“He rambled on did that interpreter, while the ancient man polished the pumpkin in the time-honoured manner, and wheezed spasmodically. But I wasn’t paying much attention, because it had suddenly come back to me that Cedarlime was the name of the house where I had spoken to the inscrutable stranger. Subconsciously I had noticed it as I crossed the road; now it was brought back to my memory.
“ ‘Is the owner of Cedarlime a youngish, man?’ I asked my informant. ‘Dark hair; rather sallow face?’
“He shook his head. The owner of Cedarlime was a middle-aged man with grey hair, but he often had friends stopping with him who came from London, so he’d heard tell—friends who didn’t stop long—just for the week-end, maybe, or four or five days. Probably the man I meant was one of these friends.
“My informant passed on to inspect a red and hairy gooseberry, and I wandered slowly out of the stuffy tent. Probably a friend—in fact, undoubtedly a friend. But try as I would to concentrate on that confounded flower show, my thoughts kept harking back to Cedarlime. For some reason or other, that quiet house and the man who had come so silently out of the bushes had raised my curiosity. And at that moment I narrowly escaped death from a swing boat, which brought me back to the business in hand.
“I suppose it was about three hours later that I started to stroll back to the station. I was aiming at a five o’clock train, and intended to write my stuff on the way up to Town. But just as I was getting to the gates of the house that interested me, who should I see in front of me but the venerable pumpkin polisher. He turned as I got abreast of him and recognised me with a throaty chuckle. And he promptly started to talk. I gathered that he had many other priceless treasures in his garden—wonderful sweet-peas, more pumpkins of colossal dimensions. And after a while I further gathered that he was suggesting I should go in and examine them for myself.
“For a moment I hesitated. I looked at my watch—there was plenty of time. Then I looked over the gates and made up my mind. I would introduce this ancient being into my account of the fête; write up, in his own setting, this extraordinary old man who had never left Appledore for forty-eight years. And, in addition, I would have a closer look at the house—possibly even see the scholarly owner.
“I glanced curiously round as I followed him up the drive. We went about half-way to the house, then turned off along a path into the kitchen garden. And finally he came to rest in front of the pumpkins—he was obviously a pumpkin maniac. I should think he conducted a monologue for five minutes on the habits of pumpkins while I looked about me. Occasionally I said ‘Yes’; occasionally I nodded my head portentously; for the rest of the time I paid no attention.
“I could see half the front and one side of the house—but there seemed no trace of any occupants. And I was just going to ask the old man who lived there, when I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves standing at one of the windows. He was not the man who had spoken to me at the gate; he was not a grey-headed man either, so presumably not the owner. He appeared to be engrossed in something he was holding in his hands, and after a while he held it up to the light in the same way one holds up a photographic plate. It was then that he saw me.
“Now, I have never been an imaginative person, but there was something positively uncanny in the way that man disappeared. Literally in a flash he had gone and the window was empty. And my imagination began to stir. Why had that man vanished so instantaneously at the sight of a stranger in the kitchen garden?
“And then another thing began to strike me. Something which had been happening a moment or two before had abruptly stopped—a noise, faint and droning, but so steady that I hadn’t noticed it until it ceased. It had been the sort of noise which, if you heard it to-day, you would say was caused by an aeroplane a great way off—and quite suddenly it had stopped. A second or two after the man had seen me and vanished from the window, that faint droning noise had ceased. I was sure of it, and my imagination began to stir still more.