On the eve of Guy Fawkes Day, I had my annual debate with Mary as to the feasibility of a small bonfire. One by one I abolished the same old objections, the danger to the house, the waste of good fuel when there were millions in London alone with no fires to warm them, the perpetuation of religious animosity, and the danger of contracting colds in the head. I went to bed, weary but triumphant. Next morning at breakfast I propounded my plans, and Mary gave official sanction for Janey and four dolls to watch the performance from the bathroom window. The greater part of the day was spent by my niece in settling the claims of rival dolls.
My surprise was great when, in the red glare of the bonfire, I recognised, propped up against the glass of the bathroom window, the expressionless faces of Rose, Eric (how I disliked that boy who, in his Eton jacket, was the very essence of priggishness), Alathea, and Sambo.
When I got to the stage of Green Bengal lights I noticed that he was clad in a Japanese kimono he had certainly never had before, and wore a cocked hat, which I had a shrewd suspicion belonged to Nelson.
The next fortnight saw deliberate war between Sambo and Eric. The immediate object was the possession of the Eton jacket, the ulterior the privilege of sitting between Rose and Alathea, and dominating the rest of the family.
Janey’s sympathies were all for Eric, who was for her the embodiment of English manhood; mine were on the side of his opponent, who came out as usual successful.
Eric jacketless, was left to face the rigour of our English winter in his shirt-sleeves.
Now that all his male rivals had been defeated, I expected that we should see an end to Sambo’s ambition.
No such thing occurred. In an altogether unchivalrous manner, he began to wage war on Rose, the oldest and most beautiful of Janey’s dolls, who was the only possessor of that much prized accomplishment of falling into a trancelike sleep whenever she lay down.
When Christmas came, Sambo was the first to be served, the first to be dressed, and the last to be put to bed.
And Janey hated him.
For the next three months nothing noteworthy took place with regard to Janey and her dolls. For a large part of the time I was away from home and saw little of my niece.
On my return, Mary called my attention to a new development. ‘I really believe that Janey is growing out of her childishness at last,’ she said. ‘She is putting away some of her dolls: she really ought to be content with fewer.’
Six weeks later, the numbers were reduced to one. It was Sambo who remained.
Though Janey had carried out the change on her own initiative, she became low-spirited, and I have no doubt shed many tears in private. So much I had expected. What surprised me was the fact that she showed no signs of transferring her affection to the one remaining member of her family.
It was true that Sambo was always with her, in the house and out of doors. He had meals by her side and slept at the bottom of her bed at night. But it was not because she cared for him; I began to think she was actuated by fear.
One afternoon I wanted Janey, and she was not to be found in nursery or garden; I searched the house in vain and was beginning to despair, when I remembered the attics. The attics were out of bounds owing to an unrailed stair that led up to them, but I was none the less successful.
There, in a stockade composed of trunks and portmanteaux, sat Janey surrounded by her dolls.
Her face was wreathed in smiles. On her lap sat Eric, at her feet lay Rose in the well-known state of trance.
‘So this is the way you spend your afternoons!’ I said. ‘I wonder what your aunt would say if she knew.’
‘Oh, please don’t tell her, uncle!’ Janey replied. ‘And whatever happens, don’t tell Sambo!’
Until she spoke, I had not noticed the absence of that individual. On inquiry it seemed that Sambo had been left fast asleep in the garden. I raised the heavy attic window and looked out. Yes, there he was sitting propped up on the garden seat looking up at us with eyes that seemed to me very wide awake.
‘I’m afraid he knows where we are!’ said Janey, ‘he is so very clever.’
Of course I said nothing to Mary of what went on upstairs. There was less need to, as Janey’s visits to her banished family very soon ceased. It was my belief that Sambo had put a stop to them. Of what happened behind the raspberry canes I very seldom speak. I never told Mary, who being entirely without imagination would have believed that I was either lying or Janey mad.
The afternoon had been more than usually close. Mary was cross, Janey was listless, and I sleepy. I had as usual ensconced myself in the shady corner of the kitchen garden where the maid never thinks of looking when she comes to announce callers, and where I not infrequently surprise school children in search of our blackbirds’ nests. I was awakened from my nap by the accustomed sound of someone in the raspberry canes.
In among the brown sticks, I caught sight of a white dress. I bent low and followed. Janey was some fifteen yards ahead of me. In her arms she was clasping a doll. She was sobbing bitterly.
Through the raspberry canes I followed her—along a little track that had not been there a fortnight before, over an open space which in autumn was trenched for celery, past the deserted graveyard where generations of cats and dogs had been laid to rest, to the very end of the long garden.
It was a deserted place given over to rubbish, broken flowerpots, piles of old pea-sticks, and mounds of yellow rotting grass cut from the lawns last summer. I hid myself behind a turf stack and watched.
On a chair that Arthur had given Janey three birthdays ago, sat Sambo, wearing his usual expression of utter vacuity. About a yard in front of him was a pile of straw and dried twigs; within reach was the silver matchbox I had spent hours in hunting for the previous two days. There was also a little saw from my tool chest.
I ground my teeth as I noticed the rusty blade. Janey placed her doll on the ground, cried over it and kissed it. Then before I realised what she was doing she had sawn off its legs and arms, and placed its dismembered trunk upon the wooden pyre. From the tennis lawn came Mary’s voice calling ‘Janey! Janey!’ It is no easy matter to strike matches on an old silver matchbox from which the roughness has long since departed. She was successful at last, and in a moment there was a blaze. The dried wood crackled with the heat. Then again came Mary’s voice louder and more persistent, and Janey was gone.
I lit a cigarette, and watched the fire die down, controlling with difficulty an impulse to add more fuel to it in the person of Sambo. Before I left the place, I found the charred remains of eight dolls. One which I took to be Eric was hideous to behold, his head was featureless, one glass eye protruding from a lump of wax.
I made my way back to the house as stealthily as I had come. Under my coat I carried Sambo.
I had to go up to town that evening on business, and I wrapped up the doll in a paper parcel (my kit bag was already full), with the intention of consulting a friend at the British Museum as to its nature and origin.
Mary had apparently taken Janey with her to call on the vicar’s wife. I saw neither of them before I left.
I did not carry out my plan; for as I was walking down Paternoster Row the following day, with my parcel under my arm, Sambo was stolen.
I had stopped opposite a stationer’s shop in whose window was exhibited a large map of Africa, flanked by bibles. I was wondering why such an immense area had been covered black instead of the more customary scarlet, and had come to the conclusion that it probably referred to unexploited coal, when I received a push in the back. After apologising to the clergyman with whom I came into somewhat violent contact, I became aware that my parcel had disappeared. Of the thief there was no sign. Yards away I saw the imposing dark blue mass of a constable. I took two steps towards him with the intention of notifying my loss. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction. Sambo after all had been no friend of ours.
***
Ten months later I went with Mary to the Agricultural Hall to see
the ‘Orient in London’. She had promised after my visit to spend a day with me at the Franco-British Exhibition, a bargain which to my mind was never fully ratified, as she resolutely declined free seats in the Scenic Railway and Flip-Flap.
I was glad I had gone as I met two acquaintances I should not otherwise have seen, Captain Carter, of my old regiment, who had taken orders and was going out to China as a missionary, and Sambo. The latter seemed to be superintending operations in an African village, and was very much at home. There was a label tied to his arm. On it I read:
‘This undoubtedly genuine African idol was found in a compartment in the Bakerloo tube. Nothing is known as to the circumstances in which it was placed there, but it was probably stolen from some museum. This idol affords an interesting example of the gods that were worshipped in the childhood of our race.’
The childhood of our race appeared to me a particularly appropriate phrase as I thought of Janey.
UNWINDING
LIKE MANY other bachelors of forty, I have a horror of parlour games.
My worst nightmare—for I have unfortunately a whole dream stable full of them—is to be pursued down endless corridors by a maiden lady who wishes me to join herself and two elder sisters at Halma.
After Halma, and a game I played one evening fifteen years ago, called ‘Ludo’, my pet aversion is ‘Unwinding’.
What are the rules? Why simplicity itself! Someone thinks of ham and eggs; that reminds me of my landlady, and she in return reminds my neighbour of Sarah Gamp; and so you proceed until you arrive at the north pole or some other equally remote point, when you unwind, going through all the nonsense again backwards way.
The game, however, has one advantage; you see the curious way in which some people’s memories work.
And with this as an introduction I will tell you the only story I know about a parlour game.
If you are a naturalist you may be acquainted with the name of Charles Thorneycroft, the author of the three-volume treatise on British spiders; his name also figures in the clergy list as vicar of Willeston Parva, but it is to the former fact that he owes the five lines in last year’s edition of Who’s Who.
Though he is almost an old man now, his friends hardly notice the change, for he has always had an old man’s characteristics, a certain garrulity in anecdote, great mismanagement in business affairs, coupled with an extreme degree of absentmindedness.
For twenty years the Reverend Charles Thorneycroft has held the living of Willeston Parva, declining all offers of preferment; for Willeston Fen lies in the borders of his parish, and Willeston Fen is one of the few remaining breeding grounds of two species of butterfly that are rapidly becoming extinct.
Besides his spiders and his library, the vicarage is large enough to give shelter to Mrs Thorneycroft and her three daughters, charming girls in spite of the atmosphere of mixed hockey and parish small talk in which they live.
Last year my customary visit to Willeston coincided with Millicent’s second birthday party. By that I do not mean that Millicent, in clerical parlance, was standing upon the threshold of her second year, for she was fifteen, and very proud of the fact.
But it was her overflow party, when her grown-up friends were called in to eat of the fragments that remained.
The arrangement was excellent, for the guests on the first occasion, with girlish indiscretion, devoured everything that was indigestible, leaving to their elders on the following day a safe if uninteresting repast.
On this occasion the party consisted entirely of men. There was Dr Philpots, an old-fashioned homoeopath; Mr Greatorex, who farmed a couple of thousand acres Fenchurch way, and who drove tandem, to the delight of all Fenchurch children; and Captain Dawson.
These three were old friends and had come to Millicent’s second birthday party for years in succession. It was this that made her two sisters object to the proposal to ask Mr Cholmondley of Oldbarnhouse.
As Madge said, Mr Cholmondley was a newcomer. He never came to church; their father and he had never met. According to Laura, the upholder of propriety, who went with her mother to pay calls, he was a mere nobody, in spite of his aristocratic name. She, for one, thought him uneducated, but as it was not her birthday party, she forbore to interfere. And so Millicent, actuated a little by pity for the lonely gentleman, and largely by obstinacy, invited Mr Cholmondley.
At the last moment she almost hoped he would refuse, but to her own and every one else’s surprise, he accepted, and his present won her heart at once.
The guests assembled late in the afternoon, and as the evening was warm we were on the lawn playing croquet until within half an hour of supper; but when the captain twice in succession sent black spinning into a clump of geraniums under the impression that it was his partner’s ball, we had to admit that it was too dark to continue.
‘Let’s fill up the time by playing at Unwinding,’ said Millicent. ‘It’s perfectly simple; we can wind until supper’s ready, and unwind afterwards.’
Laura said the game was silly, Madge that it was quite nice, and as no other suggestions were forthcoming, we began to wind. I forget most of the string of nonsense we concocted, but I remember that from Irving we went to Hamlet, from Hamlet to Champainbury, a little village on the other side of the parish, then to champagne and from champagne to luxury.
Dr Philpots, who, when not fully absorbed in homoeopathy, was apt to fall back on Socialism, declared that luxury reminded him of first-class railway carriages.
The vicar, deep in an article in Nature, had not been listening.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Oh, first-class railway carriages! First-class railway carriages remind me of murder! An admirable criticism of the whole question,’ he went on, ‘I only hope Fortescue will have sufficient sense of decency to read it.’
Needless to say, we passed over Fortescue’s shortcomings, to inquire how he had got the idea of murder into his head. There was really no connection between the two things at all.
But the vicar’s opinion was not to be shaken. ‘Whenever I see a first-class railway carriage I think of murder. I’ll tell you why when we go into supper.’
‘It’s like this,’ he said as soon as we were seated. ‘About ten years ago I had to travel down from London by the last train on Saturday night. The day had been tiring, and as the Sunday’s sermon was still unprepared, I departed from my usual habit, and took my seat in an empty first-class compartment.
‘I wrote undisturbed for an hour and a half, until the sudden grinding of brakes, and the flash of red and green signal lamps, informed me of the fact that we had reached Marshley Junction.
‘One or two people got out, but it seemed as if I were to have the carriage to myself again. The guard had blown his whistle, and we had begun to move, when the train from Saunchester drew up. I put my head out of the window to see if there was anyone who had been rash enough to risk the connection. Yes, almost before the train had stopped, a door was thrown open, and a man rushed across the platform.
‘The carriage I was in was the last in my train. He had just time to open the door of my compartment, when the guard shouted to him to stand clear. He flung himself down in the corner, panting. “That was touch and go,” I said. “It was lucky for you the door was not locked.” He assented, and I went on with my work, only noting that the man looked very pale. When I had finished the page I was writing, I chanced to look on the floor. “If you don’t mind,” I said to my companion, “we will have the window raised. The rain seems to be getting in.” It was trickling across the floor, making its way along a crack in the oilcloth. But though I had closed the window, the little stream still ran on. I am short-sighted, and it took me twice as long as it would have done another to realise that it was not water but blood. It was dripping from a wound in the hand of the man who sat opposite me.
‘ “It’s a nasty cut,” he said, as his eyes caught mine. “Could you bind it up for me? You will find a handkerchief in my coat pocket. There was a drunke
n man in my carriage. He filled himself with whisky, and then smashed the bottle, and when it came to a free fight, I fell and cut myself. There’s something to be said for the teetotaller’s point of view after all.
‘ “That’s better,” he said, as I finished tying the bandage. “It’s exceedingly kind of you to have put yourself to so much trouble. I’m afraid I shall have ruined this suit, and as bad luck would have it, it’s new today.”
‘We were silent some time, while the stranger wiped the mist from the pane with the window sash.
‘ “Yes,” he said, “drunkenness is a horrible thing, but I doubt very much whether prohibition would have the effect so many people think.” He went on to talk of America, which he seemed to know. I turned the conversation on to the question of mob law and its relation to crime.
‘ “It’s useless,” I remember him saying, “to think that violence can suppress violence. In most cases I think that even the compulsory detention of criminals in prisons and reformatories defeats its own object. A man’s conscience, though it may permit a crime, may be trusted to cause him more discomfort than all your dark cells and strait waistcoats. But, of course, I may be prejudiced.”
‘He kept me busily engaged in talk, until we reached the next station. Lowering the window before the train stopped he looked out upon the platform. “My brother ought to be here to meet me,” he said, “but I don’t see him anywhere. Goodnight, sir!”
‘My first feeling, after he had gone, was one of curiosity as to his profession. In spite of his talk, he seemed hardly a gentleman. I finally docketed him as a newspaper reporter. I went on with my writing, but broke off a minute later. “What a curiously disagreeable fellow his brother must be,” I said to myself. “He seemed actually relieved to find that he was not on the platform to meet him.”
‘Next morning the papers were full of an awful murder committed on the line. The body of an old gentleman horribly mutilated had been found in a compartment on the 10.30 train from Saunchester. There was every sign of a desperate struggle, and a hand-bag and pocket-book found under the seat had evidently been rifled. No clue to the identity of the murderer had been observed.
The Double Eye Page 5
