J. Jefferson Farjeon
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955) was the grandson of an American actor, Joseph Jefferson, son of a popular novelist, Benjamin Farjeon, and brother of a well-regarded children’s author, Eleanor Farjeon. With such a pedigree, it is hardly surprising that he tried his hand at both acting and—with much greater success—at writing. He became a journalist, but did not always find it easy to support his wife and child, and decided to supplement his income by producing short stories, novels, and plays. A turning point in his fortunes came when his stage thriller No. 17 began a tour of Northern theatres at the Winter Gardens, New Brighton on 6 July 1925, and received enthusiastic reviews. Hitchcock directed a film version, and the central character, Ben, featured in several of Farjeon’s later novels.
Farjeon was an industrious writer whose entertaining way with words appealed to a large readership in the decades before his death from liver cancer. After he died, as is so often the case with purveyors of popular fiction, his books went out of print, and were neglected for many years until the British Library’s reissue of his Christmas crime story Mystery in White (1937) introduced him to a new generation of readers. His books and stories benefited from a wide range of settings, ranging from English villages to the Pyrenees; this little tale illustrates his penchant for melodrama.
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It was one of those ridiculous Rhine castles you cannot quite believe. You’ve seen the sort of thing often enough in pictures—perched high up on a wooded mountain shelf, with a pointed red-roofed tower rising heavenwards and oblong slit-windows looking down sheerly on the winding river hundreds of feet below—and for a moment it has wrenched you from jazz and wireless back to medieval days. ‘How picturesque—how quaint!’ you have said. But it has probably never occurred to you to live in one.
Nor would it have occurred to me if I had not one day bought a copy of The Times to read a bad notice a kind friend had told me of, and if my eye had not been caught by the following advertisement on the front page: ‘Castle on the Rhine. Owner, occupying few rooms, willing to let the remainder for summer months. Terms very moderate. Service provided. Apply—’
The name was Steinbaum.
My natural tendency is to spend the summer months in Gleneagles or Frinton or Le Touquet, and no German castle, however picturesque and quaint, would lure me. The picturesqueness may include damp and draughts, and the quaintness may spread to the sanitary arrangements. But the advertisement chanced to fit my mood and my necessity, for I had begun a novel with a romantic German setting, and all I really knew about Germany was the language.
Moreover, the notice when I turned to it was very bad indeed! The reviewer advised me to confine myself to environments with which I was familiar.
So I cast myself adrift from my friends and my relatives, and—to cut a long journey short—I arrived one gloomy evening at the ridiculous Rhine castle I had never quite believed. I had caught a preliminary glimpse of it, when it had still been three miles away, as the station car had wound round a ghastly hairpin bend, and I had thought, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ Now here the nonsense was, sitting on its mountainous green perch with a kind of mellow coldness like a bit of crumbling history; and Herr Steinbaum proved to be as crumbling as his residence.
I confess I endured a few moments of uncomfortable doubt as I saw the grim old man standing under the entrance arch; and subsequent events proved, you will agree, that there was something definite about the place, quite apart from its external aspect, to account for the chill that suddenly ran up and down my spine. But the chill evaporated at my first sight of Gretchen, Steinbaum’s daughter, a flaxen-haired girl whose smile was an instant welcome. ‘I’ll put you in my novel,’ I decided, as she insisted very unreasonably on carrying my suitcase into the castle, ‘and you shall marry a jolly nice chap and be happy for ever after!’
The station car turned—perilously—and went away. Its departure severed my last link with the outer world. It seemed also to sever my link with the twentieth century. The old man belonged to a Holbein canvas, and Gretchen would have looked perfectly appropriate in a costume four hundred years behind the fashion.
They led me to the rooms which it was suggested I should occupy. Actually, as I discovered later, I had my choice of over forty. The living-room was enormous, and most of the furniture had been assembled near a great log-fire. I welcomed the fire, for the evening was cool. The rest of the furniture seemed very distant and cold. A narrow, dark passage, lit by a candle in a high niche, led to my bedroom, almost equally large. The bed itself would have held a family.
‘I hope this is satisfactory?’ said Herr Steinbaum, while we stood in the bedroom.
They had both been watching me closely and anxiously. I felt their anxiety pressing upon me. I assured them that it was thoroughly satisfactory, and asked if there were a bathroom. I prayed silently while I put the question.
‘Oh, yes!’ cried Gretchen, her voice alive with joyous relief. My approval had sounded convincing. ‘And newly painted. But quite dry—shall I show it to you?’
‘Perhaps you will excuse me while she does so?’ added Herr Steinbaum. ‘Your supper—it will be ready when you are.’
He withdrew, and Gretchen conducted me through another ill-lit passage to a bathroom that was hardly more than a passage itself. It was L-shaped, with the bath round the bend. The ceiling was a mile off. The one narrow window could be reached if one stood on the rim of the bath. But the whiteness of the bath provided illumination. It dazzled through the dimness.
Again I felt Gretchen’s eyes upon me.
‘You’ve painted it beautifully,’ I said.
‘But how did you know?’ she exclaimed, as though I had performed a conjuring trick.
Simple Gretchen! I knew because, although I had only been inside the castle a few minutes, I already knew many things. The Steinbaums, like the castle walls themselves, were a conflict of obvious truths and inscrutable secrets. I knew without being told that Gretchen had painted the bath and had washed the spotless towel that hung from a heavy iron hook. I knew that Herr Steinbaum was preparing the supper. I knew that the castle had once contained much more furniture, and that the advertisement in The Times had been a desperate remedy. I knew—and the reason for this knowledge was less obvious—that there were only three living souls within the castle walls—Gretchen, Herr Steinbaum, and myself. But I did not know how many dead ones there might be! The latter were included among the inscrutable secrets.
‘Just a guess,’ I answered Gretchen, lightly. ‘I’m good at guessing.’
An odd look came into her eyes. The secrets stirred uneasily. Then she made a sudden excuse, and left me.
I lingered in the impossible bathroom for a few moments. What pages it would fill in my novel! It would write itself. I drank its atmosphere greedily, and wondered whether to have a murder in it, though that would stain Gretchen’s beautiful white paint. And as I walked back to my bedroom, my footsteps made hollow echoes behind me on the stone floor of the passage, and the bed shouted voicelessly of centuries of life and death, each ignorant of the other…
But this is not my novel. It is just a short, swift incident, a single chapter of reality that prefaced my thirty imaginative ones, providing them—for me, at any rate—with a strange, underlying vividness. So there is no time here to linger.
Gretchen served my supper in the vast living-room. It was a simple, efficient meal, and every time she came she added human warmth to the chemical heat of the log-fire, and every time she went the chemical heat seemed inadequate. Fortunately for me—I make no bones about my mood—she showed a desire to linger, but I fed this disposition as much for her sake as for my own. Gretchen needed company, though my own was not the kind she needed. A rather elderly author has one foot already in the grave of imagination. Youth requires both feet out.
But even though I was obviously friendly, her lingering was rather furtive—as though she felt she really had no right to stay—and it was only at her last visit that I succeeded in engaging her in conversation that was more than casual.
‘Will you want anything more to-night?’ she asked.
‘Nothing more,’ I answered. ‘Everything has been perfect. I had no idea a castle could be so comfortable.’
‘I am glad you like it,’ she said.
‘To-morrow I shall want to explore,’ I went on. ‘What part do you and your father live in? I’d better know, or I shall be walking in on you!’
‘Oh, we are down below,’ she replied.
‘And I can go everywhere else?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘That’s splendid. I particularly want to go up into the tower. The view from there must be wonderful.’
Again that odd look came into her eyes. I was jerked back to the moment in the bathroom, just before she had left me. But she smiled very quickly, as though to cover a secret that was slipping from its shroud and might betray its nakedness.
‘It’s not very safe, the stairs are rickety,’ she exclaimed. ‘But the views are wonderful everywhere.’
The secret slipped back, but Gretchen’s simple mind, if it had attempted subtlety, misjudged that of a rather elderly author. I was not too elderly to negotiate a rickety staircase or to be intrigued by so thinly veiled a warning.
‘Do you ever get lonely here?’ I asked, changing the subject.
‘Sometimes, a little,’ she admitted. ‘But then we have always been here. One grows used to it.’
‘And, of course, you have to look after your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘He likes it here?’
‘Oh, he would never leave it! You see, it has been in our family for many generations. I don’t know how far back!’
I wondered whether it would belong to the family for many more generations. Would Gretchen herself be the next? Or would some mortgagee step in one day and claim it? And then I found myself wondering about Gretchen’s mother. After a moment’s hesitation, I put my wonder into words.
‘Your mother—is she alive?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
‘My mother died when I was little,’ she told me. ‘Too little to remember her.’ She paused, then said, with that quaint abruptness that slayed her most interesting moments, ‘I must go.’
I deduced that Gretchen’s mother had been considerably younger than her father. Herr Steinbaum looked nearly seventy, though, as I was destined soon to learn, the castle had prematurely aged his appearance. I began to learn, indeed, before I saw Gretchen again.
When she had left me, I sat for awhile and smoked. By all the rules I should have gone to bed, for I had had a long day of travelling and had earned my sleep. But I felt restless. Through the great quietude, invisible life tingled all around me. It flowed under my feet, ran along the stone walls, whispered behind a faded tapestry. I had an itch to interpret it, or to convert it into something concrete.
‘Why, of course!’ I exclaimed, suddenly. ‘I must write!’
For here was Atmosphere, first-hand!
I spent a luxurious period in preparation. The sleepiness that had been fighting the restlessness, induced by my fatigue and the warmth of the fire, slipped away as I busied myself with my typewriter and my papers. I thought of the critic whose bad notice had played its part in sending me here, and I smiled at the odd tricks of Fate. His next notice of my work would be very different. I began to compose it for him in my mind.
Then, for over an hour, my typewriter clicked. It clicked with an entirely new voice, a voice not sympathetic to the surroundings, and as I wrote I became conscious of a gradual change. The secret life was slowing up. Pausing. Stopping. Before the incongruous music of my machine I had been listening to it. Now it was listening to me…sullenly…antagonistically…
I began making mistakes. I began taking pages out and starting them again. I began jumping at my errors. When I struck an ‘m’ on the keyboard instead of a comma, a pang of nervous irritation shot through me.
‘This is ridiculous!’ I exclaimed aloud.
I read through all I had written, and threw the pages on the dying fire. There they performed their last service of making a temporary blaze.
Again, I should have gone to bed. But again, the atmosphere of the silent castle confounded normality. Now that I had stopped clicking my typewriter, the secret life was starting up again. I felt impotent. The critic laughed at me, and advised me to take up farming.
‘I shall never write here,’ I murmured, with the clouded vision of the over-fatigued.
And it was then that I thought of the tower.
I usually write in a small room, my imagination functioning best through walls that are close. Of course, that was the trouble—this room was too large! Instead of remaining near at hand my imagination was wandering all over the place, and refused to come back when it was wanted. It was like a wild dog off the leash. But in the tower, where the rooms were probably very much smaller, my mind would be less nomadic, and I myself would feel less like an ant in space.
Yes, undoubtedly, here lay the solution. The tower might be draughty, and would almost surely be unfurnished, but a few pounds spent on it would be a good investment…As the idea worked into me, my impatience to prove its practicability rose, and I decided to investigate the tower at once—and then to sleep soundly.
Where was it? I tried to locate it by visualising the outside of the castle. It rose distinctly in my memory, a grim sentinel against a background of scudding evening clouds, too far above the winding water to be reflected in it. But though I recalled the tower, I could not locate my own portion of the castle, and I crossed to an oblong, Gothic window, opened it with a loud creak, and looked out. It gave me a bit of a shock. The river below was a dizzy distance down. I twisted my head upwards, and stared at angles of stone, some of them gleaming at the edges in the pale moonlight. I saw nothing that looked like a tower.
Twisting my head back to normal, I was about to withdraw it when I noticed a small movement on the ribbon of road that wound round the mountain to the final lap to the castle. It looked like a tiny insect crawling along a large bird’s-eye photograph. A bit late for a traveller, wasn’t it?…Now the insect had stopped. I lost it in the shadows, and couldn’t find it again. Perhaps I had been mistaken. I closed the window, with another disconcerting creak.
I crossed the vast floor and opened the door to the outer passage. It did not look inviting, but after taking a candle I went out into it, closing the door behind me. I felt guilty at my foolishness. It was nearly midnight. But the castle-itch had got me, Gretchen’s thinly-veiled warning had got me, my own stubborn mood had got me. I had to find that tower.
I paid for my stubbornness. I wandered through passages that twisted, and up and down stairs that wound, and I lost myself. I lost myself among shadows and echoes. The echoes seemed to be of footsteps behind me. I opened doors into spaces too big for a single candle’s illumination. I walked into a cupboard. Twice I nearly took headers. The second time my candle went out, and I had to light it again. It annoyed me enormously to discover that my fingers were not steady.
I would have given my soul at that moment for a sight of pleasant Gretchen!
‘This is just silly!’ I told myself. ‘I’m going back!’
That was just sillier. I didn’t know my way back. I didn’t even know what floor I was on.
Presently I stood still and thought. Or, rather, I stood still and thoughts came. I wondered whether the footsteps behind me had really been echoes? I wondered whether the shadow ahead of me really was a shadow? I wondered whether the insect were still on the ribbon of road? I wondered whether to scrap my novel about Germany, and to write one about Brighton? I wondered how I had ever found the maze at Hampton Court difficult?
And then I wondered why I was standing still, and I discovered that it was the shadow ahead—long and upright, like a flat black slab pasted against a wall ahead of me. ‘Ha!’ I cried, and thrust my candle towards it.
The block slab vanished, to become a narrow passage, with stone steps winding upwards.
I sat on the bottom step and laughed. If Gretchen had come upon me then—I thought more and more about Gretchen, and with more and more gratitude for her existence—she would have taken me for a maniac. My laughter, however, prevented me from becoming one. I floated back to sanity on the tide of the ridiculous.
The outer walls that enclosed the staircase were curved, and so was the central structure round which the ascending steps wound. This, without doubt, was the tower. There was no turning back now, unless I wished to face a future of everlasting shame!
I got up from my cold seat and began to mount the steps. Round and round and round they went. They seemed endless. Was I mounting spirally to heaven? Every now and again little slits in the wall admitted silver glints of moonlight. I gave up counting the steps at 180 as they commenced to develop cracks and holes and looseness. Towards the end of the journey the crumbling stone changed to decaying wood. Then, suddenly, my head emerged through a gap and I found myself gazing along the floor of the tower-room.
Two-thirds of the floor was in deep shadow, but the part in which I had emerged was illuminated by an elongated oval of moonlight that came slanting in through the largest window. No, aperture. Windows have glass. The bottom of the aperture was low and wide, and as I stared across at it I was suddenly seized by a terrible fascination. It was so strong that it frightened me, and I tried to explain it to myself in simple terms.
‘You want to see the view,’ I thought. ‘That’s all!’
Of course that was all! And, equally of course, an impression that something stirred in the shadowed portion of the room was imagination. Still—there was no object in prolonging my visit. The idea that this lofty insecure chamber could be used as a study was laughable. I would just take a peep through the window, see the view, and go down again.
That tiny journey to the aperture took only a few seconds, but I have never lived through seconds more packed. I fought dizziness, and also indignation at my dizziness. I am not ordinarily subject to vertigo. I fought other things, as well. It was as though all the forces that had been pressing on me in my room, and the echoing steps and uncanny fancies that had followed me out of it, had suddenly seized me to impel me forward. I was surrounded by the invisible, secret life of the castle.
You may interpret this in your own fashion. You may say that it was the outcome of my own unbalanced mood. For myself, I assert nothing beyond the facts, and one more fact must be added—the impression of an agonised woman hovering near the window. Actually, no living woman was there at all.
Well, I reached the window, and I looked out. Below me was a view of terrible magnificence. The wall of the tower went sheerly down to the rock on which it stood, and the rock went sheerly down to the water. I believe I did go through a miniature brain-storm. I wanted to tear myself away, but something held me there—till all at once I felt rings round my ankles, and found myself being drawn back into the room.
‘Do not be alarmed,’ said a quiet voice behind me. ‘But it is better in here than out there.’
The grip on my ankles relaxed. I scrambled round, and stared into the eyes of Herr Steinbaum.
‘I regret this very deeply,’ he murmured. ‘We should have warned you.’
‘Gretchen—your daughter—did warn me,’ I answered, my mind in a whirl. Then added, protestingly, ‘Yes—but of what?’
His eyes probed mine, seeking their knowledge.
‘Of the danger,’ he replied, with a little shrug.
‘The danger of a high window?’ I challenged. ‘Just that?’
Again he paused before speaking. Then he said, very slowly,
‘But the danger is great. Once—many years ago—a man fell out.’ I started, but not merely at his words. Above me, harsh and metallic, clanged a clock. It clanged twelve times. ‘At about this hour,’ said Herr Steinbaum.
I stared at him. His quiet voice was in conflict with the odd light in his eyes. I steadied myself before asking,
‘Were you here, Herr Steinbaum, when I arrived?’ He nodded. ‘Only you?’
‘Who else?’ he exclaimed, sharply.
Before I could shape my reply I caught a sound on the stairs below us. Herr Steinbaum’s ears were as quick as mine, and we turned simultaneously. My heart thumped as rapid footsteps wound towards us. A moment later Gretchen appeared, agitated and breathless.
Her appearance gave me a double shock. For one instant I thought she was the woman of my fancy, by the window…
She came to a sudden halt when she saw us. She looked as though she were going to faint. ‘An old man—I let him in—he frightened me—’ she blurted out.
And then she did faint.
I caught her in my arms. Her distressed condition made me forget my own. For a few seconds I held her. The poor child was in her dressing-gown, and I hesitated to lower her to the cold ground.
‘She’ll be all right in a moment,’ I said. ‘Is there any water?’
Herr Steinbaum did not reply.
‘I’ll look after her,’ I went on. ‘If you want to go?’
Still Herr Steinbaum did not reply. I lowered her carefully to the ground. She seemed to disappear into the shadows. Then I looked up at Herr Steinbaum. He was standing rigid, his eyes fixed on the top of the stairs.
It did not seem possible that the castle could produce any experience more eerie than I had already encountered within its grim walls, but when fresh footsteps sounded on the stairs, I realised that the trump card was yet to be played. But I listened to the sounds, I remember, with a strange sense of detachment. My own story had ended when I had been dragged back from the window. The story that was reaching its culmination up these stairs was Herr Steinbaum’s and Gretchen’s. I was a mere spectator.
Gretchen’s steps had been swift, like the wind. The new steps were slow, like a whisper. Not a clear whisper—a husky whisper, that scraped. And as it scraped upwards it grew slower and slower. I wondered what would happen if it stopped…
Then the top of a white head appeared in the space of moonlight that touched the well of the stairs. The white head paused—as my own head had paused a little earlier—and two old, tired eyes fixed themselves on the window across the room. The eyes did not move, yet I was conscious of something like a tiny flicker of fading light…Then two old, tired legs resumed their whispering progress…
A ghost? Herr Steinbaum’s expression suggested it. And as the bent form completed its journey and turned slowly towards us, silvered in the moonlight, it seemed not to belong to this earth.
I knew it was not a ghost, while I also knew it soon would be. I was totally unprepared, however, for the startling suddenness of the transition.
‘I came back to bring you peace,’ it quavered, ‘and for one more glimpse—’
It slipped to the floor. An arm slid forward along the ground, and came to rest within a few inches of Gretchen. The journey was over.
Then Herr Steinbaum came out of his trance. He came out of it with a quietness which drew my admiration and my gratitude. Composure was needed at that moment.
‘Can you carry Gretchen down?’ he asked, simply. ‘I will follow you.’
I stooped and picked her up. Luckily, she was light. I carried her down the countless stairs, and had hardly reached the bottom before I heard Herr Steinbaum behind me. After that, he preceded me to her bedroom, and then directed me to my own.
‘Will you wait for me there?’ he asked.
‘But isn’t there anything I can do?’ I answered.
‘If there is, I will let you know.’
I returned to my rooms. I waited. The walls no longer whispered. They were silent. I felt as though they had lost a fourth dimension.
In ten minutes, Herr Steinbaum joined me.
‘She is asleep—and everything else is done,’ he said. ‘So now, please, ask your questions.’
‘I may?’ I replied.
‘It is your right—and my desire.’
Three questions were racing through my mind. Each one was obvious, but I asked them diffidently.
‘Who was he?’
‘My brother, who owned this castle before me. The man who—fell out of the window.’
‘Who was—the woman?’
‘You saw her, then? She was my wife. She used to meet my brother in the tower-room, but had an accident before their last appointment. She told me a minute before she died. So I kept the last appointment for her.’
The third question came after a long pause.
‘And Gretchen?’
‘Their daughter, sir.’ There was a longer pause. ‘I learned that, also, in the last minute.’ Then Herr Steinbaum added, very quietly, ‘But murder is murder. And love is love. And Gretchen, the child of love, is very beautiful.’
‘But you did not murder him!’ I interposed, quickly.
‘We live by our intentions, not by our acts,’ he answered. ‘But, to-night, my brother has brought peace between us.’ Then he asked, abruptly, ‘You will not now wish to stay?’
‘I wish it more than ever,’ I replied.
He took a deep breath.
‘That pleases me,’ he said. ‘It will please Gretchen more. And now, if you will excuse me, I will go up once more to my brother.’
I jumped up and seized his arm.
‘You will come down again?’ I exclaimed.
‘Would I desert Gretchen?’ he answered.
A few seconds later, his footsteps died away in the passage.
You have had my story. And Herr Steinbaum’s and Gretchen’s. But the story of Herr Steinbaum’s brother, who fell from a tower and returned to it, is only known to the tide.