Part 11

He played a few bars, then paused, listening. The sighing had begun again; it was close behind him.

He swung round sharply. There was nobody there. But the door, which had been shut a minute ago, stood wide open. A cold wind blew in, cutting through the hot, stagnant air. He got up and shut the door. The cold wind wrapped him in a belt, a swirl; he stood still in it for a moment, stiff with fear. When he crossed the room to the piano it was as if he moved breast high in deep, cold water.

Somewhere in the secret place of his mind a word struggled to form itself, to be born.

“Mother.”

It came to him with a sense of appalling, supernatural horror. Horror that was there with him in the room like a presence.

“Mother.”

The word had lost its meaning. It stood for nothing but that horror.

He tried to play again, but his fingers, slippery with sweat, dropped from the keyboard.

Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.

Then he saw her.

She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.

The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.

Hollyer stood up and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.

Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.

And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.

Hollyer, rigid, pouring out sweat, still stared at the place where it had stood. His heart-beats came together in a running tremor: it was as if all the blood in his body was gathered into his distended heart, dragging it down to meet his heaving belly.

Then he turned and went headlong towards the door, stumbling and lurching. He threw out his hands to clutch at a support and found himself in Effie’s arms.

“Wilfrid—darling—what is it?”

“Nothing. I’m giddy. I—I think I’m going to be sick.”

He broke from her and dragged himself upstairs and shut himself into his study. That night his old single bed was brought back and made up there. He was afraid to sleep in the room that had been his mother’s.

V

He had run through all the physical sensations of his terror. What he felt now was the sharp, abominable torture of the mind.

If the dead knew—

The dead _did_ know. She had come back to tell him that she knew. She knew that he thought of her with unkindness. She had been there when he talked about her to Effie. She knew the thought he had hidden even from himself. She knew that she had died because, secretly, he had wished her dead.

That was the meaning of her look and of her tears.

No fleshly eyes could have expressed such an intensity of suffering, of unfathomable grief. He thought: the pain of a discarnate spirit might be infinitely sharper than any earthly pain. It might be inexhaustible. Who was to say that it was not?

Yet could it—could even an immortal suffering—be sharper than the anguish he felt now? If only he had known what he was doing to her— If he had known. If he had known—

But, he thought, we know nothing, and we care less. We say we believe in immortality, but we do not believe in it. We treat the dead as if they _were_ dead, as if they were not there. If he had really believed that she was there, he would have died rather than say the things he had said to Effie. Nobody, he told himself, could have accused him of unkindness to his mother while she lived. He had really loved her up to the moment, the moment of supreme temptation, when he wanted Effie. He had not willed her to die. He had been barely conscious of his wish. How, then, could he be held accountable? How could he have destroyed the thing whose essence was the hidden, unknown darkness? Yet, if men are accountable at all, he was accountable. There had been a moment when he was conscious of it. He could have destroyed it then. He should have faced it; he should have dragged it out into the light and fought it.

Instead, he had let it sink back into its darkness, to work there unseen.

And if he had really loved his mother, he would have wished, not willed her to live. He would have wanted her as he wanted her now.

For, now that it was too late, he did want her. His whole mind had changed. He no longer thought of her with resentment. He thought, with a passionate adoration and regret, of her beauty, her goodness, and her love for him. What if she _had_ kept him with her? It had been, as Effie had said, because she loved him. How did he know that if she had let him go he would have been good for anything? What on earth could he have been but the third-rate organist he was?

He remembered the happiness he had had with her before he had loved Effie; her looks, her words, the thousand things she used to do to please him. The Mendelssohn she had given him. A certain sweet cake she made for him on his birthdays. And the touch of her hands, her kisses.

He thought of these things with an agony of longing. If only he could have her back; if only she would come to him again, that he might show her—

He asked himself: How much did Effie know? She must wonder why he had taken that sudden dislike to the drawing-room; why he insisted on sleeping in his study. She had never said anything.

A week had passed—they were sitting in the dining-room after supper, when she spoke.

“Wilfrid, why do you always want to sit here?”

“Because I hate the other room.”

“You didn’t use to. It’s only since that day you were ill, the last time you were playing. Why do you hate it?”

“Well, if you want to know—you remember the beastly things I said about mother?”

“You didn’t mean them.”

“I did mean them— But it wasn’t that. It was something you said.”

“I?”

“Yes. You said ‘If the dead knew—’”

“Well—?”

“Well—they do know—I’m certain my mother knew. Certain, as I’m certain I’m sitting here, that she heard.”

“Oh, Wilfrid, what makes you think that?”

“I can’t tell you what makes me think it— But—she was there.”

“You only think it because you’re feeling sorry. You must get over it. Go back into the room and play.”

He shook his head and still sat there thinking. Effie did not speak again; she saw that she must let him think.

Presently he got up and went into the drawing-room, shutting the doors behind him.

The Mendelssohn was still on the piano ledge, open at Number Nine. He began to play it. But at the first bars of the melody he stopped, overwhelmed by an agony of regret. He slid down on his knees, with his arms on the edge of the piano and his head bowed on his arms.

His soul cried out in him with no sound.

“Mother—Mother—if only I had you back. If only you would come to me. Come—Come—”

And suddenly he felt her come. From far-off, from her place among the blessed, she came rushing, as if on wings. He heard nothing; he saw nothing; but with every nerve he felt the vibration of her approach, of her presence. She was close to him now, closer than hearing or sight or touch could bring her; her self to his self; her inmost essence was there.

The phantasm of a week ago was a faint, insignificant thing beside this supreme manifestation. No likeness of flesh and blood could give him such an assurance of reality, of contact.

For, more certain than any word of flesh and blood, her meaning flashed through him and thrilled.

She knew. She knew she had him again; she knew she would never lose him. He was her son. As she had once given him flesh of her flesh, so now, self to innermost self, she gave him her blessedness, her peace.

THE VICTIM

Steven Acroyd, Mr. Greathead’s chauffeur, was sulking in the garage.

Everybody was afraid of him. Everybody hated him except Mr. Greathead, his master, and Dorsy, his sweetheart.

And even Dorsy now, after yesterday!

Night had come. On one side the yard gates stood open to the black tunnel of the drive. On the other the high moor rose above the wall, immense, darker than the darkness. Steven’s lantern in the open doorway of the garage and Dorsy’s lamp in the kitchen window threw a blond twilight into the yard between. From where he sat, slantways on the step of the car, he could see, through the lighted window, the table with the lamp and Dorsy’s sewing huddled up in a white heap as she left it just now, when she had jumped up and gone away. Because she was afraid of him.

She had gone straight to Mr. Greathead in his study, and Steven, sulking, had flung himself out into the yard.

He stared into the window, thinking, thinking. Everybody hated him. He could tell by the damned spiteful way they looked at him in the bar of the “King’s Arms”; kind of sideways and slink-eyed, turning their dirty tails and shuffling out of his way.

He had said to Dorsy he’d like to know what he’d done. He’d just dropped in for his glass as usual; he’d looked round and said “Good-evening,” civil, and the dirty tykes took no more notice of him than if he’d been a toad. Mrs. Oldishaw, Dorsy’s aunt, _she_ hated him, boiled-ham-face, swelling with spite, shoving his glass at the end of her arm, without speaking, as if he’d been a bloody cockroach.

All because of the thrashing he’d given young Ned Oldishaw. If she didn’t want the cub’s neck broken she’d better keep him out of mischief. Young Ned knew what he’d get if he came meddling with _his_ sweetheart.

It had happened yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when he had gone down with Dorsy to the “King’s Arms” to see her aunt. They were sitting out on the wooden bench against the inn wall when young Ned began it. He could see him now with his arm round Dorsy’s neck and his mouth gaping.

And Dorsy laughing like a silly fool and the old woman snorting and shaking.

He could hear him. “She’s my cousin if she _is_ your sweetheart. You can’t stop me kissing her.” _Couldn’t_ he!

Why, what did they think? When he’d given up his good job at the Darlington Motor Works to come to Eastthwaite and black Mr. Greathead’s boots, chop wood, carry coal and water for him, and drive his shabby secondhand car. Not that he cared what he did so long as he could live in the same house with Dorsy Oldishaw. It wasn’t likely he’d sit like a bloody Moses, looking on, while Ned—

To be sure, he had half killed him. He could feel Ned’s neck swelling and rising up under the pressure of his hands, his fingers. He had struck him first, flinging him back against the inn wall, then he had pinned him—till the men ran up and dragged him off.

And now they were all against him. Dorsy was against him. She had said she was afraid of him.

“Steven,” she had said, “tha med ’a killed him.”

“Well—p’r’aps next time he’ll knaw better than to coom meddlin’ with _my_ lass.”

“I’m not thy lass, ef tha canna keep thy hands off folks. I should be feared for my life of thee. Ned wurn’t doing naw ’arm.”

“Ef he doos it again, ef he cooms between thee and me, Dorsy, I shall do ’im in.”

“Naw, tha maunna talk that road.”

“It’s Gawd’s truth. Anybody that cooms between thee and me, loove, I shall do ’im in. Ef ’twas thy aunt, I should wring ’er neck, same as I wroong Ned’s.”

“And ef it was me, Steven?”

“Ef it wur thee, ef tha left me— Aw, doan’t tha assk me, Dorsy.”

“There—that’s ’ow tha scares me.”

“But tha’ ’astna left me—’tes thy wedding claithes tha’rt making.”

“Aye, ’tes my wedding claithes.”

She had started fingering the white stuff, looking at it with her head on one side, smiling prettily. Then all of a sudden she had flung it down in a heap and burst out crying. When he tried to comfort her she pushed him off and ran out of the room, to Mr. Greathead.

It must have been half an hour ago and she had not come back yet.

He got up and went through the yard gates into the dark drive. Turning there, he came to the house front and the lighted window of the study. Hidden behind a clump of yew he looked in.

Mr. Greathead had risen from his chair. He was a little old man, shrunk and pinched, with a bowed narrow back and slender neck under his grey hanks of hair.

Dorsy stood before him, facing Steven. The lamplight fell full on her. Her sweet flower-face was flushed. She had been crying.

Mr. Greathead spoke.

“Well, that’s my advice,” he said. “Think it over, Dorsy, before you do anything.”

That night Dorsy packed her boxes, and the next day at noon, when Steven came in for his dinner, she had left the Lodge. She had gone back to her father’s house in Garthdale.

She wrote to Steven saying that she had thought it over and found she daren’t marry him. She was afraid of him. She would be too unhappy.

II

That was the old man, the old man. He had made her give him up. But for that, Dorsy would never have left him. She would never have thought of it herself. And she would never have got away if he had been there to stop her. It wasn’t Ned. Ned was going to marry Nancy Peacock down at Morfe. Ned hadn’t done any harm.

It was Mr. Greathead who had come between them. He hated Mr. Greathead.

His hate became a nausea of physical loathing that never ceased. Indoors he served Mr. Greathead as footman and valet, waiting on him at meals, bringing the hot water for his bath, helping him to dress and undress. So that he could never get away from him. When he came to call him in the morning, Steven’s stomach heaved at the sight of the shrunken body under the bedclothes, the flushed, pinched face with its peaked, finicking nose upturned, the thin silver tuft of hair pricked up above the pillow’s edge. Steven shivered with hate at the sound of the rattling, old-man’s cough, and the “shoob-shoob” of the feet shuffling along the flagged passages.

He had once had a feeling of tenderness for Mr. Greathead as the tie that bound him to Dorsy. He even brushed his coat and hat tenderly, as if he loved them. Once Mr. Greathead’s small, close smile—the greyish bud of the lower lip pushed out, the upper lip lifted at the corners—and his kind, thin “Thank you, my lad,” had made Steven smile back, glad to serve Dorsy’s master. And Mr. Greathead would smile again and say, “It does me good to see your bright face, Steven.” Now Steven’s face writhed in a tight contortion to meet Mr. Greathead’s kindliness, while his throat ran dry and his heart shook with hate.

At meal-times from his place by the sideboard he would look on at Mr. Greathead eating, in a long contemplative disgust. He could have snatched the plate away from under the slow, fumbling hands that hovered and hesitated. He would catch words coming into his mind: “He ought to be dead. He ought to be dead.” To think that this thing that ought to be dead, this old, shrivelled skin-bag of creaking bones should come between him and Dorsy, should have power to drive Dorsy from him.

One day when he was brushing Mr. Greathead’s soft felt hat a paroxysm of hatred gripped him. He hated Mr. Greathead’s hat. He took a stick and struck at it again and again; he threw it on the flags and stamped on it, clenching his teeth and drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss. He picked up the hat, looking round furtively, for fear lest Mr. Greathead or Dorsy’s successor, Mrs. Blenkiron, should have seen him. He pinched and pulled it back into shape and brushed it carefully and hung it on the stand. He was ashamed, not of his violence, but of its futility.

Nobody but a damned fool, he said to himself, would have done that. He must have been mad.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had known ever since the day when Dorsy left him.

“I shan’t be myself again till I’ve done him in,” he thought.

He was only waiting till he had planned it out; till he was sure of every detail; till he was fit and cool. There must be no hesitation, no uncertainty at the last minute, above all, no blind, headlong violence. Nobody but a fool would kill in mad rage, and forget things, and be caught and swing for it. Yet that was what they all did. There was always something they hadn’t thought of that gave them away.

Steven had thought of everything, even the date, even the weather.

Mr. Greathead was in the habit of going up to London to attend the debates of a learned Society he belonged to that held its meetings in May and November. He always travelled up by the five o’clock train, so that he might go to bed and rest as soon as he arrived. He always stayed for a week and gave his housekeeper a week’s holiday. Steven chose a dark, threatening day in November, when Mr. Greathead was going up to his meeting and Mrs. Blenkiron had left Eastthwaite for Morfe by the early morning bus. So that there was nobody in the house but Mr. Greathead and Steven.

Eastthwaite Lodge stands alone, grey, hidden between the shoulder of the moor and the ash-trees of its drive. It is approached by a bridle-path across the moor, a turning off the road that runs from Eastthwaite in Rathdale to Shawe in Westleydale, about a mile from the village and a mile from Hardraw Pass. No tradesmen visited it. Mr. Greathead’s letters and his newspaper were shot into a post-box that hung on the ash-tree at the turn.

The hot water laid on in the house was not hot enough for Mr. Greathead’s bath, so that every morning, while Mr. Greathead shaved, Steven came to him with a can of boiling water.

Mr. Greathead, dressed in a mauve and grey striped sleeping-suit, stood shaving himself before the looking-glass that hung on the wall beside the great white bath. Steven waited with his hand on the cold tap, watching the bright curved rod of water falling with a thud and a splash.

In the white, stagnant light from the muffed window-pane the knife-blade flame of a small oil-stove flickered queerly. The oil sputtered and stank.

Suddenly the wind hissed in the water-pipes and cut off the glittering rod. To Steven it seemed the suspension of all movement. He would have to wait there till the water flowed again before he could begin. He tried not to look at Mr. Greathead and the lean wattles of his lifted throat. He fixed his eyes on the long crack in the soiled green distemper of the wall. His nerves were on edge with waiting for the water to flow again. The fumes of the oil-stove worked on them like a rank intoxicant. The soiled green wall gave him a sensation of physical sickness.

He picked up a towel and hung it over the back of a chair. Thus he caught sight of his own face in the glass above Mr. Greathead’s; it was livid against the soiled green wall. Steven stepped aside to avoid it.

“Don’t you feel well, Steven?”

“No, sir.” Steven picked up a small sponge and looked at it.

Mr. Greathead had laid down his razor and was wiping the lather from his chin. At that instant, with a gurgling, spluttering haste, the water leaped from the tap.

It was then that Steven made his sudden, quiet rush. He first gagged Mr. Greathead with the sponge, then pushed him back and back against the wall and pinned him there with both hands round his neck, as he had pinned Ned Oldishaw. He pressed in on Mr. Greathead’s throat, strangling him.

Mr. Greathead’s hands flapped in the air, trying feebly to beat Steven off; then his arms, pushed back by the heave and thrust of Steven’s shoulders, dropped. Then Mr. Greathead’s body sank, sliding along the wall, and fell to the floor, Steven still keeping his hold, mounting it, gripping it with his knees. His fingers tightened, pressing back the blood. Mr. Greathead’s face swelled up; it changed horribly. There was a groaning and rattling sound in his throat. Steven pressed in till it had ceased.

Then he stripped himself to the waist. He stripped Mr. Greathead of his sleeping-suit and hung his naked body face downwards in the bath. He took the razor and cut the great arteries and veins in the neck. He pulled up the plug of the waste-pipe, and left the body to drain in the running water.

He left it all day and all night.

He had noticed that murderers swung just for want of attention to little things like that; messing up themselves and the whole place with blood; always forgetting something essential. He had no time to think of horrors. From the moment he had murdered Mr. Greathead his own neck was in danger; he was simply using all his brain and nerve to save his neck. He worked with the stern, cool hardness of a man going through with an unpleasant, necessary job. He had thought of everything.

He had even thought of the dairy.

It was built on to the back of the house under the shelter of the high moor. You entered it through the scullery, which cut it off from the yard. The window-panes had been removed and replaced by sheets of perforated zinc. A large corrugated glass sky-light lit it from the roof. Impossible either to see in or to approach it from the outside. It was fitted up with a long, black slate shelf, placed, for the convenience of butter-makers, at the height of an ordinary work-bench. Steven had his tools, a razor, a carving-knife, a chopper and a meat-saw, laid there ready, beside a great pile of cotton waste.

Early the next day he took Mr. Greathead’s body out of the bath, wrapped a thick towel round the neck and head, carried it down to the dairy and stretched it out on the slab. And there he cut it up into seventeen pieces.

These he wrapped in several layers of newspaper, covering the face and the hands first, because, at the last moment, they frightened him. He sewed them up in two sacks and hid them in the cellar.

He burnt the towel and the cotton waste in the kitchen fire; he cleaned his tools thoroughly and put them back in their places; and he washed down the marble slab. There wasn’t a spot on the floor except for one flagstone where the pink rinsing of the slab had splashed over. He scrubbed it for half an hour, still seeing the rusty edges of the splash long after he had scoured it out.

He then washed and dressed himself with care.

As it was war-time Steven could only work by day, for a light in the dairy roof would have attracted the attention of the police. He had murdered Mr. Greathead on a Tuesday; it was now three o’clock on Thursday afternoon. Exactly at ten minutes past four he had brought out the car, shut in close with its black hood and side curtains. He had packed Mr. Greathead’s suit-case and placed it in the car with his umbrella, railway rug, and travelling cap. Also, in a bundle, the clothes that his victim would have gone to London in.

He stowed the body in the two sacks beside him on the front.

By Hardraw Pass, half-way between Eastthwaite and Shawe, there are three round pits, known as the Churns, hollowed out of the grey rock and said to be bottomless. Steven had thrown stones, big as a man’s chest, down the largest pit, to see whether they would be caught on any ledge or boulder. They had dropped clean, without a sound.

It poured with rain, the rain that Steven had reckoned on. The Pass was dark under the clouds and deserted. Steven turned his car so that the headlights glared on the pit’s mouth. Then he ripped open the sacks and threw down, one by one, the seventeen pieces of Mr. Greathead’s body, and the sacks after them, and the clothes.