“Hullo, you inside here,” Hi called. “I am a friend. Is anyone there? Señor Elena. Señor George, Señor William. Hey, hey, heya. Is anyone here at all?”
His voice rang along the corridor and died away: no one was there. “Very well, I’ll go in,” Hi said. He stepped in, and closed the door against the wind. As he did so a letter and envelope, which had been lying on the edge of a table near him, fell to the stone flags with a clatter. He replaced them on the table; then paused to look about him.
He had heard that men of the great ranches lived like princes. The hall in which he stood was bare, big and white, lit by electric lights. There were two stiff black chairs, two black pictures of yellow nymphs, a table heaped with silver horse-trappings, and the English grandfather’s clock, gravely telling the time. He walked up to the clock and read the words on the dial:
Edward Hendred.
1807
Abingdon.
These two little things of old Berkshire met thus in this strange house so many miles from Thames and Down. “Hendred of Abingdon,” he repeated. “There may be a Berkshire man here who may know father.” He glanced at the pictures of the yellow nymphs in their clothes blown out in the grand manner. “Religious pictures,” he thought and glanced away. The house was so still that he hardly dared to go further.
“What can have happened?” he asked. “Some fight or some show or what?”
He walked to the nearest door, on his left. The door was ajar, shewing a lit room: he knocked at the door, had no answer, and therefore looked in. It was a big, long room, in use as the messroom of the household, for whom thirty places had been laid on the table. Food in abundance had been set there for a meal, which had been begun. Baskets of small Meruel loaves were on a sideboard near the door: he felt these by accident as he put out his hand: the under loaves were still warm from the oven. There was warmth in the vast silver cazuela tureen, which stood, more than half empty at the head of the table. The table was littered with the mess of the meal: broken loaves, bowls which had been used for cazuela, halves of oranges, skins of bananas, and the bones of big birds like turkeys. Yet from the look of the plates Hi felt that the meal had never been finished: something had interrupted it before they had reached the coffee and cigarettes. Somebody with some news had come there soon after they were half way through, then chairs had been thrust back and food left, half eaten and the eaters and talkers had gone. Why had they gone, and where? Hi did not like the feeling of this house.
He went again to the hall and cried: “Is there anybody here?” But there was no answer. “There must be someone somewhere in all this barrack,” he said. “Surely in the kitchen or outhouses there will be a woman or a negro or a peon. There must be at least a caretaker or night-watchman. The kitchens will be along the corridor somewhere at the back.”