Mrs. Amworth

The village ofMaxley, where last summer and autumn, these strange events
took place, lies on a heathery and pine-clad upland of Sussex. Inall England
you could not find a sweeter and saner situation. Should the windblow from
the south, it comes laden with the spices of the sea; to the easthigh downs
protect it from the inclemencies of March; and from the west andnorth the
breezes which reach it travel over miles of aromatic forest andheather. The
village itself is insignificant enough in point of population,but rich in
amenities and beauty. Half-way down the single street, with itsroad and
spacious areas of grass on each side, stands the little NormanChurch and the
antique graveyard long disused: for the zest there are a dozensmall, sedate
Georgian houses, red-bricked and long-windowed, each with asquare of
flower-garden in front, and an ampler strip behind; a score ofshops, and a
couple of score of thatched cottages belonging to laborers onneighboring
estates, complete the entire cluster of its peaceful habitations.The general
peace, however, is sadly broken on Saturdays and Sundays, for welie on one
of the main roads between London and Brighton and our quietstreet becomes a
racecourse for flying motor-cars and bicycles. A notice justoutside the
village begging them to go slowly only seems to encourage them toaccelerate
their speed, for the road lies open and straight, and there isreally no
reason why they should do otherwise. By way of protest,therefore, the ladies
of Maxley cover their noses and mouths with their handkerchiefsas they see a
motor-car approaching, though, as the street is asphalted, theyneed not
really take these precautions against dust. But late on Sundaynight the
horde of scorchers has passed, and we settle down again to fivedays of
cheerful and leisurely seclusion. Railway strikes which agitatethe country
so much leave us undisturbed because most of the inhabitants ofMaxley never
leave it at all.

I am the fortunate possessor of one of these small Georgianhouses, and
consider myself no less fortunate in having so interesting andstimulating a
neighbor as Francis Urcombe, who, the most confirmed ofMaxleyites, has not
slept away from his house, which stands just opposite to mine inthe village
street, for nearly two years, at which date, though still inmiddle life, he
resigned his Physiological Professorship at Cambridge Universityand devoted
himself to the study of those occult and curious phenomena whichseem equally
to concern the physical and the psychical sides of human nature.Indeed his
retirement was not unconnected with his passion for the strangeuncharted
places that lie on the confines and borders of science, theexistence of
which is so stoutly denied by the more materialistic minds, forhe advocated
that all medical students should be obliged to pass some sort ofexamination
in mesmerism, and that one of the tripos papers should bedesigned to test
their knowledge in such subjects as appearances at time of death,haunted
houses, vampirism, automatic writing, and possession.

"Of course they wouldn't listen to me," ran his accountof the matter, "for
there is nothing that these seats of learning are so frightenedof as
knowledge, and the road to knowledge lies in the study of thingslike these.
The functions of the human frame are, broadly speaking, known.They are a
country, anyhow, that has been charted and mapped out. Butoutside that lie
huge tracts of undiscovered country, which certainly exist, andthe real
pioneers of knowledge are those who, at the cost of being deridedas
credulous and superstitious, want to push on into those misty andprobably
perilous places. I felt that I could be of more use by settingout without
compass or knapsack into the mists than by sitting in a cage likea canary
and chirping about what was known. Besides, teaching is very badfor a man
who knows himself only to be a learner; you only need to be aself-conceited
ass to teach."

Here, then, in Francis Urcombe, was a delightful neighbor to onewho, like
myself, has an uneasy and burning curiosity about what he calledthe "misty
and perilous places"; and this last spring we had a furtherand most welcome
addition to our pleasant little community, in the person of Mrs.Amworth,
widow of an Indian civil servant. Her husband had been a judge inthe
North-West Provinces, and after his death at Peshawar she cameback to
England, and after a year in London found herself starving forthe ampler air
and sunshine of the country to take the place of the fogs andgriminess of
town. She had, too, a special reason for settling in Maxley,since her
ancestors up till a hundred years ago had long been native to theplace, and
in the old churchyard, now disused, are many gravestones bearingher maiden
name of Chaston. Big and energetic, her vigorous and genialpersonality
speedily woke Maxley up to a higher degree of sociality than ithad ever
known. Most of us were bachelors or spinsters or elderly folk notmuch
inclined to exert ourselves in the expense and effort ofhospitality, and
hitherto the gaiety of a small tea-party, with bridge afterwardsand galoshes
(when it was wet) to trip home in again for a solitary dinner,was about the
climax of our festivities. But Mrs. Amworth showed us a moregregarious way,
and set an example of luncheon parties and little dinners, whichwe began to
follow. On other nights when no such hospitality was on foot, alone man like
myself found it pleasant to know that a call on the telephone toMrs.
Amworth's house not a hundred yards off, and an inquiry as towhether I might
come over after dinner for a game of piquet before bedtime, wouldprobably
evoke a response of welcome. There she would be, with a comrade-like
eagerness for companionship, and there was a glass of port andcup of coffee
and a cigarette and game of piquet. She played the piano, too, ina free and
exuberant manner, and had a charming voice and sang to her ownaccompaniment;
and as the days grew long and the light lingered late, we playedour game in
her garden, which in the course of a few months she had turnedfrom being a
nursery for slugs and snails into a glowing patch of luxuriantblossoming.
She was always cheery and jolly; she was interested ineverything, and in
music, in gardening, in games of all sorts was a competentperformer.
Everybody (with one exception) liked her, everybody felt her tobring with
her the tonic of a sunny day. That one exception was FrancisUrcombe; he,
though he confessed he did not like her, acknowledged that he wasvastly
interested in her. This always seemed strange to me, for pleasantand jovial
as she was, I could see nothing in her that could call forthconjecture or
intrigued surmise, so healthy and unmysterious a figure did shepresent. But
of the genuineness of Urcombe's interest there could be no doubt;one could
see him watching and scrutinizing her. In matter of age, shefrankly
volunteered the information that she was forty-five; but herbriskness, her
activity, her unravaged skin, her coal-black hair, made itdifficult to
believe that she was not adopting an unusual device, and addingten years on
to her age instead of subtracting them.

Often, also, as our quite unsentimental friendship ripened, Mrs.Amworth
would ring me up and propose her advent. If I was busy writing, Iwas to give
her, so we definitely bargained, a frank negative, and in answerI could hear
her jolly laugh and her wishes for a successful evening of work.Sometimes,
before her proposal arrived, Urcombe would already have steppedacross from
his house opposite for a smoke and a chat, and he, hearing who myintending
visitor was, always urged me to beg her to come. She and I shouldplay our
piquet, said he, and he would look on, if we did not object, andlearn
something of the game. But I doubt whether he paid much attentionto it, for
nothing could be clearer than that, under that penthouse offorehead and
thick eyebrows, his attention was fixed not on the cards, but onone of the
players. But he seemed to enjoy an hour spent thus, and often,until one
particular evening in July, he would watch her with the air of aman who has
some deep problem in front of him. She, enthusiastically keenabout our game,
seemed not to notice his scrutiny. Then came that evening, when,as I see in
the light of subsequent events, began the first twitching of theveil that
hid the secret horror from my eyes. I did not know it then,though I noticed
that thereafter, if she rang up to propose coining round, shealways asked
not only if I was at leisure, but whether Mr. Urcombe was with me.If so, she
said, she would not spoil the chat of two old bachelors, andlaughingly
wished me good night.

Urcombe, on this occasion, had been with me for some half-hourbefore Mrs.
Amworth's appearance, and had been talking to me about themedieval beliefs
concerning vampirism, one of those borderland subjects which hedeclared had
not been sufficiently studied before it had been consigned by themedical
profession to the dust-heap of exploded superstitions. There hesat, grim and
eager, tracing, with that pellucid clearness which had made himin his
Cambridge days so admirable a lecturer, the history of thosemysterious
visitations. In them all there were the same general features;one of those
ghoulish spirits took up its abode in a living man or woman,conferring
supernatural powers of bat-like flight and glutting itself withnocturnal
blood-feasts. When its host died it continued to dwell in thecorpse, which
remained undecayed. By day it rested, by night it left the graveand went on
its awful errands. No European country in the Middle Ages seemedto have
escaped them; earlier yet, parallels were to be found, in Romanand Greek and
in Jewish history.

"It's a large order to set all that evidence aside as beingmoonshine," he
said. "Hundreds of totally independent witnesses in manyages have testified
to the occurrence of these phenomena, and there's no explanationknown to me
which covers all the facts. And if you feel inclined to say `Why,then, if
these are facts, do we not come across them now?' there are twoanswers I can
make you. One is that there were diseases known in the MiddleAges, such as
the black death, which were certainly existent then and whichhave become
extinct since, but for that reason we do not assert that suchdiseases never
existed. Just as the black death visited England and decimatedthe population
of Norfolk, so here in this very district about three hundredyears ago there
was certainly an outbreak of vampirism, and Maxley was the centerof it. My
second answer is even more convincing, for I tell you thatvampirism is by no
means extinct now. An outbreak of it certainly occurred in Indiaa year or
two ago."

At that moment I heard my knocker plied in the cheerful andperemptory manner
in which Mrs. Amworth is accustomed to announce her arrival, andI went to
the door to open it.

"Come in at once," I said, "and save me fromhaving my blood curdled. Mr.
Urcombe has been trying to alarm me."

Instantly her vital, voluminous presence seemed to fill the room.

"Ah, but how lovely!" she said. "I delight inhaving my blood curdled. Go on
with your ghost story, Mr. Urcombe. I adore ghost stories."