War in Heaven

by Charles Williams

  So much the clerks heard before the police with their proceedings retired into cloud and drove the civilians into other rooms. Almost as soon, either by the telephone or some other means, news of the discovery reached Fleet Street, and reporters came pushing through the crowd that began to gather immediately the police were seen to enter the building. The news of the discovered corpse was communicated to them officially, and for the rest they were left to choose as they would among the rumours flying through the crowd, which varied from vivid accounts of the actual murder and several different descriptions of the murderer to a report that the whole of the staff were under arrest and the police had had to wade ankle-deep through the blood in the basement.

  To such a distraction Mr. Persimmons himself returned from a meeting of the Publishers’ Association about four o’clock, and was immediately annexed by Inspector Colquhoun, who had taken the investigation in charge. Stephen Persimmons was rather a small man, with a mild face apt to take on a harassed and anxious appearance on slight cause. With much more reason he looked anxious now, as he sat opposite the inspector in his own room. He had recognized the body as little as any of his staff had, and it was about them rather than it that the inspector was anxious to gain particulars.

  “This Rackstraw, now,” Colquhoun was saying: “it was his room the body was found in. Has he been with you long?”

  “Oh, years,” Mr. Persimmons answered; “most of them have. All the people on this floor—and nearly all the rest. They’ve been here longer than me, most of them. You see, I came in just three years before my father retired—that’s seven years ago, and three’s ten.”

  “And Rackstraw was here before that?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly.”

  “Do you know anything of him?” the inspector pressed. “His address, now?”

  “Dalling has all that,” the unhappy Persimmons said. “He has all the particulars about the staff. I remember Rackstraw being married a few years ago.”

  “And what does he do here?” Colquhoun went on.

  “Oh, he does a good deal of putting books through, paper and type and binding, and so on. He rather looks after the fiction side. I’ve taken up fiction a good deal since my father went; that’s why the business has expanded so. We’ve got two of the best selling people to-day—Mrs. Clyde and John Bastable.”

  “Mrs. Clyde,” the inspector brooded. “Didn’t she write The Comet and the Star?”

  “That’s the woman. We sold ninety thousand,” Persimmons answered.

  “And what are your other lines?”

  “Well, my father used to do, in fact he began with, what you might call occult stuff. Mesmerism and astrology and histories of great sorcerers, and that sort of thing. It didn’t really pay very well.”

  “And does Mr. Rackstraw look after that too?” asked Colquhoun.

  “Well, some of it,” the publisher answered. “But of course, in a place like this things aren’t exactly divided just—just exactly. Mornington, now, Mornington looks after some books. Under me, of course,” he added hastily. “And then he does a good deal of the publicity, the advertisements, you know. And he does the reviews.”

  “What, writes them?” the inspector asked.

  “Certainly not,” said the publisher, shocked. “Reads them and chooses passages to quote. Writes them! Really, inspector!”

  “And how long has Mr. Mornington been here?” Colquhoun went on.

  “Oh, years and years. I tell you they all came before I did.”

  “I understand Mr. Rackstraw was out a long time at lunch to-day, with one of your authors. Would that be all right?”

  “I daresay he was,” Persimmons said, “if he said so.”

  “You don’t know that he was?” asked Colquhoun. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Really, inspector,” the worried Persimmons said again, “do you think my staff ask me for an hour off when they want to see an author? I give them their work and they do it.”

  “Sir Giles Tumulty,” the inspector said. “You know him?”

  “We’re publishing his last book, Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels in Folklore. The explorer and antiquarian, you know. Rackstraw’s had a lot of trouble with his illustrations, but he told me yesterday he thought he’d got them through. Yes, I can quite believe he went up to see him. But you can find out from Sir Giles, can’t you?”

  “What I’m getting at,” the inspector said, “is this. If any of your people are out, is there anything to prevent anyone getting into any of their rooms? There’s a front way and a back way in and nobody on watch anywhere.”

  “There’s a girl in the waiting-room,” Persimmons objected.

  “A girl!” the inspector answered. “Reading a novel when she’s not talking to anyone. She’d be a lot of good. Besides, there’s a corridor to the staircase alongside the waiting-room. And at the back there’s no-one.”

  “Well, one doesn’t expect strangers to drop in casually,” the publisher said unhappily. “I believe they do lock their doors sometimes, if they have to go out and have to leave a lot of papers all spread out.”

  “And leave the key in, I suppose?” Colquhoun said sarcastically.

  “Of course,” Persimmons answered. “Suppose I wanted something. Besides, it’s not to keep anyone out; it’s only just to save trouble and warn anyone going in to be careful, so to speak; it hardly ever happens. Besides——”

  Colquhoun cut him short. “What people mean by asking for a Government of business men, I don’t know,” he said. “I was a Conservative from boyhood, and I’m stauncher every year the more I see of business. There’s nothing to prevent anyone coming in.”

  “But they don’t,” said Persimmons.

  “But they have,” said Colquhoun. “It’s the unexpected that happens. Are you a religious man, Mr. Persimmons?”

  “Well, not—not exactly religious,” the publisher said hesitatingly. “Not what you’d call religious unpleasantly, I mean. But what——”

  “Nor am I,” the inspector said. “And I don’t get the chance to go to church much. But I’ve been twice with my wife to a Sunday evening service at her Wesleyan Church in the last few months, and it’s a remarkable thing, Mr. Persimmons, we had the same piece read from the Bible each time. It ended up—‘And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.’ It seemed to me fairly meant for the public. ‘What I say unto you,’ that’s us in the police, ‘I say unto all, Watch.’ If there was more of that there’d be fewer undiscovered murders. Well, I’ll go and see Mr. Dalling. Good day, Mr. Persimmons.”

  Chapter Two

  THE EVENING IN THREE HOMES

  I

  Adrian Rackstraw opened the oven, put the chicken carefully inside, and shut the door. Then he went back to the table, and realized suddenly that he had forgotten to buy the potatoes which were to accompany it. With a disturbed exclamation, he picked up the basket that lay in a corner, put on his hat, and set out on the new errand. He considered for a moment as he reached the garden gate to which of the two shops at which Mrs. Rackstraw indifferently supplied her needs he should go, and, deciding on the nearest, ran hastily down the road. At the shop, “Three potatoes,” he said in a low, rather worried voice.

  “Yes, sir,” the man answered. “Five shillings, please.”

  Adrian paid him, put the potatoes in the basket, and started back home. But as at the corner he waited for the trams to go by and leave a clear crossing, his eye was caught by the railway station on his left. He looked at it for a minute or two in considerable doubt; then, changing his mind on the importance of vegetables, went back to the shop, left his basket with orders that the potatoes should be sent at once, and hurried back to the station. Once in the train, he saw bridges and tunnels succeed one another in exciting succession as the engine, satisfactorily fastened to coal-truck and carriages, went rushing along the Brighton line. But, before it reached its destination, his mother, entering the room with her usual swiftness, caught the station with her foot and
sent it flying across the kitchen floor. Her immediate flood of apologies placated Adrian, however, and he left the train stranded some miles outside Brighton in order to assist her in preparing the food for dinner. She sat down on a chair for a moment, and he broke in again hastily.

  “Oh, mummie, don’t sit down there, that’s my table,” he said.

  “Darling, I’m so sorry,” Barbara Rackstraw answered. “Had you got anything on it?”

  “Well, I was going to put the dinner things,” Adrian explained. “I’ll just see if the chicken’s cooked. Oh, it’s lovely!”

  “How nice!” Barbara said abstractedly. “Is it a large chicken?”

  “Not a very large one,” Adrian admitted. “There’s enough for me and you and my Bath auntie.”

  “Oh,” said Barbara, startled, “is your Bath auntie here?”

  “Well, she may be coming,” said Adrian. “Mummie, why do I have a Bath auntie?”

  “Because a baby grew up into your Bath auntie, darling,” his mother said. “Unintentional but satisfactory, as far as it goes. Adrian, do you think your father will like cold sausages? Because there doesn’t seem to be anything else much.”

  “I don’t want any cold sausages,” Adrian said hurriedly.

  “No, my angel, but it’s the twenty-seventh of the month, and there’s never any money then,” Barbara said. “And here he is, anyhow.”

  Lionel, in spite of the shock that he had received in the afternoon, found himself, rather to his own surprise, curiously free from the actual ghost of it. His memory had obligingly lost the face of the dead man, and it was not until he came through the streets of Tooting that he began to understand that its effect was at once more natural and more profound than he had expected. His usual sense of the fantastic and dangerous possibilities of life, a sense which dwelled persistently in a remote corner of his mind, never showing itself in full, but stirring in the absurd alarm which shook him if his wife were ever late for an appointment—this sense now escaped from his keeping, and, instead of being too hidden, became too universal to be seized. The faces he saw, the words he heard existed in an enormous void, in which he himself—reduced to a face and voice, without deeper existence—hung for a moment, grotesque and timid. There had been for an hour some attempt to re-establish the work of the office, and he had initialled, before he left, a few memoranda which were brought to him. The “L. R.” of his signature seemed now to grow balloon-like and huge about him, volleying about his face at the same time that they turned within and around him in a slimy tangle. At similar, if less terrifying, moments, in other days, he had found that a concentration upon his wife had helped to steady and free him, but when this evening he made this attempt he found even in her only a flying figure with a face turned from him, whom he dreaded though he hastened to overtake. As he put his key in the lock he was aware that the thought of Adrian had joined the mad dance of possible deceptions, and it was with a desperate and machine-like courage that he entered to dare whatever horror awaited him.

  Nor did the ordinary interchange of greetings do much to disperse the cloud. It occurred to him even as he smiled at Barbara that perhaps another lover had not long left the house; it occurred to him even as he watched Adrian finding pictures of trains in the evening paper that a wild possibility—for a story perhaps; not, surely not, as truth—might be that of a child whose brain was that of the normal man of forty while all his appearance was that of four. An infant prodigy? No, but a prodigy who for some horrible reason of his own concealed his prodigiousness until the moment he expected should arrive. And when they left him to his evening meal, while Barbara engaged herself in putting Adrian to bed, a hundred memories of historical or fictitious crimes entered his mind in which the victim had been carefully poisoned under the shelter of a peaceful and happy domesticity. And not that alone or chiefly; it was not the possibility of administered poison that occupied him, but the question whether all food, and all other things also, were not in themselves poisonous. Fruit, he thought, might be; was there not in the nature of things some venom which nourished while it tormented, so that the very air he breathed did but enable him to endure for a longer time the spiritual malevolence of the world?

  Possessed by such dreams, he sat listless and alone until Barbara returned and settled herself down to the evening paper. The event of the afternoon occupied, he knew, the front page. He found himself incapable of speaking of it; he awaited the moment when her indolent eyes should find it. But that would not be, and indeed was not, till she had looked through the whole paper, delaying over remote paragraphs he had never noticed, and extracting interest from the mere superfluous folly of mankind. She turned the pages casually, glanced at the heading, glanced at the column, dropped the paper over the arm of her chair, and took up a cigarette.

  “He’s beginning to make quite recognizable letters,” she said. “He made quite a good K this afternoon.”

  This, Lionel thought despairingly, was an example of the malevolence of the universe; he had given it, and her, every chance. Did she never read the paper? Must he talk of it himself, and himself renew the dreadful memories in open speech?

  “Did you see,” he said, “what happened at our place this afternoon?”

  “No,” said Barbara, surprised; and then, breaking off, “Darling, you look so ill. Do you feel ill?”

  “I’m not quite the thing,” Lionel admitted. “You’ll see why, in there.” He indicated the discarded Star.

  Barbara picked it up. “Where?” she asked. “‘Murder in City publishing house.’ That wasn’t yours, I suppose? Lionel, it was! Good heavens, where?”

  “In my office,” Lionel answered, wondering whether some other corpse wasn’t hidden behind the chair in which she sat. Of course, they had found that one this afternoon, but mightn’t there be a body that other people couldn’t find, couldn’t even see? Barbara herself now: mightn’t she be really lying there dead? and this that seemed to sit there opposite him merely a projection of his own memories of a thousand evenings when she had sat so? What mightn’t be true, in this terrifying and obscene universe?

  Barbara’s voice—or the voice of the apparent Barbara—broke in. “But, dearest,” she said, “how dreadful for you! Why didn’t you tell me? You must have had a horrible time.” She dropped the paper again and hurled herself on to her knees beside him.

  He caught her hand in his own, and felt as if his body at least was sane, whatever his mind might be. After all, the universe had produced Barbara. And Adrian, who, though a nuisance, was at least delimited and real in his own fashion. The fantastic child of his dream, evil and cruel and vigilant, couldn’t at the same time have Adrian’s temper and Adrian’s indefatigable interest in things. Even devils couldn’t be normal children at the same time. He brought his wife’s wrist to his cheek, and the touch subdued the rising hysteria within him. “It was rather a loathsome business,” he said, and put out his other hand for the cigarettes.

  II

  Mornington had on various occasions argued with Lionel whether pessimism was always the result of a too romantic, even a too sentimental, view of the world; and a slightly scornful mind pointed out to him, while he ate a solitary meal in his rooms that evening, that the shock which he undoubtedly had felt was the result of not expecting people to murder other people. “Whereas they naturally do,” he said to himself. “The normal thing with an unpleasant intrusion is to try and exclude it—human or not. So silly not to be prepared for these things. Some people, as De Quincey said, have a natural aptitude for being murdered. To kill or to be killed is a perfectly reasonable thing. And I will not let it stop me taking those lists round to the Vicar’s.”

  He got up, collected the papers which he had been analysing for reports on parochial finance, and went off to the Vicarage of St. Cyprian’s, which was only a quarter of an hour from his home. He disliked himself for doing work that he disliked, but he had never been able to refuse help to any of his friends; and the Vicar might be numbered amon
g them. Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. It was because the Vicar, a hard-worked practical priest, had been driven by stress of experience to some similar standpoint that the two occasionally found one another congenial.

  That evening, however, he found a visitor at the Vicarage, a round, dapper little cleric in gaiters, who was smoking a cigar and turning over the pages of a manuscript. The Vicar pulled Mornington into the study where they were sitting.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “come in, come in. We’ve been talking about you. Let me introduce the Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum—Mr. Mornington. What a dreadful business this is at your office! Did you have anything to do with it?”

  Mornington saluted the Archdeacon, who took off his eyeglasses and bowed back. “Dreadful,” he said, tentatively Mornington thought; rather as if he wasn’t quite sure what the other wanted him to say, and was anxious to accommodate himself to what was expected. “Yes, dreadful!”

  “Well,” Mornington answered, rebelling against this double sympathy, “of course, it was a vast nuisance. It disturbed the whole place. And I forgot to send the copy for our advertisement in the Bookman—so we shan’t get in this month. That’s the really annoying part. I hate being defeated by a murder. And it wasn’t even in my own room.”

  “Ah, that’s the trade way of looking at it,” the Vicar said. “You’ll have some coffee? But this poor fellow … is it known at all who he was?”