THE Falcon Hotel at Much Swayford in Shropshire offers no great beauty to the world. Its front is of brick, garnished with a little ivy, a signboard, and so forth; its duty in that quiet market place is of the humdrum sort, even the drinkers in its parlour would direct you to the Crown at the top of the street for truer comfort. But it possesses two attractions—magnificent beer, and a Boots with an inward-roving eye.
He is called Boots by everyone though in reality he is more than that, for the mistress runs the place entirely at Tom’s word. He wears the green trousers and the green waistcoat with the black sateen sleeves, but there his servitude ends. He goes and comes at pleasure, bullies the diminutive staff, lets rooms, draws accounts, opens and shuts, and indulges his melancholy in the intervals. Usually you find him behind the bar in the small back parlour, drinking some of the magnificent beer when he is not selling it, and he will talk to you about the village in so odd and secretive a way that you cannot doubt the existence of some fearful knowledge beneath the green waistcoat with the black sateen sleeves. Bad weather makes him almost cheerful, but sweet and sunny days bring down upon him the strangest mood of any Boots in all the shires of England.
And should you go into the Falcon’s bar lazily on such a day, with Much Swayford sleeping outside; should you get Tom into the round-backed armchair with his face from the sunlight on the striped day-blind, and lure him into talkativeness, you might hear a tale from his lips that will cause you to look again at the frontage of brick and ivy and make you ask whether it is true that wonder has passed the Falcon by.
One evening, he will tell you, he was walking out on the hill to freshen his lungs before sleep, and also to straighten a couple of tiny worries which had come upon him during the day. As a rule he goes into these matters at some length before getting on with his tale, but you must not interrupt. One of them concerned hotel luggage that had been lost on the rail, the other was simply an undischarged account for drinks. He had paused, it seems, to lean over the gate of Dick Bonalack’s paddock, the better to clear these things in his mind, when he heard feet swishing the grass behind him and turned to see a stranger coming out of the wood that stretches over from Little Swayford. A tall fellow, he was, thin as a skewer, and he marched straight up to Tom.
‘Is that Much Swayford?’ he asked, pointing into the valley with a gesture almost regal.
‘It is,’ said Tom. ‘The path beyond that stile will bring you right into it, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
The gaunt man spun round ‘like a machine’, Tom says, walked towards the stile, climbed over it without using his hands, and disappeared down the path. He had scarcely gone when Tom again heard feet swishing the grass behind him, and again saw the stranger coming out of the wood. He stared in astonishment, but the man marched up, exactly as before, and pointed into the valley with the same peremptory gesture.
‘Is that Much Swayford?’ he asked, fixing extraordinary eyes upon the Boots of the Falcon.
Tom was utterly terrified: speech, voice, features, movements, were in most accurate duplication.
‘It is,’ he replied, his mouth dry, his heart beating uncertainly. ‘The path beyond that stile—’
He stopped. The stranger had clicked his tongue angrily, as one who finds himself doing some trifling task twice, and was already walking towards the stile which he climbed as before, without using his hands. He was real, he was of flesh and blood, for a piece of cow dung adhered to his shoe and he paused on the stile step to scrape it off; but a cold wind blew among the trees as he vanished, and Tom found himself shivering violently.
Talk of mental telepathy had not reached so far as country inns in those days. He just stood there, bewildered, dumb, his mind like an aged and weary horse toiling over a hill road. His hand clutched at the gate of Dick Bonalack’s paddock, his body was still. And he was in this state, gazing stupidly at the wood, when for the third time he beheld the tall and now horrible form emerge from the trees. Tom did not cry out. A sudden reaction had destroyed his fear and he swore that now, though the fellow be the devil himself, he would touch him in some way, catch his arm and ask firmly who he was.
But he got no opportunity. The stranger walked beside the hedge as though Tom did not exist, made for the stile, stepped over without use of the bar, and rapidly went away down the path in the failing light.
‘Three times!’ Tom said loudly, and his nerves sought relief in wild words. ‘Oh, there’s blackness after my soul! The same perishing man, the same perishing way, three times!’
He could speak but he could not move. The return swing of fear had struck at his legs, and he was forced to cling to the paddock gate to keep from falling. Away in the village a dog barked, its voice bringing comfort to poor Tom, reminding him of little pleasant things, sane things, the clatter of his back parlour when customers were in for their evening jollity, the golden light reflected in a pool of spilled beer under the lamp on the counter, and the look of the market place in moonlight when all the windows were darkened. Was it possible that a man could see what he had just seen?
‘If he comes again,’ Tom whispered, as a frightened child vows that next time it really will be brave, ‘now if he comes again—’
And then he did come again. The sun had set. A beautiful lavender sky hung over the valley. The wood was quite black, murmurous and weird, and it yielded up the stranger like some ghastly expression of itself. He came on in the dusk, erect and silent and terrible: he passed within a dozen yards of Tom, who almost screamed as he saw the handless rise over the stile; and he went very swiftly indeed down the path into Much Swayford.
‘Sir—sir—sir! Why did you ask me—’
Tom called, and ceased, utterly alone in the night. The whole earth seemed to be listening, marvelling. No sheep bleated, the dog’s bark had died away. Tense was the silence of the wood now, sinister under the onslaught of the night wind. It was as though the breeze could stir everything but the wood. It was as though the wood were solid, bewitched, able to send out horror after horror, yet never permitting itself to be invaded even by the wind.
‘I must—I must get back.’
By a tremendous effort Tom shook his hands free of the gate and, once moving, he ran. He went the long way round into Much Swayford, by Clifton’s Mill and where the gipsies camp, simply because he could not face the path beyond the stile. He stumbled on the hard uneven turf of the hillside, he dreaded the hedges of the lane, he looked askance at every man he met in the streets of the village.
He certainly thought he was ill. The Falcon Hotel, when he came to it, was lit and noisy with customers; but Ernest could be trusted, and Tom let himself in by the side door and went to his bed in the mood of a man threatened by death.
All night he lay huddled under the clothes, half awake and yet dreaming, in doubt whether he should send for the doctor. Nightmare mocked him, the same man walking again and again out of a wood and asking the same question. He got up after midnight, lit his candle, stole down into the bar for rum—carefully counting out the silver to pay for it—but the crude spirits only added perspiration to his terror.
DAWN came, with a shrilling of cocks. Tom rose absurdly early, thrust his head under the pump in the yard, and went about his affairs like a man returned from fantastic danger. The sunshine revived him, the sunshine and presently the chatter of the girls in the kitchen. He told himself that the experience was ended, that he must drink a little less, that he must walk a little more. He even hazarded a mild joke with Elsie that he had been ‘rather seeing things’ the night before; and when the breakfast-room bell rang he went up to greet his guests with a smile.
‘May I have breakfast, quickly?’ a voice said, almost before he was in the room.
‘Coming, sir,’ Tom replied, ‘it’s coming at once.’ Then the smile fled from his face, for he was looking again into the blazing eyes of the man from the hill-top.
No recognition flickered there. The man cast his cigarette behind him into the fireplace, said ‘Let it quick, then,’ and sat down to table, hasty, awkward his movements.
He had arrived just after dark, Tom learned, and had caused alarm by insisting that his luggage be fetched from the station despite the late hour. It was enormous luggage, practically filling the largest bedroom on the first floor. It consisted not only of bags, but of crates and cylinders and packing-cases as well. Each package was taken up to the room under his personal direction, and he had sworn most shockingly at Ernest when one of them seemed likely to drop. Tom came in by the side door after the uproar had subsided, and as he had gone right up to bed naturally he heard nothing of the visitor. But now, talking to Ernest in the morning light, his curiosity was aflame.
‘Who is he?’ Tom demanded. ‘How was his luggage labelled? Did you get him to sign the visitors’ book?’
‘Oh, he signed,’ Ernest answered, and was forced to follow Tom into the office to give the rest of his reply. ‘His stuff came from London. I thought perhaps he was a commercial, with all that gear, so I as’ed him if he wanted a showroom for today.’
‘Well? What did he say?’
‘Oh, he swore, Tom! He swears lovely!’
Tom made no answer. He was gazing with relief at the last entry in the visitors’ book, a perfectly normal address in perfectly human handwriting:
BURTON, W. G., Rorkers Avenue, Camberwell, LONDON
The pen had been driven firmly and beautifully, but a vicious deep flourish under the signature spoke of arrogance.
Arrogance, indeed, was the quality of the Falcon’s new guest. He treated everybody in a dismissive sort of way: when he wanted service he called sharply for it, as one calls a dog: when his needs had been satisfied he turned away without thanks. As weeks went by it grew obvious that he refused to learn the names of the staff which tended him. He generally said ‘you’, or asked for ‘the man’, or hastened ‘the girl’, contemptuously. Nothing brought a smile to his face. Not once did he remark upon the sweet and sunny weather that throughout his stay showed Much Swayford as a miracle village in a setting of Shropshire green. Accounts were said regularly, and he worked in his bedroom day and night, rarely going out. He worked, slept, ate, and brooded in his bedroom.
He had an argument with Tom, a swift and devastating argument, from which he emerged triumphant with the right to put a new lock on his door and retain the only key himself. A chambermaid was allowed in for twenty minutes each morning, but he at in grim silence through that time, watching her.
No letters came for him, no friends called; only, one morning, two huge crates turned up from St. Helens in Lancashire and stood in the yard all day. Tom, pulling very discreetly at the straw, found they contained glass. He knew from Elsie that Burton’s room was already full of mirrors, all left with their faces to the wall, and he asked himself what on earth the man could be doing and planning.
Meanwhile, the village had become aware of t. . .
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