by Lord Dunsany
“Yes,” he said.
“I can’t ever imagine doing of such a thing,” I told him.
He sighed at that, as though it were something against me.
“I suppose I should never be a detective,” I said. And he just shook his head.
Then he looked broodingly into the fire for what seemed an hour. And then he shook his head again. We both went to bed after that.
I shall remember the next day all my life. I was out till evening, as usual, pushing Numnumo. And we sat down to supper about nine. You couldn’t get things cooked at those flats, so of course we had it cold. And Linley began with a salad. I can see it now, every bit of it. Well, I was still a bit full of what I’d done in Unge, pushing Numnumo. Only a fool, I know, would have been unable to push it there; but still, I had pushed it; and about fifty bottles, forty-eight to be exact, are something in a small village, whatever the circumstances. So I was talking about it a bit; and then all of a sudden I realized that Numnumo was nothing to Linley, and I pulled myself up with a jerk. It was really very kind of him; do you know what he did? He must have known at once why I stopped talking, and he just stretched out a hand and said: “Would you give me a little of your Numnumo for my salad?”
I was so touched I nearly gave it him. But of course you don’t take Numnumo with salad. Only for meats and savouries. That’s on the bottle.
So I just said to him, “Only for meats and savouries.” Though I don’t know what savouries are. Never had any.
I never saw a man’s face go like that before.
He seemed still for a whole minute. And nothing speaking about him but that expression. Like a man that’s seen a ghost, one is tempted to write. But it wasn’t really at all. I’ll tell you what he looked like. Like a man that’s seen something that no one has ever looked at before, something he thought couldn’t be.
And then he said in a voice that was all quite changed, more low and gentle and quiet it seemed, “No good for vegetables, eh?”
“Not a bit,” I said.
And at that he gave a kind of sob in his throat. I hadn’t thought he could feel things like that. Of course I didn’t know what it was all about; but, whatever it was, I thought all that sort of thing would have been knocked out of him at Eton and Harrow, an educated man like that. There were no tears in his eyes but he was feeling something horribly.
And then he began to speak with big spaces between his words, saying, “A man might make a mistake perhaps, and use Numnumo with vegetables.”
“Not twice,” I said. What else could I say?
And he repeated that after me as though I had told of the end of the world, and adding an awful emphasis to my words, till they seemed all clammy with some frightful significance, and shaking his head as he said it.
Then he was quite silent.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Smethers,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Smethers,” said he.
And I said, “Well?”
“Look here, Smethers,” he said, “you must ’phone down to the grocer at Unge and find out from him this.”
“Yes?” I said.
“Whether Steeger bought those two bottles, as I expect he did, on the same day, and not a few days apart. He couldn’t have done that.”
I waited to see if any more was coming, and then I ran out and did what I was told. It took me some time, being after nine o’clock, and only then with the help of the police. About six days apart they said; and so I came back and told Linley. He looked up at me so hopefully when I came in, but I saw that it was the wrong answer by his eyes.
You can’t take things to heart like that without being ill, and when he didn’t speak I said: “What you want is a good brandy, and go to bed early.”
And he said: “No. I must see someone from Scotland Yard. ’Phone round to them. Say here at once.”
“But,” I said, “I can’t get an inspector from Scotland Yard to call on us at this hour.”
His eyes were all lit up. He was all there all right.
“Then tell them,” he said, “they’ll never find Nancy Elth. Tell one of them to come here and I’ll tell him why.” And he added, I think only for me, “They must watch Steeger, till one day they get him over something else.”
And, do you know, he came. Inspector Ulton; he came himself.
While we were waiting I tried to talk to Linley. Partly curiosity, I admit. But I didn’t want to leave him to those thoughts of his, brooding away by the fire. I tried to ask him what it was all about. But he wouldn’t tell me. “Murder is horrible” is all he would say. “And as a man covers his tracks up it only gets worse.”
He wouldn’t tell me. “There are tales,” he said, “that one never wants to hear.”
That’s true enough. I wish I’d never heard this one. I never did actually. But I guessed it from Linley’s last words to Inspector Ulton, the only ones that I overheard. And perhaps this is the point at which to stop reading my story, so that you don’t guess it too; even if you think you want murder stories. For don’t you rather want a murder story with a bit of a romantic twist, and not a story about real foul murder? Well, just as you like.
In came Inspector Ulton, and Linley shook hands in silence, and pointed the way to his bedroom; and they went in there and talked in low voices, and I never heard a word.
A fairly hearty-looking man was the inspector when they went into that room.
They walked through our sitting-room in silence when they came out, and together they went into the hall, and there I heard the only words they said to each other. It was the inspector that first broke that silence.
“But why,” he said, “did he cut down the trees?”
“Solely,” said Linley, “in order to get an appetite.”
The Cut
A curious thing happened a while ago in Kent, and has rather come to a head during the last week. It was near a little village so secluded in one of the folds of the downs that it is no use giving its name, because you would never have heard of it. It is no more than a cluster of houses, round the tiniest church I know: you get to it, whichever way you come, by going down a steep slope that, all through the dog-days, is covered with thyme, great mauve patches of it, and the taller blooms of the mint. Sometimes you see the bright blue borage there, and the little harebells astray like lost fairies. In spring the same slopes are blue and yellow with speedwell and maywort. On the tops of the hills are straggling woods that we call shaws in Kent, full of foxes, badgers, owls, and many other wild things that like to shelter from man among hazels, birches, yew-trees, and briar-rose. To be brief, the place that I tell of is rural and out of the way.
Well, close to this village there lives a man called Wichers, who owned an ordinary, fairly intelligent dog, and used to teach it tricks. One of the tricks he taught it was to run to the village every morning, three or four hundred yards away, with a penny in his mouth, and go to the shop and put his paws up on the counter; when old Jeggins, that is the shopkeeper, would take the penny out of the dog’s mouth and give him the Daily Mail, which he would take back to his master. There was no harm in that, and nothing out of the ordinary. But that’s how it all began.
Then Wichers taught the dog to take sixpence to a farmer living two hundred yards away, and to bring back a basket with half a dozen eggs. He was always teaching him tricks. At first he taught him the trick about the paper and the penny in order to save himself trouble. “After all,” he used to say, “what is a dog for?” But, by the time the dog had learned his second trick, Wichers’ only motive in teaching him anything more was a certain vainglorious delight in exhibiting his accomplishments as a teacher. And so he taught the dog some other trick with a shilling; and so the dog, that like most dogs was a good deal shrewder than his master supposed, began to get some idea of the value of money.
And that’s where my story really starts; for before that happened the dog was merely doing tricks that were not essentially diff
erent from other dog-tricks. I mean, the penny might just as well have been a lump of sugar. But once the dog began to see the difference between what the various coins could do, everything was altered. From that point it almost seems to me, if one knows what thought is, that the dog had begun to think.
Tim was his name. And one day he got tired of his tricks and slipped out of his master’s house and went off on a long walk; and then all the trouble began. For he went into Sevenoaks,3 and made his way into a comfortable house at the edge of the town, and sold himself to Mr. Murchens for five pounds. That is what he did. He went right in and sat up and begged, and refused food and went on begging, till Mr. Murchens saw what he wanted; for Wichers’ boasts had spread far and wide and everybody knew that the dog wanted money.
Well, he refused coppers and silver as he had refused food, and still he went on begging; and then Mr. Murchens offered him a pound note, which Tim took at once and went on begging, leaving it on the floor beside him and growling if anyone put a hand near it. Then Mr. Murchens offered him another pound note, and Tim took it and laid it neatly on the other. Mr. Murchens was greatly excited, and a little reckless, and he gave him five pounds in all; and when they were all lying in a little heap beside Tim he said: “Now, that is enough.” And the dog seemed to agree and stopped begging.
“You mustn’t let the dog have all that money,” said Mrs. Murchens then.
“But what’s he going to do next?” was all Murchens said.
And for a while the dog sat there, and growled if anyone went near the five pounds. And suddenly he gathered it all up and ran out of the house with the five pounds in his mouth, and went away and put it all in a bank. I don’t mean the kind of bank that you may be thinking of: it was a green bank outside the town under a hedge, where a good many rabbits used to come out in the evening; and he burrowed into it and put the five pounds in, just as they do with bones, and covered it all up. Then he ran back to Mr. Murchens’ house and curled up on the hearth-rug in the drawing-room and stayed there. You see, he’d sold himself. He’d sold Wichers’ dog, as a matter of fact. But then he was Wichers’ dog.
What the rights of it are I can’t make out; and, as it has never been done before, there is nothing to guide one. That is where precedent and custom come in, making a great many things, that would be otherwise horribly complicated, quite easy to deal with. Were it not for precedent I don’t know where we should be. And they didn’t seem quite to know where they were in Sevenoaks in this particular case. Of course Wichers tried to get back his dog, but the dog stuck to his bargain, and, when Wichers at last traced him, refused to stir from the hearth-rug where he had taken up his new lodgings.
Murchens seemed to take the same view of it as Tim did; and, however critical my hearers may be of his attitude, it must be remembered that he had paid good money for the dog, money that Mrs. Murchens says is too much for any dog, at any rate with all the taxes one has to pay, not to mention rates. I thought for a moment that I heard someone laugh, though how the sound reached me I can’t say, but wireless sometimes does queer things. Yet it is no matter for laughter, and Mrs. Murchens is perfectly right; it is a difficult thing to run any house properly nowadays; and if you were to buy things for five pounds and part with them almost immediately, it would be practically impossible.
Murchens stuck to his point, which was that he had bought the dog; and Wichers stuck to his, which was that nobody could sell his dog but himself; and in the end it came before the magistrates. There had been a lot of argument for and against Murchens, with which I will not trouble you; but none of the magistrates had taken any part in it, which is as it should be; and the case was very simply decided, as cases about the ownership of dogs very often are, by the dog himself, who ran joyfully up to Murchens and would not look at Wichers; and the magistrates decided that Tim was clearly Murchens’ dog.
There is still nothing in this story to trouble the town of Sevenoaks to its very foundations, though that is what soon occurred. So far it is no more than a slightly unusual story: dogs have begged for sticks, stones, bones, balls, and food before now, though probably not for pound notes; and they have changed owners before. But from now on the unusual definitely colours my story, increasing until unusual is hardly the adequate word for it.
The dog ran to his bank and drew out a pound of his money, carefully covering up the hole through which he had drawn it out; and with this he went to a shop that sold collars: not dog-collars; that is the whole point of my story.4 He bought an ordinary collar, a starched linen collar with ends that turned back, not the kind of collar that I should have chosen myself, but yet an ordinary collar. He bought it by running in with the pound note in his mouth and putting up his paws on the counter, just as he used to when fetching the Daily Mail, and then going and yapping at the collar that he could see in the window.
They got the wrong article for him at first, as often happens when you buy a thing from the window; but he went on yapping until they got him the right one, and his joy when they did that was manifested as only a dog can manifest joy, so that there was no doubt whatever that it was the collar he wanted. When they saw that, one of them must needs go and fasten it on for him with one of those little studs that one gets from the laundry, and which cost the shop nothing. And the head man gave him exactly the correct change: he had to do that, with all the assistants watching and taking so much interest in the dog. Though he would have done it in any case: I know him well and he is quite honest.
Change was a thing that the dog had never had before, and it made him all the keener on shopping. He ran back to his bank and deposited it there; and next day he drew out half a crown and was back again at the shop. This time he bought a tie, a green and pink one in stripes, which he was able to do for one and sixpence, and got his shilling change, and was learning all the time more and more about money. The assistant tied the tie for him as neatly as if they had been putting the gaudy thing round one of their own necks for a Bank Holiday; and away the dog went again, put the shilling into the bank, chased a rabbit that was loitering about too close, and went back to his lodgings with Mr. Murchens.
To all appearances he was still an ordinary dog, on whom someone had played a little trick, or had petted fantastically, and nobody as yet took any serious notice. Of course the collar and tie got many a laugh, but evoked no real thought. And then he bought a little walking-stick at a toy-shop. He saw it in the window and went in and played his usual tricks, and bought the thing for a shilling, a little cane about a foot and a half long, with a rather neat handle. Tim got it in his mouth and went down the High Street wearing his collar and tie. And that was when people began to notice something odd.
What was the dog doing, they asked, all on his own with a walking-stick, and that rather natty collar and gaudy tie? Jealousy is too strong a word for it; and there was no jealousy; at any rate not as yet. But people were beginning to ask if those were quite the dress and airs for a dog. And he was giving himself airs; there could be no doubt of that: they increased with each little purchase. And then one day he saw a child’s waistcoat, if that is the right word for it, in a window. And he bought that too.
There was no doubt now that the dog was gradually dressing himself up: he was gradually breaking down the differences that there ought to be, and that there must be, between ourselves and creatures unthinkably lower. And willing hands were helping him in every shop that he went to. It was no longer a mere matter of a laugh or so in the street; but protests were to be heard in the houses at evening. Some said it was a mere trifle; but the necessary barriers are made of trifles. Some said that these barriers were snobbish; while others said that they were the very walls that held up our civilization.
Days went by while the dog’s boastful airs grew more and more lamentable, and Mr. Murchens did nothing. Even taunts failed to move him. “One would think he was one of the family,” said someone to him. But even that drew no action from Mr. Murchens. He seemed to be proud of the dog. And then o
ne day came the incident that has brought it all to a head.
Mr. Slegger, who had been sun-bathing in his garden during the luncheon hour, came away hurriedly to attend to some business at his office. I think the boy had run over from the office to say that the telephone-bell was ringing; but I am not sure. Mr. Slegger had put on his coat and his hat; but the essential point of this episode is that he was not wearing a collar. In this kit he appeared in the High Street, just as Tim was going by. And the dog cut him.
Of course Tim knew Slegger quite well, and had often stopped and wagged his tail in response to the invariable greeting of: “What cheer, Tim,” from Slegger. But on this occasion he would take no notice of Slegger whatever.
The news spread through the town at about the pace of fire in a barn; there were meetings and discussions about it, and the theory that it might be an oversight was tested and dissipated by confronting Tim with another collarless man, with precisely the same result. And that’s the situation with him in Sevenoaks now; and if it wasn’t in the High Street it might be overlooked; but, being in the High Street, the issues are clear.
In Sevenoaks, and in all the district round, we have felt that we are unquestionably above all that sort of thing; that no equality between ourselves and inferior creations is possible, far less any question of superiority of one of those inferior creations to one of us, though he had a hundred collars and we only a dirty neck.
You might think that the whole town would not support Slegger, whether they knew him or not. You might think that there would be some who would even prefer to laugh at him; but that is not the case, for over everyone in Sevenoaks now falls like a shadow the fear that at any moment he may be cut himself; and no one that has not seen a man being cut by a dog can perhaps quite appreciate the sickening drop that that is to one’s self-esteem. An old and comfortable, but untidy, jacket, an unbuttoned waistcoat, a carelessly chosen tie, may at any moment subject a man to this sudden humiliation.