by Alec Waugh
‘Good Lord,’ said Arnold, ‘what’s the matter? Have you got mud-sores or something?’
Butterman had given a start at the first sound of his friend’s voice, but the expression of surprise changed quickly to one that Arnold found impossible to diagnose. It was a mixture of knowingness, and suspicion, and furtive cunning; a look that was at the same time a shield against detection and an invitation to share in a conspiracy. There was triumph in it, and fear, hatred and distrust and friendship. And when Butterman spoke his voice had a peculiar intonation that should have been the key to the mystery, but was at the same time an added veil across it.
‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘not yet. Nothing that you can see as yet.’
And Arnold as he heard it shuddered as though he had been brought face to face with something that was uncanny and unhealthy, something that was outside the experience of practical mortality.
There was an odd smell of burning about the house. For a week ever since their return from the jungle, it had clung fugitive and intermittent to the wide-windowed, wide-verandaed bungalow. For half a day or so you would think it had disappeared, and then suddenly as you came into a room or went on to a veranda you would meet it, vague, sinister, repellent. And for hours, although it was so slight that a stranger coming into the house would not have noticed it, the smell would follow you. You would taste it in your food and in your wine. It would be upon the soap with which you washed your face and in the flowers which were upon your table. You waited for it, sought for it, in the same way that during a sleepless night you will listen with a straining ear for the faint rattle of a window pane in a distant corridor.
‘For God’s sake,’ muttered Arnold irritably to his boy, ‘can’t you find where that smell comes from? It must be something that the boys are doing in the kitchen.’
But the boy lifted his clasped hands before his face.
‘No, no, master,’ he pleaded. ‘Boys worried by it as much as master. No can find, master, no can find!’
It was in the liveliest of ill-tempers that Arnold went in to breakfast.
In the doorway of the room he paused.
Butterman as usual was down already. He was seated in a wicker chair on the veranda manicuring his nails. It was a habit to which he was becoming increasingly addicted. The hours of idleness that most men devote to pipes and cigarettes he would spend drawing a long steel file slowly round the oval of his nails, lifting his fingers to the light to examine his handiwork; then once again remitting the supple metal to its task. A testy comment rose to Arnold’s lips, but he bit it back; the fellow was his guest here after all. And walking over to the table he took his seat at it.
The laundry account had been placed on a slip of paper beside his plate, and as the meal had not yet been served, he picked the thing up and glanced at it. It had been arranged in two columns; down one side of it was a list of the various articles: shirts, collars, singlets, handkerchiefs. And against each article was set in the first column the number of pieces that he had sent, in the second those that had been sent by Butterman. He amused himself for a moment by a comparison of the number. Shirts, collars, handkerchiefs; the same number identically. Then suddenly he gave a whistle.
‘Good lord! man,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty economical in socks.’
Butterman looked up quickly.
‘Economical? Socks? What do you mean?’
‘Do you know that you haven’t sent a single pair to be washed this week?’
Butterman did not answer. Instead he rose to his feet and walking to the table, leant forward over it.
‘Don’t you think,’ he said, and he spoke slowly, articulating each word carefully. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if I were to go back to my own house now? It was extremely kind of you to offer me the hospitality of yours. But I must not trespass on it too long. The alterations that were being made to mine are practically completed. Don’t you think it would be better if I were to go?’
Arnold watched him closely. There was nothing unusual or unexpected in Butterman’s suggestion. A man preferred to be among his own things. But behind the intonation of the words, ‘Don’t you think it would be better,’ it was almost as though he had heard a threat. It was absurd, of course. Butterman and he were old and proven friends. It was absurd, utterly absurd. He would have to watch himself. A man was in a bad way when he began to imagine things.
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘It’s only for another day or two. It’s so jolly having you. Life gets a little lonely sometimes for an old bachelor like myself.’
‘Old bachelor,’ he repeated, and the pitch of Butterman’s voice rose suddenly to a laugh. ‘Why didn’t you marry then? What was to stop you marrying? And now you are finding yourself lonely!’
‘Well, sometimes, naturally.’
Again Butterman laughed, a high-pitched laugh, that was a cackle almost.
‘Lonely! Those homes that are not homes, that have all the appearance, but none of the reality, none of the sweetness of a home! Lonely, yes, I think I’d better be going, Arnold.’
‘It’s as you choose, of course. But if you go I shall be extremely sorry. It’s nice having you.’
‘Nice having me? But why, why should you like having me?’ He did not wait, however, for a reply. ‘Well, if you want me, I suppose I might as well. Here, or another place, it comes to the same thing.’
And pulling back a chair he sat down hurriedly at the table. At that moment the boy arrived with breakfast.
It was the usual two-course meal. Eggs and bacon, preceded by a sardine fish-cake. But though Arnold doused his plate in tomato ketchup, and stirred three lumps of sugar into his tea, through every mouthful that he took he was conscious of that acrid, persistent taste of burning. No wonder they got nervy with this smell about the place.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Padre Martin will be dropping in today for tiffin.’
Butterman grunted.
‘Good fellow, Martin,’ Arnold added.
Butterman made no comment. He finished his fish-cake, helped himself to three of the four eggs upon the dish and consumed them resolutely. ‘Whatever else there may be wrong with him, the fellow’s appetite’s all right,’ thought Arnold. It was not till he had finished his fourth piece of toast and marmalade that Butterman spoke again.
‘Do you often,’ he asked, ‘have Martin here to tiffin?’
‘Not too often; now and again.’
‘Once every four months or so, for example?’
‘About that.’
‘And when did you ask him last?’
‘I forget, some while back at least. It seemed about time to be asking him again.’
Butterman grunted.
‘Tiffin isn’t a very usual meal to be asked to. It isn’t like dinner, is it? One doesn’t usually,’ he went on, ‘ask a man to tiffin unless it’s for some special reason. I wonder why you asked Martin here today.’
‘My dear fellow …’
But Butterman, once he had set the question, appeared to have lost all interest in the subject.
‘Here, or another place,’ he said cryptically, ‘it comes to the same thing.’
And rising from the table he walked over to the wicker chair by the veranda, drew from his pocket the long steel file and set himself once again to smooth the curved surface of his nails.
Arnold drew a perplexed hand across his forehead. Where was he? What was happening to him? Was this the friendly, familiar world in which he had lived so long? As he walked out of his bungalow, he felt himself to be escaping from the poisoned atmosphere of some prison house.
He had left the house earlier than usual, but the car was already waiting for him.
‘Straight to the office, master?’ asked the Syce.
Arnold shook his head. He had need before the day’s work started of a few moments of fresh air, and the arrival of the laundry account had reminded him that there were several articles of which he stood in need.
‘Drive to Yem-Sing’s,’ he said.
It was nine o’clock: the heat of the day was still some hours distant, and the main street of Chiengmai was crowded with men and women hurrying by in their brightly-coloured singlets: many of them carrying slung across their shoulders deep tins of water and baskets of fruits and vegetables. They drove slowly, for the motorcar was as new a visitant as the railway to North Siam, and neither had the Laos acquired the habit of avoiding danger, nor had the drivers learnt to resist the thrill of speed; incapacities so regrettable in their consequences that the authorities had marked at either end of the main street a series of artificial bumps in the centre of the roadway to enforce a slackening of pace. At a speed of little more than five miles an hour Arnold’s car drew up before a Chinese store.
‘I want quite a lot of things, Yem-Sing,’ he said.
The merchant passed his hands across each other; and his lips parted gratefully over teeth blackened by many passages of lime-tinged betel-nut, as Arnold hurried through his list.
‘Six shirts,’ he repeated, ‘six singlets, two dozen handkerchiefs, a dozen pair of socks, white socks. Ah, but that is the one thing I cannot manage. I have not in my shop a single pair of white socks left.’
‘What!’
‘I am sorry, master, extremely sorry.’ And in the Lao fashion he lifted his clasped hands before his face. ‘But only a week back the naï Butterman came in here and bought every pair of white socks I had.’
‘The naï Butterman!’
‘Yes, master, truthfully. “How many pairs have you of white socks?” he asks. Forty or fifty pairs, I tell him. “Very well,” he answers, “I will take the lot.” ‘
‘Forty or fifty pairs!’
‘To be exact there were forty-seven.’
For the second time that day Arnold rested a perplexed hand upon his forehead. Forty-seven pairs, and not one pair sent to the laundry; and in the jungle that curious outburst against his servant; and that strangely intonated phrase: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I went?’ Those questions about Martin; the odd expression of his eyes when he had come that evening into his tent. Where was it, what had happened to it, that friendly, that familiar world?
As he came out into the sun-drenched street he noticed Martin’s car passing on the other side of it.
‘You’re coming to tiffin today, aren’t you?’ he called out.
For answer the Padre drew his car up beside the pavement.
‘Tell me, how is Butterman?’
Arnold shook his head helplessly. ‘It’s something I don’t understand. Something I don’t begin to understand. At times he seems perfectly all right, so perfectly all right that I begin to wonder whether it isn’t just myself imagining things. It’s a hopeless situation.’
‘I know, I know. And we’re so far here from everything. If we could only get him down to Singapore or Bangkok even. If only a specialist in these things could look at him. It’s outside my scope.
I can only guess at things. Ah well, at any rate, we shall have some common ground to compare notes on after tiffin.’
It was a tiffin of which Arnold was able subsequently to remember little. He could not recall what they ate or what they drank, or of what they spoke. There remained only the recollection of vague constraint: of himself talking loudly and incessantly on topics that were of no interest to him: of Martin’s thin, high-pitched voice breaking in with an occasional comment: of Butterman taciturn and glowering, eating prodigiously of every dish: a vague impression. Everything that was said and thought during the early stages of the meal was muffled and obliterated by the one unforgettable moment of dramatic action. The rest was dim. He could not even remember how that moment had come about. Suddenly it had been there upon them. One minute it had not been, the next it was. One minute he had been talking in quick, querulous, excited sentences, the next for some obscure reason unknown to him he had ceased; had realized suddenly that Butterman in a trance almost of detachment was leaning on his elbows across the table, the hands lifted before his face, examining his fingers with the minutest care; had realized that the Padre in a trance also was gazing at them as in moments of hypnotic influence the subject will gaze at some bright object, a shilling, a crystal, a metal disc; found himself as his voice trickled into silence, gazing in his own turn, fascinated, spellbound, at those thin, tapered fingers that slowly one by one Butterman was revolving under his inspection.
Of how long they sat there Arnold had no idea. It was one of those instants that belonging as they do to eternity are timeless. There was the dateless interval of silent gazing, then the sudden shattering of that instant; the lifted head, Butterman’s glance passing from one to the other, and the coming into his face as he realized he was being watched of an incredibly sinister expression.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Ah!’ And he laughed, leaning farther forward across the table, so that his hands were held almost beneath their faces. ‘Look at them, look closely—they’re interesting hands. They’re firm, strong hands; feel the bones, how strong they are. Such strong hands, it wouldn’t be difficult for them to kill a man. They’d go round his throat so quietly: they’d just tighten, tighten, tighten, so firm and strong: such firm strong fingers, right to the finger-tips, to the very extremities: the extreme extremities.’
Coldly, regularly, inexorably, like the chill, persistent rain of a northern twilight, the words followed one another. Then suddenly with a laugh, he flung himself back in his chair.
‘By the way, Padre,’ he said jovially, ‘I know what I wanted to ask you: you’re the very man to help me. I wonder if you could find a new boy for me?’
The change of attitude was so startling that the Padre could do no more than stammer feebly:
‘New boy? But what’s wrong with the one you’ve got?’
‘What’s wrong?’ and into the voice had returned the note of menace. ‘He spies, that’s what’s wrong with him, he spies. And I’ve no use for people who spy on me. I should remember that, Padre, if I were you. I get rid of them … one way or another. You’ll get me a new boy, won’t you?
‘By the way, Arnold,’ he went on. ‘I’ve thought of rather a good scheme for stabilizing the value of the tical round Be-koy.’ And for the next twenty minutes he discussed that very real problem of jungle life, the fluctuating value of exchange, with admirable clearness.
‘I can’t make it out,’ said Arnold afterwards. ‘There are times when he seems the sanest man I’ve ever come across. At others … well, you saw what he was like … and one can’t place it, that’s the trouble. One doesn’t know what one’s up against.’
It was at that moment that the boy who had been moving for some seconds at Arnold’s side, came forward. On his face was a peculiar smile of triumph.
‘I have found out, master,’ he announced, ‘whence comes that smell.’
‘Ah!’
‘It is the naï Butterman.’
‘What!’
‘Yes, master, the sweeper discovered it. Every morning the naï Butterman burns in his bathroom the pair of socks that he has worn the day before.’
Although there had been no creak of a lifted latch, no sound of a footfall in the passage, Arnold was conscious as he bent forward among the papers on his desk that someone was standing beside him in the room; someone who stood watching him with intent, malicious eyes. And for a moment he felt so terrified that he did not dare to move, did not dare to disturb that silent watching, did not dare to face the menace that was waiting him. Then with a quick jerk of resolution he looked up.
‘Well, Butterman,’ he said, ‘and what is it I can do for you?’
By an effort of will he kept his voice natural and level-toned. But he felt the palms of his hands go moist as he met that glazed, uncannily bright stare.
‘I’m rather busy at the moment,’ he went on, ‘but if you’d care to sit down and wait a little …’
Butterman laughed. He was not wearing a topee, and the hair that fell dankly along h
is forehead was dishevelled. There was no collar-stud at his throat and the silk tie that held his shirt was knotted loosely. His sleeves were rolled above his elbow. In his eyes there was that same expression of hunted and desperate cunning with which he had leant forward an hour back across the tiffin table, and his laugh had that false unnatural note which one associates with the villains of melodrama. In his hand he was holding a heavy Colt revolver.
‘Wait,’ he cried. ‘Oh, I don’t mind waiting for a little. I’m in no hurry. Padre Martin will be at the hospital another two hours yet.’
‘So you’re going to see Padre Martin?’
‘Yes, when I’ve done with you,’ and stepping forward he seated himself on the edge of the table, without lowering for an instant the revolver that he had levelled at Arnold’s head. ‘So you thought you could spy on me,’ he said; ‘that you could bring me down from the jungle, and keep me in your house and spy on me; that you could have Padre Martin to tiffin with you, watching and watching till the moment came. You thought you were very clever, didn’t you, that I shouldn’t see through you as easily as I saw through that boy of mine. You weren’t quite clever enough, though, were you?’
‘Now, my dear fellow, do be sensible. What on earth is there that we could be spying on you for?’
‘Spying on me, what for? Ah, but my good fellow, there’s no need for me to pretend things any longer. We know well enough, we three, you and Martin and I. My boy may suspect, but he doesn’t know. There’s just we three, and there’s no need for us to hide things from each other. We can be open now, can’t we? It’s so easy to be open now. Nothing’s any longer at stake. It doesn’t matter what we say or what we reveal; because in such a little while now there’ll be only one of us who’ll know. Only one left by … well … shall we say by three o’clock?’
And as he leant back laughing heartily, with the revolver held unwaveringly before him, the nature of his plan grew plain to Arnold.