by Matthew Head
It was a shame that there were only the two of us to see Jacqueline’s second entrance. She appeared in the doorway and stood there quietly for a brave moment. She had creamed and powdered away the last signs of the disfiguring bruise on her mouth, and had substituted a dark, subdued lipstick for the flaming vermilion she usually wore. There were faint, faint shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, and her great, sad eyes looked out with courage from her romantically pallid face. Her hair was parted in the middle and brushed back simply. She looked young and fragile, and the black lace negligée she had assumed in her new widowhood was just about as funereal as a night with a nautch dancer. Miss Finney was never one to deny credit where credit was due. “Boy!” she said in genuine admiration. “Ain’t that sumpin’!”
Jacqueline ignored this vulgarity and spoke her opening line with quiet fortitude.
“I am ready,” she said.
“If you aren’t, no woman ever was,” snapped Miss Finney. “Let’s get down to business.”
Jacqueline met this with the patient smile of one whose grief lifted her above Miss Finney’s coarse-grained nature. She set her body into motion and crossed over to a chair and sat down quietly, her hands folded in her lap.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
I could see Miss Finney choking back whatever comment first occurred to her. She took a moment to compose herself and then said directly and without rancor, “I want to know everything just as it happened, Jacqueline. You tried to tell us some of it last night but you never managed to make anything clear. I hope it won’t be too painful for you to go over it again.”
“Thank you,” said Jacqueline piteously, “oh, thank you! I shall try.”
She had reached the station, she said, a little after ten o’clock. She was tired, but happy to be coming back to Gérôme to sustain him during his period of grief for his brother. Gérôme was waiting for her; he had stayed up, he said, on the bare chance that she might be able to make it that night. It had been a sweet homecoming. Sad, of course, because of André’s death, but joyous too, because—
Jacqueline lowered her eyes, looking at her hands in her lap. “I am telling you everything, Mademoiselle Finney,” she said. “I know you do not like me, and it is true I was not always a good wife to Gérôme.” She raised her eyes again and looked into Miss Finney’s with simple candor. She spoke with such apparent sincerity that I felt shamefaced for being unable to believe her. “I was selfish,” she said. “I was spoiled. Paris and beautiful things had been my life, my whole life. I love beauty. I love gaiety, Mademoiselle Finney. Here in this wilderness I was lost, imprisoned. I—”
She rose and clenched her hands at her sides, and turned her back to us suddenly. The back of the negligée was just as effective as the front. When she had modeled it for a moment she turned to us with tears in her eyes and in her voice. “I became cross. I was not always kind to Gérôme. I will tell you the truth. I had gone to Léopoldville because I had told Gérôme I could stand it no longer. He told me to go to Léopoldville for a vacation and think things over.”
There had been a great reconciliation. She had told him that the time away from him had given her the opportunity to see things in their true perspective. She loved him, she wanted only to be with him, to be a good wife. If it meant she must stay in the wilderness, his wilderness should be her wilderness; their wilderness, she said, would be their own little world. There had been tears, tears of joy mixed with those of sorrow for André.
All this was beginning to stretch out, but Miss Finney was patient.
“Why, I’m very happy for you, Jacqueline,” she said awkwardly. “Maybe you’d better tell the rest as briefly as you can. You don’t want to tax your strength.”
“Thank you,” said Jacqueline tremulously. “Thank you, dear friend.”
Gérôme had suggested a little drink, some very special brandy he had been saving for their next wedding anniversary. She was tired, desperately tired, but this was an occasion. While Gérôme had gone after the brandy, she had gone to freshen up and to slip into the red crêpe lounging pajamas, favorites of Gérôme’s. This had taken her some little time, she said, and it was easy for us to believe it. When she had come back into the room, Gérôme was standing petrified by the table with the brandy on it, facing two natives she had never seen before (but she knew none of the natives, hardly her own houseboys, even; they all looked alike, these savages). She had not heard them come in, she had heard no sound at all; they had simply appeared out of thin air, and she had entered to face the terrifying tableau in the living room. She pointed out the spots where the natives were standing, where Gérôme was standing, and the door she had come in—the same one she had just now entered.
Gérôme spoke to the natives in French, asking them what they wanted. They had answered briefly in their own tongue, probably saying that they did not understand French, perhaps making some demand. Neither Jacqueline nor Gérôme knew a word of the language.
Jacqueline remembered Gérôme’s pistol in their bedroom. She turned to leave the room but one of the natives was upon her in an instant, grabbing her from behind by the arms near the shoulder, and making the bruises Madame Boutegourde had seen last night. Gérôme had turned to attack the native. The second native jumped across the room and felled Gérôme with one blow. Gérôme lay still on the concrete floor. Jacqueline had screamed. The second native stepped over Gérôme’s body and grabbed both her wrists in one hand. “He was big, big! A great black brute of a thing—” and she displayed to us her two small bruised wrists that he had clamped in his one great hand. He had put the other over her mouth. She had fainted.
When she came to, both natives had Gérôme’s body and were carrying it out of the room. She had crawled across the floor toward them on her hands and knees. Then rising to her knees she had beat at one of them with her fists. He freed one hand and hit her in the mouth, saying something in his language. She didn’t know how long she was unconscious that time. When she came to she was alone. She was half crazy with terror; she hadn’t even remembered that she could have driven the car. She had run all the way to the Boutegourdes’, falling down, running into bushes. She remembered it only as one remembers a nightmare. The Boutegourdes’ screen was unlatched; she had managed to get into the room, calling for help, and had collapsed.
Jacqueline did a fine job on this recitation. It was one that would have been easy to overplay, which was even difficult not to overplay. But she did it just right, with only occasional gestures, and those all the more effective for being quickly stifled, letting her tone of voice and the attitude of her body, stiffening or wilting, do the rest. The script was terrible, like anything an actress writes for herself to play, but even Bergner couldn’t have got more out of it.
Miss Finney listened thoughtfully and attentively to all of this. When it was over, she had only one comment:
“Yeh,” she said.
Miss Finney and I left the house and started back to the Boutegourdes’.
“Well,” she said, “what’d you think of all that?”
“I’d like to have the stubs,” I said.
She shot me a suspicious glance. “What stubs?” she asked.
“The ticket stubs,” I said. “For my memory book.”
“Oh,” said Miss Finney. “You’re not very funny. You’re right, though—she certainly played that one right up to the hilt. How much of it do you believe?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I wouldn’t say it was one hundred per cent autobiographical. You probably don’t believe any of it.”
“Oh yes I do,” Miss Finney said. “I believe she ran all the way to the Boutegourdes’ so she could arrive out of breath and all messed up. But the word hasn’t been invented that would say what I think of the rest of it.”
“You don’t believe anybody,” I said. “You keep telling me I have to watch out for these false faces and stuff. How about you and your own face value?”
Miss Finney l
ooked a little bit smug. “I’m pretty good at fooling people when I want to,” she said, “but I haven’t fooled you much, Hoopie. I’ve teased you and I’ve held out on you and I’ve sneaked into Henri’s room while you were asleep and stolen your handkerchief out of your hind pocket, but I never have deliberately fooled you.”
The meanest thing I could do to Mary Finney was to fail to rise to the bait, so I began whistling Love in Bloom under my breath and let my glance wander around vacantly. She stood it for about four bars and then said, “Oh, shut up! You’re not fooling me.”
“All right then,” I said. “I’m wild to know about the handkerchief. I’m wild to know about all the rest of this business too but I’m not going to sit up and beg for any of it.”
“I’ll tell you some of it after the funeral,” she said. “You’re a fine, patient boy, Hoopie, and your Aunt Mary is getting very fond of you. By the way, while you were waiting for me to get back from the village, did anybody say anything or do anything?”
“No,” I said. “We just sat around. I don’t know about the others, but I sat there wondering whether you would yell very much when they began giving you the works down in the village.”
“They’d have to get awfully hungry before they’d go after a tough old piece like me,” Miss Finney said. “So nobody said anything? Well, that’s all right, everything fits in anyhow.”
When we reached the Boutegourdes’, Miss Collins was there alone. She had some cool lemonade fixed up for us and while we were drinking it Henri and Papa Boutegourde came in. They looked a sickish color but said the body was sewed up in the canvas and loaded on the station truck, and that we could bury it any time now. Papa Boutegourde said he would go get Jacqueline. I was sorry that she was going to come on again, because anything short of her appearing in a clap of thunder would be an anticlimax, but Jacqueline must have felt the same way, because Papa Boutegourde came back without her and said that she didn’t feel equal to seeing Gérôme buried in the sordid way it would have to be done. So we took him out to the field and buried him not far from André. It was a dismal business. Miss Collins read the service in a small wispy voice, but without hesitation and somehow impressively, although she looked like a little bunch of faggots tied up in a rag as she stood there in the hot sun in the big field. Neither André nor Gérôme had meant anything much to me one way or another, but as the natives began filling Gérôme’s grave, so near the fresh mound of his brother’s, I felt depressed beyond measure. It was all so meager and so desolate, the two de l’Andréneaus buried ingloriously in an open field on the station which had gone to pieces in their hands. What would happen to the Company now, I wondered. Probably Papa Boutegourde would be appointed director of the station, find some kind of help, and go on with all the cards stacked against him, a good man in a bad spot. I thought of Gabrielle and Madame Boutegourde, well on their way to Costermansville by now, and I hoped they would find a way never to come back to the Congo-Ruzi.
When we came back from the funeral, Miss Finney said to all of us, “Anybody scared?”
Everyone made negative murmurs.
“Well, I don’t think anybody has any reason to be,” she said. “I guess nobody has any doubts as to what happened. Jacqueline says there were two natives and Gabrielle only saw one, but there could be explanations for that. Down in the village they don’t know anything about it and I believe them. I’m convinced of it and I’ll stake my life on it.”
“You may be staking all our lives on it, Mary,” Miss Collins said.
“All right, then,” said Miss Finney cheerfully, “all your lives. I tell you our village doesn’t know anything about it. These natives came from another village. This wasn’t a rebellion, either; it was personal revenge, some male relative of the M’buku Gérôme hanged. That’s why he mutilated the body that way. No point in getting your revenge and not getting credit for it; that’s what a native wants out of revenge, to show he’s avenged the family honor, not just the personal satisfaction of it. This native or these natives, whichever it was, came from the same village as those who killed the subadministrator. He’s not interested in us and he’s trotting along some bush path miles from here by now. We’re safe.” If Miss Finney wanted to string them along and make them believe she thought the natives did it, it was all right with me, but I said, “This village was bound to have known something about it, or why did they stay away from the station this morning?”
Not only Miss Finney, but everybody in the room, began to say the same thing—that the natives had their own grapevine and their own way of knowing what happened. You always hear the whites say this in the Congo, and I suppose it’s true. Anyhow I let this one pass.
Miss Finney said, “We can’t do anything until they send somebody up here from Costermansville. What does everybody want to do?”
Everybody wanted to rest.
Miss Finney said, “I could use a little peace and quiet myself. Henri, you go home and go to bed. I think you’ll find Albert there by now; I talked to him down in the village. Hoop, you go to the guest house. Emily, you’ve got your own room here. I’ll go to Gérôme’s. Guess somebody ought to be with Jacqueline besides the house boys.”
Miss Finney asked me to take her to Jacqueline’s so she could leave the old rattletrap of a station wagon for Miss Collins in case she should need it. Henri got into his car and started off ahead of us. As we got near Jacqueline’s he stopped and waved good-by to us. We waved back and he started up again and disappeared around a curve in the road. Miss Finney turned to me. “School’s out, Hoopie,” she said. “Let’s go to the guest house.”
“Don’t you want to keep an eye on Jacqueline?”
“As long as everybody else thinks I’m at Jacqueline’s, nobody’s going to go there. And as long as Jacqueline thinks I’m hanging around everybody else, she’s going to stay home. And anyway, come to think of it,” she added, “I don’t care who sees who, any more. You got any whisky in your bag?” I had.
“I don’t drink before nightfall very often,” she said, “but I’ve got one coming today. Come on. Let’s talk.” We drew up to the guest house and went in. I brought my bag from the back of the truck and we mixed a couple of bush highballs—whisky with chlorinated water and no ice—pretty bad the first few times, but you get used to it, and we certainly needed them that afternoon.
The single room of the guest house was very small. Miss Finney sat on the bed, because it was more comfortable than the stiff chair where I sat. She sat there with her drink in her hand and after the first few swallows she began to sag and look tired.
“Do you feel all right?” I asked.
“No,” she said wearily, “I feel pretty bad. I’m a woman fifty years old, Hoopie. I’m a little overweight and I’ve always been homely, and I didn’t get to bed last night. That’s enough to depress anybody.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve been acting so bright and chipper.”
“I know,” Miss Finney said. “I’ve been cracking pretty wise. Ever hear of whistling in the dark, Hoopie?”
I told her I had done lots of it from time to time.
“Me too,” she said, “but never so much as I’ve done the last twenty-four hours. I’ve tried to stand off and figure things out impersonally. It’s been fun, the figuring out. It’s the answer that’s got me whistling.”
“Me too,” I said, “if it’s what I think it is.”
She raised her eyebrows in a question.
I said, “I don’t know how you figure things, but you’ve got Henri tied up in it some way and I like Henri.”
“The trouble with you, Hoopie,” Miss Finney said, “is that you admire good looks too much.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. I knew it was true. I changed the subject. “You’re not infallible yourself. I caught you in a mistake. The knife.”
She looked blank for a moment and then straightened out of her slouch and said, “Oh my gosh!”
“All this rigmarole you gave them up at
the Boutegourdes’ about it being a native from another village. It didn’t explain how that knife of Gérôme’s got there. It didn’t fool Papa Boutegourde.”
“You two found the knife when you moved Gérôme. Did you tell Henri or Emily or anybody else?”
“I didn’t mention it to anybody myself. I can’t vouch for Papa Boutegourde.”
Miss Finney shrugged and sagged again. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “whether I fooled anybody or not. I was only making a gesture.”
I said, “How about straightening me out on a few things?” I filled our glasses with a second round of weak drinks, just to have something to sip. Miss Finney said:
“You’ve got what looks like a bunch of disconnected and irrational circumstances connected with these two killings, and with the life on this station in general. The way to go about straightening them out is to set your imagination to working and see what you can invent in the way of some single circumstance that will explain away a lot of the others. The more it explains away, the more likely your invention is to be true. See?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what you invented.”
She began to perk up again as she started rehashing her figuring-out.
“Well, look,” she said. “There were a lot of things that didn’t make sense one at a time, much less in a group, without the one unknown that would tie them together. I’m sure Jacqueline fed André the dysentery culture in Bafwali; she could have slipped it in his bedside carafe, for instance. But why in the world should she want to kill him? That had to be explained; it didn’t make sense. There was something else about Jacqueline, too—all of a sudden after she came here she took an unexplained dislike to Henri. She wouldn’t go anywhere he was, or let him in her house. Nobody could say why, not even Henri. And you know enough about Jacqueline to realize that ordinarily she’d have been out tooth and nail for a rich piece of flesh like that one, especially with nothing else in sight but André and Papa Boutegourde. And then Jeannette’s books. Gabrielle said Henri must have put them away because they gave him more pain than comfort. You know he didn’t put them away, he burnt them, but even so, Gabrielle’s explanation for why he got rid of them might still have been offered. But it doesn’t hold water. Jeannette’s things should have brought Henri more and more pleasure and less and less pain as her death receded in the background, no matter how much Henri suffered when she first died. That was three years ago, so why did he burn the books all of a sudden, within the last few months at least since Gabrielle saw them there, or maybe even within the last few weeks?”