Touching those years, the terms used by the Resident Commissioner to describe them, filled me with astonishment as I glanced over his letter again: “Beloved by this small community of forty-two souls—a source of comfort—sage in council—kind, courageous, selfless—”
With the best will in the world, I could not recognize in this picture my brother as I had known him. I turned for enlightenment to the chest on the seat beside me. I studied the carving for a moment—designs of outrigged canoes, paddles, coconut palms, turtles, and land crabs, and when, with an uncomfortable sense of intrusion, I lifted the lid, there came from the chest a subtle aroma that suggested to my imagination palm fibre and sea shells, sunshine and coral grottoes, baked breadfruit and petals of frangipani. I breathed again, it seemed to me—in that train rocking through the December snowfall—the trade winds which had blown from the pages of my boyhood reading, which was as near as I had ever got to the Pacific.
I took from the chest my brother’s manuscript book, ran my fingers over its frayed binding, turned the yellowed leaves at random. They were covered with faded writing in a hand which, even after all the long years, I recognized as my brother’s. And at the opening sentence, simple and conventional—My earliest memory is Christmas in the year 1880—I nodded to myself, remembering that and many another Christmas at home.
I was five years older than Noel. We were a large family, living in a rambling country house, and our father, an awesome man normally, was always rollicking and jovial at Christmastime. For us, his eight children, it was always, outstandingly, the happiest time of the year. Especially was it so, in boyhood and adolescence, for Noel, the youngest of us, being his birthday as well as the season for which he was named. For Noel it was a time of pure magic. His eyes shone with excitement. He was a handsome boy, sensitive and imaginative, not a bit like the rest of us, who were rather homely-looking and stodgy. Yes, at Yuletide my Noel, as a boy, was always at his best—though later, in young manhood, by a kind of reaction to a most unfortunate circumstance, he was to be always at his disastrous worst.
My sister Emily once remarked, “I suppose it’s natural that Christmas should mean even more to Noel than to the rest of us, but, you know, I wonder at times if his excitement is quite healthy. His anxiety that we should all be here together, his intense preoccupation with whether it will snow at just the right time, the utter extravagance with which he’d reward the waits if we didn’t restrain him—it all makes me wonder if there’s not perhaps a slight instability in him somewhere. Really, I tremble at times to think of his future.”
She had good reason. At sixteen he began to get into scrapes. At eighteen his behavior gave rise to a deeper disquiet. At twenty, while articled to an estate agent in Shropshire, he kicked over the traces so seriously that my father told him never to show his face at home again.
Poor Noel. Christmas was not the same for him without us—or for us without him. Some of us were married by then, but we always foregathered in the old home in deference to our father. Our natural stodginess, lacking the inspiration of Noel’s presence, was quite stupefying.
As for Noel, the very next Christmas season after he had been cast out, he was brought before a London magistrate and charged with drunkenness and insulting behavior. We heard about it later. Asked if he had anything to say, he blamed his misdemeanor on the need he had felt to drown the memory of past joyous Christmases in the home from which his own folly had barred him forever.
“Young man,” said the magistrate, “your trouble is less unique than you fancy. We are all prone to self-pity at this season. We all have memories and regrets. We are all sensitive at Christmastime, but it is a sign of immaturity in you that you have allowed such a universal feeling to become, in your case, morbidly developed. Case dismissed, but don’t leave the court. I haven’t finished with you.”
What followed was surprising. The magistrate, moved perhaps by Noel’s good looks and charm of manner, and by a certain pathos in his aberration, invited him into his own home as a guest over Christmas. The visit grew extended. Long after the holly had been taken down, my brother continued to loll in the magistrate’s house. Instead of resenting this, the magistrate and his good lady felt a growing affection for him. In a sense, they adopted him; but, not liking to see him idle, they found him a sound position in a South Coast town.
The following Christmas found Noel in trouble again. It was so serious that, instead of returning “home” to the magistrate’s house, where he was expected on Christmas Eve, he sent the unfortunate man a telegram announcing his intention of throwing himself from Beachy Head at midnight.
The harassed magistrate caused police to be rushed to the spot. Noel, however, having sent his telegram, had succumbed to drink and was later found insensible in a snow-covered beach shelter. The magistrate, though furious, yielded to his wife’s insistence that he smooth over the trouble Noel was in; but he told my brother from thenceforth he could go to the devil in his own way.
The magistrate and his wife, on the other hand, went to Aix-les-Bains to recuperate from their undeserved anxieties. One morning, as they were walking from their hotel to the curative baths, in the pleasant winter sunshine, a man darted out from behind a date palm and planted himself squarely in their path.
It was my brother Noel, handsome as ever, but much disheveled and in that state of excitement, peculiar to himself, which my sister Emily had once described as “unhealthy.”
“Go to the devil, may I?” he shouted at the magistrate. “In my own way? All right, watch me! This is my way!”
His hand flashed to his mouth. A cloaked gendarme came running towards the scene, blowing his whistle. My brother Noel lurched heavily to the left. He lurched heavily to the right. His knees buckled. The magistrate’s good lady screamed. My brother Noel fell contorted at her feet with a white froth on his lips.
It was proved afterward that he had eaten soap.
His object had been to frighten the couple into taking him back into their good graces. The extraordinary thing was that the magistrate did not have him jailed. He was eager to do so, but his good lady took the view that it was no good sending Noel to prison, since he would be out in a month or two, and free to plague them again. She would be terrified to put a foot outside her house, she said, for fear he might spring at her from the shrubbery and open his veins with a razor before her very eyes. He must be sent, she insisted, somewhere very far away.
The magistrate provided funds for Noel’s emigration to Australia.
At home, we of his family heard of all this later. Our father passed away in the interim—our sister Emily too—and those of us who were still living in the family home had resolved to let bygones be bygones and to make Noel welcome among us, should he ever show up.
But we heard nothing from him, and it was only now as I sat in the train reading his manuscript that I came to that part of it which dealt with adventures of which I had had no previous inkling.
I laid down the book on my knees for a moment. The lights had come on in the compartment. Outside, the snow was falling thickly, and the woods and fields glimmered under their mantle of white as the December evening drew in.
Poor Noel, I thought again; he had been worthless through and through when he had left England. I marveled again at the letter, so full of praise of my brother, which I had been handed at the Colonial Office. What experience had befallen him, I wondered, to have changed him so greatly?
I picked up the book again, to read of a continuing succession of disasters and infamies. Within a year, he had made Australia too hot to hold him. He was compelled to leave clandestinely aboard a trading schooner, the Ellis P. Harkness, skippered by a toothless Cockney named Larkin, as incorrigible a scoundrel as my brother.
The third member of the schooner’s company was a slim, brown, silent, smiling boy, a native of Tokelau called Rahpi. He was far too good for the precious party he sailed with, but through months of their huckstering and rogueries among the archipelagos
he served them loyally, and for my brother the boy conceived an inexplicable devotion.
One day, as the two men were drinking morosely in the cabin, an excited hail from Rahpi, at the wheel, sent them staggering up the companionway. The boy pointed off to starboard. Far across the shining water, under the blue Pacific sky, was an open boat. The prevailing easterly blew light and fitful; the boat’s sail trembled. It was clear there was no hand at the helm.
By mid-afternoon the schooner came up with the boat. There lay in it the sun-blackened body of a man. My brother Noel dropped down into the boat to examine the corpse. Clutched in its brittle fingers was a wash-leather bag. Noel loosed it from the dead man’s grip and shook the contents onto his palm. His heart gave a great thud.
Pearls!
He felt the boat rock as Larkin leaped down into it.
“Halves, mate!” Larkin said. “How about it, mate?”
Noel looked at him. Larkin’s eyes narrowed, his tongue moved round over his toothless gums, his right hand rested tensely on the bulge of the revolver in the pocket of his tattered ducks.
My brother smiled. “Halves it is,” he said.
Larkin looked with sly gloating at the pearls on my brother Noel’s palm. “What a Christmas present, mate!” Larkin said. “Eh, mate?”
The bright day seemed to my brother Noel suddenly, strangely to darken. He said slowly, “Christmas present?”
Larkin flared up. It was as though, all at once, he were anxious to find cause for offense, an excuse for a fight.
“Why, you lowdown, busted boozer,” he shouted, “ain’t you got a spark of decency left in you? Ain’t you got a family back home to bow your head in shame to think of at a time like this? Don’t you know tomorrow’s Christmas Eve?”
The pearls spilled unheeded from my brother’s hand to the bottom of the boat. Larkin plunged to his knees, pouring curses on the corpse as he shoved it aside to get at the boat’s bilges. Noel swung himself back to the schooner’s deck. He thrust past the staring Rahpi and went below. He flung his broken-peaked cap across the cabin and reached for a bottle.
That night, swaying on his feet as he stood his trick at the wheel, he brooded alcoholically, heedless of the star-bright sky. More acutely than ever before, the memory of long-lost happy Yuletides returned to plague him. He could neither relive them nor forget them. That nostalgia known to all men—but developed in my brother Noel to a destructive morbidity—made him as desperate as a trapped animal. He had a blind urge to flight, which in his befuddled mind shaped itself into a plan to seize the schooner and the pearls and be rid of Larkin—
Suddenly, leaving the wheel spokes spinning aimlessly, he lurched down the companion into the cabin. The lamp there, swaying in gimbals, cast an oily yellow gleam that made the shadows move. Larkin lay on his back in his bunk, snoring, his toothless mouth agape, his gums glistening pink in a tangle of beard.
My brother, holding his breath, slid a hand under the man’s pillow. He felt the wash-leather bag, the butt of the revolver. He drew them out cautiously. He raised the revolver to Larkin’s head, but then the thought of the boy Rahpi flashed into his mind. The Tokelau boy was asleep in the forepeak. He would hear a shot. My brother stood biting his lips. His rage flamed up again. Kill one, kill both! Rahpi must go, too. He must be hounded out and ruthlessly shot down.
Again my brother raised the revolver to Larkin’s head. But now the schooner, to a sudden freshening of the wind, and with the wheel spinning free, broached-to with a jerk that sent Noel staggering. Before he could recover himself, the squall struck—one of those Pacific squalls which an alert wheelsman could see coming from afar in good time to reef down and make all snug. But there was no wheelsman, and with a rush and hiss of rain and screaming wind, the squall was on them. Larkin woke with a shout as the schooner was lifted high on the top of the rollers, then dropped dizzily into its trough. Glass crashed as the lamp blacked out.
The two men were flung together, struggling, fighting with each other to be first up the companion. Finally both gained the deck and clung where they could as a wave swept over them. Through the tumult about them sounded a deeper, more distant note, a rumbling note like thunder.
“Breakers!” Larkin yelled.
After that, according to the account in the manuscript, my brother Noel had no clear idea of what happened, no recollection of clawing a handhold on the reef as the schooner struck. He did not know how many hours passed before he regained consciousness. His whole body stung from the cruel abrasions of the coral. His head seemed to weigh a ton as he raised it.
He struggled to his knees. The vast sky of morning was sheened over with radiant tints of pearl. The passing of the squall had left the sea shining and level to the horizon, though here and there along the curve of the reef spray leaped with a white flash against the blue. At some distance from him, two figures were picking their way along the reef, slowly and painfully, sometimes stumbling.
Noel watched them, conscious of the heavy, measured thumping in his chest. Larkin and Rahpi! Alive! With a creeping horror he remembered how a few hours before, in his madness, he had stood at the very brink of murder. Mere change had plucked him back from that awful precipice. They were alive, and he drew in his breath, deeply, in relief and gratitude.
A shout reached him, not from the men on the reef, but from the lagoon within its shelter. Noel got to his feet with difficulty, his salt-soaked body smarting, and turned. The lagoon lay tranquil, edged in the distanced by a white beach and leaning palms. A canoe, driven swiftly by paddles that flashed as they rose and fell, was coming towards him. There were two people in it, a young man and a girl. The pareus they wore were gaily colored, and the girl’s shining dark hair streamed over her brown shoulders.
“Hello?” the young man called to Noel. “All right, there? Hello?”
My brother lifted a hand slowly in reply. He wondered where he was. The young man had spoken in English. Nearing the reef, the couple, obviously brother and sister, and Tahitian in appearance, backed with their paddles, and beached the canoe.
The girl looked up at my brother with dark, gentle eyes that seemed to hold a puzzled look. She was very beautiful. My brother had a strange feeling that this meeting between them had been inevitable—that he had come to the one place in the world where he could find peace—that before him, here, lay the beginning of his real life.
There had been nobody here to greet Captain Cook when he had discovered the island on December 24, 1777, at precisely 1°.58′ N., 157° .27′ W. But for my brother Noel there was this girl, and she smiled at him gravely, yet with a kind of wonder in her eyes, as though she had been waiting for him for a long time and could not quite believe that he had come, at last.
“Welcome,” she said, “to Christmas Island.”
DEATH ON CHRISTMAS EVE
Stanley Ellin
THE THREE-TIME EDGAR AWARD WINNER and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master honoree in 1981, Stanley Ellin was one of America’s greatest short story writers of the twentieth century. His first story, “The Specialty of the House” (1948), went on to become a relentlessly anthologized classic of crime fiction and was adapted for an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Many more of his stories were adapted for TV by Hitchcock and other series, and six of his stories were nominated for Edgars, two of which won; his superb novel, The Eighth Circle (1958), also won an Edgar. Each of his stories is a perfectly polished gem, as you will see when you read this masterpiece. “Death on Christmas Eve” was first published in the January 1950 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Mystery Stories (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1956).
Death on Christmas Eve
STANLEY ELLIN
AS A CHILD I HAD BEEN VASTLY impressed by the Boerum house. It was fairly new then, and glossy; a gigantic pile of Victorian rickrack, fretwork, and stained glass, flung together in such chaotic profusion that it was hard to encompass in one glance. Standing before
it this early Christmas Eve, however, I could find no echo of that youthful impression. The gloss was long since gone; woodwork, glass, metal, all were merged to a dreary gray, and the shades behind the windows were drawn completely so that the house seemed to present a dozen blindly staring eyes to the passerby.
When I rapped my stick sharply on the door, Celia opened it.
“There is a doorbell right at hand,” she said. She was still wearing the long outmoded and badly wrinkled black dress she must have dragged from her mother’s trunk, and she looked, more than ever, the image of old Katrin in her later years: the scrawny body, the tightly compressed lips, the colorless hair drawn back hard enough to pull every wrinkle out of her forehead. She reminded me of a steel trap ready to snap down on anyone who touched her incautiously.
I said, “I am aware that the doorbell has been disconnected, Celia,” and walked past her into the hallway. Without turning my head, I knew that she was glaring at me; then she sniffed once, hard and dry, and flung the door shut. Instantly we were in a murky dimness that made the smell of dry rot about me stick in my throat. I fumbled for the wall switch, but Celia said sharply, “No! This is not the time for lights.”
I turned to the white blur of her face, which was all I could see of her. “Celia,” I said, “spare me the dramatics.”
“There has been a death in this house. You know that.”
“I have good reason to,” I said, “but your performance now does not impress me.”
“She was my own brother’s wife. She was very dear to me.”
I took a step toward her in the murk and rested my stick on her shoulder. “Celia,” I said, “as your family’s lawyer, let me give you a word of advice. The inquest is over and done with, and you’ve been cleared. But nobody believed a word of your precious sentiments then, and nobody ever will. Keep that in mind, Celia.”
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 69