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CHAPTER IX
THE GOBLINS OF THE KITCHEN

Among the things that impressed us amid the general goings-on about the house was the evidence of a certain sort of humor in the makeup of the influences that were seemingly responsible for them. That this humor did not particularly appeal to our taste, I must admit; it seemed distinctly lacking in subtlety, and suggested that its authors might be the spirits of certain disembodied low comedians of the bladder-and-slapstick variety. To some such agency, at least, we came to attribute the phenomena of the slamming doors, jingling door bell, and occasional upsetting of the parlor; and from time to time other things occurred to break this monotony of elfish sprightliness, and to show us that our spookish friends were not mere creatures of routine, but were full of waggish resource. The indoor incidents that I have already narrated may seem to have borne the ancient ghostly – or "poltergeistic" – trademark, and to have been contrived and employed after a conventional and long-approved plan: – but if there is anywhere a Shadowland Patent Office, the originators of the pranks I am about to describe should be enjoying its protection for their ingenious inventions.

I was sitting in my room at about noon, one day, awaiting a call to the luncheon which my wife was preparing. Suddenly I heard her call out from the front hall: "Come here, quick! I have something queer to show you!" I went out at once, and found her standing at the door of the dark chamber I have previously described, wherein we were accustomed to keep milk, butter, and other such provisions, for the sake of coolness.

"Look in there," said my wife – and I looked in accordingly; but I observed nothing unusual, and so reported.

"Look up," she said again. I did so, and saw a large milk pan resting motionless in the air just under the ceiling several feet above my head and just beneath the perforated opening of the ventilator. I naturally inquired how it had got there.

"I hardly know," replied my wife; "the thing was done so quickly. The pan is full of milk, and was resting on the floor of the hollow space when I came to get some of the milk for our lunch. I had taken up the pan, when it was snatched from my hands and floated up to the place where you now see it."

"This is something new," I remarked, "and rather interesting. I hope the spooks are not drinking the milk" – and as I spoke, the pan began deliberately to descend. When it was within reach I caught hold of the handle on each side, and tried to accelerate its motion. It stopped immediately, and although I employed considerable force I could not budge it. (The effect was not at all as if I were pulling against a physical force like my own; the pan was as immovable and inert as though it were a component part of the masonry of the chamber about it.) I stood aside, therefore; whereupon it began to float down again, and shortly settled in its former place on the floor, touching it so lightly that the contact did not cause even a ripple upon the surface of the milk. We tasted that milk very carefully before venturing to use it for our repast, but found nothing wrong with it.

A few evenings after the episode of the levitating milk pan, we all three went into Melbourne after dinner to attend the theatre. After the performance and while on the way to our train we passed a cook-shop, in whose window was displayed a quantity of roasted duck and teal, the game season then being at its height. They looked so appetizing that I was moved to go in and purchase a pair of teal for a shilling or two (these birds were astonishingly plentiful, and correspondingly cheap in Australia at the time), had them put into a paper box, and carried them home with the view to a light supper before we should go to bed. As it seemed hardly worth while to use the dining-room, we went into the kitchen; where I put the teal on a platter and prepared to carve them while my wife was arranging the plates and necessary cutlery. The carving knife was in its usual place in the knife-box, but I could not find the fork that went with it, and so remarked.

"Why," said my wife, "it's there with the knife, of course." She spoke with conviction and authority, for among her conspicuous traits was a love for orderliness in all things pertaining to the household.

Nevertheless, the fork was not there; nor could we find it, although we overhauled everything in the cupboard in search for it. Meanwhile our friend, actuated by the laudable purpose of keeping out of the way of our preparations, was standing near the door, with his hands in his pockets.

"I see it!" he suddenly exclaimed, and withdrawing one hand from its confinement, he pointed upward. My eye followed the direction thus indicated, and I also saw the missing utensil: – it was stuck into the upper part of the window casing, just under the ceiling, and a folded paper was impaled upon its tines. I got upon the table and took the fork from its position. It required considerable force to do so, for the tines were deeply imbedded in the woodwork. Then I unfolded the paper. It was about four inches square, and drawn upon it, with much spirit and a strict adherence to the principles of realism in art, were a skull and crossbones. These were done in a red medium which at first we thought was blood, but which we finally decided to be ink, since it retained its color for weeks, and did not darken, as blood would have done. There was no writing whatever on the sheet; therefore we had no reason to regard it as an attention from the "Black Hand" – another reason being that we had never heard of the "Black Hand" at that time. We had no red ink in the house, nor any paper like that upon which the design was drawn – and nothing ever occurred to throw any light on the matter.

This incident – like that of the hurled stone – seemed so palpably referable to human agency that it revived the rather feeble hope we had from time to time entertained that we might, after all, be the victims of some ingenious trickery. Therefore our friend and I devoted one afternoon to a close search of the house, outhouse, and the premises generally, particularly exploring the dusty attic for concealed machinery – in short, for anything that might give a clue to the mystery. We emerged from the attic looking like a couple of sweeps, but this was the only result achieved; nor did we accomplish anything else in all our investigations. As for the attic, nobody could get into it otherwise than by bringing the ladder into the house from the outhouse and raising it to the trap-door in the ceiling of the bathroom. As to outside origin of the various pranks that had been played upon us, we could see no way in which they could be performed in view of the fact that we had every facility to observe the approach of any mischief-maker: – since we had a wide street on two sides of us, and the houses on each of the other two sides were at least a hundred yards away. The fact that most of the "manifestations" with which we had been favored had occurred in the daytime added to the puzzle; the only two things that we could explain as perhaps the work of beings like ourselves (the episodes of the thrown stone and of the fork) had occurred under the cover of darkness: – therefore, hoping that, with these data to go upon, we might get to the cause of our annoyances, we set a trap with the hope that if any practical joker were at work, he might walk into it.

In furtherance of this purpose I sent my wife and our friend to the theatre, a few evenings later, accompanying them to the railway station after extinguishing all the lights in the house in order to create the impression in the mind of any possible watcher of our movements that we were all three equally on pleasure bent in town, and returning by a devious route which finally brought me by a scramble over the orchard fence to the back door. I quietly let myself into the house, arranged an easy chair at a point where I could command the hall in both directions, and sat down amid utter darkness, with my revolver in my jacket pocket and my shot gun, heavily charged in both barrels, across my knees. I was fully determined to test the materiality – or otherwise – of any shape that might present itself, by turning my artillery loose thereon without any preliminary word of challenge; but although my vigil lasted until midnight, I was obliged to report to my returning companions that nothing whatever had happened.

I may add that that evening was the longest and least agreeable I ever experienced.

It may be that the incident with which I shall close this rather rambling chapter was promoted by the same humorists who devised the conceit of the floating milk pan, and was employed as a means of enabling us to recognize therein the authors of the former whimsicality. The two pleasantries seemed, at all events, to have been conceived in the same spirit, and although both were equally odd and purposeless, the superior elaborateness of the second distinctly showed an advance over the first, and gained our applause accordingly. There was no connection between these episodes in point of time; in fact, the second occurred several months after the first, in the hottest part of the year.

Our friend being a Briton by birth and an Australian by adoption, he had enjoyed rather a narrow experience in dietetics, particularly in the vegetable line. During the early part of our housekeeping we had found much difficulty in securing for our table any garden delicacies outside the conventional list of potatoes, "vegetable marrow," and cauliflower – until Providence brought to our back door an amiable Chinese huckster, who, with several compatriots, had established a small truck-farm in the neighborhood. Earnest representations regarding our vegetableless conditions inspired his interest, and the promise of good prices awakened his cupidity; and as a result of the agreement of these motives it was not long before our table greatly improved.

And I cannot help saying – although this is a digression – that our often-expressed words of satisfaction to our purveyor stimulated him to produce and bring to us everything of the best that he could raise. In his way he was an artist, with an artist's craving for praise – so that now and then he would appear with a gift of some new product for us to try, and occasionally with a small packet of choice tea or some other Celestial delicacy, for which he would invariably refuse payment.

"You should not bring me these things," my wife said to him one day. "You can't afford them."

"Me likee bling 'em," he replied. "An' me likee you. You no ploud. Mos' lady too ploud" – and swinging his baskets to his shoulder he departed.

It was my wife's delight to tempt our friend's appetite with all sorts of culinary novelties, which the new and more liberal order of things allowed her to prepare. With true British conservatism he would venture gingerly upon an unfamiliar dish, admit it "wasn't half bad," and end by eating as much of it as both of us others together. It was finally discovered that a particularly effective way of appeal to his nature was through the medium of baked stuffed tomatoes: – of these he seemed never to have enough, and, as a consequence, they were frequently upon our bill-of-fare during the summer. It seems incredible – and lamentable – that a man should have got well into the fifties without ever having eaten a baked stuffed tomato: – such, however, was our friend's unhappy case, and my wife made strenuous efforts to ameliorate it.

"I have a treat for you to-night," she said to our friend. "Guess what it is."

"Baked stuffed tomatoes," he responded promptly – and baked stuffed tomatoes it was.

"Now," continued my wife, "you two men must eat your dinner in the kitchen to-night. The woman who cooks for me is ill to-day, and you will have to take pot-luck. I have let the fire in the stove go out, and have been using the gas range; so you will find the kitchen cooler than the dining-room, and by eating there you will save me work, besides."

So we went into the kitchen, where we found the table already laid for us.

"Before we sit down," said my wife, turning smilingly to our friend, "I am going to show you the treat you were so clever in guessing. But you are not to have it at once; that will come after the cold meat. The tomatoes are nice and hot, and I have put them in here to keep them from cooling too fast: " – and with these words she kneeled upon the floor and opened the iron door which shut in a wide but shallow cavity in the masonry that formed the base of the open fireplace.

This fireplace was an unusual feature in a modern kitchen, and we, at least, had never put it to any use. It projected slightly into the room, and on the sides of it, and against the wall in each case, were, respectively, the cook stove and gas range. Under its hearth, and but a few inches above the level of the room, was the hollow space I have mentioned – I believe it was what is sometimes called a "Dutch oven" – eight inches high, perhaps, two feet wide, and eighteen inches deep. From this space my wife partly drew out for our inspection an iron baking pan, in which an even dozen of deliciously cooked, golden-and-red, crumb-stuffed tomatoes were sociably shouldering each other: – then, after hearing our expressions of satisfaction with their appearance, she pushed the pan back again, closed the iron door, and sat down with us to dinner.

The table stood against the wall, directly under the window. My wife was seated at the end next to the fireplace, I was opposite her, and our friend was at the side, his back to the hall door and his face to the window. Thus he and my wife were each within two feet of the fireplace and the chamber under it, and the iron door guarding our treasure was in direct range of my own eyes from the position I occupied.

Having despatched the earlier portions of the repast, my wife arose, removed the used dishes to a side table, set others in their places, and with the remark: "Now for the tomatoes!" swung open the iron door under the fireplace. The interior, however, was absolutely empty: – the tomatoes, and the heavy baking pan that had held them, had disappeared!

Our friend and I sprang from our chairs in astonishment and incredulity – but the fact was undoubted; the treat which had been so much anticipated had been snatched, as it were, from our very lips. Our friend turned from one to the other of us a face so comically set between wonder and disappointment that I burst out laughing in spite of myself. But my ill-timed levity was promptly checked by my wife, who was at the moment giving a competent imitation of a lioness robbed of her whelps.

"Oh!" she cried, seemingly addressing nothing in particular, although she might have felt – as I did – that she was speaking to a derisive audience; "that is too bad of you! To steal my tomatoes, when I worked over them so long! Bring them back instantly!" But they remained invisible, and over all a sarcastic silence brooded. Then she turned upon us unfortunate men.

"Have you been playing me a trick?" she demanded. "Do you know what has become of those tomatoes?" "Certainly not" – this to both questions. Neither of us had moved from his chair since we sat down to dinner and she had shown us the pan and its contents. Nor had she, for that matter, except when she had risen to change the dishes, and even then she had not left the room.

All that could be said was that the tomatoes had been exhibited, and then had been shut up again behind the door. There was no possible doubt about that – it was equally certain that they had vanished. Very well, then let us search for them! This we did, and with great thoroughness, all over the house, and in every part of the grounds; the outhouse at the back was also carefully inspected. I even got the ladder and went, in turn, upon the roofs of both structures, looked down the chimneys: – "nothing doing" (to employ an Oriental expression not then, unhappily, in use); nowhere any trace of the missing pan or of the tomatoes.

We gave it up finally, and went back to our dessert and coffee. My wife refused to be satisfied that the tomatoes were actually gone. She was constantly getting up to open the iron door and view the emptiness behind it – as if she expected the apparent dematerialization of the pan and tomatoes to be reversed, – while our friend looked on with an aspect of forced resignation.

I left them after a time, and went out for an after-dinner smoke on the back doorstep. I had hardly lighted my pipe when I heard a cry blended of two voices in the kitchen – a shriek from my wife, and a mildly profane ejaculation from our friend. Rushing in, I saw an astonishing sight – our friend, with staring eyes and blanched face, supporting himself against the table as if staggered by a blow, my wife kneeling in front of the open iron door beneath the fireplace, and the baking pan and its dozen tomatoes lying before her on the floor!

It was some time before I could get a coherent account of what had happened. It was finally developed, however, that after I had left the room the conversation continued on the inexplicable conduct of the tomatoes. "I can't believe they are not there!" my wife asserted, and, for the dozenth time or so, she again knelt on the floor and again opened the door.

"I was standing right behind her," said our friend, "and saw her swing the door open, but there was nothing inside. At the same instant I heard a thump on the floor, and there the whole outfit was, just in front of her. I don't know where the things came from – perhaps down the chimney: – at any rate, one moment there was nothing there; the next, the pan and the tomatoes were on the floor."

After we had regained our composure we considered what we should do with the tomatoes. Our friend said he didn't think he wanted any of them, and I confessed to an equal indifference – so capricious, and often influenced by slight circumstances, is the appetite!

My wife, as usual, settled the matter. "Take them away!" she said. "Throw them into the garbage barrel!" – which was accordingly done; melancholy end of a culinary triumph! Yet we ought at least to have tasted those tomatoes: under the title "tomato à la diable" they might have found a place in the cook books.

CHAPTER X
A SPECTRAL BURGLARY

I cannot but consider it an interesting circumstance that the varied happenings in the House on the Hill seemed to arrange themselves into two rather strictly defined classes – the sportive and the terrible – and that the respective influences responsible for them appeared carefully to refrain from interfering with each others' functions or prerogatives. As among our earthly acquaintances we number some who are entirely deficient in appreciation of the ridiculous, and others so flippant as to have no sense of the serious, so, it seemed to us, the unseen friends who so diversely made their presence known were in like manner to be differentiated.

In this connection another singular fact is to be noted. While the clownish performers in the juggling of the milk pan, the prestidigitation of the baked stuffed tomatoes, and other such specialties, always remained invisible, even to my wife, what I may call the more dramatic manifestations were accompanied by apparitions that were the evident actors in them. It also occurred to us that if the "acts" that were staged for our benefit were to be regarded as presenting what passed for entertainment in the Dark World, there must be drawn there, as here, a sharp line of distinction between vaudeville and "the legitimate;" incidentally, too, it would seem that ghostly audiences were like many in the flesh in their capacity for being easily entertained.

However that may be, we somehow came to the opinion that while the more impressive of the phenomena with which we were favored appeared to be due to the action of beings that had aforetime been upon the earth – for in every such case the attending spectres were to be identified as simulacra of persons whose previous existence was known to some one (and generally all) of us, – the tricksy antics that seemed to come from Nowhere might find their impulse in elementary entities or forces which had not yet exercised their activities upon the earth plane (and, indeed, might never be intended to do so), and thus had never assumed a material form. I do not put this forward as a theory, but simply as a passing impression that lightly brushed our minds: – and to repel the temptation of being led into the seductive regions of speculation, I will re-assume my rôle as a mere narrator of facts and describe a quite inexplicable affair that occurred near the close of our tenancy.

The bedroom which I have before described as being at the front of the house, with two windows overlooking the veranda, was occupied at night by my wife and myself. Between the windows was a ponderous mahogany dressing table, surmounted by a large mirror. This article of furniture was so broad that it extended on either side beyond the inner casing of the windows, and so heavy that it required the united strength of both of us to move it – as, during the cleaning of the room, we sometimes had to do. The windows were protected by wire screens, secured by stout bolts which were shot into sockets in the woodwork, and fitted flush with the surface of the outer window casing. In February – the time of which I am writing – the weather was at its hottest, and we slept at night with the windows open, trusting our security to the strong wire screens.

One morning, after an untroubled night's sleep, I awoke soon after sunrise, and from my place in bed, nearest the window, looked lazily out upon the day. Still half-asleep, I lay for some time without noting anything unusual; but as my sensibilities revived I observed that the screen was missing from the left-hand window, and that the dressing table, instead of standing in its usual place against the wall, was turned half-way around, and projected at right angles into the room. I was out of bed in an instant, and at the window – looking out of which I saw the screen lying flat on the floor of the veranda. I went out and examined it. It was uninjured, and the bolts still projected from either side to show that they had not been drawn; but two deep grooves in the woodwork of the casing indicated that the screen had been dragged outward from its place. How this damage could have been done to the stout casing, without marring in the least the comparatively light frame of the screen, I could by no means understand – particularly as there was no possible way by which one could get a hold upon the outside of the screen except by the use of screws or gimlets to act as holds for one's hands; and of these there were no marks whatever.

I had made this examination so quietly that I had not awakened my wife: – now, however, I returned to the bedroom and aroused her.

Her first thought, on seeing the condition of affairs, was that burglars had visited us: – my idea had been the same until I had observed the peculiar facts that I have just noted. Tacitly accepting this theory for the moment, I assisted her in making an inventory of our portable valuables. While I satisfied myself that my purse and watch were safe, my wife took her keys from under the pillow (where she always kept them at night) and went to the dressing table, in one of whose drawers was her jewel box. The drawer was locked, and so was the jewel box, and the latter, on being opened, seemed to hold all its usual contents intact.

"No," she said, after mentally checking off the various articles; "everything is here; nothing has been taken. Wait! I am wrong; one thing is missing. Do you remember that rhinestone brooch in the shape of a butterfly you bought for me one evening in Paris, four years ago?"

"Why, yes," I replied; "I got it in a shop under the arcades on the Rue de Rivoli, and paid five francs for it. You don't mean to say that the thieves, or our friends the 'spooks,' or whoever it may be, have taken that trifle and left your diamond rings and other things really valuable untouched!"

Yet such appeared to be the case – the cheap and unimportant brooch was the only thing unaccounted for, nor had anything else been disturbed throughout the house. It seemed incredible that any burglar who had passed merely the kindergarten stage of schooling in his profession could have been deceived into supposing that this commonplace article de Paris had any value; besides, why should this have been taken and the real jewelry that lay with it in the same box have been left? And how had it been extracted from the locked box inside the locked dressing table? The keys of both were on the same ring under my wife's pillow, and although a robber might extract them without awaking her, it seemed unreasonable to suppose he would take the additional risk of replacing them when he had completed his work. But for these and other questions that presented themselves we could find no satisfactory answers.

We ate our breakfast in a state of mild expectation that the brooch might be returned as mysteriously as it had been taken. The adventure seemed to be constructed on lines similar to those laid down in the affair of the baked stuffed tomatoes, and we were disposed to credit it to the same agency; – but if the sprites who were responsible for the former prank had contrived this later one also, they either intended to carry it no further, or were preparing a different dénouement. This last conjecture proved to be the true one, but we had to wait a long time for the fact to be developed.

We gave our "spooks" sufficient time to consummate their joke (if, indeed, they were responsible for it), and finally concluding that they were not inclined to embrace the opportunity, we again took under consideration the burglar theory, and I went to the local police station to report the occurrence. Two heavyweight constables returned with me to the house and gravely inspected the premises. Their verdict was speedy and unanimous: – "Housebreakers." There had been similar breakings-and-enterings in the town recently – therefore the facts were obvious. I showed them the drawer and jewel box, and described the singular and modest spoil of the supposed thieves; I also exhibited the unmarred frame of the screen and the scarred window casing, and asked them how they explained that. This puzzled them, but they fell back easily upon the obvious and practical. "Housebreakers," they repeated. "We shall make a report" – and marched away as ponderously as they had come. I did not acquaint them with the goings-on in that house for a year past: – had I done so, my prompt apprehension as a suspicious character would doubtless have followed.

In July of the following year I went from Philadelphia, where I was then living, to spend a few days with my wife at Savin Rock (near New Haven, Connecticut), where I had rented a cottage for the summer. The morning after my arrival I was awakened by my wife, who had risen but the moment before, and who, as I opened my eyes, exclaimed excitedly: "Look! Look at what is on the bureau!" Following with my eyes the direction of her pointed finger, I saw upon the bureau the pin-cushion into which I had stuck my scarf pin the night before, beside which, and in the centre of the cushion, appeared the butterfly brooch which I had last previously seen in Australia, sixteen months before!

"Where did you find it?" I asked, forgetting for the moment, and in my half-awake condition, the incident in which it had figured as above described.

"I didn't find it," my wife replied; "it is less than a minute ago that I saw it. It was not on the pin cushion last night; how in the world did it come here?" – "And from where?" – thus I completed the question.

Neither of us had any reply to this: – so I merely advanced the suggestion that it was pleasant to think that our spookish friends had not altogether forgotten us, although on our part we had no desire to cultivate their better acquaintance. This expression of sentiment may have had its effect: – at any rate, with the return of the brooch came an end to the mystery of "The House on the Hill."