by E. Nesbit
And we came to Bruges at last in our travels, and Bruges was very full, because of the Exhibition. We could only get one room and one bed. So we tossed for the bed, and the one who lost the toss was to make the best of the night in the armchair. And the bed-clothes we were to share equitably.
We spent the evening at a café chantant and finished at a beer hall, and it was late and sleepy when we got back to the Grande Vigne. I took our key from its nail in the concierge’s room, and we went up. We talked awhile, I remember, of the town, and the belfry, and the Venetian aspect of the canals by moonlight, and then Haldane got into bed, and I made a chrysalis of myself with my share of the blankets and fitted the tight roll into the armchair. I was not at all comfortable, but I was compensatingly tired, and I was nearly asleep when Haldane roused me up to tell me about his will.
‘I’ve left everything to you, old man,’ he said. ‘I know I can trust you to see to everything.’
‘Quite so,’ said I, ‘and if you don’t mind, we’ll talk about it in the morning.’
He tried to go on about it, and about what a friend I’d been, and all that, but I shut him up and told him to go to sleep. But no. He wasn’t comfortable, he said. And he’d got a thirst like a lime kiln. And he’d noticed that there was no water-bottle in the room. ‘And the water in the jug’s like pale soup,’ he said.
‘Oh, all right,’ said I. ‘Light your candle and go and get some water, then, in Heaven’s name, and let me get to sleep.’
But he said, ‘No – you light it. I don’t want to get out of bed in the dark. I might – I might step on something, mightn’t I – or walk into something that wasn’t there when I got into bed.’
‘Rot,’ I said, ‘walk into your grandmother.’ But I lit the candle all the same. He sat up in bed and looked at me – very pale – with his hair all tumbled from the pillow, and his eyes blinking and shining.
‘That’s better,’ he said. And then, ‘I say – look here. Oh – yes – I see. It’s all right. Queer how they mark the sheets here. Blest if I didn’t think it was blood, just for the minute.’
The sheet was marked, not at the corner, as sheets are marked at home, but right in the middle where it turns down, with big, red, cross-stitching.
‘Yes, I see,’ I said, ‘it is a queer place to mark it.’
‘It’s queer letters to have on it,’ he said. ‘G.V.’
‘Grande Vigne,’ I said. ‘What letters do you expect them to mark things with? Hurry up.’
‘You come too,’ he said. ‘Yes, it does stand for Grande Vigne, of course. I wish you’d come down too, Winston.’
‘I’ll go down,’ I said and turned with the candle in my hand.
He was out of bed and close to me in a flash.
‘No,’ said he, ‘I don’t want to stay alone in the dark.’
He said it just as a frightened child might have done.
‘All right then, come along,’ I said. And we went. I tried to make some joke, I remember, about the length of his hair, and the cut of his pyjamas – but I was sick with disappointment. For it was almost quite plain to me, even then, that all my time and trouble had been thrown away, and that he wasn’t cured after all. We went down as quietly as we could, and got a carafe of water from the long bare dining table in the salle-à-manger. He got hold of my arm at first, and than he got the candle away from me, and went very slowly, shading the light with his hand, and looking very carefully all about, as though he expected to see something that he wanted very desperately not to see. And of course, I knew what that something was. I didn’t like it. And he looked over his shoulder every now and then, just as he did that first evening after I came back from India.
The thing got on my nerves so that I could hardly find the way back to our room. And when we got there, I give you my word, I more than half expected to see what he had expected to see – that, or something like that, on the hearth-rug. But of course there was nothing.
I blew out the light and tightened my blankets round me – I’d been trailing them after me in our expedition. And I was settled in my chair when Haldane spoke.
‘You’ve got all the blankets,’ he said.
‘No, I haven’t,’ said I, ‘only what I’ve always had.’
‘I can’t find mine then,’ he said, and I could hear his teeth chattering. ‘And I’m cold. I’m … For God’s sake, light the candle. Light it. Light it. Something horrible …’
And I couldn’t find the matches.
‘Light the candle, light the candle,’ he said, and his voice broke, as a boy’s does sometimes in chapel. ‘If you don’t he’ll come to me. It is so easy to come at anyone in the dark. Oh Winston, light the candle, for the love of God! I can’t die in the dark.’
‘I am lighting it,’ I said savagely, and I was feeling for the matches on the marble-topped chest of drawers, on the mantelpiece – everywhere but on the round centre table where I’d put them. ‘You’re not going to die. Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. I’ll get a light in a second.’
He said, ‘It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold,’ like that, three times. And then he screamed aloud, like a woman – like a child – like a hare when the dogs have got it. I had heard him scream like that once before.
‘What is it?’ I cried, hardly less loud. ‘For God’s sake, hold your noise. What is it?’
There was an empty silence. Then, very slowly:
‘It’s Visger,’ he said. And he spoke thickly, as through some stifling veil.
‘Nonsense. Where?’ I asked, and my hand closed on the matches as he spoke.
‘Here,’ he screamed sharply, as though he had torn the veil away, ‘here, beside me. In the bed.’
I got the candle alight. I got across to him.
He was crushed in a heap at the edge of the bed. Stretched on the bed beyond him was a dead man, white and very cold.
Haldane had died in the dark.
It was all so simple.
We had come to the wrong room. The man the room belonged to was there, on the bed he had engaged and paid for before he died of heart disease, earlier in the day. A French commis-voyageur representing soap and perfumery; his name, Felix Leblanc.
Later, in England, I made cautious enquiries. The body of a man had been found in the Red Hill tunnel – a haberdasher man named Simmons, who had drunk spirits of salts, owing to the depression of trade. The bottle was clutched in his dead hand.
For reasons that I had, I took care to have a police inspector with me when I opened the boxes that came to me by Haldane’s will. One of them was the big box, metal lined, in which I had sent him the skins from India – for a wedding present, God help us all!
It was closely soldered.
Inside were the skins of the beasts? No. The bodies of two men. One was identified, after some trouble, as that of a hawker of pens in city offices – subject to fits. He had died in one, it seemed. The other body was Visger’s, right enough.
Explain it as you like. I offered you, if you remember, a choice of explanations before I began the story. I have not yet found the explanation that can satisfy me.
THE HEAD
I
When your personal appearance is best described by the enumeration of your clothes, your character by the trade mark on the gilt waistband of your cigar, and your profession ‘just anything that comes along, don’t you know’, you are not exactly the right man in the right place, when you find yourself up to your knees in mud, your carriage with a wheel off lying prone in a ditch several fields off, and your chance of getting to the house, where a music hall star has given you an inconvenient rendezvous, less than the least crumb of the biscuit you wish you had put in your pocket before starting.
Morris Diehl cursed his luck in the grey of a winter’s dusk. His driver had left the carriage and gone back with the horses to the inn where he had lunched. His boots were full of water, his high hat seamed and scratched by the skeleton-fingered trees that leaned here and there over the
stone walls. His cigar, long since cold, its end wet and flattened and gnawed, lay foul between his lips. He threw it away. He was lost, beyond a doubt lost, on these confounded Derbyshire hills, where every field is just the same as every other field, and the stone walls have no more of individual distinction than the faint blue-grey lines of a copy book.
If he had only had the sense to stay where the coachman had left him or, better still, at the Inn, the Inn down in the valley, where the Station was – where there were lights, and voices, and things to drink. Tottie de Vere, the star on whom hung all the hopes of his newest venture – a Company for promoting Cafés Chantants in Manchester, Liverpool, and Bolton – Tottie de Vere had declined to give any appointment save this: he might call on her between six and seven at Sir Alexander Brisbane’s, the grey house with acres of glass, ten miles from anywhere. And he had tried to keep the appointment, tried with unreasonable determination, and there he was.
Lights and voices – and things to drink. To eat, also. For Mr Diehl was not only thirsty. He was hungry as well, and cold and lonely. He thought of the Strand and the lights of the Strand, lights from restaurants and theatres, where one smelt French cooking, and the patchouli, and the Regalias. These were to him what, to some of us, the home pastures and the scent of stocks and woodsmoke are. He had waited by the carriage till he had grown certain that all men were alike and that his driver would, warmed and comforted in the ale-house, not be such a fool as to keep his promise and come back ‘with a trap’. He had walked up and down the road for a while, the bleak wind nuzzling in between his neck and the fur collar of his big coat; and then he had started to reach Sir Alexander’s on foot, seen a light, and been beguiled by it to what he esteemed a short-cut. Even if it were not Sir Alexander’s light yet any light meant a possible fire – shelter, at any rate, from that too intimate North-Easter.
He was going now, difficultly towards the light. Across the fields and over the eternal sameness of grey walls – black, they seemed, in that sombre twilight of cold stars. Beyond the last wall was a little hill brook. He was in it almost knee-deep before he guessed at anything worse than the cold muddy pastures. The next wall had a gate; he saw the blacker blank and made for it. His fur-lined coat caught on its hasp and ripped, loudly. And his hat was struck by some silly arch or other above the gate, and fell, rolling hollowly on the flags.
‘Damn,’ said Mr Diehl. ‘Oh, damn and blast.’ He groped for the hat in the dark dampness, found it; and, then he was at the door of the cottage whose windows, all alight, had beckoned him from afar.
‘There must be a wedding or a wake,’ said he. ‘Copy, either way.’ He was, casually, a journalist when financial enterprises were cold to him.
He knocked. He had not been conscious of any movement in the house, but now he was conscious of a cessation of movement, and of a silence, as though something inside the house were holding its breath.
‘Who’s there?’ The voice came from behind the door – low down, as though the speaker had been trying to look out into the dark through the keyhole.
‘I’ve lost my way,’ said Mr Diehl.
‘You’ll find it – some way or other,’ said the voice.
‘I’m very wet – and tired. I should be very grateful for a night’s lodging, Sir.’
He added the Sir because the note of the voice was distinctly feminine, and he saw that the door would open more readily to one whose honesty of purpose was so clear and fine, that it could persist even in the face of the conviction that there was ‘a man in the house’. Mr Diehl’s mind – it was not the mind of a fool – pictured a faded woman, her terror at this late visit soothed and charmed by the solid compliments it was part of his trade to sow broadcast, with both hands, on any soil. The harvest, he knew, rarely failed.
‘Ah, have pity,’ he said, all the pathos of a hundred melodramas reinforcing the earnest pleading of gross physical discomfort. ‘I am lost on these wild moors – I shall die if you do not assist me. Have pity on me and God will reward you.’
‘You can go back the way you came,’ said the voice.
‘I shall die,’ he said, piteously, but very distinctly, as his elocution master had taught him in the days when he meant to be an actor. ‘I shall die if you turn me away. My death will be at your door – Ah, save me, for the love of God.’
‘For the love of God?’ the voice repeated slowly, ‘For the love …’
The rest was lost in the rusty withdrawal of bolts. The door creaked open a brilliant inch.
‘No one’s crossed this door this ten years past,’ said the voice – ‘but I can’t let a human creature perish by fire or by cold. For the love of God, come in.’ The door was flung back. Within was a little square hall or lobby – narrow stairs led up in front of Mr Diehl. To the right, a closed door; to the, left, the outer door held open.
‘Go and stand on the stairs,’ said the thin treble voice, ‘till I get the door shut.’
From the stairs Morris watched to see the door closed by that spare, fluttering woman’s form. But it was a man who shut the door and barred it, and then turned to the visitor the cold, calm face of one wholly self-possessed.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Since you are here, I’ll do what I can for you. Get off your wet things. I’ll go and fetch you a change.’
Diehl, alone in a fire-lit kitchen, threw off the wet fur coat across a brown wood settle, loosened his squelching patent leather boots, and heard above him the muffled sound of footsteps on old worm-eaten boards, the creak of old beams, the opening and shutting of drawers and presses.
He had got to bare feet and a costume like that of a Corsican brother in reduced and muddy circumstances when his host returned, an armful of clothing over his arm.
‘Here,’ he said in his thin treble, ‘get into these. It’ll be easy. I was a bigger man than ever you’ll be.’
He was, now, a smaller man – smaller by the stooping shoulders, the narrow chest, the yellow leanness of wrists and neck, by, in a word, age. He was an old man, white-haired and pale. Nothing was young in face and figure, save only the eyes – and they would not have shone amiss in the face of an adventurer of twenty.
Hot gin and water, the generous half of a plate-pie, one’s feet in borrowed large shoes among the grey ashes, to whose centre fire had been forced to life by big bellows …
Morris Diehl expanded – and, when expanded, he looked better than in his fur coat. He was resolved to stay the night. He pledged his host again and again in the hot sugary drink, adding strength to the other’s glass from the brown demijohn, whenever the old man left the fire for more wood, or to fill the kettle, or to bring out his tobacco jar from the disused oven where he stored it – ‘to keep moist,’ he said. He grew more cordial, and Diehl, who was by nature an actor anywhere but on the boards, which paralysed him, set so gay a tune of good fellowship that the other’s mind soon danced to it.
‘I’m glad I let you in. Yes, by God, I’m glad I broke my vow. You’re a good fellow, sir, pardoning the liberty, and this night’s the whitest I’ve known for ten years. How old would you take me to be, now?’
The question was awkward. As a woman of thirty is said to subtract passionately to make a total of twenty-seven, so men who are far gone in their seventies will add to their years, and claim your amazed admiration as gaffers of eighty-six.
Diehl looked hard at the old man. He would have liked to rest his decision on the spinning of a coin.
‘Not much past sixty,’ struck him as a tactful compromise.
The old man laughed, well pleased, as it seemed.
‘I’m forty-three, come Lady Day, and seven days beyond,’ he said. ‘I was born on All Fools’ Day, three-and-forty years ago, and christened April by the same token, like the fool I am. April Vane’s my name. “Vane by name and vain by nature,” they used to say when I was a young man – though you wouldn’t think it to look at me now.’
‘I beg your pardon.’ Diehl had no other counter ready.
; ‘Not at all, sir, not at all,’ the old man rejoined. ‘It ’ud be a wonder if you could guess my age. Why, my hair went white like you see it – in three days.’
‘You had some shock, I suppose,’ said Morris, and he sipped the hot gin; ‘it’s a sad world, God help us.’
‘I don’t tell my story to strangers,’ said the other, with shrill, sudden dignity.
‘I trust,’ said Diehl in his best manner, ‘that I can sympathise with another man’s sorrows without seeking to thrust myself into his confidence.’
Even as he spoke, he saw how well the old man, the remote house, the air of mystery, would serve him in an article for the Daily Bellower – could he but learn the secret of this hermit’s grief. He saw the headlines:
AN ENGLISH HERMIT
TRAGIC STORY
A BROKEN LIFE
‘No,’ said the other; ‘no – of course not. You’re a gentleman. Anyone could see that. Let alone your fur coat.’
‘I’ve known trouble myself,’ said the guest, and told a tale. A long tale full of pathetic incidents, a tale whose denouement may have been suggested by the prostrate stump of his cigar against the leg of the table – by that, or by something more subtle.
‘I saw my angel girl,’ he ended, ‘at the window of that burning house. How could I save her? I rushed forward. “Darling,” I cried, “I am coming to rescue you!” I plunged among the burning débris, and knew no more, ’til I woke in hospital with a broken heart – and this.’
He pulled up his sleeve and showed a scar, got in a drunken fight with a Jew in Johannesburg – the weapons, whisky bottles.
‘They cured my face burns,’ he added. Smoothing his heavy moustache, ‘these hardly show, even by daylight, but that scar I shall carry to my grave.’
There was silence. Then:
‘Why did you go on living?’ asked the other man, his voice tense as the string of a violin.
‘I … oh … my poor old mother,’ said Diehl, whose mother had died in giving birth to him, her only child; ‘for her sake, don’t you know, and my little sister.’