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88 pages

English

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OLD MAN'S BEARD, H. R. Wakefield's second collection of ghost stories, was first published in 1929, and built on the success of the earlier THEY RETURN AT EVENING. The fifteen disturbing tales collected here are: 'Old Man's Beard', 'The Last to Leave', 'The Cairn', 'Present at the End', '"Look Up There!"', '"Written in Our Flesh"', 'Blind Man's Buff', 'A Coincidence at Hunton', 'Nurse's Tale', 'The Dune', 'Unrehearsed', 'A Jolly Surprise for Henri', 'The Red Hand', 'Surprise Item', 'A Case of Mistaken Identity'.

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Ghost

Fiction

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	02 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781456636524
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Old Man's Beard
by H. R. Wakefield
Subjects: Fiction -- Ghost Stories; Horror

First published in 1929
This edition published by Reading Essentials
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
For.ullstein@gmail.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Old Man's Beard

fifteen disturbing tales

by R. H. WAKEFIELD

Old Man’s Beard

MR BICKLEY almost precisely satisfies our American friends’ definition of a ‘Regular Fellar’. That is to say, he makes an article of commerce, and by selling it at seven times its cost of production has prospered greatly. Mr Bickley has merely super-tax worries. He is a good ‘mixer’ — he knows sixty-three persons by their Christian names: he is always ready to talk golf shop, with particular reference to a gross eighty-seven he once ‘shot’ on a short course burnt to a cinder. He makes almost exactly the same slice off the first tee twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday, and can stow away several rounds of drinks without becoming unduly pugnacious, verbose or pleased with himself. He goes to and from the City in a big car and smokes a big cigar during the process. And so on and so on. But he slightly diverges from type in two respects; he quite frequently reads a book that has neither been written by Mr Edgar Wallace nor recommended to him for its candid treatment of the Sex Question, and he hasn’t got quite the Orthodox Regular Fellar’s life partner. Mrs Bickley is a bit of an enigma to the other R.F.s. Sometimes they are reassured that she is just what she ought to be — a ‘lovely little woman’, again in our American friends’ idiom — the adjective being a tribute to her character rather than her physical charms, though these are still considerable. But at other times the R.F.s have an unpalatable impression that she would like to take them by the shoulders and drown them in deep water. And then they are rather afraid of her and very sorry for Mr Bickley. As a matter of fact her mother was an Hungarian and temperamental, one who found even the Buda-Pesth variety of R.F. so desperately, irredeemably deadly that none such ventured for long into her presence. She had been the Perfect Mistress in her youth, a Perfect Wife to an Englishman of high intelligence in her middle age, and a formidable and indomitable old woman. In her daughter these characteristics were strongly diluted by Anglo-Saxon tolerance and phlegm; though sufficient of the fiery spirit remained to save her from becoming just a British Female Yawn. She was an avid but virtuous flirt in her youth, she is at present a perfect wife for an Englishman of no particular intelligence, and in her old age she will probably be a bit of an autocrat and a nuisance. And there are still to be found traces of that scarifying old mother of hers; sudden sharp explosions caused by boredom; quick, short-lived ardours for good-looking men with brains — though she meets very few — and apparently causeless fits of temper, so uncontrollable and uncompromising that poor Mr Bickley — that nice little man — has always urgently watched the temperamental development of his daughter and only child, Mariella, for symptoms of that dangerous and irregular Mittel -European strain. And, though they are still further diluted, they are there. She is all right in many respects. She is physically flawless and saved from being merely the ordinary, full-blooded, smooth-skinned, regular-featured Daily Mirror bathing belle by a delicate upward slant of her eyelids, and a certain indefinable but captivating ‘chic’, by an air of slightly exotic breeding and an absolute incapacity for giggling at little odd erotic moments. Again, though she is as intellectually incurious as a portable wireless set she is as sexually inquisitive as a curate, and in Mr Bickley’s opinion she knew What Every Young Girl Ought To Know much sooner than any young girl ought to know it. At the age of fifteen she had driven the chauffeur — a most high-minded young man — almost out of his mind by the warmth of her feelings towards him, and when they were discovered together by Mrs Bickley he had spilled indignant protests all over the garage where Mariella had neatly cornered him. After this infatuation faded, she had experienced a succession of hurried, hot passions for a number of hopelessly ineligible youths, so that Mr Bickley, with a meanness only excused by his desperation, once upbraided her mother for introducing this culpable and devilish strain into the staid and seemly Bickley stock. Whereupon, the Old Lady being in the ascendant, he got about five times as good as he gave and spent a restless night composing a dignified letter to The Times on the dangers of mixed marriages.

And then came that most desired return to Bickleyism, for Mariella accepted the hand — the in every way desirable hand — of young Arthur Randall. Six weeks before it hadn’t been desirable at all, for then he had been extremely impecunious, and merely — or so at least it appeared — a superlative player of games. Mariella had seen him make eighty-four runs against Larwood, Barratt and Staples when the dust was flying, and beat three men in succession to score the winning try against Wales, and as the applause rose and towered she had made up her mind, and prepared herself for a long and fiercely contested battle with her father. And then Arthur’s uncle suddenly slipped his anchor, leaving his nephew £80,000! This timely and unexpected event eased the situation completely, and Mariella was soon flourishing a solitaire diamond ring and the wedding was fixed for the end of October. The beginning of August found them all installed in a well-appointed furnished house at that aristocratic resort, Brinton-on-Sea, which Mr Bickley had rented for seven weeks.

This confinement within four walls gave Mr Bickley a not too earnestly desired opportunity of scrutinising the character of his prospective son-in-law, so far as that young gentleman permitted him to do so. Physically he was beyond criticism. Tall, lithe and dark, he had exceptional vitality and perfect health. He was a joy to look upon, and the fact that he had stood up to the Notts fast bowlers for two hours, and had picked their short ones off his nose and plunked them up against the square-leg boundary was sufficient evidence of his courage and pugnacity, as was that vicious ‘hand-off’ which had turned the Welsh full-back turtle and given him a very sore jaw-bone for a week. It would have been very soothing to have been able to couple these moral qualities and physical attributes with £80,000 and find nothing more to scrutinise. But Mr Bickley reluctantly and irritably nosed up something else; something enigmatic, elusive, buried so deep, as it were, that Mr Bickley felt his nose was only long enough to unearth its fringes and vague outline. What was it? Well, it sometimes revealed itself in sudden and most unexpected flashes of brutal, ruthless insight, almost a devilish sort of flourished egoism, most singular in so usually commonplace a master of moving spheres and ovals. Yet was he ever quite commonplace? Wasn’t that orthodox exterior possibly a very cunningly adjusted mask? Unpleasant questions which Mr Bickley reprimanded his mind for asking about his prospective son-in-law. Yet they had some justification. For example, on one occasion they had all been sitting on the beach and he had been reading out from the Daily Express an account of the lamentable defalcations of a former business acquaintance, with appropriate comments. And then young Randall had suddenly stared into his face with a most ironical and piercing expression and said, ‘There, but for a spot of caution and the grace of Old Nick, went Horace Bickley.’ Which was exceedingly rude and he hoped unjustified. It had taken him very much aback, though both Mariella and her mother had seemed amused. And then again, when they had been discussing a peculiarly unpleasant murder of a young woman by a solicitor’s clerk, and marvelling how he could have brought himself to commit such an atrocity, young Randall had remarked with frigid detachment, ‘She probably bored him, and if by slitting her gullet he prevented her from boring anyone else, I consider he did a service to Society.’ He said something unexpected and in bad taste like that quite often. Did he mean such things? He certainly appeared to. So he couldn’t be quite ordinary. Was that a good or a bad thing? Well, Mariella wasn’t quite ordinary either. All those difficult, adolescent tendencies, now so pleasantly dormant, that her foreign blood explained but didn’t eliminate, and other little signs here and there showed she had a slight streak of some kind. Perhaps their prospects of marital happiness would be increased by the fact that each was slightly peculiar, and certainly it was most reassuring that young Randall seemed so utterly devoted to Mariella, fiercely and fanatically so, and she seemed to have concentrated at last in a sort of smouldering and unvarying way.

Mr Bickley had waded his way through the evidence to a fairly favourable summing-up when something else came to worry him. Mariella didn’t seem very flourishing. The family G.P. had described her as the most flawless physical specimen he had ever examined, and the sun and sea and air of Brinton should have put the keenest edge on this brilliant Toledo blade, and the close presence of her lover should have made her spirit leap within her. But the actual result was depressingly different. After the first few days she seemed limp and lethargic and ‘snappy’ in the mornings. S