The Particular Frequency of the Scullery Light
Being an account assembled from the household journals of Mrs. Dorothea Pembridge, and the recollections of her daughter, Miss Clara Pembridge, aged nine, as recorded by Dr. F. Ashmore, M.D., F.R.C.P., attending physician and family acquaintance, at the request of Mr. Reginald Pembridge, in the autumn of 1903. Dr. Ashmore wishes it noted that he approached this matter as a man of science, and that his conclusions remain, at every point, entirely provisional.
The gasfitter came on a Tuesday.
Mr. Pembridge had engaged the man — a competent, unremarkable fellow from the firm of Grout & Sons, Harlow Street — to install a new burner in the scullery, the old fixture having grown corroded beyond reasonable maintenance. The work was completed by four in the afternoon. The man was paid. He left. Mrs. Pembridge noted in her journal that the new light was "quite satisfactory," that it burned "cleanly," and that she was "pleased with the arrangement." She then recorded, at some length, her feelings regarding the cost of turnips.
It was Clara who first heard it.
I should describe Clara as she was in those weeks, before the business with the light had progressed to its later stages. She was, by every account, an unusually composed child — not given to fancies or vapours, not disposed toward the theatrical sensibility one occasionally encounters in children of the literary classes. Her mother described her, with a certain deflation, as "sensible." Her father called her "steady." Her elder brother, William, aged fourteen, called her "a frightful bore," which, given the circumstances, I now consider the most prescient observation made by any member of the household.
Clara was steady. Clara was sensible.
Clara heard the light.
The humming began, so far as can be established, on the Wednesday evening — the day after installation. Mrs. Pembridge recorded nothing unusual. The cook, Mrs. Betts, made no mention of it. William claimed, with the confident boredom of adolescence, that he had not been in the scullery at any relevant hour.
Clara said nothing at all, for eleven days.
It is this silence that strikes me now as more significant than I allowed at the time.
When she finally spoke — and she spoke to me, not to her parents, which I consider either a compliment to our friendship or a measure of how thoroughly she had calculated that her parents would not be useful — she described the sound as follows:
"It is not like singing. It is more like remembering a song. As though something once knew the song and does not know it anymore, but keeps trying. It does not get louder. It never gets louder. That is the part I cannot explain."
I asked her whether the melody was one she recognised.
She looked at me with an expression I had previously associated with much older faces, and said: "That is rather the trouble, isn't it."
I accompanied Clara to the scullery the following afternoon, at her invitation. I will record what I observed with the precision I have always brought to clinical documentation, and I will not embellish it, and I will ask the reader to bear in mind that I have examined children professionally for nineteen years, and I know the difference between a frightened child and a child who is frightening.
The scullery was as one would expect: stone floor, deep ceramic sink, rack of copper pans, the usual industry of any domestic workspace. The new gaslight fixture was affixed to the east wall, a modest brass fitting, functional rather than ornamental, burning with the steady blue-edged flame that one now regards as the ordinary signature of modern gas.
I heard nothing.
I said as much to Clara.
"It doesn't always start at once," she said. She sat down on the low wooden step that separated the scullery from the larder passage — a step I noticed, for no reason I could immediately identify, that she had chosen with the care of someone who had already considered, and rejected, several other positions — and she waited.
We sat together in the light of that new and entirely unremarkable burner for perhaps eight minutes.
Then the temperature dropped.
I am a physician. I do not use that phrase loosely. The air in the scullery grew cold with a thoroughness that had nothing to do with draughts, with the season, with the ventilation of the room. It dropped the way a held breath releases — suddenly, completely, as if the warmth had never been present at all. The copper pans, I noticed, were no longer quite the colour they had been. The shadows behind the drying rack had changed their geometry in some fashion I did not examine closely enough to describe with accuracy, though I have since wished that I had.
I still heard nothing.
Clara's face had gone very still.
"There," she said.
I should like to report that I undertook a thorough investigation. I should like to tell you that I summoned Grout & Sons, that I requested an inspection of the fitting and the pipes, that I had the gaslight removed and replaced with an oil lamp, that the disturbances ceased and the matter concluded with the tidy resolution one prefers in accounts of this kind.
I did do these things. That is not, I'm afraid, where the account concludes.
The gasfitter who returned from Grout & Sons — not the original man, who had, I was informed, left the firm under circumstances nobody seemed willing to specify — examined the fixture for the better part of an hour. He declared it sound. He declared the pressure regular. He declared the humming, if humming there was, consistent with minor turbulence in the supply line, a phenomenon entirely without significance, which could be resolved by a small adjustment to the valve.
He made the adjustment.
Clara went to the scullery that evening.
She returned to the parlour almost immediately. She sat down beside her mother, took up the book she had been reading — a natural history of British birds, if the detail is of interest to anyone — and did not say anything at all.
Later, after the household had retired, I found her still in the parlour, in the dark, the book closed in her lap.
She said: "It knows the song now."
I asked her what she meant.
She said: "Before, it was trying to remember. That was the worst part, I thought. But it was not the worst part." She paused. The fire was very low. "It remembered while I was in there. I watched it remember." Another pause. "I don't think I should go back."
I asked what she had seen. Physicians ask questions. It is the one thing we are reliably good for.
Clara considered this for a long moment. Then she said, with the terrible precision of a sensible child:
"I don't think I should say. I don't think it helps, saying."
Mr. Pembridge had the light removed the following week, and an oil lamp installed in its place. He noted in his own journal that the gaslight had given "unsatisfactory performance," and that he had "always preferred oil." He did not, to my knowledge, ask Clara for her opinion.
The cold did not return to the scullery.
Clara did not return to the scullery either.
She is, as I write this, eleven years old now, and she remains — her mother's word — sensible. She does her lessons. She walks the dog. She eats her meals without complaint.
She does not, her mother notes, with a mild and unexamined puzzlement, spend any time near lights she has not herself lit.
I have not asked her why.
I find, on reflection, that I do not wish her to explain.