They Return at Evening 1 – Wakefield · Verses Across
Literature · Short Stories
They Return at Evening 1That Dieth Not
18
Literature · Short Stories
They Return at Evening 1
That Dieth Not
WakefieldEnglish
THAT DIETH NOT
PART I
Well, that’s over! I expected an ordeal and found almost a farce. There is something to be said for being a Local Notable. For example, deferential condolences and preferential treatment (and no awkward questions) from the Coroner when one’s wife is found dead at the bottom of the steps into the garden. With what censorious disdain old Weldon brushed aside the curiosity of Mr. Trench Senior! Now I have prosecuted Trench Junior for poaching three times; consequently Trench Senior does not love me. So I was none too pleased to see him on the Jury. I knew he would be nasty if he saw a chance, and he asked a very nasty and intelligent question. For if she had tripped on the top steps I doubt if she would have fallen so far, and if she had slipped lower down, why such shattering injury? Why indeed! You didn’t deserve such a pulverising rebuke, Mr. Trench, but I’m very glad you got it!
And now that it is all over I can reflect without anxiety. Reflect that I am a murderer and, as such, if I got my deserts, a doomed and execrated pariah. No more loose generalisation was ever made than that whoever commits adultery--and, of course, any other sin or crime--in his heart, is guilty of that offence. Every man of imagination who is tempted commits sins in his heart as often as he is tempted, but not one in ten thousand commits them with his hand. Myriads of men must have played with the idea of killing their wives, but _I killed mine_. Is there no difference? Consult the Shade of Ethel! No, I realise perfectly that I possess a kink which should have resulted in a six-foot drop. That I might never kill again, and that it was only by an acute combination of circumstances that I did so once, is beside the point.
A murderer should die--if he is sane and sober and selfish.
And am I so sure I could never commit another? I am not so sure. I have no remorse. There might be something to be said for a murderer who bitterly repents (though I’d hang him), but as for me--why shouldn’t I murder again if someone again drove me to such an extremity of exasperation?
I rehearse all this--why and to whom? Why, because, murderer though I am, I feel compelled to tell the story of this repulsive episode impartially, and so rid my mind of it and, perhaps, forget it, for, murderer though I am, otherwise I believe myself to be reasonably decent and civilised, and I want to see what sort of defence I can muster. And to whom do I address myself? Well, it has long been a theory of mine--more than that, a profound conviction--that the minds of men are far more complex, bifurcated and stratified than is generally accepted or perceived. There is more than one “I” pervading my consciousness. There is the “I,” the murderer, who is sitting here recalling, sifting and writing down. “I” number one, let us call him; but there is also “I” number two, who is compelled to observe “I” number one. It has been suggested that there is also a “number three” watching “number two,” and so on ad infinitum. It may be so, but for me there is a limit set to the terms in the series, and it is fixed at “number two.” I often feel compelled to explain to him the actions of “number one,” though I do not feel he is or wants to be a judge, but just an aloofly interested spectator; in no sense a “conscience,” but poised in another layer of consciousness. It is with such vague precision that this duality works in me. And I want to explain to this watcher just how I came to kill Ethel. He may or may not be particularly interested, but he is in the unfortunate position of being compelled to listen!
I was thirty-one, wanting an heir, an ingenuous lover of beauty, and Ethel was certainly beautiful, and, I thought, a destined mother of robust children. That is why I proposed to her. I am wealthy, “a prominent local figure”; Ethel had an allowance of £40 a year--that is why she accepted me. She was highly intelligent in a debased feminine way, and she never used her brains to better purpose than in her behaviour to me during our engagement. A lovely piece of acting! Quite flawless. Such a lover of the country, adoring children, so docile, unselfish and interested in everything which interested me! What a treasure I believed I was about to acquire! Before the end of our honeymoon I began desperately to doubt it. She let me know quite uncompromisingly that she intended to “social push” with vigour and success. Now I am by nature a recluse, a detester of crowds, a loather of London: I make friends slowly and doubtingly, though most firmly now and again. But I flinch from “acquaintances” and the claims upon one’s time and nerves they entail. It was, therefore, with incredulous dismay that I discovered Ethel was determined that we should spend six months in London and three months in fashionable resorts, and that I was to spend those six months playing the sedulous host and involving myself in an incessant spate of fatuous entertainment. When I had somewhat absorbed this shock I told her that it was the tradition in my family personally to look after the estate during most of the year, that I must work very hard if my book on “The Future of the Novel as an Art Form” was to be ready in time, that I wanted children, and that her programme was impossible. And then I had my first taste of that most wicked temper. Had I faced up to it and fought her, I believe I could have gained a precarious victory, but it was so horrible, so disgusting and intolerable that I gave way. It was a fatal blunder, for she then knew she possessed a most potent weapon against me. I did not capitulate unconditionally, but I felt exasperatedly certain that I should have to renew the battle before I should be able to enforce my side of the bargain.
Well, I agreed to do what she wanted for one year; to take a house in London for the Season and a Villa on the Riviera for the winter. I should have considered this quite reasonable if she had not been granted every opportunity before our marriage to understand what sort of person I am; and if she had not so cunningly and wickedly concealed from me what manner of woman she was. And though it is very plausible to say that my love for her should have made me delighted to please her, that is really vast rubbish, for the deep, dominating characteristics of a man’s temperament can never be changed, while one can love and cease to love and love again.
Though it caused my vitality to droop and drain, I fulfilled my part of the contract. I took a monstrosity in Bruton Street, gave four huge parties, attended dozens of other huge parties, was forced to carry on disjointed chat through Tristan in a box, sit through Rigoletto in a stall, and poison my system in Night Clubs; so learning to despise humanity--or rather that brand of it--as no man should be taught. Had I possessed a constitution which would have allowed me to drink my critical sense to drowsing point, I might have tolerated such a régime, but, unfortunately, my grandfather had mortgaged the family liver.
As I withered Ethel bloomed. Her polluted sense of values and her intense social vanity made her revel in this frenetic round of snobbery, this eternal return of jostling, aimless futility.
I was not a success. My temperament nipped me below the arm-pits and dragged me round, the skeleton at the feast, though I never caused any awed hush to fall upon the assembly.
“Arthur, I do wish you’d make an effort to seem to enjoy things,” Ethel once said. “The other night I overheard George Willard say that you were the World’s Worst Flat-tyre at a party. It makes me feel so ashamed and embarrassed.”
“Do you think I care what that chinless, brainless, Bateman-drawing thinks about me?” I replied, knowing I was a fool to argue.
“Well, he’s the son of a Duke,” said Ethel; “and what do you mean by a ‘Bateman-drawing’?”
“Oh, he was a pupil of Rembrandt,” I replied inanely.
“You pretend to know all about Art, but the other day, when Lady Frowse was trying to discuss the Academy with you, you looked absolutely ‘gaga.’”
“Lady Frowse,” I replied, “was quoting verbatim from the notice in the Times, which, unfortunately, I had already read.”
Then Ascot, jostle, clothes, and equine interludes--then Cowes, jostle, different clothes and the occasional belching of a decrepit cannon. And then Ethel went off to twitter in butts, and I, thank God, to Paradown and peace.
I made good progress with my book; my intense feeling of release fortunately stimulating my creative energy. I had also plenty of time to think, though nothing very pleasant to think about. I had the most bitter and smarting self-contempt. To think that I could have been such an utter flaming fool as to have ruined my life by a fatuous idealisation of a certain fortuitous combination of pigment, cuticle--and the way the blood shone through it, hair--and the way the light caught it, bones--and the way their envelope draped round them. A perilous privilege, “a sense of beauty.” But had I ruined it? I considered the chances. Ethel was perfectly happy, rapidly stabilising her position amongst the Right People, with my cheque book as her entrenching tool and her temper to animate my fountain pen, with her beauty and her sexlessness and her unscrupulousness to get what she wanted from men and to keep her from ever repaying the debt. What a way to think about one’s wife! Humbug! There was no other way to think about her. No, there would be no co-respondent to encourage and supplicate! And I could do nothing, unless I refused to fill my fountain pen, and I could not do that, for I had only myself to blame, and I was ready to blame myself. At present I could see no hope.
I lived a life of extreme asceticism, feeling feebly that by so doing I was defying and rejecting Ethel. Once I had been fool enough to regard women as mentally almost indistinguishable, and it had been merely by the physical criterion I had separated one from another in my mind. Now that I had been taught to despise the dangerous deceptiveness of eyes and breasts, colouring and curves and all those superficial stimulants which excite the featherless biped man to idealise the featherless biped woman, I realised what I should have known a year before--that I could only love someone with a mind I could respect. “What care I how fair she be, if she’s naught but fair to me?”
Ethel came down at the end of October, her waist heavy with social scalps. A title had the same effect on her as the sound of a hunting horn on a pack of hounds. It gave her a delicious sense of excitement and well-being. When on one occasion she was addressed by a Minor Royalty for one thrilling moment, I believed she was about to die of joy. And, bitterly as she learned to loathe me, I am certain the fact she was loathing the current number of one of the oldest baronetcies in England gave her a soothing sense of social pride.
I had been working very hard on a delicate and highly contentious section of my book, and was inclined to be irritable and “on edge.” Luckily at first Ethel was fairly amenable. For one thing, she had the Riviera to which to look forward, for another she was learning to ride, an art which she had been instructed was a necessary accomplishment for an English Gentlewoman. She learned quickly, and looked as nearly palatable as any Gentlewoman can when topped by a silk hat. The servants hated her, for her attitude towards them veered from touchy insolence to obviously insincere blandishments, and that they disliked both variants they showed most definitely though courteously.
As a Local Notable it was my duty to introduce Ethel to those of my neighbours and friends she had not already met in London, and for this purpose I gave a series of week-end parties. The fact that I do not puncture or pursue the fauna of Wiltshire by any of the traditional methods has not prevented me from being on most excellent terms with my neighbours. I think I can say I have worked pretty hard at those often tiresome jobs which the occupation of a prominent local position entail. I am regarded as a bit of a freak--as was my father before me, but my idiosyncrasies give them something to talk about, and there is a “Dear Oldness” about their references to me which mark the absence or passing of criticism. I was curious to observe how my good friends would regard my good lady. Well, the Elderly Ladies Who Knew, knew she was not quite a lady. The young women envied her clothes and looks, but I do not think they envied me. The men behaved in a robustly gallant manner towards her, partly out of consideration to me and partly because her beauty was within limits overwhelming. But I think they reserved judgment. A few fledglings fell in love with her and they did envy me. How I should have rejoiced to have settled some money on her and danced at her wedding to one of them!
She played her part rather well, but that which has fundamental flaws betrays itself inevitably by superficial cracks. Her breaks were not shattering, but they were palpable, and not one of them went by the Elderly Ladies Who Knew. She was quite unconscious of them. I usually said nothing, but I had to protest against one. She had repeated with the eager placid certainty of the natural scandal-monger a scabrous little rumour about the morals of Lady Pount’s niece in the presence of her Aunt. While undressing, I suggested that the study of Debrett should not be pursued too academically, and that the art of knowing Who is Who should be an applied art, in so much as it might prevent awkward pauses in the hour of anecdote. And I gave as an instance the choice little canard she had repeated that evening. At which she lost her temper uneasily.
“I can’t remember all those people! How was I to know they were related? It’s true, anyway, and I think she ought to be shown up, it’s disgusting.”
“Nothing,” I said, “is worth an awkward pause, not even the exposure of notorious evil-livers. Some people have a sixth sense for knowing how to avoid them. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
A short but violent scene ensued.
So we scrambled along the broad, well mile-stoned path to mutual hostility. I made occasional half-hearted attempts to persuade myself that Ethel was other than she was. She felt, when she inspected her wardrobe and my broad acres and stable, and all those joys which I had brought into her life, that there were sufficiently compensating “Betters” for the “Worse.”
And then it was time for the Riviera, its boomed beauty, its bloody brood. What a region! I have cruised the Mediterranean fairly extensively, and it is no Sea for me. What merits the Southern Latins may once have possessed is a matter of opinion; that they retain any to-day seems to me untenable. A breed of pimps, parasites and horse-torturers, the choicest surviving examples of that cretin civilisation which is Catholicism’s legacy to the world. And it has always seemed to me that members of races vastly their intellectual and moral superiors become debased and degraded when brought in contact with them, though I know the region attracts the worst.
Ethel was so happy. She changed her clothes at intervals during the day, and made the acquaintance of a Grand-Duke, who was accompanied by a selection from his harem. Her delight in this encounter was so unconcealed that the nobleman for some time believed that she was anxious to be enrolled in his service! She “adored” the Casino. I took one look at those tables. A vice is known by the company it collects. There must be something to be said for opium. It makes glad the heart of Chinks, it induced The Ancient Mariner, and made De Quincey immortal. Booze has many excellent songs, Boris Goudonov, and missed partridges to its credit. Even murder can point to detective stories--the favourite literature of our Great Ones, and the support of hangmen’s families. But gambling has nothing to justify its existence unless it be Revolver Smith’s dividends and A New Use for Old Piano Cases. My absence from this Rouge et Noir midden didn’t matter, for Ethel had many friends who considered it a Green Baize Paradise.
I mooned about aimlessly, did a little work, pretended at dropsical meals that I was having a good time, and then one day decided I could stick no more of it. So I informed Ethel and quelled the inevitable typhoon by reminding her she was there at my expense and that she could stay there alone at my expense if she chose, otherwise we’d both return to England at my expense. This syllogistic presentation of the case impressed her, and I returned alone.
On the journey home I had an opportunity for coolly regarding things in themselves, with particular reference to my marriage. By then I knew for certain that Ethel would never leave me of her own accord. She had everything she wanted, a title, money to burn, a circle of sycophants, a husband she could dominate. Could she? I supposed so, for the dread of scenes is the beginning and end of feminine domination in the case of men of my type, weak, introspective, with sensitive ears and a tantalising tolerance. I say tantalising because, were I asked to prescribe for the matrimonial troubles of others, I should be cool, hard, a rationalist, a regarder of facts in the face. I should prescribe for those in my state a drastic, cauteristic remedy, and feel confident of its efficacy. “No sentimentalist need apply” I should inscribe on my brass plate.
“Physician, heal thyself,” the hardest of all hard sayings! But this is how I should prescribe in a case such as mine. “Force a divorce, you will never be happy. You know her chief concern is money, settle some on her. Living with her seems the Devil, well, take him by the horns.”
Perfectly sound, common sense itself, but I couldn’t do it.
A week after getting back I received a cable, “Returning immediately. Ethel.”
This unexpected announcement filled me with a vague excitement. What had she been up to? Something which might lead to a solution--a dissolution? I enjoyed twenty-four hours of such straw-clutching, and then she arrived, and, as was her wont, went straight and viciously to the point. “I’m going to have a baby, and I won’t have a baby. You’ve got to help me. It’ll spoil everything. I don’t care how much you want it. Tell me someone to go to.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” I replied. “Certainly I want you to have a child, and you’ll be much happier. Now, Ethel, be unselfish about this!”
“Happier! Unselfish! I like that. You don’t have to spend nine foul months, be cut out of everything, and probably have your figure ruined. I refuse to argue about it. Will you help me?”
“No, I won’t,” I said.
She said no more, but in ten minutes she was on her way to London.
I heard nothing more from her for a fortnight, and then one evening she came back. She went straight to her room, refused to see me, and dined in bed.
However, I went up to her after dinner.
She was shaking with anger, and her eyes were those of a trapped lynx.
“I told you I didn’t want to see you, but now you’re here let me tell you this, I will never bear your child.”
I think it was then, when I saw her hatred for me, that I first knew I hated her, and I suppose the murderer in me first woke to life.
She was as good as her word. She had a miscarriage two weeks later, and became quite light-hearted again. One day she came into my dressing-room when I was shaving to tell me that, as she was not quite fit enough to hunt, she was going up to London, and had taken a suite at Claridge’s. And then I received the worst shock of my life. She bent down for a moment to smell a bowl of roses on the dressing table. I had my razor in my hand, and for a moment I believed I could not restrain myself from cutting that lovely throat. With an agonising effort of self-control, I flung the razor on the floor. Ethel glanced up quickly, and, I suppose, partially understood the look in my face, for she put her hands to her eyes and ran from the room. She went up to London after breakfast, leaving me to my thoughts.
For the rest of the day I could not control my nerves nor stay still for a moment, for my brain continually forced that hideous picture before my eyes. I could see her writhing on the carpet, the blood gushing from her throat. And that night, each time I fell into an uneasy doze, it came as a fleeting dream vision more vivid and more vile. I knew I was receiving a most urgent warning, that my subconsciousness was telling me that inevitably, if I continued to see her, one day I should kill her.
The next morning I met Margaret Pascal. It was the only time I have figured in one of those coy sexual situations beloved by the authors of scenarios, for I found her embraced by barbed wire in Far Wood. After I had disentangled her and noticed the lovely junction of her legs and feet, we began a vague little talk. I told her my name. “This is all yours then,” she said. “Was I trespassing?”
“Technically, yes,” I replied. “But please commit the offence as often as you like.”
“I am staying with the Franks,” she said, “and was just wandering about. As a matter of fact, I adore birds, and there’s a shrike’s larder in that thorn just there, and I wanted to examine the grisly little feast.”
She had a curiously deep and individual voice, and one can fall in love with a voice at first hearing, as I did. While we inspected the sorry and dismembered collation, each drawn, quartered and impaled remnant fluttering in the breeze, I appraised her. I had learned bitterly to distrust women’s looks, so I paid little attention to her physical attributes. It was a certain combination of sweetness and intelligence, of gentleness and determination, and her all-pervading rightness, which lulled and soothed and stirred and excited me. She told me afterwards that I had the same immediate effect on her. A certain tension established itself, a happy unease.
When we parted I asked her if she would like me to show her over a part of the estate which was specially famous for its birds and beasts, for I had forbidden my keepers to shoot or trap there. She said she would love it, and I arranged to fetch her in the car early next day.
I found my mood had completely changed. I could even examine Ethel’s photograph with a whistling ease, for everything else I had a bounding pulse and a flattering eye. And I knew why--it was because I was falling in love with Miss Pascal, and that it would make me exquisitely happy so to do. I could hardly realise Ethel existed, and felt quite care-free whether she did or not. I knew the reaction must come, but for the moment I was anæsthetised and thinking only of the morrow.
I called for Margaret early. The Franks are pleasant hunting, shooting and horticultural nonentities, and I think they were a little astonished at my precipitance; for my reputation is not exactly that of one who chooses to spend a whole day alone with a strange female. But it was the happiest day I had ever spent. I found in Margaret just that congruent complement of myself--association with which makes life worth living--and nothing else does. She was twenty-nine, very straight and strong. Her features I never have bothered about, though I gathered that a good many other men had. She has an admirable instinct for pictures, music and the written word, and her critical sense is quick and certain. I gathered she had practised at all three for a time, but had gallantly renounced each in turn, realising she could never transcend mediocrity. “I prefer,” she said, “to criticise the successes of others happily, than to face my own failures with angry tears in my eyes. In many a second-rate painter and writer is buried a first-rate critic. A little talent is a cruel thing.”
In the afternoon I took her for a fifty-mile run. Driving a car is one of my few accomplishments, and a lust for speed one of the very few unexpected traits in my character (a capacity for flinging my wife down a row of steps is the only other one I can recall).
My Ponitz has done 110 miles an hour at Brooklands and is the fastest car on the road I have ever known. Motor shop is the most boring of all, for fooling about with a car is for most people merely a substitute for thought. It is not so with me. Timid by nature, I resolved to conquer this timidity. Driving was an agony to me at first; I imagined a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent pedestrian, but slowly I gained confidence, and then my curious, restless mania for speed asserted itself.
I asked Margaret if she minded fast driving. “Go ahead,” she replied, “and I’ll tell you afterwards.” There was a perfect three-mile straight on the way home, and we touched eighty. She was in her element. “Take me again,” she cried. “It was simply glorious, and I’ve never seen such perfect control. I don’t mean to be personal, but it seemed to me you became a different person as soon as we reached sixty, somehow defiant and austere.”
“How far would you like to go next time?” I asked. “Past the Plunge of Plummet?” and felt a fool for asking. She looked at me sharply and flushed slightly.
“Your wife might have something to say to that. By the way, when is she coming back?”
“Not yet awhile,” I answered irritably. “Would you like to come to-morrow?”
“I’d love it,” said Margaret, “but till I know you better you mustn’t take me too far.” She said that lightly, but with a certain emphasis.
My recent social experiences had taught me that the average young woman of her class was at best a demi-vierge, and such a remark from such an one would merely have implied encouragement for a casual intrigue, but I knew Margaret hadn’t a trace of the promiscuous rip in her make-up, and I knew she knew I loved her, and that she mistrusted her powers of resistance. This went to my heart.
So it began, and it moved swiftly. A few days later we decided that it was impossible for her to stay on with the Franks and continue to see me each day. So I took a flat in Paris, and there we lived together. “In sin,” you suggest, number two. If you like to, call it so. When one has lost and found oneself in a woman, what the respectable sensualist focuses his smutty spectacles upon and the Law deliciously terms “misconduct” becomes of the most petty importance. It is not quite negligible, for in that hopeless, tantalising longing for complete fusion, when four eyes almost become two, and two minds just not one, when in fleeting seconds of ecstasy the illusion of this complete unison is attained, that mechanical conjunction is inevitable. But to those who love imaginatively and therefore hunger and thirst and lust and strive to isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, this physically compelled commonplace loses its significance. It was only Margaret who could make me dread to die.
I told Ethel I should be abroad for a while, but she showed no interest in the information. By the time a month was up Margaret and I were just not one person, and I the unhappiest man in the world, for even if the view Prometheus enjoyed from his eyrie was the loveliest in the world, he must for ever have turned his eyes away from it to search for that speck in the sky. And often when I was alone with Margaret and for the moment utterly happy and at peace, it seemed that Ethel’s face crept in between us, and once again I felt that foul longing to get my hands to her throat. She would never divorce me. I knew it, and I could not force permanently on Margaret the uneasy, furtive alternative. She would have accepted it gladly and made the best of it, but I could not do it. “You preferred to murder your wife,” I hear you murmur with some irony, number two. Yes, number two, I preferred to murder my wife.
We travelled back together, and I drove Margaret back to her flat in Gloucester Place. On the way we were held up by a traffic block at the Marble Arch. A car halted beside us, and as I glanced casually at it it seemed familiar. And then I saw Ethel, smoking a cigarette and talking to an elderly man with jackal’s eyes. She saw me a second later. The cigarette dropped from her hand, and she craned forward to see who was with me, and then the dam broke and we went on down Great Cumberland Place.
“That was my wife in that car,” I said to Margaret.
I saw her hand tremble. “Did she see us? Does it matter?”
“She certainly saw me,” I replied, “and it matters not at all. But if I know her, she’s the most frightened woman in London.”
We parted miserably and uncertainly, comforting each other with vague hopes of some solution.
When I got back to Paradown, Ethel was waiting for me. She was shaking with the rage of terror as she rushed at me.
“Who was that woman you were with? Someone you picked up in Paris, I suppose. That’s what you call working at your rotten book! Who is she?”
“A Miss Pascal,” I said.
“Have you been living in Paris together?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yes,” I said wearily.
“Oh, you are, are you? and planning to get rid of me. Well, I’m afraid you won’t find it so easy. Remember this; I’ll never divorce you or give you a chance to divorce me. You beast and hypocrite! Pretending to be so cold and pious, and then sneaking off to Paris with the first low woman you can find!”
I said nothing. The only chance to bring her scenes to a close was to keep silence. Replying merely fed them.
“Can’t you speak, you beastly fool? Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No,” I replied, “but I think we’d do better to separate.”
“Oh, you do! Well, you’ve had my answer. I’ll never leave you. I’ve seen you look like a fiend at me, as if you wished I were dead, but if I were, I’d still come between you and that strumpet.”
The application of that disgusting epithet to Margaret began to rouse the killer in me, but I rallied all my self-control to subdue it.
“Well, then,” I said, “there’s no need for such a scene as this. If you insist, you shall remain my wife in name, but in nothing more. I cannot inhabit the same house with you, but I will make you as generous an allowance as I can afford.”
“I imagine,” sneered Ethel, “that when that little drab has been through your pockets it won’t be so generous!”
I got up to leave the room, and this completely destroyed the remnant of her self-control. Her lips pouring out a stream of foul abuse, she came for me, struck me with all her force in the mouth, spat in my face, and then rushed over to my writing table, opened the drawer which contained all the notes I had been working on for the last six months, and flung them by handfuls in the fire. Something snapped in my brain. When she had finished she ran from the room, and I followed her stealthily. She went through the door into the garden to get air, I suppose. Just as she reached the top step I seized her by the shoulders and hurled her down. Her head struck the bottom step, and she writhed over on to her back and lay still. Trembling with horror and yet elation, I crept back to my study, and the butler found her an hour later.
Well, number two, there is my story. I suppose rather a commonplace sex-crime narrative. I’ll read it again in ten years’ time. I wonder if I shall believe it ever happened!
PART TWO
_Which consists of a letter written by Sir Arthur Paradown to his friend, Mr. Weldon, the Coroner._
My dear Weldon,
Seven months ago you held an inquest on my first wife. It will now be your dubious pleasure to perform that office on me, and I am sending you with this letter an account of the events leading up to that first inquest; this will reveal the incidents leading up to the second. And I am doing so because I have a favour to ask of you. Can you forget for a few hours the fact that I was a murderer, and remember that I was a fairly conscientious landowner and did my best for the County and helped a few people to be a little happier? If you can, do you think you can be a little unprofessional and tell the Jury that I have written you a private letter which explains my suicide, and that it has persuaded you that I was not insane, and then treat these documents as secret? What harm can it do! And it can do good, for my present wife is expecting to have a child in six months’ time, and I do not want the stigma of my insanity to rest on Margaret’s baby. Will you do this for me? Read what follows, and then decide----
Murderer’s sob-stuff is a peculiarly repellent brand, so I will merely state that when, six months later, I married Margaret, I knew for the first time utter cloudless happiness--for just six weeks, and then one evening after dinner, when we were sitting in my study, the telephone bell rang. Margaret took off the receiver and listened for a moment.
“It’s making such a weird noise,” she said.
“Give it to me,” I replied, and put it to my ear.
“You thought you were rid of me, didn’t you, you murderer! But as you killed me, I shall kill you!”
I knew the voice.
I made a casual remark, lest Margaret should suspect something was wrong, and went out into the garden to recover from what had been a terrific shock, and to regain my balance.
“Subjective or objective?” That is the old, old question on these occasions. In the first case I was mad, subject to hallucinations, in the second--well, then, a mystery of a different sort. There was little to choose between the alternatives. I certainly felt as sane as ever, but perhaps murder itself is a symptom of deep-rooted mental disease which could break out in other ways. My whole being rejected this hypothesis. But I had a dreadful certainty that in either case my doom had been spoken. This certainly must have branded itself upon my face, for Margaret was only half persuaded there was nothing wrong when I went in again.
I had three days’ respite.
Margaret tolerated broadcasting, and our set was in use on most evenings. I used to stop work and come in to hear the news. On this occasion, after the usual ponderous catalogue of minutiæ, listeners, as usual, were promised a “Little Piano Music” as a reward for their patience. Instead--as far as I was concerned, a voice suddenly cried out, “Sir Arthur Paradown murdered me, his wife, on March 9th.”
I gripped my chair and glanced at Margaret, but she was placidly reading. “It’s very clear to-night,” she said.
It was ridiculous and yet dreadful. I felt a deep horror of myself, an awful sense of isolation and distress. The question was--could I face this persecution? But then, I might be mad! I’d see a specialist the next day. In any case I was involved in something foul. My loathing for Ethel was such that, had she been with me, I would have strangled her in cold blood.
The specialist found nothing the matter, and was obviously puzzled at my visit. I told him I fancied I heard sounds which were imperceptible to others. It sounded vague and lame. He made a few obvious remarks about possible over-work, which were so nauseatingly inadequate to my trouble that I hurried away. Of course I’d only gone to him in panic, it was a witch-doctor I needed.
Margaret, as arranged, rang me up at the club at lunch-time. Just as she had finished reciting a list of things she wanted me to do for her, her voice went blurred, and through it came another: “Are you beginning to be sorry you murdered me? You can tell me when I come to you at Paradown.”
In the agonised daze which from then on always ensued on these occasions, I drove back home. “When I come to you.” What had she meant by that?
When Margaret came out to greet me, I took her in my arms and kissed her, and let the small, clean fraction of my soul sink into her.
“What’s the matter, my darling?” she asked, looking anxiously into my eyes.
“Sweetest,” I replied, “if I should die, think only this of me. I adored you. There might have been a time for such a word.” I felt unstrung, diseased, clinging to her, yet forced from her by that deadly secret she never could nor should share.
“What is it, Arthur, my dearest? You’ve suddenly changed. Something has happened. Tell me! Tell me! Whatever it is you can tell me.”
A surging, clanging fury of despair and self-pity raced through me and then suddenly left me, left me limp and lying with a certain despair and subtlety about over-work and liver and moodiness, rounded off with a desperate sort of “Soon be all right again” coda.
Margaret forced some sort of reassurance on herself and went to bed. I stayed up with my thoughts.
The bitterest knowledge which flays the brain of those who are at once vile and highly sensitive is that of the misery they inflict on those who love them. I know some who with a hardy egoism declare that the simple must suffer and the complex must cause them to suffer, that that is an inexorable law of life, and that the sufferings of the simple are simple, tolerable little pangs, those of the complex insufferable agonies, and that the only judge of a complex temperament should be another equally complex. Alas, when murder is the symptom of complexity that flattering unction fails of its purpose. Ethel had timed her re-entry well. She just gave me time to realise the full extent of the happiness of which she would deprive me, and she doubled my misery by reflecting it back again from Margaret. How I longed to get my hands on her!
Just before going up to bed I went out into the garden. As I came through the door I saw her standing there on the top step with her back to me, just as at that other time. And then it seemed as though I was rent and torn apart, and that a shadow leapt from me, a furtive poised thing, which took her by the shoulders and hurled her--hurled her----
Margaret found me lying there, and, poor darling, sent for dear old Fritaker, who tried to pretend his feet were scientifically pacing the bottom when he was hopelessly out of his depth.
“Nervous strain,” he diagnosed. “Bed, and feeding up,” he prescribed. I felt like quoting Macbeth to him.
Yet bed and feeding up and an aching determination to spare Margaret contrived to patch me up, and for fleeting moments I felt some little reassurance. The “symptoms” of my disorder were not renewed, still I felt that Ethel knew her business, and would torture me with finesse. In that case could I train myself to nerve myself against her? Could I face the worst she could do, leading otherwise a normal, sufficiently tolerable existence? Could I deceive and so protect Margaret? I must fight for her. My rotting brain might merely be breeding these phantoms in its corruption, though relatively there seemed to me little difference between being haunted by Ethel objectively and haunting myself with her subjectively. In any case I would fight. I sent for my lawyer and had my affairs put finally in order, and a week later got up and resumed my normal life. And for some days nothing happened, and I began to wonder if, perhaps, I had had some obscure nervous disorder--a lesion which had healed itself.
And then one evening, just before dusk, when Margaret was in the garden, I had occasion to go up to my dressing-room for some papers. I opened the door. There was a coffin almost at my feet, housing a shrouded figure. There was a dark patch where the head of this figure should have been, and from it came something which slithered writhing down the shroud, and then the figure began slowly to rise.
I shut the door and cowered shuddering in the passage. When I felt I had strength to move I went down, drank a glass of brandy, and kept out of Margaret’s way till dinner. But by that time she was seriously frightened about me and watching me closely, so she knew at once I had had a “relapse.” I assured her that such ups and downs were to be expected, but agreed to go up to London with her for a change. Anything to make her happy, and one place was as good as another to one in my case. We went up the next day.
I was out alone seeing my publisher the next morning, and when I got back to the hotel I asked the lift-attendant if my wife was in. He said she was, as he’d seen a lady entering our suite. She was not there, however, so I asked him if he was quite certain, and he said that he was. Just then his bell rang, and a moment later he came up again with Margaret. His face was a study in astonishment. I tipped him and told him it was all right. I imagine he suspected that Salt Lake City was my spiritual home.
I only mention this little incident, Weldon, as evidence that these appearances were, up to a point at least, perceived by others, and therefore some evidence of my sanity.
What undermined and pierced me was that as my life grew more shadowed Margaret and I were being prised apart. She was still my darling, and the fact that she loved me the sole justification for my living, but I felt I was living in an extra dimension, as it were, that the shadow of what I had done and what I was suffering was erecting a barrier between us, and soon I should be alone with my secret, isolated and yet in some deadly way still Ethel’s husband. I could see that Margaret felt this vaguely, too, and that she knew something was sweeping us apart. I used to wonder miserably how I seemed to her, and what torturing, confused, despairing realisation must have come to her. If only I could have told her! But her belief in me was all I had to cling to, and I could not tell her that I had flung Ethel down those steps! And yet, if I could have got my hands on Ethel’s throat, I’d have been a murderer again. That obscene, meagre, despicable, mercenary, murdered fool! The best thing I ever did was to crack that evil little skull. She may have had her revenge, but if there are steps in Hell--melodrama! and likely to make a bad impression on you, my dear Weldon.
My poor darling Margaret thought a little amusement would be good for me, so we went to see some picture by Charlie Chaplin that evening. It would have done me more good if Ethel hadn’t come in and sat down next to me and begun to produce the picture, for something went snap in my head and there were the steps at Paradown, and Ethel came out, and I behind her, and down she went, and then her crushed and bleeding face grew and grew and thrust itself into mine. And I found myself back at Paradown in bed in my room and Margaret, white and wretched, and with a certain dread and despair on her face, bending over me. And then I remembered, and could not face her eyes. That was yesterday morning.
In the evening old Fritaker doped me, and Margaret went to bed in another room. Eventually I dozed off, and woke again, and then, as I turned sleepily, someone slipped into my arms. For a moment I had the ecstasy of feeling Margaret’s heart beating against mine. And then I doubted, shook, and turned on the reading lamp beside the bed, and there was Ethel. For a moment she was warm and whole, and then she glazed, swelled and burst asunder, and became a seething bladder of corruption.
That, my dear Weldon, was five hours ago. It is now 6.30. This dirty little tale is ready for its envelope addressed to you. One bullet stands between me and release--for I can’t fight that--and, I hope, between my hands and Ethel’s throat. I’m not mad, I’m not mad, I swear it!
