by Roy Vickers
He was delighted when they advised him to fight. In the hall, on the way out, he lobbed a half finished cigarette into a huge brass coal vase, placed there for the purpose. He had walked a dozen paces into the wind before the system stopped him short.
He had thrown the cigarette into the vase, but had not actually seen it land. Lots of fires—some fires, anyhow—were caused by half finished cigarettes thrown carelessly away. Suppose he had missed the coal vase? Suppose the half finished cigarette had rolled along the floor, slipped through a chink in the boards? On a windy day like this, that old-fashioned building would burn like matchboard. He flashed up a pageant of disaster. The traffic cordoned off, the police holding back the crowd of morbid sightseers. He could hear the fire gongs, the cries of the doomed in the upper floors. Why not slip back and make sure about that cigarette?
“I have no reason to believe that I missed the coal vase—a damned great vat like that! It’s simply that I don’t want to alter the system. And I promised Marion I would. Got to begin somewhere!”
It was not the wind alone that made walking back to his office a trudging labour. The slight feeling of guilt stayed with him until he went out for lunch. His way took him past the corner of Hedgecutter Street. No fire gongs. No police. No morbid sightseers.
He let out a long breath.
“I mustn’t get worked up like that again! The system cut out all worry. Better watch my step, or I shall get nervy.”
Having thus warned himself, he was free to enjoy lunch with a director of the insurance company whose support he secured in resisting the claim for damage.
On the way back after lunch his eye travelled over a display in one of Hoffmeister’s windows, came to rest on a purse-comb in tortoiseshell. It would be fun to give it to Marion, in token that their little misunderstanding at breakfast time had been rubbed out. He gave his name and business address. If they would send the comb during the afternoon he would pay the messenger in currency. The manager insisted on his taking the comb and sending a cheque at convenience. Curwen thanked him and placed the comb—unwrapped—in his breast pocket—inside his note case, to make sure it would not be crushed.
Approaching Hedgecutter Street, he caught the unmistakable echo of a fire gong. At the corner, the traffic was cordoned off. The fire brigade was in action and the police were holding back the crowd of sightseers. Sebastopol House was in flames.
In the first confusion, Peter Curwen had the sense of being cheated—as if he had been promised that there would be no fire. While he gaped, his eye took in detail. Above the flames, seen intermittently through the smoke, a man was standing on a window sill on the top floor, steadying himself with one hand on the gable. The escape ladder was swaying towards him. When it reached the edge of the window sill the man loosened his hold on the gable, stooped for the ladder and overbalanced. Curwen shut his eyes. His mind stepped back some three hours. He saw himself standing in the wind a dozen yards from Sepastopol House, hesitating.
“If I had gone back, that man would be alive now.”
In the office, he steadied himself. He was as able to distinguish fact from phantasy as anybody else. It would be hysterical to jump to the conclusion that he had caused the fire. That long sequence about the half finished cigarette falling through a chink in the floorboards, and the rest of it, had been phantasy. The mathematical chances against all that having happened were enormous. Admittedly, he had suspected that the cigarette might have missed the coal vase, but that did not mean that it had in fact done so. His suspicion had been created by the system. As Marion had pointed out, these systematic suspicions were uneconomical. The light always had been turned off. The taps never did leak. Judgment, therefore, could be suspended.
The afternoon editions weakened the mathematical part of the argument by stating that the fire was believed to have started between the hall and the basement.
Now and again, there came sharp mental images of Marion. Of Marion at breakfast, complaining about the system. Of himself giving way, against his better judgment. Of himself hesitating on the wind-swept pavement. Better go back and make sure about that cigarette. I promised Marion. Got to begin somewhere. Begin—oh God!—begin with the fire gong. Steady! Mathematical chances.
He decided to say nothing to Marion about the fire. He was not thinking about her feelings—Marion wouldn’t have any feelings about someone else’s fire. Intuition warned him that it would be better for himself if the fire were never discussed with her.
“Sebastopol House has been gutted! There’s a whole column about it,” said Marion as soon as he came in. “But I expect you know, as it’s so near the office.”
“I saw it when I came back from lunch.” As long as he kept close to the newspaper reports, there should be no danger. “I was there when that man fell.”
“Poor darling! How upsetting for you! No wonder you look limp. Go and sit down and I’ll bring you a drink.”
The hall lounge was warm and cosy. He sat down, under inward protest. He must be very careful about drink, now—never allow himself to get the very slightest degree fuddled.
“We’ve nothing on tonight,” Marion was saying, “so you can have a good rest.”
Normally, he enjoyed a quiet evening at home. Tonight, he felt an undefined reluctance to be alone with Marion. He drank the whisky at a gulp.
“I’m not tired. I was going to suggest that we look in at the Parnassus after dinner.”
In his dressing-room he took out his notecase, stared at the tortoiseshell purse-comb, until he remembered buying it, to placate Marion. Why did that now seem so contemptible? He glanced at the communicating door, then furtively slipped the comb into a drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs.
The spiritual vulgarity of his action shocked him into momentary suspicion of himself. He was, he reminded himself, a free agent. If he wished, say, to turn back a dozen yards or so, for any purpose whatever, no one could prevent him. If he did not wish to turn back, the choice was exclusively his own, for which he would bear exclusive responsibility. Further discussion of this subject would be unnecessary.
The inquest, as far as Peter Curwen was concerned, was far from satisfactory. The deceased, Henry Morprill, was a dark, in the middle thirties, employed by a manufacturer’s agent occupying the top floor. The manner in which he had met his death was not in dispute. The police did not suggest incendiarism, nor was there any evidence that anyone had been culpably careless.
“It seems to have been one of those fires that have no detectable cause,” said the Coroner. “It was a very windy day. A live cigarette end, or a spark from a distant chimney, might have been blown through a ventilator and carried to the space between the ground floor and the ceiling of the basement. It seems that we shall never know for certain. You are not, however, concerned with the fire, as such.”
Peter Curwen had attended the court with something approaching confidence that the fire would be attributed to a half-finished cigarette falling outside the coal vase. The protracted doubt was attacking the flank of his defences.
Direct inquiry of the experts would be impossible because he had sustained no financial loss in the fire. Using his connection with the insurance companies, he contrived a drink with the fire assessor concerned.
“An incendiary generally leaves something for us to work on,” said the assessor. “But a straight fire—I should say about a third of ’em have to be left to inspired guesswork. A man may do something slightly dangerous every day for twenty years, and suddenly it starts a fire!”
“In the hall—”
“The wind may be blowing at an angle it’s never blown at before. Freak combination of small factors. This is a case in point.”
“In the hall,” said Curwen, “there was a large coal vase. People would lob half-finished cigarettes into it as they passed. Now, suppose a cigarette missed the coal vase, rolled through a chink in the floorboards—”
“Could be! It’s as likely as anything else. That’s what I meant
by inspired guess. Let’s have another drink.”
The doubt was now securely entrenched. When he had parted from the assessor, Curwen pinched a cigarette in half. He lobbed one half at a litter bin, and missed.
That night they were booked for a dinner party. When he opened the drawer for a handkerchief, he remembered that under the pile lay the tortoiseshell comb. He felt unable to cope with the complicated vibrations set up by that comb. He lifted a handkerchief as if he feared to disturb the pile. It could lie buried until he had focused the death of that clerk.
That it was a poor hiding place did not occur to him. Like many a man in his circumstances he put his soiled linen in a basket and was incurious as to the processes by which it eventually reappeared in a chest of drawers.
He kept his end up at the dinner party. Afterwards, Marion was quieter than usual. She had perceived that the climate of their marriage had changed.
The coroner’s jury had expressed sympathy with the widow and had felt the better for it. The widow—the half-finished cigarette—sympathy! The doubt was a haunting abstraction, but the widow was an inescapable actuality. He wrote to her, on office paper bearing his name. He asserted that he was under a moral obligation to her late husband—the nature of which he was not at liberty to divulge—that he proposed to call on her on the following day to inquire whether he could be of any service to her.
He was glad they had another dinner engagement that night. It was as if he were afraid of being alone with Marion. The pile of handkerchiefs in his drawer was considerably higher. He did not know that Marion always placed incoming handkerchiefs at the bottom of the pile.
At breakfast the next morning, he stopped with the coffee spoon halfway to his plate. He put it back in the saucer, then stole a glance at Marion.
“I’m so glad you’re trying,” she said. “It’ll come easier after a while.”
He felt fury so sudden and so intense that he left the room and did not return. Before leaving the flat, he went to his dressing-room, took the tortoiseshell comb from under the pile of handkerchiefs and later put it into storage in the office safe.
By lunch time his calm had returned. Indeed, he was on the verge of good spirits as his thoughts dwelt on his coming interview with Mrs. Morprill. A clerk’s widow would be faded and poor—or at least shabby-genteel—faced with a hundred financial anxieties. It would be balm to his lacerated conscience to smooth her path through life. His success in business would acquire an added sweetness.
Gormer’s Green, where the widow lived, was some twelve miles out, a part of London unknown to him. He left the office shortly after four. On emerging from the underground, he groped his way in a maze of five-roomed semi-detached houses of identical pattern.
At first glance, Mrs. Morprill was fairly close to his mental picture of her, except that she was tall and did not droop. Faded she certainly was, but her make-up was passable. She had shape, too, which survived the dowdiness of her dress. Her eyes were calm and friendly.
“It was so kind of you to write, Mr. Curwen. Do please come in. I expect you could do with a cup of tea, after that long walk from the station.”
Her voice was soft and her speech free from affectation. She showed him into the parlour-dining-room and left him while she prepared tea. The furniture was mass produced: the carpet was garish and the pictures he thought awful. But a home-made bookcase gave a pleasing touch of individuality.
Mrs. Morprill was not parading her grief. She made some conventional remarks to which he did his best to respond, waiting to get in with his little speech.
“Mrs. Morprill, you know why I have come here. In your bereavement, you are called upon to face a number of practical difficulties. I earnestly hope you will allow me to help.”
“I’m sure I don’t know how to thank you for offering, Mr. Curwen.” She was unembarrassed, took his words at their face value. “But we’ve been living in a quite simple way, and I don’t think there’s really anything that isn’t being taken care of, one way and another. There’s less practical sort of bother than you’d think.”
For Curwen, it was the wrong answer. This woman was courageous, but she was feminine and would yield to the right kind of pressure.
“I’m sure you’ll let me speak openly, Mrs. Morprill. Let’s look squarely at the facts. To begin with, your income has been cut off.”
“Oh! I didn’t know you meant money help!”
“You’re not offended? Please don’t say you are.”
“Why, of course not! I couldn’t be offended at such a very kind thought. But, you see, I don’t think I need any money help, thanking you most gratefully all the same.
“It isn’t as though Henry had left me in the lurch,” she explained. “He was a thoughtful man—clever too, though not what I’d call pushful. He paid a bit extra to the building society on the instalments, and now this house becomes ours—mine, I should say. And besides that, he was insured for a thousand pounds. And Maggie—that’s our daughter—she’ll be twelve next month—she’s at the Grammar school I’m pleased to say, and she seems to have all the clothes and things she needs.”
Curwen was losing his nerve.
“The interest on that thousand will be less than forty pounds a year.”
“I shall go back to work. I was a typist before we married. I shall take a refresher course as soon as I’ve straightened my mind a bit. As to the next few weeks, they’re paying his salary till the end of the month. And there’s the holiday money we’ve saved, which we shan’t be wanting now—for holidays I mean.”
Curwen groped vainly for a new line of appeal. This faded woman, with her soft, monotonous voice and her homely idiom, was crushing his spirit. Telling him he was a nice kind man, and would he please stop talking about money.
“Mr. Curwen, I’d like it if you would tell me something about Henry. Nothing private, I mean. Just little things. It won’t upset me—I promise!”
“I will tell you this about him.” He faltered, feeling now that his presence in her house was a loutish intrusion. “If you would let me make you an allowance equal to his salary, I would still be in debt to your husband. And you would make me very happy indeed.”
She ought to accept, or kick him out. But her eyes showed only a mild wonder.
“Your debt to him wasn’t a money debt, so it can’t be repaid in money,” she said, forming the thought as she spoke. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy about it, Mr. Curwen. I feel a bit like that about him myself. He was much kinder to me than I was to him. I’m sort of in debt to him, too.”
Walking back to the underground, missing his way again, Curwen realised that his fruitless visit had substantially damaged him. He had thought of a woman deprived of a breadwinner. He had understated the case so grossly that the Doubt was beginning to lose its essential character. It was no longer of primary importance to know whether his half lighted cigarette had in fact rolled under a chink in the floorboards and caused the fire. What if it had? The law and public pinion would pronounce it an accident—a trivial act of carelessness with an unforeseeably tragic sequel.
All very reasonable—until he remembered that he himself had set up the postulate that an act of carelessness of that kind need never and ought never to occur. That was the essence of the system, thoughtfully based on the so-called freak accident to the corvette. Like a muddled child he had rushed to the widow, begging to be allowed to buy back that moment of self-betrayal in Hedgecutter Street.
He reached home an hour later than usual. Marion, in a dinner dress, was waiting in the hall.
“Peter, have you forgotten that we’re taking Mother to the theatre tonight and that she’s due at any minute?”
He had forgotten. He tried to break out of his pre-occupation.
“Sorry, dear! I’ll hurry.”
“I have the tickets,” said Marion. “I will hand them to you at the theatre. You will remember that, won’t you? And not keep feeling in all your pockets before we get there? Mother notices every
thing.”
Again her words awoke that queer kind of anger that was new to him. It was something apart from ill-temper, indefinable and alarming.
Marion kept back dinner until he was ready. Mrs. Lardner was excessively polite about it. Service sent up a new maid, who was very slow. They reached the theatre a full minute after the curtain had risen. There were two intervals, in each of which he had two double whiskies, which was a lot, for a man of his habits.
“Mother wasn’t on her best behaviour,” remarked Marion, after Mrs. Lardner had gone. “We started off on the wrong foot.”
“My fault for being late.” He was pouring himself a stiff one. “I stayed to clear up some arrears and didn’t notice the time.”
“Yes, Peter. I thought you might forget, so I rang you about four. Miss Aspland said you had left the office and would not return.”
She was making a point of his white lie. Doubtless, she was expecting further evasions. She darned well wouldn’t get any.
“I was at Gormer’s Green. I went to see the widow of the man who was killed in the Sebastopol House fire.”
“Really? Then, you knew her before? What an extraordinary coincidence!”
“I had never heard of her until the inquest. I sought her out because it is possible—I repeat, possible—that I was the indirect cause of her husband’s death.”
He could see that she was startled to the point of confusion. Serve her right!
“I haven’t got there yet, Peter. A man you’ve never heard of before falls from the top floor—”
“Stop guessing and listen!” He told her of his call on the lawyers, told her in detail of his lobbing the half-finished cigarette and his uncertainty whether it had gone into the coal vase. He paused to drain his glass—and remembered that he had taken several whiskies at the theatre. Instantly, he sprang on guard.
“Yes—well—what next?” she prompted.
Deep, intuitive fear of himself—fear that some words, spoken out loud, might unleash something—saved him from telling her what happened next. He resented his fear and wanted to defy it. Wanted to play with fire. Play with the Sebastopol House fire. Nothing in the fire, as such. Nothing in the half-finished cigarette, as such. Nothing in the widow.
