by Hugh Walpole
When Bunning (the clocks were striking eleven) came blinking in upon him he was muttering— “Let me go, let me go. I killed him, I tell you. I’m glad I killed him. . . . Oh! Let me alone! For pity’s sake let me alone! I can’t confess! Don’t you see that I can’t confess? There’s Margaret. I must keep her — afterwards when she knows me better I’ll tell her.”
As he faced Bunning’s staring glasses, the thought came to Him, “Am I going mad? — Has it been too much for me? — Mad?”
He stopped, wheeled round, caught the table with both hands, and leaned over to Bunning, who stood, his mouth open, his cap and gown still on.
Olva very gravely said: “Come in, Bunning. Shut the door. ‘Sport’ it.
That’s right. Take off your gown and sit down.”
The man, still staring, white and frightened, sat down.
Olva spoke slowly and very distinctly: “I’m glad you’ve come. I want to talk to you. I killed Carfax, you know.” As he said the words he began slowly to come back to himself from the Other World to this one. How often, sleeping, waking, had he said those words! How often, aloud, in his room, with his door locked, had he almost shouted them!
He was not now altogether sure whether Bunning were really there or no.
His spectacles were there, his boots were there, but was Bunning there?
If he were not there. . . .
But he was there. Olva’s brain slowly cleared and, for the first time for many weeks, he was entirely himself. It was the first moment of peace that he had known since that hour in St. Martin’s Chapel.
He was quiet, collected, perfectly calm. He went over to the window,
opened it, and rejoiced in the breeze. The room seemed suddenly empty.
Five minutes ago it had been crowded, breathless. There was now only
Bunning.
“It was so awfully hot with that enormous fire,” he said.
Bunning’s condition was peculiar. He sat, his large fat face white and streaky, beads of perspiration on his forehead, his hands gripping the sides of the armchair. His boots stuck up in the most absurd manner, like interrogation marks. He watched Olva’s face fearfully. At last he gasped —
“I say, Dune, you’re ill. You are really — you’re overdone. You ought to see some one, you know. You ought really, you ought to go to bed.” His words came in jerks.
Olva crossed the room and stood looking down upon him.
“No, Bunning, I’m perfectly well. . . . There’s nothing the matter with me. My nerves have been a bit tried lately by this business, keeping it all alone, and it’s a great relief to me to have told you.”
The fact forced itself upon Bunning’s brain. At last in a husky whisper: “You . . . killed . . . Carfax?” And then the favourite expression of such weak souls as he: “Oh! my God! Oh! my God!”
“Now look here, don’t get hysterical about it. You’ve got to take it quietly as I do. You said the other day you’d do anything for me. . . . Well, now you’ve got a chance of proving your devotion.”
“My God! My God!” The boots feebly tapped the floor.
“I had to tell somebody. It was getting on my nerves. I suppose it gives you a kind of horror of me. Don’t mind saying so if it does.”
Bunning, taking out a grimy handkerchief, wiped his forehead. He shook his head without speaking.
Olva sat down in the chair opposite him and lit his pipe.
“I want to tell somebody all about it. You weren’t really, I suppose, the best person to tell. You’re a hysterical sort of fellow and you’re easily frightened, but you happened to come in just when I was rather worked up about it. At any rate you’ve got to face it now and you must pull yourself together as well as you can. . . . Move away from the fire, if you’re hot.”
Bunning shook his head.
Olva continued: “I’m going to try to put it quite plainly to you, the
Carfax part of it I mean. There are other things that have happened
since that I needn’t bother you with, but I’d like you to understand why
I did it.”
“Oh! my God!” said Bunning. He was trembling from head to foot and his fat hands rattled on the woodwork of the chair and his feet rattled on the floor.
“I met Carfax first at my private school — a little, fat dirty boy he was then, and fat and dirty he’s been ever since. I hated him, but I was always pleasant to him. He wasn’t worth being angry with. He always did rotten things. He knew more filthy things than the other boys, and he was a bully — a beastly bully. I think he knew that I bated him, but we were on perfectly good terms. I think he was always a little afraid of me, but it’s curious to remember that we never had a quarrel of any kind, until the day when I killed him.”
Olva paused and asked Bunning to have a drink. Bunning, gazing at him with desperate eyes, shook his head.
“Then we went on to Rugby together. It’s odd how Fate has apparently been determined to hammer out our paths side by side. Carfax grew more and more beastly. He always did the filthiest things and yet out of it all seemed to the world at large a perfectly decent fellow. He was clever in that way. I am not trying to defend myself. I’m making it perfectly straightforward and just as it really was. He knew that I knew him better than anybody, and as we went on at Rugby I think that his fear of me grew. I didn’t hate him so much for being Carfax, but rather as standing for all sorts of rotten things. It didn’t matter to me in the least whether he was a beast or not, I’m a beast myself, but it did matter that he should smile about it and have damp hands. When I touched his hand I always wanted to hit him.
“I’ve got a very sudden temper, all my family are like that — calm most of the time and then absolutely wild. I hated him more up here at College than I’d hated him at school. He developed and still his reputation was just the same, decent fellows like Craven followed him, excused him; he had that cheery manner. . . . Hating him became a habit with me. I hated everything that he did — his rolling walk down the Court, his red colour, his football . . . and then he ruined that fellow Thompson. That was a poor game, but no one seemed to think anything of it . . . and indeed he and I seemed to be very good friends. He used to sneer at me behind my back, I know, but I didn’t mind that. Any one’s at liberty to sneer if they like. But he was really afraid of me . . . always.
“Then at last there was this girl that he set about destroying. He seduced her, promised her marriage. I knew all about it, because she used to be rather a friend of mine. I warned her, but she was absolutely infatuated — wouldn’t hear of anything that I had to say, thought it all jealousy. She wasn’t the kind of girl who could stand disgrace. . . . She came to him one day and told him that she was going to have a baby. He laughed at her in the regular old conventional way . . . and that very afternoon, after he had seen her, he met me — there in Sannet Wood.
“He began to boast about it, told me jokingly about the way that he’d ‘shut her mouth,’ as he called it . . . laughed . . . I hit him. I meant to hit him hard, I hated him so; I think that I wanted to kill him. All the accumulated years were in that blow, I suppose; at any rate, I caught him on the chin and it broke his neck and he dropped . . . that’s all.”
Olva paused, finished his drink, and ended with —
“There it is — it’s simple enough. I’m not in the least sorry I killed him. I’ve no regrets; he was better out of the world than in it, and I’ve probably saved a number of people from a great deal of misery. I thought at first that I should be caught, but they aren’t very sharp round here and there was really nothing to connect me with it. But there were other things — there’s more in killing a man than the mere killing. I haven’t been able to stand the loneliness — so I told you.”
The last words brought him back to Bunning, a person whom he had almost forgotten. A sudden pity for the man’s distress made his voice tender. “I say, Running, I oughtn’t to have told you. It’s been too much for you. But if you knew the relief that it is
to me. . . . Though, mind you, if it’s on your conscience, if it burdens you, you must ‘out’ with it. Don’t have any scruples about me. But it needn’t burden you. You hadn’t any-thing to do with it. You were here and I told you. That’s all. I’ve shown you that I want you as a friend.”
For answer the creature burst suddenly into tears, hiding his face in his sleeve, as small boys hide their faces, and choking out desperately —
“Oh! my God! Oh! my God!”
CHAPTER X
CRAVEN
1
That evening Olva was elected President of the Wolves. It was a ceremony conducted with closed doors and much drinking of wine, by a committee of four and the last reigning President who had the casting vote. The College waited in suspense and at eleven o’clock it was understood that Dune had been elected.
According to custom, on the day following in “Hall” Olva would be cheered by the assembled undergraduates whilst the gods on the dais smiled gently and murmured that “boys will be boys.”
Meanwhile the question that agitated the Sauline world was the way that Cardillac would take it. “If it had been any one else but Dune . . .” but it couldn’t have been any one else. There was no other possible rival, and “Cards,” like the rest of the world, bowed to Dune’s charm. The Dublin match, to be played now in a fortnight’s time, would settle the football question. It was generally expected that they would try Dune in that match and judge him finally then on his play. There was a good deal of betting on the matter, and those who remembered his earlier games said that nothing could ever make Dune a reliable player and that it was a reliable player that was wanted.
When Olva came into “Hall” that evening he was conscious of two pairs of eyes, Craven’s and Bunning’s. On either side of the high vaulted hall the tables were ranged, and men, shouting, waving their glasses, lined the benches. Olva’s place was at the end farthest from the door and nearest the High Table, and he had therefore the whole room to cross. He was smiling a little, a faint colour in his cheeks. At his own end of the table Craven was standing, silent, with his eyes gravely fixed upon Olva’s face. Half-way down the hall there was Bunning, and Olva could see, as he passed up the room, that the man was trembling and was pressing his hands down upon the table to hold his body still.
When Olva had sat down and the cheering had passed again into the cheerful hum that was customary, the first voice that greeted him was Cardillac’s.
“Congratulations, old man. I’m delighted.”
There was no question of Cardillac’s sincerity. Craven was sitting four places lower down; he had turned the other way and was talking eagerly to some man on his farther side — but the eyes that had met Olva’s two minutes before had been hostile.
Cardillac went on: “Come in to coffee afterwards, Dune; several men are coming in.”
Olva thanked him and said that he would. The world was waiting to see how “Cards” would take it, and, beyond question, “Cards” was taking it very well. Indeed an observer might have noticed that “Cards” was too absorbed by the way that Dune was “taking it” to “take it” himself consciously at all. Olva’s aloof surveying of the world about him, as a man on a hill surveys the town in the valley, made of “Cards’” last year and a half a gaudy and noisy thing. He had thought that his attitude had been nicely adjusted, but now he saw that there were still heights to be reached — perhaps in this welcome that he was giving to Dune’s success he might attain his position. . . . Not, in any way, a bad fellow, this Cardillac — but obsessed by a self-conscious conviction that the world was looking at him; the world never looks for more than an instant at self-consciousness, but it dearly loves self-forgetfulness, for that implies a compliment to itself.
Afterwards, in Cardillac’s handsome and over-careful rooms, there was an attempt at depth. The set — Lawrence, Galleon, Craven and five or six more — never thought about Life unless drink drove them to do so, and drink drove them to-night. A long, thin man, Williamson by name, with a half-Blue for racquets and a pensive manner, had a favourite formula on these occasions: “But think of a rabbit now . . .” only conveying by the remark that here was a proof of God’s supreme, astounding carelessness. “You shoot it, you know, without turning a hair (no joke, you rotter), and it breeds millions a week . . . and — does it think about it, that’s what I want to know? Where’s its soul?
“Hasn’t got a soul. . . .”
“Well, what is the soul, anyway?”
There you are-the thing’s properly started, and the more the set drinks the vaguer it gets until finally it goes happily to bed and wakes with a headache and a healthy opinion that “Religion and that sort of stuff is rot” in the morning. That is precisely as far as intellect ever ventured in Saul’s. There may have been quaint obscure fellows who sported their oaks every night and talked cleverly on ginger-beer, but they were not admitted as part of the scheme of things. . . . Saulines, to quote Lawrence, “are not clever.”
They were not especially clever to-night, thought Olva, as he sat in the shadow away from the light of the fire and watched them sitting back in enormous armchairs, with their legs stretched out, blowing wreaths of smoke into the air, drinking whiskies and sodas . . . no, not clever.
Craven, the shadows blacker than ever under his eyes, was on the opposite side of the room from Olva. He sat with his head down and was silent.
“Think of a rabbit now,” said Williamson.
“I suppose,” said Galleon, who was not gifted, “that they’re happy enough.”
“Yes, but what do they make of it all?”
At this moment Craven suddenly burst in with “Where’s Carfax?”
This question was felt by every one to be tactless. Elaborately, with great care and some considerable effort, Carfax had been forgotten — forgotten, it seemed, by every one save Craven. He had been forgotten because his death did not belong to the Cambridge order of things, because it raised unpleasant ideas, and made one morbid and neurotic. It had, in fact, nothing in common with cold baths, marmalade, rugby football, and musical comedy.
On the present occasion the remark was especially unpleasant because Craven had made it in so odd a manner. During the last few weeks it had been very generally noticed that Craven had not been himself — so pleasant and healthy a fellow he had always been, but now this Carfax business was too much for him. “Look out for young Craven” had been the general warning, implied if not expressed. Persons who threatened to be unusual were always marked down in Cambridge.
And now Craven had been unusual— “Where’s Carfax?” . . . What a dreadful thing to say and how tactless! The note, moreover, in Craven’s voice sounded a danger. There was something in the air as though the fellow might, at any moment, burst into tears, fire a pistol into the air, or jump out of the window! So unpleasant, and Carfax was much more real, even now, than an abstract rabbit.
“Dear boy,” said Cardillac, easily, “Carfax is dead. We all miss him — it was a beastly, horrible affair, but there’s no point in dwelling on things; one only gets morbid, and morbidity isn’t what we’re here for.”
“It’s all very well,” Craven was angrily muttering, “but it’s scandalous the way you forget a man. Here he was, amongst the whole lot of you, only a month or so ago and he was a friend of every one’s. And then some brute kills him — he’s done for — and you don’t care a damn . . . it’s beastly — it makes one sick.”
“Where do you think he is, Craven?” Olva asked quietly from his shadowy corner.
Craven flung up his head. “Perhaps you can tell us,” he cried. There was such hostility in his voice that the whole room was startled. Poor Craven! He really was very unwell. The sight of his tired eyes and white cheeks, the shadow of his hand quivering on his knee — here were signs that all was not as it should be. Gone, now, at any rate, any possibility of a comfortable evening. Craven said no more but still sat there with his head banging, his only movement the shaking of his hand.
; Cardillac tried to bring ease back again, Williamson once more started his rabbits, but now there was danger in that direction. Conversation fell, heavily, helplessly, to the ground. Some man got up to go and some one else followed him. It was the wrong moment for departure for they had drunk enough to make it desirable to drink more, but to escape from that white face of Craven’s was the thing — out into the air.
At last Craven himself got up. “I must be off,” he said heavily.
“So must I,” Olva said, coming forward from his corner. Craven flung him a frightened glance and then passed stumbling out of the door.
Olva caught him up at the bottom of the dark stairs. He put a hand on
Craven’s trembling arm and held him there.
“I want to talk to you, Craven. Come up to my room.”
Craven tried to wrench his arm away. “No, I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”
“You haven’t been near me for weeks. Why?”
“Oh, nothing — let me go. I’ll come up another time.”
“No, I must talk to you — now. Come.” Olva’s voice was stern — his face white and hard.
“No — I won’t.”
“You must. I won’t keep you long. I have something to tell you.”
Craven suddenly ceased to struggle. He gazed straight into Olva’s eyes, and the look that he gave him was the strangest thing — something of terror, something of anger, a great wonder, and even — strangest of all! — a struggling affection.
“I’ll come,” he said.
In Olva’s room he stood, a disturbed figure facing the imperturbability of the other man with restless eyes and hands that moved up and down against his coat. Olva commanded the situation, with stern eyes he seemed to be the accuser. . . .
“Sit down — fill a pipe.”
“No, I won’t sit — what do you want?”
“Please sit. It’s so much easier for us both to talk. I can’t say the things that I want to when you’re standing over me. Please sit down.”
Craven sat down.
Olva faced him. “Now look here, Craven, a little time ago you came and wished that we should see a good deal of one another. You came in here often and you took me to see your people. You were charming . . . I was delighted to be with you.”