Hatter's Castle

by A. J. Cronin

  He nodded his head wisely, as he replied:

  ‘That’s right. It’s reserved for me and you. Don’t be afraid; nobody will disturb us.’ He sat down heavily on a chair close to her, and tried to take her hand in his.

  ‘But you can’t come in here!’ she protested in a panic. ‘You’ve no right to do such a thing. I’ll – I’ll call the landlady.’

  She was as timid as a partridge, and, he told himself greedily, as smooth and plump. He longed to bite the round contour of her shoulder.

  ‘No! my dear,’ he said thickly, ‘I’ve seen her already. We had a nice long talk outside. She’s not bonny, but she’s honest. Yes! she’s got my money, and I’ve got you.’

  ‘It’s impossible! You’re insulting me,’ she cried out. ‘There’s been a mistake. I never set eyes on you before. I’m expecting someone here any minute.’

  ‘He can wait till I’ve gone, dearie,’ he replied coarsely. ‘I like the look of you so well I would never let you go now!’

  She jumped to her feet indignantly.

  ‘I’ll scream,’ she cried. ‘You don’t know what you’re about. He’ll kill you if he comes in.’

  ‘He can go to hell, whoever he is. I’ve got you now,’ shouted Matt, gripping her suddenly before she could shriek.

  At that moment, when he hugged her close to his rampant body, whilst he bent down to her face, the door opened and, as he raised his head furiously to vituperate the intruder, he gazed straight into the eyes of his father. For what seemed an eternity of time the three figures remained motionless as though the three emotions of surprise, anger, and fear had petrified them into stone; then gradually, as Matt’s arm relaxed, the limp figure of the girl slipped silently out of his embrace. Then as if this movement induced him to speak, yet without for an instant removing his eyes from his son’s face, and in words as cold and penetrating as steel, Brodie said:

  ‘Has he hurt ye, Nancy?’

  The pretty barmaid of the Winton Arms came slowly up to him and tremblingly sobbed:

  ‘Not much. It was nothing at all. He didna hurt me. Ye just came in time.’

  His lips compressed themselves firmly, and his gaze became more fixed as he replied:

  ‘Don’t weep then, lassie! Run awa’ out.’

  ‘Am I to wait in the house for ye, dear?’ she whispered. ‘I will, if ye wish it.’

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed, without an instant’s hesitation.

  ‘Ye’ve had enough to thole. Run awa’ hame.’ His eyes dilated and his hands opened and shut as he continued slowly: ‘I want to have this – this gentleman to myself – entirely to myself.’

  As she brushed past him he stroked her cheek, without looking at her, without relaxing a muscle of his face.

  ‘Dinna hurt him,’ she whispered fearfully. ‘He didna mean anything. Ye can see he’s not himself.’

  He did not reply, but when she had gone he shut the door quietly and came close up to his son. The two men looked at each other. This time Matt’s eyes were not beaten down for he immediately lowered them and gazed deliberately at the floor, through his inebriated mind a wild succession of thoughts whirled. The immediate sinking fear he had experienced was replaced by a contrary emotion which rushed upwards in a fierce and bitter resentment. Was his father inevitably doomed to thwart him? The memory of each humiliation, every taunt, all the beatings he had endured from the other throughout his life seethed through his pot-valiant brain like white fire. Was he to submit patiently to another thrashing because he had unwittingly obtruded upon his father’s low woman? Mad with drink and frustrated lust, inflamed by the hot tide of his hate, he stood still, feeling blindly that now, at least, he was beyond fear.

  Brodie gazed at the lowered head of his son with a burning passion which at last burst the bonds of his iron control.

  ‘You dog!’ he hissed from between his clenched teeth. ‘You dared to do that! You dared to interfere with me and with what is mine. I warned ye to keep out of my way and now I’ll – I’ll strangle you.’ He put out his great hands to clutch the other’s neck but with a jerk Matt broke away from him, staggering to the other side of the table, from where he glared insanely at his father. His pale face was bedewed with sweat his mouth worked convulsively, his whole body shook.

  ‘You’re as bad as me, you swine!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t think you can come it over me any longer. You wanted that bitch for yourself. That was all. But if I can’t get her I’ll see that you don’t. I’ve suffered enough from you. I’m going to suffer no more. Don’t look at me like that!’

  ‘Look at ye!’ roared Brodie. ‘I’ll do more than look at ye! I’ll choke ye till I squeeze the breath out of your worthless body.’

  ‘Let me see you try,’ shouted the other, with a heaving breast. ‘You’ll choke me none – you’ll grind me down no-longer. You think I’m feared of you, but by God! I’m not. I’ll show you something you don’t expect.’

  A more brutal rage surged in Brodie at this unexpected defiance and his eye glared but, without speaking, he began slowly to advance round the table towards his son. Yet, strangely, Matthew did not move. Instead, with a wild shout of delirious exultation he plunged his hand into his hip pocket and withdrew a small derringer which he clutched fiercely in his grasp and pointed directly at his father.

  ‘You didn’t know I had tins, you swine,’ he shrieked. ‘You didn’t know I had brought this from India. There’s a bullet in it that’s a keepsake for you. Take it now, damn ye. Take it now, you sneering bully!’ And shutting his teeth behind his pale lips, he jerked back his forefinger and pulled the trigger. There was a bright yellow flash and a sharp explosion which sounded loudly within the confines of the room. The bullet, fired at close range, furrowed Brodie’s temple and buried itself in the mirror of the overmantel, amidst a crashing of glass which tinkled upon the floor amongst the dying echoes of the shot.

  For a second, Brodie stood aghast, then, with a loud cry, he rushed forward and struck his son a fearful blow with his mallet fist full between the eyes. Matthew dropped like a pole-axed animal, striking his head against the table leg as he fell. He lay senseless upon the floor, bleeding from his nose and ears.

  ‘You murderer!’ panted Brodie, staring with glittering eyes at the insensate form beneath him. ‘You tried to murder your own father.’ Then, as he stood thus, a furious knocking came upon the door, and the woman of the house burst into the room, trembling, her gruesome face becoming more ghastly as she gazed at the pistol and the inanimate figure on the floor.

  ‘My God!’ she gasped. ‘Ye havena – ye havena shot your own son?’

  Brodie pressed his handkerchief to his raw, scorched temple, his face rigid, his chest still heaving painfully.

  ‘Leave us,’ he commanded, still keeping his gaze upon Matthew. ‘It was him tried to kill me.’

  ‘’Twas him fired at you, then,’ she cried, wringing her hands. ‘ I knew no good would come o’ him bustin’ in like he did. Whatna noise that pistol made, too!’

  ‘Get out o’ here then,’ he ordered roughly. ‘Get out or there’ll be more noise – if that’s all that concerns you.’

  ‘Dinna do anything rash,’ she implored him. ‘Remember the name o’ the house.’

  ‘Damn you and your house! The only name it has is a bad one,’ he shouted, forcing his fierce gaze on her. ‘Don’t ye know I was nearly deid,’ and seixing her by the shoulder, he thrust her out of the room. When he had closed the door behind her he turned and again grimly contemplated the prone figure, then advancing, he stood over it and stirred it with his foot.

  ‘You would have murdered your father,’ he muttered. ‘ By God, I’ll pay you for it.’ Then he moved slowly to the table, sat down and, folding his arms across his chest, patiently awaited the other’s recovery.

  For five minutes there was absolute silence in the room, except for the slow tick-tock of a clock that hung against the wall and the occasional fall of a cinder in the grate; then, suddenly, Matt groaned and moved. H
olding his head in both hands, whilst blood still streamed from his nose, he tried to sit up but failed, and subsided again upon the floor with a low moan of pain. The blow which he had received had almost fractured his skull and now he felt sick with concussion. He had yet no consciousness of his father’s presence as the room swam around him and a violent nausea affected him. He felt deathly sick, hiccoughed and then vomited. The disgusting accumulation of his stomach contents gushed from his mouth and mixed revoltingly with the pool of blood upon the floor. It appeared as if he would never stop retching, as though the reflex straining of his body would kill him, but at last he ceased, and after lying weakly upon his side, he rose, and staggered dizzily to a chair by the table. His face was pale and streaked with blood, his eyes puffed and swollen, but with such vision as was left to him he now saw, and gazed dumbly at his father.

  ‘You’re still here, you see,’ whispered Brodie softly, ‘ and so am I.’ He uttered the last words with a slow intensity as he drew his chair nearer to that of his son. ‘Just the two of us alone in this room. Isna’ that grand? It’s a rare delight for me to be with ye like this, and to see ye so close to me.’ He paused for a moment then snarled: ‘Your dear mother would love ye if she could only see you now. The sight o’ your face would fair fill her heart with joy! The look o’ these smart clothes that you’ve spewed such a braw new pattern ower would fair chairm her! Her big braw son!’ Matthew was incapable of speaking, but speech was not required of him; Brodie picked up the pistol and, turning it over ostentatiously before his son’s shrinking gaze, continued, in a more restrained and contemplative tone: ‘Man, when I see you there, I’m surprised that a thing like you had the courage to try to murder me. Ye’re such a poor bit o’ dirt. But although I’m not anxious to have a bullet in my brain it’s a pity, in away, that ye didna succeed. Ye would have danced so brawly at the end of a halter, swingin’ from side to side with the rope round your yellow neck.’

  Matthew, now quite sober, turned a dead, piteous face towards his father, and, impelled by the instinct of flight, weakly tried to get up, in an endeavour to escape from the room.

  ‘Stay where you are, you dog!’ flared Brodie. ‘Do you think I’m done with ye yet? Ye’ll leave here at my pleasure, and there’s just the chance ye might never leave at all.’

  ‘I was out of my head, father,’ Matt whispered. ‘ I didn’t know what I was doin’ – I was drunk.’

  ‘So ye take a dram, do ye?’ sneered his father. ‘The very idea, now! That’s another gentlemanly habit ye brought back from abroad. No wonder ye have such a bonny aim wi’ a gun.’

  ‘I didna mean to fire,’ whispered the other. ‘I only bought the pistol for show. Oh! I’ll never, never do it again.’

  ‘Tuts! man,’ jibed Brodie, ‘dinna make such rash promises. Ye might want to murder somebody in real earnest tomorrow – to blow their brains out so that they lay scattered on the floor.’

  ‘Father, father, let me go,’ whined Matthew. ‘Ye can see fine I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Come! come!’ jeered Brodie, ‘this’ll never do. That’s no’ like the big man you are – that’s not like your mother’s dashin’ son. Ye must have spewed a’ the courage out o’ ye by the look o’ things. We maun gie you another drink to pull ye together.’ He seized the bell that lay on the table and rang it loudly. ‘Just consider,’ he continued with a dreadful laugh, ‘a dead man couldna have rung that bell. Na! I couldna have given ye a dram if ye had murdered me.’

  ‘Don’t say that word again, father,’ Matt sobbed. ‘It makes me feared. I tell ye I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  Here the landlady of the house came in and, with tight lips, silently regarded them.

  ‘We’re still a’ alive, ye see’, Brodie sang out to her gaily, ‘in spite of all the pistols and gunpowder and keepsakes from India; and since we’re alive we’re goin’ to drink. Bring us a bottle o’ whisky and two glasses.’

  ‘I don’t want to drink,’ Matt quailed. ‘ I’m too sick.’ His head was splitting in agony and the very thought of liquor nauseated him.

  ‘What?’ drawled Brodie. ‘ Ye don’t say! and you the seasoned vessel that carries revolvers about wi’ ye. Man, ye better tak’ what’s offered, for ye’ll need a good stiffener before I hand ye over to the police!’

  ‘The police!’ gasped Matt, in terror. ‘ No! No! you wouldna do that, father.’ His fear was abject. He was now, through the blow, the reaction of his feelings, and the close proximity of his father, reduced to the level of an invertebrate creature who would have willingly crawled at the other’s feet if he could thereby have propitiated him.

  Brodie eyed his son repugnantly; he read his mind and saw the arrant cowardice staring from his bloodshot eyes. He was silent whilst the woman entered with the bottle and glasses, then, when she had withdrawn, he muttered slowly to himself:

  ‘God help me! Whatna’ thing is this to bear my name?’ Then bitterly he took up the bottle and poured out two glasses of neat spirit.

  ‘Here,’ he shouted, ‘we’ll drink to my big, braw son. The fine man from India! The lady’s man! The man that tried to kill his father!’ Fiercely he thrust the glass at his son. ‘Drink it, you dog, or I’ll throw it in your teeth.’ He drained his glass at a gulp, then fixed a minatory eye upon the other whilst Matthew painfully forced himself to swallow his portion of the spirit.

  ‘Now,’ he sneered, ‘we’ll make a fine comfortable night o’ it, just you and me. Fill up your glass! Fill it up, I say!’

  ‘Oh! father, let me go home,’ cried Matt – the sight and taste of the whisky now loathsome to him – ‘I want to go home. My head is bursting.’

  ‘Dear! dear!’ replied Brodie, in a broad mimicry of his wife’s voice. ‘Our Matt has a wee bit headache. That must have been where I struck you, son. That’s terrible! What shall we do about it?’ He affected to think deeply whilst he again emptied his glass. ‘Man, I can’t think of anything better than a leetle speerits. That’s the remedy for an honest man like you – some good honest whisky.’ He filled out another full glass of the raw liquor and bending forward, seized his son’s jaw with vice-like fingers, prised open the weak mouth, the quickly titled the contents of the glass down Matt’s gullet; whilst Matthew gasped and choked he continued, with a frightful assumption of conviviality: ‘ That’s better! That’s much better! And now tell me – don’t hesitate, mind ye, but be quite frank about it – tell me what ye thought of Nancy. She’s maybe no so weel born as your mother, ye ken, but she doesna stink in her person. Na! she’s a clean wee body in some respects. A man canna have it both ways, apparently.’ Then dropping his assumed smoothness he suddenly snarled, in a devilish voice: ‘Was she to your taste, I’m askin’ you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell,’ whined Matthew, realising that whatever answer he gave would be the wrong one.

  Brodie nodded his big head reflectively.

  ‘Man, that’s true enough! I didn’t give ye enough time to sample her. What a pity I came in so soon. I might have given ye another ten minutes thegither.’ Deliberately he whipped his own imagination on the raw with a dark unconscious sadism, knowing only that the more he tortured himself the more torment he gave his son. The more he saw his son’s painful thoughts revolt from the consideration of his recent excesses, the more thickly he thrust these repugnant ideas upon him.

  ‘Man,’ he continued, ‘I couldna help but admire the bold, strong way you handled her, although she couldna have refused anything to a braw callant like you. Ye would have thocht ye were fetchtin’ wi’ a man the way ye gripped her.’

  Matthew could endure it no longer. He had reached the limit of his endurance and laying his head, which throbbed with the beat of a hundred hammers, upon the table, and bursting outright into weak, blubbering tears, he cried:

  ‘Father, kill me if ye like. I don’t care. Kill me and be done with it but, for God’s sake, let me be.’

  Brodie looked at him with baffled, embittered fury; the hope he h
ad entertained of taunting his son info another wild assault so that he might experience the delight of again battering him senseless to the floor, died within him. He saw that the other was too weak, too broken, too pitifully distressed to be provoked into another outburst and a sudden, rankling resentment made him bend over and catch him a tremendous buffet on the head, with his open hand.

  ‘Take that, then, you slabbering lump,’ he shouted loudly: ‘ you haven’t even got the guts of a sheep.’ All the refinement of his anger, the sneering, the sarcasm, the irony, vanished, and instead, his rage foamed over like a raging sea whilst his face grew black with rabid fury like the dark clouding of an angry sky. ‘You would lay your fingers on my woman! You would lift your hand against me! Against me!’ he roared.

  Matt raised his eyes weakly, imploringly. ‘Don’t look at me,’ bellowed Brodie, as though a sacrilege had been committed by the other. ‘Ye’re not fit to lift your eyes above the level o’ my boots. I canna look at ye but what I want to spit on ye. Take that, and that, and that.’ With every word he cuffed the other’s head like an empty cask, sending it juddering against the table. ‘ God!’ he cried in disgust, ‘what are ye! Your head sounds like an empty drum. Have ye got to be drunk before ye can stand up for yourself? Have ye no sense of pride in the blood that’s in ye? Have ye no pride to be heir to the name I gave ye?’ Then, in the height of his fury, he suddenly seized Matt by the arm and, lifting him like a huddled marionette, dragged him to his feet. ‘ For what am I wasting my time on ye here? We’ll go home!’ he cried. ‘I’ll take ye home. Now we must deliver ye safely to your mother, out o’ this wicked house. It’s not the place at all for the son of such a godly woman.’ He linked his arm through Matt’s and propped the staggering, half insensible figure against his own, then, flinging some money on the table, he rammed his hat on his head. ‘Can ye sing?’ he shouted, as he trailed Matt out into the drab, empty street ‘We maun have a bit chorus on the way home. Just you and me – to show folks what good friends we are. Sing, you dog!’ he threatened, twisting the other’s arm agonisingly. ‘ Sing, or I’ll kill ye!’