And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worth while to consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck. No good would ever come of that half-finished novel. He had intended that it should appear in the autumn; was under contract that it should appear; no matter; it was better to pay forfeit to his publishers than to waste what days were left. He was spent; age was not far off; and paths of wisdom and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey . . .
If only he had chosen the wife, the child, the faithful friend at the fireside, and let them follow an ignis fatuus – that list! . . .
In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly that he should be so weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable matter, and that his hand, chancing to stray to his face in the darkness, should encounter a beard.
‘Most extraordinary!’ he began to mutter to himself. ‘Have I been ill? Am I ill now? And if so, why have they left me alone? . . . Extraordinary! . . . ’
He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom. He rose a little on his pillow, and listened . . . Ah! He was not alone, then! It certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and alone – Alone? Oh no. He would be looked after. He wouldn’t be left, ill, to shift for himself. If everybody else had forsaken him, he could trust Elsie Bengough, the dearest chum he had, for that . . . bless her faithful heart!
But suddenly a short, stifled, spluttering cry rang sharply out.
‘Paul!’
It came from the kitchen.
And in the same moment it flashed upon Oleron, he knew not how, that two, three, five, he knew not how many minutes before, another sound, unmarked at the time but suddenly transfixing his attention now, had striven to reach his intelligence. This sound had been the slight touch of metal on metal – just such a sound as Oleron made when he put his key into the lock.
‘Hallo! . . . Who’s that?’ he called sharply from his bed.
He had no answer.
He called again. ‘Hallo! . . . Who’s there? . . . Who is it?’
This time he was sure he heard noises, soft and heavy, in the kitchen.
‘This is a queer thing altogether,’ he muttered. ‘By Jove, I’m as weak as a kitten too . . . Hallo, there! Somebody called, didn’t they? . . . Elsie! Is that you? . . . ’
Then he began to knock with his hand on the wall at the side of his bed.
‘Elsie! . . . Elsie! . . . You called, didn’t you? . . . Please come here, whoever it is! . . . ’
There was a sound as of a closing door, and then silence. Oleron began to get rather alarmed.
‘It may be a nurse,’ he muttered; ‘Elsie’d have to get me a nurse, of course. She’d sit with me as long as she could spare the time, brave lass, and she’d get a nurse for the rest . . . But it was awfully like her voice . . . Elsie, or whoever it is! . . . I can’t make this out at all. I must go and see what’s the matter . . . ’
He put one leg out of bed. Feeling its feebleness, he reached with his hand for the additional support of the wall . . .
But before putting out the other leg he stopped and considered, picking at his new-found beard. He was suddenly wondering whether he dared go into the kitchen. It was such a frightfully long way; no man knew what horror might not leap and huddle on his shoulders if he went so far; when a man has an overmastering impulse to get back into bed he ought to take heed of the warning and obey it. Besides, why should he go? What was there to go for? If it was that Bengough creature again, let her look after herself; Oleron was not going to have things cramp themselves on his defenceless back for the sake of such a spoilsport as she! . . . If she was in, let her let herself out again, and the sooner the better for her! Oleron simply couldn’t be bothered. He had his work to do. On the morrow, he must set about the writing of a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning . . .
He let go the wall and fell back into bed again as – oh, unthink-able! – the other half of that kiss that a gnash had interrupted was placed (how else convey it?) on his lips, robbing him of very breath . . .
12
In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at the windows of the old house with the antique insurance marks in its walls of red brick and the agents’ notice-boards hanging like wooden choppers over the paling. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the narrow entrance-alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children were in the houses, behind closed doors.
A long-nosed man had a little group about him, and he was telling some story over and over again; and another man, little and fat and wide-eyed, sought to capture the long-nosed man’s audience with some relation in which a key figured.
‘ . . . and it was revealed to me that there’d been something that very afternoon,’ the long-nosed man was saying. ‘I was standing there, where Constable Saunders is – or rather, I was passing about my business, when they came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving me! I saw her face . . . ’
‘What was it like, Mr Barrett?’ a man asked.
‘It was like hers whom our Lord said to, “Woman, doth any man accuse thee?” – white as paper, and no mistake! Don’t tell me! . . . And so I walks straight across to Mrs Barrett, and “Jane,” I says, “this must stop, and stop at once; we are commanded to avoid evil,” I says, “and it must come to an end now; let him get help elsewhere.”
‘And she says to me, “John,” she says, “it’s four-and-sixpence a week” – them was her words.
‘ “Jane,” I says, “if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should stop . . . and from that day to this she hasn’t set foot inside that gate.’
There was a short silence: then, ‘Did Mrs Barrett ever . . . see anythink, like?’ somebody vaguely enquired.
Barrett turned austerely on the speaker. ‘What Mrs Barrett saw and Mrs Barrett didn’t see shall not pass these lips; even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking evil,’ he said.
Another man spoke.
‘He was pretty near canned up in the Waggon and Horses that night, weren’t he, Jim?’
‘Yes, ’e ’adn’t ’alf copped it . . . ’
‘Not standing treat much, neither; he was in the bar, all on his own . . . ’
‘So ’e was; we talked about it . . . ’
The fat, scared-eyed man made another attempt.
‘She got the key off of me – she ’ad the number of it – she come into my shop of a Tuesday evening . . . ’
Nobody heeded him.
‘Shut your heads,’ a heavy labourer commented gruffly, ‘she hasn’t been found yet. ’Ere’s the inspectors; we shall know more in a bit.’
Two inspectors had come up and were talking to the constables who guarded the gate. The little fat man ran eagerly forward, saying that she had bought the key of him. ‘I remember the number, because of it’s being three one’s and three three’s – 111333!’ he exclaimed excitedly.
An inspector put him aside.
‘Nobody’s been in?’ he asked of one of the constables.
‘No, sir.’
‘Then you, Brackley, come with us; you, Smith, keep the gate. There’s a squad on its way.’
The two inspectors and the constable passed down the alley and entered the house. They mounted the wide carved staircase.
‘This don’t look as if he’d been out much lately,’ one of the inspectors muttered as he kicked aside a lit
ter of dead leaves and paper that lay outside Oleron’s door. ‘I don’t think we need knock – break a pane, Brackley.’
The door had two glazed panels; there was a sound of shattered glass; and Brackley put his hand through the hole his elbow had made and drew back the latch.
‘Faugh!’ . . . choked one of the inspectors as they entered. ‘Let some light and air in, quick. It stinks like a hearse –’
The assembly out in the square saw the red blinds go up and the windows of the old house flung open.
‘That’s better,’ said one of the inspectors, putting his head out of a window and drawing a deep breath . . . ‘That seems to be the bedroom in there; will you go in, Simms, while I go over the rest? . . . ’
They had drawn up the bedroom blind also, and the waxy-white, emaciated man on the bed had made a blinker of his hand against the torturing flood of brightness. Nor could he believe that his hearing was not playing tricks with him, for there were two policemen in his room, bending over him and asking where ‘she’ was. He shook his head.
‘This woman Bengough . . . goes by the name of Miss Elsie Bengough . . . d’ye hear? Where is she? . . . No good, Brackley; get him up; be careful with him; I’ll just shove my head out of the window, I think . . . ’
The other inspector had been through Oleron’s study and had found nothing, and was now in the kitchen, kicking aside an ankle-deep mass of vegetable refuse that cumbered the floor. The kitchen window had no blind, and was over-shadowed by the blank end of the house across the alley. The kitchen appeared to be empty.
But the inspector, kicking aside the dead flowers, noticed that a shuffling track that was not of his making had been swept to a cupboard in the corner. In the upper part of the door of the cupboard was a square panel that looked as if it slid on runners. The door itself was closed.
The inspector advanced, put out his hand to the little knob, and slid the hatch along its groove.
Then he took an involuntary step back again.
Framed in the aperture, and falling forward a little before it jammed again in its frame, was something that resembled a large lumpy pudding, done up in a pudding-bag of faded browny red frieze.
‘Ah!’ said the inspector.
To close the hatch again he would have had to thrust that pudding back with his hand; and somehow he did not quite like the idea of touching it. Instead, he turned the handle of the cupboard itself. There was weight behind it, so much weight that, after opening the door three or four inches and peering inside, he had to put his shoulder to it in order to close it again. In closing it he left sticking out, a few inches from the floor, a triangle of black and white check skirt.
He went into the small hall.
‘All right!’ he called.
They had got Oleron into his clothes. He still used his hands as blinkers, and his brain was very confused. A number of things were happening that he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand the extraordinary mess of dead flowers there seemed to be everywhere; he couldn’t understand why there should be police officers in his room; he couldn’t understand why one of these should be sent for a four-wheeler and a stretcher; and he couldn’t understand what heavy article they seemed to be moving about in the kitchen – his kitchen . . .
‘What’s the matter?’ he muttered sleepily . . .
Then he heard a murmur in the square, and the stopping of a four-wheeler outside. A police officer was at his elbow again, and Oleron wondered why, when he whispered something to him, he should run off a string of words – something about ‘used in evidence against you.’ They had lifted him to his feet, and were assisting him towards the door . . .
No, Oleron couldn’t understand it at all.
They got him down the stairs and along the alley. Oleron was aware of confused angry shoutings; he gathered that a number of people wanted to lynch somebody or other. Then his attention became fixed on a little fat frightened-eyed man who appeared to be making a statement that an officer was taking down in a notebook.
‘I’d seen her with him . . . they was often together . . . she came into my shop and said it was for him . . . I thought it was all right . . . 111333 the number was,’ the man was saying.
The people seemed to be very angry; many police were keeping them back; but one of the inspectors had a voice that Oleron thought quite kind and friendly. He was telling somebody to get somebody else into the cab before something or other was brought out; and Oleron noticed that a four-wheeler was drawn up at the gate. It appeared that it was himself who was to be put into it; and as they lifted him up he saw that the inspector tried to stand between him and something that stood behind the cab, but was not quick enough to prevent Oleron seeing that this something was a hooded stretcher. The angry voices sounded like a sea; something hard, like a stone, hit the back of the cab; and the inspector followed Oleron in and stood with his back to the window nearer the side where the people were. The door they had put Oleron in at remained open, apparently till the other inspector should come; and through the opening Oleron had a glimpse of the hatchet-like ‘To Let’ boards among the privet-trees. One of them said that the key was at Number Six . . .
Suddenly the raging of voices was hushed. Along the entrance-alley shuffling steps were heard, and the other inspector appeared at the cab door.
‘Right away,’ he said to the driver.
He entered, fastened the door after him, and blocked up the second window with his back. Between the two inspectors Oleron slept peacefully. The cab moved down the square, the other vehicle went up the hill. The mortuary lay that way.
Phantas
For, barring all pother,
With this, or the other,
Still Britons are Lords of the Main.
The Chapter of Admirals
1
As Abel Keeling lay on the galleon’s deck, held from rolling down it only by his own weight and the sun-blackened hand that lay outstretched upon the planks, his gaze wandered, but ever returned to the bell that hung, jammed with the dangerous heel-over of the vessel, in the small ornamental belfry immediately abaft the mainmast. The bell was of cast bronze, with half-obliterated bosses upon it that had been the heads of cherubs; but wind and salt spray had given it a thick incrustation of bright, beautiful, lichenous green. It was this colour that Abel Keeling’s eyes liked.
For wherever else on the galleon his eyes rested they found only whiteness – the whiteness of extreme eld. There were slightly varying degrees in her whiteness; here she was of a white that glistened like salt-granules, there of a greyish chalky white, and again her whiteness had the yellowish cast of decay; but everywhere it was the mild, disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed. Her cordage was bleached as old straw is bleached, and half her ropes kept their shape little more firmly than the ash of a string keeps its shape after the fire has passed; her pallid timbers were white and clean as bones found in sand; and even the wild frankincense with which (for lack of tar, at her last touching of land) she had been pitched, had dried to a pale hard gum that sparkled like quartz in her open seams. The sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mists that not a cord or timber cast a shadow; and only Abel Keeling’s face and hands were black, carked and cinder-black from exposure to his pitiless rays.
The galleon was the Mary of the Tower, and she had a frightful list to starboard. So canted was she that her mainyard dipped one of its steel sickles into the glassy water, and, had her foremast remained, or more than the broken stump of her bonaventure mizzen, she must have turned over completely. Many days ago they had stripped the mainyard of its course, and had passed the sail under the Mary’s bottom, in the hope that it would stop the leak. This it had partly done as long as the galleon had continued to glide one way; then, without coming about, she had begun to glide the other, the ropes had parted, and she had
dragged the sail after her, leaving a broad tarnish on the silver sea.
For it was broadside that the galleon glided, almost imperceptibly, ever sucking down. She glided as if a loadstone drew her, and, at first, Abel Keeling had thought it was a loadstone, pulling at her iron, drawing her through the pearly mists that lay like face-cloths to the water and hid at a short distance the tarnish left by the sail. But later he had known that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron. The motion was due – must be due – to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister, three-miles-broad waterway. With the eye of his mind he saw that loadstone now as he lay against a gun-truck, all but toppling down the deck. Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past. He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would rise, and the men would run . . .
But no; the men would not run this time to drop the fenders. There were no men left to do so, unless Bligh was still alive. Perhaps Bligh was still alive. He had walked half-way down the quarter-deck steps a little before the sudden nightfall of the day before, had then fallen and lain for a minute (dead, Abel Keeling had supposed, watching him from his place by the gun-truck), and had then got up again and tottered forward to the forecastle, his tall figure swaying and his long arms waving. Abel Keeling had not seen him since. Most likely, he had died in the forecastle during the night. If he had not been dead he would have come aft again for water . . .
At the remembrance of the water Abel Keeling lifted his head. The strands of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its steepness and his own balance. The mainmast was some seven or eight yards away . . . He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to make shuffling movements down the slope.
To the mainmast, near the belfry, was affixed his contrivance for catching water. It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side than at the other (but that had been before the mast had steeved so many degrees away from the zenith), and tallowed beneath. The mists lingered later in that gully of a strait than they did on the open ocean, and the collar of rope served as a collector for the dews that condensed on the mast. The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck beneath it.
The Dead of Night Page 9
