“—Why Urky? Well, why not Urky? I need someone and he fills the bill because his taking-off will cause a stir, especially in the way I have managed it, without in any serious way depriving the world of a useful human creature. Besides, I have become impatient with his hoity-toity ways with me, as well as his stinginess. It is an oddity of people with unusual sexual tastes that they must enjoy them in the company of somebody whom they can patronize and look down on; I think Oscar Wilde really liked his grooms and messenger boys better than he ever liked aristocratic Bosie. There are men who like vulgar women, as well as women who prefer vulgar men; snobbery in sex has never been carefully investigated. But I, to whom Urky was what a dog is to a man, have grown tired of playing the gossiping old Edinburgh wifie, to be snubbed and put down by The McVarish. The worm turns: the parasite punishes.
“—So, a few hours ago when the tedious charade of the Two Old Edinburgh Ladies had sniggered toward its close, I made a change in the script, which Urky at first saw as an ingenious variation designed for his pleasure. Oh, invaluable parasite!
“—Imagine him, tied up and giggling like a schoolgirl as I lean closer and closer.
MRS. MASHAM: Mistress Morley, my dear, you do giggle so! It can’t be good for you. I shall have to punish you, you naughty girlie. Look how you’ve disturbed your frock! I shall have to tie you up tight, my wee lassie, verra tight indeed.—But och! what a foolish giggler! Can ye not laugh a guid hearty laugh! Here, let me show you how. See, I am going to put this record on the machine; it’s Sir Harry Lauder singing ‘Stop Your Tickling, Jock’.—Now, listen how Sir Harry laughs; that’s a laugh, eh? A guid, hearty laugh? Come on, Mistress Morley, sing with me and Sir Harry:
I’m courtin’ a fairmer’s dochter,
She’s one o’ the fairest ever seen;
Her cheeks they are a rosy red,
And her age is just sweet seventeen—
I’ll just turn up the volume a bit to encourage you. And I’ll tickle you! Yes, I will! See, I’m coming at you to tickle you!—Och, do ye call that a laugh? I know what! Ordinary tickling will never do the job. Now watch: ye see I have here my knitting needles. If I juist insert this one up your great red nose, Mistress Morley, and wiggle it a wee bit to tickle the hairs, eh? Ticklish, eh? But still not enough; let’s put the other needle up the other hole in yer neb. See, when I wiggle them both how easy it is to laugh? Laugh right along with Sir Harry? Och, that’s not laughin’. That’s more like shriekin’. I’ll just push them in a wee bit further. No, no, it’s no good rollin’ yer een and greeting, Mistress Morley, my dear.—D’ye know, a great idea occurs to me! Juist suppose now—I’ll need some sort of a hammer—so juist suppose I take off my shoe, so. Then wi’ the heel o’t I gie the ends o’ the needles a sharp tap—one, two: But Mistress Morley, ye’re no longer laughin’. Only Sir Harry is laughin’.
“—And indeed only Sir Harry was laughing, for Urky with two aluminum knitting-needles well up into his brain was quite quiet. Whether it was the needles, or fright, or heart failure, or all three, Urky was dead, or too close to it to make a sound.
“—So—out of Mistress Masham’s old gown in a flash, set the repeating-device and turn up the volume on the record-player to the full, so that Sir Harry will go on singing his song and laughing heartily until a neighbour phones the caretaker, and out of the flat, not forgetting my envelope. But no need to worry about fingerprints; I wanted to leave plenty of those, so that there would be no danger of anybody else stealing my murder.
“—No fingerprints, however, on one little thing I removed from Urky’s apartment; he had it locked up in his desk and like so many vain people he had a simple faith in simple locks. You may open your gifts now, children.—Package Number One: yes, it’s the Gryphius Portfolio and it’s yours, my dears, to gloat over and keep for your own dear little selves. Especially those letters concealed in the back flap. Urky knew all about them, and he hinted about what he knew, underestimating my power to comprehend, as he always did, the poor sap.
“—The other package, the big one, is the complete typescript of my novel Be Not Another. I am writing to the papers, Clem, to tell them what I have told you here, and to say that you have my book, that it is rare and fine, and that applications from publishers who hope to get it must be made to you. And there will be applications! Oh, indeed there will be applications! Publishers will fight to publish a murderer, when they had no time to spare for a philosopher. It’s a hot property, so make the toughest deal you can, dear Clem. Revenge me, dear old boy; roast ’em, squeeze ’em, gouge ’em for every possible dollar. And keep a sharp eye on the kind of publicity they give it; I have provided the material for a first-rate campaign—‘The book a man murdered to place in your hands!—A great, misunderstood genius speaks to his times!—The philosopher-criminal bares his soul!’—that’s the first line of fire, after which you’ll easily get some eminent critic to plump it all out with praise as the distilled essence of a mighty, ruined spirit.
“—As for the monies accruing, I leave it to you to set up a handsome research fund at Spook, so that people like yourself can get some of the dibs to further their work. And I want it named the Parlabane Bounty, so that every pedant who wants a hand-out has to burn a tiny pinch of incense to my memory. You know how these things are managed. Don’t worry that Spook won’t take the money. The dear old coll. will sanctify my gift to its use, never fear.
“—That’s all, I think. I hope you and Molly won’t come to quarrelling over the Gryphius. Because I mean it for both of you, and if either one tries to bag it all, or cheat the other out of her due—you, Clem, appear to me as the most likely to try a dirty trick—there will certainly be hell to pay, if I have any influence in hell.
“—All that now remains is for me to put myself beyond the reach of the law. Not, let me assure you, because I fear it, but because I despise it. I could get a lot of interest in my book by hanging around, going to trial, and having my say from the dock. But you know what would happen in a modern court. Could I expect justice? Could I, who have planned a murder and killed a man in cold blood, expect to have my own life exacted as poetic justice (the only really satisfactory kind) demands? Not a chance! What a parade there would be of psychiatrists, eager to ‘explain’ me! They would assure the court that I was ‘insane’ because of course no man in his right mind ever wants revenge or personal advancement. People drunk with the cheap wine of compassion would assure one another that I was ‘sick’. But I’m not insane and I am in robust health, and I will not expose myself to the pity of my inferiors.
“—So, one last tiny joke. Everybody will assume that I have committed suicide. Well, if I have, let them prove it. But you, dear friends, shall know. I am going to dress myself now in my habit; then I shall lie down on my bed with my prayerbook at hand, and I shall inject into a vein in my foot—there are lots of them—a few c.c.s of potassium; in thirty seconds I shall be dead, and that will just give me time, I trust, to drop the needle through a hole in the floor under Ma Mustard’s bedside carpet. Neat, don’t you think? I shall be enchar-nelled (good, romantic word) before anybody thinks to look under the carpet. Keep this under your hat. I should like to puzzle my old friends, the police. Their doctors are very unimaginative.
“—However, should any snooper decide to dig me up, I make a final bequest under the provisions of the Human Tissue Gift Act of 1971. I leave my arse-hole, and all necessary integument thereto appertaining, to the Faculty of Philosophy; let it be stretched upon a steel frame so that each New Year’s Day, the senior professor may blow through it, uttering a rich, fruity note, as my salute to the world of which I now take leave, in search of the Great Perhaps.
My blessings on you both, my dears,
John Parlabane
(sometime of the Society of the Sacred Mission)
When Darcourt had finished reading, Hollier was already deep in the letters from the back flap of the Gryphius; his face glowed, and when Darcourt spoke to him he seemed at f
irst not to hear. “Clem?”
“Hmm.”
“We ought to talk about that manuscript.”
“Yes, yes; but I’ll have to go through it carefully before I can say anything definite.”
“No, Clem.”
“What?”
“You mustn’t go through it. I know it’s exciting, and all that, but you must realize it isn’t yours.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s stolen goods, you know.”
“McVarish stole it. Now we’ve got it back.”
“No. Not ‘we’. You have no right to it whatever. It belongs to the Cornish Estate, and it’s my job to see that it is returned to its owners.”
Darcourt rose, and took the Gryphius Portfolio and the precious letters out of Hollier’s hands, folded it up in its original wrappings, and left the room.
(5)
THE FOLLOWING TEN DAYS were sheer hell for me. First, there was all the worry about Hollier, who collapsed within a few minutes of Darcourt’s masterful recovery of the Gryphius Portfolio, and was in such a dreadful way that I feared he might die. I have often heard about people ‘collapsing’ but what does it mean? In Hollier’s case it meant that I could not get him to speak, or apparently to hear, and his eyes were fixed on nothingness. He was cold to the touch. He sat crumpled up in an armchair, and kept turning his head slowly toward the left and back again, for all the world like a sturdied sheep; I could not shake him into attention, or get him to his feet. In my alarm I could not think of anything except to call Darcourt back, and in half an hour he reappeared, accompanied by a doctor friend who was, I afterward learned, the same one who had been called to certify the death of Parlabane.
Dr. Greene pushed Hollier about, and tapped him under the knees, and listened to his heart, and waved his hand in front of his eyes, and eventually came up with a diagnosis of shock. Had Hollier had some severe setback? Yes, said Darcourt, a severe setback related to his research, quite unavoidable; I was impressed by Simon’s firmness, his refusal to budge an inch. Aha, said the doctor, he understood completely; such metaphysical ills sometimes came his way in his treatment of academics, who were a delicately balanced lot. But he had known old Clem since their days at Spook, and he was sure he would come round. Would need nursing and tender, loving care, however. So the two men heaved Hollier to his feet, and manhandled him into my small car, which was not really big enough for four people, one of whom was too ill to squeeze himself into a small space, and I drove to Hollier’s mother’s house in Rosedale—not very far from my own home.
It was not a place I would have chosen to provide tender, loving care. It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste, and Mrs. Hollier, whom I had never met, was stiff with Good Taste too. I was left in the drawing-room—positively the palest, most devitalized room I have ever been in—while the men and Mrs. Hollier lugged the invalid upstairs; after a while an elderly housekeeper toiled upward with what looked like a cup of bouillon; after an even longer while Darcourt, and Dr. Greene, and Mrs. Hollier returned and I was introduced as a student of the professor’s, and Mrs. Hollier gave me a look that could have etched glass, and nodded but did not speak. The doctor was talking reassuringly about a drop in blood pressure that was dramatic but not really alarming, and the necessity for rest, light diet, and detective stories when the patient seemed ready for them. He would keep in touch.
I felt very much out of things. Darcourt and Dr. Greene were the kind of Canadians who understood and could cope with such refrigerated souls as Mrs. Hollier. A Northern land and its Northern people can be brisk and bracing when faced with a metaphysical ill, but I was not of their kind. I had a disquieting feeling that, when Hollier was ill, this was the place where he belonged. However much an intellectual adventurer he might be, this cold home was his home.
That night, therefore, I told Mamusia everything, or as much as she would comprehend, because she insisted on seeing the situation from a point of view entirely her own.
“Of course he is cold and cannot speak,” she said; “the curse has been thrown back on him and he is looking inward at his own evil. I told him. But would he listen? Oh, no! Not the great professor, not Mr. Modern! He thought he would be happy if he killed his enemy—because that is what he has done and don’t you try to tell me otherwise—but now he knows what it is to kill with hate. The knife, the gun—perhaps you can get away with it if you are made of coarse stuff. But a man like Hollier to kill with hate—he’s lucky he didn’t die at once.”
“But Mamusia, it was the other man—the monk—who killed Professor McVarish.”
“The monk was a sly one. A real bad man. I wish I had known him. Such people are rare. But the monk was just a tool, like a knife or a gun—”
“No, no, Mamusia, the monk had terrible hatred for McVarish! For Hollier, too—”
“Sure! All that hate slinking around, looking for a place to explode itself. To think Hollier wanted to pull me in such a mess! He is a fool, Maria. No husband for you. Lucky the Priest Simon drank the spiked coffee.”
“You won’t look at it as it really is.”
“Won’t I? Let me tell you, you fool, that my way is the way it really is: all this other stuff is just silly talk by people who don’t know anything about hate, or jealousy, or any of the things that rule their lives because they don’t accept them as realities, real force. Now you listen to me: I want your car keys.”
“What for? You can’t drive.”
“I don’t want to drive. And you shall not drive. Not for forty days. You are mixed up in this, you know. How much I can’t say, because I don’t believe you have told me the whole truth. But you are not going to drive any car for the next forty days. Not while those men can still reach you.”
“What men are you talking about?”
“McVarish and the monk. Don’t argue. Give me the keys.”
So I did, pretending a reluctance I did not altogether feel. I did not want to figure in one of those accidents in which, the newspapers ambiguously report, a car ‘goes out of control’. Perhaps; but into whose control?
I was in great anxiety about what the newspapers would say. Had Parlabane written to them in the same unbuttoned spirit that he had written to me and Hollier? No: a joker in this as in everything, Parlabane had written his letter to us and delivered it by hand on the Saturday night after he had killed McVarish. The much abbreviated accounts that he had written for the three Toronto papers and which were, I later learned, terrible muddles of crossing out and misused carbon copying, he had posted—but in a mailbox that was intended for overseas post only; upon each he had put a few details in his own hand, so that no paper received quite the same story. This confusion, and the fact that there was no postal delivery on Easter Monday, meant that the papers did not have their story until Thursday; the police, who had been sent a carbon and some further details, did not get their letter until Friday, such is the caprice of modern postal service. Therefore, the story of Urky’s taking-off appeared on the Monday as a report of an inexplicable murder, and at the weekend figured again with all the rich embroidery of Parlabane’s confession. God be praised, he had not named either me or Hollier in his accounts of the ‘ceremonies’—only as custodians of his great book. The police let it be known that they had information not granted to anyone else, and that they were not going to tell all they knew; great destruction among the drug-pushers was predicted by the press.
Between the news of the murder on Monday, and the revelation of its nature and its cause on Thursday, University authorities had lavished much praise on the character of Urky; a devoted teacher, a great scholar, a man of fine character and irreproachable conduct, a loss to the academic community never to be replaced—he was given the works, in a variety of distinguished styles. There was great speculation about The Demon Knitter who had slain the blameless scholar and grossly ‘interfered’ with his body by stuffing him with velvet ribbon. This was a relief from the bread-and-butter murders with guns and hammers
upon obscure and uninteresting victims, with which the press has to do the best it can. This came to an abrupt stop when the real story broke; the plans that had been going forward for a splendid memorial service in Convocation Hall were abandoned. Murray Brown spoke in the Legislature, pointing out that the education of the young was in dubious hands and something like a purge of the whole University community would not be amiss. And of course the news about Parlabane’s book galvanized the publishers. The telephone began to ring.
Who was there to answer it but myself? I had been mentioned in Parlabane’s letter as one of the two people who had access to the complete typescript, and Hollier could not be reached. He was still cosy, lucky man, in his bed at his mother’s house and could not speak on the telephone, his mother said. So I temporized, and evaded direct questions and commitments, and refused to see people, and then was forced to see them when they pushed through the door of Hollier’s rooms. Unwillingly I was photographed by newspapermen who lay in wait outside Spook, and hounded by literary agents who wanted to free me from tedious cares; I experienced all the delights of unsought notoriety. I was offered a lot of money for my story, John Parlabane as I Knew Him, and the services of a ghost to write it up from my verbal confession. (It was assumed that, as a student, I would not be capable of coherent expression.) I was invited to appear on TV. Hollier’s mother was outraged by the newspaper publicity and suspected, by the sixth sense given to mothers, that I had designs on her innocent son, and seemed convinced that the whole thing was my fault. After someone had attempted a clumsy robbery in Hollier’s rooms I put the typescript of Be Not Another in the vault at Spook and attempted to have the telephone disconnected, but that took several days to accomplish. O tohubohu and brouhaha!
Another thing for which I had cause to thank the spirit of Parlabane was that in none of his letters to police or newspapers had he mentioned the Gryphius Portfolio. Where it was now I had no idea. But late on the Friday of the second week of this siege by newspapers and publishers I was sitting in Hollier’s outer room, trying to get on with some of my own work, and not managing to do so, when there came a knock at the door.