The Bath Mysteries

by E. R. Punshon

  Lawrence seemed about to make some angry remark and then changed his mind. He was sitting at the table now, and they were both silent. Bobby, watching closely, saw by the flickering and uncertain light that came through the broken mantle on the gas pendant how Lawrence’s expression had altered. His utter, frozen indifference had been broken now; it was as if he had become aware of his environment; his eyes were no longer aloof but living, as if these stories of the past had drawn him from his perpetual contemplation of it and made him more conscious of the present. Bobby continued:

  “The letter I got tonight said the reason you went for the warder, and got flogged for it, was because you had seen him put his foot on a mouse.”

  “It wasn’t that so much,” Lawrence explained in hesitating, doubtful tones, “it was the way he did it – deliberately, as if he thought it fun. I suppose, in a prison, a mouse means a lot; it comes and goes, and you can watch it; you can’t come and go, but the mouse can, and so you watch. When he did it, I hit out at him without thinking – I mean without thinking who he was and what I was. I was in good condition then, whatever I am now, and I had him down in a moment. Some other warders came up and went for me, and I lost my head a bit, I suppose, and went for them, too. So after that they tied me up and flogged me. You don’t know what it is, to be tied up and whipped. I think they whipped the soul and heart out of me.”

  They were both silent again, both thinking deeply.

  Lawrence muttered:

  “It was being tied up and whipped. It was deliberate... like the mouse. Deliberate. It was afterwards I heard about mother. She had stood it about the five years, but when she knew I had been flogged with the cat – she couldn’t.”

  “No,” said Bobby, “no.”

  “It wasn’t that it hurt so awfully, it wasn’t the pain – it hurt all right, but anyone can stand pain if they’ve got to. It was its being done so deliberately,” Lawrence said, and added: “Like the mouse under that warder’s boot.”

  “I expect,” Bobby mused, “only the very best and the very worst can go through a flogging and remain unchanged.”

  “I was changed, I think,” Lawrence said. “Afterwards I felt somehow I wasn’t like a man any more.”

  “Afterwards,” Bobby said, “they found out things about that warder and he got the sack, didn’t he? But they couldn’t unflog you.”

  “No,” agreed Lawrence, “and they couldn’t make me feel a man again – nothing can. I’m just a thing that’s been tied up and whipped. Not even God can alter that.”

  “I suppose God can do what He can do,” Bobby said.

  Lawrence seemed to be sinking back into his former abstraction.

  “It’s all past now,” he said.

  “You’re making it the present,” Bobby told him, and went on in a tone he tried to make hard and sneering: “Oh, yes, you talk about cruelty – cruelty to a mouse, cruelty to a girl when you saw a man putting a lighted cigarette-end on her wrist. All that upsets you a whole lot, doesn’t it?”

  “Cruelty always did, somehow, I don’t know why; seeing helpless things ill-used always upset me. I dare say it wouldn’t now. Who told you about the Embankment?”

  “Well, we’ll be getting on,” Bobby said, “but I wouldn’t talk about cruelty to helpless things upsetting you if I were you – not while you’re trying your best to poke a helpless girl’s eyes out. Worse, if you ask me, than squashing a mouse; worse than putting a lighted cigarette to her wrist. Not that you care, you and your talk about cruelty.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lawrence said, staring at Bobby in bewilderment, his tones more human than any he had used before.

  “I’m talking about a girl who is going blind,” Bobby answered, “going blind because she’s working her eyes out to get money to help you and all you do is keep your hands in your pockets and look on.”

  “I don’t know –”

  “Of course you don’t,” Bobby interrupted sharply. “Why should you? The fellow who flogged you didn’t know either. Why should he? That made no difference. You were flogged and her sight’s going.”

  “You mean Alice – Miss Yates?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bobby answered, shrugging his shoulders. “It isn’t you, anyhow, so that’s all right. We’ll be getting along – gross breach of duty wasting all this time talking. After all, there’s been murder done, and they’re wanting to see you at the Yard. I don’t happen to think you had anything to do with it, but that doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” agreed Lawrence; “besides, you see, I had.”

  CHAPTER 26

  LAWRENCE’S STORY

  When he had said this, Lawrence relapsed again into silence, but a silence different entirely from that which had before possessed him. For that had been a denial and a withdrawal, a refusal of that common manhood by which we are all members one of another, a silence, in fact, of an inhuman indifference. But now this new silence of his was an outcome of doubt and of bewilderment, of terror, of a whole tumult of long-repressed emotions stung all suddenly into violent being once again. Whereas before his immobility had been that of unknowing stock or stone, now he seemed a man again, for he was suffering.

  Not that Bobby at the time understood all this in such plain terms. But he did realize well enough that he had achieved his main purpose of awakening Lawrence from the lost dream of the past in which he had been living, and bringing his mind back to that strange aspect of reality we call the present; and he realized, too, that this ferment of the other’s re-awakened mind had best be left for the time to work out its own conclusions.

  The thought came oddly into his mind, as he and Lawrence left the house together and went down the street towards the main road, that it was almost as if it was by the side of one risen from the dead that he walked. He found himself wondering if those who had walked with Lazarus, or with the son of that widow who had but the one child, had felt a little as he felt now toward Lawrence.

  By good luck, before they had gone far, they met a cruising police car. In it they were conveyed to Scotland Yard, and there Bobby was much puzzled by the reception given to Lawrence. It is true that between the professional criminal and the professional detective there often exists an odd kind of fellowship, as of those who know and understand each other and take each other as part of the necessary framework of the world. There is no malice on either side, provided that the decencies are observed, and the arrested criminal may always be sure that any reasonable request he makes will be granted. While if he does manage to wangle a “not guilty” verdict out of the jury, he will probably get from his defeated opponent of the police a hearty slap on the back, a word of congratulation on such undeserved good luck, and a warning to change his ways while there was time, since good luck does not last forever.

  But tonight there was a warmer, almost an apologetic, tone about the formalities ensuing on Lawrence’s arrival. Bobby even had the impression that had Lawrence insisted he might have been allowed to go home again. He showed himself, however, amenable to every suggestion, content to be passive in their hands, though still not so much indifferent as too absorbed in his own thoughts to have time to spare for other matters. There was no objection whatever on his part to the suggestion that he might be willing to spend what remained of the night at the Yard, so that there would be no delay in the morning in beginning those interviews, by his consent to take part in which, the C.I.D. officials explained, they would feel themselves put under so great an obligation.

  As for Bobby, convinced by all this that either the case against Lawrence was very black indeed, and probably blacker still against someone else, or else that no case existed at all, he was told he had done well in producing Lawrence, and even better in performing that feat on a footing of such amiability and friendliness.

  “Always best, to bring ’em in as if you loved ’em,” the officer in charge said to him approvingly; and, by way of reward, told him to be sure to be on hand in good time next day �
� next day being purely a figure of speech, since by now it was nearly five in the morning, all this and the formalities on Lawrence’s arrival having taken up a good deal of time.

  So Bobby returned home, went upstairs to look longingly at his bed, passed a contemplative and affectionate hand over the unruffled smoothness of its pillow, then treated himself to a bath and a shave, and to a breakfast consisting largely of hot, black coffee of a strength to daunt the boldest, and so returned to the Yard, where he was greeted with the news that Lawrence was asking for him.

  Bobby went accordingly to the room where Lawrence was waiting, and was surprised to find him standing at the window, smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he remarked, after they had exchanged brief good mornings.

  Lawrence, with an air of considerable, even comical, surprise, contemplated the cigarette between the fingers.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t for years. But one of your people gave me a packet, and I forgot I didn’t.”

  He took another whiff, and seemed to enjoy it and yet still to be surprised at what he was doing. He laid the cigarette down, and said, leaning against the window and looking sideways out of it to where the river flowed brightly in the morning sunshine:

  “I wanted to ask you... you told me .. . you said... I mean, is that true what you said about Miss Yates?”

  “Yes. Why not?” Bobby answered, in as careless a tone as he could assume. Exaggerating a trifle, he added: “Her sight may go any minute almost – and, when it goes, it goes for good.”

  “What... I mean... what for?”

  “How should I know?” Bobby retorted. “I never asked, and I don’t suppose she would have told me if I had.” After a pause, he added: “I saw her trying it out the other night.”

  “Trying what out?”

  “Blindness. Trying what it would feel like.”

  He told curtly, and rather roughly, how he had watched the girl groping her way along the pavement and up the stairs of the house to her room. Lawrence listened with an intensity of interest far removed indeed from the dreadful, frozen indifference that hitherto had seemed to remove him so far from common humanity. But he made no comment at first as he moved restlessly up and down the room, pressing his hands together, fidgeting with the buttons of his coat, trying to moisten with his tongue his dry and twitching lips. He burst out presently into a low cry:

  “But why? What for? I can’t make it out.”

  “Well, it’s your affair, not mine,” observed Bobby, with a yawn that began by intention but soon passed beyond control as it cavernously expressed a whole night out of bed. “By the way, what did the Berry, Quick people pay you?”

  “Pay me?” repeated Lawrence. “Why? It was never settled exactly. There was always money in the bank, and I took what I wanted when I had to.”

  “Then you have no cash by you? I mean, if you wanted to go away somewhere – abroad, for example – in a hurry, perhaps – you couldn’t do it, because you have no money by you.”

  Lawrence was looking puzzled now. He felt in his pockets, and produced a shilling or two and some copper.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he said, in the same puzzled way. “I get a bill for board and lodging every month, and I draw out money to pay it. Or if I want anything else – I don’t often – a new hat, I mean, or something like that... and I don’t want to go abroad in a hurry. Why should I?”

  “Someone else might think there might be need some day,” observed Bobby; and Lawrence came and sat down opposite and stared at him, though not much with any air of awareness of his presence. He gave, indeed, somewhat an impression of one attempting to recall things seen and experienced on and from a sick bed, between intervals of recurring delirium. At last Bobby broke the silence by saying twice over: “Well? Well?”

  “You don’t mean,” Lawrence asked then, as it were a great wonder showing itself slowly on his troubled and bewildered features, “you don’t mean she’s losing her sight scraping coin together so that I could run for it if I had to?”

  “Better ask her,” Bobby said, perpetrating another atrocious yam. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Who wouldn’t give a kingdom for a bed? Didn’t some johnny say that once, or something like it? Well, never mind. Nothing to do with me. I suppose it’s a natural idea that police couldn’t be trusted to give a fair show to an ex-convict when they had proof of dirty work at the crossroads and they knew he had been hanging around, and so the best thing would be for him to bolt. You aren’t listening, are you?” he went on, noting with satisfaction that this chatter had passed unheeded by a Lawrence profoundly lost in his own thoughts. “But tell me this.” He called Lawrence back to his surroundings by the crude method of poking him violently in the ribs. “Did you never wonder how it was the Yates girl turned up at the Berry, Quick Syndicate?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lawrence answered slowly. “No, I didn’t – I suppose, if I thought about it at all, I thought he had sent her.”

  “Didn’t you recognize her?”

  “Not at first; not for a long time, I think. Then I did.”

  “And it didn’t occur to you to wonder...?” Lawrence shook his head.

  “I never wondered about anything,” he said. “I never cared enough. It didn’t matter. I was only waiting – I think,” he said slowly and carefully. “I think I felt I was as good as dead. I felt I had died long before, and I was just waiting for – for a grave.”

  “Who do you mean by ‘he’? You said, you thought probably ‘he’ had sent her.”

  “He brought a fur coat for her once,” Lawrence said. “He said I was to give it her; it was an old one his wife had done with, but Miss Yates might be glad of it as we didn’t pay her much. So I thought he knew about her, but – now I’m not sure he even knew there had been a change and she had come and the other one gone.”

  “Who do you mean – ‘he’?” Bobby asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Lawrence answered. “Though I think perhaps you do.”

  Bobby looked at him doubtfully.

  “Never mind what I know,” he said. “How do you mean, you don’t know? You must. How can you help?”

  “I never saw him in the light,” Lawrence answered. “It was dark when we talked on the Embankment. At the office, it was always dark, too, always late at night when he came. Generally I got a typewritten letter to say what I was to do. Or he rang up. But sometimes he came himself. Then, if I was already there, he switched off the light before he came in. If he was there before me, he would have taken the bulb off. So I never saw him. He said he had to be careful because of certain reasons.”

  “You never asked him what they were?”

  “No. Why should I? They were his reasons, not mine. He said something once about an official position he held, and so he didn’t want it known who he was.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I didn’t care. What did it matter? Sometimes I think I was glad I didn’t know. But generally I never thought about it. Why should I?”

  “Most people would,” Bobby grumbled.

  Lawrence seemed to be thinking.

  “I wasn’t a person," he muttered, more to himself than to Bobby. “They had made me just a thing.”

  “Oh, rot,” Bobby snapped impatiently. “You mean, you liked to sit and feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Well, well,” Lawrence said, a trifle uneasily. “I don’t think it was that,” he protested, but with some doubt in his voice.

  “Yes, it was,” Bobby declared positively. “Anyhow, you heard the chap’s voice – you would know that again?”

  “Yes, I think so; yes, I would. He had a slight stutter. Very slight, but you noticed it. When he began speaking, generally.”

  “Oh, a stutter,” Bobby muttered. “A stutter,” he repeated.

  “I know his name, too,” Lawrence continued. “It’s the same as yours: Owen – Chris Owen. After he had gone once, when I put the bulb back, I saw he had dropp
ed some envelopes on the floor. I suppose he hadn’t noticed in the dark, pulled them out by mistake somehow, and let them fall and never knew. I saw the name. It was Chris Owen.”

  “The – the address?" Bobby asked, his voice gone small and dry.

  “I didn’t notice. I tried not to,” Lawrence said. “I knew he didn’t want me to know, so I didn’t look. Besides, I didn’t care; it didn’t matter. But I had seen the name. I remembered it.”

  “Chris Owen?” Bobby repeated dully. He said, with extreme irritation: “Did you never get to know anything more? You hadn’t much curiosity?”

  “None,” Lawrence answered. “Dead things have none.”

  “Not even at first – the first time you met him.”

  “No. I told you. It was dark. He talked to me. He didn’t even ask me my name, so why should I ask his? He told me to think it over, and, if I agreed, then to leave a message at a coffee stall that ‘William Priestman agreed.’ He said William Priestman was as good a name as any for the time.”

  “So it was,” agreed Bobby, grimly remembering.

  “Afterwards, he said, I could use my own if I wanted to. I was hungry. He gave me food. That was all I knew or cared to know.”

  “It seems – funny,” Bobby said, with doubt in his voice.

  “Yes. I dare say. You don’t understand. How could you? You have never come out of prison after five years there. You don’t know what it’s like. I went in a man. I came out a thing. There had been the cat – and mother; what happened to her, I mean. She couldn’t stand it – the cat, I mean – knowing I had been tied up, flogged. Got on her nerves, I suppose. Perhaps it did on mine, too. I had heard of it, of course, but I didn’t know it was like that – not so much inhuman, if you know what I mean, unhuman rather. You felt you weren’t a man any more, just a thing to be tied up and whipped or anything. It’s silly talking like this – no one can understand. After I came out I felt like a dead man come from his grave, and I wanted to die again and go back and be done with the filthy thing that’s life, but somehow I couldn’t kill myself – I don’t think I was afraid; I hadn’t the will, perhaps, or else it was because of what mother did. I used to wander about the Embankment and the parks – like the others. One night, on the Embankment, I had a turn up with the fellow who was bullying a girl. It was when I saw him pushing a cigarette-end against her wrist... something took hold of me. He went away or I expect I should have killed him – something had come upon me. I felt as if I could have torn him in half as easily as I could a scrap of paper. I never thought of him or the girl again. He had gone, and I told her to get on with her job – easy to see what it was. I don’t think I should ever have known it was her again at the office, only for the way she had of looking at me as if... as if”