The Purple Envelope

On the morning of his twenty-first birthday Howard shaved himself with particular care. He scraped his fat cheeks till they shone and smarted, he pursued an imaginary beard far down his neck, and then, taking hold of his small yellow moustache, he combed it and waxed it and pulled it till it was as straight as a ruler and as sharp as a needle.

“After all, I don’t look such an ass,” he thought. For he had a very proper wish to be handsome and terrible and manlike, now that he was a man. It was a cold morning, and the little shaving-glass became coated with his breath.

The inexorable, he read. Someone had traced those words upon the glass, and now they started out in clearness against the misty background. “Prosy beast!” thought Howard, recognizing the finger of some under-housemaid.

He rubbed the glass clean, admired himself again, and then went to the open window to look at the view, which had always seemed to him the most beautiful in the world.

There was no garden on this side. The house looked straight into meadows, and beyond the meadows woods began, running uninterruptedly towards the sea. Somewhere in those woods was the river, and Howard fancied he could just make out the great pool, shining through a gray tangle of leafless trees. But what he liked best were the rabbits, who were hopping in the meadows by dozens, and even strolling along the gravel path. “Oh, it is a shame, it is!” he murmured wrathfully. For his uncle would allow no wild thing to be killed—not a rabbit, no, nor a hare, nor a pheasant, partridge, rook, sparrow or butterfly. And Howard loved to take life, as all those do who are really in touch with nature.

He was a kind comfortable youth, singularly free from envy and uncharitableness. But he did wish that he was coming of age here not as a guest but as an owner. What a shooting-party he would have had! A shooting-party and a dance. Whereas his uncle had provided a house full of elderly relatives, church, and a meeting of the Selborne Society.

“A piece of paper for you, dear boy,” said his uncle as soon as he reached the dining-room.

The piece of paper was a cheque. It was adequate but not startling.

“And by your plate is a present.”

Howard ran to his plate and undid a large parcel, which contained nothing better than the complete works of M. Maeterlinck.

“I hope you’ll get to like the man,” said Mr Sholton. “As far as kindness can be taught, it is taught by him.”

“Thank you most awfully,” said Howard. “I’m fairly sure to get to like him no end.” He piled the volumes up like bricks, and felt that his moustache was already drooping. Then he received the other family presents—Watts’s Hope, Watts’s Love and Death, Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat, a sovereign-purse, a watch-chain, a tea-caddy, and In Tune with the Infinite by Mr Trine.

They all drew up to the food, but Mr Sholton had some more to say about Maeterlinck, and said it over a dish of cooling eggs.

“I particularly admire his conception of Justice. He believes that Justice dwells in each of us. When we do wrong it is because we are acting superficially, and contradicting our real self, who does the real deeds, and cannot err. And the inexorable—” He stopped suddenly and, much to Howard’s relief, began to help the eggs.

“Inexorable!” murmured some ladies, liking the word. And the conversation went on in that strain of dreamy kindly culture which is so pleasant for those who have got it in their blood or who have not got anything else. It was the butler who broke the spell.

“Left for Mr Howard, sir, on the attainment of his majority, with good wishes for your happy birthday, Mr Howard, sir.”

Howard gave a sharp cry of joy. The butler was carrying a gun.

“Who from?” asked Mr Sholton, frowning a little.

The gun had just been left, without any name, by a lady.

“Duck!” cried Howard, falling fiercely on his present and tearing it from its wrappings. “Take care!” screamed everyone, for he was sighting imaginary birds amongst the furniture. The works of Maeterlinck slipped one by one from the table onto the floor.

“What was the lady like?” asked Mr Sholton.

“I scarcely saw her,” said the butler in an offended voice. “She was very pressed. She said she did not care how soon she got back. Those were her words. She was not a young lady, but at the same time she was not exactly old.”

Howard gave a cry of astonishment. The gun was like no gun he had ever seen. Its bore, instead of being circular, was oval.

“I am sorry she would not come in,” said Mr Sholton, who was always courteous. “Which way did she go?”

“The way of the woods,” replied the butler, and retired.

“But what am I to do?” cried Howard plaintively. “I never saw such a gun. It wouldn’t take anything. No one makes oval cartridges I ever heard of. Here’s one, just one, come with it. But she should have sent a gross.”

“Come, Howie!” said his uncle gently. “I dare say your friend will be writing. And you know how degenerate I am; however many cartridges you had, they would be useless to you here.”

The other relatives exchanged glances. They deplored the growing brutality of the young man. They censured the ill-directed generosity of the middle-aged lady. They celebrated the wisdom, the unexpected wisdom, of old Mrs Sholton, who had at the last moment left the estate not to her grandson, but to her son. When Howard returned to the table he found

favour neither with his aunt, the antivivisectionist, nor with Mr and Mrs Bellingham, vegetarian cousins, nor with Miss Bellingham (Sister Rose Edith)—and with his uncle least favour of all. It was unwise of him to talk so persistently of shooting and hunting and other forms of murder. Nor should he have left his uncle’s present in a heap upon the floor. Mr Sholton was very thoughtful all the day, and had a walk with Mr Bellingham at the end of it.

“You really feel it my duty?” said Mr Bellingham, when the walk was over. “You put it that way?”

“I do,” replied Mr Sholton. “You care for power as little as myself. But the things I love you love also; and the things I do—or rather don’t do—I can trust you to omit them after me.”

“It’s hard luck on Howard,” said Mr Bellingham, who was upright and sympathetic, like most of the Sholton stock. “Naturally he counts on the place coming to him.”

“And so it ought, in the ordinary course of things. But did you ever know things take an ordinary course? Look!” He pointed to the beautiful country by which the house was surrounded on every side. “All that’s mine. Think of it Howard’s! Think of the vulgarity, the slaughter, the desecration of nature that would come after me. It’s more like Paradise than anything I’ve ever known—and because he’s my nephew is it to be made into Hell?”

Mr Bellingham could scarcely reply to this. “You are taking a most serious step,” he said at last.

“Nothing,” whispered Mr Sholton, “to the steps I have taken already.” He left his cousin abruptly and did not refer to the subject again.

As for Howard, he managed to idle through his visit. For a day or two he tried to be more spiritual, and made a list of the fresh words in Maeterlinck and looked them up in the dictionary. But he was dreadfully bored; he might not do anything worth doing, he had had no presents worth having.

No more cartridges had come for the silly gun, and there had been no letter.

His uncle was not very pleasant, and always busy with papers, and as for his aunts they would catch him and make him stand for hours in the shrubbery, on the chance of seeing a long-tailed tit. They caught him one cold afternoon, and just as the tit came near he remembered something and exclaimed “The inexorable! That was the word!” and the tit was frightened and flew away.

“The inexorable!” Next morning, when he shaved, he breathed on the glass again to see if anything would happen. It was a little amusement for him. Nor was he disappointed. Ring my own life now stood out against the misty background.

“She is mad, that slavey,” he meditated. “‘The inexorable; ring my own life’—whatever does she want to smear that on the glass for?” All day he had so little to think about that he thought about the writing. And that night he breathed on the glass before he went to bed. Ring my own life had disappeared. He wiped the glass clean, opened the bedroom window according to his custom, and slept the sleep at all events of the healthy.

Habits—so he had recently been told in church—are easily formed when we are young. And it was almost without thinking that he went straight to the shaving-glass as soon as he got up. It was fun to cloud the surface over, and suddenly to blot out the reflection of the room. The morning was very cold and he only had to open his mouth to steam like a boiling kettle.

“Rot!” he exclaimed stupidly.

One word, Humanitarian, was written across the glass.

Howard struck himself sharply on the chest. Then he went to the window, and there was the same tangible, commonplace world—the pearl-gray sky, the rabbits hopping, the sun coming through mists out of the sea.

When he felt quite awake he came back and breathed on the glass again.

There was the word, as plain as any rabbit, with clean sharp outlines, Humanitarian.

Someone had come in and written it during the night.

He went to the door. As usual he had forgotten to lock it. Then he scuttled back to bed, for the housemaid was approaching with the hot water.

“Beastly cheek!” he murmured, wrathfully surveying the damsel as she moved about the room. He was loth to abandon first impressions, and took it as an extra proof of the housemaid’s guilt that she could gaze without flinching on the fading word.

For the sake of something to say, he spoke of the matter at breakfast.

“No servant of mine would do such a thing,” said Mr Sholton, flushing,

“and for the matter of that no one in the house.”

“Well, they won’t get the chance again,” said Howard. “I’ll pretty well lock my door, I can tell you; it’s lucky I didn’t wake up, for I let out pretty hard when I’m frightened.”

“Do you indeed?” said his uncle coldly. “It’s my opinion, Howard, that you wrote these words yourself.”

“’Pon my honour I’m not having you on!” cried the young man.

“You must know by now that I trust you. My explanation is that you wrote those words in your sleep.”

“Me sleepwalking?” he exclaimed. It was as bad as being told that he snored. “I’m not that sort.”

“None the less it is my explanation.” Mr Sholton felt very sour and dogmatic that morning. The episode was distasteful to him, and he could not tell why.

“Me write humanitarian! I can’t even spell it.”

“So I have often observed,” was the reply. Howard went a little redder than usual.

The suave voice of Mrs Bellingham now intervened. “It is a probable explanation,” she said, “but we must never forget the possibility of other agencies. Would you tell me, Howard, exactly the words you have found on your shaving-glass, from time to time?” As she spoke she took out a little green notebook.

“My dear, you could scarcely write to them yet,” said her husband.

“Their time is extraordinarily valuable.”

“I am only collecting data,” said Mrs Bellingham. “Data for the Psychical Research Society,” she explained for Howard’s benefit.

“The inexorable ring my own life humanitarian,” he dictated, feeling an awful fool. The phrase was copied into Mrs Bellingham’s book.

“Thank you, Howard,” said she, smiling brightly. “We live in a world of mystery, and one has no right to neglect a possible clue.”

That night Howard locked his door. He did not hold with people messing round when he was asleep.

According to agreement, he did not breathe on the shaving-glass when he woke up. He carried it carefully into the breakfast-room to perform the operation in public. The ladies gathered round him; the men were also interested, but restrained themselves till they saw which way the thing would turn.

Principles the pur

Mrs Bellingham gave a piercing scream, and the whole room was in an uproar.

“I locked my door,” shouted Howard. “I tell you I locked my door.

‘Principles the pur’? What’s it mean? How’s it here? Who the devil’s been writing this time?”

“You yourself, my boy,” said Mr Sholton. “In your sleep.” He hated the shaving-glass more than ever.

Howard forgot himself. “Oh, drop that sleepwalking, I won’t stand it.”

“Oh Howie! Howie!” cried the aunts.

But Howard cherished his materialism. He would not have it questioned.

In the midst of those hysterical anaemic people he stood wrathful and solid, declaring that he slept when he slept, and that when he was awake, as now, he was very much awake indeed.

“The words are fading,” they yelled. “Howard! Breathe! Quick!”

“Oh, breathe yourself!” he retorted.

Mrs Bellingham breathed nervously. And for her also Principles the pur stood out upon the glass.

“We are on the verge of something great,” she cried. “Tonight he will return, and write again!”

“I’m sorry for him if he does,” said the young man. “I’m sorry for him if he does. If he’s being funny he’ll remember it.”

“We do not like bluster here,” said his uncle gently. “We are apt to consider it a sign of fear rather than of courage.”

“But of course I’m afraid,” he cried. “Who isn’t?”

There was a pause. Then Mr Bellingham said: “To speak for myself and my wife, we are rather approaching the thing in a scientific spirit. The Society for Psychical—”

“Spooks!” interrupted Howard. “I knew we’d come to spooks. And I’d rather it was they than I. Who says I’m a beastly somnambulist?”

“Breakfast,” said Mr Sholton. “Breakfast. Breakfast.”

All through the meal Mrs Bellingham kept the shaving-glass by her plate and breathed on it at intervals, much to her host’s annoyance. For Mr Sholton was a refined dreamy man, who liked spiritual things to be treated with reverence and grace. He did not believe in ghosts; there was something vulgar about them; they made too palpable a connection with the unseen.

No spirit would descend from the empyrean to smear messages on a shaving-glass—the shaving-glass of a brainless, squalid-souled youth.

“Howard!” she cried suddenly. ‘“Principles’ has a small p. There’s a full stop after it. There’s a capital T to ‘The’. After ‘pur’ comes a hyphen. Tell me: what punctuation was there the other times?”

“I don’t go in for stops,” said Howard. He was cross, and, like his uncle, he could not eat. These people made him feel ill. He didn’t care a hang about the “message”; what he wanted to know was who had come into his room. And it required all Mrs Bellingham’s tact and enthusiasm to remind

him of what he scarcely remembered. At last she was able to restore the inscriptions as follows: The inexorable… [ du] ring my own life, humanitarian principles. The pur-

“Here’s at all events some sense,” she told them. “It’s an odd way to split up ‘during’, but we have good authority for it.” She smiled at Mr Sholton, who had his own theory on the division of words. “And, if I’m right, next time we shall have the other syllable of ‘pur-’—’purport’ or ‘purpose’ most probably. A new sentence is beginning. We have only to read it off.”

As soon as Howard could escape, he got his new gun and took it to show the keeper, a jolly, idle man who dated from the bloody reign of old Mrs Sholton. The keeper had often seen the gun before; indeed Howard took it every morning. But they were both simple folk, who valued repetition, and on this occasion, as on others, the following conversation took place:

“If I may venture, sir, this is but a poor present. I never seed a noval gun.”

Howard (laughing immoderately): “A noval gun and a novel gun, eh?

D’ye see? Noval—novel.”

The keeper (holding his sides): “Not a hovel gun, sir; a hoval gun; made like a No.”

This tangle had a great fascination for them. They entered again and again, till they were weak with mirth. Mr Sholton overheard them, and raised his hands to heaven. But for all that Howard was tranquil and confident when he returned to the house.

Mrs Bellingham greeted him mysteriously. “Howard, I am so sorry; we ought to stop the experiment; it worries Robert” (Mr Sholton). “He doesn’t like it; he says it is a trap.”

“Trap away!” said Howard. “I don’t mind.”

“It’s a pity Robert feels this; for Sister Rose Edith has made a most brilliant and practical suggestion.”

“It’s nothing to do with my uncle. It’s my show, and I am going through with it.”

The ladies were delighted. They had done their duty by their host, and now Sister Rose Edith could speak.

“Let us obscure the glass with candle smoke,” said she, “and if it should be Howard who touches it the traces will be found on his finger when he wakes.”

So that evening Howard and the three Bellinghams met stealthily on the landing, and the shaving-glass was smoked over a flat candlestick. They felt they were being a little absurd, and had a sudden reaction. Mrs Bellingham giggled, and as for the Sister she turned quite skittish, and made a thumbmark in the top left-hand comer “pour encourager les autres”.

Gravity returned to Howard when he entered his bedroom. He locked the door, placed the shaving-glass on the dressing-table as usual, and began his survey.

There was not anything remarkable about the room, nor had there ever been. It was just a square room, rather lofty, with a sash window and a door.

To the right, in a similar but rather larger room, slept his uncle. To the left was the apartment of the Bellinghams. Overhead reposed the servants.

Underneath was the private sitting-room of the aunts. Behind him ran the broad landing, from one end of the house to the other, and in front, out through the window, were the meadows, the woods and the sea. Thus, on every side, he was bounded by the familiar.

He flung up the window. It was snowing a little, and he could not see much. But he saw, for the first time, that close under the sill there ran a broad stringcourse. A man—if he was fool enough, or if he was a boy—

might possibly swarm up the drainpipe to the right, and then do a horizontal bar along the stringcourse till he reached Howard’s room.

“He shall have the chance,” thought Howard, and left the window open.

Then he turned the bed, so that he might sleep facing the light. He provided

himself with a candle, matches and some heavy volumes of Maeterlinck.

And at the last moment he went to the cupboard and got out the gun. This was not at all right of him, and very dangerous besides. As he slipped in the solitary cartridge he said to himself, “I was only told never to have it loaded in the grounds; nothing was ever said about the house.” To a mind such as his the argument seemed quite sound. “Self-defence too,” he murmured, as he got into bed and laid the gun beside him.

He slept like a truthful man, and never turned once all night. It was rather cold when he woke up, and no wonder, for there had been a good deal of snow, and some of the flakes had sailed into the room. What else had sailed in he did not discover. But more words had been traced upon the glass—

traced by a finger. He looked at his own fingers. They were clean.

We are now coming to those scenes which are easier to imagine than to describe, and the scene at the breakfast table was one of them. Here was the blackened glass; here was the mark of Sister Rose Edith’s thumb, and here below it had been written other words.

-ple envelope

And what had been written last time? principles. The pur- Mrs Bellingham shrieked wildly: “The purple envelope! The purple envelope! I said so. Our new sentence is beginning! Howard is chosen; the message is for him. Tonight—tonight—”

“Tonight,” sang out Howard, “the glass shall be under my pillow.” For he could be as brave as any animal.

“Dare you?” they cried. “You must not thwart the spirit; you must not anger it. We are on the edge of a secret. Leave the glass where it was before.”

“Under my pillow, thank you, and the spirit shall touch me first!”

There was a gust of snow against the window, and one of the aunts screamed. “Oh, don’t blaspheme,” she sobbed. “Who knows what’s around

us? Something awful—something awful may come in any minute. Where’s Robert? Why’s he so late? Why’s it so dark? Oh, leave the thing alone!”

Mrs Bellingham kissed the old lady, who was not much of a personage, and comforted her. “It’s research, dearest. Nothing was ever found without courage, and Howard is brave. Don’t you want to hear this message to the end?”

The aunt continued to cry.

“It’s our duty to inquire—to keep our minds open for Truth. We mustn’t stagnate. Robert tells you that. Look! Here he comes; as well as ever.” And as their host entered the room they greeted him with one great cry of:

“The Purple Envelope!”

Mr Sholton raised his hands to his ears, and then fell forward, without a word, upon the carpet.

They were silent at last. The thing was beginning to go too far.

Mr Sholton was carried back to his bed. In about half an hour he sent down a message that he was much better—practically well—and that he would like to see Howard alone.

He looked anything but practically well. He was still lying down, with the clothes drawn up to his chin, and his face was that of a man who has known unspeakable terror.

“Shut the door, Howie!” he chattered. “Please shut the door at once!”

The bedroom was horribly airless. Both the windows were tightly closed, and over the register of the grate there had recently been pasted a thick sheet of brown paper.

“Yes, the draughts!” said Mr Sholton, following his nephew’s glance. “I put this collapse down to the draughts.”

Howard would have put it down to sleeping in such an atmosphere. Why, even the mouseholes in the wainscot had been stopped with fresh plaster, and plastering had begun round the frames of the windows!

“Take a comfortable chair, dear boy,” he continued. He was anxious to be friends with Howard. They had drifted apart ever since the arrival of that fatal gun.

“Oh, all right!” said Howard awkwardly. As his uncle delayed to speak he took a good stare at the furniture and pictures. “These must be worth pots,” he observed at last.

Mr Sholton sighed. If Howard had been in a book he might have admired him as a smart little berserk hero. Unfortunately he was alive, and scarcely the person from whom to demand intelligence, sympathy or forgiveness.

And Mr Sholton was demanding all three.

“Howard,” he began, “you know that I have always tried to spread, during my own life, humanitarian principles.” He interrupted himself with a strange cry of alarm. When he spoke again it was to say: “Reach me that drawer of papers. I want to put myself in your hands without comment.”

Apparently the drawer belonged to a cabinet, though no cabinet was visible in the room. Mr Sholton had it placed by him, drew his left hand from under the bedclothes, and began to rummage for what he wanted.

Howard stared at the pictures again, and in an evil moment his eye fell on a tempera panel which hung in the centre of the wall. It had been painted in Umbria, by some scholar of Perugino, and seemed scarcely a thing of paint at all—rather some exhalation of green and tender blue, full of sweetest unreality. The Virgin—no woman, neither was she divine—knelt in aimless adoration to the Child, and on either side of her stood beautiful bloodless saints, who tottered piously, like the aspens which shadowed them. There are not many men who have such a picture in their bedroom, and each morning and evening, when Mr Sholton looked at it, he felt that his life had not entirely failed.

“Well, she’s not my idea of a tootsy!” said Howard, and clenched his criticism by a coarse and vapid jest. His uncle did not laugh. But he laughed

himself, for he had put the thing rather well. After a pause, he tried the jest a second time. It sounded better than ever. This time Mr Sholton spoke.

“I can’t find what I want, Howard. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, I’ll grope. What is it?” The drawer was full of papers and packets, of all sizes and colours.

“What I want isn’t here.” And Mr Sholton laid his hand over the drawer.

“What was it you wanted?”

“Please do not trouble to look, or to stop here longer. I dare say you are anxious to pay your daily visit to the keeper.”

“But hadn’t you something to lay before me?” His uncle’s manner had changed, and he could not think why.

“Nothing worth your notice,” said Mr Sholton, lying most obviously.

Howard’s sleeve chanced to brush his hand. He could not keep back a cry of disgust.

“So long! I say”—he had stopped at the door—“did you know we smoked that glass last night, and this morning my fingers were clean?

Clears me, doesn’t it?”

“Do I suppose you couldn’t wash your hands?” shouted Mr Sholton, in a sudden fit of terror and rage. “Couldn’t you wash your hands?”

Howard’s honesty was irregular, but well defined. He would sooner have killed himself than lied in this particular way. He turned with a good deal of dignity, and left the room.

He brooded over the trouble all day. Even to him it had become mysterious. Who had written those words? Why had his uncle fainted?

What was hidden in that drawer? And his aunt—the one who was almost dotty—why would she continually cry? For a time he even forgot to think about his gun.

Night came at last—the night which was to solve something. The excitement began early: scarcely had he locked his door to undress when there was a tap upon it. A note from his uncle.

“Apologies, I hope,” thought Howard. He was right.

“My dear boy: I am older than you are, and till last week I was your guardian. You must believe, therefore, that I have my reasons when I ask you to do something strange. Tonight, when you go to bed, shut your window, and then smash that shaving-glass to pieces. You shall have a new one, and much more besides, if you will obey me. You are not a sleepwalker; I ought never to have said such a thing; I ask you to forgive me. I have never taken this affair as a joke. It is either nothing, or else it is incalculably grave. Once or twice in our lives we touch the corner of the unknown. Some people strive to touch it; they think it will be pleasant or exciting; like the Bellinghams. Howard, don’t think that. Shut the window.

Break the glass into little pieces.”

Most men would have thought a little after such a letter. Howard was driven into action. He flung the window up to the top, hoping that his uncle would hear the rattle of it.

The snow came pouring in, and there was a bitter wind from the east. His teeth chattered as he retired, with his strange equipment—the loaded gun, which he laid beside him, and the shaving-glass, which he placed underneath his pillow. The candle blew out before he was quite settled, and at once his impudence deserted him. Had he remembered the matches? Had he put a good thick book on the chair? The shaving-glass slipped out, and it was as if a sheet of ice fell upon his neck. Soon his feet got cold, and as he chafed them together the bedclothes seemed heavier. It struck him that the snow must be drifting this way, right across the room. Though it was so dark, he could see it streaming towards him eternally, covering the floor, trimming the brass bedrail, soaking into the blankets. The flakes were small at first, and disappeared quickly; they only chilled his feet; but soon they began to form a white crust which stretched up to his knees. And they came larger—as large as peas, as large as blackberries. Every now and then he kicked upwards and sent some of the crust rustling onto the carpet. But still

the bedclothes grew heavier, for the flakes were as large as lumps of sugar, and he could feel the weight of each as it fell. His feet and knees were paralysed; he could move them no longer; he could scarcely stretch his hand out to the gun, which chilled him like an icicle. The chairs and the dressing-table now began to appear out of the night in their ghostly coverings, and as to the carpet it must be ankle-deep. The flakes were as big as apples, and he was paralysed up to his thighs. He drew deep breaths, for he knew what was going to happen, and for the first time he realized the unacknowledged warmth of life.

“If only I was standing!” he said, and began to cry piteously. Through his tears the flakes were enormous and pounded upwards towards his heart. At last there came a flake greater than all the rest, which blocked up the whole window, and something was sitting across it, and as it broke upon him he screamed and lunged forward, and came on nothing but the blanket; which was perfectly dry.

When he lit the candle he saw that he had been asleep for several hours.

“The thing’s gone far enough,” he thought, and sprang out of bed to shut the window. The carpet was not ankle-deep in snow, nor had any snow fallen on it at all. But the room was freezing, and as he pulled down the sash he thought that the air without felt more genial than the air within.

He turned to go back. By the side of his bed stood his uncle.

Now he understood the whole thing. Mr Sholton was the sleepwalker.

And he had known it. He had come night after night along the stringcourse and written on the glass. He had found the black marks on his finger. Hence his faintness and his anger. Everything was explained now. And, if it had not been for the bad dream and the cold, Howard would have been tranquil and even amused. But he shuddered when his uncle groped under the pillow. If those fingers had touched him he would have died.

Mr Sholton had come just as he was, in pyjamas and thick night-socks.

His eyes were wide open, but he saw nothing, and though his mouth moved

no sound came out of it. In the light of the candle he was even thinner and more spiritual than usual, and the finger with which he wrote upon the glass seemed half transparent. He did not wish to write; his face was distorted and his little chest heaved with inaudible sighs. When his task was over he moved away willingly and approached the window. The cold grew intolerable.

“Wake up!” said Howard hoarsely.

The figure stopped. It could hear him. Its features altered. Returning to the bed, it felt up and down amongst the clothes.

“That’s all right,” said Howard. “Wake up. Wake up.”

He did not speak again. For he saw his uncle’s face plainly, and it was transfigured with hate. At last things were simple. They were here to kill each other.

The young man was helpless from the first. He was only a cold frightened lump of flesh and blood, and there was nothing in him to oppose the power of the sleepwalker. A tiny net seemed to fall over him, and after it fell another. Slowly he was drawn towards the bed. He cursed his obstinacy.

He cursed the Bellinghams and their fiendish experiments, and he cursed every breath his uncle should ever draw, every pleasure he should approach, every kind word he should ever utter. They were face to face now, with the bed between them. Howard snatched up the shaving-glass, and hurled it at the enemy. But he must have aimed badly, for the glass smashed on the opposite wall. The figure smiled. Another net fell over him, and he bent forward obediently to kiss the finger that beckoned him. His mouth was blistered with the cold. But ere they touched, his hands fell on the gun, and for a moment he was strong again. There was no time to sight. He fired straight into his uncle’s body.

With the click of the trigger he awoke for good. He was alone, the candle was flickering out, the shaving-glass was smashed, the window was shut.

But there was no explosion. The new gun had missed fire.

So he was a sleepwalker after all.

Then he did a thing which sounds like madness, but which really saved him from going mad. He dressed quickly and let himself out of the front door. After these two dreams he could endure the room no longer. For a whole hour he ran through the snowy glades of the woods and over the fields, till he was tired and warm. Then he fell into a loosened rick of hay and buried himself up to his chin, and was asleep at once, nor did he move or dream again.

When he woke the sky was pale green and the shadows on the snow were purple. The rick chanced to be above the house and he had an agreeable view of the smoking kitchen chimney. Woods too are beautiful in the early morning, and as he filled his pipe the sun rose clear out of the winter sea.

Possibly there would be skating. As he felt for matches he came on the oval cartridge which he must have taken away from the room in his flight. He slit it open. It was full of rubbish.

“This unknown female is a rotter!” he observed. “Not one grain of powder in it. Just the kind of thing a woman would think funny. Why, if it hadn’t been a dream I should have been done for. But Lord! How I hate him still! It’s as if it wasn’t a dream.”

He threw the cartridge away. One of his uncle’s shepherds came up the hill, and they spoke with precision of the weather. The pipe drew well, and it was still between his teeth when a rabbit hopped cheerfully towards him.

“But I’ll kill something,” he thought, and waited till the creature ventured into the field. There he chased it skilfully, and by good luck ran it down and twisted its neck with pleasure. Now the poacher was ready for breakfast, and, having given the rabbit to the admiring shepherd, he swaggered away to the house.

The other guests had assembled, and, forgetting a most necessary toilet, he burst into their midst. “Sorry!” he cried, “but I have had a night and a

half. It’s all explained, I’m a sleepwalker after all! Bad dreams, bad cartridge, and the shaving-glass no more good either.”

Then he saw that nearly everyone was crying.

“You break it to him,” said one aunt, and the other replied, “No, dear, I can’t, you.”

“It is an apt comment,” said Mr Bellingham slowly, “on the futility of our daily life. While we have been intent on useless inquiries into the other world, real tragedy has come upon us unheralded. My poor Howard! I don’t know how to put it to you; I must simply say, without any attempt at preparation—that your uncle is dead.”

“Dead?” said Howard politely. “I’m very sorry for that. But what of?”

“Suddenly, of something internal, during the night.”

“A chill?” he cried, puzzled again.

“No, he complained of the cold yesterday, but the doctor says it was not a chill. Indeed the room this morning was suffocating. All the cracks and windows were plastered up. There was a little hole through the brown paper over the register, but that was really all.”

“It was unlike him,” said the ladies gently. “He used not to object to the air.”

But Howard cared for nothing if it was not a chill. He was desperately hungry, and began to eye the food. “A curious collapse, the doctor says,”

whispered Mr Bellingham. “Thank God, he did not suffer, but it was as if something exploded inside him; all the sources of life have been deranged.

This is what the doctor says. You, when you see him, would imagine no such thing. For he died with a quiet smile on his face, and his finger stretched out, as if to bless us.”

He raised his voice a little for the last sentence, and again they paid the homage of tears for their kind departed friend, who would never take his seat at that table again.

“Bacon for anyone?” asked Howard. “Mrs Bellingham, some bacon?” He had slipped into his uncle’s chair, and was lounging forward over the dish.

They looked at him in horror. He was covered with mud and hay, his eyes were still bloodshot, and in his face there was neither affection nor anger nor remorse, nor any spiritual quality but the hunger of the beasts who are said to perish.

In their common misery Mrs Bellingham found time to whisper to her husband, “Our young friend is a little premature!”

***

As for the purple envelope—where it was hidden, what exactly it contained, why it had not been destroyed—all this should have been stated clearly at the beginning of the story, and there is no point in stating it now. But when Mr Sholton left the estate to his cousin he was giving away what had never been his. Howard now reigns over those woods and meadows, even as his grandmother desired. Power has made him dictatorial and noisy. He eats and drinks enormously, he quarrels with his neighbours, he is rude to his lady, he has not the slightest conception of the intellectual problems which underlie our daily life, nor of the spiritual problem which surrounds it. Such a man is neither a comfort to the aged nor an example to the young. But I stop with him whenever I get the chance.

“Oh, take away this beastly oval gun!” he said to me on the occasion of my last visit. “It’s just the thing for you—smart, showy and absolutely useless.”

He is quite right. I have a certain regard for the weapon, and I refused it, with thanks.

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