Now it happened that in the early hours of Whit-Monday, before Millie was woken up, Mr. Hall and Mrs. Hall both got up and went noiselessly down into the cellar. Their business there was of a private nature, and had something to do with the specific gravity of their beer. They had hardly entered the cellar when Mrs. Hall found she had forgotten to bring down a bottle of sarsaparilla from their room. As she was the expert and principal operator in this affair, Hall very properly went upstairs for it.
In the hall he was surprised to see that the stranger's door was open. He went on into his own room and found the bottle as he had been instructed.
But returning with the bottle, he noticed that the locks of the front door had been opened, that the door was not properly closed. And with a flash of inspiration he connected this with the stranger's room upstairs and the suggestions of Mr. Teddy Henfrey. He clearly remembered holding the candle while Mrs. Hall locked the door overnight. At the sight he stopped, then with the bottle still in his hand went upstairs again. He knocked at the stranger's door. There was no answer. He knocked again; then pushed the door open and entered.
It was as he expected. The bed, the room also, was empty. And what was stranger, even to his slow intelligence, on the bedroom chair and along the edge of the bed were the clothes, the only clothes as far as he knew, and the bandages of their guest. His big hat even was hanging over the bed-post.
As Hall stood there he heard his wife's voice coming out of the depth of the cellar, with that rapid telescoping of the syllables and interrogative rising intonation of the final words to a high note, by which the West Sussex villager indicates impatience. "George! Have you got what I want?"
At that he turned and hurried down to her. "Jenny," he said, over the cellar steps, "It's true what Henfrey says. He isn't in his room. And the front door's unlocked."
At first Mrs. Hall did not understand, and as soon as she did she decided to see the empty room for herself. Hall, still holding the bottle, went first. "If he isn't there," he said, "his clothes are. And what's he doing without his clothes, then? It's a most curious business."
As they came up the cellar steps, they both thought they heard the front door open and shut, but seeing it closed and nothing there, neither said a word to the other about it at the time. Mrs. Hall passed her husband in the passage and ran on first upstairs. Some one sneezed on the stairs. Hall, following six steps behind, thought that he heard her sneeze. She, going on first, was under the impression that Hall was sneezing. She threw open the door and stood looking around the room. "Of all the strange things!" she said.
She heard a sniff close behind her head as it seemed, and, turning, was surprised to see Hall a dozen feet away on the top-most stair. But in another moment he was next to her. She moved forward and put her hand on the pillow and then under the clothes.
"Cold," she said. "He's been up for an hour or more."
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened - the bed-clothes picked themselves up, jumped up suddenly into a sort of peak, and then jumped straight over the bottom of the bed. It was exactly as if a hand had held them in the centre and thrown them to one side. Immediately after, the stranger's hat flew off the bed-post, flying in a circle through the air, and then straight at Mrs. Hall's face. Then as quickly came the sponge from the washbasin; and then the chair, throwing the stranger's coat and trousers carelessly to one side, and laughing dryly in a voice very like the stranger's, turned itself up with its four legs at Mrs. Hall, seemed to take aim at her for a moment, and charged at her. She screamed and turned, and then the chair legs came gently but firmly against her back and pushed her and Hall out of the room. The door slammed violently and was locked. The chair and bed seemed to be executing a dance of triumph for a moment, and then abruptly everything was still.
Mrs. Hall almost fainted in Mr. Hall's arms in the hall. It was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Hall and Millie, who had been woken up by her scream of panic, succeeded in getting her downstairs, and applying the treatment customary in these cases.
"It was spirits," said Mrs. Hall. "I know it was spirits. I've read in the newspapers about them. Tables and chairs jumping and dancing - !"
"Take a drop more, Jenny," said Hall. "It will steady you."
"Lock him out," said Mrs. Hall. "Don't let him come in again. I half guessed - I might have known. With those eyes and bandaged head, and never going to church on a Sunday. And all those bottles - more than it's right for any one to have. He's put spirits into the furniture. My good old furniture! It was in that very chair my poor dear mother used to sit when I was a little girl. To think it should rise up against me now!"
"Just a drop more, Janny," said Hall. "Your nerves are all upset."
They sent Millie across the street through the golden five o'clock sunshine to wake up Mr. Sandy Wadgers, the blacksmith. Mr. Hall's compliments and the furniture upstairs was behaving in the most extraordinary manner. Would Mr. Wadgers come round? He was a knowing man, was Mr. Wadgers, and very resourceful. He took quite a serious view of the case. "I'm damned if that isn't witchcraft," was the view of Mr. Sandy Wadgers. "You want horseshoes for people like that."
He came round greatly worried. They wanted him to go first upstairs to the room, but he didn't seem to be in any hurry. He preferred to talk in the passage. Huxter's apprentice came out and began taking down the shutters of the shop window. He was called over to join the discussion. Mr. Huxter naturally followed in the course of a few minutes. The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action. "Let's have the facts first," insisted Mr. Sandy Wadgers. "Let's be sure we'd be acting perfectly right in breaking that door open."
And suddenly and most wonderfully the door of the room upstairs opened by itself, and as they looked up in amazement, they saw descending the stairs the figure of the stranger staring more blackly and blankly than ever with those unreasonably large blue glass eyes of his. He came down rigidly and slowly, staring all the time; he walked across the passage staring, then stopped.
"Look there!" he said, and their eyes followed the direction of his gloved finger and saw a bottle of sarsaparilla next to the cellar door. Then he entered the lounge, and suddenly, quickly, violently slammed the door in their faces.
Not a word was spoken until the last echoes of the slam had disappeared. They stared at one another. "Well, if that doesn't beat everything!" said Mr. Wadgers, and left the alternative unsaid.
"I'd go in and ask him about it," said Wadgers, to Mr. Hall. "I'd demand an explanation."
It took some time to convince the landlady's husband. At last he knocked, opened the door, and got as far as, "Excuse me - "
"Go to the devil!" said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and "Shut that door after you." So that brief interview terminated.