I shall not try to excuse myself. Perhaps I was afraid. I might have seen that there was good reason to be.
Certainly I did not ponder that chance vision I had had of a ‘ghost’ in the window of Josebaar Hawkins’s house. I did not even offer the experience as a suitable Gothic tale, one hot Tuscan night among the soft blue hills when others were telling ghost stories. Did I even call it to mind? Perhaps — I cannot remember. But of course, too, what I had seen was not a ghost. Not that at all.
Needless to say, when I got back to England late in July, I was at once assailed by feelings of unquiet and guilt, and instantly wrote to Aunt Alice — there had been no letters from her waiting for me, but as a general rule she did not constantly put pen to paper. I asked how she did, and if I might come down and see her.
After a slight delay, I received her reply, which was brief and penned in a careful, rigid style. She said she was in her usual health, and would be glad if I would ‘take time to call on her’. I thought the whole tone of her letter sulky, and was peeved that she had not mentioned some presents I had sent her on my travels — for which churlishness may I be forgiven.
For some reason, as I saw to the packing of my bag, I had upon my mind that fragment of Pope’s Pastorals, which I had heard the very evening the telegram reached me informing me of my aunt’s illness. The gracious verse was in every way unlike the rhyme that had accrued about Amber Hawkins and her murdering spouse, yet now it too lodged fast in my head, and repeated itself over and over. Never came warning in a stranger guise.
The words are well known, of course, but I shall put them down even so, such is their unconscionable significance to me now:
The train reached Steepleford Halt soon after three o’clock of a peerless summer afternoon. London had been somewhat stuffy and overheated, but as we entered the countryside beyond, a wonderful honeyed peace descended, balmy, lazy, and a-flicker with butterflies. Flowers blazed from every hedge and bank, the trees were laden with heavy green, the sky was as blue as the mysotis.
Descending from my carriage I was struck initially only by the sense of the huge sun, which was hammering the earth. But looking about me I perceived at once a quality in the light, both dry and harsh. Everything looked to me, in this glare, drained of colour, faded like a woman’s lovely gown worn too often.
The veteran who oversaw the station was standing to one side, consulting his watch as the train pulled out again. It was my habit to exchange a few pleasantries with him when I met him, and I prepared to do so now, but he forestalled me. Looking up, his face was not as it had been, not so much older as used up. He nodded but did not smile.
‘Good day. I regret the train was late.’
‘No matter. It was a delightful journey today.’
‘But a poor arrival, I dare to think,’ he said. He sounded surly, which surprised me very much; he was not of this sort. Then he pointed straight by me. ‘D’you see that tree?’
I turned, to humour him, and gazed towards an old copper beech that had guarded the ground above the railway for as long as I had been coming there, and no doubt for some regiments of years before that.
‘The tree. Indeed I do.’
‘See how it leans?’
‘Why, yes — what can have happened?’
‘The good Lord knows,’ said he. ‘The roots are out to one side. Dying, it is.’
‘What a great pity. Can nothing be done?’
He made a noise. He was angry, not merely at my paltry concern, but at all things that had somehow conspired to ruin the beauty of the tree.
‘It’s got to be felled tomorrow,’ he said. ‘A danger to the trains if it falls, d’you see.’
I said again I was very sorry, as I was, and gave him something for his trouble, at which he looked as if the coins concerned were the Thirty Pieces of Silver themselves.
I was glad to get out of the station after that.
My intention had not been to walk; it was too sultry, and here for sure there was a dull storminess to the air that was already making my head ache. The station farther up the line lay five miles beyond the town, but in an outpost where a cab might be accosted. Here, however, I had been promised my aunt’s carriage, which now, going out on to the path, I did not find. This I could have understood more readily if the train had been early, or on time.
I almost turned back to ask the stationmaster if a carriage might be procured from the local inn, but then thought better of it. The walk to the town would not take so long, providing I struck off at once for Salter’s Lane, and followed that to Steepleford.
There I idled, on the gravel, under the impoverished shade of some spindly, desiccated sycamores, as if a decision had still to be made. I was reluctant to go on. But go on I must, and would.
Until this moment I had, I think, almost entirely suppressed or driven away my utter unease at the prospect of the Lane where witches once had leaped in their revels, and where lay the house of a murderer — and of his wife who, as I had seen and still believed, haunted its window. Now my fears rushed in like the sea tearing through one small crack in a dyke, carrying all before it.
I broke out into a sweat that even the leaden heat had not occasioned, for the moisture was cold, and my heart thudded in my breast.
Come, I thought, in heaven’s name, you are not a baby. What is there to be afraid of? If the wretched nook affects you so, do what the others do, and look away from it.
What finally galvanized me was a dawning grasp of what the absence of the carriage might mean. In the past, when it had been promised, it had been reliable. If my aunt had forgotten to order it forth, or her coachman had not brought it, then something must have happened to interrupt the mission. And all at once I was vastly unsettled as to what.
Then I did set off, striding the path between the fields, towards the woodland that lay like a smoky cloud upon the nearest horizon.
I must have noticed as I went the state of those fields. They were bleached and barren-looking, the grain in parts fallen, and where it was still upright, then not normal in its colour. In other areas it seemed burnt. At the time I suspected a fire had taken place, or infestation of some sort. My mind was not truly on the fields, and did not want to be.
But then I reached the edge of the woods. And with the best will in the world, I could no longer delude myself.
Only after the most serious of gales would so many great trees have fallen. Looking in, at what had been the greenest of green shades, I now beheld bald, wide avenues, all railwayed with these broken pillars, which had tumbled in every direction, taking in every case more than one or two of their fellows with them. Besides these fallen giants, the standing wood was sickly. There could be no mistaking it. A yellowish tinge was on each leaf, or worse, a blackened scorching, as if some acid had been thrown over and among them all. The leaf canopy besides showed great holes.
I advanced like some soldier into enemy territory, where any lethal hazard or trap may be encountered. No sooner was I in, however, than I paused again. Upon the raddled ground, bare of anything but the most hardy weeds and brackens (and these burnt and brown), I had begun to see strange heaps and drifts of a dark dust. I knew at once what these were, but going over to one of the fallen trees, I tapped it, not very hard, with a strong-looking stick I had found on the outer path and picked up thoughtlessly, as one sometimes does on a walk. No sooner did the stick make contact than the bole of the prone trunk, for about five feet either side of the light blow, gave way in a shower of what appeared to be the finest black sugar. The sturdy-looking stick also snapped in half, brittle as charcoal. And the sugar-like substance sprayed out from it too. I dropped the stick then. As it hit the ground, it shattered into some twenty further fragments. The dust — the dust was all that remained of trees that, last summer, had seemed to touch the sky.