thoroughgoing investigation of it; but, to the best of his belief, their recorded cases gave no instance of anything so elaborate as this business of Canon's Park. And again; so far as he could remember, the appearances ascribed to a telepathic agency were all personal; visions of people, not of places: there were no telepathic landscapes. And as for hallucination: that did not carry one far. That stated a fact, but offered no explanation of it. Arnold had suffered from liver trouble: he had come down to breakfast one morning and had been vexed to see the air all dancing with black specks. Though he did not smell the nauseous odour of a smoky chimney, he made no doubt at first that the chimney had been smoking, or that the black specks were floating soot. It was some time before he realized that, objectively, there were no black specks, that they were optical illusions, and that he had been hallucinated. And no doubt the parson and the farmer had been hallucinated: but the cause, the motive power, was to seek. Dickens told how, waking one morning, he saw his father sitting by his bedside, and wondered what he was doing there. He addressed the old man, and got no answer, put out his hand to touch him: and there was no such thing. Dickens was hallucinated; but since his father was perfectly well at the time, and in no sort of trouble, the mystery remained insoluble, unaccountable. You had to accept it; but there was no rationale of it. It was a problem that had to be given up.
But Arnold did not like giving problems up. He beat the coverts of Stoke Newington, and dived into pubs of promising aspect, hoping to meet talkative old men, who might remember their fathers' stories and repeat them. He found a few, for though London has always been a place of restless, migratory tribes, and shifting populations; and now more than ever before; yet there still remains in many places, and above all in the remoter northern suburbs, an old fixed element, which can go back in memory sometimes for a hundred, even a hundred and fifty years. So in a venerable tavern--it would have been injurious and misleading to call it a pub--on the borders of Canon's Park he found an ancient circle that gathered nightly for an hour or two in a snug, if dingy, parlour. They drank little and that slowly, and went early home. They were small tradesmen of the neighbourhood, and talked their business and the changes they had seen, the curse of multiple shops, the poor stuff sold in them, and the cutting of prices and profits. Arnold edged into the conversation by degrees, after one or two visits--'Well, sir, I am very much obliged to you, and I won't refuse'--and said that he thought of settling in the neighbourhood: it seemed quiet. 'Best wishes, I'm sure. Quiet; well it was, once; but not much of that now in Stoke Newington. All pride and dress and bustle now; and the people that had the money and spent it, they're gone, long ago.'
'There were well-to-do people here?' asked Arnold, treading cautiously, feeling his way, inch by inch.
'There were, I assure you. Sound men--warm men, my father used to call them. There was Mr. Tredegar, head of Tredegar's Bank. That was amalgamated with the City and National many years ago: nearer fifty than forty, I suppose. He was a fine gentleman, and grew beautiful pineapples. I remember his sending us one, when my wife was poorly all one summer. You can't buy pineapples like that now.'
'You're right, Mr. Reynolds, perfectly right. I have to stock what they call pineapples, but I wouldn't touch them myself. No scent, no flavour. Tough and hard; you can't compare a crabapple with a Cox's pippin.'
There was a general assent to this proposition; and Arnold felt that it was slow work.
And even when he got to his point, there was not much gained. He said he had heard that Canon's Park was a quiet part; off the main track.
'Well, there's something in that,' said the ancient who had accepted the half-pint. 'You don't get very much traffic there, it's true: no trams or buses or motor coaches. But they're pulling it all to pieces; building new blocks of flats every few months. Of course, that might suit your views. Very popular these flats are, no doubt, with many people; most economical, they tell me. But I always liked a house of my own, myself.'
'I'll tell you one way a flat is economical,' the greengrocer said with a preparatory chuckle. 'If you're fond of the wireless, you can save the price and the licence. You'll hear the wireless on the floor above, and the wireless on the floor below, and one or two more besides when they've got their windows open on summer evenings.'
'Very true, Mr. Batts, very true. Still, I must say, I'm rather partial to the wireless myself. I like to listen to a cheerful tune, you know, at tea time.'
'You don't tell me, Mr. Potter, that you like that horrible jazz, as they call it ?'
'Well, Mr. Dickson, I must confess...' and so forth, and so forth. It became evident that there were modernists even here: Arnold thought that he heard the term 'hot blues' distinctly uttered. He forced another half- pint--'very kind of you; mild this time, if you don't mind'--on his neighbour, who turned out to be Mr. Reynolds, the pharmaceutical chemist, and tried back.
'So you wouldn't recommend Canon's Park as a desirable residence.'
'Well, no, sir; not to a gentleman who wants quiet, I should not. You can't have quiet when a place is being pulled down about your ears, as you may say. It certainly was quiet enough in former days. Wouldn't you say so, Mr. Batts?'--breaking in on the musical discussion--'Canon's Park was quiet enough in our young days, wasn't it? It would have suited this gentleman then, I'm sure.'
'Perhaps so,' said Mr. Batts. 'Perhaps so, and perhaps not. There's quiet, and quiet.'
And a certain stillness fell upon the little party of old men. They seemed to ruminate, to drink their beer in slower sips.
'There was always something about the place I didn't altogether like,' said one of them at last. 'But I'm sure I don't know why.'
'Wasn't there some tale of a murder there, a long time ago? Or was it a man that killed himself, and was buried at the crossroads by the green, with a stake through his heart?'
'I never heard of that, but I've heard my father say that there was a lot of fever about there formerly.'
'I think you're all wide of the mark, gentlemen, if you'll excuse my saying so'--this from an elderly man in a corner, who had said very little hitherto. 'I wouldn't say Canon's Park had a bad name, far from it. But there certainly was something about it that many people didn't like; fought shy of, you may say. And it's my belief that it was all on account of the lunatic asylum that used to be there, awhile ago.'
'A lunatic asylum was there?' Arnold's particular friend asked. 'Well, I think I remember hearing something to that effect in my very young days, now you recall the circumstances. I know we boys used to be very shy of going through Canon's Park after dark. My father used to send me on errands that way now and again, and I always got another boy to come along with me if I could. But I don't remember that we were particularly afraid of the lunatics either. In fact, I hardly know what we were afraid of, now I come to think of it.'
'Well, Mr. Reynolds, it's a long time ago; but I do think it was that madhouse put people off Canon's Park in the first place. You know where it was, don't you?'
'I can't say I do.'
'Well, it was that big house right in the middle of the park, that had been empty years and years--forty years, I dare say, and going to ruin.'
'You mean the place where Empress Mansions are now? Oh, yes, of course. Why they pulled it down more than twenty years ago, and then the land was lying idle all through the war and long after. A dismal-looking old place it was; I remember it well: the ivy growing over the chimney-pots, and the windows smashed, and the `To Let' boards smothered in creepers. Was that house an asylum in its day?'
'That was the very house, sir. Himalaya House, it was called. In the first place it was built on to an old farmhouse by a rich gentleman from India, and when he died, having no children, his relations sold the property to a doctor. And he turned it into a madhouse. And as I was saying, I think people didn't much like the idea of it. You know, those places weren't so well looked after as they say they are now, and some very unpleasant stories got about; I'm not sure if the doctor didn't get mixed up in a lawsuit over a gentleman, of good family, I believe, who had been shut up in Himalaya House by his relations for years, and as sensible as you or me all the time. And then there was that young fellow that managed to escape: that was a queer business. Though there was no doubt that he was mad enough for anything.'
'One of them got away, did he?' Arnold inquired, wishing to break the silence that again fell on the circle.
'That was so. I don't know how he managed it, as they were said to be very strictly kept, but he contrived to climb out or creep out somehow or other, one evening about tea time, and walked as quietly as you please up the road, and took lodgings close by here, in that row of old red-brick houses that stood where the technical college is now. I remember well hearing Mrs. Wilson that kept the lodgings--she lived to be a very old woman--telling my mother that she never saw a nice-looking, better-spoken young man than this Mr. Valiance--I think he called himself: not his real name, of course. He told her a proper story enough about coming from Norwich, and having to be very quiet on account of his studies and all that. He had his carpetbag in his hand, and said the heavy luggage
