This
latter, except for a tenancy of rather less than three weeks, now four
years ago, has stood unoccupied since the summer of 1896, and though it
could be taken at a rent almost comically small, it is highly improbable
that either of its last tenants, even if times were very bad, would
think of passing a night in it again. For myself--I was one of the
tenants--I would far prefer living in a workhouse to inhabiting those
low-pitched oak-panelled rooms, and I would sooner look from my garret
windows on to the squalor and grime of Whitechapel than from the
diamond-shaped and leaded panes of the Manor of Trevor Major on to the
boskage of its cool thickets, and the glimmering of its clear
chalk-streams where the quick trout glance among the waving water-weeds
and over the chalk and gravel of its sliding rapids. It was the news of these trout that led Jack Singleton and myself to
take the house for the month between mid-May and mid-June, but as I have
already mentioned a short three weeks was all the time we passed there,
and we had more than a week of our tenancy yet unexpired when we left
the place, though on the very last afternoon we enjoyed the finest
dry-fly fishing that has ever fallen to my lot. Singleton had originally
seen the advertisement of the house in a Sussex paper, with the
statement that there was good dry-fly fishing belonging to it, but it
was with but faint hopes of the reality of the dry-fly fishing that we
went down to look at the place, since we had before this so often
inspected depopulated ditches which were offered to the unwary under
high-sounding titles. Yet after a half-hour’s stroll by the stream, we
went straight back to the agent, and before nightfall had taken it for a
month with option of renewal. *       *       *       *       *

We arrived accordingly from town at about five o’clock on a cloudless
afternoon in May, and through the mists of horror that now stand between
me and the remembrance of what occurred later, I cannot forget the
exquisite loveliness of the impression then conveyed. The garden, it is
true, appeared to have been for years untended; weeds half-choked the
gravel paths, and the flower-beds were a congestion of mingled wild and
cultivated vegetations. It was set in a wall of mellowed brick, in which
snap-dragon and stone-crop had found an anchorage to their liking, and
beyond that there stood sentinel a ring of ancient pines in which the
breeze made music as of a distant sea. Outside that the ground sloped
slightly downwards in a bank covered with a jungle of wild-rose to the
stream that ran round three sides of the garden, and then followed a
meandering course through the two big fields which lay towards the
village. Over all this we had fishing-rights; above, the same rights
extended for another quarter of a mile to the arched bridge, over which
there crossed the road which led to the house. In this field above the
house on the fourth side, where the ground had been embanked to carry
the road, stood a brick-kiln in a ruinous state. A shallow pit, long
overgrown with tall grasses and wild field-flowers, showed where the
clay had been digged. The house itself was long and narrow; entering, you passed direct into a
square panelled hall, on the left of which was the dining-room which
communicated with the passage leading to the kitchen and offices. On the
right of the hall were two excellent sitting-rooms looking out, the one
on to the gravel in front of the house, the other on to the garden. From
the first of these you could see, through the gap in the pines by which
the road approached the house, the brick-kiln of which I have already
spoken. An oak staircase went up from the hall, and round it ran a
gallery on to which the three principal bedrooms opened. These were
commensurate with the dining-room and the two sitting-rooms below. From
this gallery there led a long narrow passage shut off from the rest of
the house by a red-baize door, which led to a couple more guestrooms and
the servant’s quarters. Jack Singleton and I share the same flat in town, and we had sent down
in the morning Franklyn and his wife, two old and valued servants, to
get things ready at Trevor Major, and procure help from the village to
look after the house, and Mrs Franklyn with her stout comfortable face
all wreathed in smiles opened the door to us. She had had some previous
experience of the “comfortable quarters” which go with fishing, and had
come down prepared for the worst, but found it all of the best. The
kitchen-boiler was not furred; hot and cold water were laid on in the
most convenient fashion, and could be obtained from taps that neither
stuck nor leaked. Her husband, it appeared, had gone into the village to
buy a few necessaries, and she brought up tea for us, and then went
upstairs to the two rooms over the dining-room and bigger sitting-room,
which we had chosen for our bedrooms, to unpack. The doors of these were
exactly opposite one another to right and left of the gallery, and Jack
who chose the bedroom above the sitting-room had thus a smaller room,
above the second sitting-room, unoccupied, next his and opening out from
it. We had a couple of hours’ fishing before dinner, each of us catching
three or four brace of trout, and came back in the dusk to the house. Franklyn had returned from the village from his errand, reported that he
had got a woman to come in to do housework in the mornings, and
mentioned that our arrival had seemed to arouse a good deal of interest. The reason for this was obscure; he could only tell us that he was
questioned a dozen times as to whether we really intended to live in the
house, and his assurance that we did produced silence and a shaking of
heads. But the country-folk of Sussex are notable for their silence and
chronic attitude of disapproval, and we put this down to local
idiosyncrasy. The evening was exquisitely warm, and after dinner we pulled out a
couple of basket-chairs on to the gravel by the front door, and sat for
an hour or so, while the night deepened in throbs of gathering darkness. The moon was not risen and the ring of pines cut off much of the pale
starlight, so that when we went in, allured by the shining of the lamp
in the sitting-room, it was curiously dark for a clear night in May. And
at that moment of stepping from the darkness into the cheerfulness of
the lighted house, I had a sudden sensation, to which, during the next
fortnight, I became almost accustomed, of there being something unseen
and unheard and dreadful near me. In spite of the warmth, I felt myself
shiver, and concluded instantly that I had sat out-of-doors long enough,
and without mentioning it to Jack, followed him into the smaller
sitting-room in which we had scarcely yet set foot.