The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  ‘Yes, Mr Harries, and thank you, I’m sure!’ Andrew, slightly fuddled with the wine and the liqueur, rose to his feet to make a speech about it, but Harries sat him down again.

  ‘Of course we do, Andrew! That brings me to what I want to say. I’m getting old, Andrew, and I’m very lonely. After so many years of domestic life I can’t get used to popping about from one hotel to another. You’re living in rooms and you can’t like that very much. Now suppose you were to take a nice little place at Hampstead and I’ll come and live with you as your paying guest. Of course, the house will be yours and you’ll be master. But the rent, the rates, the servants’ wages will be mine. And Connie shall tell me what the housekeeping works out at. I like a good table and now I’ve no dependants I’m able to pay for it.’

  At this stage we have no more than the bare fact that Andrew consented. One imagines him demurring a little at first, but only at the possibility of Harries paying more than his fair share, for Andrew was not greedy. His fatal credulity must have made it easy for the others to reassure him on this point. In a month the three of them were settled at Hampstead.

  Chapter Three

  It was one of the new houses that had been built for an artist. It was an eight-roomed house with a studio on the top floor – an elaborate affair in fake-Tudor style with oak rafters, which would greatly have offended present-day taste. The studio was by far the best room in the house and so was allotted to Harries as a bed-sitting-room. There was one other room on the top floor and that was Connie’s, the middle floor being shared by the two maids and Andrew. The furniture and equipment, for every room except Andrew’s, was provided by Harries.

  To this régime Andrew was contributing three-pounds-ten per week. The odd ten shillings, together with the trifling bonus at Christmas, barely paid his season ticket and lunches. It was when he was driven to borrowing four pounds from his lodger for the purchase of a new suit that Harries decided to make another change in his host’s fortunes.

  Harries, more to provide himself with a lazy occupation than with the idea of making money, had bought an agency in what he regarded as a freak enterprise. He was, in fact, the English representative of a French firm who had hit on the idea of hiring actors to perform little plays which could be photographed and subsequently rented in the film form to those music-halls that made a feature of ‘Animated Pictures’. Harries had a single room in Shaftesbury Avenue and he turned up when he felt inclined and filled what orders had arrived by post.

  ‘Andrew, I don’t like to see a man of your ability hard up for a few pounds. Your people don’t appreciate you. I do. I’ll give you six pounds a week with a small commission to take care of my agency. There, boy, don’t thank me – thank Connie!’

  And so Harries became not only Andrew’s ‘lodger’ but also his employer. Regarded by itself, it was a fair enough arrangement. Andrew was a good and conscientious worker, who more than covered his salary by the increased attention given to the business. For a year everything seemed to work smoothly – for everyone except Andrew. For during this year a number of little conventions had sprung up which, designed nominally for Andrew’s benefit, tended to leave him in the cold.

  There was, for instance, what we may call the ‘outing’ convention. Within their first month together Harries, over breakfast, had asked them both to dine with him in Town that night and go to a music-hall. But after breakfast Connie had taken Andrew aside.

  ‘Of course he has to ask us both – with him living in the house. But he’s done so much for us that I do feel we oughtn’t to put him to any extra expense. And with taking two of us out everything’s doubled, isn’t it! I’m only thinking of you, Andrew. You’re much too independent spirited to like having another man spending a lot of money on you, which you can’t possibly return.’

  It was Andrew himself who suggested that a simple way out of the difficulty would be for him to make an excuse to cry off. Next week there was another little outing with the same little speech in different words by Connie. After it had happened twice it slipped into being an understood thing that Harries should invariably invite them both and that Andrew should as invariably make an excuse – at which Harries would express a genially-bullying regret.

  Shortly after Andrew had begun to work for Harries the dinner convention was established. Andrew left the office at six and, with a longish walk from the station, was rarely in the house before seven. Connie discovered that Harries tended to lose his appetite if dinner were later than seven. She and Harries had drifted into the habit of dressing for dinner – it saved trouble if they wished to go out anywhere afterwards. And as she felt sure that Andrew would not care to sit down in morning-dress, and further as he did not possess a dinner-jacket anyway, it seemed simpler that he should have a good square meal in the middle of the day and just a light supper about eight o’clock after dinner had been cleared away.

  Andrew, of course, was very blind. Even with the six pounds a week and the small commission – with three pounds ten going to the household – there was little enough left after meeting his daily expenses, in which the good square meal was included. Twenty pounds a year was the utmost he could give to his wife as a dress allowance. But he knew nothing of dress values and merely thought she did extraordinarily well with the money.

  Connie gradually accumulated several pieces of jewellery. First there was a gold wrist-watch, frankly and openly a present from Harries. There was nothing to cavil at in this, for Connie had presented Harries with an exactly similar watch bought at the same shop at the same time. The two watches, indistinguishable to the naked eye, were, they said, a quaint pledge of their friendship. There was a diamond ring which she told Andrew had cost five pounds – and he believed it. She told him she had won the five pounds at the races – and he believed her again. And later he believed the several tales which accounted for the bracelet, the pendant, and the brooch.

  After his solitary supper he would join them in the drawing-room and stay with them until they drove him out with the phonograph, which he detested, being a quiet little man. He took up photography, pottered about with it in the evenings. At week-ends they were always ready to pose for him. The poor little fool took over thirty photographs of them together, sitting about the garden and what not.

  It was not until the second year of this régime that he began to be acutely miserable. He made the discovery that in any given week he enjoyed scarcely half a dozen hours of his wife’s company. Not since they had been at Hampstead had she favoured him with a single caress. The old inferiority complex was inflamed again. Then quite suddenly he revolted.

  One Saturday night he went into her room when she was dressing for dinner and was contemptuously snubbed.

  ‘It’s not fair, Connie. I’ve never been given a fair chance. We don’t have any home-life. We hardly ever see each other. And it’s all Mr Harries.’

  ‘I can’t argue with you now –’ she glanced at the wrist-watch Harries had given her ‘– you know he doesn’t like me to be late for dinner.’

  Andrew struck an attitude, looking like a pocket Napoleon.

  ‘Harries must go!’

  ‘Don’t talk so silly, Andrew! We couldn’t keep up this house without him – nor the servants nor anything.’

  ‘We don’t want any of it. We could get a little place of our own in Islington.’

  She utterly failed to understand what had happened. So she laughed at him and dared him to speak to Harries. She must have been very surprised when he took her at her word and went straight across to Harries’ room.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Well, Andrew, my boy, what do you want? I shall be down presently. Won’t it wait?’

  At any other time this would have cowed Andrew. But he was worked up now. He looked round the studio, taking in the fake-Tudor beams, the senseless skylight, the sideboard, the incongruous bed with its heavy rails. He stood there, hating the lot.

  ‘You’ve been very kind to us, Mr Harries. But I’ve bee
n thinking it over and I don’t think it quite works, if you know what I mean. Of course, this is really your house – there’s no question of asking you to leave it. But I’m taking Connie away. We’re going to have a little place in Islington all by ourselves.’

  Harries was not angry. His attitude to Andrew was such that he could never feel anger towards him. He laughed, quite sincerely, for he was amused.

  ‘Why, Andrew, if you and I part company where are you going to get another job?’ he asked.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about that, Mr Harries.’

  ‘Of course you hadn’t! Now run away, there’s a good lad! And ask Connie if she can spare me a minute. She can slip on a wrap if she isn’t dressed.’

  Andrew went away. He even obeyed the order to tell Connie that she was wanted. For part of him was still pure automaton.

  But there was a part of him that was nothing of the kind. There was that inferiority complex. We have all been told that a sense of inferiority is a very dangerous thing to nurse if you do not fully understand it. If you do not even recognize that you have one, heaven knows where it may drive you! And Andrew did not know that he had one – did not even know that Connie’s coldness to him had driven his imagination to create a dream-world in which there was no Harries. As once before he had created a dream-world in which there was no office but only cowboys – who had taught him lasso-work and rope-spinning.

  To-night the dream had matured. Once again the dream translated itself into reality. He crept into Harries’ room in the small hours. He reached through the back bed-rails, noosed the neck of the sleeping man and, obtaining great leverage with his feet against the head of the bed, strangled him.

  Then he threw one end of the rope over the nearest fake-Tudor beam. He could not pull the body up on the rope, for he weighed less than ten stone and Harries weighed fifteen. A man cannot pull a greater weight than his own, but if he is in reasonable health he can lift one far greater.

  An upright chair and a directory. With his shoulder he got the dead man’s feet on to the directory. Steadying the body with the rope he pulled the body into an erect position. He fastened the other end of the rope round the double tassel-hooks normally used for the cord of the skylight. Then he caused the heels of the corpse to knock away the chair.

  He was in no hurry. He was able to observe that in the brief struggle Harries had broken a thumb-nail. A suicide should show no signs of a struggle. Andrew looked about him.

  In the bed, undamaged, was a gold wrist-watch, indistinguishable from the one Connie wore. Andrew fastened it on the dead man’s wrist, then moistened his handkerchief on his tongue and wiped away his own finger-prints. The unbroken wrist-watch would kill suspicion that there had been any kind of struggle, thought Andrew – whereupon he went to bed and slept until he was awakened by the scream of the housemaid who was taking tea to Harries’ room.

  Chapter Five

  Though there was no apparent reason for William Harries to commit suicide – there was still less apparent reason why anyone should want to murder him. True, as the police at once recognized, it might have been done by a jealous husband – but in this case the hypothetically jealous husband weighed less than ten stone. Even if he could have overpowered a man of that size he could not have hoisted him on to the beam and secured the rope on the double tassel-hook. There was, of course, the possibility that Andrew might have strangled him first and, in short, that he might have done exactly what he did do. But what might have happened is of little interest to Scotland Yard if it cannot be proved. And in this case it could not be proved.

  There was no possibility, it seemed, of Andrew paying the penalty unless he confessed. And why should he confess? The poets may believe that the Avenging Furies haunt the murderer, but police records do not bear this out. Andrew, so far from being haunted, was undoubtedly proud of his deed. The murder, we may say, made a new man of him.

  The new man, on the night after the inquest, went to his wife’s room. In her anger at what she regarded as his intrusion she gave voice to those suspicions which the police had kept to themselves. Whether it was mere abuse or not, he neither admitted nor denied anything. He just took one of her silver-backed hair brushes and beat her rather brutally. She put in a good deal of screaming, but as the servants had left after the inquest there was no one to hear her.

  In the course of her screaming she let fly some of the virulent abuse she had learnt in her early career. But he merely walloped her the harder. It was when her strength was failing under his repeated blows that she gasped out:

  ‘Will – he’s killing me! Willie – don’t let him!’

  The castigation immediately ceased. Until that moment he had not known why he was beating her. It was not for anything she had said – it was just that this meek little man was turning savage – finding his release, as the psychologists would say. And now her words, which in themselves proved nothing, suddenly brought a dimly apprehended fact to his full consciousness.

  ‘You’ve been carrying on with him behind my back. Go on – haven’t you?’

  And then the dreadful retort gasped out between sobs:

  ‘What if I have! You didn’t think you were getting this house and all the rest of it for nothing, and you needn’t try to kid me.’

  He did not mind her accusing him of the murder, rather liked it in fact. But this was a cruel charge – the more unbearable because he seems to have understood that, though unjust, anyone but she herself would have been justified in making it. To it he made what seems to us the irrelevant answer:

  ‘If I can’t kid you, you can’t kid me any longer.’

  He pulled her from her bed. She scratched and bit him, but he got a good grip on her hair and dragged her into the room that had been Harries’. She was terrified, because she thought that he intended to murder her too. Indeed, it may well have been his intention to do so, but the intention was never fulfilled.

  He flung her on the sofa, where she lay panting, too exhausted to attempt to run from the room. He snatched up a poker and broke the door of Harries’ sideboard. Then he helped himself to a stiff tot of Harries’ brandy.

  ‘I’ve been a fool – and you needn’t tell me that again, because I know it. You gave him what you ought to have given me, and it’s no good your saying I was standing in on it, because you know I wasn’t. I’ve hated it here.’

  He took another brandy, sipped it while he sat on the edge of Harries’ bed, and looked up at the beam on which he had hanged him.

  ‘You’ve broken the glass of my wrist-watch,’ she whimpered. ‘It only came back from the mender’s to-day.’

  But Andrew was not in the mood to bother about a wrist-watch.

  ‘I’m not the first man to be fooled by a woman. We don’t want to talk any more about Harries. He’s all over. The question is, what am I going to do with you? Serve you right if I was to string you up. But that’s all over. Tell you what I’m going to do with you, Connie. I’m going to forgive you.’

  Now a man, in the simple calculation of Connie’s class, was a man. Harries, she quite realized, was ‘over’ – and it would obviously be wise to take what she could get. She poured forth a fervent torrent of promises of good behaviour for the future. But the swash-buckling, brandy-drinking, wife-beating Andrew was not afflicted with credulousness and paid no attention. At the end of it all she asked him where they were going to live.

  ‘I dunno. I’ll think it over. Tell you in the morning. And now hop off to bed – go on! Do what I tell you or I’ll set about you again.’

  By the following morning the violence had evaporated, but the meekness had not come back. As they sat together in the kitchen over a breakfast which she had prepared he gave his decision.

  ‘We’re going to live here. The rent is eighty and it’s five weeks to June quarter-day. I’ll be able to manage it. You’ll have to keep the place clean and have supper ready for me when I come in – at seven.’

  Chapter Six

  What was left
of Harries’ capital went to Chancery but the Agency went to Andrew. He ran over to Paris and obtained a renewal of the contract in favour of himself. While there, he established relations with another French studio and three Italian studios. For in those days France and Italy dominated the new-born industry.

  Andrew scraped together the rent by quarter-day and was safe in his possession of the house for another three months – and in that short time a great deal happened.

  In those days there was not in Great Britain a single house devoted solely to the film. Some of the music-halls ran it as a cheap turn, and there were a number of individuals on the road with a small assortment, who would turn up and take a room in the town hall for a couple of nights. Quite suddenly Paul Nillsen, a Swede, started a chain of tiny theatres to be devoted exclusively to the cinematograph film. But before he had opened a single theatre a rival chain was started by George Aventaar (the father of the distinguished Royal Academician). Each had to go to Andrew for service. Each offered an ahead contract with a cash deposit. By employing an astute solicitor on the contracts, Andrew was able to accept both offers.

  The dramatic picture was making a slow start. They were ten-minute affairs, most of them very crude – but some of them struck a very high level of artistic technique (which is just about to be re-discovered). But with this new fillip, production increased and within a year the two-reel drama was born. Andrew was the first renter to occupy a whole house in Wardour Street.

  In the meantime his personal life was passing through a no less startling phase of reconstruction. The murder, we may assume, was ever present in his memory, though not quite in the sense that the moralist would expect. So far from being a secret horror it became a positive inspiration to a life of freedom and self-determination.