He said: ‘As for hurrying, young man, I’m seventy-seven years old, my arteries are hard, and I could not hurry myself for the crack of doom. Here, carry the bag. Hand me my hat and my stick, and we’ll walk up to Wagnall’s Barn on this fool’s errand of yours. Because a fool’s errand it is, I fancy. Come on.’
The little dog, Dot, looking like a bit of the mud made animate, only half distinguishable in the half dark, barked with joy, running a little way backwards and a long way forwards, leading us back to the Barn through that darkened green tunnel.
The doctor had a flash-lamp. We made our way to the barn, he grumbling and panting and cursing the weather. We went in. He swung the beam of his lamp from corner to corner, until it came to rest on my jacket. It lay as I had wrapped it over poor Dolores, but it was empty.
I shouted: ‘Alpha, Beta! Here’s the doctor!’
The echo answered: ‘Octor!’
I could only pick up my jacket and say: ‘They must have gone away.’
Dr MacVitie said, drily: ‘Very likely, if they were here at all.’
‘Here’s my jacket, damp on the inside and dry on the outside,’ I said. ‘And I have the evidence of my own eyes——’
‘No doubt. Very likely. In a lifetime of practice I have learned, sir, to discredit the evidence of my eyes, and my other four senses, besides. Let’s away. Come!’
‘But where have they gone?’
‘Ah, I wonder!’
‘And the dog, where’s the dog?’ I cried.
He said, in his dour way: ‘For that, I recommend you consult Mr Lindsay, the vet.’
So we walked down again, without exchanging a word until we reached Dr MacVitie’s door. Then he said: ‘Where did you spend your evening?’
I said: ‘I came straight to the Barn from The White Swan.’
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I recommend ye go back, and take a whisky-and-water, warm; and get ye to bed in a dry night-shirt. And this time take a little more water with it. Good-night to ye——’ and slammed the door in my face.
I walked the half mile to The White Swan, which was still open. The landlord, Mr Lagg, looked me up and down, taking notice of my soaking wet clothes and muddy boots. ‘Been out?’ he asked.
In Sussex they have a way of asking unnecessary, seemingly innocent questions of this nature which lead to an exchange of witticisms – for which, that night, I was not in the mood.
I said: ‘I went up to Wagnall’s Barn for Jolly Jumbo’s Carnival. But he pulled out, it seems, and left a man, a woman, and a dog——’
‘You hear that, George?’ said Mr Lagg to a very old farmer whose knobbed ash walking-stick seemed to have grown out of the knobbed root of his earthy, arthritic hand, and who was smoking a pipe mended in three places with insulating tape.
‘I heerd,’ said old George, with a chuckle. ‘Dat gen’lemen’ll been a liddle bit late for dat carnival, like.’
At this they both laughed. But then Mr Lagg said, soothingly, as to a cash customer: ‘Didn’t you look at the notice on the bill, sir? Jolly Jumbo was here all right, and flitted in a hurry too. And he did leave a man and a girl (not lawfully married, I heerd) and one o’ them liddle shaved French dogs.
‘I say, you’m a liddle late for Jolly Jumbo’s Carnival, sir. ’Cause if you look again at Jolly Jumbo’s bill, you’ll see – I think the programme for the Cricket Match covers up the corner – you’ll see the date on it is August the fourteenth, 1904. I was a boy at the time; wasn’t I, George?’
‘Thirteen-year-old,’ old George said, ‘making you sixty-three to my seventy-two. Dat were a sad business, but as ye sow, so shall ye reap, they says. Live a vagabond, die a vagabond. Live in sin, die in sin——’
‘All right, George,’ said Mr Lagg, ‘you’re not in chapel now … I don’t know how you got at it, sir, but Jolly Jumbo (as he called hisself) lef’ two people and a dog behind. Hauled out his vans, eleven o’clock at night, and left word with Dr MacVitie (the old one, that was) to go up to Wagnall’s Barn.
‘But he was in the middle o’ dinner, and wouldn’t go. Then he was called out to the Squire’s place, and didn’t get home till twelve o’clock next night. And there was a liddle dog that kep’ barking and barking, and trying to pull him up the path by the trousis-leg. But Dr MacVitie——’
‘Dat were a mean man, dat one, sure enough!’
‘You be quiet, George. Dr MacVitie kicked the liddle dog into the ditch, and unhooked the bell, and tied up the knocker, and went to bed. Couple o’ days later, Wagnall, going over his land, has a look at that barn, and he sees a young girl stone dead, a young fellow dying, and a poor liddle dog crying fit to break your heart. Oh, he got old Dr MacVitie up to the barn then all right, but t’was too late. The fellow, he died in the Cottage Hospital.
‘They tried to catch the dog, but nobody could. It stood off and on, like, until that pair was buried by the parish. Then it run off into the woods, and nobody saw it again——’
‘Oh, but didn’t they, though?’ said old George.
Mr Lagg said: ‘It’s an old wives’ tale, sir. They do say that this here liddle grey French dog comes back every year on August the fourteenth to scrat and bark at the doctor’s door, and lead him to Wagnall’s Barn. And be he in the middle of his supper or be he full, be he weary or rested, wet or dry, sick or well, go he must…. He died in 1924, so you see it’s nothing but an old wives’ tale——’
‘Dey did used to git light-headed, like, here on the marshes,’ said old George, ‘but dey do say old Dr MacVitie mustn’t rest. He mus’ pay dat call to dat empty barn, every year, because of his hard heart. Tomorrow, by daylight, look and see if doctor’s door be’nt all scratted up, like.’
‘George, you’re an old woman in your old age,’ said Mr Lagg. ‘We take no stock of such things in these parts, sir. Would you like to come up to the lounge and look at the television until closing time?’
Teeth and Nails
‘MADAME, I have the honour of wishing you a very good night,’ said Ratapoil, kissing his wife’s fingers. She curtsied graciously. Tessier started then, for a three-branched candlestick seemed to detach itself, of its own accord, from the shadows in a far corner of the dining-room. It was only a slave lighting Madame Ratapoil upstairs, but he was dark and silent as smoke out of a magical Arabian bottle.
The lady having been bowed out, Ratapoil threw off his gold-buttoned blue coat, and loosened his waistcoat, and the waist-band of his trousers, too. Tessier said dryly: ‘Aie, Ratapoil, old wolf! You stand on ceremony nowadays!’
Ratapoil said, half apologetically: ‘Tessier, old comrade, in a savage country it is a gentleman’s duty to preserve the Decencies.’
‘You have done well for yourself,’ said Tessier, draining his glass. ‘You have come a long way, Ratapoil, since you and I dined off dried dates and crawling green water under the Pyramids … not that it is much cooler here in New Orleans——’ A great black hand came down over his shoulder, and filled his glass from a crystal decanter. ‘– Eh, Ratapoil! Is that a man, or a ghost? Send him to bed, for God’s sake! I hate people coming up behind me like that.’
Ratapoil dismissed the slave with a jerk of the head. ‘Not a bad boy, that one,’ he said. ‘He is worth five dollars a pound, and weighs a hundred and ninety-five; but I won him at piquet, as against three hogshead of rum.’
‘What, so now he deals in rum and slaves! Molière gave us the Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Ratapoil gives us the Gentilhomme Bourgeois! Ratapoil turns tradesman. Aie, but times have changed indeed!’