Part 11

I never believe in those women who, when trouble comes, sit at home and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it.

She seemed to rise all at once out of villadom--that smug, narrow life which ruins so many people. Villadom! It promulgates the hateful, stultifying creed of “paying your way.” Barbara told me once that a lady at Norwood refused to visit another lady because she hadn’t paid her butcher’s bill. She threw off her shackles--the shackles of that spick-and-span house, with the stiff white curtains at the windows, the demure maidservants, and the noisy overflow of babies. She sent for Mrs. Martin to keep house, then packed a little black box, kissed her children with the air of a Spartan, and came away to the Inn with me.

With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins. He had a little den leading out of his bedroom, which he used as a carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You see--hadn’t I mentioned it?--Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny--that could be called certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a certain income.

She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she might as well have been in Alaska--these suburbs are so beautifully isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by someone in the Inn--in the house--at 7.

I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut up with Sophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor, Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was empty and the other--the fatal set, although she knew nothing about that--belonged to Stapley.

Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the murderer was in the Inn, in the very house.

The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other, “Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss Martin, didn’t know how to show their sympathy. They brought her flowers and new-laid eggs--anything. One brought a stray white kitten that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.”

The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind, hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her; dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who are--well, particular--and the women who are not.

She brought a faint air of repression and tragedy into the Inn, but no one dreamed of resenting it. The careless, rather wild life we all lead seemed suddenly hollow, feeble--wicked almost. Many a host said to a noisy friend:

“Don’t make so much row, old man. You’ll frighten Mrs. Piety.”

She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs, peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity.

I went with her to every curio shop and marine store in Bloomsbury. There are many. Some of the people who keep them are regular characters in their way. We were trying to find out the history of the dagger--that queer-handled weapon which had stuck out from dead Murphy’s waistcoat. The police had it. They were making every inquiry of course, but Barbara thought she could do better than they. As I said, a true woman must do something--even if it is something foolish. The little stuffy, foul courts of Holborn grew to know her and to pity her. All the other women pointed after her furtively and said, as the laundresses said, “Pore young thing.”

You don’t want me to go into the detective side of the affair. You can well imagine the array of evidence against Bob; you can see the damning importance of his row with Murphy, of the soaked red corner of his cuffs, and the red-ocher splashes on his face and hands.

Barbara heard him committed for trial. She didn’t cry out or even shudder. But her eyes grew more wide and somber than before.

That night I took her to the theater. Several fellows came to me quite seriously and said:

“Do something to distract her. The poor woman’s going out of her mind.”

Hemming--he had been a friend of Jimmy’s, and was on a dramatic paper--added:

“Take her to a music hall, make her dead-drunk--anything for a distraction. The theater for a compromise. I can pass you into the Adelphi. There is a splendid melodrama on there. Something exciting.”

I had expected opposition, but, queerly enough, she jumped at the idea. She dressed herself very smartly; I think her face was rouged. She kept laughing as we jolted to the Strand in a cab.

In the second act there was a row between two men, and one stabbed the other to the heart. It was most unlucky. Barbara was staring up at the dress circle. She turned to me suddenly, her cheeks and eyes blazing. She got up and slipped on her cloak, pulling the hood well over her head before she was out of doors. When I rose too she made a quick, excited gesture, and whispered:

“Don’t follow. Whatever you do, don’t follow.”

I let her go out quietly alone. When I happened to look up at the dress circle I saw a vacant seat.

When one man on the stage stabbed the other, Barbara naturally turned her head away. She happened to look up at the dress circle, and her eyes fixed on a family party in the front row. It was Stapley, the girl he was engaged to, and her mother.

Barbara was struck by the look on his face. He seemed as much moved by that murder on the stage as she was. He looked a guilty man, a terrified man. His face was the face of a corpse; his eyes were the eyes of a corpse--some corpse whose last impression had been one of fearful horror.

Presently he rose, whispered a word or two to his companions, and went away. At the same moment Barbara slipped up from her seat in the stalls.

She followed him out of the theater, along the brilliant whirl of the Strand, through dirty little streets to Holborn, across the road, under the gateway, and into the Inn. The square was quiet. The trees waved troublously. There were peep-holes of bright light at men’s windows, and once she heard a loud peal of laughter.

Stapley turned in at No. 7.

The policeman happened to be taking shelter in the doorway of No. 5. It was a wet night. She stepped back and whispered to him before she crept with a stealthy, springy step up the stairs. Stapley went on, past my rooms, past Murphy’s, to the top floor. He put in his key and opened the door of his set--the fatal set, which had been responsible for so much; the set which had egged on Orion to murder, which had saddled poor Orchard with such a horrid companion--I’ll tell you that some other day--which had seen Jimmy die. He opened the door. There was a bracket lamp on the wall immediately opposite. It was burning feebly, and there was a dark circle on the wall paper behind it, where the oil had sweated. Below the lamp was a little glass which Orion had gilded with a sixpenny bottle of dye. Barbara was close behind Stapley--so close that she could see her own face in the little glass slightly behind his.

He stepped in. She leaned over the banisters and swiftly beckoned. She heard the roar of the streets through the open window on the staircase, and she heard the heavy tread of the policeman’s boots on the wood. Then she glided after Stapley. Before he turned to shut the door she was in the passage alone with him at the top of the big, quiet house, with the policeman coming steadily up the stairs. Her eyes, when later on she told me the scene, were the glowing, deadly eyes of a wild beast. I suppose she must have looked at Stapley in the same way--accusingly, fiercely, without a shimmer of mercy. No doubt she thought of Bob waiting for his trial, of the quiet, narrow life at Norwood which had satisfied her, and which she was in danger of losing. She said crisply:

“A policeman is coming up to arrest you for the murder of Denis Murphy.”

When she saw Stapley’s face she no longer had the least doubt of his guilt.

The policeman came up, puffing a little, to the third flight, and Stapley, taken utterly by surprise, not knowing how much had been found out, never said a single word in defense, never resisted when he was arrested. There wasn’t a tittle of evidence against him. It was a woman’s instinct, only a woman’s instinct, that--hanged him? No; the set spares its victims that. It gave Orion a hint to fling himself out of the window. Only a woman’s instinct. If I had not taken her to that melodrama, Bob Piety would have swung.

“The Play’s the Thing.” Now, wouldn’t that be a splendid title? If only poor Nat had been alive!

Stapley was tried. He made a full confession. The jury, finding his story much too fantastic, brought him in mad, and, so far as I know, he is alive, at Broadmoor at this moment.

It came out in evidence, and on his own showing, that he had been going queer for some time before he stabbed Murphy. He had been reading very hard, and then, of course, those rooms got on his nerves. He exaggerated trifles. For instance, he fixed a certain hour for his laundress to turn up in the morning. He used to get up and wait for her with his watch in his hand, dreading that she would be a minute late. That morning arrival of hers became the one moment of his day. He could think of very little else. Would she come in time to-morrow? Was it worth his while to pay her if she wouldn’t be punctual, if she wasted daily five minutes? Five minutes! Ten sometimes. How much did that mount up to in a month? The woman was deliberately robbing him. He would not stand it. One must draw the line somewhere. He used to beseech her, bully her, raise her money, threaten to sack her. He bribed her with old hats and trousers for her husband. If she would only turn up to time, so that the one hour of the day--that hour of nine--could take its place with the others, sink into comparative insignificance like the rest!

He used to ask other fellows very earnestly--we all remembered it afterward:

“What would you do if your laundress was always five minutes late in the morning? I want practical advice. I don’t want to be hard on the woman; but, then, no one likes to be imposed upon.”

Sometimes he would oversleep and she would slip in quietly with her key and wake him by planking his boots down outside his bedroom door. On those days he was more wretched than ever, because he had no means of judging how late she had been.

He used to decide beforehand what dress the pretty cousin would wear next time they met. He dared not influence her. But if she wore blue, that meant damnation for him--this world and the next. But red was bliss forever. He used to say to himself, “This is the very last time I’ll play these mental pranks. To-day shall decide everything.”

And she would be on the platform waiting for his train, smiling and radiant in a blue gown, and he would have to go over it all again.

The fang of some dread or other was always fastening in him. He was full of all kinds of whimsical fancies--those whims which seem so unimportant, so imbecile and contemptible to the level-minded, and which are so tragic to the morbid. You understand the sort of thing; avoiding the seams of paving stones, taking your fate from the chance expression of the first strange face you meet when you go out of doors, from the color of a horse, the chime of a clock, street cries--anything.

He was very candid when he stood on his trial for his life; he poured out all his troubles, piteously magnifying trifles, blaming the laundress, the blue dress, the clock in the square, the cab outside, for his misfortune. The prison doctor and another examined him. Of course they said he was mad. He may have been. Yet, if he had taken some other set, he would have been as sane as you are to-day.

On the Saturday that he killed Murphy he had delayed going to Dulwich by the usual early afternoon train. He was afraid for one thing--afraid of the poor little cousin’s frock. He kept putting it off--the time-table spread out in front of him--from one half-hour to the other. And then, as the afternoon went on, a new terror presented itself. The Inn began to fill up and grow gay with fellows home early from their offices, and smart shop girls, light-hearted with the weekly half-holiday. He could see them all at the open windows--men in lounging coats and women in cambric bodices.

Pretty faces peeped over flower boxes and round idly flapping curtains. He was afraid to cross the square. Directly the girls saw him they would lean over the window ledges, make funny grimaces, and cough. There would be a perfect chorus of short, dry, mocking coughs. He had a little nervous trick of clearing his throat, and the girls, who were full of chaff, and not over-fond of him because he was so grave and proper, always mimicked him and called him Splutters. They have a nickname for most of the men, but no one but Stapley ever took any notice.

He was afraid to run along that line of little coughs and bantering cries of “Splutters! Splutters!” He looked at one girl immediately opposite, a girl with very fluffy hair and a flashing steel buckle at her waist, and said tragically:

“If that girl coughs and calls out ‘Splutters,’ I may as well go and hang myself. I shan’t have any luck. It will be all up with me.”

So for fear that she would, he waited until dusk, when he thought he would be able to glide out of the Inn unobserved.

While he waited he noticed that there was something unusual about the paneling of the wall--something that he had never observed before. It was near the window, at a part where Orion’s leather paper had peeled off. There was a slight but unmistakable difference in the molding. The possibility of a secret cupboard in the wall at once occurred to him. At the same moment he seized it feverishly as an omen, a thing that might make a free man of him once more. The nervous, prompting fiend at his side made him say to himself, as his quivering fingers fiddled at the wood:

“If there should be a secret place behind, then there will be an end to your foolery. It won’t matter whether Augusta wears red or blue. Mrs. Worsell may stay away until ten, if she chooses.”

He tapped and pushed and pressed and coaxed for a little, and at last the panel moved slightly upward. He put his hand in, felt a bolt, drew it down, and sliding up the panel saw a shallow cupboard. It was full of dust, and empty except for a knife. Ah! _The_ knife. The knife which later on was to investigate the very recesses of Murphy’s heart. A knife with a chased silver handle and a fine blade.

He held it in his hand, and stood pondering on it and on the shallow hidden place behind the panel. He became conscious of something heavy and still in the air, something waiting, watchful, as his hand gripped that handle. Every little sound in other sets became full of portent. That knife! Who had hidden it there? How had it been used? How long ago was it since a human hand, warm with life, made a blur on that polished, delicately chased handle?

Then he suddenly thought that he would take it down and show it to Kinsman, who was very interested in curios and had some knowledge of them. He gave a last rapid look at the time-table, and decided that he would not go down to Dulwich in time for dinner; he’d have a steak at Gatti’s. Kinsman would be interested in the knife. He went downstairs as he was, in his old slippers, leaving his door ajar and his rooms in darkness. He had not lighted the lamp because he had been telling himself every half-hour that he would get off to Dulwich.

On the way downstairs he heard a woman’s clear strong voice singing “Tatters.” It was Sophia’s voice, and Sophia was the worst tease of them all. He began to clear his throat directly he thought of her. He would not go downstairs to Kinsman. He would wait until he could find him alone. He would go upstairs and get his hat and bag, and put on his boots and be off to Dulwich. It was evening. Augusta--dear, tender little Augusta--would have on her evening gown--red nun’s veiling.

As ill-luck would have it, there was a light under Murphy’s door. And Murphy’s oak was hospitably black, and the inner door with its gleaming brass knocker seemed to wink an invitation. The very knife in his hand seemed to point to Murphy’s door. Well, why not show it to Murphy? He was a bit of a fool, but he would be interested.

So he pulled up, knocked at the door--and you know the rest.

He swore to the very last that he did not do it, that he was merely the agent of the knife--that diabolical knife with the secret history.

Murphy came to the door. His pretty, dissolute face was rather flushed with annoyance. His lips, those pouting, cherry-red lips like a girl’s, showed his white, even teeth under his mustache, which was turning white. His sodden brown eyes, half veiled in a web of crow’s feet, his smirking, unfailing air of conceit and satisfaction, struck clean-living, over-wrought Stapley as disgusting. The man was an evil clod upon an honest earth. There was the trail of twenty years’ intrigue, shuffling, and sham on his features. His eyes were dull with the ruin of many women. He was accursed, heavy, hateful with old secrets, old sins--like the knife. The knife! It claimed kinship. It flew forward to his heart.

That is all. As Murphy shouted out and fell, Stapley went, quick and silent like a panther, up the stairs--quick and silent, with the cunning of a wild animal, just as Barbara, a few weeks later, stole up after him. He softly shut his oak--the oak is always discreet--and sat shivering, almost breathless, in the dark, listening to the tramp of feet and the anxious buzz of tongues underneath.

When everything was still he stole out and went to Dulwich.

Augusta had a blue gown--it was the Boat Race day--and Stapley was a Cambridge man.

She wore blue constantly afterward. This was one of his plaintive injuries when he babbled out everything at the trial. Blue at the theater that night when his face betrayed him to the vigilant eye of Barbara. Blue when she came to the court to give evidence against him. I wonder if she wears blue when she goes to see him at Broadmoor. Some women would do that in the hope of a cure; though, as you say, they probably don’t allow visits at Broadmoor, and a cure wouldn’t be of any real help in Stapley’s case.

HOPKINS.

ORCHARD was artistic--and talked about it. How tiresome such people are! He split the world into two factions--the artist and the rank, impossible Philistine. Religious bigots talk in the same way--of professing Christians and the unregenerate. I knew a dear old lady once who thought that we had a perfect right to stone some Mohammedan missionaries who came to England.

In the middle of a country walk Orchard would stop, with a deep gulp of admiration, and ask you to admire the view. He raved of autumn tints, apple blossoms, bare boughs. He pretended to like a fog. He painted landscapes--or seascapes, according to your imagination--on the panels of his walls; he stenciled his ceilings, and produced an idealized portrait of his laundress.

He had all the delightful courage and egotism of the amateur. He boasted that he had only once been to the Academy--that temple of mediocrity. He told you coolly that there was only one English artist of talent--and he was Whiffin. “Never heard of Whiffin! Who is Whiffin? You astonish me. My dear fellow,” he would say pityingly, “there is _only_ Whiffin.”

The others--men whom the ignorant regard as leading--he disposed of glibly. This one was color-blind; he thought that was common knowledge. That one employed a ghost; the fellow could hardly hold a brush himself. Another only painted flesh tints; you can’t have a picture all flesh. “My dear fellow, I assure you there is no one but Whiffin. He is the coming man. I’m surprised you don’t know his work. Galleries! A man like Whiffin wouldn’t exhibit at the galleries.”

Orchard was willing to undertake anything--artistic. But his great hobby was house-building. He said that the average architect didn’t get the surroundings in harmony. The architect’s work only began when the roof was on. He should design the garden, the furniture. He should choose the pictures, the tenants. Every new house ought to be embowered in creepers from the very start. An old lawn and a clipped yew tree were as essential, more essential, than water pipes. The house must cultivate a ghost. It must have a peacock with a spread tail, a fish pond, full of hoary carp, a raven that would say “nevermore.”

He was full of amusing sentiment. He bought his bread at Mackary’s, the confectioner’s near Bernard Street. It was a queer old shop. Orchard said that it reminded him of Hogarth. Of course he had the greatest possible contempt for Hogarth--but he liked the faint flavor of hoops and beauty patches which hung about Mackary’s.

Mackary’s business, so it is said above the door, was founded in 1712. The shop window was bow-fronted and had small square panes. Behind these panes were home-baked puffs and Banburys, straight glass bottles full of pink lozenges or sponge fingers. Mackary kept up the traditions of his house. He still made a feature of a special cake said to have been a favorite with Queen Charlotte, and he ignored French pastry.

Miss Mackary kept the books, and wrote poetry after the shutters were up. Mrs. Mackary was plump, wore a lace cap, and had house property in her own right near Tarn’s. They were superior people. Orchard willingly paid a halfpenny more on the half-quartern loaf for the privilege of stepping in with the assured air of a regular customer. He never paid his bill, so that it really made no difference. He used to sit and eat Queen Charlotte’s cakes and talk poetry with Miss Mackary. They were all very civil to him--he used to say that nothing demoralized a tradesman more than cash payment.

I don’t know why I tell you of Whiffin, of the Mackarys, of Orchard’s crazy architectural ideas--they have nothing to do with the story. But they will prove to you what a harmless simpleton he was before he took set 7, before the advent of Hopkins.