There was no complaint of the Italian colony. It did its work well. They are the best stonemasons in the world. The large tunnel on Heatherstone’s line was a model in its way, wonderfully stone-arched, Sir Godfrey Simon said.
So these were not the things that bothered Heatherstone and his stockholders. It was the insistence of the government that they should displace this Italian labor with labor from England. It was a sort of national eviction they were after. And the government was farsighted. It knew the only solution was to scatter the unemployed; to spread them out over the Empire; that is to say, over the world. And it put its thumb on Heatherstone.
Now, that is how Letington came to get into the thing.
Heatherstone and his stockholders met, determined to send somebody out to Canada to take charge of the enterprise and to substitute English labor for the Italian.
Here was his brother-in-law, “idling,” as the poets used to write it, “between tennis and the bath”; that is to say, between the shooting in Scotland and the polo at Roehampton; and so the earl sent him.
Sir Godfrey Simon said that Letington was the last man to send, if you looked at him from one angle.
He was not a man of business. He was a sportsman and he was a dreamer. Any one would have seen this but the hard-headed earl. On the other hand, he had a certain courage that fitted him for such a venture. He was a big-game hunter; he had gone on all sorts of expeditions into waste places of the earth; he knew how to handle men, and he was not concerned about hardship.
But he was a sentimentalist.
At any rate, that was Heatherstone’s final opinion and the opinion of his stockholders.
The methods of these men were direct. They were not concerned with circumlocutions. The order to Letington was to move that Italian colony out—boots and baggage—and substitute English labor for it!
Sir Godfrey Simon made an impressive picture of the situation Letington found himself in. He saw at once how difficult the thing could be.
The resolution directed him to remove from this Canadian forest what was, as I have said, a complete section of Italy set down in it. It was a difficult thing to undertake, and it was a brutal thing.
Letington saw that the moment he went over the line.
Here were these foreign people with their families, their homes, their gardens, their churches, their shrines; graves of their dead, their schools—their civilization, in fact.
Where would they go? How would they continue to live when they were ejected out of this New Italy? Where could he place them? That was not a thing that Heatherstone and his stockholders had considered. It was not a part of the English business problem. It was, as I have said, sentimentalism. They were practical people. Considerations of humanity had nothing to do with it.
But humanity did have something to do with it.
Letington saw what he was “up against,” as we would say, and he made a protest. He sent in a report to the earl. He pointed it all out to him.
It was a good paper, Sir Godfrey Simon said—a good paper for impractical people who confused sentiments of humanity with their business affairs. But it was a poor paper for the earl and his stockholders. They gave Letington a pretty curt answer. He would do what he was told! He was not there on God’s business. He was there on the affairs of an English company. He would carry out the directions they gave him and leave his sentimentalism to the ulterior Authority that considered the sparrow.
I do not mean that this was the message of the directors. It never could have been the message of the Glasgow solicitor who was secretary of the board. But it was the message as edited by Sir Godfrey Simon.
Letington went over the line; over the plant.
It was a strip of railway well kept up; its bridges solid; its one big tunnel a fine example of stone work. Everything was in order: the little switches running out to the bark sheds; the mills in the mountains; the Italian village, where the whole dependency lived. The road was over a little valley, burrowing at one point through a shoulder of a mountain. It was a mountainous country; winter was on the way; snow would come presently, and then it would be a sector of Switzerland. It was in the late autumn when Letington went out.
There was nothing that Letington could do after he got the reply of the Glasgow solicitor. He had either to go ahead or give the thing up, and there was something in the man that balked at failure. He was not a success in any way that our commercial age would be apt to measure him. But he did not give things up. That was the quality that made him one of the best sportsmen in his class. He was not afraid, and he did not weaken.
So he called the Italian colony together and explained his directions. The Italians said almost nothing at the time. I suppose they could not realize it. But the idea began to move in them, and they finally understood what the English company intended. When they got the thing in their heads the whole colony was by the ears.
They sent a committee to wait on Letington. They put the case before him in their protest. They wished him to put their protest before the company. He took a good deal of pains to make them understand him then. He had put the matter before the company. He got out his report, the report he had sent in to the earl and his stockholders, and read it to them. He read it carefully and slowly. And then he showed them the reply.
There must have been some sensible persons on that Italian deputation. A common workman often has a clear head; an understanding heart he nearly always has. They said nothing more, and they went out. Letington was misled. He imagined the colony had accepted this decree of eviction. It was a profound error. The Italians had merely realized that it was of no use to make further protest. The English company would not change.
Two or three days later an extraordinary thing happened.
An Italian woman, accompanied by two or three laborers, came in to see Letington.
They wished a private conference with him, and they were admitted to his office. The woman looked like a Neapolitan peasant. She wore the picturesque costume of Salerno. She was of middle age. But there was something about her that profoundly impressed Letington when he came to observe her closely. Her big, determined features gave him the impression of a powerful personality who by an accident of birth had arrived from a low racial origin.
There was no mistaking the fact that she was an extraordinary person. She did not speak English, or, at any rate, only a few words of it.
The men with her began to explain.
They used a lot of words and gestures, and they interrupted one another in their effort to make their meaning clear in a language in which they felt themselves to be deficient. But they finally made Letington understand. He did not understand the Italian word they used, but he did understand what they were meaning by it. The woman was what we would call in our plain English tongue a witch. She had a familiar spirit. She had a control of what we call supernatural forces, or, rather, to be more accurate, a supernatural control of what we call natural forces, and when they got that idea before Letington they coupled their threat with it.
They said if he undertook to put his policy into effect, this woman would cause the great engine that pulled the transcontinental train over the line to disappear. They elaborated the threat with the figures of their Italian tongue and with vague gestures. The engine would vanish.
Of course Letington was not misled about it. He thought he understood perfectly what was behind all this theatrical property. The thing was just a plain threat to wreck the train!
This was serious. As I have said, the English guaranteed the safety of the train over this line: to wreck it would be to destroy the company.
But the threat carried farther. If the engine were wrecked, would the crowded passenger coaches escape? The thing might carry murder with it. He could see all sorts of disasters extending themselves from this threat, and he said what he thought.
The Italian workmen with the woman protested with great vigor. No one would be hurt; no part of the great transcontinental train would be in
jured; there would be no scratch on paint of a coach; there would be no battering of a bolt in the engine. Nothing would be injured.
The great engine would simply disappear.
This woman, this witch, this person with the supernatural control of the natural forces of the world, by her magic would simply remove that engine from sight and hearing. The train would remain! That was what they meant.
They went out with the promise that they would return and show Letington what the woman could do; that is to say, she was going to give him an example of the power she possessed.
What precisely did this mean? Was it, in fact, what he first imagined, a veiled threat to derail the great train? That would be simple enough and not outside of probability. Not, in fact, outside of a possible event—there was precedent enough for it.
The Latin was racially influenced to revenge.
It was with him a form of human injustice. Northern races, logically and coldly, might adjust their difficulties in third-party tribunals, but revenge is an act of the Latin. It is a conception of justice common to peoples of a hotter blood. It is an old, deep-seated instinct. When one received an injury, one returned it. When a village or a family received an injury, it returned it.
This seemed the adequate explanation, if, in fact, the threat meant anything. It was hardly likely that even ignorant Italians were moved by the idea that they could frighten an English company out of a plan on which it had decided or that they could frighten its manager here.
The Anglo-Saxon was not easily intimidated. You could not, usually, move him with a threat. And yet these explanations, when one undertook to apply them to the event, did not seem wholly adequate. There must be something more behind this extravagance. Frankly, the man was puzzled; he was also alarmed, but he was not in fear. He was not the sort of person to be easily put in fear. Still, he could not rid himself of a sort of concern about it. The thing must mean something, and he recalled the indirections and the extravagant innuendo of the Italian speech. He expected something to happen, but the thing that did happen was alien to any idea in the man.
The Italians said they would return and this woman, this witch, this person with the familiar spirit would show him what she could do.
And she did return.
Some days later they came in again to Letington—the Italian workmen and this woman. It was rather late in the evening—twilight, in fact. Night was descending. Letington was alone. He had remained to go over some reports of the office. The man was, in fact, conscientious about the business of this company, and he was endeavoring to get up the details on it; going back to see how his predecessor had managed the business. This is how he came to be alone and in the office of the company at this late hour.
Three persons entered.
But there was now with them a fourth person—a little, old woman, feeble and not able to walk. The Italian laborers carried her in gently and put her into a chair at the end of the room. She was dressed in the deep, somber mourning of the Italian women in the bereavement of death. Without being able to see any feature of her, Letington said it was impossible to escape the conviction that the woman was immensely, incredibly old and of such frailty that the slightest exertion would eject her out of life. With the others was the big, sturdy Italian woman, in the dress of a peasant of Salerno.
She stood in the center of the group, a figure of strength and vigor.
She had, as I have said, and as Letington continually insisted, the dominance of uncultivated persons, who by some strange order of nature seemed foreordained for a certain direction of events; having, in fact, a certain authority of action in the presence of unusual events. I gave some examples a while ago. You have all met with these examples. You know what Letington meant, and you know what I mean here in my effort to put this extraordinary story before you.
The group said very little.
Letington never could recall any significant conversation. The Italian workmen, who carried in the woman, made some usual salutation. They bid him “Good evening,” or something of the sort, and they may have uttered some expression to indicate the object of their arrival: that they came to verify what they had said, or the like. He thought they did say something of this character. He was not certain.
What happened was too extraordinary. The verbal passages preceding it did not sufficiently impress him. At any rate, they were not important. They had, in fact, come to give the demonstration, as one would call it; to show what the witch could do before she undertook the thing she threatened—to put teeth into the threat, as we would say. If the approaches to the event were not recalled in sharp outlines, we must believe that the event itself was sufficiently vivid. Letington may have forgotten what they said; but he never forgot what happened.
The big peasant woman made him a curtsy. He said it reminded him of that exaggeration which a certain old dancing master in London used to demonstrate to the American women about to be presented at the Court of St. James. It had an Old World, out-of-fashion aspect about it.
Something in a fairy story was the idea I got; the kind of extreme gesture of the Foreign Envoy at the Court of the King of the Golden Mountains! I can only present the thing by this indirection. You know what I mean.
Letington said another thing about it that makes the illustration I suggest a bit more apt. He said it was ironical, as though it were made before a mock authority; as though superior persons presented themselves before a pretender. It would be the way a jinni would bow before a mortal king in an Arabian story before he produced his magic city or his winged horse.
After that curtsy, the woman took out of the bosom of her dress what appeared to be a ball of grass made up with resin. She held it in the palm of her hand. One of the Italian workmen ran forward, got a coal from the fire, and touched it to the ball of resin.
The thing began to smoke.
It smoked feebly at first, after the manner of a wet wisp of hay, scarcely afire. The smoke arose like a fantastic flower, a thin stem curling and expanding at the summit. Then it extended itself. It extended itself vaguely until the whole room was filled with an aromatic odor, a sort of haze. Letington said the thing went on until the ball of resin in the woman’s hand was consumed, and the result was that strange aromatic odor filling the whole space and a haze as though one had caught and confined here the sort of blue-gray haze observed on our mountains in the autumn, in what we call Indian summer.
There had been no sound.
There was absolute silence in the room. Letington said he did not move. He looked on as if at some extravaganza, but he was impressed. The thing got him, as we might say, into a sort of atmosphere. The strange thing was that it did not seem to be absurd. It seemed to be a sort of phenomenon of some character appearing with a certain aspect of dignity.
We cannot understand, I fear, precisely how he thought about it. At any rate, the peasant woman standing thus, surrounded with this impalpable smoke haze, as of something arising from the earth about her, suddenly cried out, extending her hand.
Letington said it was a harsh cry. He often thought about it afterward. It was not in any language that he knew. He did not think the words the woman uttered were of the Italian language. He thought it was an older, harsher language. And it was a sort of formula. It was a cry that seemed to shatter or, as one would say, break down a barrier already thinned or weakened. That is an inadequate explanation of the effect. But Letington said he had some sort of vague conception of that character. He had no idea of what would happen, but the thing that did happen was beyond any conception that he could have had.
I have said that the Italian laborers brought in an old woman and put her in a chair in the corner of the room. Now, at this cry, the feeble figure in the chair rose. It came up stiffly to its feet like an image of wood, and then it began to sing.
Letington said that he remained immovable with wonder.
The singing was something heavenly. The rich, deep, beautiful voice filled the room: extended itself; seeme
d to fill the world.
He said the thing was incredible beyond any winging of the fancy.
He had never heard such a voice. It was not the volume of it, for it lacked great volume; it was not the vigor of it nor any unusual note. There was a haunting music in it, an appealing sweetness—something that got into one’s spirit and there awakened every romantic fancy.
It was incredible. It belonged in a fairy story; in the properties of romance. It seemed to the man that he was hearing something that he had read about in the poets of old time, in ancient romances, as though the practical world had turned backward—revolved backward—into a world of wonder.
It was the golden-snooded muse, singing in the Seven-Gated City of Thebis! He could see the fairy city in the air—a mirage of gilded towers and veiled brazen gates on a cloud island; and the voice coming from an interminable distance, but losing nothing, neither its vigor nor any tone!
It had that marvelous quality.
It was far away, and it was not far away. He said he could not differentiate the singing from the conceptions of romance that arrived with it. It was something singing behind the horns of Elfland in some kingdom of faërie: singing among the stars in unending summer, in undying youthfulness! He said every extravagant expression that he could think of paled before the wonder of that heavenly reality.
Then the figure collapsed. The big peasant woman caught it. They wrapped it up in a shawl and carried it out.
Letington did not move. He remained in his chair behind his table, that plain oak table, with the records of the company littering it before him. He sat there for a long time without thought, as he used to try to express it, and without motion, as one recovering from a drug or a hypnotic envelopment. He did not know what had happened to him. The thing was too unreal; it was too improbable; it was too utterly beyond all human sense.
The footsteps of the Italians carrying out the ancient, feeble woman grew vague, and ceased. There was again silence; the haze in the room disappeared. The aromatic odor thinned out, ceased to exist. But the man remained in his chair. Finally he put his hand up and passed it over his face, as though by that gesture to remove an illusion.
The Bradmoor Murder Page 14
