Part 10

45. _Statement of John Munting_ [Continued.]

The next news I had about the Harrisons was about the middle of October, 1929, when I got a note from Lathom, written, rather unexpectedly, from “The Shack, Manaton, Devon.” He said that he was staying with Harrison, who was having his annual “camp” among the water-colour “bits” and the natural foodstuffs. Harrison, it appeared, had been so pressing that he really had not known how to refuse, especially as he was really feeling rather played-out after several months’ strenuous work in Paris. After the unbearably hot and prolonged summer, the prospect of pottering about a bit among the lush grass and deep lanes of Devon had seemed attractive, even when coupled with the boredom of Harrison’s company. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “the old boy is not so bad when you get him in the country by himself. This is the kind of life that really suits him. As a family man he is a failure, but he quite comes out and blossoms doing the odd bits of work about the shack. And he certainly is a first-class cook, though up to the present I have successfully avoided his nettle-broth and stewed toadstools, not wishing to be cut off in my youth. This is a pretty place—miles away from everywhere, of course, stuck down on a circumbendible lane which runs down from Manaton (half a dozen houses and a pub) to the deep valley which separates the Manaton Ridge and Becky Falls from Lustleigh Cleave. The only neighbours are the sheep and cows—an old ram walked into the kitchen the other day. Harrison was grunting over the stove and didn’t see him at first. ‘Be-hey-hey,’ says the ram; ‘Eh-heh-heh,’ bleats Harrison, looking up; and damn it, he was so exactly like the old fellow that he wanted nothing but a pair of horns to complete the resemblance! We wash the crockery, and then Harrison takes his newest superfine painting-box, with the collapsible legs and all the rest of it, and trundles away into the valley, where he sits all day in a gorse-bush, trying to put the tumbling of the stream on paper. The drought has dried it up a good bit, but never was anything so desiccated as the arid little plan of it he produces with pride for me to see, painted with a brush with three hairs in it—peck, peck, scratch and dab—like a canary scrabbling for seed. Why don’t I take the opportunity to do some work in this glorious place? No, thanks; I’m a figure and portrait wallah—besides, I’ve come here for a rest. It is not mine to sing the stately grace—I smoke my pipe in the doorway, drive the cattle out of the back garden, and see that the stewpot doesn’t boil too fast.

“So here I am, in comfortable exile with Menelaus, while Helen sits at home and sews shirts. And it’s a better way, too. One mustn’t take these things too seriously. Damned if Harrison hasn’t got the right idea after all. Look after the grub and leave women to their own fool devices. They give a man no peace. You, being married, have perhaps got your house in order. Do you find it as easy to do your work, now that you’re hooked up to a whirlwind? But, of course, your whirlwind works too, and helps to turn the mill-wheel, which no doubt makes all the difference.”

Lathom went on in this strain for a page or so. Cynicism from him was something new, and I took it to spell restlessness of some sort or other. Either, I thought, he was getting fed up with the lady’s exactions, or the trio had arrived at a _modus vivendi_. It was no affair of mine.

He ended up by saying that he would be running up to town in a day or two and would look me up. I was then living in Bloomsbury—in fact, in my present house—and my wife was away with her people. I had arranged to go with her, but at the last moment an urgent matter turned up—an Introduction to an anthology, which had to be rushed out in a great hurry before some other publisher get hold of the idea, and I had to stay behind to get the thing fairly going, as it meant a good deal of work at the British Museum.

When Lathom turned up at about one o’clock on the 19th, I explained this to him and apologised for having no lunch to offer him. Like most men, and women, too, when left to themselves, I found solitary meals uninspiring. So, apparently, did “the girl,” whom, till my wife left me, I had imagined to be a good cook. Not that I had ever expected Elizabeth to leave her writing to see after my meals, so I can only suppose that her moral influence was enough to make the difference between roast mutton and raw.

Lathom commiserated me, and we went and had some grub at the “Bon Bourgeois.” He seemed to be in high spirits, when he thought about it, but had a way of going off into fits of abstraction which suggested nerves or preoccupation of some kind. He asked about the anthology and my work generally with apparent interest, and then, to my surprise, broke suddenly into my description of the plot of my new novel by saying:

“Look here, if the wife’s away, why don’t you come down to the Shack with me for the week-end? It’ll do you good, freshen you up and all that.”

“Good heavens,” I said, “it’s Harrison’s place. He won’t want me.”

“Oh yes, he’d love to have you. Oh, rather. In fact, he only said to me yesterday, when I was starting off, he wished I could bring you back with me. He’s quite forgotten all that misunderstanding. He’s rather distressed about it, really. Thinks he did you an injustice. Would like to make it up. He says you must be harbouring resentment, because you’ve been in town all this time and haven’t been to see them.”

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “_You_ know why I’ve thought it best to keep out of it.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t. Naturally he thinks you’re offended.”

“Didn’t you tell him I was busy?”

“Of course. Oh, yes. Played up the popular literary man for all it was worth. So he said, of course you were too important nowadays to remember your old friends.”

“Damn it,” I said, “what a tactless devil you are, Lathom. You needn’t have hurt his feelings.”

“No, but look here. Why not come down? It’ll please the old boy no end, and as neither of the women will be there, there won’t be any awkwardness. It’s a damned good opportunity for being civil to him without involving your wife.”

“Civil is a good word for it,” I objected. “I don’t know that it’s particularly civil to plant myself on the man like that, and make him feed me and so on, without notice, when he probably doesn’t want me. Just at the week-end, too, when it’s difficult to get extra supplies.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Lathom, “we’ll take some grub down with us. I was going to in any case. Everything has to be brought out there by a carrier twice a week. Frightful desolate hole. We’ll take a bit of beef and a couple of pounds of sausages. That’ll see us through all right.”

I considered it.

“I say,” said Lathom, suddenly. “Do come, old man. I wish you would. It’s all right there, you know, but I do get a bit bored at times. I’d like to have a yap with somebody who talks my language.”

“If you’re fed up,” I said reasonably, “why do you stay?”

“Oh, well—I promised I would, don’t you see. It’s not bad really, but it would do us both good to have a bit of a change.”

“Now, look here, Lathom,” said I, “I don’t like the idea particularly. I’m not particularly puritan” (I don’t know why one uses that phrase—I suppose it is easier to disown one’s decencies when one represents them as something grotesque in a black suit and steeple-hat), “but considering the way you behaved to Harrison, I think it’s rather thick to go and push your friends on to him. What you do is your own business” (looking back on it, I seem to have extracted a great deal of satisfaction from this original thought), “but it’s rather different for me.”

“Punk!” said Lathom. “That’s all absolutely over. Finished. Washed out. It’s you who keep on digging it up again. Can’t you forget it and come down and help me out with old Harrison?”

“Why so keen?”

“Oh, I’m not particularly keen. I thought you’d like it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing this afternoon? B.M. again?”

I said, no; I avoided the Reading Room on Saturday afternoons, because it was so crowded, and asked him about his work.

He talked about it a little, in the same vague way as before, saying how difficult it was to settle to anything, and displaying some irritability with his sitters of the moment. His triumph at the Academy had made him fashionable, and fashionable women were all alike, it seemed; small-minded and featureless. One might as well paint masks. All of which I had heard so often from other painters that I put Lathom down as already spoilt.

I suggested that he should stay up in town and do a show with me, but he said he was fed up with shows. He had only come up to see his agent, and was catching the 4.30. Why didn’t I change my mind and come with him?

It ended in my changing my mind, and going. I hardly know why, except that I was only six months married and my wife was away, which, to the well-balanced mind, is no good reason for idle behaviour.

The express ran us down in smooth, stuffy comfort, and reached Newton Abbot dead on time at 9.15. I cannot say—though I have tried—that I remembered any particular incident on the way down. I hate talking on railway journeys, anyway, and Lathom did not seem very conversational. I read—it was Hughes’ _High Wind in Jamaica_—an over-rated book, I think, considered as a whole, but memorable for that strange and convincing description of the earthquake. The thick heat and silence, and then the quick, noiseless shift of sea and shore, like the tilting of a saucer. Good, that. And the ghastly wind afterwards. And the child, not realising that anything out of the way had happened, because nobody gave the thing its proper terrifying name. That is very natural. I do not care for the part about the pirates. It is an anti-climax.

I know we dined on the train, but railway meals are seldom memorable. Lathom grumbled, and left his portion half-eaten, and I said something about his acquiring a taste for hedgehog-broth and stewed toadstools—some silly remark which he took as a deadly insult.

At Newton Abbot we changed into the local, and dawdled through Teigngrace, Heathfield and Brimley Halt, taking over half an hour about it, till we were turned out, twenty minutes late, on the platform at Bovey Tracey. It was a quarter-past ten and dark, but the smell of the earth came up pleasantly, with a welcome suggestion of rain in the air. I stood on the platform, clutching an attaché case in one hand and the bag with the beef and sausages in the other, while Lathom transacted some occult business with a man outside. Then he came back, saying briefly, “I’ve got a man to take us,” and we stumbled out to where an aged taxi thrummed mournfully in the gloom. Lathom bundled in, and I parked my bags at his feet.

“What the devil’s that?” he said crossly.

“The grub, fathead,” said I, following him in.

“Oh, yes, of course, I’d forgotten,” he said. “Come on, let’s get going, for God’s sake!”

Being used to Lathom, I ignored his irritability. We jolted off.

The taxi had a churchyard smell about it, and I mentioned the fact. Lathom slammed the window down with an impatient grunt. I remarked, foolishly, that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the trip. He said:

“Oh, don’t talk so much.”

It seemed to me that the prospect of seeing Harrison again had rather got on his nerves, and I looked forward to an exasperating week-end.

“_Vous l’avez voulu_, Georges Dandin,” I reflected, and lit a cigarette resignedly. The narrow road heaved and sank between the dark hedges, but climbed on the whole, wriggling determinedly up and round to the ridge. A dim light or so and a cluster of black roofs announced civilisation, and Lathom roused himself to say: “Manaton—there’s a good view from here by daylight.”

“We shan’t be long now, then, I suppose,” said I.

He did not reply, and I suddenly became aware that I could hear him breathing. Once I had noticed it, I couldn’t seem to shut my ears to the sound. It was like hearing your own heartbeats in the night—when they seem to grow louder and louder, till they fill the silence and keep you from going to sleep. The breaths seemed quite to rasp my ear, they were so heavy and so close.

“Eh!” said Lathom, unexpectedly. “What did you say?”

What had I said? It must have been ages ago, for Manaton was well behind us now, and the car was nosing her broken-winded way steadily down and down, with deep cart-ruts wringing her aged bones. I recollected that I had said I supposed we shouldn’t be long now.

“Oh, no,” said Lathom. “We’re nearly there.”

We bounced on in silence for ten minutes more; then creaked to a standstill. I put my head out. Dim fields, trees and the tinkling of a distant stream coming remotely up on a puff of south-west wind. No light. No building.

“Is this it?” I asked, “or has the engine conked?”

“What?” said Lathom, irritably. “Yes, of course this is it. What’s the matter? Push along—we don’t want to stay here all night.”

I wrestled with the door and edged out, Lathom close at my heels. He paid the driver, and the car began to move off, lurching on down the slope to find a place to turn.

“Here!” said I; “have you got the beef?”

“Oh, hell,” said Lathom, “I thought you had it.”

I plunged after the taxi, reclaiming the food, and came back to where Lathom was standing. His hurry seemed to have left him. He was striking a match and having a little trouble with it. The car, a hundred yards off, choked, crashed its gears, burbled, choked again, burbled, choked, and came thudding up on bottom gear. It passed us, labouring and bumping, moved up into second, hesitated into top, and its red rear light vanished, showed, jerking, vanished and span slowly skywards.

“Ready?” said Lathom.

I did not point out that I had been patiently waiting for him to make a move, but grasped the bags and followed.

“We’ve got a field to cross,” he explained, holding a gate open for me.

We staggered along for a little. Then he stopped and I bumped up against him.

“Over there,” he said.

I looked, and saw a patch of extra darkness, between the darkness of some tree-stems.

“There’s no light,” I said. “Is he expecting you? I hope he won’t be annoyed with me for coming.”

“Oh, he won’t be annoyed,” said Lathom, shortly. “He’s gone to bed, I expect. Early bird. Up with the lark and down with the sun and all that. It doesn’t matter. We can forage round for ourselves.”

A few more minutes, and we stood at the door of the shack. You know what it’s like—indeed, all England knows by now—a low, two-roomed cottage, ugly, built of stone, with a slate roof. Only one story—what in Scotland they call a but and ben. The windows were unshuttered, but not a spark of light showed through them—no candle, not so much as the embers of a fire.

Lathom gave an ejaculation.

“He must have gone to sleep,” he muttered. I was fumbling for the handle of the door, but he pushed me aside, and I heard the latch click open. He paused, staring into the dark interior.

“I wonder if he’s gone wandering off and got lost somewhere,” he said, hesitating on the threshold.

“Why not go in and see?” I countered.

“I’m going to.” He stepped in and the unmistakable rattle of matches in the box told me that he was getting a light. He was clumsy about it, and only after several futile scratches and curses did the small flame flare up; he held it high, and for a moment I saw the living-room—a kitchen table cluttered with crockery, a sink, an empty hearth, and a jumble of painting gear, clumped in a corner. Then the match flickered and burnt his fingers, and he dropped it, but made no effort to strike another.

“Juggins!” said I, defiantly, for this cheerless welcome was getting on my nerves. “Here—isn’t there a candle or anything?”

I hunted through my pockets for a petrol lighter. This gave a steadier light, by which I found and lit a bedroom candle on a bracket just behind the door. The untidy room leaped into existence again. I set the candle down on the table, beside the sordid remnants of a meal. A chair lay overturned on the floor. I righted it mechanically and looked round. Lathom was still standing just inside the door, with his head cocked sideways, as though he were listening.

“Well, I’m damned,” said I, “this is very cheerful. If Harrison—”

“Listen a minute,” he said, “I thought I heard him snoring.”

I listened, but could hear nothing except a tap dripping into the sink.

“Looks to me as if he’d gone out,” I said. “How about starting the fire up? I’m chilly. Where’s the wood?”

“In the basket,” said Lathom, vaguely.

I investigated the basket, but it was empty.

“Oh, well,” I said, “let’s have a drink and get to bed. If Harrison comes in later, you’ll have to do the explaining.”

“Yes,” said Lathom, eagerly. “Good idea. Let’s have a drink.” He wandered about. “Where the devil’s he put the whiskey?” He flung open a cupboard door, and groped about, muttering.

At this point a thought occurred to me.

“Would Harrison go out and leave the door unlocked?” I said. “He’s a careful sort of fellow as a rule.”

“What?” Lathom’s head emerged for a moment from the cupboard. “No—no—I should think he would lock up.”

“Then he must be about somewhere,” I said. We had been talking almost in whispers—I suppose with the idea of not disturbing the sleeper, but now I lost patience.

“Harrison!” I shouted.

“Shut up!” said Lathom. “He must have left the whiskey in the bedroom.” He picked up the candle and plunged into the inner room.

The shadows parted and flowed in after him as he went, leaving me in darkness again. His footsteps shuffled to a halt and there was a long pause. Then he spoke, in a curious, thick voice with a catch in it, like a gramophone needle going over a crack.

“I say, Munting. Come here a minute. Something’s up.”

The inner room was in a sordid confusion. My hurrying footsteps tripped over some bedclothes. There were two beds in the room, and Lathom was standing by the farther of the two. He stepped aside, and his hand shook so that the candle-flame danced. I thought at first that the man on the bed had moved, but it was only the dancing candle.

The bed was broken and tilted grotesquely sideways. Harrison was sprawled over it in a huddle of soiled blankets. His face was twisted and white and his eyeballs rolled up so that only the whites showed. I stooped over him and felt for his wrist. It was cold and heavy, and when I released it it fell back on the bed like dead-weight. I did not like the look of the nostrils—black caverns, scooped in wax—not flesh, anyway—and the mouth, twisted unpleasantly upwards from the teeth, with the pale tongue sticking through.

“My God!” I cried, but softly—and turned to look at Lathom, “the man’s dead!”

“Dead?” He was looking at me, not at Harrison. “Are you sure?”

“Sure?” I put a finger beneath the fallen jaw, which woodenly resisted me. “Why, he must have been dead for hours. He’s stiff, man, stiff!”

“So he is, poor old b——” said Lathom.

He began to laugh.

“Stop that,” I said, snatching the candle away from him, and dumping him roughly down on to the other bed. “Pull yourself together. You want a drink.”

I found the whiskey with some trouble. It was on the floor, under Harrison’s bed. He must have grasped at it in his struggles and let it roll away from him. Fortunately, the cork was in place. There was a tumbler, too, but I did not touch that. I fetched another from the living-room (Lathom cried out not to be left in the dark, but I paid no attention), and poured him out a stiff peg, and made him swallow it neat. Then I stood over him as he sat and shuddered.

“Sorry, old man,” he said at last. “Silly of me to make an ass of myself. Bit of a startler, isn’t it? But your face—oh, Lord!—if you could have seen yourself! It was priceless.”

He began to giggle again.

“Don’t be a fool,” said I. “We’ve got no time for hysterics. Something’s got to be done.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Yes—something must be done. A doctor, or something. All right, old man. Give me another drink and I’ll be as right as rain.”

I gave him another small one and took some myself. That seemed to clear my mind a little.

“How far are we from Manaton?”

“About three miles, I think—or a little over.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose somebody there will have a telephone, or can send a messenger. One of us had better get along there as fast as possible and get on to the police.”

“Police?”

“Yes, of course, you ass. They’ve got to know.”

“But you don’t suppose there’s anything wrong about it?”

“Wrong? Well, there’s a dead man—that’s pretty wrong, I should think. He must have died of something. Did he have a heart, or fits, or anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

I surveyed the distasteful bed again.

“It looks more as though—he’d eaten something—”

I stopped, struck by an idea.

“Let’s look at the things in the other room,” I said. Lathom jumped to his feet.

“When I left him he said something about fungi—he was going to get some special kind—”

We went out. In a saucepan on the table was a black, pulpy mess. I sniffed it cautiously. It had a sourish, faintly fungoid odour, like a cellar.

“Oh, Lord,” whimpered Lathom, “I knew it would happen some day. I told him over and over again. He laughed at me. Said he couldn’t possibly make a mistake.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said, “but it looks rather as if he had. Poor devil. Of course, it would happen the very day there was nobody here to help him. I suppose he was absolutely on his own. Didn’t any tradesmen call, or anything?”

“The carrier comes over on Mondays and Thursdays with supplies,” said Lathom, “and takes the orders for the next visit.”

“No milkman? No baker?”

“No. Condensed milk, and the carrier brings the bread. If there’s nobody in he just puts the things on the window-sill.”

“I see.” It seemed to me pretty ghastly. “Well,” I went on, “will you go or shall I?”

“We’d better both go, hadn’t we?”

“Nonsense.” I was positive about this. I don’t know why, except that it seemed damnable, somehow, to leave Harrison’s body alone, when leaving it could do no possible harm. “If you don’t feel fit to go, I will.”

“Yes—no!” He looked about him uneasily. “All right, you go. It’s straight up the hill, you can’t miss it.”

I took up my hat, and was going, when he called me back.

“I say—do you mind—I think I’d rather go after all. I feel rather rotten. I’ll be better in the fresh air.”

“Now, look here,” I said firmly. “We can’t stay shilly-shallying all night. If you don’t like staying in the house, you’d better go yourself. But make up your mind, because the quicker we get on to somebody the better. Get the police and they’ll probably be able to find a doctor. And you’ll have to give them Mrs. Harrison’s address.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Yes—I suppose—I suppose—they’d better break it to her.”

“Somebody’s got to. It’s a beastly business, but you don’t know any relations you could get hold of, do you?”

“No. Very well. I’ll see to it. Sure you won’t come with me? You don’t mind staying?”

“The sooner you go, the shorter time I’ll have to stay,” I reminded him.

“Right-ho!” he paused, appeared about to say something, then repeated “right-oh!” and went out, shutting the door behind him.