The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  Perhaps he thought merely of the absurdly convincing story he would tell the authorities when they came to investigate; perhaps he brooded on the humiliations, the soul privations he had suffered at his wife’s hands; perhaps he dreamed of Miss Henderson, of a vaguely happy future with a dynasty of little girls which they might found together; or perhaps he merely toyed with the new, immensely exotic realization that he was a murderer—that by moving a mat rather than breaking a door, he had joined irrevocably that twilight confederacy of wife-slayers along with Crippen, Smith, Greenwood, Armstrong, and Landru.

  As he sat there, while the noises of London started to clatter outside, he glanced every now and then at his watch. Six o’clock … six-twenty … six forty-five … Mabel always rose to make breakfast at seven. What would be thought later if her husband had not detected the disaster by that hour?

  Mr. Loomis put down his teacup. He moved into the hall. He glanced nervously up the stairs. Anxiety, almost identical with genuine concern for his wife, seized him. Hardly knowing whether he was play-acting or not, Mr. Loomis rushed out of the house, ran to the Miltons’ front door, and started to bang on it. At length Mamie appeared in a crumpled wrapper, her pinkish hair dishevelled.

  “Quick …” gasped Mr. Loomis. “My wife … gas … door locked. Phone Doctor Heather … quick.”

  Mamie grasped an emergency. “Al, come down,” she screamed.

  She was on the phone when Al rolled sleepily downstairs, buttoning his trousers as he came. In a few seconds the two men were back in Mr. Loomis’ house.

  “This door here,” panted Mr. Loomis outside his wife’s room. “She locked it. I told you … the gas …”

  He smelt the gas; he saw Al’s great bulk lurch against the locked door; he heard the hinges creak. But suddenly all this seemed a spectacle fulfilling itself in some remote region of space. Once again Al hurled himself against the door. Mr. Loomis heard the splintering of the wood, was conscious of a strengthening of the smell of gas.

  Then, brown and pink, the roses of the mat loomed towards him and struck him in the face.

  When he came to himself, he was lying on the small, uncomfortable sofa in the living room downstairs. He was conscious of mental confusion and a vague dread. He was conscious, too, of Mamie seated by him and bathing his aching forehead. Directly in his path of vision was the text above the mantel. Someone must have turned it around, for THOU LORD SEEST ME stared back at him.

  “There, there.” He was aware of the pungent odor of spirits beneath his nostrils. “Come on now. Take a sip of this.”

  Mr. Loomis gulped down a mouthful of brandy. He managed to ask: “Is—is Mabel all right?”

  Mamie looked down at him and he saw that her good-natured brown eyes were filled with pity.

  “It’s best you hear it from me instead of the doctor. She’s gone, poor soul.”

  In the tangle of Mr. Loomis’ emotions the principal feeling was wonder. Mabel, the seemingly indestructible, was dead. The thing he had cherished as an impossible dream had actually happened. And now that he had helped to bring it about, he saw with perverse clarity that this was the only success of his life. He had failed as a husband and as a father: he had failed even to amount to anything really important at Tinker & Smythe. It had been left to him to find his true niche as a murderer.

  A little murderer, perhaps, a mat-pushing murderer. But a successful one.

  The secret joy, which had come at the moment when he first paused outside the bedroom door, seeped through him again. Who could say now that he was a poor little man?

  Mamie had taken his hand and was murmuring to him vague inarticulate sounds of comfort. He yielded luxuriously to her pity.

  A few moments later Dr. Heather entered the room. Mr. Loomis, who had not before seen his wife’s new physician, gathered an impression of a solemn young man with a formal face and a precise voice which said: “I want you to know, Mr. Loomis, that you have my deepest sympathy. I also want to reassure you. Mr. Potts has told me of your—ah—little domestic squabble last night. He is afraid that you may feel responsible for the fact that the gas was not turned off and hence for the—ah—tragedy itself.”

  Mr. Loomis found the young man’s pedantic mode of speech difficult to follow. He sat up on the couch, peering in bewilderment.

  “In the first place,” continued the doctor, “there was a pane of glass broken in the window. That in itself would have prevented a sufficient concentration of gas to prove lethal. But, as it happens, we may dismiss the gas. Your wife did not die from asphyxiation.”

  Mr. Loomis at last understood the words and there rushed back to him a picture of himself the night before banging down the sash after he had shouted to Mabel from the window. Yes, of course, he had broken the pane. Blankly he ventured: “She didn’t die…?”

  “Not from asphyxiation. As you know, your wife consulted me a few days ago for what she believed to be indigestion. I examined her and suspected a serious heart condition. I prescribed sedatives and advised her strongly against all exertion or excitement. The episode with the little girl last night must have proved too much for her. She must have had a heart attack soon after she locked herself into the bedroom. She had certainly been dead several hours before the gas started to escape.”

  Mr. Loomis, listening and understanding, began to shiver. Mamie put a consoling arm around him.

  “And so,” went on Dr. Heather in the tone he had cultivated for sad occasions, “you have no reason to blame yourself for negligence. And, if on the strength of your little disagreement last night, you should be in doubt as to your wife’s affections, I can lay your mind at rest on that score also. When I informed her of her heart condition, she insisted that no mention should be made to you. You had your worries at the office, she said. She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety.” He laid a rather cold hand on Mr. Loomis’ sleeve. “She was a good woman.”

  There was more—much more. Dr. Heather seemed to talk interminably about a death certificate, about the fact that an inquest would not be necessary, about funeral arrangements. There were countless telephone calls and through it all, Mamie and Al, friendly and comforting, handled everything. Mr. Loomis, coddled with cups of tea and nips of brandy, got through the day in a state of suspended animation.

  But at last it was all over and he was alone. He stood in the middle of the room with his arms limp at his sides. The grey evening light, peering through the window, seemed to muse over the framed wool text above the mantel. Suddenly, feeling started again with the violence of a bullet tearing through his flesh.

  He had not been a success as a murderer.

  He had been a grotesque failure. Mabel had died, as she had lived, on her own initiative. He had been a foolish little man, inflated with self-importance, pushing a mat around ineffectually as a child might push a toy.

  The doctor’s voice came back to him: She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety. She was a good woman.

  Mr. Loomis felt dry and hollow as an autumn seedpod. He gazed in agony at the text in front of him.

  It was a lie. Even God couldn’t see him. He was too small.

  Everyone was very kind. Tinker & Smythe insisted upon a two weeks’ vacation. Miss Henderson wrote a little note of condolence. Dinah Milton, now that the ogress was laid to rest in the Pimlico cemetery, gambolled at will between the two houses. Since Mamie, at best a slipshod mother, was more and more preoccupied with Al, there were blissful hours in which Mr. Loomis could take the little girl walking in Kensington Gardens and gorge her at Lyons’ Tea Shops.

  Gradually he began to believe that the Destiny, which had denied him stature, might also yield him rewards.

  But on the last night of his holiday, after he had read Dinah to sleep with Black Beauty, this new budding hope was brutally destroyed. Al and Mamie, their faces shining with happiness and beer, announced the fact that Mamie had finally decided to marry Al. They would emigrate together. The boat for Australia was sailing soon and Al’s
papers would suffice for his wife and Dinah.

  Mr. Loomis managed to twitter his congratulations, but as he lay sleepless and alone in his conjugal bed, he felt all the pangs of disenchantment. Dinah had been a shining prize dangled before him only to be snatched away. The future stretched ahead of him bitterly empty.

  But slowly, daringly, the thought of Rose Henderson came to comfort him. Romantic images stole through him as he tossed against the pillows. Miss Henderson looking up from her desk, showing her fine white teeth in a smile of pleasure at his return next day to the office. Miss Henderson’s shy acknowledgment as he thanked her for her letter. Miss Henderson, perhaps, across the table from him in a little restaurant. Oh, Mr. Loomis, all these years I’ve waited, but I never thought …

  Why not? Why shouldn’t it happen? Hadn’t the dream of the santonin bottle come true? These new fantasies explored the future with a delicious sense of certainty.

  Mr. Loomis crept out of bed and fumbled the photograph from his wallet. He did not need to turn on the gas to remember every detail of that childish body, those wistful eyes and the solemn face absorbed with the candy rock.

  He put the photograph under his pillow and drifted into a soothing sleep.

  At precisely a quarter to two the next afternoon Mr. Loomis passed the open door of Mr. Tinker’s office and saw, as he had hoped, that Miss Henderson was standing by the desk, sorting papers. He stepped across the threshold and she glanced up. “Oh, Mr. Loomis, I didn’t see you.”

  Mr. Loomis wasn’t seeing her, either. He was seeing something which he had built out of dreams, a never-never-land creature at once a little barelegged girl and the mother of other little barelegged girls yet to come.

  “I wish to thank you for your letter of sympathy, Miss Henderson. I deeply appreciated it.”

  Miss Henderson flushed a heavy pink. “Oh, of course I had to write.”

  It was all beginning in a fashion so similar to Mr. Loomis’ imaginary dialogue that he drifted even farther into unreality. He was not the recently widowed cashier and she was not Miss Rose K. Henderson, Mother’s Service Manager. They were characters in a debonair romance.

  “I was wondering, Miss Henderson, if you would do me the great pleasure of dining with me one night.”

  Miss Henderson’s flush was an unbecoming carmine now. “Well, I mean, I am sure it would be very nice. But I live with my mother. She’s old and not very strong. I always …”

  “A little French restaurant,” continued Mr. Loomis, his mating gallantry undisturbed. “In Soho perhaps. A quiet little dinner. Wine?”

  Miss Henderson patted nervously at the heron’s nest above her thick spectacles. “Wine? I never touch wine, Mr. Loomis. And, really, I mean, isn’t it rather premature? So soon, I mean, after your wife …”

  “I have kept this,” confided Mr. Loomis, producing the photograph from his wallet. “A dear little girl with bare legs.”

  “Really!” Miss Henderson snatched the photograph from him. “Really, Mr. Loomis!”

  The tone of her voice edged into Mr. Loomis’ reverie. Dimly he was aware that the dialogue was not progressing as it should. He blinked and, actually looking at her for the first time, saw the awkward flush, the eyes, prudish and outraged behind the opaque lenses, watching him as if suspicious of his sobriety.

  “Miss Henderson, I was not suggesting anything …”

  “Really, Mr. Loomis, this is most embarrassing. I think it would be better if we forgot the whole episode.”

  There they were. The words were spoken. They could not be taken back. Mr. Loomis accepted their inevitability, and with that clarity which now seemed so often to plague him, he realized that this last dream had also been meaningless. It was too late to search for the little girl of the photograph in the barren, middle-aged spinster which was the reality of Rose K. Henderson—thirty years too late.

  “Yes, Miss Henderson,” he said meekly, much as in the old days he had said: “Yes, Mabel.”

  Still icily clear in his mind, he returned to his own office, and sat down behind his open ledger. Dinah was gone; little Rosie Henderson was only a faded photograph. For the first time he realized that in losing his wife he had lost the only thing he had ever really had. For all her acrimonies, her scoldings, Mabel had been a frame for existence. Without the frame was blankness. Perhaps, if he had killed her, there might have been some perverse sense of achievement to support him. But he had only tried to kill her, failed, and lost her anyway.

  Mr. Loomis made an effort to reach some communion with the ledger entries which had once been his friends. But even they eluded him and he began gropingly to see that his love of his work at Tinker & Smythe had been inextricably tied to his dread of homegoing. Now that dread was removed and replaced by—nothing.

  Mr. Loomis struggled with the ledger. For hours, it seemed, he poured over a single column until the precise little pounds, shillings, and pence danced before his eyes like midges.

  It was no good. He closed the book and carried it automatically to the safe. He swung open the door and put the ledger in its appointed place. As he did so, his eyes fell on the poison shelf—on the little green bottle of santonin crystals.

  He knew at once what to do. It was as if the next step, which had never figured in his daydreams at all, was something he had rehearsed a thousand times. He took down the bottle, shook crystals into his palm, and replaced the bottle on its shelf. Carefully he closed the safe and went down the passage to the washroom. The crystals dissolved quickly in the paper cup of water. Mr. Loomis raised the cup to his lips and drank.

  As he felt the bitter taste in his mouth, a tingle almost of relief passed through him. Perhaps, vaguely, he realized that here at last was an enterprise at which he could not fail.

  After he had dropped the empty cup into the wastebasket, Mr. Loomis returned to his own office and sat down to wait. He was without feelings now. He had read somewhere that the first symptom of santonin poisoning was a visual illusion in which everything seemed tinged with yellow.

  On the wall in front of him was a calendar. He had hardly noticed it before. A charming little thatched cottage nestled on the bank of a millpond. A small boy—or was it a small girl?—sat fishing on the flowery brink of the water. Evening light lulled the whole scene in a placid golden glow …

  Mr. Loomis was perfectly aware of the fact that someone had entered the room. He even knew it was Miss Griffin, one of the junior typists, and when she said: “There’s a gentleman to see you. Shall I send him in?” he heard her and nodded his assent. Both Miss Griffin and the office were beautiful, bathed in the golden sunset of the calendar.

  When Miss Griffin’s sparse figure was replaced by that of a large, burly man, Mr. Loomis immediately recognized Al Potts. He didn’t wonder why Al should be standing there in his office. It only surprised him mildly that Dinah’s stepfather-to-be should shine with such a heavenly light.

  “Well, Bloomers, hope you don’t mind me barging in this way.” Mr. Loomis heard the words distinctly and once again gave his regal nod.

  “I wanted to catch you before you got home. There’s been a kind of to-do and I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  Al was shifting his weight from one large foot to the other—a dancing bear in a world of gold.

  “It’s this way, Bloomers. Mamie and me broke the news to Dinah today and she’s taken it real bad. Been carrying on all afternoon, bawling that she won’t go to beastly old Australia, that she won’t ever leave her Daddy Bloomers.”

  Mr. Loomis was light as a piece of paper, floating up, up. But he listened and happiness floated with him.

  “Can’t do a thing with her,” continued Al Potts, “and while she was bawling, Mamie and me got to thinking. To begin with life’s going to be pretty rugged; no time, no place really for a kid. So we was wondering, seeing Dinah’s so head over heels in love with her Daddy Bloomers, we was wondering if you’d let us leave her with you, say for a year—till we get settled …

  “I
f you was to say yes, it would be a real act of friendship,” concluded Al Potts, “and it’ll make Dinah the happiest little monkey in the world.”

  The joy was so intense now that it was almost an agony. Everything was gleaming—gleaming gold. Dinah wouldn’t leave her Daddy Bloomers. Dinah was going to be his after all. The gold was sand, a vast stretch of golden sand by the summer sea. Dinah was jumping and prancing, her pigtails flying, the gulls curving above her in the gentle golden sky. Look, she had turned! She was running towards him and as she ran, there was another golden child running with her, a solemn little girl clutching a stick of rock.

  Laughing, sporting, Dinah and Rosie came nearer and nearer. In ecstasy Mr. Loomis stretched out his hands to them.

  “Hey, Bloomers,” shouted Al Potts, “what’s up? What’s the matter?”

  “Happy.” Mr. Loomis’ outflung arms sank onto the desk. “So happy …”

  As his head dropped forward onto his hands, the office clock struck five.

  MRS. APPLEBY’S BEAR

  “Imagine the thrill,” quavered Amelia Appleby. “I ran to the door and there was Papa with a bear. A real live bitsy bear cub. Cute wasn’t the word for it. I guess I was the only little girl in Poughkeepsie who owned a real live … Trudy, you’re not listening.”

  Mrs. Appleby plucked at the front of her pink bed jacket and looked at her younger niece who stood by the window surveying the sultry summer garden.

  “Trudy, what was I saying?”

  “You guessed you were the only little girl in Poughkeepsie who owned a real live bear. My, how you loved it. No one will ever know how much you cried when it got too big and had to be given to the Albany zoo.”

  “I hadn’t got to that part yet. That’s the part I like telling the best.” Old Mrs. Appleby’s face puckered. “Really, how can you be so unfeeling? Your own aunt.”

  Trudy swung from the window. Her bold, highly colored face, which was thickening into middle age, blazed exasperation. “I’ve listened to that bear a thousand times. Do I have to go on and on and on?”