'I think you'll find that his sight isn't any too good,' said Dr Fell. 'Send him in.'
The man who entered was, in his own way, an impressive figure. His long, quiet face was hollowed at the temples; his grey hair grew far back on the skull, giving him a great height of narrow and wrinkled forehead. His bright - blue eyes, which did not at all seem dimmed despite the wrinkles round them, looked gentle and puzzled. He had a hooked nose, and deep furrows running down to a kindly, uncertain mouth; and his trick of wrinkling the forehead, so that one eyebrow was slightly raised, made him look more uncertain still. Despite his stoop he was still tall; despite his bony frailty he was still powerful. He looked like a military man gone senile, a well - brushed man gone slovenly. There was nothing of - humour in the face, but a great deal of muddled and apologetic good - nature. He wore a dark overcoat buttoned up to the chin. Standing in the doorway, peering hard at them from under tangled eyebrows, he held a bowler hat pressed against his chest, and hesitated.
'I am sorry, gentlemen. I am honestly very sorry,' he said. His deep voice had a curious quality as though the man were unused to speech. 'I know I should have come to see you before going over there. But young Mr Mangan woke me up to tell me what had happened. I felt I had to go over and see Grimaud, to see whether there might be anything I could do -'
Rampole had a feeling that he was still dull - witted and uncertain from sleep or sleeping - drugs; that the bright glare of his eyes might have been so much glass. He moved over, and one hand found the back of a chair. But he did not sit down until Hadley asked him to do so.
'Mr Mangan told me -' he said,' Dr Grimaud -'
'Dr Grimaud is dead,' said Hadley.
Drayman remained sitting as bolt upright as his stoop would allow, his hands folded across his hat. There was a heavy silence in the room, while Drayman shut his eyes and opened them again. Then he seemed to stare a long way off, and to breathe with heavy, whistling sluggishness.
'God rest his soul,' Drayman said, very quietly. 'Charles Grimaud was a good friend.'
'Do you know how he died?'
'Yes. Mr Mangan told me.'
Hadley studied him. 'Then you will understand that to tell everything, everything you might happen to know, will be the only way to help us catch the murderer of your friend?'
'I - Yes, of course.'
'Be very certain of that, Mr Drayman! More certain than you are. We wish to know something of his past life. You knew him well. Where did you first know him?'
The other's long face looked muddled; an illusion as though the features had got out of line. 'In Paris. He took his doctorate at the university in 1905, the same year I - the same year I knew him.' Facts seemed to elude Drayman; he shaded his eyes with his hand, and his voice had a querulous note like a man asking where somebody has hidden his collar studs. 'Grimaud was very brilliant. He obtained an associate professorship at Dijon the year afterwards. But a relative died, or something of the sort, and left him well provided for. He - he gave up his work and came to England shortly afterwards. Or so I understand. I did not see him until years afterwards. Was that what you wished to know?'
'Did you ever know him before 1905?'
'No.'
Hadley leaned forward. 'Where did you save his life?' he asked, sharply.
'Save his life? I don't understand.'
'Ever visit Hungary, Mr Drayman?'
'I - I have travelled on the Continent, and I may have been in Hungary. But that was years ago, when I was young. I don't remember.'
And now it was Hadley's turn to pull the trigger in trick marksmanship.
'You saved his life,' he stated, 'near the prison of Siebenturmen, in the Carpathian Mountains, when he was escaping. Didn't you?'
The other sat upright, his bony hands clenched across the bowler. Rampole had a feeling that there was more dogged strength in him now than there had been for a dozen years.
'Did I?' he said.
'There's no use going on with this. We know everything - even to dates, now that you've supplied them. Karoly Horvath, as a free man, wrote the date in a book in 1898. With full academic preparation behind, it would have taken him four years at least to get his doctorate at Paris.
We can narrow down the time of his conviction and escape to three years. With that information,' said Hadley coolly, 'I can cable to Bucarest and get the full details within twelve hours. You had better tell the truth, you see. I want to know all you know of Karoly Horvath - and his two brothers. One of those two brothers killed him. Finally, I'll remind you that withholding information of this kind is a serious offence. Well?'
Drayman remained for a little time with his hand shading his eyes, his foot tapping the carpet. Then he looked up. They were startled to see that, though his puckered eyes kept their blue glassiness, the man was gently smiling.
'A serious offence,' he repeated, and nodded. 'Is it, indeed? Now frankly, sir, I don't give a damn for your threats. There are very few things which can move or anger or terrify a man who can see you only in outline, as he sees a poached egg on his plate. Nearly all the fears of the world (and its ambitions too) are caused by shapes - eyes and gestures and figures. Young people can't understand this, but I had hoped you would. You see, I am not precisely blind. I can see faces and the morning sky, and all those objects which the poets insist blind men should rave about. But I cannot read, and the faces I cared most to see have been for eight years blinder than mine. Wait until your whole life is built on those two things, and you will learn that not much can move you when they go.' He nodded again, staring across the room. His forehead wrinkled. ' Sir, I am perfectly willing to give you any information you wish, if it will help Charles Grimaud. But I don't see the sense of raking up old scandal.'
'Not even to find the brother who killed him?'
Drayman made a slight gesture, frowning. 'Look here, if it will help you, I can honestly tell you to forget such an idea. I don't know how you learned it. He did have two brothers. And they were imprisoned.' He smiled again. 'There was nothing terrible about it. They were imprisoned for a political offence. I imagine half the young fire - eaters of the time must have been concerned in it ... Forget the two brothers. They have both been dead a good many years.'
It was so quiet in the room that Rampole heard the last collapsing rattle of the fire and the wheezing breaths of Dr Fell. Hadley glanced at Dr Fell, whose eyes were closed. Then Hadley regarded Drayman as impassively as though the latter's sight had been sharp.
'How do you know that?'
'Grimaud told me,' said the other, accentuating the name. ' Besides, all the newspapers from Budapest to Brasso were shouting about it at the time. You can easily verify all this.' He spoke simply. 'They died of bubonic plague.'
Hadley was suave. 'If, of course, you could prove this beyond any doubt - '
'You promise that there would be no old scandal raked up?' (That bright - blue stare was difficult to meet. Drayman twisted and untwisted his bony hands.) 'If I tell you exactly, and you receive the proof, you will let the dead rest?'
'It depends on your information.'
'Very well. I will tell you what I saw myself.' He reflected - rather uneasily - Rampole thought. ' It was in its own way a horrible business. Grimaud and I never spoke of it afterwards. That was agreed. But I don't intend to lie to you and say I've forgotten it - any detail of it.'
He was silent for so long a time, tapping his fingers at his temple, that even the patient Hadley was about to prompt him. Then he went on:
'Excuse me, gentlemen. I was trying to remember the exact date, so that you can verify everything. The best I can do is to say it was in August or September of nineteen hundred - or was it nineteen one? Anyhow, it occurs to me that I might begin, with perfect truth, exactly in the style of the contemporary French romances. I might begin, "Towards dusk of a cool September day in the year 19 - a solitary horseman might have been seen hurrying along a road," and what a devil of a road! - "in a rugged valley below the south - eas
tern Carpathians." Then I should launch into a description of the wild scenery and so on. I was the horseman; it was coming on to rain, and I was trying to reach Tradj before dark.'
He smiled. Hadley stirred in some impatience, though Dr Fell opened his eyes; and Drayman was quick to take it up.
'I must insist on that sort of novelesque atmosphere because it fitted into my mood and explains so much. I was at the romantic Byronic age, fired with ideas of political liberty. I rode horseback instead of walking because I thought I cut a good figure; I even took pleasure in carrying a pistol against (mythical) brigands, and a rosary as a charm against ghosts. But if there weren't either ghosts or brigands, there should have been. I know that I several times got the wind up about both. There was a sort of fairy - tale wildness and darkness about those cold forests and gorges. Even about the cultivated parts there was something queer. Transylvania, you see, is shadowed in on three sides by mountains. It startles an English eye to see a rye - field or a vineyard going straight up the side of a steep hill; the red mill yellow costumes, the garlicky inns, and even, in the bleaker parts, hills made of pure salt.
'Anyhow, there I was going along a snaky road in the bleakest part, with a storm blowing up and no inn for miles. People saw the devil lurking behind every hedge in a way that gave me the creeps, but I had a worse cause for the creeps. Plague had broken out after a hot summer, and was over the whole area like a cloud of gnats, even in the chilly weather. In the last village I passed through - I've forgotten its name - they told me it was raging at the salt - mines in the mountains ahead. But I was hoping to meet an English friend of mine, also a tourist, at Tradj. Also I wanted to look the prison which got its name after seven white hills, like ft low range of mountains, just behind. So I said I meant to go on.
'I knew - I must be getting near the prison, for I could see the while hills ahead. But, just as it was getting too dark to see at all, and the wind seemed to be tearing the trees to pieces, I came down into a hollow past the three graves. They had been freshly dug, for there were still footmarks round them; but no living person was in sight.'
Hadley broke across the queer atmosphere which that dreaming voice was beginning to create.
'A place,' he said, 'just like the one in the painting Dr Grimaud bought from Mr Burnaby.'
'I - I don't know,' answered Drayman evidently startled.' Is it? I didn't notice.'
'Didn't notice? Didn't you see the picture?'
'Not very well. Just a general outline - trees, ordinary landscape -'
'And three headstones - '
'I don't know where Burnaby got his inspiration,' the other said dully, and rubbed his forehead. 'God knows I never told him. It's probably a coincidence; there were no headstones over these graves. They wouldn't have bothered. There were simply three crosses made of sticks.
'But I was telling you. I sat there on my horse, looking at those graves, and with a not very pleasant feeling. They looked wild enough, with the greenish - black landscape around and the white hills beyond. But it wasn't that. If they were prison graves, I wondered why they had been dug so far away. The next thing I knew my horse reared and nearly threw me. I slewed round against a tree; and, when I looked back, I saw what was wrong with the horse. The mound of one grave was upheaving and sliding. There was a cracking noise; something began to twist and wriggle; and a dark - coloured thing came groping up out of the mound. It was only a hand moving the fingers - but I don't think I have ever seen anything more horrible.'
'BY that time,' Drayman went on, ' there was something wrong with me as well. I didn't dare dismount, for fear the horse would bolt; and I was ashamed to bolt, myself. I thought of vampires and all the legends of hell coming up out of the twilight. Frankly, the thing scared me silly. I remember battering round on that horse like a teetotum, trying to curb it with one hand while I got out my revolver. When I looked back again, the thing had climbed clear out of the grave and was coming towards me.
'That, gentlemen, was how I met one of my best friends. The man reached down and seized a spade, which somebody who dug the grave must have left there and forgotten. And still he came on. I yelled in English, "What do you want?" - because I was so fuddled that I couldn't remember a word in any other language. The man stopped. After a second he answered in English, but with an outlandish accent, "Help," he said, "help, milord; don't be afraid," or something of the sort, and threw down the spade. The horse was quieter, but I wasn't. The man was not tall, but very powerful; his face was dark and swollen, with little scaly spots which gave it a pinkish look in the twilight. And down came the rain while he was still standing there waving his arms.
'He stood in the rain, crying out to me. I won't try to reproduce it, but he said something like "Look, milord, I am not dead of plague like those two poor devils," and he pointed at the graves. "I am not infected at all. See how the rain washes it off. It is my own blood which I have pricked out of my skin." He even stuck out his tongue to show how it was blackened with soot, and the rain made it clean. It was as mad a sight as the figure and the place. Then he went on to say that he was not a criminal, but a political offender, and was making his escape from the prison.'
Drayman's forehead wrinkled. He smiled again.
'Help him? Naturally I did. I was fired by the idea. He explained things to me while we laid plans. He was one of three brothers, students at the University of Klausenburg, who had been arrested in an insurrection for an independent Transylvania under the protection of Austria, as it was before 1860. The three of them were in the same cell, and two had died of the pestilence. With the help of the prison doctor, also a convict, he had faked the same symptoms - and died. It wasn't likely that anybody would go very close to test the doctor's judgement; the whole prison was mad with fear. Even the people who buried those three would keep their heads turned away when they threw the bodies into pine coffins and nailed on the lids. They would bury the bodies at some distance from the prison. Most of all, they would do a quick job of nailing the lids. The doctor had smuggled in a pair of nail - cutters, which he showed me. A powerful man, if he kept his nerve and didn't use up too much air after he had been buried, could force up the lid with his head enough to wedge the nail - cutters into the loose space. Afterwards a powerful man could dig up through loose ground.
'Very well. When he found I was a student at Paris, conversation became easy. His mother had been French, and he spoke the language perfectly. We decided that he had better make for France, where he could set up a new identity, without suspicion. He had a little money hidden away, and there was a girl in his native town who -'
Drayman stopped abruptly, like one who remembers that he has gone too far. Hadley merely nodded.
'I think we know who the girl was,' he said. 'For the moment we can leave "Madame Dumont" out of this. What then?'
'She could be trusted to bring the money and follow him to Paris. It wasn't likely that there would be a hue and cry - in fact, there wasn't any. He passed as dead; even if Grimaud was frightened enough to tear away from that neighbourhood before he would even shave or put on a suit of my clothes. We excited no suspicion. There were no passports in those days, and he posed on the way out of Hungary as the English friend of mine I had been expecting to meet at Tradj. Once into France - you know all the rest. Now, gentlemen!' Drayman drew a curiously shuddering breath, stiffened, and faced them with his hard blank eyes. 'You can verify everything I have said -'
'What about that cracking sound?' interjected Dr Fell in an argumentative tone.
The question was so quiet, and yet so startling, that Hadley whirled round. Even Drayman's gaze groped towards him. Dr Fell's red face was screwed up absently, and he wheezed as he poked at the carpet with his stick.
'I think it's very important,' he announced to the fire, as though somebody had contradicted him. 'Very important indeed. H'mf. Look here, Mr Drayman, I've got only two questions to ask you. You heard a cracking sound - of the lid wrenching on the coffin, hey? Yes. Then that
would mean it was a fairly shallow grave Grimaud climbed out of?'
'Quite shallow, yes, or he might never have got out.'
'Second question. That prison, now - was it a well - or badly - managed place?'
Drayman was puzzled, but his jaw set grimly. 'I do not know, sir. But I do know it was under fire at that time from a number of officials. I think they were bitter against the prison authorities for letting the disease get started - it interfered with the usefulness of the workmen at the mines. By the way, the dead men's names were published; I saw them. And I ask you again, what's the good of raking up old scandals? It can't help you. You can see that it's not any particular discredit to Grimaud, but -'
'Yes, that's the point,' rumbled Dr Fell, peering at him curiously. 'That's the thing I want to emphasize. It's not discreditable at all. Is it anything to make a man bury all traces of his past life?'
The Hollow Man Page 10
