“This is what Daniel Kassassian will tell you. The fog was so thick that he could see nothing. He ran across the road in the direction of the cry, and on the pavement outside the office he collided with a man who seemed—he will go no further than that—who seemed to have come out of the office. The collision was so violent, for both were running, that the man’s hat, a black felt hat, was knocked off. Kassassian stooped to pick it up, and when it was in his hand the man snatched it so violently that, to use Kassassian’s words, ‘it seemed a bit queer to me.’ Then Kassassian noticed a peculiar thing: bound round the man’s face was a black handkerchief. It was tied over the bridge of his nose, leaving his eyes uncovered, but obscuring the lower half of his face. Kassassian was so startled by this that he retained his hold of the hat and something of a struggle went on for the possession of it. In the course of this struggle, the two swayed within the faint light cast through the fog by a street lamp, and that light was sufficient for Kassassian to see that down the back of one of the man’s hands ran a livid scar.
“At last the masked man tired of the struggle, gave Kassassian a push, leaving him in possession of the hat, and ran as fast as he could go into the fog.
“Now Kassassian proceeded to investigate the cry which had brought him to the spot. He entered the office, and to his horror, stretched before the open door of the safe, he discovered the body of a man, later identified as Percy Lupton, with his head battered in. A round ebony ruler, bloodstained, lay alongside him.
“Kassassian placed upon the table the black felt hat, within which, as you will hear from the hatter who sold it to Oliver Essex, were the initials ‘O.E.,’ and he rang up the police...”
*
The grey wig surmounting the unmoving blur of scarlet; counsel twitching his gown as he wove mesh after mesh of the net; twelve intent faces of jurors; all about me here in the public gallery the livid eager faces of men and women in at the kill; it all wavered through the foggy air of the court, the phantasmagoric, unbelievable reality upon which I had been waiting. From the moment when Oliver had entered the dock, standing thin and upright as a young poplar, his hand, marked with the scar that Kassassian had seen in the lamplight that foggy night, clutching the rail before him, I had not looked at him. The judge’s scarlet was a bloody focus of my vision; all outside it rayed and danced uncertainly like a shimmer of summer heat.
Suddenly it all seemed meaningless, a staged, fantastic show, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Oliver. I got up and stumbled down the stairs, across the wide tiled hall where a few policemen stood and lawyers went with clicking shoes, their gowns fluttering behind them like black wings. Down the stone steps to the mean and sordid street. And as I looked at the people hurrying by, nothing green, nothing gracious, a wilderness of soot and stone, I knew that this was the phantasmagoria, that the reality was now behind me, and I walked blindly away from its intolerable presence, my heart crying: “O Oliver, my son, my son!”
*
He had destroyed so much that I had loved: Livia Vaynol, and Maeve, and Rory, and Maggie; but he had called me “Father” again; not “Sir” as in that time when there was ice between our hearts. Oh, why should I sit there and listen to the words and the words and the words, when I knew better than any of them what had happened? He had told me himself, and somehow, God help me, there was comfort in that.
He ran into the fog, and as he ran a voice kept crying in him: “You’ve left your hat, you fool; you’ve left your hat.” But if he had known incontrovertibly that the hat would hang him, the impulse to run was now stronger than the impulse to go back. “I had killed so many men,” he said, with brutal candour; “I had been applauded for killing them, promoted for killing them, given medals for killing them; but don’t let any fool tell you there’s no difference between killing in peace and war. In three seconds after I had killed that man I knew the difference. I knew that I had killed one man too many.”
So, panic in his heart, he ran. There was nobody at home in his lodgings. Dennis Newbiggin had taken his mother to the first house of a music hall. So to calm himself he took a hot bath and changed his clothes. He didn’t want to look flustered or unkempt. He was thinking it all out clearly. He left the house feeling fresh, with an overcoat in place of his raincoat, a new hat, well-polished shoes, a few clothes in a small suit-case. He now had a useful sum of money in his pocket. He didn’t leave till after nine, and he walked into town. Remembering the tell-tale scar upon his hand, he wore gloves. He habitually wore his hat with the brim tilted forward to hide the scars about his eyes.
To test his nerve, he walked past the builder’s yard. The light was on in the office. Two or three people, including a policeman, were inside, and there was another policeman at the door. A knot of curious sightseers had assembled on the pavement. He mingled with them for a moment and asked what the trouble was. Then he went on, his nerves in control, no panic, no haste.
He had a meal at an hotel, spinning it out as late as possible, and then booked a sleeping-berth on the night train to London. The steward who woke him in the morning brought a newspaper with his tea. The death of Percy Lupton was reported in it, though it had not caused much excitement. Kassassian’s struggle with the masked man was related, and the paragraph said that “the police are hopeful of tracing this man through the initials ‘O.E.’ found on the hatband.” Well, he was in London now, a big place where O.E. was not likely to be recognised.
What he intended to do was already beginning to take shape in his mind. He set off for Paddington in a taxi, intending to leave his suit-case there, and suddenly panic leapt upon him again. His eye fell on the suit-case, all the initials “O.E.” stamped boldly on its side. That was the sort of thing one overlooked! Carrying one’s doom about in a taxi!
So at Padding ton, instead of putting the bag into the left-luggage office, he hung about for a time and then took another taxicab to Victoria. It was still early. The police would hardly be looking for “O.E.” yet, and if they came looking here and found O.E.’s suit-case, so much the better. Let them hang about and wait till he called for it. They would wait a long time. In the taxi he had transferred pyjamas and shaving tackle to his overcoat pockets. He now bought a new, cheap suit-case, had some bogus initials stamped on it in the shop, put his things into it, and left it at Paddington.
All this, which should have eased his mind, irritated it. He began to be overburdened with a sense of the innumerable small slips that might be made, the innumerable small things that must be done to ensure his safety. He found himself taking off his gloves to pay the taximan, remembering that he must keep them on, fumbling in his pocket, and getting hot and worried.
He intended to travel to Cornwall, but would not do so in the daytime. People in his compartment, people in the dining-car, people in the corridor. Too many people keeping him under observation. Here, among millions, he could move about and be seen by no one twice. In a train it was another matter. So he booked a sleeper on the night train, giving a name that would fit the bogus initials on his suit-case, and then he wandered out to lose himself in London.
*
Dear God! After all these years Oliver had called me Father again. And again, as when he was a child, we were having “conversations.” And this is our conversation: here in the dark bilge of the Jezebel his voice is going on and on, telling me of what happened when he had killed one man too many! But there is no ice between our hearts. I do not hate him, and his face, as he looks at me, is not cold. It is old and sleepless and sad, but it is not cold. He has overtaken me in experience. We understand one another. We are easy. There is even a strange happiness flowing between us, as if two ice-floes had melted and come together in an element greater and deeper than either.
*
I read of the murder of Percy Lupton in the Daily Telegraph on the morning of the first Tuesday in December, 1922. I read that a black felt hat had been handed to the police by a man named Kassassian, and that the initials “O.E.” were on the l
ining-band. It meant nothing to me. I went into my study and wrote. At eleven o’clock Annie Suthurst brought me my coffee. When she had put it on the table, she went to the window, looked through the parted curtains, and said: “Ah wonder what yon copper wants? Been standin’ there gawpin’ at t’house all t’mornin’. Looks as though ’e’s keepin’ us under observation or summat, You ’aven’t committed a crime, Mr. Essex?”
I went to the window. “Where? What man?”
“Yon feller walkin’ up an’ down. He’s a plain-clothes man. You can always tell ’em. Look at t’webs on ’im.”
“What makes you think he’s watching us?” I asked anxiously.
She broke into a laugh. “Nay, get on wi’ thy work. Ah’m nobbut jokin’. But there ’e’s been sin’ nine o’clock.”
She left the room and I went back to my desk, but I did not work. I was strangely troubled. I was troubled by thoughts that were monstrous, fantastic. I resisted for a long time the urging to take up the Daily Telegraph again; but at last it overcame me.
“The initials O.E.”
But why should a detective be outside my door?
Well, that’s pretty obvious. Suppose they have discovered who O.E. is? Wouldn’t they keep an eye on any place he might bolt to—his father’s flat, for example?
But this is nonsense—madness. My dear man, you’re going off your head.
I suddenly discovered that I was standing before the fire with the paper gripped in both hands, my knuckles standing out white through the skin. My eyes encountered my image in a mirror over the fireplace, a face tense and contorted, with the cheek muscles twitching, out of control.
I sank into a chair lest my trembling legs should drop me. I knew what Oliver had done.
Knew? Yes; in that moment I knew, as certainly as if I had been physically present in that little Manchester office and seen the blows raining through the fog-misted light. I knew that now there could be nothing else. Here was a morally logical conclusion. I felt sick to death: old and grey and withered. It was a long time since I had thought of Nellie. Now she was with me, unobtrusive as when she was alive, but persistent and deadly.
“You’re bad for Oliver. You’re ruining the boy.”
As though it were being enacted even now before my eyes, I saw the cane lashing down upon the white skin of his young bare back, saw the blue and purple weals start up when, for the only time, she had thrashed him. That day when he had cheated at school, that day when Rory had fled, both to protect Oliver and to test his nerve for torturing ordeals.
“Love. A great idea you’ve got of love! D’you call it love to bring a child up to think he can do what he likes without taking the consequences?”
And as the cane fell on Oliver’s back: “I’m doing your work.”
You ghost of a grey, joyless bitch, leave me alone, leave me alone! I took my hat and coat and almost rushed into the street, but she was there before the gay shop windows, among the hurrying people, in the keen blowing of winter wind and the grind and roar of the traffic: “You’ll know one of these days! You’ll know that I was right.”
*
By the afternoon the murder was a big affair. It was on the front pages. “FAMOUS V.C. AND MURDERED CASHIER.”
The hatter had identified O.E. Yes, he remembered selling the hat, only a week before, to Major Oliver Essex.
“The police, making inquiries into Major Essex’s movements last night, found that he had not spent the night at his lodgings. His present whereabouts are unknown. Major Essex is the son of William Essex, the well-known dramatist and novelist.”
I had remained out till four o’clock. I crept up the stairs to the flat as though I myself were a hunted man. Annie Suthurst brought me some tea. She said nothing. She was as solicitous as a nurse dealing with a patient sick to death. She had seen the papers all right.
*
Hard on her heels, Dermot came into the room. “Why, Bill,” he said, “Bill...” and could say no more. He stood there on the verge of tears.
“For God’s sake, get out,” I said savagely. “Get out! Leave me alone!”
In the morning I went to Paddington and took the train to Truro.
So far as I knew, there was only one man in England to whom Oliver could turn now, and that was Captain Judas. I didn’t know what I intended to do, except that I must get to Heronwater. I told nobody where I was going—not Dermot; not Annie Suthurst. Just to go, just to feel that at this last desperate moment I might get near to Oliver.
It was dark when the train ran over the viaduct into Truro station. I had never before travelled down here by train in the winter. We rumbled slowly over the viaduct, always associated in my mind with tea-time of a summer’s day, the children leaning eagerly out of the window: “The viaduct! Look! The cathedral! Look at the green copper roof!” The long journey nearly done, and joy in the morning. And now again, in the dark of the deepening winter night, the long journey was nearly done.
I did not take a taxi from Truro to Heronwater. I walked. No one must know that there was anyone at Heronwater. The shops were lit as I walked through the town. The windows were gay with lanterns and Christmas trees and coloured dainties. But it was a wretched night. A thin rain was drizzling down, and once the main streets were left behind the town seemed like my heart to be bowed beneath a load of misery.
Before I left the town I bought tea and condensed milk, a loaf of bread and a quarter of a pound of butter. That was all I could carry. It was a good four miles to Heronwater, and I did not reach the house till nearly seven o’clock. The big wrought-iron gates were fastened with a padlock and chain. There was a small iron gate at the side: the gate on which Oliver had swung that day when we waited for Dermot who was bringing Donnelly and Maggie to stay with us. I had a key to this small gate, and when I had passed through I locked it behind me. Half a dozen paces took me into the darkness of the rhododendrons. I was alone now in my own little world: a world of blackness and dripping water. I followed the twist of the drive to the front of the house. The place was deserted: not a sound, not a gleam of light. I went on, scrunching over the gravel to the path that led down through the wood to the water. The surface was treacherous with wet leaves and smooth slippery pebbles. Down at last, at the little grassy quay on the water’s edge. Here was the shack that had been turned into two rooms for Sam Sawle. That was my objective: the lair in which I could lie hidden and observe all that happened on the Jezebel.
I went into the shack, locked the door, saw that the curtains were drawn close across the window, and then ventured to strike a light. Hanging to a hook behind the door was a hurricane lamp that Sawle had used many a time for lighting us to the steps when we came home on dark nights. There was a candle still in it. By this meagre light I looked about the damp and dusty room, filled with relics of the days when Heronwater was alive with happy children. Oars leaned in a corner. Carefully coiled fishing lines, dim with spiders’ webs, were on a shelf. There were gaily-coloured cushions for the boats and squares of canvas for repairing sails. A girl’s flimsy green bathing-suit was hanging from a hook, and standing along a wall was an assortment of boots and shoes: canvas shoes and rubber shoes and wellingtons. Boat-hooks, bait-tins, a glass jar filled with bright pebbles and cowrie shells from Molunan beach. Over it all, dust undisturbed for years, and a disagreeable musty odour of decay.
Piled in the little hearth was a store of logs. With my booted foot I smashed up a packing-case and managed to start a fire. No one could see the smoke, down there in the darkness alongside the river. Gradually the chill was chased from the room. I sat down in Sam Sawle’s sprawling wicker chair and stretched the wet legs of my trousers to the blaze. I opened my overcoat upon another chair. The fag-end of candle in the hurricane lamp spluttered and went out, and in the glow of the firelight I sat there amid the mementoes of so much that had turned to dust. Nellie and Donnelly, Maeve and Rory, Sawle and Martin: all had here come running in and out, dumping this, snatching up that, with the gree
n grass and the green water shining in the sun without. Sitting there isolated from the world, tired to death and grey at the heart, with not a sound reaching me from the night, with the very rain too light and ghostly to make a sound as it dewed the roof, I felt like the survivor of an age that time had done with, and wondered why I myself had been chosen to remain.
*
I awoke in the first light of the morning stiff and cold. My bones seemed to creak as I got up out of the chair. I was faint for want of food. There was no water in Sawle’s shack, so I took the food I had bought in Truro and climbed up the path to the house. I was thankful that we pumped our water; otherwise, the supply would have been cut off. The pump was in the kitchen, and the sound of its clanking in the grey morning light seemed to fill the sheeted house. Sheets everywhere: cold, spectral. Again I had to light a fire to boil the water, and the breakfast, when it came, was nothing but tea and bread and butter. But the hot tea made a great difference. I lit a pipe and felt better. I did not want to enter the ghostly sheeted house again; so I took a few buckets of water, a kettle, a teapot and crockery down to the shack, and then cleared the woodshed of all its logs. I felt, irrationally, but with conviction, that Oliver would come to the Jezebel. I did not know how long I should have to wait. Now I could give myself a fire at night, and, if need be, I could live on a loaf for two days. So on that Thursday morning I settled down to wait, looking for hour after hour at the black hull of the Jezebel across the river.
*
I did not see him come. I saw Judas come up on deck once or twice during the Thursday, and his lights burned steadily all through Thursday night. On Friday there was nothing all day, nothing but the blue shimmer of smoke rising from the galley chimney. It was dark by four o’clock; by five the stars were out in a cloudless sky. I shut the door of the shack behind me and walked across the quay, down the steps to the river. I stood there listening to the gentle slapping of the water, looking at the lace-work of bare trees rising above the opposite bank, etched against the star-patterned sky. Then my heart stood still. Leaning over the bulwarks of the Jezebel, with nothing to show he was there but a head blocking out a few stars, was a man, and then there were two men. The night was so dark that I could have believed my long vigil had made me ready to see what was not. Then, clearly, two heads moved once more against the stars, and I knew that the waiting was over.
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