5
Monica had not long been in her flat in Courtfield Gardens before Mrs Merry appeared.
“I’ve brought you a few letters which came during the past two or three days,” said she. They were dull; one with a Canadian stamp, addressed in George Medwall’s careful hand, was on top.
“There were no messages,” said Mrs Merry. “Mr Revelstoke telephoned yesterday to know when you would be home, and as I had had your telegram I said you’d be back this evening.”
Was Giles anxious to see her, then? He had been too sure of her devotion to show any concern about her goings and comings before. Did he feel that he should unsay the cruel things he had said in Venice? But cruel things cannot be unsaid; they may be forgiven, and Monica was ready to forgive, but she was certain that she would not forget. She unpacked because it gave her something to do—something which would keep her in her flat. But all the time she wanted to go to Tite Street. She must not do so, for her letter had been plain; she had broken with Giles. Apparently he had received her letter, and he wanted her; otherwise why that unaccustomed inquiry? Did he think he knew her so well that he could be sure she would run to him as soon as she came back to London? Then he did not know her at all. Desperately as she loved him, she had some pride; she must preserve her self-respect, as Sir Benedict said.
But suppose he were lonely and hurt? The bad performance of The Golden Asse had ravaged him as only she knew. It was all very well for Sir Benedict and Petri to say that it had not been disastrously bad; they meant only that the audience had not hissed—or had only hissed once. To Giles anything below the high mark of achievement which he set for himself was disaster. What had Ripon called him, in mockery? A Satanic genius? True, for he was proud as Lucifer. But he had not Lucifer’s self-sufficiency. She knew that, better than anyone else in the world. For although he would not tell her how much he needed her tenderness and understanding, she could feel it. And feeling his need, could she withhold herself from him? Was she not, in this realm, more knowledgeable than he? Was she not one of the Eros-men, and had not Domdaniel called her a fellow-artist? Should she not have a spirit above personal hurts? Should she not be ashamed to withhold her presence and her comfort from Giles as a means of revenge?
Yes, what she was doing was revenge—a tortured, unworthy passion which fouled her love. What she was doing was all those things he hated, and rightly. It was provincial. It was common. It was probably colonial and Saltertonian and Non-conformist and typically American and lower-middle-class and non-U and all the other things he taunted her with being, in his impatient desire that she should be, like himself, a true artist who looked at the world with level and open eyes.
It had been a little after nine o’clock when she reached Courtfield Gardens from the air terminal. It was half-past eleven when she climbed the stairs in Tite Street.
6
The house had a Sunday night stillness, and the tiny globes which Mrs Klein used to light the stairs exaggerated the chapel-like gloom of its Ruskin Gothic. On the second flight, which led to Giles’ top floor, the cat Pyewacket was sitting; he miaouled when Monica stooped to stroke him, and ran upward ahead of her. The door at the top of the stair was closed.
She remembered that earlier time when she had returned from a journey to find Giles in bed with Persis; the door had not been closed then. Did this show some greater degree of caution? But suppose Persis were again with him? Did it really make any difference to the consuming fact that she loved him, and could not live apart from him, and must therefore endure anything from him? If Persis were there, she would have to accept it, and drudge for Persis as she drudged for Giles. The abjection of her love was complete.
The door was locked. She had a key—the only key other than Giles’ own, and he had given it to her not in order that she might have free access to the flat, but because he was always losing his own key, and wanted another in safe keeping in case he should at some time find himself locked out. She unlocked the door and pushed it open. It moved heavily, for a blanket lay on the floor against it.
She had meant to call “Giles”—but the gas stifled the name in her throat and she retreated down the stairs, choking and gasping. Pyewacket, who had rushed through the door ahead of her, dashed out of the flat and down the stairs, spitting and snarling.
Get help? No; go in. She crumpled her scarf over her mouth and nose, and ran through the living room to the windows, which were closed but not fastened, and opened easily. Was it safe to turn on a light? She knew nothing of gas. Would it ignite? Would there be an explosion? Where was Giles?
Giles lay on the floor, in pyjamas and dressing-gown. In a score of films which Monica had seen, the discoverer of someone in such a position ran to them at once, felt the pulse, listened to the heart, stared into the face. But she was so frightened that she shrank against the windows, to get air and to be as far as possible from him. It was some time before she found courage to creep forward (why? did she fear to waken him?) and look at his face in the very little light which came through the windows. His skin was dark; it seemed to her that it was black. His lips were parted, and he did not breathe. She should take his pulse. But she dared not touch him. He was dead, and she was afraid of his body.
It did not occur to her until this minute to turn off the gas-fire which hissed a foot or two from his head. Now she did so, walking around the body in a wide circle because she dared not reach across it to the gas-tap. And as she knelt by the grate she saw that in each of his hands was a piece of paper. In one of these she recognized her letter.
Was it her first thought that she had driven him to take his life? It was not. Her first thought was that if that letter were found, she would be accused of having done so.
Danger dispersed her panic. She must behave sensibly now, or God knew what would happen to her. She retreated to the window again, and made her plan.
Thank Heaven she was wearing gloves! Monica was not a great reader of detective fiction, but she knew that dreadful retributive magic could be worked with fingerprints. With luck, nobody need know that she had ever been in the flat. Less fearful than before (but still fearing that he might wake and blast her with some sarcasm, as he had done at times when he woke from sleep to find her looking into his beloved face) she went to the body, and gently drew the letter from the right-hand fingers. It was not difficult. With it safely in the pocket of her coat, she looked quickly through the flat. A few of Persis’ undergarments were, as usual, hanging wetly above the bath—Leave them? Yes. Let Perse look out for herself. Then she crept back into the living-room and closed the windows as they had been before.
The other paper? Without a light she could not tell what it was, but it was a long clipping from a newspaper. Well, there could be no harm to her in that. Without a farewell glance at the black face Monica turned on the gas once again, tip-toed to the door, closed and locked it, and went as quietly as she could down the stairs. The blanket could not be pulled back into place, but that could not be helped. Pyewacket was at the street door, and she and the cat went out together into Tite Street. The squalling of babies in the hospital over the way was audible almost until she reached the Embankment. It was now twenty-five minutes to twelve.
She did not stay there long. Mist was rising from the river, and the Embankment was cold and inhospitable. Nevertheless, there were people there: lovers soddenly embracing, hands groping beneath their mackintoshes; a man and woman in middle age, talking passionately in some unknown language; one of London’s inassimilable poor, filthily bearded and rustling from the newspapers which were stuffed in the legs of his trousers. Monica walked slowly, trying to think, but repeating: Giles is dead; he wanted them to think I drove him to it; he wanted to get me into trouble; he loved me; he didn’t love me; he wanted to spite me; he did it from despair; he did it for revenge; he hated me. It led nowhere.
A policeman passed and re-passed her. “Anything wrong, miss?” said he.
“No; nothing thanks.”
“Waiting for anyone?”
“No.”
“Well, if I may suggest it, miss, if you’ve seen all you want to see of the river, it might be a good idea to go home. Would you like me to get you a cab?”
“Thank you; that would be very kind.”
Why a cab? She was well-dressed, and wearing gloves. Amy always said that a lady should never appear on the street without gloves. How providential it was, sometimes, to know the ropes of ladyhood.
7
The coroner was that fortunate creature, a man really happy in his work. He delivered his summing-up to the jury with a professional flourish and a sense of style which, without being in any way unseemly, showed a degree of satisfaction.
They had heard the evidence, said the Coroner, and he hoped that they had heeded his two or three adjurations to mark it well, for it was of a complexity not common in such investigations. The body of Giles Adrian Revelstoke had been identified by Mr Griffith Hopkin-Griffiths of Neuadd Goch, Llanavon, his step-father; who had also testified that his stepson was thirty-four years old and so far as he knew had been in good health. The body had been discovered at half-past nine on the morning of September 29 by his landlady, Mrs Maria Augusta Klein, and his pupil, Miss Monica Gall. Miss Gall, who acted as a secretary and amanuensis to Mr Revelstoke, had arrived to do some work on the magazine Lantern, of which Mr Revelstoke was one of the editors, and had found the door of his flat locked—an unusual circumstance. She had called Mrs Klein, who assured her that Mr Revelstoke was at home, and accompanied her to the door of his flat. After repeated loud knocking, Miss Gall had opened the door at Mrs Klein’s suggestion, using a key which, as a member of the Lantern staff, she had with her. They found Mr Revelstoke dead on the floor, with some evidences of a paroxysm, and had called the police.
The evidence of the police was that there was a strong smell of coal gas in the room, that the windows were closed, and that a blanket had apparently been used to block the crack under the main doorway. The police pathologist had testified, however, that death was not caused by gas, but by suffocation. Although the tap of the gas-fire was turned on when the police arrived, no gas was coming through and examination of the meter—one of the familiar shilling-in-the-slot meters—showed that it had run out at a time which could not be determined. It appeared, therefore, that Mr Revelstoke had been overcome with gas, and that when the gas in the room began to disperse—for the windows did not give a tight seal to the room—he had partly recovered. Nausea from the gas had caused him to regurgitate a considerable quantity of vomitus into his mouth and in his partly-conscious state he had been unable to free himself from it; the heavy, snoring breathing characteristic of certain stages of gas poisoning had caused him to draw a quantity of vomitus into his lungs, which had brought about death by suffocation. The opinion of the pathologist was that this had happened six or seven hours before he was discovered, which was to say at some time between two and three in the morning.
A verdict of suicide would certainly occur to the jury, but they must weigh the following considerations very heavily against it. The evidence of Miss Persis Kinwellmarshe (present in the court with her father, Rear-Admiral Sir Percy Kinwellmarshe) and another associate in the Lantern work was that she had seen the dead man after his return from Venice, and that he had appeared to be in his usual spirits, sardonic but cheerful. She had prepared a picnic supper which they had shared on the night of Sunday, September 28. Mr Revelstoke had spoken then in his usual amusingly unrestrained fashion of a critique of his opera The Golden Asse, written by Stanhope Aspinwall of the Sunday Argus, which she had brought to him. This was the newspaper clipping which had been found in the dead man’s hand; she had received it from Mr Phanuel Tuke, a co-editor of Lantern, who had thought that Mr Revelstoke would like to have it. The dead man had laughed at Mr Aspinwall’s critical pretensions.
Mr Stanhope Aspinwall, the respected music critic, had given evidence that he had never known Mr Revelstoke personally, though he had once sat in front of him at a concert, and had received two or three very abusively-worded letters from him. Therefore there could be no question of enmity between these men. The critique found with the body referred to the revised version of the composer’s opera which Mr Aspinwall had travelled to Venice to see within the past fortnight; he had seen it twice, and some part of his review had been devoted to a comparison between the opera as conducted by the composer, and by Sir Benedict Domdaniel. He had said that Mr Revelstoke was a thoroughly incompetent conductor, and in that capacity was the worst enemy of his own genius as a composer. The intention of the review was favourable, and certainly it must be considered so by an unprejudiced reader.
There was the evidence, however, of John Macarthur Eccles, the other friend who had visited him on Sunday night, that Mr Revelstoke was extremely sensitive to criticism, although he pretended to hardihood respecting it. There was the evidence, also, of Sir Benedict Domdaniel, the dead man’s musical and literary executor, that Mr Revelstoke had been under unusual strain during the revision of The Golden Asse, which had brought on exaggerated alternations of melancholy and defiant high spirits, and that Mr Revelstoke had left Venice abruptly after being told by Sir Benedict and the manager of the Fenice opera house that he could not conduct his opera there again.
There was the evidence also of Mr Phanuel Tuke that the magazine Lantern was in financial straits.
Taken with a romantic predisposition this added up to a story of a gifted young man who felt that the world had scorned him and who had taken his own life in a period of depression. But on the other hand, there had been equally strong evidence that Giles Revelstoke had loyal friends, that his latest and most ambitious work had been received with acclaim on the continent, and by Britain’s foremost musical journalist had been mentioned as “of the same great family as Mozart’s Magic Flute, one of the serenely wise creations which form the crown of beauty in music”. A conductor of world fame—Sir Benedict Domdaniel again—had said that Giles Revelstoke was a composer of unquestionable genius who was just beginning to come into his mature productive period. Therefore, before they blotted the dose of such a life with the stain of a suicide verdict, let the jury reflect that while it may have been possible, and indeed seemed probable, that Giles Revelstoke meant to take his life, he had not in fact done so; the gas supply had failed, and had it not been for the unlucky fact that he had suffocated before fully waking he would not have died. Under the circumstances the Coroner recommended a verdict of death by misadventure.
The jury were not of a romantic turn of mind. They were, with two or three exceptions, elderly, poor men who hung about in Horseferry Road with the hope of being called for duty on coroner’s juries, counting the few shillings they received as a pleasant windfall to add to their pensions. After a brief drag at their pipes in the retiring-room they shuffled back into court, and gave the Coroner the verdict for which he had asked.
And so it was pronounced. The Coroner, who did not get a distinguished audience every day, and who liked to give a cultured twist to his duties when he could, had passed the time while the jury were conferring, scraping in the ashes of his mind for a live coal. And, from some long-ago popular article about Schubert, he produced one which flamed quite brightly for the moment.
“By the death of Giles Adrian Revelstoke,” said he, “music loses a rich treasure, but even fairer hopes.”
Good, kindly man, he almost wished that he had not said it, for so many of his hearers wept.
8
Ideally, important things should happen late, as the climax of the day, but the inquest took place in the morning, and from its close until bedtime all was slow, torturing diminution for Monica.
There was luncheon with Stanhope Aspinwall, who sought her out when the court adjourned, asked the favour of her company and bore her off to the ladies’ annex of his distinguished club. He was a short, bald man, one of the dwindling army of pince-nez wearers, precise in speech, and clearly burdened with guilt.
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br /> “If I had for one instant supposed,” he said as they took coffee, “that my comments on his conducting—fully justified, I firmly insist—might have put such a dreadful thought in his head nothing could have induced me to publish them in that form. For there was asperity; I admit to asperity. He had pestered me with letters—such letters as nothing would induce me to show to anyone, though I have kept them—and my personal feeling toward him was cool, though certainly not hostile. But for his talent—let us be honest, and say genius—I had nothing but admiration. I say this to you because you have become associated with his work in the mind of the public, and I expect that you will be even more so in future. Of course it is foolish for me to link myself even in my own mind with this tragedy, but I do so. How can I do otherwise, foolish or not? Those letters—who would not have resented them? I admit to you freely that this will be a dreadful lesson to me. Asperity: asperity is the bosom-sin of the critic.”
The afternoon papers had not, all things considered, much to say about the inquest. The worst comment was headed—
ADMIRAL’S DAUGHTER IN LOVE-NEST
“My Knickers”: Lush Model
Another one dug up the fact that Giles had been a regular visitor to the prison where Odingsels was serving his time, and spoke sternly of highbrow filth and Lantern. But Revelstoke was not likely to be known to most of their readers and they had rottener fish to fry.
A Mixture of Frailties tst-3 Page 36
