The Dawn of Reckoning

by James Hilton

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  They bade each other good-night and went to their rooms.

  VIII

  But she could not sleep. As soon as she was alone the cloud fell on her, torturing her with the thought of the morrow. She must try to sleep. She forced herself to close her eyes, and then she saw nothing but the pictures of her mind. She saw the long low fringe of the Danube river, with the mists rolling over it in winter-time, and the blaze of the summer sun at high noon, and the cross on the steeple of the quaint little ikoned church—the cross that looked like a gallows. How beautiful, despite the pain and cruelty of them, had been her childhood days, so cool, so lovely-sweet, a tremulous heaven for her to dream of now—the church bells tinkling by the riverside at Vaczs, the towers and palaces of Buda gleaming gold in the sunset—Csillagos az eg, csillagos, Bu szallt a szivemre banatos!—Oh, so long ago, so long ago.

  She would never sleep that night. She would go downstairs and be very calm, and sit in the library and think and think and perhaps talk to herself in low tone that no one would hear. She tip-toed down the stairs. What a dark and mournful house it was—nearly as dark and mournful as the Hall at Chassingford. But the library was comfortable, and the night Was warm, and nobody would interrupt her thoughts. She was quite calm…Oh, yes, quite calm…One o’clock. Eight more hours…Was he sorry? One o’clock. Eight more hours…Was he as calm as she? Was he afraid to die? Surely not. Was he sorry to leave her? Ah, that was more poignant.

  Oh, what a pile of letters on the library table! The letters had been opened and stacked in heaps. All had been addressed in the first place to Chassingford Hall, and had been re-addressed from there in Venner’s funny wriggly handwriting. Good old Venner—perhaps he didn’t hate her altogether…And all these letters were for her? Mrs. Bowden had opened them to save her trouble or worry or anxiety of some sort, for they were from people she had never heard of, from people who had never met or seen her, but who hated her so much that they took the trouble to write her abusive letters. How queer, to think of all this hate for her that was in people’s hearts! How queer and how terrible!…She took some of the letters out of their envelopes. This one—from a man in Coventry…“You ought to be put on the rack and tortured to death if Ward is hanged.”…Oh, how funny—how comic—that anybody should write like that to her!…Now this other letter. From Maida Vale…“Murderess…” Murderess! Murderess?

  The letters slipped from her hand to the floor.

  She thought she saw an old shaggy-haired dog come limping into the room. But the doors were all shut, so how could that be?—Never mind, there was the dog, all muddy and bedraggled, panting with parched lips, eyes bloodshot—limping with a wounded paw. It came on to the rug beside her and lay down exhausted. She wanted to get up and stroke it, but somehow when she tried she found that she could not move out of her chair. Poor little hunted cur! It was not frightened of her. Doggie! Doggie!—She made a whistling noise to it—softly, or Mrs. Bowden would hear her—and it opened one suffering eye and looked at her. Its tongue was hanging—hanging parched out of its mouth, and she thought it was thirsty. There was a carafe of water on the table, and she knocked it over on to the rug…If the dog were really thirsty it would lap up the water before it sank in. But—somehow—the dog wasn’t there at all—had gone away…

  But the letters…This man from Maida Vale. “Murderess, why arnt you waiting to be hung same as the man as isn’t a quarter as bad as you Im only a poor working woman but I say…” Oh, a woman, not a man. Fancy a woman writing to her like that!

  The dog was there on the rug again, but the water had all sunk into the carpet, and there was no more to throw down. Poor old doggie I…She wanted to put her arms round the shaggy neck and kiss the mud-streaked face. Nobody had ever loved that dog—you could see that from its eyes. But she loved it. She loved it because it looked so wretched and friendless and forlorn. Because she understood its dumb miseries. She must stoop down to kiss it. The creature suddenly looked up at her. She could not bear that look. It sank into her soul like a deep pain. She must…she must…she must…must…She flung out her arms and tried to embrace something dear and wonderful that had eluded her always up to now…Oh, Philip, Philip, darling Philip—if they had known each other better, if they had understood…

  But the letters. Could they be real? Were all these messages of hate for her? She took them one after the other and read them. They seemed strange, unreal, unbelievable. But there was a parcel as well. It was flat and well-packed, and the first address on it had been typewritten. She took it in her hands and pulled the string until it broke with a snap…

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVIII

  I

  “This is a present for you. By the time you get it I shall have succeeded. Realize that—only realize that—and I shall forgive both you and myself.

  “I have been very clever, oh, consummately clever, cleverer, I hope, than all the judges and juries and king’s counsels in England. For example, let me describe the method by which in due course you will receive the book.

  “First of all, notice its binding. It is beautiful old Milanese leather-work, such as I have always admired. In the course of my somewhat extensive European travels I have discovered a firm that does this sort of thing very well. It is a firm in Buda-Pesth—quite a small place in a turning off the Andrassy-Ut.

  “What an irony that I should send my diaries—these revelations of my soul—to your capital city to be bound sumptuously for your hands! Yet the plan has its advantages, for there is nobody in the firm (as I found out once myself) who can speak English. My diaries will therefore be safe from prying and from premature disclosure.

  “Do you remember as long as last December I asked you to translate for me a short business-letter into Hungarian? How eagerly and innocently you complied. Perhaps you wondered why I was sending a book all the way to Hungary to be bound? Did you? I could never, never in all my life, know what was in your mind.

  “Anyway, you will admit that the idea is clever. At the moment when the police are all nosing round my books and shelves, hoping for some clue simple enough for them to understand, the real key to my life will be lying in some workman’s house in Pesth, for nearly all these skilled leather-binders work in their own homes.

  “I have given careful orders to the firm that they are not to send on the completed book until July 28th, so that it ought to reach you on your birthday. Another fine stroke of irony!—A present for a good child from Blackpool? Southend? Scarborough? Ramsgate? Margate? Bournemouth? Brighton? Worthing? Broadstairs? Shanklin? Southport? Llandudno? Colwyn Bay? Bridlington? Skegness? Yarmouth? Lowestoft? Clacton? Westonsuper-Mare? Penarth? Cleethorpes?—No, my beloved, not any of these. From Buda-Pesth…”

  II

  Was this real? Was it her wild brain that was dictating the wild words that her eyes saw? The book was there, anyway, with its rich velvet-soft binding, and inside it the ordinary octavo pages of a half-crown diary. And it was Philip’s handwriting…

  Philip’s handwriting…Her brain was too wild to receive a shock from that. It seemed almost the most natural thing in the world that she should be reading Philip’s handwriting. As natural, anyway, as that she should be sitting up at four o’clock in the morning in a strange house, terrified by the fear of the morrow.

  She read on haphazardly.

  III

  July 4th. Why was I made, not only weak physically, but so indescribably futile in everything I do? This morning I went out to sack one of the gardeners. The man told me such a long tale that I ended by giving him a half-crown rise. I simply hadn’t the power to meet him. In personality—in all that makes a man a man and not a mere laughing-stock—he was my superior. That is why I don’t blame Stella for loving Ward. Ward is a man.

  Aug. 10th. I can see now that I have always hated Ward. I hate his “rightness”—the
smashing ease with which he gets through life. I can’t ever forget the time we waited outside the Senate House at Cambridge to learn the result of our examinations. I don’t hate him because he got a first. But I do hate him because he wouldn’t have cared if he hadn’t. O God, how I care…I care my hardest, and try my hardest, and the result—failure.

  Aug. 11th. Continuing. I used to think I had failed in everything except my marriage. Now I know that I have failed in everything without the exception…If Ward loved Stella and stole her from me openly, I could curse him like a man and put up with it. But he’s too honourable for that. He won’t take her because she’s mine. I can’t bear his damned magnanimity. I’d rather perish as a man than live on sufferance as a piteous child. There’s nothing fails like failure.

  Aug. 16th. Why do I continue the impossible fight? Why don’t I take Stella away and hide her where she can’t see Ward? I have plenty of money—I could live what most folks call an easy life if I wanted to. But I can’t surrender—I must go on fighting. Stella doesn’t understand me. Neither does Ward. Nor does anybody. The complaint that nobody understands him is very probably the last excuse of the incompetent.

  Sept. 29th. I pin my faith to some dim and unearthly success in the future. I must succeed. If my soul (I care nothing for my body) is to keep whole, I must break this long ridiculous record of failure. I must break it shatteringly. Ward told me to-day how he hated all the fuss that was made over him when he came back from his polar expedition. I should despise him if I thought he didn’t mean it. But I know he did mean it. And though I don’t despise him, I hate him, because he doesn’t care—because he wins so often that he can afford to throw away his gains.

  Sept. 30th. To-day I read an extraordinary book called Trent’s Last Case, by A. C. Bentley. It’s a sort of detective-story, and the queer thing is that it has an idea in it that I have had in my mind for some time. I’m afraid reading the book has made that idea plainer to me. It’s dreadful, but oh, if I could do it I In the detective-story a wealthy financier sort of person kills himself in such a way that his secretary, who has been carrying on with his wife, is accused of murder. But of course there’s a witness of the actual suicide, and so the case doesn’t even get as far as the police-court. That’s where your clever fiction-detective comes in. In real life, though, that wouldn’t happen. Oh, I’m tired—tired out—my brain’s going, I believe.

  Oct. 2nd. It is typical of my deplorable condition that it gives me a certain delight to blame other people for it. My mother, for instance. She sees through me; she knows I’m a weakling, an incapable. I don’t think she ever loved me. Love—what is it? First definition: something that my mother hasn’t got. Stella? Ah, little Stella has love, but not for me. A baby love, perhaps—the sort of love she would give to a kitten. She pities me. I shall never forget her face when I bungled that football kick-off. She looked at the crowd as much as to say: Don’t you dare to laugh at him—he’s my little pet. And she looked at me as much as to say: How could you be such an idiot I’m nothing like the financier person in Trent’s Last Case. He was just jealous of his wife’s attentions with another man. I’m not that. I’m a weak man who won’t be weak. I’m justifying myself before the universe.

  Of course, people who do that or think they are doing it are really quite mad.

  Oct. 5th. I am making up my mind slowly, and when I have finally done that, nothing shall stop me. My soul is burning with a new vigour. I wonder what category Lombroso or Nordau would put me into.

  Dec. 9th. I tested myself to-day. I gave orders that Stella’s kitten should be drowned. Why? Because something in my brain got hold of me and said: You must do this, or you will go under. But of course I bungled the affair. I ought never to have told the gardener to do it. Question: Why didn’t I drown the kitten myself? Answer: Because I couldn’t bear to. My brain is too far ahead of my body. I could never commit a murder—myself. But I could kill my own body because I hate it—I loathe it—it has disgraced me. Poor Stella, I feel so sorry for her about the kitten. That sounds the foulest and most damnable hypocrisy, but before God, it’s the living truth.

  Dec. 12th. I know that I am fighting Ward to the death. I shall fight cunningly, despicably, with diabolical ingenuity, and let none blame me because I was not made to fight any other way. He who is in earnest fights how he can…To the death—mine and then his. Greater hate hath no man than this…

  IV

  She closed the book and stared at it as one transfixed. Was she mad? She wondered almost calmly if her brain were sliding into chaos. She sat perfectly still for what seemed hours to her, striving to grasp reality, to hang on to any fact, however insignificant, that provided a safe and true anchorage. The book—yes, it existed. She was certain of that; she could feel its soft richly-marked leather beneath her open hand. But the rest—was it all a nightmare?

  She opened the book again and read a few pages haphazardly; then she clenched her fists and jerked herself into sudden activity. It was as if she were pushing physical clouds from before her eyes. She looked at her watch. It was after half-past five…

  V

  Activity grew in her like a prairie-fire. Half-past five. There was no time to be horrified, amazed, sceptical; no time to reason, examine, ask advice. Half-past five—just over three more hours…No time for anything but to act. Good God—they must not hang him—not now, not now. Half-past five…She must act without a moment’s delay. First—the telephone.

  She did not care—did not think about anything but her one single aim. They must not hang him—must not. What a tiresome unwieldy thing a telephone directory was…Half-past five—just over three more hours…

  It seemed an age—an eternity—before she got through. A dull-sounding, very indistinct voice replied to her first eager self-introduction. Mrs. Monsell…Oh, yes, the Mrs. Monsell…Yes, the Mrs. Monsell…Most important…Innocence…Absolute proof…must delay…

  The voice, more dull-sounding, less distinct than ever. Extremely sorry…Quite impossible…approach the solicitors…no authority…asleep…too early in the morning…

  Half-past five—getting on for six. She banged down the receiver. Not another moment would she waste on that method. She must go in person with the book. Immediately. She thought of the car, and remembered that the chauffeur was asleep and that there were some small repairs that would have to be made before setting out. No, the car would be too slow. But there was a train to town at six—the first train of the day. Even with stops it would probably be quicker than waiting for the car to be prepared. The train, then…Twenty to six…She rushed upstairs and put on a hat and coat. Then she rushed down again and slipped out through the servants’ entrance into the quiet fresh-smelling streets. A quarter to six by the clock on the clock-tower! The policeman on duty gave her a curious stare as she passed him.

  At the station everyone stared at her—booking-clerk, ticket-collector, porters, guard, passengers, the whole assembled population. They knew her from the photographs in the picture-papers, and they knew also that this was the morning—the morning. How they stared…and some of them grinned. She swept past them on to the platform like a tornado; she was aflame with an eagerness that gave her a miraculous clarity of thought. She chose, for example, the front compartment of the train, so that she would be able to jump out quickly at London Bridge.

  The train stopped agonisingly at all stations as far as Croydon. Several times she nearly yielded herself to panic, but some secret strength in her responded to each more pressing demand. Not yet—not yet…A quarter to seven—Three Bridges…Good God—if she were not in time. Just over two hours now…Would the car have been quicker? The speculation was terrible. Once when there was a signal-check she pressed her head till she winced with pain, in order to stop herself from screaming aloud. Then, after passing Redhill, the train went faster, and she found it less difficult to keep calm There were others in the compartment; they stared at her, but not with recognition.

  One thing she di
d during the journey—and did with such passion that she could almost have repeated it afterwards word for word—she read the whole diary through from cover to cover. It was real enough then. She tried to keep her mind calm while she was reading—she tried to grasp the facts, not to judge the issues. There was no longer time for that…Seven o’clock…Two hours longer—a hundred and twenty minutes. God—if she were too late!

  One thing she was certain of—that the book, in parts at any rate, had been written by a madman.

  VI

  Feb. 6th I have now almost perfected my plans. This bye-election makes everything simpler. And it is the irony of fate that this time I have just the very slightest chance of winning it.

  Feb. 10th. Ward came this morning and brought the revolver. Nobody knows about it. The only problem left is a medical one. The chest is, I think, better than the head; it gives one more time to arrange matters. More painful and slower, perhaps, but then—“you cannot eat your pastry and have it,” as my old French master used to say. The pity of it is that I can’t endure physical pain. But I must. It will be a test. If I am worth anything at all, I shall.

  Feb. 11th. Stella visited Ward in town to-day. I had her followed, of course. But there was no need—poor souls, their intentions are strictly honourable. Ward would not betray me for the world. Yet every day, though he will not have her himself, he takes her farther away from me.

  I have now arranged that Venner shall come into the room at the exact moment when Ward and I shall be quarrelling. Venner will make a good witness at the trial; he possesses just the right mixture of stupidity and unimpeachability.

  Feb. 21st. I know, by the way, that I am going mad. My brain is “racing.” Stella, poor child, is frightened of me…