Shame and Consciences

adapted by Mihangel

14. The haunted house

Next day was a saint's day, which you had to yourself from chapel in the early morning until tea. Jan had just come out of chapel and was blinking in the bright spring sunlight, when of a sudden his blood throbbed more than the Mile had made it throb. Evan Devereux had broken away from some bosom companion and was smiling in Jan's path.

"I say, I do congratulate you on yesterday! Everybody's talking about it. I meant to speak to you before. That's the worst thing of being in different houses -- we never see anything of each other, even now we're in the same form."

Boys are artless animals. Here were two, the second simpleton outshining the first in beams of pure goodwill.

"That can't be helped," said Jan reassuringly, so that Evan should not think he could possibly have been offended.

"Still, I don't see why we shouldn't help it for once. There's nothing on this morning, is there? Why shouldn't we go for a stroll together?"

Gloom crossed Jan's beaming face like thunder-clouds over sunlit fields. "I -- I'd promised another chap," he groaned.

"What other chap?" Was it contempt in Evan's tone, or merely disappointment?

"Carpenter in our house."

"Chips Carpenter! I know him well. We were at the same school before this. I never see enough of him either. Let's all go together."

But Jan was not through his difficulty yet. "We were going to the haunted house," he explained. "It's been arranged for a long time."

"The haunted house!" Evan was torn between approval and disapproval. "I never heard of one here!"

"It's a couple of miles away. They only say it's haunted. We thought we'd have a look and see."

"But is it in bounds?" Evan asked anxiously.

"I should hope so," replied Jan unscrupulously. "But here's Chips. You ask him."

Evan, however, for all his law-abiding instincts, was not one to draw back when two were for going on. He had a fund of high spirits, but not an infinity, and they ran out sometimes when least expected. But this morning he was at his best, and incomparably better company than either of the others. Jan was shy and awkward, though his soul sang with pride and pleasure. Chips the articulate, Chips the loquacious, Chips the irrepressible in congenial company, had least of all to say, except in the bitterness of his heart against the boy who had usurped his place.

"He's hardly spoken to either of us," he was saying to himself, "since the very beginning of our first term. And I should like to have seen him now if the Tiger hadn't finished fourth in the Mile!"

The worst of enthusiasm is that it readily turns to cynicism and, as in Jan's case now, the other way round. Jan had also felt very bitter about Evan, if not exactly against him. Yet here he was basking in Evan's first and almost mercenary smile. But Jan's case was peculiar. Everything good had come together at once, filling his empty cup to overflowing. He might despise public-school traditions as much as (for Chips's benefit) he pretended, but he was too honest to be indifferent to his little success of the day before. He knew it was not little for his age. It was, he would have admitted, some consolation for being at school against his will. But it was not against his will that he was walking with Master Evan on equal terms this fine spring morning.

He had always seen that the making or marring of his school life lay in Evan's power. It had not been marred as it might have been by a cruel or thoughtless tongue. It might still be made by kind words and even an occasional show of equality. Jan had never dared think of Evan as an equal, let alone treat him as one; still less could he hope for anything more. So he was nervous as they trod the hilly roads, but he was intensely happy. Spring was in the bold blue sky, and in the hedgerows faintly sprayed with green, and in Jan's heart too. Birds were singing, and Evan was bubbling like a brook with laughter and talk of the holidays and the home that Jan knew all about. Yet never a word to let poor old Chips into the secret of their old relations, or even to set him wondering. Any indiscretion of that sort was by way of falling from Jan himself.

"Do you ever see the Miss Christies now?" he asked incautiously, the use of the "Miss" betraying his inferior social standing.

"The Christies!" Evan exclaimed, emphatically and with a sidelong glance at Chips. "Oh yes, the girls skated on our pond all last holidays. Phyllis can do the outside edge backwards."

"She would. I suppose you're too big for Fanny now?"

Fanny had been Evan's pony, on which he had ridden a great deal with his friends the Christies; hence the dangerous association of ideas. He said he now rode one of the horses, when he rode at all. His tone closed that side of the subject.

"Do you remember how you used to hoist a flag, the first day of the holidays, to let the young -- to let the girls know you'd got back?"

Evan turned to Chips with a forced laugh. "All this reminiscing must be pretty boring for you. But this chap and I used to know each other at home."

"I wish we did now," said Jan. "There's nobody to talk to down in Norfolk."

"Except R. N. Ambrose," put in Chips dryly. "I suppose you know that's his uncle?"

Evan did not know, and it proved useful information all round. It reminded him that Mrs Rutter had been a lady. It reminded Jan that not all his people had sprung from the stables, and made him distinctly less liable to say "the Miss Christies" or "Master Evan." Above all, in introducing the topic of cricket, it gave Chips a chance at last and made a whole mile go like the wind. Chips could have gained full marks in any examination set on the row of green and red booklets on his shelves. He was a staunch supporter of Middlesex, but Jan and Evan were Yorkshire to the marrow, and the discussion that followed was fairly heated. It lasted them until they had almost reached the straggling and deserted street of the village famous for its haunted house.

"I suppose it's at the other end. We shan't see it yet a bit."

Jan spoke with the bated breath and sparkling eye of the born adventurer, and Chips whispered volubly of ghosts in general, but Evan fell silent for the first time. He was the smallest of the three, but much the most attractive with his clean-cut features, his auburn hair, and that clear, radiant, tell-tale skin which blushes so readily. It was blushing now, saying something he found difficult to put into words.

"Aren't haunted houses rather rot?" was his first attempt.

"Rather not!" cried Chips.

"Still, it strikes me we're bound to be seen, and it seems rather a rotten row to get into."

Chips, once the law-abider himself, growing now under Jan's spell into the relative dare-devil, was amused. He knew Evan of old, and that what he hated above all was getting into any sort of row. Jan might have known it too, by the pains he took to play down the risk. Nobody was around to see them. Nobody who did would dream of reporting them. Anyway, now that there were three of them, one could keep watch while the others explored. From all he had heard, the house was no better than a ruin, but now that they were there they must see for themselves. It was one of the two things worth doing at school, apart from games which you had to go in for whether you liked them or not.

"What's the other thing?" asked Evan with a bit of a sneer. He had been longer in the school, but had apparently learnt less.

"Molton tunnel."

"Oh yes, I've heard of that. Some fellows are fool enough to walk through it, aren't they?"

"Some who have the pluck," said Chips. "There aren't too many."

"Are you one?" asked Evan sarcastically.

"No. But he is." Chips jerked his head towards Jan. "I turned tail at the last minute."

"Don't you believe him," said Jan, grinning. "I wouldn't take him with me. He's too blind, is Chips. Wait till he starts specs, then I'll take you both in if you like. There's nothing in it. Half the time you can see one end or the other. It's only a short bit where you can't see either, and then you can feel your way. But by gum it makes you mucky!" The last sentence came out almost as "ba goom it mairkes ya moocky."

"It'd make you moockier if you met a train," Evan suggested slyly.

"But I didn't, you see."

"You jolly nearly did," Chips retorted. "The express came through the minute after you did."

"Not the minute after," Jan protested, "nor yet five minutes after. But here we are. If that isn't the haunted house I'll eat my cap."

It stood behind a row of tall iron palings in a little wilderness of a garden, but a million twigs with emerald tips quivered with joy in the breezy sunshine. It was no day for ghosts. But you could see how, in less inspiriting weather, the house could hold an evil reputation. Its windows were filthy and broken and some of them flaunted the draggled remnants of old and futile "For Sale" notices. Its paint was bleached and bloated in hideous blisters, damp and mould held foul revel from gutter to door-step, and the whole fabric cried for destruction, as the dead for burial.

"I reckon they won't have got much of an offer," said Jan, pointing to the notices. "Yet it must have been a tidy little place in its day."

He forced the drooping gate through the weeds of the path and was first into the disreputable garden. Evan was peering up and down the empty road, and Chips was watching Evan with interest.

"I shouldn't come in if I were you, Devereux."

"Why not?" demanded Evan with instant heat.

"Well, it really is out of bounds, I suppose, and some master might be there already, having a look round. And then we should be done!"

Evan told Chips to go to blazes, and was second through the gate, which Chips closed behind them. Jan was already leading the way to the back. Instinctively they stole gently over the weeds, though there was only a blank wall on the other side of the road, and only open fields beyond the matted ruin of a garden. The back windows had escaped the stones of the village urchins, but the glass top of the garden door was smashed. Jan put his hand in to turn the key, but the door was unlocked all the time. Inside, they trod equally softly, and when Chips gave an honest shudder, Evan replied with a wry giggle. In the hall it could hardly be more depressing: mouldy paper peeling off the walls, rotting floorboards that threatened to let a leg clean through, and a musty atmosphere that made Jan pull a face.

"I should like to open a window or two," he commented, looking into a room better lighted and better aired by broken panes.

"I should start my pipe if I were you," suggested Chips, perfectly sincerely but with a bad sense of timing.

It was not the first time that morning that he had thought of Jan's pipe. Nobody else seemed to know about it, but Sprawson had threatened his young 'un with hot bodkins if he caught him smoking while training, and Jan had toed the line. But today he had been going to indulge again. Chips had kept an eye on the pocket bulging with pipe and pouch, wondering if Evan's presence would prevent them emerging. But he had never meant to let the cat out like this, and turned shamefacedly from Jan's angry look to Evan's immediate air of superiority.

"You don't mean to say you smoke, Rutter?"

"I always did, you know," said Jan with an uncouth grin and scarlet ears.

"I know." Evan glanced at Chips. "But I didn't think you'd have done it here."

"I don't see any more harm in it here than at home."

"Except it's a rotten sort of row to get into. I smoke at home myself," said Evan loftily.

"All rows are rotten, aren't they?" remarked Chips with apparent innocence. But Evan was not deceived. These two were like steel and flint today, and more than sparks might have flown if Jan had not created a diversion.

"I'm going upstairs. There's something I don't much like."

"What is it?"

"I want to see."

Jan's brows were knit. The other two followed him, but close together for all their bickering. The stairs were in better shape than the lower floor, and sound enough to creak alarmingly. That made them stop dead, as though they expected a door to open and a terrible challenge to echo through the empty house. Jan pulled himself together, led the way to the landing, and picked up a newspaper which had been left hanging on the banisters.

"Some sporting card's been here before us. Here's the Sportsman of last Saturday week."

A window with a border of red and blue glass in peculiarly atrocious shades splashed the boys with vivid colour as they stood abreast. All the doors leading off the landing were shut. Jan opened one of them. Chips and Evan went into another room where, their differences forgotten in their excitement, they were chattering happily when a dreadful cry brought them headlong to the door. It was Jan's voice. They could not see him, but a large mouse came scuttling through the door where he had gone, and almost over their toes. Chips skipped to one side, but Evan threw his cap at it with a shout of nervous laughter.

"Don't laugh, you chaps!" said Jan, lurching into sight in the doorway. The strongest light was in the room behind him and they could not see his face, but they did see him swaying.

"I can't help it," said Evan hysterically. "Frightened by a mouse -- you of all people!"

Jan turned back into the room without a word, leaning on the door handle as if for support.

Evan came up alongside him. "Oh, I say, we must smash a window here!" he cried with the same strained brightness. Then Chips, bringing up the rear, saw him leap from Jan's side back into the landing. Chips pushed past him and hugged Jan's arm.

It was not another empty room. Between fireplace and window there was a tall built-in cupboard, its door wide open. In the cupboard hung a suit of bursting corduroys, with a blackened face looking out of it, and hobnail boots just clear of the floor.

"Dead?" whispered Chips through chattering teeth.

"Dead for days," Jan muttered back. "He's come in here and hung himself!"

Crashing noises came from the stairs. It was Evan in full flight, jumping many at a time. Chips rushed after him, and Jan after Chips once he had closed the door behind him. The horrified boys did not leave by the gate, but smashed the rotten garden fence in their frenzied flight across country, as if they had done the hideous deed themselves. Over the fields they fled pell-mell, through emerald-dusted hedge and brimming ditch, as though in a panic of blood-guiltiness. Spring still smiled on them sunnily, breezily. Birds welcomed them back with uninterrupted song. The boys had neither eyes nor ears, but only bursting hearts and aching limbs, until a well-known steeple pricked the sky, and they flung themselves down by the fence between a ploughed field, rich as chocolate, and a meadow alive with ewes and lambs.

Chips was badly broken-winded and speechless, because he was not supposed to run. Evan, a notoriously dapper little dandy, was quite unusually dishevelled. But Jan sat himself on the fence and repeated the same remark at intervals.

"It's a bad job."

"But are you sure about it?" Evan sat up to ask eventually. "Are you positive it was a man, and that he was dead?"

"I can swear to it."

"So can I," wheezed Chips. "And that's what we'll have to do, worse luck!"

"Why?" from Evan.

"How can we help it?"

"Nobody saw us go in or come out."

"Then do you mean to leave a dead man hanging till his head comes off?"

Chips had a graphic gift which could sometimes go too far. Evan promptly and snappily told him not to be a beast.

"I didn't mean to be. But I'd think myself one if I slunk out of a thing like this without a word to anyone."

"I don't see what business it is of ours."

"The man may have a wife and kids. They must be half-mad to know what's become of him."

"We can't help that. Besides --"

Evan stopped. Jan was not putting in his word at all, but was stolidly listening from his perch.

"Besides what, Devereux?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Of course we shall get into a row," Chips admitted, cruelly. "But I shouldn't call it a very rotten one, myself. It would be far rottener to try to avoid one now, and it might get us into a far worse row."

Evan snorted an incoherent disclaimer. The consequences, he implied, were the last thing he was thinking about, as far as his own skin went. He was ready to stand the racket, though he had been against the beastly haunted house from the start, and it was rather hard luck on him. But it really did seem hard luck on all their people if the three of them had to give evidence at the inquest and the whole thing got into the papers.

Chips felt that he would rather enjoy that part, though he did not say so, and Jan still preserved his Delphic silence.

"Besides," added Evan, returning suddenly to his original point, "I'm blowed if I could swear I'd ever seen the body myself."

"You wouldn't," Jan said sympathetically. "You didn't have a good enough look."

"Yet you saw enough to make you bolt," Chips offensively pointed out, opening all the dampers of Evan's rage.

"It wasn't what I saw, my good fool!" he cried. "You know as well as I do what it was like up there. That's the only reason I cleared out."

"Well, there you are!" said Jan, grinning aloft on his fence.

"Then you agree with Carpenter, do you, that it's our duty to report the whole thing and get a licking for our pains?"

Carpenter smiled satirically at the "licking." He knew of old that Evan's horror of the cane was on a par with the ordinary citizen's horror of gaol. And he could not help wanting Jan to know it. But Jan already did.

Once, in the very earliest days when the pretty boy and the stable brat were playing together for almost the first time, the boy had broken a window and begged the brat to admit to the crime instead. Jan would not have told this to Chips for worlds, and was sorry to have recalled so dim an incident out of the dead past. But there it was, unbidden, and here was the same inveterate horror, not so much of actual punishment as of being put in an unfavourable light. This was a trait of Evan's, distinctive and unpleasant, and both his companions were now reminded of it. But Jan's position was the harder. To have got in touch with Evan at last, to admire him as he always had and would, and yet to have that admiration promptly undermined by this display of a radical fault! Though he put it to himself more simply, this was Jan's chief problem, and it would have been bad enough without having to choose between Chips and Evan.

"I don't know about duty," he temporised, "but I don't believe we should be licked."

"Of course we shouldn't!" cried Chips. "But it wouldn't kill us if we were."

"You agree with him?" persisted Evan to Jan, in a threatening voice whose meaning was not lost on him. It meant out-of-touch again in no time, and for good.

"I don't know." Jan sighed. "I suppose we ought to say what we've seen. And it'll pay us to, if it's going to get out anyhow. But I do think it's hard on you, Devereux. We dragged you into it. You never wanted to come in. You said so over and over." Jan gloomed and glowered, then brightened up. "Look here! I votes us two tell Heriot what we've seen, Chips! Most likely he won't ask us if we were by ourselves. He's sure to think we were. If he does ask, we can say there was another chap, but we'd rather not mention his name because he was dead against the whole thing, and never saw all we did!"

Jan had unfolded his bright idea directly to Chips, and waited anxiously for his reply. He resented being placed like this between the old friend and the new, and having to side with one or the other, especially when he could not see that it mattered much which course they took -- they could not bring the dead man back to life. He supposed, on the whole, that Chips was right. Jan would have sided with Evan against any other fellow in the school; but it was the new friend who had been the true friend these two terms, and it was not in Jan's body to go against him now.

"If that's good enough for Devereux," said Chips dryly, "it's good enough for me. But I'm blowed if I could sleep till that poor chap's cut down."

Evan now became far from sure that it was good enough for him. In fact he declared nearly all the way back that he would own up with the others, that they must stand or fall together, even if he himself was more sinned against than sinning; or words to that effect. Chips, having gained his point, was content to look volumes of unspoken criticism. Jan felt heartily sick of the whole discussion. He was prepared to do what was necessary, to suffer what was inevitable, but he had talked plenty enough about it by now.

But Evan would not drop the subject until they were back in the town. The familiar street looked cynically sleepy and serene, and yet subtly altered to young eyes seared with a horror which would only emerge by degrees but was beginning to settle over them like a blight. By the time they reached Heriot's corner, two of them had already forgotten all about the consequences, while Evan blushed and stammered.

"Of course, if you found you really were able to keep my name out of it, I should be awfully thankful to you both, because I never should have put my nose into the beastly place alone. But if it's going to get you fellows into any hotter water I'll come forward like a shot."

"Noble fellow!" murmured Chips as the pair turned into their quad.

"You shut up!" Jan muttered back. "I've a jolly good mind not to open my own mouth either!"

But he did, and Evan's nobility, as it turned out, was not called on. Heriot knew that the two boys who came to him after dinner were always out together, and he was much too disturbed to ask if they had been alone as usual. He took that for granted when he reported it to the police and the Headmaster, who in turn took it for granted when he spoke to the pair of them in his study in School House. He was very stern, but not unkind. They had broken bounds, and richly deserved the flogging he would have given them if their terrible experience were not a punishment in itself. Chips was by this time utterly unstrung. Jan, who looked unmoved, was reminded that this was the second time he had escaped his deserts for a serious offence, and was grimly warned against a third. If they appreciated his mercy, the old man added, they would both hold their tongues about the whole affair.

Between themselves, the boys agreed to that, reluctant though Chips was to lock up the conversational capital of a school lifetime. Yet within a week the adventure was being talked about, despite the fact that coroner had been persuaded to call neither boy as a witness at the inquest. Jan asked Chips if he had told anybody.

"I've never said a word, my good Tiger!"

"Well, I haven't either."

"Then it must be Devereux."

"I thought you'd say that." But he kept his ears open in form, before Haigh came in, and actually overheard Evan boasting of the adventure. Jan, since nobody questioned him about it, concluded that Evan was acting on the principle of one good turn deserving another, and was leaving out every name but his own.

"Well?" asked Chips when next they met.

"Well, I'm afraid you're right. And I don't know what to think about it." Poor Jan hid his feelings as best he could.

"I won't say what I think," returned Chips.

And he never did.