“I say that you have been flirting. And I am going to put a stop to it. Do you understand?”
“Don’t be a fool. Who, or what, has put these outrageous ideas into your head?”
“I know perfectly well—”
“If you are going to say that you know I have been flirting with Bertha, then I tell you that you know nothing of the sort. I think if any other man had dared to insinuate—”
“That’s mere bluff. You think you can deceive me.”
“Someone has deceived you right enough. You said just now that people had been talking. Good heavens! Can you really suppose that she—your wife—Bertha—is the sort of woman who would—? Well; you remember what you said. As for myself, I have never pretended to be a saint; but do you believe that I would come sneaking into your house to play the dirty game you have suggested? For my own part, I would not care so much. But I can’t allow you to wrong a woman who is so loyal to you. And, look here: if people have been stuffing you with nonsense, just let me know who they are, will you?”
He spoke loudly and rapidly. Poor Robert felt a sudden liquefaction of ideas, a dissolution of confidence.
So, jarring and wrangling, but with John definitely on top, they reached again the crest of Constitution Hill and again they turned. By this time the storm was dying down, with a shuddering among the trees and a more spasmodic rattling of twigs. A silver ghost of a moon rode up through the clouds, and was then swallowed in a black mist of advancing hail.
“Yes, yes!” cried Robert Arthur, obscurely feeling himself lost in the meshes of doom. “I see your game. You’re trying to slip away from me. You won’t look at the facts of the case.”
“Nothing of the sort. And what are the facts of the case? What is the case, anyhow? What has come over you? Are you determined to believe a falsehood, or to wreck your happiness because of some ridiculous mistake, mere lying gossip or malicious invention? I don’t know, of course. I don’t even know what I am supposed to have done. But you have been wickedly bamboozled.”
Kewdingham was being worn down. His main attack was broken, yet he was not without reserves.
“Why should I believe you? I have a right to think as I please.”
“You have no right to do an unforgivable injury—”
“I have a right to do and think as I please. What I think about my wife is no business of yours. There is no need for you to interfere, thank you.”
“If it comes to rights, then I have an unquestionable right to intervene when I see that you are the victim of a dangerous error—and one that concerns my own honour, too. You have no proof, you have not a scrap of evidence to support your fantastic accusation. Who has forced you to swallow all this nonsense? Will you tell me?”
“Proof! I tell you I’ve got the proof in my own hands, and if I see fit I will produce it. I will produce it—do you hear? You hardly expected that, did you?”
John did not flinch. He knew that Kewdingham was using idle words, for there was not merely no proof—there was nothing to be proved. Still, it was desirable to be extremely cautious, extremely vigilant.
“You have evidence, you say? If this evidence is at all concerned with me, I will ask you to produce it now—if you can. It is as good a time as any.”
Robert promptly changed his front:
“Let us come to a plain understanding. I don’t want you to see her again. Or at least, only in a social sort of way. You have been behaving very imprudently, and in such a manner as to encourage a grave scandal—and I won’t have it! If you are really Bertha’s friend, and mine, you can prove your friendship by keeping at a distance.”
“Indeed! I don’t see why. That would be lending countenance to all this damned rot. It wouldn’t prove any friendship, either for you or for her. It would only prove cowardice and folly.”
“I don’t say that you are not to call, when I’m there myself.” He thought, with a tingle of regret, of John’s interest in the great collection. “You may come in for a meal now and then when you’re in Shufflecester. But I won’t have any more motor drives and all that sort of thing. And I won’t have you writing to her and asking her to your rooms and so forth.”
He glanced aside at John, and he saw dimly in the twilight the flicker of a smile. Another gust of anger shook him.
“None of your tricks—you little blackguard!”
The sky was clearing. The wings of the lady in the quadriga pricked up over the trees like monstrous black ears, the lights of the traffic gyrated merrily around Hyde Park Corner.
Blackguard! John said nothing. He stiffened himself in a final resolve. He thought of Bertha with her fine appealing eyes, her promise of passion. And he made up his mind. He would not fail Bertha in the hour of need; he would rise up as a willing champion. He was ominously composed.
“Very well, Bobby,” he said. “Do as you please.”
“Of course I shall.” Robert spoke less gruffly and with something like a groan of relief. “You might as well have seen that before. It’s a family matter—what?”
Newsboys were bawling, the bowler-hat brigade was hurrying back to suburban quarters, taxi-cabs went swishing down Grosvenor Place. London roared and rumbled all about them as Robert Arthur and his cousin parted company outside the Park.
3
When John got back to his Chelsea rooms he felt excited though chilly. He shivered a little, and there was a dry, gritty sensation in his mouth, as though his tongue was being gently galvanised. Perhaps he was going to have an attack of influenza. Or was he shaken up by his row with Kewdingham?
He rang the bell for his landlady, Mrs. Appleton.
“Mrs. Appleton, could you let me have supper at home to-night? I am not going out after all.”
The landlady, who was pale, genteel and motherly, looked at John with visible concern.
“Yes, that will be all right, Mr. Harrigall. Excuse me—but are you feeling quite well?”
“Oh, I think so, Mrs. Appleton; I think so. I was foolish enough to walk part of the way back, and it really was frightfully cold.”
Still wearing his overcoat he stood with his back to the fire, smiling with reassurance at Mrs. Appleton, who, after a few words about the meal, softly padded out of the room in her discreet slippers.
He had intended to go to the Chauves Souris with Jellibun, who writes those delightful bits in the London Argus, but he rang up and told him that he was not feeling well.
Actually, after supper, he did feel curiously exalted. The chill had gone, but the excitement remained. Nor was this excitement at all unpleasing. He had never known anything like it before. For the first time in his life he was feeling like a really murderous man. If there is anything which is convincingly virile it is the desire to kill; a desire planted imperishably in the fundamental nature of man, never to be uprooted by laws or punishments or the attitude of society.
Not that John had made up his mind to kill Robert Arthur. No such thing. He was merely in a murderous condition. With proper provocation he would have killed anyone. The new current of hatred was hardening and stiffening a hitherto pliable, indulgent character. When John walked out of the Green Park he was not by any means the John who had walked into it. When he came out he was converted. The devil makes a convert now and then, as well as the other party.
He asked Mr. Appleton (who was not quite as genteel as his wife) if he would be so good as to go out and get him a bottle of brandy.
At half-past ten John was sitting by the fire, thinking.
He thought of Bertha. He thought of the scene in the Park. As he remembered Robert’s yellow, contorted face, all puckering up in spasms of idiotic rage, he felt again the hot rush of his own anger flooding through his body like a torrent of life.
Robert had revealed himself. He had shown John something unsuspected, terrifying and ugly; for below his ridiculous bluster there could be
seen—so John imagined—the stark menace of the insane. And now John could realise what Bertha had to endure, to apprehend. It was a shocking realisation. It was more—it was intolerable. Mere philandering might be very well on occasion, but now he was thinking (not unheroically) of a rescue.
4
“I am not surprised that you are worried, my dear chap,” said Doctor Bagge to Mr. Kewdingham. “You are extremely unwell. I have been thinking about it, I can assure you. And here is an astringent with tonic properties which I have made up after the most careful consideration—the most careful consideration. Tut-a-tut! We can’t have you going on like this! It will never do. Not that I want to alarm you; certainly not. All I want you to do is to take this mixture three times a day in water, with an additional dose at bedtime if you feel any discomfort. Pray take it regularly: the effect is accumulative.”
“It is very good of you to take so much trouble,” said Robert Arthur.
“My job is to cure you,” replied the doctor cheerily. “But a cure, in this case, is not possible without the intelligent co-operation of the patient—and that, I know, you will give me.”
Robert Arthur smiled, with an air of torpid resignation. He carefully pushed into alignment, on the table in front of him, a series of impaled butterflies.
“You really must promise to do as I tell you,” the doctor continued, not without a trace of annoyance. “Be regular. If you go away, take a bottle with you. I shall ask Mrs. Kewdingham to see that you don’t forget it—I’m sure that she will be ready to help me. Eh?”
“Oh, I won’t forget, I won’t forget! I’m not a child. Of course, I shall take the stuff regularly. Is that it?—That big bottle you’ve got there?”
“Yes, that’s it. And I shall call occasionally, just to see how you are getting on. I have taken a great deal of trouble with that medicine, and I am anxious to see how it works. One more bottle will probably do the trick. I shall be surprised if we have to continue the treatment for any length of time.”
“I’m extremely grateful.” And still the annoying man examined minutely his row of butterflies.
“And, look here!”—the doctor was emphatic—“no more playing about with your quack medicines and your drugs and all that!”
Robert Arthur merely exhaled a powerful breath, pushing out his lips and frowning a little.
“Did I show you this bit of a bronze brooch, doctor? Probably Roman. Got it on Gunter’s Hill yesterday…”
“If you interfere with the action of this medicine,” said the doctor, who knew Robert’s irritating ways, “I cannot answer for the consequences. How can I do you any good if you will persist in dosing yourself with heaven knows what?”
“Probably Roman,” Robert Arthur repeated. “I wouldn’t like to call it anything else—Yes; I shall not forget what you have said.”
5
It is not necessary to follow in detail Bertha’s plan of action, nor is it necessary to explain or defend her conduct. We are only concerned, in this narrative, with a record of events. Bertha knew perfectly well what she was doing: she was killing her husband, or trying to kill him, with lead acetate.
There was no difficulty in giving him the stuff. Bertha did most of the cooking, and she was, therefore, able to put suitable doses of acetate into a great variety of substances. She had not undertaken her task in blind ignorance of toxicology. She knew that she would have to be patient, observant, methodical. Heavy doses would have defeated her purpose. A mere pinch in a rock bun, a mere powdering over the porridge, a mere suspicion in a jam tart, a bit here and a bit there, given as the occasion presented itself, but given steadily and with confidence—that was the correct procedure.
As a result of lead poisoning a shooting pain in the limbs may be anticipated, followed by unsteadiness and a sensation of cramp. This will be normally followed by a blackening of the teeth and gums, and by that peculiar drooping of the wrist which is so characteristic of the poison. Afterwards come the traces of symmetrical paralysis. Finally, in a typical case, you get the more interesting phenomena of plumbism—illusions, or the mental disorder which goes by the frightful and appropriate name of “saturnine lunacy”.
But not one of these symptoms was discovered in the singular case of Mr. Kewdingham—not even the arthralgia.
On the contrary, there was a marked improvement in health after a fortnight’s course of acetate. The patient was brighter, more vigorous, less irritable. How was it possible to explain such perversity?
Something must have gone wrong. But no!—It was out of the question. Whatever he was or was not taking, it was certain that he was taking poisonous doses of lead. Yet he was taking it with no result, or with a result exactly contrary to general experience. It was like a nightmare. Such absurd, unaccountable frustration is out of the natural order of things. It was like shooting at a ghost, trying to destroy some indestructible phantasm.
Mr. Kewdingham attributed his improvement partly to the medicine of Doctor Bagge and partly to his own knowledge of the pharmacopoeia. His opinion of Bagge naturally rose to a higher level, and he took the mixture with scrupulous regularity. He took other things as well, but he trusted mainly in the mixture.
This phenomenal recovery of health stimulated Robert’s general activity. He was busily occupied with his collection, to which he was now adding an extensive biological department. He got an enormous glass tank which he filled with detestable slime, into which he dropped unsightly creatures. In the silence of the evening his poor, disheartened wife could hear the soft exgurgitation as the bubbles broke on the top of the filmy water, or the occasional plosh of a minnow.
And as Robert grew more industrious and even cheerful, his wife became more pale and apprehensive.
“I don’t like the look of Bertha at all,” said Mrs. Poundle-Quainton to her daughter. “You would think she had something on her mind.”
“Yes, indeed,” replied Miss Ethel, clicking her bright steel needles. “I expect she is worrying about Michael. And you know, Bobby is rather selfish, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, he’s just a man!” The old lady tilted her sharp little chin. She had been engaged more than once, so she knew what she was talking about. “And he might be worse. I think it’s a good thing he is able to take such an interest in science. Besides, it was very brave of him to see that man about the—the South Sea business, you know.”
Ethel counted her stitches. “Twenty-one, twenty-two…He’s a regular Kewdingham.” And she left it at that.
It was about the middle of February.
Then Robert began to get a little restless. He was not ill, but he felt uncomfortable. When he sat with his wife in the evening, she noticed a very singular tense, dense perplexity in his face, such as you may see in the face of a tired bull. He fiddled about with his boxes, his corks or cards, in a more disjointed way. Every now and then he gave out a long windy groan.
“Are you feeling all right, Bobby?”
“I feel tremendously better. That stuff of Bagge’s is doing me a lot of good.”
“No pain?”
“Absolutely. Only a sort of—”
“Something like rheumatism?”
“No; not at all. I don’t think I feel anything, really. I don’t know what it is. I’m a hundred times better than I was before Christmas. Jenkins was remarking on it—said he’d never seen me looking so fit.”
Bertha stared at him with bewilderment, with a kind of terror. Was he really indestructible? Was Athu-na-Shulah more than a match for any ordinary poison? Nonsense!
She increased the dosage. And then—explain it as you can—he got better again.
Certainly Bertha had some difficulty in believing it. But the evidence was clear enough. Having swallowed enough lead to make a charge of duck-shot, this peculiar man was going about, not merely in his ordinary manner, but with a new appearance of alacrity. No one, not even a toxi
cologist of wide experience, could have detected a symptom of poisoning.
She was being defeated—by whom or by what?
After all, she knew he took the acetate. He took every morning, in his porridge alone, a very considerable amount of heavy metal. He took it also, throughout the day, in pies, pastry, cakes, muffins, custard, puddings, and so forth. She watched him putting it down. There could not be the slightest doubt of it. And yet, so far as results were concerned, he might have been taking so much ordinary sugar.
Yes; it was unreal, terrifying, this diabolical frustration; it was a thing outside the region of ordinary experience, like a miracle. What, in the name of goodness, could account for Bobby’s immunity? A man is a man, lead is lead, and when you combine the two in definite proportions you ought to get a definite result.
6
Tumbling one night on a most uneasy bed, and half listening for the fatal call, poor Bertha had a dream which frightened her very much indeed.
She was in the midst of a desert. Instead of being covered with sand in the ordinary way, this desert was covered with a soft, black, fluffy dust, such as you find lying on the tops of old books in London. She was quite alone, dressed like an explorer in tunic, shorts and a sun-helmet, with a big pistol on one side of her belt and a bag full of enormous bullets—lead bullets—on the other.
At every step in the black, fluffy subsiding dust her feet sank a little deeper. The air was very hot and there was a smell of dead things, although nothing could be seen but the sooty expanse of the wilderness, unbroken, unlighted, unshadowed, fluffy and silent. Her own footfalls were inaudible, she was like a fly walking in dust. And then—oh, horror!—she began to sink into this deadly though almost intangible sooty and fuscous deposit.
She had already sunk to her knees, she could feel already the awful warm dust between her thighs and her shorts, when a most obscene yellow chimpanzee rose from nowhere and waggled himself about ten paces away. He was on the top of the dust, capering as if it was an asphalt platform. She took her pistol and fired—ploff!—right into his guts. But the awful chimpanzee merely grinned; he jabbed a bit of glass into his left eye and came closer. Two shots now, two deadly smacks of lead—ploff! plaff!—full in his middle. He gave a crackle of demonic laughter and came so close that she could see all the hairs on his obscene body. Still three shots left, and it was impossible to miss him. She would give him the final and fatal dose. Now—ram the muzzle right into that swagging belly of his!—ploff! ploff! plang!—a great mass of lead has gone tearing and plunging into his vitals. He must be dead, he must be crumpled up like a punctured bladder. No! He is actually laughing again! He is coming…
Family Matters Page 11
