A "Mixed Double" of young people were contesting a game of lawn
tennis at the Rectory garden party; for the past five-and-twenty
years at least mixed doubles of young people had done exactly the
same thing on exactly the same spot at about the same time of year.
The young people changed and made way for others in the course of
time, but very little else seemed to alter. The present players
were sufficiently conscious of the social nature of the occasion to
be concerned about their clothes and appearance, and sufficiently
sport-loving to be keen on the game. Both their efforts and their
appearance came under the fourfold scrutiny of a quartet of ladies
sitting as official spectators on a bench immediately commanding the
court. It was one of the accepted conditions of the Rectory garden
party that four ladies, who usually knew very little about tennis
and a great deal about the players, should sit at that particular
spot and watch the game. It had also come to be almost a tradition
that two ladies should be amiable, and that the other two should be
Mrs. Dole and Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.
"What a singularly unbecoming way Eva Jonelet has taken to doing her
hair in," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard; "it's ugly hair at the best of
times, but she needn't make it look ridiculous as well. Some one
ought to tell her."
Eva Jonelet's hair might have escaped Mrs. Hatch-Mallard's
condemnation if she could have forgotten the more glaring fact that
Eva was Mrs. Dole's favourite niece. It would, perhaps, have been a
more comfortable arrangement if Mrs. Hatch-Mallard and Mrs. Dole
could have been asked to the Rectory on separate occasions, but
there was only one garden party in the course of the year, and
neither lady could have been omitted from the list of invitations
without hopelessly wrecking the social peace of the parish.
"How pretty the yew trees look at this time of year," interposed a
lady with a soft, silvery voice that suggested a chinchilla muff
painted by Whistler.
"What do you mean by this time of year?" demanded Mrs. Hatch-
Mallard. "Yew trees look beautiful at all times of the year. That
is their great charm."
"Yew trees never look anything but hideous under any circumstances
or at any time of year," said Mrs. Dole, with the slow, emphatic
relish of one who contradicts for the pleasure of the thing. "They
are only fit for graveyards and cemeteries."
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard gave a sardonic snort, which, being translated,
meant that there were some people who were better fitted for
cemeteries than for garden parties.
"What is the score, please?" asked the lady with the chinchilla
voice.
The desired information was given her by a young gentleman in
spotless white flannels, whose general toilet effect suggested
solicitude rather than anxiety.
"What an odious young cub Bertie Dykson has become!" pronounced Mrs.
Dole, remembering suddenly that Bertie was a favourite with Mrs.
Hatch-Mallard. "The young men of to-day are not what they used to
be twenty years ago."
"Of course not," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard; "twenty years ago Bertie
Dykson was just two years old, and you must expect some difference
in appearance and manner and conversation between those two
periods."
"Do you know," said Mrs. Dole, confidentially, "I shouldn't be
surprised if that was intended to be clever."
"Have you any one interesting coming to stay with you, Mrs.
Norbury?" asked the chinchilla voice, hastily; "you generally have a
house party at this time of year."
"I've got a most interesting woman coming," said Mrs. Norbury, who
had been mutely struggling for some chance to turn the conversation
into a safe channel; "an old acquaintance of mine, Ada Bleek--"
"What an ugly name," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.
"She's descended from the de la Bliques, an old Huguenot family of
Touraine, you know."
"There weren't any Huguenots in Touraine," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard,
who thought she might safely dispute any fact that was three hundred
years old.
"Well, anyhow, she's coming to stay with me," continued Mrs.
Norbury, bringing her story quickly down to the present day, "she
arrives this evening, and she's highly clairvoyante, a seventh
daughter of a seventh daughter, you now, and all that sort of
thing."
"How very interesting," said the chinchilla voice; "Exwood is just
the right place for her to come to, isn't it? There are supposed to
be several ghosts there."
"That is why she was so anxious to come," said Mrs. Norbury; "she
put off another engagement in order to accept my invitation. She's
had visions and dreams, and all those sort of things, that have come
true in a most marvellous manner, but she's never actually seen a
ghost, and she's longing to have that experience. She belongs to
that Research Society, you know."
"I expect she'll see the unhappy Lady Cullumpton, the most famous of
all the Exwood ghosts," said Mrs. Dole; "my ancestor, you know, Sir
Gervase Cullumpton, murdered his young bride in a fit of jealousy
while they were on a visit to Exwood. He strangled her in the
stables with a stirrup leather, just after they had come in from
riding, and she is seen sometimes at dusk going about the lawns and
the stable yard, in a long green habit, moaning and trying to get
the thong from round her throat. I shall be most interested to hear
if your friend sees--"
"I don't know why she should be expected to see a trashy,
traditional apparition like the so-called Cullumpton ghost, that is
only vouched for by housemaids and tipsy stable-boys, when my uncle,
who was the owner of Exwood, committed suicide there under the most
tragical circumstances, and most certainly haunts the place."
"Mrs. Hatch-Mallard has evidently never read Popple's County
History," said Mrs. Dole icily, "or she would know that the
Cullumpton ghost has a wealth of evidence behind it--"
"Oh, Popple!" exclaimed Mrs. Hatch-Mallard scornfully; "any rubbishy
old story is good enough for him. Popple, indeed! Now my uncle's
ghost was seen by a Rural Dean, who was also a Justice of the Peace.
I should think that would be good enough testimony for any one.
Mrs. Norbury, I shall take it as a deliberate personal affront if
your clairvoyante friend sees any other ghost except that of my
uncle."
"I daresay she won't see anything at all; she never has yet, you
know," said Mrs. Norbury hopefully.
"It was a most unfortunate topic for me to have broached," she
lamented afterwards to the owner of the chinchilla voice; "Exwood
belongs to Mrs. Hatch-Mallard, and we've only got it on a short
lease. A nephew of hers has been wanting to live there for some
time, and if we offend her in any way she'll refuse to renew the
lease. I sometimes think these garden-parties are a mistake."
The Norburys played bridge for the next three nights till nearly one
o'clock; they did not care for the game, but it reduced the time at
their guest's disposal for undesirable ghostly visitations.
"Miss Bleek is not likely to be in a frame of mind to see ghosts,"
said Hugo Norbury, "if she goes to bed with her brain awhirl with
royal spades and no trumps and grand slams."
"I've talked to her for hours about Mrs. Hatch-Mallard's uncle,"
said his wife, "and pointed out the exact spot where he killed
himself, and invented all sorts of impressive details, and I've
found an old portrait of Lord John Russell and put it in her room,
and told her that it's supposed to be a picture of the uncle in
middle age. If Ada does see a ghost at all it certainly ought to be
old Hatch-Mallard's. At any rate, we've done our best."
The precautions were in vain. On the third morning of her stay Ada
Bleek came down late to breakfast, her eyes looking very tired, but
ablaze with excitement, her hair done anyhow, and a large brown
volume hugged under her arm.
"At last I've seen something supernatural!" she exclaimed, and gave
Mrs. Norbury a fervent kiss, as though in gratitude for the
opportunity afforded her.
"A ghost!" cried Mrs. Norbury, "not really!"
"Really and unmistakably!"
"Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years ago?" asked
Mrs. Norbury hopefully.
"Nothing of the sort," said Ada; "it was a white hedgehog."
"A white hedgehog!" exclaimed both the Norburys, in tones of
disconcerted astonishment.
"A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes," said Ada; "I was
lying half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of
something sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I
sat up and looked round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil,
creeping thing, a sort of monstrous hedgehog, of a dirty white
colour, with black, loathsome claws that clicked and scraped along
the floor, and narrow, yellow eyes of indescribable evil. It
slithered along for a yard or two, always looking at me with its
cruel, hideous eyes, then, when it reached the second window, which
was open it clambered up the sill and vanished. I got up at once
and went to the window; there wasn't a sign of it anywhere. Of
course, I knew it must be something from another world, but it was
not till I turned up Popple's chapter on local traditions that I
realised what I had seen."
She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read: "'Nicholas
Herison, an old miser, was hung at Batchford in 1763 for the murder
of a farm lad who had accidentally discovered his secret hoard. His
ghost is supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes
as a white owl, sometimes as a huge white hedgehog."
"I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you
THINK you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake," said Mrs.
Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the
truth.
Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.
"This must be hushed up," said Mrs. Norbury quickly; "the servants--
"
"Hushed up!" exclaimed Ada, indignantly; "I'm writing a long report
on it for the Research Society."
It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of
brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his
life.
"It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek," he said, "but it would be a
shame to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of
ours; stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home
from Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the
room with a string on it, run one end of the string through the
window; then we pull if from below and it comes scraping along the
floor, just as you've described, and finally jerks out of the
window. Taken in heaps of people; they all read up Popple and think
it's old Harry Nicholson's ghost; we always stop them from writing
to the papers about it, though. That would be carrying matters too
far."
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard renewed the lease in due course, but Ada Bleek
has never renewed her friendship.
_________
-THE END-
[Hector Hugh Munro] Saki's short story: The Hedgehog
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