None the less, I could not get rid of it like that. ‘Nobody asks why Walther Blum does anything,’ my driver had just said; but I asked. Say he was not going away at all. Say he merely wished it to be supposed he had gone away. Say, in short, that he was setting a trap for Nicolo. Had it been possible, I would have bidden my driver turn and follow Walther Blum wherever he went. That was not possible. But something else was. I couldn’t follow Walther Blum, but I could keep an eye on Nicolo. He would not know he was being watched, and watched, moreover, for his own health and safety.
It was the first thing I did on my return to the hotel to walk into the American bar. He happened to be there. Disliking him as I did, I nevertheless made myself talk to him.
‘So another has left, Nicolo,’ I said, with an assumption of cheerfulness. ‘It is drawing near the end.’
‘Monsieur will be the last,’ he said, busily polishing.
‘When do you go to London?’
‘In four days, monsieur.’
‘Well, this country is beautiful in the winter, and beautiful in the summer, but it is not much in between.’
He showed his close white teeth in a smile. ‘It is monsieur who sees the country,’ he said. ‘We of the staff work too long hours to see much of it.’
‘But you go up the mountain sometimes for a walk and to breathe the air?’
‘Not I, monsieur. I do not like the cold. I like Capri and Sorrento and the sun on Naples bay.’
And, having ascertained that he was in the hotel, I left him, but did not go too far away.
I well believed that he was not fond of mountain climbing. He might even have to run the gauntlet of jests if he, the smooth, lazy one, were seen toiling up past the plantation during the day. For many reasons he would prefer the night. And I had no evidence that he intended to go at all. But I was persuaded by something more subtly strong than evidence. There were vast gaps in my information. I only knew in outline what had passed between Blum and his wife on that first night of all. That she and Nicolo exchanged kisses I did know, but not every kiss is an adultery, and it would be an unfeeling heart that found no forgiveness for her. But while I did not know the details, I did know the sum and result of them. Blum himself was satisfied that no guilty act had been committed. At the same time, he was equally satisfied that the attempt would be made, and had cunningly and deliberately provided the opportunity. If Nicolo did not climb the mountain it was even possible that he might prevail on her to make a pretext to come to the hotel. Or nothing at all might happen.
But as the day wore on and I wandered aimlessly about the precincts of the hotel, I thought so less and less.
I come now to the moment when Nicolo did leave the hotel, setting his face up the mountain. With the passing of time I can survey the events of that evening almost calmly; but time has had to pass. I have ceased to call myself a young man. I apprehend, too constantly, the meaning of such words as causation and fatality and absence of design. I have learned how events themselves take charge and fall into inhuman and unpremeditated patterns. I think it was so with Walther and Karen Blum. As she had ‘happened’ to him, so the world had happened to him and he to the world, and there was no escape from the dreadful logic of the upshot. It had to be so, and it was so, and I had to be a witness of it.
Nicolo did not steal out of the hotel like a man on a guilty errand. He strolled out, apparently with no other purpose than to take the air. He wore his waiter’s black trousers, but had changed his white jacket for one of purplish cloth, and on his head was a green velours hat with feathers in it. To English eyes his appearance was incongruous yet somehow dandified, and he himself was evidently well content with it. All this I saw from where I stood at the verandah’s end. He sauntered round to the back of the hotel, and I ascended quickly to my room. Not that there was any hurry. I had to let him get ahead. I do not carry firearms, but if I had had a pistol I should certainly have slipped it into my pocket. For moral effect, naturally.
He was not quite out of sight when I descended; he was well up the plantation, giving a backward glance, as if he wondered how much longer it was necessary to keep up appearances. I stepped out of his line of vision. There was one chance and one only that I should lose him, and even that did not matter – for if he took the longer and less steep of the two paths that met again farther on, I could take the other one and be there before him. That might be the best. At least I should escape the hateful appearance of watching another man unobserved. As he was of a corpulent build he probably would take the easier path. In fact, he did so, and I the other.
I made haste. If Blum should appear he would hardly resent it that one such as I should be found alone with his wife, and if he did not appear Nicolo would be likely to find an empty house at the end of his journey. It may seem odd, but it seemed somehow part of what I have called the pattern that I made no attempt to divert Nicolo himself. He was a contemptible fellow, and must take his chance. He was away to the right, somewhere over the shoulder of the hill, and as I passed the point that he too would presently have to pass, I quickened my pace to something like a run, that he might not see me ahead.
More snow than in the valleys still lay on the ground, and as I reached the beginning of the dark clearing the ghostly mass of the Huldhorn rose miles ahead, just discernible. Not a quarter of a mile away Blum’s light showed, almost as watery as on my first visit – for I discovered that the icicles had not been broken away, but still formed a screen, though a perforated and attenuated one only. This time I did not look in. I walked up to the door and knocked. Only when I had done so did it occur to me that my knock might be taken for the knock of somebody else.
There was no reply, and I knocked more loudly. Still I had no answer, though I heard a muffled sound within. There was nothing for it but the window. I advanced and looked through a ribbed and ragged hole.
Karen sat there alone. She sat where her husband had sat, under the powerful incandescent, and her round eyes appeared to be staring straight into mine. But I don’t think they saw. She was rigid, as if the sound of my knock had frozen both the sight and speech of her. The table at which she sat was empty. On the little shelf stood the row of wooden cattle and carved knives, but I did not see the statuette. I called; I gave my name; and as if my name had been a magic word, she broke into life. She sprang up and disappeared for an instant from my view. I heard the shooting of a bolt. By this time I was at the door. She flung it open, dragged me in, and shot the bolt again almost in one movement. Then she clasped both her hands on one of my shoulders, and I had to save her from falling.
‘Oh, the dear God has sent you!’ she moaned on my breast. ‘Do not go. Keep me so. Keep me so till morning, for God knows what is going to happen this night!’
‘I know what is going to happen this night if you will, Karen. You cannot stay here alone. Put your things on and come with me back to the hotel.’
She shook convulsively. ‘I cannot! I dare not! I was told I must stay here! Stay here with me!’
‘Certainly I will stay with you; but who told you you must stay here?’
‘He told me – Walther –’
‘But he has gone to the town?’
‘He has not gone to the town. I do not know where he is. But he is not far away. He was here an hour ago. He has kept me here all day, that I might neither go nor send word to the hotel.’
‘Why should you wish to send word to the hotel, Karen? Word to whom, and about what?’
But she only said, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ and crushed herself harder against me.
‘When I knocked, Karen, did you think it might be somebody else, that you did not answer?’ I asked.
I felt her nod.
‘Walther?’ (The door had been bolted, and the visitor might have been he.)
‘No.’
‘The somebody else – has he ever been h
ere?’
‘Never – never – never!’ she said, with a passion that utterly convinced me.
‘You know what I mean?’ I whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Then shall I go and turn him back?’
She bounded from my arms in fright. ‘What! Then he is coming?’
‘There may be time to warn him.’
She sank to the floor. ‘If he is on the mountain Walther can run like a hare and leap like the chamois –’
And I remembered Blum’s words: ‘If he steps a yard beyond the plantation . . . ’
It had been plain enough before; it was bright as a sunburst now. My first unworthy idea, that Blum had turned his house into a mousetrap and baited it with a piece of cheese, was utterly wrong. Nobody was luring Nicolo. He was free to stay away. But he was free only as long as he stayed away. Once he set foot on those mountain wastes he entered a cage of which the door closed behind him. What chance had he, the keeper of an American bar, against a man who could run like a hare and leap like a chamois? . . . And yet a panic took me too. I must have caught it from her, sunk to a huddle on the floor. I could not see a human being walk into an open trap like that. I must warn him. I sprang to the bolt of the door.
But I was too late. I heard the faint sound of a distant scream. I flung open the door with such force that the wall shook.
‘Eee-eee-eee!’ It was the tight-drawn, inarticulate scream of pure terror, and it came from somewhere in the wood. He had sought safety in the wood – and from a pursuing woodsman!
‘Eee-eee-eee!’ Again came the squeal. My shadow streamed from the doorway, and the beginning of the wood beyond was illuminated as if by the headlights of a car.
Karen had stopped her ears.
‘Eee-eee-eee!’
And then, a little way within the wood, I saw him, if that shadow was he. The sounds of the last scream had died away, as if he had merely continued to scream as a child screams, having once began. He seemed to be listening. Blum I did not see. This made matters no better. Better to see Blum than to know all the time that he was near, stealing noiselessly from tree to tree, ushering, shepherding, getting his man where he wanted him.
‘Eee-eeee-eeee! . . . Eeee-eeee-eeee!’
Such an added extreme of terror would have seemed inexpressible, but he did it. The next moment he was flying straight for the hut, as a moth makes for a lamp. His arms were above his head, and Blum was after him.
Do not tell me how feeble was my effort to bang the door between the two. I cannot leap like a chamois nor cover the mountains like a hare. Loudly the door swung to and back again. As it did so something fell to the floor with a little snap. I do not know on what ledge or shelf it had been standing, but it was Blum’s statuette, and the violent jar of the door had brought it down. Breathing easily, Blum slowly bolted the door.
‘Walther,’ I cried sharply, ‘open that door! No harm is done! Let the fellow go!’
He did not appear to hear me. His bright eyes were on the other’s white and sweating face.
‘Then I will open it.’ And I took a step forward.
But I seemed merely to precipitate the thing I wished to forestall. Even in a light-built man I should not have thought so swift a movement possible. I fell back with a ringing head and one useless elbow, and Blum was not calm now. He was trembling and his face was advanced towards the Neapolitan’s.
‘So you thought you would come? The coast was clear? Just one little peep past the plantation before you left?’
Nicolo was licking his lips. His purple jacket was fouled and burred, and his green velours hat had gone.
‘You said to yourself, “Walther Blum is away, and his wife must be lonely, and it would be neighbourly to sit with her an hour”?’
I saw Nicolo’s fleeting look at the window. I read his thoughts; a sudden leap to the table and a header, through icicles and all – Blum could have done it – it was all there was to do. It was, as a matter of fact, Nicolo who struck first, a desperate and futile blow. He did not even succeed in getting on to the table. He was caught and tripped, and in a moment both men were on the floor.
Karen had fallen back behind the stove, with eyes that peeped dreadfully between her fingers. And there was no more screaming now. Blum had his left forearm under the Neapolitan’s nape, and his right palm was pressed on his forehead. He was looking at him earnestly, attentively. And he had ceased to speak. Why should he speak? Words were things used up and outworn by others. To creep in midwinter round the cornice of the Huldhorn had been one of his words. And this was his companion word, that he was doing now.
Then my heart stood still as I saw the slow grope of his powerful hand along the floor. In a flash I knew beforehand what he intended to do. I tried to kick at the hand, but once more I was too late. I looked wildly round. Karen had sunk to the floor by the stove, but I saw her raise her head.
And that at least – her seeing what I foresaw – I could stop. Those blue, already overburdened eyes were not made for that. I do not know whether or not I was in time. I sprang to the middle of the room and with my unhurt hand dashed out the incandescent.
I dash out the light from this page too. As the player rises from the board without making the final move, as the pattern is all there without the addition of the last piece of all, so let it be with the tale. Say – I do not know – that the whole thing took ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, before the silence came. It was in the dead silence that I heard Blum get up from the floor. I heard his feet pass me, heard his groping in some cupboard behind me. There were sounds as he did something in the middle of the room.
Then suddenly the hut was flooded with the light of the new bulb he had fitted.
My eyes rested on Karen first. She lay on her back, wide-eyed and still. I had heard no sound from her – believe me, if you had been there you would have had ears for one set of sounds only – but deep in her breast was Walther’s slenderest carving-chisel. He was standing there, but he had not yet seen her; he was looking down at his other piece of work. I think, when I remember the cleared table at which Karen had sat, that he had intended to make a man-to-man business of it. He had cleared away all other weapons, intending to finish him with his hands, and Karen had probably hidden the thin chisel somewhere about her. But what I saw I seemed already to have known. Only the arm of the statuette was to be seen – the one that had broken off when it had fallen from behind the door. All else of that thing of loveliness was indistinguishable from the rest of the red on the floor. Blum had broken it to splinters in cramming it where he conceived it to belong – where he had conceived the smile itself to belong – in between Nicolo’s white teeth and down his throat.
Two Trifles
From The Ghost Book (Hutchinson, 1927) compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith
1
The Ether-hogs
With one foot thrust into an angle to brace himself against the motion of the ship, the twin telephone-receivers about his head, and one hand on the transmitting key, while the other hovered over screws and armatures, the young wireless operator was trying to get into tune. He had had the pitch, but had either lost it again, or else something had gone wrong on the ship from which that single urgent call had come. The pear-shaped incandescent light made cavernous shadows under his anxiously drawn brows; it shone harshly on dials and switchboards, on bells and coils, and milled screws and tubes; and the whole white-painted room now heeled slowly over this way, and then steeved as violently back the other, as the liner rolled to the storm.
The operator seemed to be able to get any ship except the one he wanted. As a keyed-up violin-string answers to tension after tension, or as if a shell held to the ear should sing, not one Song of the Sea, but a multitude, so he fluctuated through level after level of the diapason of messages that the installation successively picked up. They were com
ically various, had the young operator’s face not been so ghastly anxious and set. ‘Merry Christmas . . . the Doric . . . buy Erie Railroads . . . Merry Christmas . . . overland from Marseilles . . . closing price copper . . . good night . . . Merry Christmas’ – the night hummed with messages as a telephone exchange hums; and many decks overhead, and many scores of feet above that again, his own antennae described vast loops and arcs in the wintry sky, and from time to time spoke with a roar that gashed the night.
But of all the confusion of intercourse about him, what follows is a Conference that the young wireless operator did not hear.
The spirits of the Special Committee on Ethereal Traffic and Right of Way were holding an Extraordinary General Meeting. They were holding it because the nuisance had finally become intolerable. Mortal messages tore great rents through space with such a reckless disregard of the Ethereal Regulations that not a ghost among them was safe. A spectre would be going peacefully about his haunting; there would come one of these radio-telegraphic blasts; and lo! his essence would be shattered into fragments, which could only be reassembled after the hideous racket had passed away.
And by haunting they meant, not merely the old-fashioned terrorising by means of white sheets and clanking fetters, nor yet only the more modern forms of intimidation that are independent of the stroke of midnight and the crowing of the first cock, but also benigner suggestions – their gentle promptings to the poets of the world, their whispered inspirations to its painters, their care for the integrity of letters, their impulses to kindliness, their spurs to bravery, and, in short, any other noble urging that earth-dwellers know, who give their strength and labour for the unprofitable things they believe without ever having seen them.
A venerable spirit with a faint aura of silver beard still clinging about him spoke.
The Dead of Night Page 75
