His imagination, however, was strengthened in its hold on a disagreeable subject by a little, circumstance which occurred on the way back that evening. On Hind-head a tire bumped heavily, and was discovered down; and the dark crew disembarked while the young white man jacked up his wheel and put on the Stepney. The spot was close to the famous Gibbet, and the quartette not only strolled on to the memorial stone by the roadside, but one of them returned for a side-lamp with which to illuminate the inscription. Now the chauffeur knew parts of this by heart, having bought picture post-cards of the stone “erected in detestation of a barbarous murder” when putting up at the Huts in his last employ. As he wrestled with his wheel he heard an uncouth clucking of alien tongues; but it was not this that made him look up, and left the bad impression on his mind; it was the sudden chorus of cacophonous merriment, and the spectacle of four human beings leaning back in a patch of lamp: light, on the grassy brink of a black abyss, and holding their sides before the record of the cruel deed once done there.
“They want tipping into it,” thought Oswald Alfred; “the Devil’s Punchbowl’s just about their mark.”
Their heathen behaviour might not have struck him without Lord Amyott’s previous inquiries after the last chauffeur, and those inquiries might not have stuck in his mind if the heathen had not behaved so that evening. The unfortunate sequence formed a vicious circle in a mind not used to coping with unpleasant fancies, and spoilt his night for as good a sleeper as a very young man should be. Nor was it quite nice to lie awake, wondering about one’s predecessor, in his very bed, and that the only one in a separate building containing several locked rooms or potential Bluebeard chambers.
That night he thought of giving notice in the morning, and perhaps making off before his week was up, but a series of fine spring days hardened the lad in his original determination to “stick it” till the summer. He was no coward, when all was said in his disfavour, and as a rule he showed your real road-hog’s plentiful lack of imagination. He was not going to be a fool and forfeit a clear two pounds a week, and no silly complaints. Even the now formidable Ghum made no further allusion to the indiscretion about the Jam, did not hold it over a fellow, but seemed to have forgotten all about it, and only redoubled the ardour of his own efforts to learn to drive the car.
But you may teach a man to drive like an arrow when there is nothing else on the Ripley Road, and yet never know when a wobble of the wheel or a foot on the wrong pedal may spell instantaneous disaster. It was only a wing and a step that Mr. Ghum damaged to the like detriment of a passing car; but he was seen no more at the wheel, and it was Smart Sahib (as the menials sometimes called him with rolling eyes) who took a select load in the favorite direction about a week after their last encounter with Lord Amyott. This time, however, it was the middle of the evening before they started. And no secret was made of their intention to see Lord Amyott again, and as it certainly appeared to Oswald Alfred, by appointment.
Over Hindhead hung a skyful of stars, and if there were fewer to be seen from the lane near Liphook, it was not the fault of stars or sky. This time no wistful peeping into Paradise, but confident entry at the side gate on the part of that powerful Peri Mr. Ghum and his serene master. The white youth scarcely noticed that a dark one quietly took the vacant seat beside him, that another leant as quietly against the Stepney wheel, or for that matter that there had been four of them seated behind instead of three. It was not a night on which you noticed all you ought; the stars were too beautiful, sparkling to the eyes as the keen air did in the mouth and lungs. And for long enough nothing was to be heard but those small noises of the country night, which can mean so little individually to a cockney soul like Oswald Alfred’s, yet perhaps so much in the mass. At all events he was not feeling frightened, or mean, or particularly anxious for further relations with Lord Amyott, or to give notice before he was given it, or to drive a six-cylinder at sixty miles an hour, when the new note of a lumbering gait and laboured breathing recalled him to his motor-self.
It was old Ghum blundering through the side gate. “They have sickness in there!” he called excitedly. “The lordship — the ladyship — I no breath tell you. The doctor — they want you! Straight on — hard you like!”
Oswald Alfred had heard of strokes and seizures, and naturally conceiving either Lord or Lady Amyott the victim of one, had leapt out and was winding up before these stertorous ejaculations had merged into native patter. Ghum was assisted into his old place, the driver climbed over him into his, and off they went with clanging gears and clashing lever.
“Wait till I let her out!” muttered the man at the wheel, and gave the second-hand Cleland-Talboys gas enough to drive a motor-bus. The gray lane wobbled under her lamps, plucked out of darkness in brilliant ovals, and the low wall wavered on the edge of the halo. Lane and wall bore continuously to the left, but Oswald Alfred took no heed of the obtuse corners, and only blew his horn when a couple of figures appeared like motes in the advancing gas-beam; they had plenty of time to get out of the way, but they both jumped for their lives in a style that made the heathen squeal with joy; and only at the last moment, which was the next moment, and the worst in all his life, did Oswald Alfred see who they were.
One was that villainous Jam, showing nothing but his teeth and the whites of his evil eyes; the other was a white shirt-front with pearl studs in it, a black tie, a collar, and a cropped mustache of which every silver bristle stood out as Lord Amyott reeled and stumbled in front of the car. There was a horrible impact, but no bumping over the mass of black and white that whirled out of the halo like a wounded magpie.
Meanwhile, at the ultimate or penultimate moment of recognition, Oswald Alfred had applied his brakes with such reckless violence that a less heavily-weighted car might have completed the tragedy by turning a somersault on the fatal spot; but the overcrowded Cleland-Talboys ground itself to a shivering standstill in its own length. And the white driver started to his feet behind the wheel.
“He done it! He’s murdered ‘is lordship! I saw the swine give ‘im a push with both ‘ands!”
So he began on the trio behind, flinging an accusing arm after the wretch who was already stooping over his mangled magpie in the bracken. A patch of white shirt showed through the fronds; and to his unspeakable indignation the chauffeur saw a kick dealt it, and the white roll over into black, before the brutal leader rejoined his grinning band.
“I saw you!” cried Oswald Alfred, in inadequate greeting; “I saw you give ‘is lordship a push at the last moment! You’ll swing for it yet, you dirty nigger!”
“On the contrary,” replied the Jam, with bestial suavity, “it is you who have taken this valuable life, and you who shall answer for it with your own!”
The young man could not tell whether the fiend meant then or thereafter — by violence or by perjury — but he believed his last moments had arrived when Ghum screwed the muzzle of an automatic pistol into the flesh under his left ear.
“Down on your seat,” hissed Ghum, “and drive like the devil where I say you to drive, or I blow in your brains this minute!”
Instantaneous surrender was the only answer to that. Yet the gibbering coward heard his own abject words but faintly, as at a distance, and not as his own words at all, only to grind his teeth when he knew they were, and what a coward he had lived to be! He sobbed to think he could have fallen so low, to be first hoodwinked by a lot of murdering niggers, and then to beg for his life at their dirty hands; and yet even while he sobbed he was out and busy with the starting-handle, and more than busy, with a zeal so ignoble that he felt its poison in every vein.
He a coward! He had never been such a thing in all his days; he would have struck the man or boy who had dared to call him one before to-night. Besides, it was absurd; a man who could drive as he could in the traffic, in and out with his eyes half-shut, or at his rate by night on a twisty road, was no coward whatever else he might be. He carried his life in his hands, that was what he did and had
been doing ever since he learnt to drive a car. And yet he was driving one now at the absolute will and pleasure of a black fat fool with a pistol in his hand!
Right, left, right, and right again at that blackguard’s bidding; and now they were back on the bleak main road under a full company of stars; and those were the lights of Hindhead in the distance, and here were a pair of enormous white-hot eyes scorching down the hill to meet him. If only he had the pluck to run into them! They would not all be killed, some of these murderers would live to hang, and a turn of the hand would do it... would do it now... even now... no, now it was too late.
“And a good job, too!” said Oswald Alfred to himself. “Jolly hard on the other coves!”
But in his heart he knew it was not “the other coves” he was considering, but his own miserable skin. Well! Try again; the Hindhead lights were quite near now; why not dash into the middle of them and wreck the car against the stout old wall of the Huts? He could hear the crash, could see the débris, and himself picking himself up, to live and tell the tale if there was a God above! He would do it; this time he would; he got so far as lifting his right foot ever so little on the accelerator, as dropping a speed an instant later on the hill. But that spoilt it; nothing under thirty-five an hour would make a job of it; and after all that was impossible at the top of a long hill.
He caught himself breathing again.
Ghum came to his assistance at the same instant. “Faster! faster,” he hissed again, with his barrel against the young man’s ribs. “Come to stoppage this side Boa-vista, and you join the lordship this very night!”
The brute’s breath was on his cheek, deep-dyed with shame in the zone of light outside the Huts; a few loiterers were left idly gaping, neither more nor less interested in the carload of criminals than in the hundreds a day it was their fate to suffer from; and once more the oval searchlight danced ahead in the darkness.
There was light, too, in Oswald Alfred’s brain, where the sullen embers had been fanned to passionate flame by the vile breath on his cheek and the succulent threat in his ear. The wretches behind were keeping quiet in the silent company of their crime and its risks; he was glad Ghum had spoken, to remind him what wretches they all were. Was it likely that they would spare his life in any case after that which had been done before his eyes? What had happened to the last chauffeur?
His successor thought of him for the first time that night, and the wind in his face felt warmer than his blood; he thought of the locked doors in the deserted sick-house, and would his own be locked tomorrow? He saw certain death awaiting him under the sheltering cedars and the warm red tiles of Boavista; and simultaneously with the outward eye he saw the memorial stone marking the scene of that other “barbarous murder” — the one at which these hounds had laughed! No wonder, while they hatched its infinite superior in barbarity!
There stood the stone, over the crest of the hill and down the timely slope, on the edge of the oval halo; on the edge also of a wide abyss with lights twinkling only on the opposite rim, and in the sky that seemed somehow nearer at that moment. If that was the Devil’s Punchbowl, it looked full of boiling pitch as Oswald Alfred turned set teeth to his infamous companion, and shouted through them:
“Look out!”
Ghum looked that way as intended; for the young man was curiously determined not to die by a bullet, and this time his hands did not fail him at the last. Round went the wheel, and round came the storied stone, clean across the headlamps; a fringe of limelit gorse rose vividly between them and the pitchy void; there was a whir of wheels in the air, a lurch into space, and so the chapter ended for the occupants of the second-hand Cleland-Talboys.
Yet not for all, because by day the place is not what a dark night paints it, and there are always some who fall clear of a car.
There was one great unscathed scoundrel who stood his trial at Guildford, who insisted on giving evidence in his own defence, and who nearly succeeded in getting the court cleared by reason of his strangely individual locutions. Fourteen years was his portion; but a young spectacled coffee-colored student, being crippled for life, was more leniently handled.
Between these extreme cases of survival came a third, which was treated for a long time, and with ultimate success, in a nursing home near the scene of the catastrophe. It was summer, however, before Lord Amyott was admitted there, on two sticks, and ushered into the patient’s presence, to be immediately rewarded by a wan but unmistakable edition of the very brilliant smile which had taken his fancy by night outside his own side gate.
“There are only two things I want to know,” said Lord Amyott, in his kind rich voice. “I know all about most of it, including what happened to myself, so please hold your tongue about that, my good fellow! What I want to know is whether the final thing was another accident, so far as you were concerned, or whether you went mad and did it on purpose as that rascal Ghum declared in the witness-box.”
Oswald Alfred did not hesitate long.
“I did it on purpose,” he muttered “but I never went mad.”
“In plain English, you absolutely meant to send the lot of them to hell — and to go with them so far?”
“That was it, my lord,” said Oswald Alfred, finding more voice under the encouragement of a look and tone that rather astonished him in Lord Amyott.
“You sat tight and turned your wheel as though you were going round an ordinary corner?”
“Yes, my lord,” replied our hero, as though he had never hesitated for a single unheroic moment; but a sharp twinge of remorse caused him to qualify the boast a little. “You see, my lord,” the lad explained, “I felt they’d send me the way of the last chauffeur — and now we know what that was — but I’d a pretty good idea then, and I preferred my own way.”
Lord Amyott hobbled between his two sticks into the balcony, and bent his brow over the darkling pines; perhaps he would have liked a little less complacency in the performer of the particular feat under discussion; and he thought that on the whole he would not put his skilled opinion of it into so many words.
“There’s only one other thing I want to ask,” said he, returning as far as the French windows. “We’re a pretty pair of cripples, but I’m assured that it’s only a matter of time in both cases, and I’ve booked my own passage for September. I’ve got a new car on order to go out in the same boat. Would you like to come out with me to take the wheel?”
And Oswald Alfred lay transfigured by a smile which, it is to be hoped, was not Lord Amyott’s only reward for being braver than he knew.
MY DOUBLE
IT was on the non-stop midnight run between Euston and Crewe that I first perceived my appalling likeness to Rowland Chandler: and the calm horror of the discovery has left an even sharper impression than the truly horrifying sequel, probably because it was calm, and there was still time to think, nor any apparent ground for serious apprehension.
Yet the moment had its own uneasiness. This young man Chandler had startled London less by his vile, but, unhappily, commonplace crime than by the really remarkable manner in which the criminal had melted into thinnest air. The halfpenny evening press was in its element: the missing man’s guilt was beyond moral doubt: verbatim reports of the inquest were headlined by every damnatory epithet: inconsistent clue and improper commentary filled out the congenial columns; and I confess that I was settling myself to ten minutes sordid entertainment when my own portrait sprang upon me from the printed sheet. I started back: was this fame at last? I bent, and looked again. No; it was infamy — and Rowland Chandler! But, if I know myself in the glass, his newspaper presentment would have stood for mine.
I held my paper higher, but only to hide my dishonored face and to think. I was not alone, and now I knew that this horrid resemblance was no mere accident of the printing-house. It was a most disconcerting fact, patent at a glance to him who read and used his eyes. Already it had been patent to one or two, now that I recalled certain hitherto insignificant events of that very e
vening. I saw now why the cabman had looked at me so hard: guessed what he must have stopped to ask the policeman at the corner, who, fortunately, knew me as well as I knew him. Then there was the big man at Euston in the bowler and frieze overcoat. He must have dogged me from my cab to the booking-office. I even remembered his following me in the queue past, the window, without booking anywhere, after all, an omission which caused me momentary wonder at the time, but none whatever now.
I could only suppose that my intonation had been enough for that palpable personage from Scotland Yard. Nor is it any great boast to add that socially at least there was a somewhat obvious difference between Howland Chandler and me.
That was all very well for the skilled detective intelligence: it could scarcely turn away the suspicious glances of the average newspaper reader; and there at the moment sat one behind his newspaper in the corner opposite mine. We had the third-class compartment to ourselves; we should have it to ourselves for three mortal hours! I glanced at the fellow’s legs; they looked muscular, and the feet were firmly planted in substantial boots. What if he should see the likeness, and pin me for the murderer where I sat? I might challenge him to pull the cord, might stop the train, and show my papers, but with this portrait and my face I saw myself a prisoner in the guard’s van from that to Crewe. And I trembled at the prospect as might my guilty double in my shoes. A preventive measure was to east the incriminating sheet out of window into the rushing night. The window near us was open one hole of the strap; and I was about to obey this impulse when I saw to my horror that the act would be useless and something worse. It was the same wretched rag in which my companion sat absorbed! Nay, it was even folded the same wav: I could feel him gloating over the sensation of the hour, and under his nose my lineaments and the murderer’s name!
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 522
