Dancing with Death

by Ruth Wade

“That was very interesting, what she said about Mrs. Bradley,” he said, stuttering in his eagerness. “That’s the sort of thing people commit murder for, isn’t it, Mr. Kenny?”

  “I can think of other motives,” said Finlay menacingly.

  “Really,” said Tennyson-Smith, “there is no need to use that tone on me. I’m simply trying to be objective — ”

  “Oh, run away and play!” said Finley rudely.

  “Good night, Mr. Kenny!” said Tennyson-Smith, outraged.

  He turned around and marched off down a side street.

  “He’ll have to come back,” said Fahy, still detached. “That is a cul-de-sac.”

  “Why were you so rude to him?” Mike asked Finlay.

  “He confided to me that he fears that Professor Milligan murdered the President,” said Finlay with contempt. “He doesn’t care a hang about that, but he says he won’t marry a murderer’s daughter, and yet he fears that Miss Milligan will not easily release him from his promises to her.”

  “So they were engaged to be married?”

  “He says so. He says she pursued him and I’m afraid there is a little truth in that. He’s a vulgar, unchivalrous fellow to have discussed her at all.”

  Mike wondered about Finlay, how a man of such strong and high principles had fallen into such idle habits.

  The College gates were just closing when they reached them. As Mike walked up the avenue with the two young men, John Fahy said with respect:

  “Then it’s true that the Law never sleeps.”

  “Not quite,” said Mike, and he gave no more information.

  He entered the main hall with them and saw them mount the secondary stairs that led to the students’ rooms before starting up the main stairs to look for Daly.

  A line of light under the outer door showed that Daly was inside. He opened the door wide in answer to Mike’s knock and said with a kind of lunatic heartiness:

  “Come in, come in. It’s never too late to be visited by a friend. I was just thinking about the word ‘study,’ how sensitive we are about it. And yet Shakespeare has it: ‘Get me a taper in my study, boy.’ I always say ‘study,’ do you?”

  Suddenly he seemed to fade out, like a lamp whose oil-tank has dried up. Then he said, a little shakily:

  “I see that I was right about Biddy. She is a regular mine of information, don’t you think? Oh, come along in, for heaven’s sake!”

  He stumped across the room leaving Mike to come in and close the door as best he might. He stood against the dark background of the curtains, with his head down, looking up from under his eyebrows. Mike advanced cautiously to the fire and said:

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your association with Mrs. Bradley long ago? I wish I could have deprived Biddy of the pleasure of surprising me. She doesn’t like you.”

  “I know,” said Daly, looking a little smug. “One of my students used to go to her pub and write down her remarks in a little notebook. His heart was big with the wish for to be like James Joyce, but I put a stop to that by telling him she was laying it on. Somehow she found out about it. And then there was the little business of the verse I composed about her. It went like this.” He raised his voice a semitone and droned it out:

  “Oh, sweetest Biddy of The Cow;

  The years sit lightly on thy brow,

  And though thy form is short and curvy,

  We know it’s not from drinking Murphy.”

  “To me that sounds rather complimentary,” Mike murmured.

  “She didn’t think so,” said Daly. “It seems she had been trying to reduce. She gave up stocking Murphy’s stout after that. A kind friend repeated the verse to her.”

  “But you still continued to go there?”

  “Yes. I thought she had forgiven and forgotten. But it seems I was wrong.” He sighed. “I think I actually wanted her to tell you about Helen. It was sure to come out sooner or later. Now you think I murdered Bradley to get her back, or from motives of revenge?”

  “Well, no,” said Mike gently. “I was rather wondering whether it could have been the other way around, that Mrs. Bradley murdered her husband to get you back.”

  “Ha!” said Daly with a snort. “It takes two to play that game!”

  Mike sat down carefully in an armchair by the fire.

  Daly crossed to sit opposite him, and leaned over to put a fresh log on the fire. The sparks flew up with a crackle. Mike said after a moment:

  “Mrs. Bradley was not happy with her husband. Indeed I doubt if even Bradley’s cat could have been happy with him. He was self-satisfied, mean about money, a bully, and very exacting in his demands. I suggest that while you were on the staff here, she was content enough, because she saw you every day, but that after you retired she found her lot increasingly painful. I think it possible that your return brought things to a head, and that she decided to kill her husband and take the chance that you would receive her back.”

  “You flatter me,” said Daly, but his expression was not as flippant as his words seemed to show. After a moment he went on: “I hope that it did not happen like that. I can’t believe that it could. Besides, she and Bradley were only back in Dublin for a year before I retired.”

  “A year might be long enough,” Mike said gently.

  Daly said, rather hurriedly:

  “I know she did not care for Bradley, but she always had a great sense of duty. I doubt if she would be capable of killing him, no matter how much he deserved it. And she is very religious. Bradley had a religion once, but as he confided in someone, he only found it a hindrance, so he gave it up. Helen would not have cut him off with all his imperfections on his head without giving him a chance of repentance. In fact, she was too religious to be capable of murder at all. I knew her very well, as you may imagine.”

  “Tell me all about it,” said Mike, who had listened with a deep sense of relief to these remarks.

  Daly leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was clear that the recollection was sharply painful to him, though it was all so long ago.

  “I knew Helen since she was at school,” he said after a moment. “She is sixteen years younger than I am. She was only two years younger than Bradley. She married Bradley when she was twenty-two. She had spent the intervening years at home looking after the house for her mother, who was something of a tyrant. Her life didn’t change much in that respect, poor girl. I was at the wedding. I was on the staff here at the time and I had known Bradley as a student. Milligan gave you a good picture of him as he was then.”

  “I remember,” said Mike. “What did he look like? No one has mentioned that.”

  “Rather elegant, curiously enough,” said Daly. “He was thinner then. But he had a calculating expression which I did not care for, and he was ordering poor Helen around immediately after the ceremony. She had a little income of her own and I remember thinking even then that it was for this he had married her.

  “Well, they went off to South Africa, via a honeymoon in France and southern Italy. Bradley had a job of some kind — Helen’s mother was vague about everything except that in future she would have to look after her household herself. She complained to everyone at the wedding of Helen’s selfishness in getting married at all. Oh, it was a typical wedding and no mistake.

  “Well, time passed, and after about seven years Helen arrived home, and we were told that Bradley was dead. He had gone out with a party to inspect a mine and he had disappeared. There was some sort of an explosion, and later pieces of a man were found, and everyone decided that it was Bradley, damaged beyond repair. It must have been some unfortunate tramp who had sheltered near the mine. They never found out who he was, except that he was not Bradley. Bradley had gone off with a little bit of fluff, never intending to be away for more than a month or two. What was his rage to find when he came home that his wife, instead of waiting patiently for him as she should have done, had cleared off home to Ireland in the most callous fashion. He didn’t hurry himself to follow her.
It was four years later before he appeared in Dublin again, and in the meantime Helen had married Auld Robin Grey.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She had married me,” said Daly, with his first sign of impatience. “We were married very quietly. Her mother was there, lamenting that just when her daughter had come back and everything was going nicely again, someone else had to come along and take her away. We set up house in Ballsbridge, not far from the Royal Dublin Society’s showgrounds.”

  Mike asked a question to which he had been longing to know the answer, for the fearful complications that might follow.

  “Were there any children?”

  “Fortunately, no,” said Daly, and he raised an exasperated eyebrow at Mike, seeing at once the relief that flooded over him.

  “Please go on,” said Mike.

  “Three years after we were married we were sitting in our front garden one sunny day in August. I remember I had just got up to cut the withered heads off some roses, when I noticed a man peering over the hedge of the garden. Well, that was one of the things I hated most about marriage and suburban life — being peered at over the hedge. Most unnerving, I always found it. I got quite angry and I went across to tell the fellow to go about his business. Then I saw that it was Bradley. I remember that I felt very little surprise. ‘Fancy that,’ I said to him. ‘We all thought you were dead. So glad to find you’re not.’ He made no answer, but just stood staring across the garden at Helen. She hadn’t seen him yet. ‘That’s my wife you have there,’ he said, quite rudely. ‘Well, then, why don’t you take her away?’ I said, and I just went on cutting the heads off the roses.”

  “Is that all you said?” Mike asked in awe.

  “Well, I must admit that I succumbed to the temptation to quote Enoch Arden at him — you remember that beastly fellow who had such a fancy for nuts in his youth and who got cast away on a desert island?”

  “I remember,” said Mike.

  “I have often wondered whether Tennyson ever ate nuts himself,” said Professor Daly meditatively. “He was awfully glib about them. But then he was always writing about things he knew nothing of — sitting up there in the Manor with a well-sprung armchair under his fanny, writing away about desert islands and village revels and waking and calling me early, call me early, Mother dear. Can you remember the name of Enoch’s nut-cracking sweet? Annie, or Ellen, or Maggie or some such suitable name — ”

  “No,” said Mike, with awful calm. “I do not remember. Is that the whole story? Is that all that happened?”

  “Well, almost,” said Daly, returning reluctantly to reality. “You see, as I think I mentioned, Helen had a great sense of duty. As soon as she looked up and saw Bradley, she rose to the occasion just as you would expect. She asked him in and she sent for some tea. Yes, I remember that she got some tea for him. Then presently she went away with him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Why not? We had only a monthly tenancy of the house, so there was no trouble about that. She went back to her mother’s place for a week or two and then she went off to Africa again, or somewhere like that, with Bradley. I’m not very clear about that part of it. I’m afraid I rather lost touch.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “I stayed with Milligan for a few weeks and I then moved back into these rooms again. Mrs. Milligan was very good to me. Milligan just said he had always warned me not to have anything to do with Bradley. We understood each other.”

  “So you just went straight back to your old way of life?” Mike persisted, as if some force outside of himself were compelling him to try to discover Daly’s philosophy.

  The old man looked at him sharply. Then he said:

  “I have no feeling for property, no possessive instincts, except in the matter of my false teeth and my best suit, and possibly one or two books. Even those I know I must leave behind me when I die. I was not young when I married Helen. I was a great deal older when I was released from bondage. Now, don’t misunderstand me. She is a very excellent woman and a first-rate housekeeper. She was always cheerful and willing, and decorative, too, though you might not think so to look at her now. But she never read a book. She said she preferred the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal. She never went to concerts. She said everyone at a symphony concert was there for the sole purpose of being seen by everyone else. She could not tell me how it all began, but she was quite sure of this, all the same. Since we both hold with Rome, we were doomed to agreeing to differ on most philosophical points until death would us part. When Bradley came along we hailed him as a fairy godmother — ”

  “Perhaps you did,” said Mike. “But can you be so certain about Mrs. Bradley?”

  Again Daly looked worried, but he said:

  “Oh, she didn’t mind. She was a sensible woman.”

  Still Mike was sure that she had minded and had probably been terribly hurt at the ease with which Daly had discarded her. Mike knew that under Daly’s cultivated detachment there was a layer of what would have been selfishness in anyone else. In him it was devotion to learning, so strong that any hindrances would be ruthlessly thrust aside. Mrs. Bradley, without a doubt, had been a hindrance, but he would never have thrust her aside if the opportunity had not offered itself. Once it had, however, Daly would have considered that he would be flying in the face of Providence if he refused.

  “Stop there!” said Daly, who had been watching Mike’s face. “There’s no need for you to understand fully.”

  “Just one more question,” said Mike humbly. “Was there ever any suggestion of a charge of bigamy against her?”

  “No. I never really understood why, unless it is that Bradley prevented it. Bradley would have hated law-courts, even at that early stage of his career. I can’t think who else would have bothered. I know you can’t bear to think of things like this not being brought tidily into court,” he added kindly, “but I really can’t tell you why it wasn’t done. Perhaps it was because the country was still a little upset at that time.”

  Silence fell between them while Mike turned the whole astonishing story over and over in his mind. Then Daly said:

  “Helen would not have used nitro-benzene, by the way. A barbiturate, perhaps, if she had had one in the house, or the gas cunningly left on in a comer of the bedroom — something simple and direct. But I must insist that her principles would not have allowed her to murder anyone, least of all her husband. Besides, she may not have been as unhappy with Bradley as you think. He was far more her type than I was — he would never have wanted her to improve her mind with reading, or music, or any of that sort of thing, because he didn’t care for those things himself.”

  Mike leaned back carefully in his chair, suddenly overwhelmed with an idea so neat that it took his breath away.

  “Badger,” he brought out after a struggle. “I must see Badger.” He looked at his watch and groaned. “Ten minutes past eleven. I have no excuse for breaking in on him at this hour of the night — ”

  “Think nothing of that,” said Daly. “I’ll just telephone to let him know we’re coming.”

  “But he’ll be going to bed — ”

  “No, no. He sleeps by day. Don’t you know any natural history? He’ll be starting to work now, as he always does, though come to think of it, I haven’t seen his name in print for years. He won’t like being disturbed, but we’ll tell him he can’t hold up the course of justice.”

  “But Mrs. Badger — what about her?”

  “She doesn’t sleep much. She can’t afford to.”

  Struck dumb by this cryptic remark, Mike waited while Daly trotted off down to the public telephone in the hall. Not for the first time since the beginning of their friendship he was astonished at Daly’s humility. Mike believed that it was this humility which had led him into the error of thinking that Mrs. Bradley could be satisfied with Bradley’s company after having enjoyed his own. He had seemed quite sincere in seeing no reason for complaint on her part. Surely th
e measure of her devotion had been that she had said not one word about her marriage to Daly in the course of her conversation with Mike. Mike’s heart was wrung for the sufferings of professors’ wives. How adaptable they had to be, and how agile. Of course they did not all have to submit to being swapped around like Mrs. Bradley. But they all needed the devotion and concentration of lion-tamers to keep their charges healthy and contented. Mike had not failed to notice how few of the King’s College professors were married. The reason obviously was that the College provided such comfortable rooms and service that no wife could hope to compete with them. Mike found himself thinking of his linoleum-floored lodgings and motherly landlady with distaste.

  “That’s all fixed up,” said Daly briskly, coming back into the room. “There is a little snag in the way of supper-hospitality offered, but you must be prepared to suffer something in the cause of duty. To horse, boot and saddle!”

  Suddenly realizing that he was desperately tired, Mike heaved himself upright and followed Daly downstairs.

  Chapter 14

  The front gates were locked when they reached them, but Daly opened the wicket with a key which he carried in his pocket.

  “I very prudently kept the key when I retired,” he explained. “You never can tell when a thing like that will be useful.”

  Badger lived a quarter of an hours walk away from the College, in the direction of the city. The house was large and ramshackle, standing in an enclosed garden with a high wall that ran along by the road.

  “Poor old Badger suffers a good deal from his children,” said Daly. “They run wild around the garden and ambush visitors as they come in through the gate. They build houses in the trees and wigwams on the lawn, and insist on spending the night in them. They suffer from every fixation and inhibition known to man. I should say that they will make remarkable adults, but at present they are more than trying. Fortunately they will be in bed now.”

  A light showed in a large window beside the front door. Daly sighed a little in anticipation of Mrs. Badger s supper, and rang the bell. There was the sound of a door opening and then the voices of the Badgers could clearly be heard in the hall.