Fear

by Roald Dahl

  Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne’s precautions would sooner or later prove unavailing, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.

  This conclusion relieved her from further preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post office, a mile or so away; and when she turned towards home the early twilight was setting in.

  She had taken a footpath across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the high-road, there was little likelihood of their meeting. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted exactness of visual memory she observed that the papers on her husband’s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to luncheon.

  Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her shortsighted eyes strained through them, half discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible presence she threw herself on the bell-rope and gave it a sharp pull.

  The sharp summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.

  ‘You may bring tea if Mr Boyne is in,’ she said, to justify her ring.

  ‘Very well, madam. But Mr Boyne is not in,’ said Trimmle, putting down the lamp.

  ‘Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?’

  ‘No, madam. He’s never been back.’

  The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

  ‘Not since he went out with – the gentleman?’

  ‘Not since he went out with the gentleman.’

  ‘But who was the gentleman?’ Mary insisted, with the shrill note of someone trying to be heard through a confusion of noises.

  ‘That I couldn’t say, madam.’ Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.

  ‘But the kitchen-maid knows – wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?’

  ‘She doesn’t know either, madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.’

  Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of conformity. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.

  ‘But he must have a name! Where’s the paper?’

  She moved to the desk and began to turn over the documents that littered it. The first that caught her eyes was an unfinished letter in her husband’s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

  My dear Parvis – who was Parvis? – I have just received your letter announcing Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no further risk of trouble, it might be safer –

  She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which had been swept together in a heap, as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.

  ‘But the kitchen-maid saw him. Send her here,’ she commanded, wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a solution.

  Trimmle vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling, Mary had regained her self-possession and had her questions ready.

  The gentleman was a stranger, yes – that she understood. But what had he said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so little – had merely asked for Mr Boyne, and, scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried in to him.

  ‘Then you don’t know what he wrote? You’re not sure it was his name?’

  The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.

  ‘And when you carried the paper in to Mr Boyne, what did he say?’

  The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr Boyne had said anything, but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen together.

  ‘But, then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they went out of the house?’

  This question plunged the witness into a momentary inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard the two gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front door together.

  ‘Then, if you saw the strange gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what he looked like.’

  But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid’s endurance had been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to ‘show in’ a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting efforts: ‘His hat, mum, was different-like, as you might say –’

  ‘Different? How different?’ Mary flashed out, her own mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, and then lost under layers of subsequent impressions.

  ‘His hat had a wide brim, you mean, and his face was pale – a youngish face?’ Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger – the stranger in the garden! Why had not Mary thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why had Boyne obeyed him?

  It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called England so little – ‘such a confoundedly hard place to get lost in’.

  A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband’s phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flashlights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little, compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife’s anguished eyes as if with the wicked joy of knowing something they would never know!

  In the fortnight since Boyne’s disappearance there had been no word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the kitchen-maid had seen Boyne leave the house, and no one else had seen the ‘gentleman’ who accompanied him. All inquiries in the neighbourhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger’s presence that day in the neighbourhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighbouring villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the local railway stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.

  Mary, while every official means of investigation was working at its highest pressure, had ransacke
d her husband’s papers for any trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to her, that might throw a ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of Boyne’s life, they had vanished like the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except – if it were indeed an exception – the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter, read and re-read by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough to feed conjecture.

  ‘I have just heard of Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no further risk of trouble, it might be safer –’ That was all. The ‘risk of trouble’ was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information conveyed by the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had told his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself proved that the plaintiff was dead. It took several days of cabling to fix the identity of the ‘Parvis’ to whom the fragment was addressed, but even after these inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable to guess with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

  This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight’s search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the cloudy cauldron of human experience.

  Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were even moments of weariness when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.

  These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the routine of daily life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of ‘change’. Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish enclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as completely as if death itself had waited that day on the threshold. She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the Press, the police, and her own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

  No, she would never know what had become of him – no one would ever know. But the house knew; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets men trusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian, of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.

  ‘I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.’

  Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start and looked intently at the speaker.

  When, half an hour before, a card with ‘Mr Parvis’ on it had been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of Boyne’s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a small, sallow man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a tremor through her to know that this was the person to whom her husband’s last known thought had been directed.

  Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble – in the manner of a man who has his watch in his hand – had set forth the object of his visit. He had ‘run over’ to England on business, and finding himself in the neighbourhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs Boyne; and without asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell’s family.

  The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary’s bosom. Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?

  ‘I know nothing – you just tell me,’ she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of ‘getting ahead’ of someone less alert to seize the chance; and the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had ‘put him on’ to the Blue Star scheme.

  Parvis, at Mary’s first cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.

  ‘Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it’s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest – see?’ said Mr Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

  Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame: it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.

  ‘But then – you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?’

  Mr Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. ‘Oh no, I don’t. I don’t even say it wasn’t straight.’ He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the definition he sought. ‘I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.’ After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.

  Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent emissary of some evil power.

  ‘But Mr Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.’

  ‘Oh yes; they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technical
ly. It was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he’d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself when they told him he had no show.’

  The horror was sweeping over Mary in great deafening waves.

  ‘He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.’ Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its ‘record’.

  ‘You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t have to try again,’ said Parvis grimly.

  They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glasses thoughtfully about his finger, she motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

  ‘But if you knew all this,’ she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, ‘how is it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his letter?’

  Parvis received this without perceptible embarrassment. ‘Why, I didn’t understand it – strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.’

  Mary continued to scrutinize him. ‘Then why are you telling me now?’

  Still Parvis did not hesitate. ‘Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to – I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been raked up again, And I thought if you didn’t know you ought to.’

  She remained silent, and he continued: ‘You see, it’s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home when she got too sick – something with the heart, I believe. But she had his mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That called attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why –’