“A felt hat, a jumper suit, a tweed coat. They’re all brown, if you want the colours.”
“I don’t. I want to know what you’ve got on your feet.”
“Stockings,” said the voice very mournfully in the dark.
So that was why she had made no sound as she ran. If she thought he was going to say “Your feet must be soaked,” she was going to be disappointed.
He said, “Why?”
“Well, you see, those stairs make such a noise. There isn’t any stair carpet, and the fourth one from the bottom creaks, so I took them off—the shoes, you know, my beautiful new crocodiles—and left them in the hall just round the corner from the bottom step, because I thought if I carried them I’d be almost sure to drop them at some frightfully critical moment.”
James frowned. Of all the silly idiotic things to do—
“You mean they’re still in the hall?”
“Yes, kind Preserver.”
James considered the shoe question. If she had walked to the hayloft, she could walk to the car. He said so in a firm, dogmatic voice.
There was another of those mournful sighs.
“And leave my crocodiles—and my bicycle? I’ve got a much better plan than that.”
“Well?” He wasn’t going to commit himself, but you don’t commit yourself very far by saying “Well?”
She echoed the word brightly. Girls always thought themselves whales at making plans.
“Well, suppose you were in a house doing something that you oughtn’t to be doing, and someone came along and found you doing it, and you shot at them, and they got away—how long do you think you would stay in the house?”
“I wouldn’t,” said James.
“Nor should I. Nor would they. They’ll hunt round for us, and then they’ll go away. And then we’ll rescue the crocodiles and my bicycle. And then we’ll go away. It’s a much better plan.”
It was. But that wasn’t to say that it offered no grounds for criticism. James proceeded to criticize.
“Suppose they don’t go away.”
“They will.”
“If the fellow who did the shooting is a lunatic—”
“He isn’t.”
“Who is he?” said James in a rage.
He heard her sigh again.
“I don’t know.”
He thought she did. He very nearly said so. He went on criticizing instead.
“If they’ve gone, they’ll have shut the door. You don’t imagine they’ll leave it open, do you? And then how do we get in?”
“Kind sir, I’ve got a key.
James had a sense of being played with and laughed at. There is nothing more calculated to set a match to the temper, and his was alight already. Yet, strangely and unaccountably, instead of flaring now it sobered down. He said seriously and without heat,
“So you’ve got a key. Very well, we’ll wait. I suppose you know what it’s all about. I don’t, and I don’t want to. We’ll give them half an hour.”
He shot his wrist-watch out of his cuff and took a look at the luminous dial. The hands stood at six o’clock. There was just a chance that the fog might clear as the temperature fell. These afternoon fogs did clear off sometimes after sunset. They either did that or they got worse. If it was going to get any worse, he was stuck anyhow.
The girl leaned over to see the time. He felt her quite near for a moment. Then the hay rustled as she settled herself again.
“Half an hour—that’s a long time in the dark. Shall we say the multiplication table, or the Kings of England? You wouldn’t have the story of my life. I did offer it to you. What about yours? Are you just ‘Hi, you there!’ or have you got a name?”
“My name’s Elliot—James Elliot.”
“How nice and ordinary. Mine is Aspidistra Aspinall.”
If she had been one of his cousins, James would have said “Liar!” He very nearly said it anyhow. She needn’t suppose he had the slightest desire to know her name. He said nothing.
The hay rustled.
“It’s not my fault, it’s my misfortune.” The voice wobbled for a moment, and then went on in a bright, sweet monotone. “I was born an orphan, and my ruthless relations—”
“You can’t be born an orphan!” said James.
“Oh, but I was. Truly. Absolutely. Because my father was killed in the war and my mother died when I was born. If that isn’t being born an orphan, I don’t know what is.” This with some earnestness. Then, resuming the monotone, “Ruthless relations brought me up. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children prosecuted the god-mother who had had me christened Aspidistra. But what was the good of sending her to penal servitude for seven years—I’d got the name for life. It isn’t even as if you could shorten it. Assy! Dissy! I’d rather be a whole Aspidistra any day!”
James supposed it amused her to talk nonsense. It didn’t amuse him. He listened because he thought she was talking nonsense to cover things up—things which might make sense if he were to get a chance of putting them together. He thought she didn’t want to give him that chance, but he thought the more she talked the better, because it is very difficult to talk a lot without giving something away. If the person who had shot at them was neither an enraged householder nor a lunatic, he was a dangerous criminal and a matter of concern for the police. He added his annoyance at being shot at to his annoyance at having run away, and he set them both down to the account of this person or persons unknown. He said,
“How do you come to have a key of this house?”
There was a faint, light laugh.
“Oh, sir—this is so sudden! I haven’t got nearly as far as that. Birth and Christening, that’s where we were—Ruthless Relations and Unchristian Names. Upbringing comes next.” She seemed to hesitate, and then said quickly, “It’s your turn really. I suppose there are about a million James Elliots—the Scotch are so economical about names. But were you at Wellington?”
“I was. Why?”
“Oh, because—” said Aspidistra Aspinall. “I just wondered. Quite a lot of people do go to school there. I didn’t of course. I think Co-education might be rather fun—don’t you? I had governesses, and after they buried the third they sent me to a fierce games-playing school where they broke my spirit with lacrosse and net-ball.”
“I want to know why you’ve got a key to this house,” said James.
She said, “Oh, Mr Elliot!” in a shocked voice. And then, “All my relations would think it most improper for me to tell a total stranger a thing like that—in the pitch dark too!”
“I think I’ll be getting back to my car,” said James.
“You can’t. You agreed to give it half an hour—you know you did. Scotchmen always keep their words—at least high-minded Scotchmen. Your voice sounds devastatingly high-minded.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk such frightful nonsense!” said James, but he stayed where he was.
He heard a funny little sigh with a catch in it.
“Would you rather I burst into tears? On your shoulder? I can quite easily—if you want me to. If I stop talking nonsense for more than half a second, I probably shall whether you want me to or not.”
“I certainly don’t want you to.”
“Well, there you are. You have been warned. I’d better go on. Before my Aunt Clementa died she said I was to have her diamond necklace. She kept on saying so, and every time the nurse went out of the room she clutched my wrist and said—”
“Who clutched your wrist?”
“You’re not listening. My Aunt Clementa did.”
“It might have been the nurse.”
“Well, it wasn’t—it was my Aunt Clementa.”
“Why?”
“There isn’t any why about it. She just clutched me, and she said, ‘It’s worth a lot of money. You’ll find it when I’m gone. It’s somewhere in this room. Don’t let them get their hands on it.’”
“Who is them?”
The hay rustled vaguely.
“Yes?” said James in a nasty unbelieving tone of voice.
“Well, it didn’t come off. Things don’t. You plan them beautifully, and they walk out on you in the middle of the plan. There was someone else with a torch there first, all very hush-hush, so I ran away, and then the shooting began. And I’ve simply got to go back, because the person the torch belongs to will have my blood if I’ve lost it, and it may be anywhere by now, but I dropped it about a yard from the door of Aunt Clementa’s room, and I’m simply bound to collect it if it’s still there. And I cannot desert my crocodiles.”
III
They waited the full half hour by James’s watch. It seemed longer. At least it seemed longer to him. He had no means of knowing what the girl felt about it. After letting off what he firmly believed to be the cock-and-bull story about her Aunt Clementa’s diamond necklace, she had bombarded him with questions until it was less trouble to answer them than to sit there in the hay and say nothing—“How old are you?” “Have you got any people?” “Is your father alive?” “What does he do?” “What do you do?”
To this questionnaire James replied in due order, “Twenty-five.” “Yes.” “Very much so.” “Commands a regiment, and his family.” “I demonstrate cars. I hope I’ve just sold one.”
He heard her laugh. He thought she tried not to, but it got away.
“Why didn’t you go into the Army? If your father’s that sort, he wanted you to, didn’t he?”
James remembered the Great War, not the paltry European fracas of 1914–18, but the long, stubbornly contested struggle over the question of whether he went to Sandhurst or not. If Colonel Elliot had put his foot down a little less firmly, or had occasionally stopped bellowing when the subject came up, James might conceivably have wanted to go into the Army, but every time his father roared at him he reacted vigorously in the direction of civil life. James made much less noise, but he was more really obstinate, and in the end he got his way and a mechanical training which he hankered after. His mother, the sweetest of women, maintained a surprising calm. She had a talent for tête-a-têtes, and whether she was talking to an infuriated husband or to an exasperated son, her response hardly ever varied from a simple but effective “Oh, yes, darling—I do see what you mean.”
James did not, naturally, explain all this to a total stranger in a hay loft. He said moderately, yes, his father had wanted him to go into the Army, and no, he, James, hadn’t wanted to. He had had a small legacy from a great aunt, and had used it for a premium. It was very important to get into a good firm. He was with Atwells. They were very good people.
He looked at his watch and said abruptly,
“We’d better be getting along. Anyone who was going to clear off must have done it by now. If there is still anyone there, we shall probably get shot at again. A nice crew you keep in these parts, I must say! What we ought to do is to go straight to the police.”
“You said that before. I’m not going to.”
“That’s because you know who the fellow is.”
She must have got up, because he heard her stamp her foot in the hay. He heard her stamp, and he heard her wince. Then he heard her catch her breath.
“I say, have you got a handkerchief?” she said.
“It’s got petrol on it. What do you want it for?”
“My foot’s cut. If I go dripping blood all over everything, it’ll be a give-away.”
“How did you cut it?”
“How on earth do I know? That blighted bicycle, I shouldn’t wonder. You don’t mind if I tear the rag, do you? Because I must hitch it on to my ankle somehow.”
She hitched it, and they came down the ladder and back to the house. The bicycle lay sprawling where it had fallen. The door was shut and fastened. The fog brooded over all. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall produced a key, opened the front door, and was gone. It was exactly like a disappearing trick on the stage. One minute she was there with her shoulder practically touching his, making little clinking sounds with a key-ring, and keys, and the lock which one of the keys was supposed to fit, and the next there was neither sound nor feel of her.
He listened, and got nothing at all from the silence. He called to her under his breath, using a slightly conventionalized variant of the “Hi, you there!” type of address, and still he got nothing. He raked out his torch and switched it on. She said she had left her shoes just to one side of the stair foot. Well, she might have been telling the truth, or she mightn’t, but it was a bed-rock cert that there were no shoes there now.
He slid the beam to and fro and looked most carefully. He found a little smudged space on the dusty floor behind the right-hand newel-post. The shoes might have stood there, but they certainly weren’t standing there now.
He went to the top of the stair and flicked about with his torch. The main flight divided half way up, and led on either side to dark, empty-feeling corridors which ran away to the right and to the left.
James called into the empty-feeling space, “Are you there?” but nobody answered him. He began to experience symptoms of the parental temper. If this dashed girl thought he was going to search this dashed house for her, she could just start thinking again. It probably had twenty bedrooms, to say nothing of garrets, and cellars, and what house-agents call offices. He was prepared to let her collect her shoes and then give her a lift to wherever she might be staying, but he was hanged if he was going to play hide-and-seek with her in this mouldy house.
He scowled at the left-hand passage. And then, from the hall below, he heard a sound. He leaned over the gallery, and an uprush of cold air came to him. He had left the hall door shut, but it was certainly open now. The sound he had heard was the sound of shod feet treading lightly. Miss Aspidistra Aspinall was evidently no longer shoe-less. The crocodiles had been recovered. Her voice came up to him in a faint, floating “Coo-ee!” He stared down, and could see nothing. The smell of the fog came drifting up. The girl’s voice came with it.
“Good-night, James Elliot.”
IV
It took James one solid hour to feel and grope his way as far as Staling. He got there in the end more by luck than good management, having first crawled down the drive into what proved to be a widish lane, and then continued along the lane at a snail’s pace until it brought him out upon the road. The road ultimately brought him to Staling, and just as he came to the first house of the village, he ran out of the worst of the fog.
He knew where he was now, and the road was drivable. The local pub would certainly not have any accommodation for a Rolls. He decided to go on, and in half an hour was clear of the fog and making up for lost time on the long straight stretch over Wilder’s Heath.
His mind was now free to consider the whole adventure. The Aspidistra girl was certainly a most unblushing liar. Only impudence of the first water would have produced a name like that. It was, of course, arguable that it could hardly have been intended to deceive, but this only added to his just annoyance, to be offered a completely unbelievable lie being a gross insult to one’s intelligence.
He wondered a good deal about the shooting. There was something very odd about it. The shot might have been a random one intended to scare an intruder off the premises, but not meant to hit. This theory would have made everything much easier. James felt obliged to reject it. The shot had passed too close to him at a moment when his torch was affording a mark. It would have been perfectly easy for the person unknown to fire wide, and he hadn’t fired wide, he had had a jolly good shot at either James or the girl. The torch had spilled a little pool of light between them. It must have been quite obvious that there were two people in the hall. James had an unpleasant conviction that the perso
n unknown had aimed at one of them. He couldn’t possibly have wanted to kill James, who was a total stranger. Then he must have been aiming at the girl.
One fact emerged quite plainly from the confusion, and that was that the girl could make a pretty good guess at who had fired the shot. She had rushed out with “He’s not a homicidal maniac,” and how could she possibly say that if she didn’t know who he was? No, she knew—she knew jolly well.
But she wouldn’t go to the police. Why wouldn’t she?
Two reasons suggested themselves. She might be mixed up in whatever it was that he had butted into, in which case she wasn’t in a position to denounce a fellow-criminal. Or—she might be afraid—
James thought about this.
He gave her marks for courage. Most girls would have screamed if they had been shot at in the dark, and most girls would have cried in the hayloft. Girls could be extraordinarily brave, but they nearly always cried afterwards. This girl hadn’t—at least not as far as he knew. And she had cut her foot pretty badly too. He found himself admiring the presence of mind with which she had grabbed him and said “Run!”
He only just stopped himself on the edge of reflecting that she had a very pretty voice. On the other hand, she was the most infernal little liar. And that bunk about her Aunt Clementa and a diamond necklace—whoever heard of a name like Clementa? The girl just couldn’t speak the truth. She couldn’t even produce a reasonable, plausible lie. If the aunt had had any of the names which aunts do have, he might—no, not he, but some more gullible man might have believed her. James was not gullible. His fourteen cousins had taught him a lot about the general untruthfulness of girls. His cousin Daphne, with whom he had once been in love, had considerably undermined his faith in women by getting engaged to three separate men during three successive dances at her coming-out ball. James was one of the three, and though he now regarded Daphne as a Lucky Escape, the incident had added considerably to his native caution. His native caution told him not to believe a single word the girl had said. It added with no uncertain voice that he had better put the whole thing out of his mind and keep it out.
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