“Was it this Myra was thinking of when she wrote to us?” Bobby asked.
“I expect so. I dare say,” Outers answered wearily. “I didn’t know she had written till afterwards. They have never forgotten—she and Rosamund. It is always between us, though we never speak of it. Sometimes I think Myra still hopes the boys may even yet return. Sometimes I think Rosamund knows things she has never told me. I was blamed. I was held responsible. You understand? There was talk that I knew what the boys meant to do, it was said that I had sent them. People said I ought to have known and stopped it. They said it came of ‘going native’, as some called it. I was told it was my fault for trying to get at what the Africans really thought, giving them the idea there might be something worthwhile in their beliefs instead of teaching them their own ideas were all wrong, all evil, and they must learn European beliefs, ways, thoughts. The missionaries preached all that.”
“What started this notion that there is a death wish loose among you?” Bobby asked.
“It was one evening,” Outers answered. “We were sitting here. We all heard it. A voice—a thin, cracked voice. From near the roof, above the table we were sitting at. We had been a long time, sitting there. We thought nothing was going to happen. It was like that at times. Teddy Peel said communications seemed blocked, and he didn’t think it was any use sitting any longer. Then it came, the voice from above, I mean.”
“Teddy Peel,” Bobby repeated. “I don’t think I trust him much. I should want to know a lot more before I accepted anything that happened when he was there.”
“Yes,” agreed Outers. “There’s that. You’ve always got to sort these things out. We all heard it—that thin, cracked voice, high up against the roof, very thin, very cold, distant.”
“Ventriloquism can do a lot,” Bobby suggested.
“It was spoken in Bantu,” Outers said. “There are many different varieties of Bantu, but this was that spoken in the district where I was stationed. I don’t suppose there are more than twenty or thirty whites in all the world who can speak it. Teddy Peel can hardly be one of them; he has never even been in Africa or near it.”
Bobby was not convinced. He had experience of the strange bits of knowledge rogues and charlatans sometimes manage to pick up and use to convince others of their honesty. But he was deeply concerned and yet did not know what could be done. A little resentful, too, at being brought unawares into such a troubled situation.
“I must ask Myra,” he said rather vaguely. “I still don’t quite see why she wrote to me. Surely the best thing to do is just to ignore this ‘death wish’ as you call it, forget all about it.”
“It is not easy to forget it,” Outers said. “It is never easy to forget. And there may be some minds not willing to ignore it.”
“Whose minds?” Bobby asked; and when Outers showed no sign of being willing to answer that, Bobby repeated: “I must speak to Myra.”
“Thoughts may be forgotten or ignored and then they may die,” Outers went on. “But they may be too strong for either forgetting or ignoring. They may be smothered at birth. They may be frightened into not even wishing or trying to be born into deed. To catch ill wishes before they grow strong is what witch doctors are for. They do it, or try to, by spells, incantations and so on, by ways they keep secret, by what they call their medicine. The Christian priest would urge prayer and penance. No doubt it is a better way. But it is not the African way.”
“I am neither witch-doctor nor priest,” Bobby said.
“Ideas, death wishes,” Outers continued unheedingly, “can be checked or destroyed, whichever word you prefer, by fear. Fear is a great preventative. All religions have a hell. Myra may have thought that with you you would bring fear—a fear that the death wish would feel and no longer try to grow into a mind and then it would wither away into nothingness. And then perhaps Myra and Rosamund would find release, the release they need, though they don’t know it.”
Bobby got to his feet. He felt he only understood half, or less, of what had been said, yet that half was enough profoundly to disturb him. Was it possible, he wondered, that Outers had been hinting that his wife and daughter, or both, brooding over the loss of sons and brothers, might seek a dreadful reparation? Did they believe—or know—that Outers had in fact encouraged, more than encouraged, the two unfortunate boys to undertake their disastrous quest? He might conceivably have done so, believing that as his sons they would be immune. Or was this ‘death wish’ warning, if it had in fact occurred as related, perhaps concerned with something else altogether, some other rivalry or strain? For that matter, Outers might be aware of hidden impulses, pressures, in himself that he needed help to combat. This strange primaeval African ‘medicine’, as he called it, that he had apparently studied so deeply, had it affected him more than he had realized?
“Shall we go down again?” Bobby asked, putting these doubts and fears aside.
“I thought you ought to know,” Outers said.
They made the long descent in silence. Bobby at least was glad enough to leave a room that was beginning to seem to him full of dark and angry menace. It was a relief when he found his feet once more on firm and solid earth. In the shade of some trees in front of the house, a trolley table was now in position. Rosamund was busy arranging cups and saucers on it. Bobby had had no idea that the hour had grown so late as to warrant preparations for tea. He experienced an odd sense of relief as he watched Rosamund so busy with so homely, so pleasant a task? What could be further removed from the dark mysteries of the deep, African bush than afternoon tea on an English lawn? It seemed to put him once more in touch with the solid realities of everyday life, to sweep away the cobwebs that primaeval fancies had left over from a dreaming, superstitious past that had no possible concern with this scientific, technological age where all nature dances to our tune. He began to feel quite cheerful again, and to feel, too, that it had been rather silly of him to have taken Outer’s story of the thin, cracked voice from the roof and the warning that there was a ‘death wish’ loose among them quite so seriously.
“Anyhow, one thing’s plain,” he told himself cheerfully. “Teddy Peel’s a fraud.”
CHAPTER VI
TEA PARTY
STANDING NEAR that inviting-looking trolley which had served to recall Bobby to the realm of common sense were two young men, both looking exceedingly sulky, both with their hands in their pockets, neither speaking. The one to the left was the Ludo Manners Bobby had already met. The other was tallish, youngish, rather untidy, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses, behind which his eyes were hidden. He was beginning to grow bald and he would have passed unnoticed in the crowd in almost any Western country. Only a second glance would perhaps have taken count of the thrust-out chin, a mouth set in firm lines, and a certain suggestion in his stance of restrained, even violent strength, all ready to leap into action if required.
Rosamund came out again carrying a stand laden with cakes. Both the young men watched avidly, but neither of them moved to help her. Bobby had the impression that both had been, so to say, ‘warned off the course’, and he noticed that the two of them were scowling at each other even more openly than before.
“Punch-your-head-for-you wish trying very hard not to be born into deed,” Bobby told himself, and giggled in a way that betrayed how much his nerves had been affected by that long, strange talk in the upper chamber of the Folly Tower.
From behind, Mr Outers, who had now come up to join them, called out:
“Oh, B.B., you’ve got here, then. You haven’t met my cousin, Mr Owen, have you?”
“I’ve heard of him,” B.B. answered, moving forward to shake hands.
“Cousin Olive and Mother are just coming,” Rosamund interposed. “I told them tea was ready. They’ve been talking all afternoon.”
Myra and Olive had in fact just emerged from the house; and Bobby needed only a glance at Olive to tell him she, too, was troubled and disturbed. He guessed she had probably been list
ening to the same sad story he had heard. Myra, on the other hand, seemed much more composed, even lively, than she had been earlier on; and Bobby got the impression that this did not altogether please Rosamund.
“I’ll pour out,” she announced, seating herself before the cups and saucers; and Bobby saw her look an invitation at Ludo to take the chair by her side, which he did with alacrity.
“Now we are all hunkadory,” he said, not without a triumphant look at B.B. Her mother and Olive, Rosamund placed with the same authority, putting Bobby next to Myra and Olive next to Mr Outers. The result of these manœuvres was that B.B. was left rather on the outskirts of the little group, with only a very small, rickety chair to sit on. He looked at it doubtfully, picked it up and put it down again. He said aloud:
“I don’t think I had better risk sitting on that—might break my neck. I’ll squat on the grass instead,” and he established himself almost at Rosamund’s feet. “I can still pass the bread and butter,” he announced.
“Don’t trouble. Besides, there isn’t any,” Rosamund said icily; and Ludo, at whom Bobby took a quick glance, looked—well, the phrase that came into Bobby’s mind was ‘like murder’, but that was silly and only showed, Bobby supposed, how badly frayed were his nerves. No wonder he had been told he needed a holiday.
“No. I see there isn’t,” B.B. was saying, answering Rosamund’s remark and looking very hard at the plate in the middle of the trolley table.
“Margarine,” said Rosamund briefly.
“Such nice margarine,” put in Olive; and now it was Rosamund who flushed and looked away, for she knew from Olive’s tone that Olive had tasted it and had recognized it as real country butter, freshly made, too.
It was a piece of nice, polite homely comedy with Miss Rosamund playing off one young man against the other; and in it Bobby found such refreshment and relief he almost forgot that long talk in the Folly Tower with its dark African background.
It was considerably later, not till the two young men had departed, Rosamund and her mother vanished into the kitchen, and Outers himself to the brooding solitude of his own room, that Bobby found an opportunity to be alone with Olive. They knew each other sufficiently well to be sure at once that each had heard the same strange tragic tale.
“It’s rather a horrible story,” Olive said.
“I don’t see why we had to hear it,” Bobby grumbled.
“Myra is frightened,” Olive said; and Bobby nodded a gloomy assent, for he knew well what strange things people can do in fear.
“It’s why she started those sittings, up there in the Folly Tower,” Olive went on. “She half believes the boys may be still alive. She was hoping to get something. She’s been hinting that Rosamund knows things she won’t tell.”
“Why not?” Bobby asked; but to that question Olive made no answer, for she did not know.
“It always lies between them, what happened to the boys,” she said.
“I can’t imagine there’s the least chance of their being alive,” Bobby told her. “And if they aren’t—” And he left the sentence unfinished, for what else was there to say?
“Myra talked a lot,” Olive went on, and she shivered slightly. “These secret rites the two boys were trying to get a look at are rather dreadful—sacrifices of living creatures are offered. Human sacrifices,” she said after a long pause. “On special occasions. To propitiate the gods if deep sacrilege had been committed—or attempted. Like strangers trying to look. Myra’s nightmare, though she won’t admit it, is that if that happened, then the two boys may after death be in some way entangled with or under the control of these gods or whatever they are to whom they were offered.”
“She must be going off her head,” Bobby said angrily; and perhaps himself a little frightened, too, at this glimpse into the dark hinterland of the unknown. “Val never suggested anything like that. He did say he was blamed—held responsible. By everyone apparently—Myra and Rosamund, too. That may be what Rosamund knows and won’t tell. That he did in fact encourage the poor kids to take a chance. Nothing to be done about it.”
“Just your being here has helped already,” Olive told him. “Rosamund said so.”
“Oh, she did, did she?” grunted Bobby, quite unappeased. “In the interval of flirting with her three admirers?”
“Three?” Olive repeated questioningly.
“Well, there’s a chap they call B.B., and the Ludo young man. And then there’s Dewey James.”
“But he’s the hunchback,” Olive exclaimed.
“Doesn’t prevent him from having feelings, does it?” Bobby asked. “Doesn’t prevent her from being sorry for him, does it? And when a woman gets being sorry for you, it’s the very devil. I saw them laughing together and I saw the way he looked after her when she went off—his face shone so he might have just swallowed the sun.”
“I never thought of that,” Olive said and looked more troubled even than before. “Anyhow, I don’t think it’s fair to say she was flirting—it’s not that. It’s more she feels set aside, doomed in a way, by what’s happened—and perhaps by what may happen, for I think that voice they say they heard has frightened her as much as it has the rest of them.”
“Did you know she was a potential heiress?” he asked abruptly.
“Rosamund?” Olive asked in return. “Why? They’ve nothing but Val’s pension and this old house they’re trying to sell only no one wants it.”
“Well, she is, all the same,” Bobby insisted. “An heiress, and a whacking big one, too. Val has got tucked away a map showing what he says is probably about the biggest uranium field in the world.”
But Olive looked more puzzled than impressed. “Well, then, why doesn’t he do something about it?” she demanded. “It would give Myra something else to think about.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it,” Bobby agreed. “It’s all mixed up with this witch-doctor medicine business, and then it’s in the middle of a native reserve. Val says if it was known it was there, the natives would soon be out.”
“I don’t see why,” Olive protested, but at this point Outers appeared from the house and came across to join them.
He seemed in an entirely different mood now, excited and jovial. Bobby was inclined to suspect that he had retired into the privacy of his own room for a drink or two—or even more. Anyhow, his change of mood was very marked, even though the same heavy gloom remained in those deep-set eyes of his, where this new rather febrile joviality found no place. Possibly, Bobby thought, the telling of his story to one who was both a relative in blood and yet a stranger, too, had brought him the kind of relief often experienced after confession.
Olive managed to slip away while Outers was talking about the book he planned to write on ancient Bantu civilization as exemplified by those imposing ruins at Zimbabwe, at one time attributed to the Portuguese, but now believed to antedate the arrival in Africa of the white races by many hundreds of years. Bobby was interested and listened with attention. “At a time when the Ancient Britons were running about dressed in woad. You understand?” Outers said more than once, and Bobby made no attempt to controvert this last somewhat doubtful statement. But he was equally interested to notice that Olive had been joined by Rosamund, now escaped from the kitchen. They had crossed over together into the James domain and were chatting with Dewey in what was apparently a kind of conducted tour under his guidance. But a call from Myra to come in to dinner cut short both Outers’s discourse and this conducted tour.
It had been arranged that Bobby and Olive should leave fairly early next morning, and though the usual polite hopes were expressed on both sides that their visit would be soon repeated, yet somehow there was a general feeling that this would not be, unless indeed in very different circumstances.
Bobby, however, had now discovered that there had been no need for that long drive back on the day of their arrival to the cross-road and thence back again to Constant House. Tucked away on the south side of the Folly was a track,
certainly rough and unmade and in wet weather extremely muddy, but avoiding all that long detour to the cross-roads. The next morning, accordingly, Bobby took it, and when all the farewells had been said and they were fairly on their way, he told Olive that he was going to take the opportunity of talking to Mrs James.
“I want to hear what she thinks of this voice they talk about,” he explained. “I told Val I wanted to. I don’t think he liked the idea, but he didn’t object. Teddy Peel, as they call him, strikes me as a fraud, and I have an idea he and Mrs James may have fixed it up between them. I should like to be able to form my own opinion of her.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing,” Olive said. “There’s nothing of the vulgar cheat about her. She hates Dewey because he is deformed, she hates herself for having borne him. She loves him because he is her son, and there is nothing she would not do to make amends for the wrong she did him in giving him birth as he is.”
“How do you know all that?” Bobby asked, carefully steering his car over the bumpiest apology for a road he had ever come across.
“Well, I do know, that’s all,” Olive retorted, “and not from anything she said, either. From how she said it and how she looked. She came out to join us when Rosamund and me were talking to Dewey yesterday evening.” She added slowly: “You were right about Dewey. He is in love with Rosamund because she is sorry for him and never shows it or that there is any reason why she should be. He knows that with her he stands on his own feet and there is nothing he would not do for her—it is the sort of love that gives everything and asks for nothing, and you are all the better for having met with it.”
CHAPTER VII
HOSTILE MRS JAMES
NOT UNTIL THEY were safe once more on the high road, axles and springs still intact, did Bobby make any comment. Then he said:
Six Were Present: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 5