Whether it was the remembrance of this rather grim spectacle as I had
seen it that afternoon, or whether Harry’s story had caused some
trouble in my brain, or whether it was merely that the keen bracing air
of this place, to one who had just come from the sleepy languor of the
Norfolk Broads, kept me sleepless, I do not know; but, anyhow, the
moment I put out my light that night and got into bed, I felt that all
the footlights and gas-jets in the internal theatre of my mind sprang
into flame, and that I was very vividly and alertly awake. It was in
vain that I counted a hundred forwards and a hundred backwards, that I
pictured to myself a flock of visionary sheep coming singly through a
gap in an imaginary hedge, and tried to number their monotonous and
uniform countenances, that I played noughts and crosses with myself,
that I marked out scores of double lawn-tennis courts,--for with each
repetition of these supposedly soporific exercises I only became more
intensely wakeful. It was not in remote hope of sleep that I continued
to repeat these weary performances long after their inefficacy was
proved to the hilt, but because I was strangely unwilling in this
timeless hour of the night to think about those protruding relics of
humanity; also I quite distinctly did not desire to think about that
subject with regard to which I had, a few hours ago, promised Harry that
I would not make it the subject of reflection. For these reasons I
continued during the black hours to practise these narcotic exercises of
the mind, knowing well that if I paused on the tedious treadmill my
thoughts, like some released spring, would fly back to rather gruesome
subjects. I kept my mind, in fact, talking loud to itself, so that it
should not hear what other voices were saying. Then by degrees these absurd mental occupations became impossible; my
mind simply refused to occupy itself with them any longer; and next
moment I was thinking intently and eagerly, not about the bones
protruding from the gnawed section of sand-cliff, but about the subject
I had said I would not dwell upon. And like a flash it came upon me why
Harry had bidden me not think about it. Surely in order that I should
not come to the same conclusion as he had come to. Now the whole question of “haunt”--haunted spots, haunted houses, and so
forth--has always seemed to me to be utterly unsolved, and to be neither
proved nor disproved to a satisfactory degree. From the earliest times,
certainly from the earliest known Egyptian records, there has been a
belief that the scene of a crime is often revisited, sometimes by the
spirit of him who has committed it--seeking rest, we must suppose, and
finding none; sometimes, and more inexplicably, by the spirit of his
victim, crying perhaps, like the blood of Abel, for vengeance. And
though the stories of these village gossips in the alehouse about
noiseless visions and invisible noises were all as yet unsifted and
unreliable, yet I could not help wondering if they (such as they were)
pointed to something authentic and to be classed under this head of
appearances. But more striking than the yarns of the gaffers seemed to
me the questions of the lodge-keeper’s children. How should children
have imagined the figure of a child that would not speak to them or play
with them? Perhaps it was a real child, a sulky child. Yes--perhaps. But
perhaps not. Then after this preliminary skirmish I found myself
settling down to the question that I had said I would not think about;
in other words, the possible origin of these phenomena interested me
more than the phenomena themselves. For what exactly had Guy
Elphinstone, that savage driver, done? Had or had not the death of the
child been entirely an accident, a thing (given he drove a motor at all)
outside his own control? Or had he, irritated beyond endurance at the
checks and delays of the day, not pulled up when it was just possible he
might have, but had run over the child as he would have run over a
rabbit or a hen, or even his own dog? And what, in any case, poor
wretched brute, must have been his thoughts in that terrible instant
that intervened between the child’s death and his own, when a moment
later he smashed into the closed gates of his own lodge? Was remorse
his--bitter, despairing contrition? That could hardly have been so; or
else surely, knowing only for certain that he had knocked a child down,
he would have stopped; he would have done his best, whatever that might
be, to repair the irreparable harm. But he had not stopped: he had gone
on, it seemed, at full speed, for on the collision the car had been
smashed into matchwood and steel shavings. Again, with double force, had
this dreadful thing been a complete accident, he would have stopped. So
then--most terrible question of all--had he, after making murder, rushed
on to what proved to be his own death, filled with some hellish glee at
what he had done? Indeed, as in the churchyard on the cliff, bones of
the buried stuck starkly out into the night. *       *       *       *       *

The pale tired light of earliest morning had turned the window-blinds
into glimmering squares before I slept; and when I woke, the servant who
called me was already rattling them briskly up on their rollers, and
letting the calm serenity of the August day stream into the room. Through the open windows poured in sunlight and sea-wind, the scent of
flowers and the song of birds; and each and all were wonderfully
reassuring, banishing the hooded forms that had haunted the night, and I
thought of the disquietude of the dark hours as a traveller may think of
the billows and tempests of the ocean over which he has safely
journeyed, unable, now that they belong to the limbo of the past, to
recall his qualms and tossings with any vivid uneasiness. Not without a
feeling of relief, too, did I dwell on the knowledge that I was
definitely not going to visit this equivocal spot. Our drive to-day, as
Harry had said, would not take us within thirty miles of it, and
to-morrow I but went to the station and away. Though a thorough-paced
seeker after truth might, no doubt, have regretted that the laws of time
and space did not permit him to visit Bircham after the sinister dark
had fallen, and test whether for him there was visible or audible truth
in the tales of the village gossips, I was conscious of no such regret. Bircham and its fables had given me a very bad night, and I was
perfectly aware that I did not in the least want to go near it, though
yesterday I had quite truthfully said I should like to do so. In this
brightness, too, of sun and sea-wind I felt none of the _malaise_ at my
waking moments which a sleepless night usually gives me; I felt
particularly well, particularly pleased to be alive, and also, as I have
said, particularly content not to be going to Bircham. I was quite
satisfied to leave my curiosity unsatisfied.