Short Fiction

else had she?⁠ ⁠… She talked a lot to me, my own girl. Sometimes she would laugh a little. Look at me and laugh a little⁠—”

I shuddered. He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled moodiness.

“She would say: ‘I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to you, papa.’ And I would say: ‘Of course, my dear. You could not have meant it.’ She would lie quiet and then say: ‘I wonder?’ And sometimes, ‘I’ve been really a coward,’ she would tell me. You know, sick people they say things. And so she would say too: ‘I’ve been conceited, headstrong, capricious. I sought my own gratification. I was selfish or afraid.’⁠ ⁠… But sick people, you know, they say anything. And once, after lying silent almost all day, she said: ‘Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would not have gone. Perhaps! I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘Draw the curtain, papa. Shut the sea out. It reproaches me with my folly.’ ” He gasped and paused.

“So you see,” he went on in a murmur. “Very ill, very ill indeed. Pneumonia. Very sudden.” He pointed his finger at the carpet, while the thought of the poor girl, vanquished in her struggle with three men’s absurdities, and coming at last to doubt her own self, held me in a very anguish of pity.

“You see yourself,” he began again in a downcast manner. “She could not have really⁠ ⁠… She mentioned you several times. Good friend. Sensible man. So I wanted to tell you myself⁠—let you know the truth. A fellow like that! How could it be? She was lonely. And perhaps for a while⁠ ⁠… Mere nothing. There could never have been a question of love for my Freya⁠—such a sensible girl⁠—”

“Man!” I cried, rising upon him wrathfully, “don’t you see that she died of it?”

He got up too. “No! no!” he stammered, as if angry. “The doctors! Pneumonia. Low state. The inflammation of the⁠ ⁠… They told me. Pneu⁠—”

He did not finish the word. It ended in a sob. He flung his arms out in a gesture of despair, giving up his ghastly pretence with a low, heartrending cry:

“And I thought that she was so sensible!”

The Inn of the Two Witches

A Find

This tale, episode, experience⁠—call it how you will⁠—was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age⁠—unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but⁠—so to speak⁠—naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because the experience was simply that of an abominable fright⁠—terror he calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the subtitle. The title itself is my own contrivance, (can’t call it invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that’s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man’s word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a secondhand bookseller in the last stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some premonition of that fact which made me say: “But I must have the box too.” The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that in AD 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: “At night we stood in again,” arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. “Let’s see what it is all about,” I thought, without excitement.

Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance. “In AD 1813, I was twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don’t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Nowadays any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little