“So you really came to see me about Alfred Croucher?” said Dollar, but very gently, without the faintest accent of reproach.
“It was about both of them, but chiefly about him,” she admitted. “Of course I wanted to check his account of Mr. Scarth. If you had given him a good character, that would have been the end; but you gave him a much worse one than I expected. Croucher seems almost immaculate by comparison; honestly, I shouldn’t wonder if he were less lost to decency through his very association with a man so much worse than himself.”
“Did he tell you so?”
“He said it had brought him up with a round turn.”
“It’s possible,” said Dollar, not more dryly than he could help. “The psychology is all right.” He was smiling and nodding now. “And where is Mr. Croucher at the moment?”
“Walking up and down outside.”
“Until we call him in?”
“If only you will let me!”
She was on her feet, to take him at his word as soon as spoken; but he said that was Barton’s job, and, wondering aloud how Barton would like it, went out presumably to see. He was not gone long, and in another minute Alfred Croucher was cringing before them like a beaten cur.
But few curs whine as this one did that morning, while the crime doctor listened and their little lady winced. She was right about one thing. He did look ill; his cough was not altogether put on. He had been “tret somefink crool,” he declared, but without entering into particulars, for which Dollar did not press; but on the character of Mostyn Scarth there were no such reservations. Croucher denounced that monster with the white hatred of a holy warrior, casting up his eyes with all manner of passionate and pious invocations.
“Only take me away from ‘im, before it’s too late!” he implored, reluctant murder in the whites of his rolling eyes. “‘E’s a bad man, a very bad man ‘e is! The ‘appiest days o’ me life was wot I spent in ‘ere eighteen munf ago. It seems more like eighteen years— ‘ard. I never should’ve quit but for Shod, wot’s got a good long stretch for ‘is pines. ‘E’s another bad man; but for ‘im you ‘ad me in the ‘oller of yer ‘and, and might ‘ve made a man o’ me in no time.”
“Yet you went straight from me to threaten and rob the lady who sent you here!”
It was a dangerous opening, but Croucher did not take it. In ignoble emotion he fell upon the knees of a flash pair of trousers, which still showed the track of an ineradicable crease, and once more sued for the mercy and forgiveness already vouchsafed to him. And Lady Vera turned from the sly, leering, blinking, darting eyes to a pair turned hard as nails, and the harder for an oblique inner twinkle all their own.
“All right!” snapped Dollar, to her intense relief. “I’ll take you in, Croucher, for better or worse. Well make it for better, if we can; but do get to your two legs, man, instead of fawning on all four! Are you free to stop as you are, or is there anything you want to settle up first?”
“There’s me rooms,” said Croucher, eagerly. “There’s nuffink worth fetching, but I shouldn’t like to bilk the people, ‘speshly w’en ‘er lidyship’s gawn an’ give me the money, Gawd bless ‘er!”
Dollar precipitated the creature’s exit, on the verge of fresh saurian tears, of which there were further signs for his benefit on the mat. He might be a bad man, too, might Mr. Croucher, but he wasn’t as bad as Mostyn Scarth. And in that modest claim, at least, there was a bitter sincerity which received its due in a nod of keen acknowledgment.
“I never did think you were more than a second murderer, Croucher!”
“Wot’s that?”
The whites of those quick, furtive eyes were showing quite horribly in a moment.
“Only a technical expression, Croucher, meaning the minor malefactor.”
And he returned rather slowly into the eager presence of Lady Vera Moyle.
“I suppose I mustn’t fawn, either,” she said, in the softened tone of one of her rare rebukes. “But — do you think you can make anything of him — this time?”
“I hope so; but I shall be very glad to have him back, even if I fail again.”
“Why?”
The crime doctor gave her another of his oblique smiles.
“I shall be all the better able to watch Scarth’s latest move,” he said.
II
Over against the back windows of a nice new street of tall red houses, beyond the high red wall enclosing their common strip of shrubs and gravel, runs a humbler row of windows in connection with a mews. In one you may still catch a coachman shaving for the box, but more likely a chauffeur’s lady engrossed in her novelette; and on the next sill are pots of geraniums, while the next but one keeps the evening’s kippers nice and fresh. Most of the windows have muslin curtains, and in some the lights are on all night. Last October there was only one without any kind of covering, except a newspaper stuck across a broken pane.
It was the scandal of the row; a battered billycock lay rotting on the roof above; strange fragments of song were always liable to burst from within, as of a gentleman roistering in his sleep, and at times a bristly countenance would roll red eyes over the backs of the red houses, beginning and ending with the flats at the bottom of the street. If a dark handsome face appeared simultaneously at a top flat window, the chances were that both would vanish, but it would have been difficult to detect the exchange of actual signals.
On the return of Alfred Croucher, shaven and collared, from the audience in Welbeck Street, he went so far as to wink and wave from the window that disgraced the mews to the one that crowned the flats. His rolling eyes still had their whites about them; his wrists were still in unaccustomed cuffs; and Mostyn Scarth was at his elbow before it could be lifted with the bottle brought in to celebrate the occasion.
“Just one!” said Croucher, pitching his mongrel whine in the key of comic extravaganza. “I deserve all ten fingers for what I got to tell yer!”
“Not a drop, my Lazarus!” said Scarth. “When do you move in?”
“To-day — now.”
“You shall have the whole bottle when you come out. You may want it. What about that stamped note-paper?”
“Couldn’t lay ‘ands on a scrap.”
“Hadn’t you the waiting-room to yourself?”
“My witin’-room was the street, gov’nor.”
“Well, I must have a sheet or two as soon as you can stick them in the post; three or four would be safer, and at least a couple of his envelopes, in case of accidents. Now tell me everything that happened; and perhaps you shall have a drink before you go.”
There was no light that night in the window with the broken pane pasted over with newspaper; next day it was mended properly, and the sodden billycock removed from the roof before Alfred Croucher awoke from his innocent and protracted slumbers in the crime doctor’s patent chamber of perpetual peace.
His first impression was that some mysterious miracle had been performed expressly for his behoof. He must have been drunk to have slept so sound, and yet he had none of the disagreeable sensations which a long experience associated with the ordinary orgy. He felt profoundly rested and refreshed; never had he lain in so luxurious a bed; and the air was faintly scented, subtly soothing, and there was plenty of it, yet not a sound except the gentle stirring of his own breathing body between the sheets. His palate was clean and cool beyond belief. He opened his eyes, and saw a plain room sharp as crystal to the sight: not the bronze bedchamber that he suddenly remembered, but the same place steeped in purest sunshine, and ten thousand times fairer for the change.
Then he knew where he was, and precisely why he was there; and it was the mental equivalent of what Mr. Croucher called “‘ot coppers,” only this made him hot all over. He might have been in a fever; he hoped violently that he was. He remembered his cough, and began to practise it. A determined paroxysm revived his spirits; he was not fit to get up, and other people would just have to wait until he was, and serve ‘em jolly well right!
&nb
sp; Other people couldn’t get at him there; yet one other person could, and did, to Mr. Croucher’s mingled discomfort and relief. The doctor duly kept him in bed; but there was too much of the doctor; and yet the time hung heaviest when he was not there, and there were heavier burdens even than the time. The patient had lost his liking for a book. Conversation was more to his taste this time. His mind would wander when he read. It would follow the doctor down-stairs to his consulting-room, or across the landing to the room in which he slept. The man haunted him; it was better to have him there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher continually saw him when he was not there at all.
Better, again, to talk of some things than to dwell on them night and day, especially when those subjects seemed to possess an equally awful fascination for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in his line; that accounted for the doctor’s morbid taste, and the patient’s most terrible experience was quite enough to account for his. There was nothing unnatural in their talks. They had the thing in common, only from opposite poles of experience, which enormously enhanced the mutual interest. If there was one subject they were bound to have discussed, with no false delicacy on either side, each being what he was, it was the subject of the sixth commandment.
“Of course you think about it,” said Dollar, dismissing an incoherent excuse on the second day. “It must haunt you; it’s only natural that it should. All I should like you to do, since you never committed one, and are the last man in the world to commit one now, is to take a rather lighter view of that particular misdeed.”
“A lighter view!” repeated Croucher, goggling; and he added with a shuddering inconsequence: “The lor o’ the land don’t make light of it!”
“Literature has been known to,” rejoined the doctor, with as little apparent point. “But you are not the reader you were last year; otherwise there’s a little thing, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, that I should like to lend you.”
“One o’ the ‘ow much?” said Mr. Croucher, uncertain whether to grin, or frown, and meanwhile glaring more than he supposed.
Dollar went for the book, and read a few extracts aloud. They appeared to afford him extraordinary enjoyment; they were altogether over the bullet head on the pillow. Croucher could only gather that some people seemed to imagine it was good sport to commit a murder. Funny fools! Let them try a fortnight in the condemned cell, for one they never did commit, and see how they took to that!
But he could understand them that knew nothing about it writing a lot of rot like this; what beat him was that the crime doctor, of all people, and with all his uncanny knowledge of the subject, that even he was able to view the worst of crimes in a light which would never have dawned on the independent intellect of Alfred Croucher. It seemed to him a more lurid light than any in which he himself, at his worst, had ever seen such things; horrible, to his mind, that one who ran every risk of being murdered should sit there gloating over “the shades of merit” in one murder, and over others as “the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed.” What was more horrible, however, was the hollow note of Mr. Croucher’s own laughter, and the furtive gleaming of his restless eyes, while his body twitched between the sheets.
He asked for the book when Dollar rose to go; and was discovered, in due course, bathed in a perspiration which he made less effort to conceal.
“It ain’t all like them funny bits,” he assured the doctor, with an open shudder. “There’s a bit I struck about a servant gal, on one side of a door, an’ a bloke wot’s done the ‘ole bloomin’ family in on the other. My cripes! I ‘ad to ‘old me breff over that, and it’s made me sweat like a pig.”
“On which side of the door were you?”
“Wot’s that?”
“In your mind’s eye, my good fellow!”
Mr. Croucher had seldom found it easier to tell the truth, and he made the most of his opportunity.
“I felt as if I was the gal,” said he. “Shouldn’t wonder if I dreamt I was ‘er to-night!”
“Ah! I always find myself on the inside,” said Dollar, with extraordinary gusto. “I’d much rather have been the girl. She had the open street behind her, and the street-lamps; he had only his own handiwork in the dark, and hardly room enough to step out of the way of it. She got away, too, whereas he had to make away with himself. But I always would rather be the victim; he doesn’t know what’s coming; and it’s not a thousandth part as bad as — the other thing — when it does come.... I’m sorry, Croucher! You shouldn’t have asked me to leave you the book; but there’s nothing like looking at a thing from all sides, and it may console you to know that you’ve perspired over the best description of a murder ever written.”
Yet that was not the last of their morbid conversations; they would hardly be five minutes together before the noxious subject would crop up, nearly always through some reluctant yet irresistible allusion on the patient’s part. The doctor might come in overflowing with deliberate gaiety; there was something about him that set the bulbous eyes rolling with uneasy cunning, the cockney tongue wagging in its solitary strain, as it were under protest from the beaded brow.
On one occasion Dollar was the prime offender. It was the day after Croucher’s introduction to De Quincey and the first bad night spent by anybody in the Chamber of Peace. He declared he had not slept a wink, and was advised to get up and go for a walk.
“Alone?” said Croucher in a low voice.
“Why not? This isn’t prison, and I never hear you cough. You are not going to die just yet, Croucher!”
“I ‘ope nobody is, not ‘ere,” said Croucher, with a horrid twitch. “I feel as it might buck me up — a breff of air on a nice fine day like this.” His eyes rolled undecidedly, and the oil ran out of his voice. “But it ain’t no fun goin’ out alone.”
“Haven’t you any friends you could go and see?”
“No!” cried Croucher, with an emphasis that pulled him up. “I — I might write a letter, though — if you could spare me a bit o’ paper wiv the address.”
It was a very short letter that Alfred Croucher wrote, but a remarkably thick envelope that he himself took to the post, after looking many times up and down the street. And at the pillar-box, which was not many yards from the door, he again hesitated sadly before thrusting it in.
In the afternoon Dollar took him out in the car, and then it was that for once the poisonous topic was not introduced by Mr. Croucher.
“See that house?” said Dollar, pointing out one of the most modest in the purlieus of Park Lane. “There was no end of a murder there once. Swiss valet cut his master’s throat, made what he flattered himself were the hall-marks of burglars, and had the nerve to go into the room to wake the dead man up next morning.”
“Fair swine, eh?” said Mr. Croucher, with all the symptoms of disgust.
“A very fair artist, too,” rejoined the disciple of De Quincey. “That wasn’t his only good touch. He cut the old gentleman’s throat from ear to ear, and yet there wasn’t a spot of blood on his garments. How do you suppose he managed that? It’s a messy operation, Croucher; you or I would have made a walking shambles of ourselves!”
“How did he manage it?” asked Croucher, in a shaky growl.
“By taking off every stitch before he did the trick. How about that for a tip?”
Croucher made no reply. His teeth were clenched like those of a man bearing physical pain. They were nearly out of town, and Dollar had discoursed upon autumn tints and the nip in the air before being abruptly interrogated as to the “fair swine’s” fate.
“Need you ask?” said he. “The poor devil was too clever by half, and made a big mistake for each of his strokes of genius. He was taken, tried, condemned, and all the rest of it! And a greater writer than the gentleman who kept you awake last night wrote the best description of — all the rest of it — in existence. But don’t you ask me to lend you that!”
“They always seem to forget somefink,” said Alfred Crou
cher, another long mile out of town.
“The first thing being that the best murders oughtn’t to look like murders,” the criminologist agreed. “They ought to look like accidents, or suicides at the most. But it takes a Mostyn Scarth to cut as deep as that.”
“Wot the ‘ell mikes yer fink of ‘im?” cried Croucher, in a fury at the very name.
“Well, among other things, the fact that he saw us off in the car just now. Do you mean to say you didn’t see through the false beard of the gentleman who was picking up his umbrella as we turned into Wigmore Street?”
III
Never again did Alfred Croucher venture out alone, even as far as the pillar-box; not another letter had he to post, though he received one, wrapped round a stone, once when his window was open, and literally devoured every word. He did go out, but only with the crime doctor in his car, for an hour or two in the afternoon.
More than once they got out at Richmond Park, sent the car across to one of the other gates, and followed at a brisk walk, shoulder to shoulder, with Croucher often peeping over his, but Dollar never. The walk was sometimes broken for as long as it took Croucher to smoke a pipe in one or another of the beautiful wooded enclosures which are the inner glory of the most glorious of all public parks. There, under red canopies of dying leaves, their feet upon a russet carpet of the dead, the smoker would rest in a restless silence, because the one subject which had made him eloquent was now tabooed. Even in the Chamber of Peace there was no peace for Alfred Croucher, and but little sleep, although the doctor had walked him off his legs and would sit beside him till all hours. So the literary and conversational treatment had been altered once for all; and now the patient would hardly read or speak a word.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 516
