting, we repeat, was recovered in 1911. The Spettigue haunting covered the years 1888 to 1892. The evidence will thus lead many (with what degree of discretion we shall not at present attempt to estimate) to this conclusion; that certain buildings are endowed, as it were, with some special psychic sensitiveness; with an atmosphere peculiarly conducive to super-normal appearances. This has, of course, long been held of mediaeval castles, church precincts and the like. But the case of the Hawke Square house is somewhat different. Neither in 1772 nor in 1888 did the house possess any of the conventional associations of a ‘haunted’ place. Yet in both those years phenomena occurred. And what Dr Spettigue recorded towards the end of the nineteenth century is oddly like what Mrs Morell recorded of quite distinct protagonists in the eighteenth. But of Mrs Morell Dr Spettigue could have known nothing. It is this that makes 37 Hawke Square something of a locus classicus in researches of the present sort.

  Light striking upwards through the porthole passed in endless faintly moving washes over the low cabin ceiling; the electric fan turned monotonously from side to side, as if watching invisible tennis; somewhere a bell rang remotely; near at hand a partition intermittently creaked. But Appleby, pausing at the foot of a page, heard and saw none of these things. Instead he heard banging as of innumerable doors down giant corridors; that throb, upon which the ear imposes its own patterns, of aircraft flying very high; voices in shelters saying ‘It was a bomb all right, that one.’ And he saw the streets of Bloomsbury in silhouette against the burning city; saw Bloomsbury under fire: here a church going, here a college library, and here – just here in this corner of a minor s
quare – the flash and smoke and din-obscured labouring at what was surely the most bizarre activity ever undertaken by rational men.

  But was it indeed rational, this genie-like purloining of 37 Hawke Square? Or was it as crazy as the world to which one might so easily be conducted by an over-attentive study of Dr Spettigue and Mrs Morell? Appleby read on.

  Our only record of the first haunting is contained in a single letter made available by Dr Hayball. This, although somewhat allusive in nature, is fortunately the product of a logical mind:

  To Mrs MORELL

  Dear Madam, – I write to inform you that I have this day, together with Mr Francis Barber, terminated my three nights’ sojourn at No 37 Hawke Square. The intelligence now to be conveyed – namely, that during this period no untoward appearance was observed – I know not well whether you will receive with disappointment or relief. Had the apparition of Colonel Morell in fact manifested itself we should have had some additional assurance that the matter lay beyond the grossness of imposture or the prevalence of infectious imagination. As it is, we are very little furthered in our enquiry and it has now to be decided what, if any, action it is proper that you should take. But first, and that you may be assured of my writing from a sufficient apprehension of the facts, I will briefly consider the course of what has taken place.

  The death of Colonel Morell, although sudden, aroused in the first instance no suspicion, nor had it occurred to you in any way to connect with it his occasionally expressed anxieties about the Italian manservant who, with his wife, has since quitted your service. And it was only after your chance communication of that anxiety to the late Colonel Morell’s fellow-officer Captain Bertram that this gentleman was first visited by the apparition. Let me remind you, dear Madam, with such gentleness as this painful subject requires, that the ideas of sudden death and poison lie sufficiently near together in the arcana of the mind to be readily brought together when there is offered so striking a link as absconding Italian. Were Captain Bertram a man of fanciful mind – and of this his return to India prevents my forming an opinion of my own – the raw materials of romantic fiction lay ready to his hand.