2
A few weeks ago, said Bailey, I was staying at the house of a cousin of mine. I never liked the woman, but I wanted free board and lodging, and hunger soon blunts the edge of one’s delicacy. She’s at least ten years my senior, and all I could remember of her was that she had bullied me when I was a child into learning to read. Ten years ago she married a man named Dearth—James Dearth, the resident owner of a smallish farm in Norfolk, not far from the coast. All her relatives opposed the marriage. Relatives always do. If people waited for the approval of relatives before marrying, the world would be depopulated in a generation. This time it was religion. My cousin’s people were primitive and methodical in their religion, as the name of their sect confessed; whereas Dearth professed a universal toleration that they thought could only be a cloak for indifference. I have my own opinion about that, but it doesn’t matter now. When I met the man I forgot all about religion: I was simply repelled by the notion of any woman marrying so odd a being. Rather small in build, he possessed the longest and narrowest face I have ever seen on a man of his size. His eyes were set exceptionally wide apart, and the nose, culminating in large nostrils, made so slight an angle with the rest of the face that seen in profile it was scarcely human. Perhaps I exaggerate a little, but I know no other way of explaining the peculiar revulsion he inspired in me. He met me at the station in his dog-cart, and wheezed a greeting at me. ‘You’re Mr. Bailey, aren’t you? I hope you’ve had an agreeable journey. Monica will be delighted.’ This seemed friendly enough, and my host’s conversation during that eight-mile drive did much to make me forget my first distaste of his person. He was evidently a man of wide reading, and he had a habit of polite deference that was extremely flattering, especially to me who had had more than my share of the other thing. I was cashiered during the war, you know. Never mind why. Whenever he laughed, which was not seldom, he exhibited a mouthful of very large regular teeth.
Dearth’s Farm, to give it the local name, is a place with a personality of its own. Perhaps every place has that. Sometimes I fancy that the earth itself is a personality, or a community of souls locked fast in a dream from which at any moment they may awake, like volcanos, into violent action. Anyhow Dearth’s Farm struck me as being peculiarly personal, because I found it impossible not to regard its climatic changes as changes of mood. You remember my theory that chemical action is only psychical action seen from without? Well, I’m inclined to think in just the same way of every manifestation of natural energy. But you don’t want to hear about my fancies. The farmhouse, which is approached by a narrow winding lane from the main road, stands high up in a kind of shallow basin of land, a few acres ploughed but mostly grass. The countryside has a gentle prettiness more characteristic of the southeastern counties. On three sides wooded hills slope gradually to the horizon; on the fourth side grassland rises a little for twenty yards and then curves abruptly down. To look through the windows that give out upon this fourth side is to have the sensation of being on the edge of a steep cliff, or at the end of the world. On a still day, when the sun is shining, the place has a languid beauty, an afternoon atmosphere. You remember Tennyson’s Lotus Isles, ‘in which it seemed always afternoon’: Dearth’s Farm has something of that flavour on a still day. But such days are rare; the two or three I experienced shine like jewels in the memory. Most often that stretch of fifty or sixty acres is a gathering-ground for all the bleak winds of the earth. They seem to come simultaneously from the land and from the sea, which is six miles away, and they swirl round in that shallow basin of earth, as I have called it, like maddened devils seeking escape from a trap. When the storms were at their worst I used to feel as though I were perched insecurely on a gigantic saucer held a hundred miles above the earth. But I am not a courageous person. Monica, my cousin, found no fault with the winds. She had other fears, and I had not been with her three days before she began to confide them to me. Her overtures were as surprising as they were unwelcome, for that she was not a confiding person by nature I was certain. Her manners were reserved to the point of diffidence, and we had nothing in common save a detestation of the family from which we had both sprung. I suppose you will want to know something of her looks. She was a tall, full-figured woman, handsome for her years, with jet black hair, a sensitive face, and a complexion almost Southern in its dark colouring. I love beauty and I found pleasure in her mere presence, which did something to lighten for me the gloom that pervaded the house; but my pleasure was innocent enough, and Dearth’s watchdog airs only amused me. Monica’s eyes—unfathomable pools—seemed troubled whenever they rested on me: whether by fear or by some other emotion I didn’t at first know.
She chose her moment well, coming to me when Dearth was out of the house, looking after his men, and I, pleading a headache, had refused to accompany him. The malady was purely fictitious, but I was bored with the fellow’s company, and sick of being dragged at his heels like a dog for no better reason than his too evident jealousy afforded.
‘I want to ask a kindness of you,’ she said. ‘Will you promise to answer me quite frankly?’ I wondered what the deuce was coming, but I promised, seeing no way out of it. ‘I want you to tell me,’ she went on, ‘whether you see anything queer about me, about my behaviour? Do I say or do anything that seems to you odd?’
Her perturbation was so great that I smiled to hide my perception of it. I answered jocularly: ‘Nothing at all odd, my dear Monica, except this question of yours. What makes you ask it?’
But she was not to be shaken so easily out of her fears, whatever they were. ‘And do you find nothing strange about this household either?’
‘Nothing strange at all,’ I assured her. ‘Your marriage is an unhappy one, but so are thousands of others. Nothing strange about that.’
‘What about him?’ she said. And her eyes seemed to probe for an answer.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Are you asking for my opinion of your husband? A delicate thing to discuss.’
‘We’re speaking in confidence, aren’t we!’ She spoke impatiently, waving my politeness away.
‘Well, since you ask, I don’t like him. I don’t like his face: it’s a parody on mankind. And I can’t understand why you threw yourself away on him.’
She was eager to explain. ‘He wasn’t always like this. He was a gifted man, with brains and an imagination. He still is, for all I know. You spoke of his face—now how would you describe his face, in one word?’
I couldn’t help being tickled by the comedy of the situation: a man and a woman sitting in solemn conclave seeking a word by which to describe another man’s face, and that man her husband. But her air of tragedy, though I thought it ridiculous, sobered me. I pondered her question for a while, recalling to my mind’s eye the long narrow physiognomy and the large teeth of Dearth.
At last I ventured the word I had tried to avoid. ‘Equine,’ I suggested.
‘Ah!’ There was a world of relief in her voice. ‘You’ve seen it too.’
She told me a queer tale. Dearth, it appears, had a love and understanding of horses that was quite unparalleled. His wife too had loved horses and it had once pleased her to see her husband’s astonishing power over the creatures, a power which he exercised always for their good. But his benefactions to the equine race were made at a hideous cost to himself of which he was utterly unaware. Monica’s theory was too fantastic even for me to swallow, and I, as you know, have a good stomach for fantasy. You will have already guessed what it was. Dearth was growing, by a process too gradual and subtle for perception, into the likeness of the horses with whom he had so complete sympathy. This was Mrs. Dearth’s notion of what was happening to her husband. And she pointed out something significant that had escaped my notice. She pointed out that the difference between him and the next man was not altogether, or even mainly, a physical difference. In effect she said: ‘If you scrutinize the features more carefully, you will find them to be far less extraordinary than you now suppose. The poison is not in his features. It is in the psychical atmosphere he carries about with him: something which infects you with the idea of horse and makes you impose that idea on his appearance, magnifying his facial peculiarities.’ Just now I mentioned that in the early days of her marriage Monica had shared this love of horses. Later, of course, she came to detest them only one degree less than she detested her husband. That is saying much. Only a few months before my visit matters had come to a crisis between the two. Without giving any definite reason, she had confessed, under pressure, that he was unspeakably offensive to her; and since then they had met only at meals and always reluctantly. She shuddered to recall that interview, and I shuddered to imagine it. I was no longer surprised that she had begun to entertain doubts of her own sanity.
But this wasn’t the worst. The worst was Dandy, the white horse. I found it difficult to understand why a white horse should alarm her, and I began to suspect that the nervous strain she had undergone was making her inclined to magnify trifles. ‘It’s his favourite horse,’ she said. ‘That’s as much as saying that he dotes on it to a degree that is unhuman. It never does any work. It just roams the fields by day, and at night sleeps in the stable.’ Even this didn’t, to my mind, seem a very terrible indictment. If the man were mad on horses, what more natural than this petting of a particular favourite?—a fine animal, too, as Monica herself admitted. ‘Roams the fields,’ cried my poor cousin urgently. ‘Or did until these last few weeks. Lately it has been kept in its stable, day in, day out, eating its head off and working up energy enough to kill us all.’ This sounded to me like the language of hysteria, but I waited for what was to follow. ‘The day you came, did you notice how pale I looked? I had had a fright. As I was crossing the yard with a pail of separated milk for the calves, that beast broke loose from the stable and sprang at me. Yes, Dandy. He was in a fury. His eyes burned with ferocity. I dodged him by a miracle, dropped the pail, and ran back to the house shrieking for help. When I entered the living-room my husband feigned to be waking out of sleep. He didn’t seem interested in my story, and I’m convinced that he had planned the whole thing.’ It was past my understanding how Dearth could have made his horse spring out of his stable and make a murderous attack upon a particular woman, and I said so. ‘You don’t know him yet,’ retorted Monica. ‘And you don’t know Dandy. Go and look at the beast. Go now, while James is out.’
The farmyard, with its pool of water covered in green slime, its manure and sodden straw, and its smell of pigs, was a place that seldom failed to offend me. But on this occasion I picked my way across the cobblestones thinking of nothing at all but the homicidal horse that I was about to spy upon. I have said before that I’m not a courageous man, and you’ll understand that I stepped warily as I neared the stable. I saw that the lower of the two doors was made fast and with the more confidence unlatched the other.
I peered in. The great horse stood, bolt upright but apparently in a profound sleep. It was indeed a fine creature, with no spot or shadow, as far as I could discern, to mar its glossy whiteness. I stood there staring and brooding for several minutes, wondering if both Monica and I were the victims of some astounding hallucination. I had no fear at all of Dandy, after having seen him; and it didn’t alarm me when, presently, his frame quivered, his eyes opened, and he turned to look at me. But as I looked into his eyes an indefinable fear possessed me. The horse stared dumbly for a moment, and his nostrils dilated. Although I half-expected him to tear his head out of the halter and prance round upon me, I could not move. I stared, and as I stared, the horse’s lips moved back from the teeth in a grin, unmistakably a grin, of malign intelligence. The gesture vividly recalled Dearth to my mind. I had described him as equine, and if proof of the word’s aptness were needed, Dandy had supplied that proof.
‘He’s come back,’ Monica murmured to me, on my return to the house. ‘Ill, I think. He’s gone to lie down. Have you seen Dandy?’
‘Yes. And I hope not to see him again.’
But I was to see him again, twice again. The first time was that same night, from my bedroom window. Both my bedroom and my cousin’s looked out upon that grassy hill of which I spoke. It rose from a few yards until almost level with the second storey of the house and then abruptly curved away. Somewhere about midnight, feeling restless and troubled by my thoughts, I got out of bed and went to the window to take an airing.
I was not the only restless creature that night. Standing not twenty yards away, with the sky for background, was a great horse. The moonlight made its white flank gleam like silver, and lit up the eyes that stared fixedly at my window.