On
other nights when no such hospitality was on foot, a lone man like
myself found it pleasant to know that a call on the telephone to Mrs.
Amworth’s house not a hundred yards off, and an inquiry as to whether
I might come over after dinner for a game of piquet before bed-time,
would probably evoke a response of welcome. There she would be, with a
comrade-like eagerness for companionship, and there was a glass of port
and a cup of coffee and a cigarette and a game of piquet. She played
the piano, too, in a free and exuberant manner, and had a charming
voice and sang to her own accompaniment; and as the days grew long
and the light lingered late, we played our game in her garden, which
in the course of a few months she had turned from being a nursery for
slugs and snails into a glowing patch of luxuriant blossoming. She
was always cheery and jolly; she was interested in everything, and in
music, in gardening, in games of all sorts was a competent performer. Everybody (with one exception) liked her, everybody felt her to bring
with her the tonic of a sunny day. That one exception was Francis
Urcombe; he, though he confessed he did not like her, acknowledged that
he was vastly interested in her. This always seemed strange to me, for
pleasant and jovial as she was, I could see nothing in her that could
call forth conjecture or intrigued surmise, so healthy and unmysterious
a figure did she present. But of the genuineness of Urcombe’s interest
there could be no doubt; one could see him watching and scrutinising
her. In matter of age, she frankly volunteered the information that she
was forty-five; but her briskness, her activity, her unravaged skin,
her coal-black hair, made it difficult to believe that she was not
adopting an unusual device, and adding ten 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,
I was to give her, so we definitely bargained, a frank negative, and
in answer I could hear her jolly laugh and her wishes for a successful
evening of work. Sometimes, before her proposal arrived, Urcombe would
already have stepped across from his house opposite for a smoke and a
chat, and he, hearing who my intending visitor was, always urged me
to beg her to come. She and I should play our piquet, said he, and
he would look on, if we did not object, and learn something of the
game. But I doubt whether he paid much attention to it, for nothing
could be clearer than that, under that penthouse of forehead and thick
eyebrows, his attention was fixed not on the cards, but on one 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 a
man who has some deep problem in front of him. She, enthusiastically
keen about 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 the veil 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 coming round, she always 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, and laughingly wished me good
night. Urcombe, on this occasion, had been with me for some half-hour
before Mrs. Amworth’s appearance, and had been talking to me about
the mediæval beliefs concerning vampirism, one of those borderland
subjects which he declared had not been sufficiently studied before
it had been consigned by the medical profession to the dust-heap of
exploded superstitions. There he sat, grim and eager, tracing, with
that pellucid clearness which had made him in his Cambridge days so
admirable a lecturer, the history of those mysterious 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 with
nocturnal blood-feasts. When its host died it continued to dwell in the
corpse, which remained undecayed. By day it rested, by night it left
the grave and went on its awful errands. No European country in the
Middle Ages seemed to have escaped them; earlier yet, parallels were to
be found, in Roman and Greek and in Jewish history. “It’s a large order to set all that evidence aside as being moonshine,”
he said. “Hundreds of totally independent witnesses in many ages
have testified to the occurrence of these phenomena, and there’s no
explanation known 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 two answers I can make you. One is that there
were diseases known in the Middle Ages, such as the black death, which
were certainly existent then and which have become extinct since, but
for that reason we do not assert that such diseases never existed. Just as the black death visited England and decimated the population
of Norfolk, so here in this very district about three hundred years
ago there was certainly an outbreak of vampirism, and Maxley was the
centre of it. My second answer is even more convincing, for I tell you
that vampirism is by no means extinct now. An outbreak of it certainly
occurred in India a year or two ago.”

At that moment I heard my knocker plied in the cheerful and peremptory
manner in which Mrs. Amworth is accustomed to announce her arrival, and
I went to the door to open it. “Come in at once,” I said, “and save me from having 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 in having my blood curdled. Go on with your ghost-story, Mr. Urcombe. I adore ghost-stories.”

I saw that, as his habit was, he was intently observing her. “It wasn’t a ghost-story exactly,” said he. “I was only telling our
host how vampirism was not extinct yet. I was saying that there was an
outbreak of it in India only a few years ago.”

There was a more than perceptible pause, and I saw that, if Urcombe was
observing her, she on her side was observing him with fixed eye and
parted mouth. Then her jolly laugh invaded that rather tense silence. “Oh, what a shame!” she said. “You’re not going to curdle my blood
at all. Where did you pick up such a tale, Mr. Urcombe? I have lived
for years in India and never heard a rumour of such a thing. Some
story-teller in the bazaars must have invented it: they are famous at
that.”

I could see that Urcombe was on the point of saying something further,
but checked himself. “Ah! very likely that was it,” he said. But something had disturbed our usual peaceful sociability that night,
and something had damped Mrs. Amworth’s usual high spirits. She had no
gusto for her piquet, and left after a couple of games.