With all these plates spinning, it was easy
to whip up any one of them, and the subject of spooks generally was
lighted upon again and again. “Margaret is on the high road to madness,” remarked Hugh on one of
these occasions, “for she has begun using planchette. If you use
planchette for six months, I am told, most careful doctors will
conscientiously certify you as insane. She’s got five months more
before she goes to Bedlam.”

“Does it work?” I asked. “Yes, it says most interesting things,” said Margaret. “It says things
that never entered my head. We’ll try it to-night.”

“Oh, not to-night,” said Hugh. “Let’s have an evening off.”

Margaret disregarded this. “It’s no use asking planchette questions,” she went on, “because there
is in your mind some sort of answer to them. If I ask whether it will
be fine to-morrow, for instance, it is probably I--though indeed I
don’t mean to push--who makes the pencil say ‘yes.’”

“And then it usually rains,” remarked Hugh. “Not always: don’t interrupt. The interesting thing is to let the
pencil write what it chooses. Very often it only makes loops and
curves--though they may mean something--and every now and then a word
comes, of the significance of which I have no idea whatever, so I
clearly couldn’t have suggested it. Yesterday evening, for instance,
it wrote ‘gardener’ over and over again. Now what did that mean? The
gardener here is a Methodist with a chin-beard. Could it have meant
him? Oh, it’s time to dress. Please don’t be late, my cook is so
sensitive about soup.”

We rose, and some connection of ideas about “gardener” linked itself up
in my mind. “By the way, what’s that cottage in the field by the foot-bridge?” I
asked. “Is that the gardener’s cottage?”

“It used to be,” said Hugh. “But the chin-beard doesn’t live there: in
fact nobody lives there. It’s empty. If I was owner here, I should put
the chin-beard into it, and take the rent off his wages. Some people
have no idea of economy. Why did you ask?”

I saw Margaret was looking at me rather attentively. “Curiosity,” I said. “Idle curiosity.”

“I don’t believe it was,” said she. “But it was,” I said. “It was idle curiosity to know whether the
house was inhabited. As I passed it, going down to the club-house, I
felt sure it was empty, but coming back I felt so sure that there was
someone there that I rapped at the door, and indeed walked round it.”

Hugh had preceded us upstairs, as she lingered a little. “And there was no one there?” she asked. “It’s odd: I had just the same
feeling as you about it.”

“That explains planchette writing ‘gardener’ over and over again,” said
I. “You had the gardener’s cottage on your mind.”

“How ingenious!” said Margaret. “Hurry up and dress.”

A gleam of strong moonlight between my drawn curtains when I went up
to bed that night led me to look out. My room faced the garden and
the fields which I had traversed that afternoon, and all was vividly
illuminated by the full moon. The thatched cottage with its white walls
close by the stream was very distinct, and once more, I suppose, the
reflection of the light on the glass of one of its windows made it
appear that the room was lit within. It struck me as odd that twice
that day this illusion should have been presented to me, but now a yet
odder thing happened. Even as I looked the light was extinguished. The morning did not at all bear out the fine promise of the clear
night, for when I woke the wind was squealing, and sheets of rain from
the south-west were dashed against my panes. Golf was wholly out of the
question, and, though the violence of the storm abated a little in the
afternoon, the rain dripped with a steady sullenness. But I wearied
of indoors, and, since the two others entirely refused to set foot
outside, I went forth mackintoshed to get a breath of air. By way of
an object in my tramp, I took the road to the links in preference to
the muddy short cut through the fields, with the intention of engaging
a couple of caddies for Hugh and myself next morning, and lingered
awhile over illustrated papers in the smoking-room. I must have read
for longer than I knew, for a sudden beam of sunset light suddenly
illuminated my page, and looking up, I saw that the rain had ceased,
and that evening was fast coming on. So instead of taking the long
detour by the road again, I set forth homewards by the path across
the fields. That gleam of sunset was the last of the day, and once
again, just as twenty-four hours ago, I crossed the foot-bridge in the
gloaming. Till that moment, as far as I was aware, I had not thought
at all about the cottage there, but now in a flash the light I had
seen there last night, suddenly extinguished, recalled itself to my
mind, and at the same moment I felt that invincible conviction that
the cottage was tenanted. Simultaneously in these swift processes of
thought I looked towards it, and saw standing by the door the figure of
a man. In the dusk I could distinguish nothing of his face, if indeed
it was turned to me, and only got the impression of a tallish fellow,
thickly built. He opened the door, from which there came a dim light as
of a lamp, entered, and shut it after him. So then my conviction was right. Yet I had been distinctly told that
the cottage was empty: who, then, was he that entered as if returning
home? Once more, this time with a certain qualm of fear, I rapped on
the door, intending to put some trivial question; and rapped again,
this time more drastically, so that there could be no question that my
summons was unheard. But still I got no reply, and finally I tried the
handle of the door. It was locked. Then, with difficulty mastering an
increasing terror, I made the circuit of the cottage, peering into each
unshuttered window. All was dark within, though but two minutes ago I
had seen the gleam of light escape from the opened door. Just because some chain of conjecture was beginning to form itself in
my mind, I made no allusion to this odd adventure, and after dinner
Margaret, amid protests from Hugh, got out the planchette which had
persisted in writing “gardener.” My surmise was, of course, utterly
fantastic, but I wanted to convey no suggestion of any sort to
Margaret.... For a long time the pencil skated over her paper making
loops and curves and peaks like a temperature chart, and she had begun
to yawn and weary over her experiment before any coherent word emerged. And then, in the oddest way, her head nodded forward and she seemed to
have fallen asleep. Hugh looked up from his book and spoke in a whisper to me. “She fell asleep the other night over it,” he said. Margaret’s eyes were closed, and she breathed the long, quiet breaths
of slumber, and then her hand began to move with a curious firmness. Right across the big sheet of paper went a level line of writing, and
at the end her hand stopped with a jerk, and she woke. She looked at the paper. “Hullo,” she said.