I groped down the stairs again. In the meantime, tea had been served. She sat behind the low table, behind the large, polished urn, holding a sleeve away from it as she poured, so that her bare white arm seemed to shoot out of the sleeve.
“You must be tired,” she said. “You must be terribly hungry,” she said, in that flat, offhand, utterly dead voice that reminded me of the leave trains at Victoria during the war, the careless English women on the platform by the first-class carriages, saying those unimportant things, so easily, to the faces they would never see again. So careless, so smooth, so utterly dead inside.
It was like that. I took a cup of tea and a piece of scone. “He’s upstairs,” I said. “Blotto. Of course you know that.” “Oh, yes.” Her sleeve swirled a little, very delicately.
“Do I put him to bed?” I asked. “Or do I just let him decompose where he is?”
Her head jerked queerly. There was for the moment an expression she never meant me to see.
“John!” Quite smooth again now. “You’ve never talked like that about him before.”
“Never talked much about him at all,” I said. “Funny. He asked me down, too. And I came. Funny people—people are. It’s been nice here too. I’m leaving.”
“John!”
“The hell with it,” I said. “I’m leaving. Thank him—when he’s sober. Thank him a lot for asking me.”
“John!” For the third time, just like that. “Aren’t you being just a little strange?”
“It’s the American gutturals creeping out,” I said, “after a long hibernation.”
“Have you hated him so much?”
“If you’ll pardon an old friend,” I said. “There are too many exclamation points in this conversation. Forget my bad manners. Of course I’ll put him to bed—and then I’ll take myself some English air.”
But she was hardly listening to me now. She was leaning forward, and her eyes had an almost clairvoyant look, and she began to talk quickly, as if something had to be said and there wasn’t much time and interruptions might come.
“There’s a woman over at Lakeview,” she said. “A Lady Lakenham. A terrible woman. A man-eater. He’s been seeing her. This morning they had some sort of quarrel. He shouted all this at me, while we were alone in the house, contemptuously, over glasses of brandy he spilled all down his coat. She hit him in the face with a whip and rode him down on her horse.”
Of course I wasn’t hearing her either, not with my conscious ears. Instantly, as you’d snap your fingers, I had become a wooden man. It was as if all time were distilled into one instant and I had swallowed that, like a pill. It had made a wooden man of me. I could even feel a wooden grin pulling my face.
So even there he had to be first.
She stopped talking, it seemed, and she was looking at me across the tea urn. I saw her. I could see. One can, even in those moments. Her hair was ever so pale, her melancholy ever so distinct. She made the usual motions, slow, lovely curves of the arm and hand and wrist and cheek, which at the time had an almost unbearable seductiveness, but which in retrospect would have only the faded and uncertain grace of wisps of mist.
It seemed that I had handed her my cup and she was pouring me more tea.
“She lashed him with a hunting crop,” she said. “Imagine! Edward! Then she rode him down, knocked him over with her big horse.”
“On a big black stallion,” I said. “She rode him down like a bundle of dirty rags.”
Her breath caught in the stillness.
“Yes, she has her points,” I said brutally. “And she loves the house. Lakeview You ought to see what Lakenham did to the inside of it. He did his best lick on the main staircase—somebody else’s heel of a husband.”
Did her breath stay caught, or did someone laugh behind an arras, some court fool hiding from a wicked king?
“I knew her too,” I said. “Intimately.”
It seemed to dawn on her a little too slowly, as if a native had to be waked in a grass hut in Sumatra, and then run mile after mile through the jungle, and then a man had to ride a horse across a vast desert, and then a sailing ship had to battle storm after storm around the Horn, bringing the news home. It seemed to take all that time.
Her eyes got very large and very still and like gray glass. There was no color in them and no light.
“He must have thought he had the morning,” I said. “I had an afternoon appointment. It just didn’t—” I stopped. That wasn’t funny, not in any company.
I stood up. “I’m sorry. So uselessly sorry. I’m just as easy to take as the next guy, for all my visions. I’m sorry. Sorry, and I know it’s just a word.”
She stood up too. She was coming around the table, very slowly. We were quite close together then, but no part of us touched.
Then she touched my sleeve, very lightly, as though a butterfly had lighted on it, and I was very still, not wanting to frighten the butterfly.
It floated away. It hovered in midair. It settled once more on my sleeve. Her voice said, as softly as the butterfly had moved, “We don’t have to talk about it. We understand. We understand everything, you and I. We don’t have to say a word.”
“It could happen to anybody,” I said. “The hell of it is when it does.”
There was something else behind her eyes. They were not blank any more, but neither were they soft. Little doors were opening far back, at the ends of dark corridors. Doors that had been shut so long. So unutterably long. Steps came, along a stone corridor. They shuffled, without haste, without hope. A thread of smoke was caught in a draft and spiraled to nothing. All these things I seemed to see and know behind her eyes. Nonsense, of course.
“You’re mine,” she whispered, “all mine now”
She clutched my head and pulled it down. Her lips fumbling unskillfully on my mouth were as cold and remote as Arctic snow.
“Go upstairs and see if he is all right,” she whispered secretly, “before you go.”
“Sure.” I spoke like a man who has been shot through the lungs.
So I went out of that room again, and up those stairs again.
Fumbling this time, fumbling with ancient caution. An old man whose bones were brittle. I got to my room and shut the door. I panted against it for a little while. Then I changed my clothes and put on the only lounge suit I had with me, tucked the rest of my stuff into a suitcase, closed the suitcase, and locked it very softly. Listening, moving very softly, a little boy who has been bad, bad, bad.
And in the silence I helped to make, steps came up the stairs and went into a room and came out of a room and went down the stairs again. Very slowly, all this, creeping like my thoughts.
Sounds came back. The cracked, incessant humming of the old woman in the kitchen, the buzzing of a late bee under my window, the creaking of an old countryman’s cart far down the road. I picked up my suitcase and went out of my room. I shut its door softly, softly.
And at the top of the stairs his door had to be wide open again. Wide open, as if somebody had come up deliberately and opened it and left it open.
I put the suitcase down and leaned against the wall and stared in. He didn’t seem to have moved much. Pretty complete case. He looked as if he had taken a running dive onto the high bed and grabbed two big handfuls of the counterpane and so passed into the large alcoholic beyond.
Then in the gray stillness I was aware of a lack of sound. The stertorous breathing, half snore, half mutter of the unconscious drunk. I listened—oh, very carefully. It was missing—his breathing. He didn’t make any sound at all, sprawled on his face on that high bed.
Yet it wasn’t even that that brought me into the room like a panther, crouching, noiseless, holding my own breath. It was something I had already looked at and not observed. His left ring finger. Funny, that was. It was half an inch longer than the middle finger next to it, as his hand hung limp against the spread. It should have been half an inch shorter.
It was half an inch longer. The extra length
happened to be a congealed icicle of blood.
It had come all the way from his throat, soundless, implacable, and made that funny icicle there.
He had been dead, of course, for hours.
4
I shut the door of the drawing room very politely, very carefully, like an old family priest departing into his funk hole, in the days of one of the anti-Catholic persecutions.
Then I stole over and shut the French doors. I suppose a little last fragrance of the roses and the nectarines crept in at me, mockingly, as I did this.
She was leaning back in a low chair, smoking a cigarette not skillfully, her pale gold head against a cushion. Her eyes—I didn’t know what was in her eyes. I had had enough of what was in eyes, anyhow.
“Where’s the gun? It should be in his hand.”
I made it sharp but not loud, not a carrying voice. But there was no gentle English grayness in me now.
She smiled very faintly and pointed to one of those spindly articles of furniture on insecure logs which sometimes have drawers but are really to hold an array of little glazed cups and mugs emblazoned in gilt: “A Present from Bognor Regis,” or wherever it was, and a coat of arms.
This particular sideboy, or whatever it was, had a stiff curved drawer, which I pulled out, rattling the glazed mugs a little.
It was in there, on a sheet of pink shelf paper, against a fringed doily. A Webley revolver. Innocent as a fish knife.
I put my nose down and sniffed at it. There seemed to be that harsh smell of cordite. I didn’t touch the gun—yet.
“So you knew,” I said. “You knew all the time I was making a prissy fool of myself. You knew while we had tea. You knew he was lying up there on that bed. Dripping blood slowly, slowly, slowly—the dead do bleed, but so slowly—from a wound in his throat, down under his shirt, down his arm, down his hand, down his finger. You knew all the time.”
“That beast,” she said in an utterly calm voice. “That offal. Have you any idea what he has subjected me to?”
“All right,” I said. “I get that too. I’m not squeamish either, about his sort. But things have to be done. The gun shouldn’t have been touched at all. Where it was it probably looked all right. Now you’ve handled it. Fingerprints, you know You know about fingerprints?”
I wasn’t talking to a child or being sarcastic either. I was just getting an idea over, in case it hadn’t got over. She had somehow discarded the cigarette without my observing a movement. She could do those things. She sat now very still, her hands on the arms of her chair, slim, separate, as delicate as dawn.
“You were here alone,” I said. “It was while Old Bessie had gone out. Nobody heard the shot, or would have thought of it as anything but a hunting gun.”
She laughed then. It was a low, ecstatic laugh, the laugh of a woman nestling back among pillows, in a great canopied bed.
As she laughed, the lines of her throat sharpened a little. And they never softened again, that I saw.
“Why,” she asked, “are you worrying about all that?”
“You should have told me before. What are you laughing at? Do you think this English law of yours is funny?…And you went up and opened that door—you. So I wouldn’t leave without knowing. Why?”
“I loved you,” she said. “After a fashion. I’m a cold woman, John. Did you know I was a cold woman?”
“I suspected it, but it didn’t happen to be any of my business. You’re not answering my question.”
“Your business, as it were, lay elsewhere.”
“That’s a thousand years ago. Ten thousand. That lies with the Pharaohs. Crumbling in an ancient shroud. This is for now” I pointed upward, a hard stiff finger.
“It’s beautiful,” she sighed. “Let’s not make a cheap sensation of it. It’s a beautiful tragedy.” She touched her slim, delicate neck caressingly.
“They’ll hang me, John. They do—in England.”
I stared at her with what eyes I had and what was in them.
“Deliberately,” she said coolly. “With due formality. And some faint, summary regrets. And the governor of the prison will have a perfect crease in his trousers, put there as deliberately, as carefully, as coldly as—as I shot him.”
I kept on breathing enough to stay alive. “On purpose?” It was a useless question. I already knew.
“Of course. I’ve been intending to for months. Today seemed somehow a little more brutal than usual. This woman over at Lakeview didn’t improve his self-esteem. She made him cheap. He was always nasty. So I did what I did.”
“But you could stand his being just nasty,” I said.
She nodded that head. I heard a strange, clanking noise like nothing else on earth. Something swayed, hooded. Very gently it swayed, in a cold light, from a long, hidden exquisite neck.
“No,” I said, without breath. “Never. This is easy. Will you play it my way?”
She stood up all in one smooth motion and came to me. I took her in my arms. I kissed her. I touched her hair.
“My knight,” she whispered. “My plumed knight. My glistening one.”
“How?” I asked, pointing into the drawer at the gun. “They’ll test his hand for powder nitrates. That is, leakage of gas when the gun is fired. It’s something that stays in the skin for a while and makes a chemical reaction. That has to be arranged.”
She stroked my hair. “They will, my love. They will find what you mean. I put the gun in his own hand, and held it there, and soothed him. My finger was over his finger. He was so drunk he didn’t even know what he was doing.”
She went on stroking my hair.
“My plumed, glistening knight,” she said.
I wasn’t holding her now; she was holding me. I squeezed my brains slowly, slowly. Into a clot.
“It may not make a very good test,” I said. “And they might test your hand as well. So we must do two things. Are you listening to me?”
“My plumed knight!” Her eyes shone.
“You must wash your right hand with good, harsh laundry soap and hot water, for a long time. It may hurt, but keep it up as long as you dare without taking the skin off. That would show. I mean that. It’s important. The other thing is—I’m leaving with the gun. That should throw them off. I don’t think that nitrate test is any good after about forty-eight hours. Understand?”
She said the same things, in the same way, and her eyes shone with the same light. Her hand on my head was the same soft, lingering hand.
I didn’t hate her. I didn’t love her. It was just something I had to do. I got the Webley and the pink paper under it, because that was slightly oil-stained. I looked closely at the wood of the drawer. That seemed clean. I put the gun and the paper away in my pockets.
“You don’t sleep in the same room with him,” I pounded on. “He’s drunk—sleeping it off. Nothing new, nothing to get excited or worried about. You heard a shot, of course, at somewhere around the right time, but not too close and not too evasive either. You thought it was a gun in the woods.”
She held my arm. I had to smooth hers. Her eyes demanded it.
“You’re pretty disgusted with him,” I said. “It’s happened often enough, so that you got an overload today. So he’s to be left alone till morning. Then Old Bessie—”
“Oh, not Old Bessie,” she said beautifully. “Not poor Old Bessie.”
It may have been a nice touch. It slid past me. I started to go.
“The main things—washing your hand, but not enough to inflame it—and me off with the gun. All set?”
She clutched me again, with that fierce, unskillful clutch.
“And afterwards—?”
“And afterwards—” I breathed dreamily against her icy lips. I pried myself loose from her and left that house.
5
For almost three weeks I stayed clear of them, or they let me. I was pretty good, for an amateur, in a small tight country like England.
I ditched my runabout late at night, in the loneliest c
opse I could drive to without lights. It seemed a thousand wind-swept solitary miles from anywhere. It wasn’t, of course. I dragged my suitcase across infinite English landscapes, through the dark, through fields of drowsy cattle, past the fringes of silent villages where not a single lamp warmed the night.
Not too early I reached a railway station and rode it to London. I knew where to go, a small lodging house in Bloomsbury, north of Russell Square, a place where no one was what he should be or wanted to be, and no one cared, least of all the slattern who called herself the landlady.
Breakfast, a cold, greasy mess on a tray outside your door. Lunch, ale and bread and cheddar, if you wanted it. Dinner, if you were in the dining class, you went out and foraged for. If you came home late at night, the white-faced specters of Russell Square haunted you, creeping along where the iron railings had been, as though the mere memory of them brought some shelter from the policeman’s lantern. They haunted you all night with the ache of their “Listen, dearies,” with the remembrance of their pinched lips, gnawed thin from within, their large hollow eyes in which a world was already dead.
There was a man at the digs who played Bach, a little too much and a little too loud; but he did it for his own soul.
There was a lonely old man with a poised, delicate face and a filthy mind. There were two young wooden butterflies who thought of themselves as actors.
I got sick of all that soon enough. I bought a knapsack and went on a walking tour down to Devonshire. I was in the papers, of course, but not prominently. No sensation, no blurred reproduction of my passport photograph, which made me look like an Armenian rug merchant with the toothache. Just a discreet paragraph about my being missing, age, height, weight, color of eyes, American, believed to have information which might aid the authorities. There was some brief biographical stuff about Edward Crandall, not more than three lines. He was not important to them. Merely a well-to-do man who happened to be dead. Calling me an American clinched it. My accent, when I tried it, was almost good enough for Bloomsbury. It would be more than good enough for the rural districts.