The Best Crime Stories Ever Told

by Dorothy L. Sayers

“Do say something, Alice!” she implored.

  “Esther, I beg your pardon!” said Mrs. Arne. “I was thinking.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, of course you don’t. People who sit and stare into the fire never do think, really. They are only brooding and making themselves ill, and that is what you are doing. You mope, you take no interest in anything, you never go out—I am sure you have not been out of doors today?”

  “No—yes—I believe not. It is so cold.”

  “You are sure to feel the cold if you sit in the house all day, and sure to get ill! Just look at yourself!”

  Mrs. Arne rose and looked at herself in the Italian mirror over the chimney-piece. It reflected faithfully enough her even pallor, her dark hair and eyes, the sweeping length of her eyelashes, the sharp curves of her nostrils, and the delicate arch of her eyebrows, that formed a thin sharp black line, so clear as to seem almost unnatural.

  “Yes, I do look ill,” she said with conviction.

  “No wonder. You choose to bury yourself alive.”

  “Sometimes I do feel as if I lived in a grave. I look up at the ceiling and fancy it is my coffin-lid.”

  “Don’t please talk like that!” expostulated Miss Graham, pointing to Mrs. Arne’s little girl. “If only for Dolly’s sake, I think you should not give way to such morbid fancies. It isn’t good for her to see you like this always.”

  “Oh, Esther,” the other exclaimed, stung into something like vivacity, “don’t reproach me! I hope I am a good mother to my child!”

  “Yes, dear, you are a model mother—and model wife too. Father says the way you look after your husband is something wonderful, but don’t you think for your own sake you might try to be a little gayer? You encourage these moods, don’t you? What is it? Is it the house?”

  She glanced around her—at the high ceiling, at the heavy damask portières, the tall cabinets of china, the dim oak panelling—it reminded her of a neglected museum. Her eye travelled into the farthest corners, where the faint filmy dusk was already gathering, lit only by the bewildering cross-lights of the glass panels of cabinet doors—to the tall narrow windows—then back again to the woman in her mourning dress, cowering by the fire. She said sharply—

  “You should go out more.”

  “I do not like to—leave my husband.”

  “Oh, I know that he is delicate and all that, but still, does he never permit you to leave him? Does he never go out by himself?”

  “Not often!”

  “And you have no pets! It is very odd of you. I simply can’t imagine a house without animals.”

  “We did have a dog once,” answered Mrs. Arne plaintively, “but it howled so we had to give it away. It would not go near Edward. . . . But please don’t imagine that I am dull! I have my child.” She laid her hand on the flaxen head at her knee.

  Miss Graham rose, frowning.

  “Ah, you are too bad!” she exclaimed. “You are like a widow exactly, with one child, stroking its orphan head and saying, ‘Poor fatherless darling.’”

  Voices were heard outside. Miss Graham stopped talking quite suddenly, and sought her veil and gloves on the mantelpiece.

  “You need not go, Esther,” said Mrs. Arne. “It is only my husband.”

  “Oh, but it is getting late,” said the other, crumpling up her gloves in her muff, and shuffling her feet nervously.

  “Come!” said her hostess, with a bitter smile, “put your gloves on properly—if you must go—but it is quite early still.”

  “Please don’t go, Miss Graham,” put in the child.

  “I must. Go and meet your papa, like a good girl.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You mustn’t talk like that, Dolly,” said the doctor’s daughter absently, still looking towards the door. Mrs. Arne rose and fastened the clasps of the big fur-cloak for her friend. The wife’s white, sad, oppressed face came very close to the girl’s cheerful one, as she murmured in a low voice—

  “You don’t like my husband, Esther? I can’t help noticing it. Why don’t you?”

  “Nonsense!” retorted the other, with the emphasis of one who is repelling an over-true accusation. “I do, only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, dear, it is foolish of me, of course, but I am—a little afraid of him.”

  “Afraid of Edward!” said his wife slowly. “Why should you be?”

  “Well, dear—you see—I—I suppose women can’t help being a little afraid of their friends’ husbands—they can spoil their friendships with their wives in a moment, if they choose to disapprove of them. I really must go! Good-bye, child; give me a kiss! Don’t ring, Alice. Please don’t! I can open the door for myself—”

  “Why should you?” said Mrs. Arne. “Edward is in the hall; I heard him speaking to Foster.”

  “No; he has gone into his study. Good-bye, you apathetic creature!” She gave Mrs. Arne a brief kiss and dashed out of the room. The voices outside had ceased, and she had reasonable hopes of reaching the door without being intercepted by Mrs. Arne’s husband. But he met her on the stairs. Mrs. Arne, listening intently from her seat by the fire, heard her exchange a few shy sentences with him, the sound of which died away as they went downstairs together. A few moments after, Edward Arne came into the room and dropped into the chair just vacated by his wife’s visitor.

  He crossed his legs and said nothing. Neither did she.

  His nearness had the effect of making the woman look at once several years older. Where she was pale he was well-coloured; the network of little filmy wrinkles that, on a close inspection, covered her face, had no parallel on his smooth skin. He was handsome; soft, wellgroomed flakes of auburn hair lay over his forehead, and his steely blue eyes shone equably, a contrast to the sombre fire of hers, and the masses of dark crinkly hair that shaded her brow. The deep lines of permanent discontent furrowed that brow as she sat with her chin propped on her hands, and her elbows resting on her knees. Neither spoke. When the hands of the clock over Mrs. Arne’s head pointed to seven, the white-aproned figure of the nurse appeared in the doorway, and the little girl rose and kissed her mother very tenderly.

  Mrs. Arne’s forehead contracted. Looking uneasily at her husband, she said to the child tentatively, yet boldly, as one grasps the nettle, “Say good night to your father!”

  The child obeyed, saying “Good night” indifferently in her father’s direction.

  “Kiss him!”

  “No, please—please not.”

  Her mother looked down on her curiously, sadly.

  “You are a naughty, spoilt child!” she said, but without conviction. “Excuse her, Edward.”

  He did not seem to have heard.

  “Well, if you don’t care—” said his wife bitterly. “Come, child.” She caught the little girl by the hand and left the room.

  At the door she half turned and looked fixedly at her husband. It was a strange ambiguous gaze; in it passion and dislike were strangely combined. Then she shivered and closed the door softly after her.

  The man in the arm-chair sat with no perceptible change of attitude, his unspeculative eyes fixed on the fire, his hands clasped idly in front of him. The pose was obviously habitual. The servant brought lights and closed the shutters, drew the curtains, and made up the fire noisily, without, however, eliciting any reproof from his master.

  Edward Arne was an ideal master, as far as Foster was concerned. He kept cases of cigars, but never smoked them, although the supply had often to be renewed. He did not care what he ate or drank, although he kept as good a cellar as most gentlemen—Foster knew that. He never interfered, he counted for nothing, he gave no trouble. Foster had no intention of ever leaving such an easy place. True, his master was not cordial; he very seldom addressed him or seemed to know whether he was there, but then neither did he grumble if the fire in the study was allowed to go out, or interfere with Foster’s liberty in any w
ay. He had a better place of it than Annette, Mrs. Arne’s maid, who would be called up in the middle of the night to bathe her mistress’s forehead with eau-de-Cologne, or made to brush her long hair for hours together to soothe her.

  Naturally enough Foster and Annette compared notes as to their respective situations, and drew unflattering parallels between this capricious wife and model husband.

  III

  Miss Graham was not a demonstrative woman. On her return home she somewhat startled her father, as he sat by his study table, deeply interested in his diagnosis book, by the sudden violence of her embrace.

  “Why this excitement?” he asked, smiling and turning round. He was a young-looking man for his age; his thin wiry figure and clear colour belied the evidence of his hair, tinged with grey, and the tired wrinkles that gave value to the acuteness and brilliancy of the eyes they surrounded.

  “I don’t know!” she replied, “only you are so nice and alive somehow. I always feel like this when I come back from seeing the Arnes.”

  “Then don’t go to see the Arnes.”

  “I’m so fond of her, father, and she will never come here to me, as you know. Or else nothing would induce me to enter her tomb of a house, and talk to that walking funeral of a husband of hers. I managed to get away today without having to shake hands with him. I always try to avoid it. But, father, I do wish you would go and see Alice.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “Well, not exactly ill, I suppose, but her eyes make me quite uncomfortable, and she says such odd things! I don’t know if it is you or the clergyman she wants, but she is all wrong somehow! She never goes out except to church; she never pays a call, or has any one to call on her! Nobody ever asks the Arnes to dinner, and I’m sure I don’t blame them—the sight of that man at one’s table would spoil any party—and they never entertain. She is always alone. Day after day I go in and find her sitting over the fire, with that same brooding expression. I shouldn’t be surprised in the least if she were to go mad some day. Father, what is it? What is the tragedy of the house? There is one, I am convinced. And yet, though I have been the intimate friend of that woman for years, I know no more about her than the man in the street.”

  “She keeps her skeleton safe in the cupboard,” said Dr. Graham. “I respect her for that. And please don’t talk nonsense about tragedies. Alice Arne is only morbid—the malady of the age. And she is a very religious woman.”

  “I wonder if she complains of her odious husband to Mr. Bligh. She is always going to his services.”

  “Odious?”

  “Yes, odious.” Miss Graham shuddered. “I cannot stand him! I cannot bear the touch of his cold froggy hands, and the sight of his fishy eyes! That inane smile of his simply makes me shrivel up. Father, honestly, do you like him yourself?”

  “My dear, I hardly know him! It is his wife I have known ever since she was a child, and I a boy at college. Her father was my tutor. I never knew her husband till six years ago, when she called me in to attend him in a very serious illness. I suppose she never speaks of it? No? A very odd affair. For the life of me I cannot tell how he managed to recover. You needn’t tell people, for it affects my reputation, but I didn’t save him! Indeed I have never been able to account for it. The man was given over for dead!”

  “He might as well be dead for all the good he is,” said Esther scornfully. “I have never heard him say more than a couple of sentences in my life.”

  “Yet he was an exceedingly brilliant young man; one of the best men of his year at Oxford—a good deal run after—poor Alice was wild to marry him!”

  “In love with that spiritless creature? He is like a house with someone dead in it, and all the blinds down!”

  “Come, Esther, don’t be morbid—not to say silly! You are very hard on the poor man! What’s wrong with him? He is the ordinary, common-place, cold-blooded specimen of humanity, a little stupid, a little selfish—people who have gone through a serious illness like that are apt to be—but on the whole, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen—”

  “Yes, and his wife is afraid of him, and his child hates him!” exclaimed Esther.

  “Nonsense!” said Dr. Graham sharply. “The child is spoilt. Only children are apt to be—and the mother wants a change or a tonic of some kind. I’ll go and talk to her when I have time. Go along and dress. Have you forgotten that George Graham is coming to dinner?”

  After she had gone the doctor made a note on the corner of his blotting-pad, “Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne,” and dismissed the subject of the memorandum entirely from his mind.

  George Graham was the doctor’s nephew, a tall, weedy, cumbrous young man, full of fads and fallacies, with a gentle manner that somehow inspired confidence. He was several years younger than Esther, who loved to listen to his semi-scientific, semi-romantic stories of things met with in the course of his profession. “Oh, I come across very queer things!” he would say mysteriously. “There’s a queer little widow—!”

  “Tell me about your little widow?” asked Esther that day after dinner, when, her father having gone back to his study, she and her cousin sat together as usual.

  He laughed.

  “You like to hear of my professional experiences? Well, she certainly interested me,” he said thoughtfully. “She is an odd psychological study in her way. I wish I could come across her again.”

  “Where did you come across her, and what is her name?”

  “I don’t know her name, I don’t want to; she is not a personage to me, only a case. I hardly know her face even. I have never seen it except in the twilight. But I gathered that she lived somewhere in Chelsea, for she came out on to the Embankment with only a kind of lacy thing over her head; she can’t live far off, I fancy.”

  Esther became instantly attentive. “Go on,” she said.

  “It was three weeks ago,” said George Graham. “I was coming along the Embankment about ten o’clock. I walked through that little grove, you know, just between Cheyne Walk and the river, and I heard in there someone sobbing very bitterly. I looked and saw a woman sitting on a seat, with her head in her hands, crying. I was most awfully sorry, of course, and I thought I could perhaps do something for her, get her a glass of water, or salts, or something. I took her for a woman of the people—it was quite dark, you know. So I asked her very politely if I could do anything for her, and then I noticed her hands—they were quite white and covered with diamonds.”

  “You were sorry you spoke, I suppose,” said Esther.

  “She raised her head and said—I believe she laughed—‘Are you going to tell me to move on?’”

  “She thought you were a policeman?”

  “Probably—if she thought at all—but she was in a semi-dazed condition. I told her to wait till I came back, and dashed round the corner to the chemist’s and bought a bottle of salts. She thanked me, and made a little effort to rise and go away. She seemed very weak. I told her I was a medical man, I started in and talked to her.”

  “And she to you?”

  “Yes, quite straight. Don’t you know that women always treat a doctor as if he were one step removed from their father confessor—not human—not in the same category as themselves? It is not complimentary to one as a man, but one hears a good deal one would not otherwise hear. She ended by telling me all about herself—in a veiled way, of course. It soothed her—relieved her—she seemed not to have had an outlet for years!”

  “To a mere stranger!”

  “To a doctor. And she did not know what she was saying half the time. She was hysterical, of course. Heavens! what nonsense she talked! She spoke of herself as a person somehow haunted, cursed by some malign fate, a victim of some fearful spiritual catastrophe, don’t you know? I let her run on. She was convinced of the reality of a sort of ‘doom’ that she had fancied had befallen her. It was quite pathetic. Then it got rather chilly—she shivered—I suggested her going in. She shrank back; she said, ‘If you only knew what a relief it is, how m
uch less miserable I am out here! I can breathe; I can live—it is my only glimpse of the world that is alive—I live in a grave—oh, let me stay!’ She seemed positively afraid to go home.”

  “Perhaps someone bullied her at home.”

  “I suppose so, but then—she had no husband. He died, she told me, years ago. She had adored him, she said—”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Pretty! Well, I hardly noticed. Let me see! Oh, yes, I suppose she was pretty—no, now I think of it, she would be too worn and faded to be what you call pretty.”

  Esther smiled.

  “Well, we sat there together for quite an hour, then the clock of Chelsea church struck eleven, and she got up and said ‘Good-bye,’ holding out her hand quite naturally, as if our meeting and conversation had been nothing out of the common. There was a sound like a dead leaf trailing across the walk and she was gone.”

  “Didn’t you ask if you should see her again?”

  “That would have been a mean advantage to take.”

  “You might have offered to see her home.”

  “I saw she did not mean me to.”

  “She was a lady, you say,” pondered Esther. “How was she dressed?”

  “Oh, all right, like a lady—in black—mourning, I suppose. She has dark crinkly hair, and her eyebrows are very thin and arched—I noticed that in the dusk.”

  “Does this photograph remind you of her?” asked Esther suddenly, taking him to the mantelpiece.

  “Rather!”

  “Alice! Oh, it couldn’t be—she is not a widow, her husband is alive—has your friend any children?”

  “Yes, one, she mentioned it.”

  “How old?”

  “Six years old, I think she said. She talks of the ‘responsibility of bringing up an orphan.’”

  “George, what time is it?” Esther asked suddenly.

  “About nine o’clock.”

  “Would you mind coming out with me?”

  “I should like it. Where shall we go?”

  “To St. Adhelm’s! It is close by here. There is a special late service tonight, and Mrs. Arne is sure to be there.”