In Due Course

1

Fate, poaching as ever on preserves of human enterprise, had fired two barrels at young Alec Judeson. Malaria first got him down; dysentery prevented recovery. The board of doctors that yesterday examined him would, as they had warned him, in due course certify not merely that he must go home forthwith, but also that he must never return to the tropics. The days of his rubber planting in Malaya were numbered.

The medical examination had been at Penyabong, the chief town of Senantan, and Alec was now on his way back to the estate at Sungei Liat to pack up and to say goodbye. Tonight he would stay at the little resthouse on the summit of Bukit Kotak Pass, and leave the remaining forty-one miles to be driven in the cool of the early morning. Backing his two-seater car into the resthouse stable he suddenly realised how bitterly he would miss the touch of its steering-wheel and the feel of that patch on the driving seat where the stump of a fallen cheroot had burned through the leather. Nevertheless he must get out a quick advertisement for its sale if he was to scrape together enough dollars for his passage.

A zig-zag of earthen steps led from the stable up to the small plateau on which the resthouse was perched. Empty beer bottles, sunk neck-downward into the soil for half their length, formed the vertical front of each step and so protected the stair from scour or detrition. On either side, amid the knee-deep lalang grass, sprawled straggly bushes of red shoe-flower or hibiscus. How weak he had become was brought home to Alec by painful inability to mount the steps without several stops and waits. 'Those damned doctors were just about right!' he muttered crossly, slashing with his cane at a stem of hibiscus that slanted across the path.

The action dislodged, and brought rustling and fluttering to the ground at his feet, a large green mantis. Uncannily swivelling its triangular head the insect fixed him with protuberant black eyes and challengingly crooked its long forelegs in the posture that has earned for the species the epithet of 'praying'. He flicked it distastefully with his stick into the gutter, climbed the few remaining steps to the resthouse verandah, and there sank heavily into one of the long rattan chairs.

A whisky-and-soda helped him regain his breath before, taking a packet of letters from his pocket, he drew out one from a blueish, crested envelope, unfolded it, and began to scan its contents attentively. The embossed address was: 'Saintsend, Dedmans Reach, Tillingford', and the manuscript below it ran as follows:

MY DEAR ALEC—I am greatly distressed by the news of your breakdown in health. You will remember my dubiety as to your physical fitness for work in a tropical climate and my unavailing attempts to dissuade you therefrom. This letter, however, is written in no spirit of 'I told you so', but repeats my former invitation to come and live with me here at Tillingford. Your father (and I state this with certainty, as he told me so only ten days before he died) would have approved. It is indeed obviously right that you should get to know, and to regard as 'home', the property that you will come into sooner rather than later; for I am now 67 and do not need a medico to tell me that I've got a dicky heart. So do come along, and if you want to bring with you any of your oriental paraphernalia, there's plenty of room here for its exposition or stowage.

Yours avuncularly—
MATTHEW JUDESON

P.S.—You will find several improvements at Saintsend. The Conservancy people refused to let me root out those pollarded willows from the river bank; so I have blotted out all view of them by continuing the garden wall round to where the boathouse used to be. This I have pulled down, filled in the dyke, and built instead a decent-sized studio, music-room and library—my 'Athenaeum', I call it.
'Yours avuncularly!' 'Exposition or stowage of oriental paraphernalia!' 'Athenaeum', indeed! Alec winced as these phrases stung him into remembrance of Uncle Matthew's pomposity and humourless affectation. And why, in heaven's name, wall off the old willows and thereby lose those lovely glimpses of river? Well, in due course (a half-conscious euphemism, this, on Alec's part for after his uncle's death), in due course the wall could be pulled down again; and a temporary circumvallation would only in small degree detract from the amenities of an exceedingly comfortable and commodious residence. Amused that his thoughts should thus run in terms of a house agent's advertisement Alec mentally registered acceptance of his uncle's offer. He would telegraph to the old man as soon as his sailing date was fixed; but, for the moment, he felt it sufficient to clinch his decision with another whisky-and-soda.

As he lay in the long chair, sipping it, there clumsily alighted on the verandah rail beside him another mantis; or, maybe, the same one as before, for the beady stare and aggressive genuflexion were identical. Making a trigger of right forefinger and thumb, he flipped the creature off its perch into the garden and, in doing so, turned his eyes towards the sunset. This was of that jaundiced kind for which. Malays have the ugly word mambang. Not merely the western sky but the whole vault was dyed an ugly stagnant yellow. Hills and jungle seemed to soak in it, and Alec remembered that, on such an evening, Malay children would be kept indoors: an understandable, albeit superstitious, precaution.

Five minutes or so later, the yellow glare having dimmed with a suddenness reminiscent of opera, the resthouse-keeper lit the lamp which hung above the dry-rotten table whereon he would shortly lay supper. Numerous patches of iron-mould gave the badly laundered cloth a resemblance to maps of an archipelago, and so turned Alec's thoughts to Java and to the set of shadow-show silhouettes which he had bought on holiday there eighteen months ago. He had, indeed, already been twice reminded of them this evening by the praying mantis, the disproportion of whose neck and arms to the rest of its body was as great as in the case of the shadow puppets. In their case this disproportion was of course necessary in order that the jointed arms should be long enough for the showman to jerk them by their slender rods into the attitudes and gesticulations demanded by his miniature drama. A marionette is manipulated by strings from above, a shadow silhouette by spindles from below; the one being pulled and the other pushed much in the same way, Alec cynically reflected, as weak or obstinate characters need pulling or pushing in real life. He would certainly take these shadow figures home with him, as being the only 'oriental paraphernalia', to use his uncle's expression, that he possessed. They had been cut in thick buffalo hide and elaborately painted in gold, silver, crimson, saffron, brown and indigo; but on one side alone, the other being left polished but bare: for a shadow drama is watched from both sides of a stretched sheet—on one side, spectators see the painted surfaces of the figures against the white cloth and in the full glare of footlights;' on the other, the clear-cut shadows of them projected through the cloth. From neither side is the showman visible, for he operates between two parallel screens of palm-leaf immediately beneath the sheet.

The meal, over which Alec Judeson indulged in these Javan memories, was not, for dietetic reasons, that prepared for him by the resthouse-keeper, whose menus depended for edibility on liberal libations of Worcestershire sauce. His hostess at Penyabong had prudently provided him with a hamper of more palatable, and less dangerous, fare. Nevertheless he was too tired to eat more than a few mouthfuls of each dish; and, before many minutes passed, he gave up the effort and went straight from table to bed.

As he undressed a slight movement of the mosquito-net aroused his curiosity; so, before taking off his shoes, he got up from the chair to investigate. To his annoyance he discovered, for the third time that evening, a mantis. So strong was the grip of its hind legs on the curtain that its head and neck were thrust toward him, at right-angles to the body. Neglectful of their sharp spurs Alec seized the waving forelegs and was sharply pricked for his rashness. This angered him. Savagely grabbing it by its back and wing-cases, he tore the creature roughly from the net and held its head over the smoking chimney of the lamp. As the black, starting eyes became incinerated into opaque grey, he heard a sizzle and a crackle before he threw the still-wriggling insect to the floor and crushed it under foot. Next moment he was hating himself for this cruelty. Walking to the window he stood for some seconds listening to the stridulation of cicadas in the jungle; then spat into the darkness and returned to his undressing. A few minutes later he parted the mosquito curtains and crept into bed.

Out of weakness and exhaustion he was soon in the indeterminate borderland between waking and sleeping. Pictures passed before his closed eyes of Saintsend garden and he found himself wondering whether, after all, Uncle Matthew had not been right about those pollarded willows at the river edge. Were they not, perhaps, a little too like those gruesomely vitalised trees in Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Peter Pan? There certainly seemed to be a group of shadow-show figures in the tree to the left of the sundial, and there appeared, too, to be something waving at him from among the spindly boughs of the one on the right. Then of a sudden they parted, and the thing looked out at him 'O hell! That bloody mantis again!' He had cried this aloud and thereby woken himself out of his half-sleep. Was the wretched fever on him again? Having lit the bedside candle and rummaged in a suitcase for his thermometer, he took his temperature. Normal. Nerves, then, must have caused his dream, and small wonder after that episode of the mantis! To guard against further nightmare by forcing all nonsensical fancies out of his brain, he now set it to visualise Saintsend with all the accuracy and detail of which his memory was capable. This stern mental exercise, which within half an hour induced a sound sleep, enabled him also to contemplate, with pleasurable anticipation, various improvements to house and garden which it would be possible to make—in due course.

2

Nine weeks later a taxi from Tillingford pulled up at the steps of Saintsend. Young Judeson had scarcely opened its door before he heard the voice of his uncle raised in ponderous salutation.

'Alec, my dear boy, how splendid to see you again! You must excuse a rising septuagenarian for not coming down the steps to greet you. The legs are willing but the heart is weak! Come along up and let Larkin attend to your impedimenta. What? only two cabin trunks? I thought you Eastern nabobs travelled with more than that!'

'Nabobs may do so, but not a broken-down planter!' frowned the nephew as he paid off the taxi-man and turned to mount the steps. 'Why, uncle, how fit and young you're looking!'

'Looks are liars, I'm afraid, my dear boy. Soon falls the rotting leaf that autumn gilds: that's from one of my own poems. Now, if you hand over your keys to Larkin, he'll show you upstairs and help you unpack. They're putting you in the south wing, where you'll enjoy a safe refuge from avuncular intrusion. No more going up and down stairs for the victim of myocarditis! Come and see the Athenaeum as soon as you've tidied yourself up, and don't take too long about it, because our new neighbour at Sennetts, Miss Scettall, has promised to drop in to tea, and you will like to have a look round before she comes.'

Alec highly approved the bedroom and adjoining sitting-room assigned to him. The windows of both gave on to the riverside, and he could look over the new wall and the willow-tops on to the marshland and wood beyond. In the right foreground rose a whitewashed gable of the new studio or music-room, which looked far too nice and unpretentious to be dubbed an Athenaeum. In order that it might be above flood-level, it had been built on a raised terrace and was approached by a ramp of masonry leading from a french window in the library. Steps had thus been avoided at either end, and the rough stonework was already ornamentally studded with patches of saxifrage and wall-rue. It would be a dangerous passage to fall from, and Alec found himself considering whether the addition of a rail or low parapet might not be an improvement—in due course.

A deferential cough woke him from this reverie, and, turning round, he saw Larkin standing in the doorway.

'Pardon me asking, sir, but would you be wanting them two parcels as is atop of the brown trunk to be undone? Both of 'em seems to be stuck up with sealing-wax, like.'

'Oh no, thank you, Larkin; just put them, as they are, into that big drawer below the cupboard. Be careful not to shake the square cardboard box: it's got some rather rare and valuable insects inside it.'

Larkin seemed greatly interested at this. 'Then who'll be attending to their feeding, sir, if I may ask it? My young Tom, now, 'e's fair nuts on caterpillars. Hentomolology, the master names it in 'is school report; but, "Tom," I says, "don't you never be putting them bug 'utches again in my pantry, for they ain't 'ealthy; not about the 'ouse."'

'No; but mine aren't alive, Larkin! They're stuffed specimens, like you see in a museum. The fellow in the dispensary on our rubber estate gave them to me when I was saying goodbye. I had been telling him about an experience with what they call a praying mantis. You tell young Tom, next time he has a half-holiday, to pop in here, and I'll show him all sorts of queer things—scorpions, centipedes, mantises, and what not. A bit of a surprise for him after butterflies and moths!'

Having dismissed Larkin with this invitation for Tom, Alec brushed his hair with unusual attention, for the benefit of Miss Scettall, and started to go downstairs. He walked slowly and musingly. His uncle's appearance had very greatly shocked him by its promise of longevity. The cheeks were fuller than he remembered them and positively ruddy. The hair too was but little greyer, if at all, and the eyes gave no hint of weakening. Matthew, in short, looked good for another ten years at least; whereas during the voyage home from Malaya Alec had been nursing the prospect of a brief spell of nepotal attention being speedily rewarded by grateful benedictions from an early deathbed. After all, had not his uncle indicated as much in his letter of invitation? But not only did he now appear in deplorably rude health, but in five minutes of conversation had paraded all those exasperating affectations that would render any long companionship with him intolerable. Those bleats of 'my dear boy' and 'your poor old uncle'! That periphrastic avoidance of the first person singular; a maddening habit copied, perhaps, from those among the Anglican hierarchy who address their children in God as 'your Bishop'!

Alec was by now at the foot of the staircase and in the long corridor leading to the library. On either side hung paintings in oils of his grandfather's hunters and dogs, heavily and gaudily framed. The names were on plaques beneath: Caesar, Hornet, Buster, Ponto, and the rest. Alec made a mental note for their removal in due course; and then he suddenly frowned. With his uncle in such good trim, how could his promised inheritance be expected any longer to eventuate in due course. It was bound to be overdue: damnably overdue!

As if to corroborate this anticipation, Matthew Judeson emerged at this moment from the library door, and in full bleat. 'What, down again already? Good on you, my boy; quick work! Now be careful of this rug; it's apt to slip on the marble floor and have you over. Now one goes out through the french window and here we are, you see, on a ramp or isthmus; no steps to negotiate, just a gradual incline. And this is the door of the Sanctum Sanctorum! Open it, Alec; and please not to say that you are disappointed!'

Alec certainly was not. He was wondering in fact how so fussy and finical a man could have evolved so restful a room. The plain large open fireplace, the unstained panelling, unceiled barrel roof, grand piano in unpolished oak, red Dutch tiles and rough cord carpets, deep broad leathered chairs—all were right and pleasing.

'One tries,' his uncle resumed, 'to do a good turn to friends whenever occasion offers. The Scettalls are poorly off, so I called in young Alfred for a fee to help with the designs and furnishing. He would already have set up as an architect by now, but for his having got mixed up in a business of which his sister is best left in ignorance. He can rely on his present benefactor, of course, not to tell her.'

'What do you mean by his present benefactor?'

'Why, this old uncle of yours: who else?'

'Well, this unfortunate young nephew of yours...' Alec had thus begun in bantering imitation of the old man's circumlocution when Larkin appeared, not obtrusively but withal importantly, in the doorway and announced: 'Miss Scettall'.

At her finishing school the lady who now entered had been known among the other girls as 'Mona Lisa'. Her likeness to Leonardo's famous picture had grown rather than lessened with her years, and renders any detailed description of her appearance unnecessary. It need only be said that she was fully conscious of the likeness, dressed to the part, and expected all the attention that it demanded. During the conversation that followed her introduction to Alec, although politeness required her to address her remarks mainly to her host, she held the younger man's interest and attention by beck or smile and was gratified to find him all eyes and ears. The tea talk was suitably trivial, but two bits of it must be recounted as bearing upon later developments. The first related to a review in the Tillingford Gazette of Matthew Judeson's locally printed Second Posy of Poesy, wherein it was opined that the best compliment payable to the second posy was that nobody could have suspected its authorship to be identical with that of the first.

'Now tell us, Mr Judeson,' Mona Lisa commanded with a shake of the forefinger, 'just how you feel about that criticism. Are you conscious of having changed, or shall we say "developed", so greatly? Does your old self know your new self? Or vice versa?'

The question was clearly distasteful to Uncle Matthew; for he answered with a certain acidity that he would ask his nephew to read the books, of which Larkin had already been instructed to place author's presentation copies by his bedside, and to pass judgment. He could not help feeling that his first 'posy' had been much underrated. Only forty-three copies had in fact been sold.

That ended discussion on this topic; but after desultory talk of weather, crops and the new vicar at Fenfield the conversation took its second turn of relevance to our story.

'By the way, Mr Judeson,' said Miss Scettall in low confidential tones, 'your friend spoke to us again last night.'

'Which? Saint or the corpse?'

'Well—both or either; you see, our saint was the corpse!'

After this enigmatic utterance Miss Scettall turned to Alec and, raising her voice, continued: 'Now let me warn you before it is too late, Mr Alec, not to allow your uncle to interest you too much in his spiritualism. It isn't always quite comfortable, and I'm glad that he's got your company now in this old house. Good gracious, six o'clock! I must be off at once or Alfred will go without his supper, for we've no cook these days.'

As they escorted her to the front door, Alec wondered how earlier in the day he could have thought his uncle looking well. Perhaps it was the gloom of the corridor, but his face now appeared drawn and grey.

'Alec, my dear boy,' he said as soon as the guest was gone, 'the excitement of your arrival has quite knocked me over.' (Alec noted this first allusion to himself as 'me'.) 'I shall need to take dinner in bed if you will excuse me. Please make yourself thoroughly at home. You can't think how eagerly I have awaited your coming. Tomorrow we'll inspect the gardens together and the fields. There's lots to show you. Good night, my dear boy, and God bless you!'

Alec, too, was tired and went early to bed. He woke but once in the night when he heard the stable clock strike four. A patch of light which he had vaguely noticed before falling asleep still showed on the ceiling. One of the curtains, he now saw, had been only half drawn and, going to the window to adjust it, he found that the light came from a chink in the shutters of his uncle's downstair bedroom. Was the old fellow then afraid to sleep in the dark?

3

Of Alec's first days at Saintsend it is necessary only to record his growing affection for the place and increasing dislike of his uncle. This dislike was only slightly relieved by curiosity in regard to his character and behaviour. The two books of verse, which Alec found duly placed by Larkin at his bedside, certainly presented an enigma. A Posy of Poesy, published six years ago, was a collection of what might be described as period pieces; metrical exercises of classical artificiality. The first to catch Alec's eye as he opened the volume ran as follows:

Time was when I with heart intact
Would mock the poet's fancy
Whose heart, he quoth, was well nigh crackt
For love of pretty Nancy.
But, now I know, be stated truth:
Of me the same were spoken
Save that my dearling's name is Ruth,
My heart completely broken!
And so on, page after page, until Alec, nauseated by the banality of

My heart is locked and, woe is me,
Cressida doth keep the key
And will not unlock it!
closed the book with a vicious snap and picked up its newly published successor. In order not to waste time over it he would read the first poem, then the last, and then one taken at random from the middle.

The first was headed 'Red Idyll' and, as it seemed rather long, he looked at the last two verses only:

He smelt the hot blood spurting; then
Pressed the red blade to his own heart:
Oh throbbing wild embrace! Next morn
They two were difficult to part.

The dayspring crimsoned overhead,
But grey and cold they lay beneath;
Starkly protesting to the skies
Swift tragedy of love and death.
Good heavens! Uncle Matthew trying to be passionate and modern! What about the end piece? Here it was, written in a loose hexametrical form and entitled 'On My Portrait by N...'

How can you bid me, sir, accept the ME of this portrait?
Does it not lie by its truth, a truth that is irreligious?
Secrets are blabbed by those lips that my will had sealed for ever,
While from the eye peeps hunger for things that I live to dissemble:
The nose, too, is tendentious, sniffing up self-approval,
And a smug ear sits tuned for flattering insincerities.
Take it away, I beg: I cannot conspire betrayal
Of the poor Jekyll who gives to Hyde, out of decency, biding.
Uncle Matthew turning autopsychoanalytic! Good gracious me! And now for a piece from the middle. Here we are—'Firewatching'.

What seest thou in the caves of fire?
I see red avenues of desire
Slope to a fen of molten mire.
What hearest thou in the caves of fire?
I hear the hiss of a hellish quire,
The knell of a bell in a falling spire.
What smellest thou in the caves of fire?
I smell the reek of a funeral pyre,
Foul incense raised to Moloch's ire.
What tastest thou in the caves of fire?
The gust of rouge when cheeks perspire,
The acrid lips of a wench on hire.
What touchest thou in the caves of fire?
The dead grey ash of lust's empire
Cold or ever the red flames tire.
'Really, Uncle Matthew!' murmured Alec, and then hastily corrected himself. 'No, not really, Uncle Matthew. It just can't be; it's the sort of stuff he won't allow himself even to read. It's quite beyond or, he would say, below him.'

The next poem, in three cantos headed 'addenda', 'corrigenda' and 'delenda', repudiated his authorship even more loudly; but Alec was prevented from trying to guess any solution to the puzzle by a knock at the door and the entry of Larkin. Young Tom was going to be at home that morning and would Mr Alec be so good as to show him them insects? Yes, Mr Alec would, and at half-past eleven if convenient. At that hour consequently we find young Tom in a transport of delight and his father performing the role of commentator.

'Coo! Weren't that stinging crab a fair caution? Beg pardon, sir, did you say scorpion or scorpicle? And 'ooever seed the likes of this 'ere? A prying mantis? What, sir, prying like what they pries in church? Well, fancy that! 'E don't look much of a church-goer to me. But now, Mr Alec, if I may make so bold, please don't let Tom 'ere waste any more of your time. If you'll let me take the box downstairs 'e can make some drorins of the creeturs in the pantry for 'is Natural 'Istory master and I'll mind 'e keeps it careful as gold.'

'Very well, take it by all means: and when Tom has finished his drawings you can place it on the hall table where you put the letters.'

Who could have foretold that this simple and reasonable request was a first link in the chain of destiny that was to drag two masters of Saintsend to their deaths? Yet so it was to prove; and with speed.

On return from a walk down-river that afternoon Alec found a car at the front door and a sadly worried Larkin to greet him. His uncle, so Larkin said, had been took very poorly, not to speak of a fit, and the doctor was with him now. It had all happened along of them insects, for Mr Judeson must have seen the box on the hall table and had opened it. Talk of a shock, why in all his life Larkin had never seen anyone took worse. Matthew Judeson was indeed in serious case. Not a stroke, luckily, said the doctor, but nevertheless a cardiac upset of grave omen for the future. Of his surviving the present collapse the doctor was very hopeful, but he must lie in bed until further notice and receive no outside visitors. With the aid of a draught sent post-haste from the Tillingford dispensary the patient fell into a restful sleep and it was Alec, not he, who lay awake into the early hours of the morrow, thinking of the many things which he would venture upon in due course and congratulating himself on a probable acceleration in the time schedule.

His uncle's salutation when he went to see him next morning was unusual. 'I suppose, Alec,' he said, 'you don't believe in witches? No, I thought not. Nor had your old sceptic of an uncle ever done so until he met Miss Scettall. Now, however, he has his doubts, and perhaps you would be interested to hear the reason.'

'Look here, uncle,' Alec interrupted at this point, 'the doctor says that you're not to tire yourself. So please cut out all this roundabout talk of "your old uncle" and try to speak of yourself as "me" or "I". Yes, I would like to hear about that Mona Lisa woman if only you will speak naturally.'

Matthew contrived to turn a wince into a smile with some difficulty, because his conversion of first into third person was a trick that enabled him, as it were, to sit with the audience and admire his own play-acting. However, he affected to take the request in good part and continued, 'Anything to please you, my dear Alec! Well, when Miss Scettall came to Sennetts last year she somehow took to me and I to her. We were excellent neighbours. But as the months passed by I noticed her becoming increasingly possessive, and on New Year's Day I got a card from her with the message, 'May this Leap Year bring you happiness!' That put me on my guard, and when she suggested a walk on the afternoon of 29th February I was ready for her. After effervescing about her love for the river country, she began to enthuse over Saintsend and said that all the dear old house needed was an understanding chatelaine. It was then that I quoted two lines from my first book:

Ah! hapless nymph, what boots it him to harry
If Strephon is resolvèd not to marry?
She gave a laugh, but the sound of it was unpleasant. 'Surely,' she said, 'you don't imagine that I'm the sort to angle for superannuated fish? Come along to Sennetts and I'll give you a cup of tea.' I had to go, of course, and when tea was over and Alfred had joined us, she began the séance business that has been the curse of my life ever since.'

The doctor's arrival at this point gave his patient a respite from completing the story. This was just as well perhaps, for he was becoming exhausted.

4

Three or four days were to pass before, at Alec's prompting, his uncle took up the unfinished tale. Once again he started with a question.

'You know perhaps the origin of the name Saintsend?'

'Why, yes: I've read it in Bennet's Tillingford.'

'And what does Bennet say?'

'That before the big house at Sennetts was burned down in 1747 and the estate broken up, the farm we now call Santry was known as Sennett's Entry and Saintsend as Sennett's End. The present names are just contractions.'

'Then what does he say of Dedman's Reach?'

'Oh, that's a much more modern name. The land belonged not so long ago to a Sir Ulric Dedman.'

'I wish, my dear boy, that what Bennet wrote were true. Unfortunately, I know better, or perhaps I should say, worse. I learned the real truth during those séances I have told you of. The first spirit we got into touch with gave his name as Saynt; Lemuel Saynt. He said that he wanted to warn me about evil existences in the riverside willows that had brought about his drowning (Saintsend, you see, means Saynt's end) in 1703. That he was right about the willows I found out soon after, for I very nearly fell into the stream myself. I distinctly felt a push from behind, and there was a sort of gurgling grunt as my left leg slipped in. It was a horribly near thing. I have seen them too sometimes—or rather their arms and legs. That was why your mantis and stick-insects gave me such a shock last Friday. Luckily, I cannot see the willows any more now that the wall is finished and I sleep downstairs. You can still see them from your room of course, and I advise you to keep the curtains drawn on moonlit nights. We never managed to get a clear account from Saynt of the dead man in the reach. You heard Miss Scettall say the other afternoon that it was Saynt himself. I suspect her and Alfred, however, of inventing things when I am not there, and I've caught Alfred trying to guide the planchette. I'm certain, too, that both of them try to incite the willow Things against me. On quite windless nights I sometimes hear them scraping and scratching at my new wall. Who was it, Alec, who said that Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned? It's true enough of Adeline Scettall. She's playing the witch on me night and day. Your coming here, my dear boy, made me feel safer until I opened that box of yours. Magnify that mantis a dozen times and you'll have some idea of what's in the willows. You believe me, don't you? It's all perfectly true, and I simply had to tell you.'

Alec sat thinking for some moments, and then he drew his bow at a venture. 'Uncle,' he said, 'you spoke just now of Alfred guiding the planchette. Does that by any chance account for your second posy of poesy?'

'It certainly came from the planchette,' was the answer, 'and there was a spirit's order to publish it in my name I hope that it was not Alfred: if so, he's as bad as his sister. All my nice friends are offended by the verses, and the vicar at Fenfield has even asked me to give up taking round the bag. From being a sidesman I've become an untouchable! I can't blame him either.'

Unable to repress a slight smile at this ecclesiastical deprivation, Alec told his uncle not to take such things too seriously. Everything would be right and normal again so soon as the séances were stopped. Then, bidding the old man calm himself and take a nap, the nephew went out into the garden to think things over. For an hour or more he paced slowly to and fro, his eyes upon the ground. Finally, with the air of one who has laid his plan, he walked briskly across the stable-yard, through the coach-house (now used as a garage) and into the little harness-room. On a shelf stood two old acetylene car-lamps, one of which he took down and filled with carbide. He had promised, to show Larkin how the shadow puppets worked and now he needed only a dust-sheet, which was soon got, for a practical demonstration. This he gave in his bedroom after dark and, when Larkin left to lay the table for dinner, he switched the beam of the lamp for a brief moment onto the white gable of the Athenaeum. Jadi!' he said; which is Malay for 'It'll do'.

Next morning, as though to assure his uncle that he had seen nothing incredible in the previous day's narration, he remarked that, having had to get up just after midnight to open the window, he had made the mistake of looking at the willows. There was certainly something there which he could not associate with the vegetable or animal creation. He felt that his uncle must shake himself and Saintsend free from this ugly tangle of spiritualism without a day's delay. It was getting on his own nerves too.

This speech had the desired effect. 'I'll write at once,' the uncle replied, 'to Miss Scettall and tell her to arrange a final séance at Sennetts tonight. A final séance is necessary because Saynt has hinted before now of other and more direct methods of approach to me and I must avoid that at all costs. We must pension him off decently, so to speak. The doctor won't like my going out to dinner, but to be quit of this wretched business will be better medicine than any he has ever prescribed. Anyhow, I have made up my mind to go.'

After lunch Alec heard Larkin being told that his master would be out to dinner at Sennetts and that brandy, whisky and two glasses were to be put on the small table in the Athenaeum against his return. Larkin need not sit up; he would close the house himself.

'If the whisky and the second glass are meant for me,' interposed Alec, 'I must ask to be excused. I feel a bout of malaria coming on and shall go early to bed with a couple of quinine tablets. You can tell me all about your evening at Sennetts after breakfast tomorrow.'

'Very well, Larkin; the brandy and one glass only. Be careful not to forget, for after my recent collapse I may need it.'

Thus came it about that, when at nearly midnight he heard the sound of his uncle's car returning down the drive from Sennetts, Alec was in his bedroom. But not in bed. He sat on a stool by the window. On a small table behind him stood an acetylene car-lamp with a sheet of heavy cardboard pressed against the glass to block its rays. In his right hand he held a shadow puppet ready for manipulation. Through the window he could now see the figure of his uncle moving up the ramp towards the Athenaeum. Just as the figure reached the highest point Alec suddenly whipped away the sheet of cardboard and manipulated his puppet. Simultaneously, on the white gable above his uncle, loomed a long-armed, narrow-bodied, spindly shadow, beckoning and waving.

There was no cry nor sound of any sort save a dull dead thud on the gravel path beneath the ramp. Within five seconds the acetylene lamp was in a cupboard, the puppet back in its box, and Alec's head on its pillow. Nothing occurred to disturb the remaining hours of night, but early next morning Larkin found the lights in the Athenaeum still burning. A moment later he knew the cause. Another light, and one that could not be relit, had been extinguished.

5

The interval between the inquests on uncle and nephew was almost exactly four months. Certain events during this period are worthy of brief record for the purposes of rounding off our tale.

Nobody knows whether Leonardo da Vinci liked or disliked the smile on his Mona Lisa. Worn by Miss Scettall on a call of condolence it infuriated the new master of Saintsend. So also did her remark that all of us must come to the grave in due course. What the hell did she mean by that? Had she any suspicions? Anyhow, he wasn't going to have her poking her nose into his affairs: so he told her bluntly that he attributed his uncle's death to her spook-raising and that she would not be welcomed at Saintsend again so long as he was there. 'No doubt you'll have company enough without me,' she had replied: and what exactly did she mean by that?

Larkin always said that his new young master's heavy drinking began on the night of the old one's funeral. A tile had been blown off the bedroom roof and while dressing for dinner Alec heard the drip-drip of a leak from the ceiling. The drops were falling on the puppet box, and removing the top ones he carefully wiped each before putting the box into a drier place. He did not trouble to wash his hands thereafter and Larkin said to him as he sat at table, 'Why, sir, your fingers is all bloody!' The crimson veneer from a damp puppet had in fact come off on them, but there seemed no sufficient reason in this for Alec's extreme concern and annoyance. His face turned scarlet and then suddenly white; he swore at Larkin and bade him bring a neat brandy.

On the following morning he threw the whole collection of shadow figures, box and all, into the river. Revisiting the place that evening he cursed himself for not having corded the box. As a result of the omission one of the figures suddenly protruded itself at him from the swirl of an eddy. It seemed to him to have expanded in the water and to be now nearly life-size. That, of course, must have been an optical illusion; but Alec never cared to walk on the riverbank again and when the masons arrived by his order to pull down the garden wall he abruptly told them to leave it alone and get out. The same day he had his bed moved downstairs to a room at the opposite end of the corridor to where his uncle had slept. He was suffering, he said, from insomnia. A week or so later he ordered all windows on the river side of the house to be kept closed and shuttered by day as well as night.

The effects of heavy drinking had indeed begun to exact a heavy toll on mind and body. Larkin was accused of allowing young Tom to put scorpions and centipedes into Alec's boots and shoes and a scarlet mantis into his bed. All patterned carpets and rugs had soon to be taken up and stowed in the box-room, for Alec felt that in some strange way insects and shadow figures had got woven into the designs. Curtains were next taken down because of what he believed to lurk in their folds, and pictures because of what might hide behind them. No window might now be opened, even on the landward side, and bath plugs must be kept firmly in their sockets for fear of what might otherwise crawl out on him.

The faithful Larkin at last gave notice. Before its term was up, however, the end had come, and from a trivial causation. The Tillingford Grammar School was about to stage a speech-day pageant, of which one item would be a 'grasshopper parade' performed by the smaller boys. Their costumes, cheap but effective, were of green-dyed sacking with long thin osier shoots for antennae and legs. After rehearsal one evening Tom, thus clad, ran up to Saintsend to show his father. In an end-of-term exuberance he jumped the little clipped yew hedge below the rose garden and landed nimbly on the lower lawn. Alec at this moment, perhaps in maudlin remorse, was gazing down from the stone ramp on to the spot in the gravel path below where his uncle had fallen to his death. Out of the corner of a bloodshot eye he caught a sudden glimpse of the boy-grasshopper. With a hysterical cry of 'Good God! that mantis again!' he stumbled, pitched forward and fell.

Larkin, who was tidying up inside the Athenaeum, heard both cry and thudding crunch. Quick though he ran to his master's assistance, it was to no use; for the neck was broken.

6

Saintsend thus passed into possession of a distant and wealthy cousin, John Fenderby-Judeson. Within a year or so he had made many improvements, including the removal of Matthew Judeson's wall. Later he married a neighbouring lady whose Christian name was seldom spoken, for he chose to call her 'Mona Lisa'. The most recent accounts from Tillingford and Fenfield suggest that the riverine air of Saintsend is not suiting her too well and that she would like the dividing wall to be rebuilt. She complains, too, of bad nights, but her husband assures her that, if only she will exercise patience, an end will surely come to them in due course.

Clarke,
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