“Then I knew that I had found the château of my dreams. Quite naturally, I knew that, a hundred yards farther on, a narrow road would cut the highway. I took it. It led me to a white gate, and there was the path I had so often followed. Beneath the trees I admired the soft colored carpet formed by the periwinkles, primroses, and anemones. When I came out from under the arching lindens, I could see the green lawn and the small stoop, at the top of which was the door of light colored oak. I got out of my car, walked rapidly up the steps, and rang the bell. I was very much afraid nobody would answer, but almost immediately a servant appeared. He was a man with a melancholy face, very old, wearing a black coat. Upon seeing me he seemed surprised, and looked at me attentively without speaking.
“ ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘I am going to make a strange request. I do not know the owners of this house, but I should greatly appreciate their permission to see it.’
“ ‘The château is to let, Madame,’ he said, ‘I am here to show it.’
“ ‘To let?’ I said. ‘What an unexpected piece of luck!... How is it the owners themselves aren’t living in this fascinating house?’
“ ‘The owners did live in it, Madame. They left only when the house became haunted.’
“ ‘Haunted?’ I said... ‘That certainly won’t stop me. I did not know that in the French countryside they still believed in ghosts...’
“ ‘I shouldn’t believe it either, Madame,’ he said in all seriousness, ‘if I had not myself so often met at night in the park the ghost that drove my masters away.’
“ ‘What a story!’ I exclaimed, trying to smile, but not without a strange uneasiness.
“ ‘A story,’ said the old man with an air of reproach, ‘that you, least of all, Madame, should not laugh at, since that ghost was you.’ ”
The Kill
by Peter Fleming
In the cold waiting-room of a small railway station in the West of England two men were sitting. They had sat there for an hour, and were likely to sit there longer. There was a thick fog outside. Their train was indefinitely delayed.
The waiting-room was a barren and unfriendly place. A naked electric bulb lit it with wan, disdainful efficiency. A notice, “No Smoking,” stood on the mantel-piece; when you turned it round, it said “No Smoking” on the other side, too. Printed regulations relating to an outbreak of swine-fever in 1924 were pinned neatly to one wall, almost, but maddeningly not quite, in the center of it. The stove gave out a hot, thick smell, powerful already, but increasing. A pale leprous flush on the black and beaded window showed that a light was burning on the platform outside, in the fog. Somewhere, water dripped with infinite reluctance onto corrugated iron.
The two men sat facing each other over the stove on chairs of an unswerving woodenness. Their acquaintance was no older than their vigil. From such talk as they had had, it seemed likely that they were to remain strangers.
The younger of the two resented the lack of contact in their relationship more than the lack of comfort in their surroundings. His attitude toward his fellow beings had but recently undergone a transition from the subjective to the objective. As with many of his class and age, the routine, unrecognized as such, of an expensive education, with the triennial alternative of those delights normal to wealth and gentility, had atrophied many of his curiosities. For the first twenty-odd years of his life he had read humanity in terms of relevance rather than reality, looking on people who held no ordained place in his own existence much as a buck in a park watches visitors walking up the drive: mildly, rather resentfully inquiring — not inquisitive. Now, hot in reaction from this unconscious provincialism, he treated mankind as a museum, gaping conscientiously at each fresh exhibit, hunting for the noncumulative evidence of man’s complexity with indiscriminate zeal. To each magic circle of individuality he saw himself as a kind of free-lance tangent. He aspired to be a connoisseur of men.
There was undoubtedly something arresting about the specimen before him. Of less than medium height, the stranger had yet that sort of ranging leanness that lends vicarious inches. He wore a long black overcoat, very shabby, and his shoes were covered with mud. His face had no color in it, though the impression it produced was not one of pallor; the skin was of a dark sallow, tinged with gray. The nose was pointed, the jaw sharp and narrow. Deep vertical wrinkles, running down toward it from the high cheek bones, sketched the permanent groundwork of a broader smile than the deep-set, honey-colored eyes seemed likely to authorize. The most striking thing about the face was the incongruity of its frame. On the back of his head the stranger wore a bowler hat with a very narrow brim. No word of such casual implications as a tilt did justice to its angle. It was clamped, by something at least as holy as custom, to the back of his skull, and that thin, questing face confronted the world fiercely from under a black halo of nonchalance.
The man’s whole appearance suggested difference rather than aloofness. The unnatural way he wore his hat had the significance of indirect comment, like the antics of a performing animal. It was as if he was part of some older thing, of which homo sapiens in a bowler hat was an expurgated edition. He sat with his shoulders hunched and his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets. The hint of discomfort in his attitude seemed due not so much to the fact that his chair was hard as to the fact that it was a chair.
The young man had found him uncommunicative. The most mobile sympathy, launching consecutive attacks on different fronts, had failed to draw him out. The reserved adequacy of his replies conveyed a rebuff more effectively than sheer surliness. Except to answer him, he did not look at the young man. When he did, his eyes were full of an abstracted amusement. Sometimes he smiled, but for no immediate cause.
Looking back down their hour together, the young man saw a field of endeavor on which frustrated banalities lay thick, like the discards of a routed army. But resolution, curiosity, and the need to kill time all clamored against an admission of defeat.
“If he will not talk,” thought the young man, “then I will. The sound of my own voice is infinitely preferable to the sound of none. I will tell him what has just happened to me. It is really a most extraordinary story. I will tell it as well as I can, and I shall be very much surprised if its impact on his mind does not shock this man into some form of self-revelation. He is unaccountable without being outré, and I am inordinately curious about him.”
Aloud he said, in a brisk and engaging manner: “I think you said you were a hunting man?”
The other raised his quick, honey-colored eyes. They gleamed with inaccessible amusement. Without answering, he lowered them again to contemplate the little beads of light thrown through the iron-work of the stove onto the skirts of his overcoat. Then he spoke. He had a husky voice.
“I came here to hunt,” he agreed.
“In that case,” said the young man, “you will have heard of Lord Fleer’s private pack. Their kennels are not far from here.”
“I know them,” replied the other.
“I have just been staying there,” the young man continued. “Lord Fleer is my uncle.”
The other looked up, smiled and nodded, with the bland inconsequence of a foreigner who does not understand what is being said to him. The young man swallowed his impatience.
“Would you,” he continued, using a slightly more peremptory tone than heretofore, — “would you care to hear a new and rather remarkable story about my uncle? Its denouement is not two days old. It is quite short.”