Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and
soul, in the little patch of ground, half-orchard and
half-garden, that abutted on the farmyard at Mowsle Barton.
After the stress and noise of long years of city life, the
repose and peace of the hill-begirt homestead struck on his
senses with an almost dramatic intensity. Time and space
seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness; the
minutes slid away into hours, and the meadows and fallows
sloped away into middle distance, softly and imperceptibly.
Wild weeds of the hedgerow straggled into the flower-garden,
and wallflowers and garden bushes made counter-raids into
farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and solemn
preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or
roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere;
even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their
hinges. And over the whole scene brooded the sense of a
peace that had almost a quality of magic in it. In the
afternoon you felt that it had always been afternoon, and
must always remain afternoon; in the twilight you knew that
it could never have been anything else but twilight.
Crefton Cockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat beneath
an old medlar tree, and decided that here was the
life-anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that
latterly his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for.
He would make a permanent lodging-place among these simple
friendly people, gradually increasing the modest comforts
with which he would like to surround himself, but falling in
as much as possible with their manner of living.
As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an
elderly woman came hobbling with uncertain gait through the
orchard. He recognized her as a member of the farm
household, the mother or possibly the mother-in-law of Mrs.
Spurfield, his present landlady, and hastily formulated some
pleasant remark to make to her. She forestalled him.
“There's a bit of writing chalked up on the door over
yonder. What is it?”
She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the
question had been on her lips for years and has best be got
rid of. Her eyes, however, looked impatiently over
Crefton's head at the door of a small barn which formed the
outpost of a straggling line of farm buildings.
“Martha Pillamon is an old witch” was the announcement
that met Crefton's inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a
moment before giving the statement wider publicity. For all
he knew to the contrary, it might be Martha herself to whom
he was speaking. It was possible that Mrs. Spurfield's
maiden name had been Pillamon. And the gaunt, withered old
dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as
to the outward aspect of a witch.
“It's something about some one called Martha Pillamon,”
he explained cautiously.
“What does it say?”
“It's very disrespectful,” said Crefton; “it says she's
a witch. Such things ought not to be written up.”
“It's true, every word of it,” said his listener with
considerable satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive
note of her own, “the old toad.”
And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled
out in her cracked voice, “Martha Pillamon is an old
witch!”
“Did you hear what she said?” mumbled a weak, angry
voice somewhere behind Crefton's shoulder. Turning hastily,
he beheld another old crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled,
and evidently in a high state of displeasure. Obviously
this was Martha Pillamon in person. The orchard seemed to
be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the
neighbourhood.
“'Tis lies, 'tis sinful lies,” the weak voice went on.
“'Tis Betsy Croot is the old witch. She an' her daughter,
the dirty rat. I'll put a spell on 'em, the old nuisances.”
As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk
inscription on the barn door.
“What's written up there?” she demanded, wheeling round
on Crefton.
“Vote for Soarker,” he responded, with the craven
boldness of the practised peacemaker.
The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded
red shawl lost themselves gradually among the tree-trunks.
Crefton rose presently and made his way towards the
farmhouse. Somehow a good deal of the peace seemed to have
slipped out of the atmosphere.
The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen,
which Crefton had found so agreeable on previous afternoons,
seemed to have soured today into a certain uneasy
melancholy. There was a dull, dragging silence around the
board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to taste it,
was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the
spirit of revelry out of a carnival.
“It's no use complaining of the tea,” said Mrs.
Spurfield hastily, as her guest stared with an air of polite
inquiry at his cup. “The kettle won't boil, that's the
truth of it.”
Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce
fire was banked up under a big black kettle, which sent a
thin wreath of steam from its spout, but seemed otherwise to
ignore the action of the roaring blaze beneath it.
“It's been there more than an hour, an' boil it won't,”
said Mrs. Spurfield, adding, by way of complete
explanation, “we're bewitched.”
“It's Martha Pillamon as has done it,” chimed in the old
mother; “I'll be even with the old toad, I'll put a spell
on her.”
“It must boil in time,” protested Crefton, ignoring the
suggestions of foul influences. “Perhaps the coal is
damp.”
“It won't boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast
tomorrow morning, not if you was to keep the fire agoing all
night for it,” said Mrs. Spurfield. And it didn't. The
household subsisted on fried and baked dishes, and a
neighbour obligingly brewed tea and sent it across in a
moderately warm condition.
“I suppose you'll be leaving us now that things has
turned up uncomfortable,” Mrs. Spurfield observed at
breakfast; “there are folks as deserts one as soon as
trouble comes.”
Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of
plans; he observed, however, to himself that the earlier
heartiness of manner had in a large measure deserted the
household. Suspicious looks, sulky silences, or sharp
speeches had become the order of the day. As for the old
mother, she sat about the kitchen or the garden all day,
murmuring threats and spells against Martha Pillamon. There
was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle
of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their
last flickering energies to the task of making each other
wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had
survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where all else
was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the
uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power
seemed to be distilled from their spite and their cursings.
No amount of sceptical explanation could remove the
undoubted fact that neither kettle nor saucepan would come
to boiling-point over the hottest fire. Crefton clung as
long as possible to the theory of some defect in the coals,
but a wood fire gave the same result, and when a small
spirit-lamp kettle, which he ordered out by carrier, showed
the same obstinate refusal to allow its contents to boil he
felt that he had come suddenly into contact with some
unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden forces. Miles
away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch
glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and
yet here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest
civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where
something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very
practical sway.
Passing out through the farm garden on his way to the
lanes beyond, where he hoped to recapture the comfortable
sense of peacefulness that was so lacking around house and
hearth---especially hearth---Crefton came across the old
mother, sitting mumbling to herself in the seat beneath the
medlar tree. “Let un sink as swims, let un sink as swims,”
she was repeating over and over again, as a child repeats a
half-learned lesson. And now and then she would break off
into a shrill laugh, with a note of malice in it that was
not pleasant to hear. Crefton was glad when he found
himself out of earshot, in the quiet and seclusion of the
deep overgrown lanes that seemed to lead away to nowhere;
one, narrower and deeper than the rest, attracted his
footsteps, and he was almost annoyed when he found that it
really did act as a miniature roadway to a human dwelling.
A forlorn-looking cottage with a scrap of ill-tended cabbage
garden and a few aged apple trees stood at an angle where a
swift-flowing stream widened out for a space into a
decent-sized pond before hurrying away again trough the
willows that had checked its course. Crefton leaned against
a tree-trunk and looked across the swirling eddies of the
pond at the humble little homestead opposite him; the only
sign of life came from a small procession of dingy-looking
ducks that marched in single file down to the water's edge.
There is always something rather taking in the way a duck
changes itself in an instant from a slow, clumsy waddler of
the earth to a graceful, buoyant swimmer of the waters, and
Crefton waited with a certain arrested attention to watch
the leader of the file launch itself on to the surface of
the pond. He was aware at the same time of a curious
warning instinct that something strange and unpleasant was
about to happen. The duck flung itself confidently forward
into the water, and rolled immediately under the surface.
Its head appeared for a moment and went under again, leaving
a train of bubbles in its wake, while wings and legs churned
the water in a helpless swirl of flapping and kicking. The
bird was obviously drowning. Crefton thought at first that
it had caught itself in some weeds, or was being attacked
from below by a pike or water-rat. But no blood floated to
the surface, and the wildly bobbing body made the circuit of
the pond current without hindrance from any entanglement. A
second duck had by this time launched itself into the pond,
and a second struggling body rolled and twisted under the
surface. There was something peculiarly piteous in the
sight of the gasping beaks that showed now and again above
the water, as though in terrified protest at this treachery
of a trusted and familiar element. Crefton gazed with
something like horror as a third duck poised itself on the
bank and splashed in, to share the fate of the other two.
He felt almost relieved when the remainder of the flock,
taking tardy alarm from the commotion of the slowly drowning
bodies, drew themselves up with tense outstretched necks,
and sidled away from the scene of danger, quacking a deep
note of disquietude as they went. At the same moment
Crefton became aware that he was not the only human witness
of the scene; a bent and withered old woman, whom he
recognized at once as Martha Pillamon, of sinister
reputation, had limped down the cottage path to the water's
edge, and was gazing fixedly at the gruesome whirligig of
dying birds that went in horrible procession round the pool.
Presently her voice rang out in a shrill note of quavering
rage:
“'Tis Betsy Croot adone it, the old rat. I'll put a
spell on her, see if I don't.”
Crefton slipped quietly away, uncertain whether or no the
old woman had noticed his presence. Even before she had
proclaimed the guiltiness of Betsy Croot, the latter's
muttered incantation “Let un sink as swims” had flashed
uncomfortably across his mind. But it was the final threat
of a retaliatory spell which crowded his mind with misgiving
to the exclusion of all other thoughts or fancies. His
reasoning powers could no longer afford to dismiss these
old-wives' threats as empty bickerings. The household at
Mowsle Barton lay under the displeasure of a vindictive old
woman who seemed able to materialize her personal spites in
a very practical fashion, and there was no saying what form
her revenge for three drowned ducks might not take. As a
member of the household Crefton might find himself involved
in some general and highly disagreeable visitation of Martha
Pillamon's wrath. Of course he knew that he was giving way
to absurd fancies, but the behaviour of the spirit-lamp
kettle and the subsequent scene at the pond had considerably
unnerved him. And the vagueness of his alarm added to its
terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your
calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.
Crefton rose at his usual early hour the next morning,
after one of the least restful nights he had spent at the
farm. His sharpened senses quickly detected that subtle
atmosphere of things-being-not-altogether well that hangs
over a stricken household. The cows had been milked, but
they stood huddled about in the yard, waiting impatiently to
be driven out afield, and the poultry kept up an importunate
querulous reminder of deferred feeding-time; the yard pump,
which usually made discordant music at frequent intervals
during the early morning, was today ominously silent. In
the house itself there was a coming and going of scuttering
footsteps, a rushing and dying away of hurried voices, and
long, uneasy stillnesses. Crefton finished his dressing and
made his way to the head of a narrow staircase. He could
hear a dull, complaining voice, a voice into which an awed
hush had crept, and recognized the speaker as Mrs.
Spurfield.
“He'll go away, for sure,” the voice was saying; “there
are those as runs away from one as soon as real misfortune
shows itself.”
Crefton felt that he probably was one of “those,” and
that there were moments when it was advisable to be true to
type.
He crept back to his room, collected and, packed his few
belongings, placed the money due for his lodgings on a
table, and made his way out by a back door into the yard. A
mob of poultry surged expectantly towards him; shaking off
their interested attentions he hurried along under cover of
cowstall, piggery, and hayricks till he reached the lane at
the back of the farm. A few minutes' walk, which only the
burden of his portmanteaux restrained from developing into
an undisguised run, brought him to a main road, where the
early carrier soon overtook him and sped him onward to the
neighbouring town. At a bend of the road he caught a last
glimpse of the farm; the old gabled roofs and thatched
barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with its
wooden seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness in
the early morning light, and over it all brooded that air of
magic possession which Crefton had once mistaken for peace.
The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his
ears with a welcome protective greeting.
“Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry,” said
a fellow-traveller; “give me the peace and quiet of the
country.”
Crefton mentally surrendered his share of the desired
commodity. A crowded, brilliantly over-lighted music-hall,
where an exuberant rendering of “1812” was being given by
a strenuous orchestra, came nearest to his ideal of a nerve
sedative.