A dragon pursued him, clanging a bell; mechanically he moved aside, and the electric luggage-trucks passed him, writhing into the customs-house at the end of the station. Artivale lived in the Quartier Latin; it was necessary to get there before the hand fell on his shoulder. Paris taxi-drivers were mad, surely, and their taxis on the verge of disintegration; chasing enormous trams, charged by demonaic lorries, hooting incessantly and incessantly hooted at, Lomax in his wheeled scrap-iron rattled across a Paris darkened into the menace of an imminent cataclysm. A heaven of lead hung over the ghastly streets. All condemned, thought Lomax, as he racketed through the procession of life that was so gaily unconscious of the night in which it moved.
He arrived at Artivale’s house.
Artivale himself opened the door.
“Good God!” he said on seeing Lomax, “what . . . But come in. – You’re ill,” he continued, when he had got Lomax inside the door.
“No,” said Lomax, oblivious of the startling appearance he presented, with haggard cheeks behind the absurd spectacles; “only, I had to see you, – in a hurry.”
“In a hurry?” said Artivale, accustomed to think of Lomax as a man without engagements, occupations, or urgency.
“You see,” said Lomax, “I murdered Bellamy and I may be arrested at any moment.”
“Of course that does explain your hurry,” said Artivale, “but would you mind coming down to the kitchen, where I want to keep my eye on some larvae? We can talk there. My servants don’t understand English.”
Lomax followed him downstairs to the basement, where in a vaulted kitchen enormous blue butterflies circled in the air and a stout negress stoked the oven. The room was dark and excessively hot. “We’re in the tropics,” said Lomax, looking at the butterflies.
Artivale apologised for the atmosphere. “I have to keep it hot for the sake of the larvae,” he explained, “and I had to import the black women because no French servant would stand the heat. These are the larvae,” and he showed Lomax various colourless smudges lying on the tables and the dresser. “Now tell me about Bellamy.”
The negress beamed upon them benevolently, showing her teeth. A negro girl came from an inner room, carrying a pile of plates. A butterfly of extraordinary brilliancy quivered for a moment on the kitchen clock, and swept away, up into the shadows of the roof, fanning Lomax with its wings in passing.
“The murder was nothing,” said Lomax; “he asked me to do it. He was ill, you see, – mortally, – and he was afraid of pain. That’s all very simple. He left me his fortune, though.”
“Yes,” said Artivale, “I read his will in the paper.”
“I am leaving that to you,” said Lomax.
“To me, – but, my dear fellow, you’re not going to die.”
“Oh yes,” said Lomax, “I shall be hung, of course. Besides, we are all condemned, you know.”
“Ultimately, yes,” replied Artivale, “but not imminently.”
“That’s why people forget about it,” said Lomax, gazing at him very intently.
Artivale began to wonder whether Lomax suffered from delusions. “Could you take off those spectacles?” he asked.
“No,” said Lomax. “I should go mad if I did. You have no idea how beautiful your butterflies are, seen through them, – the blue through a veil of black. But to go back to the fortune. I ought, perhaps, to leave it to Miss Whitaker, but she has enough of her own already.”
“Why to Miss Whitaker?” asked Artivale.
“I married her in Cairo,” replied Lomax; “I forgot to tell you that. It is so difficult to remember all these things.”
“Are you telling me that you and Miss Whitaker were married all that time on the yacht?”
“Exactly. She was going to have a child, you know, – by another man.”
“I see,” said Artivale.
“But of course all these things that I am telling you are private.”
“Oh, quite,” said Artivale. “Miss Whitaker was going to have a child, so you married her; Bellamy had a mortal illness, so you murdered him. Private and confidential. I quite understand.”
“I hope you will have no scruples about accepting the fortune,” said Lomax anxiously. “I am leaving it to you, really, as I should leave it to a scientific institute, – because I believe you will use it to the good of humanity. But if you make any difficulties I shall alter my will and leave it to the Royal Society.”
“Tell me, Lomax,” said Artivale, “do you care a fig for humanity?” “There is nothing else to care about,” said
Lomax.
“Of course I accept your offer, – though not for myself,” said Artivale.
“That’s all right then,” said Lomax, and he rose to go.
“Stay a moment,” said Artivale. “Naturally, you got Bellamy to sign a paper stating that you were about to murder him at his own request?”
“No,” said Lomax; “it did cross my mind, but it seemed indelicate, somehow, – egotistic, you know, at a moment like that, to mention such a thing, – and as he didn’t suggest it I thought I wouldn’t bother him. After all, he was paying me a great compliment, – a very great compliment.”
“Oh, undoubtedly!” said Artivale, “but I think, if you will forgive my saying so, that your delicacy outran your prudence. Any evidence that I can give . . .”
“But you have only my word, and that isn’t evidence,” replied Lomax, smiling.
At that moment a bell pealed through the house upstairs.
“That will be for me,” said Lomax; “how lucky that I had time to say what I wanted to say.”
“Oh, you are lucky, aren’t you?” cried Artivale wildly; “a lucky, lucky dog. Your luck’s inconceivable. Lomax, – look here, – Lomax, – you must get out of this house. The back door. . . .”
The bell rang again.
“It’s only a question of sooner or later,” said Lomax gently; “for everybody, you know; not only for me. If they let me keep the spectacles I don’t mind. With them, I don’t see things as they are. Or perhaps I do. It doesn’t make much difference which. If you won’t go up and open that door, I shall go and open it myself.”
They took Lomax away in a cab. He was not allowed to keep his spectacles. Artivale came downstairs again to the kitchen, and watched a peacock butterfly of humming-bird proportions crawl free of its cocoon and spread its wings in flight.
It was only during the course of his trial that Lomax discovered how pitiable a weapon was truth. A law-court is a place of many contradictions; pitch-pine walls and rows of benches give it the appearance of a school treat, white wigs and scarlet and phraseology erect it into a seeming monument to all civilisation, but of the helplessness of the victim there is at least no doubt at all. His bewilderment is the one certain factor. Lomax in the days when he might meet fact with fantasy had been a contented man; now, when he tried to meet with fact the fantastical world which so suddenly and so utterly swamped him, was a man confounded, a man floundering for a foothold. He had lost his spectacles. He had lost his attitude towards life. He had lost Miss Whitaker, or at any rate had exchanged her for a Miss Whitaker new and formidable, a Miss Whitaker who, astonishingly and catastrophically, spoke a portion of the truth. If earth had turned to heaven and heaven to earth a greater chaos could not have resulted in his mind.
The public see me in the dock; they do not see me in my cell. Let me look at the walls; they are white, not clouded into a nameless colour, as once they would have been. Uncompromisingly white. How ugly, how bare! But I must remember: this is a prison cell. I have no means of turning it into anything else. I am a prisoner on trial for my life. That’s fact. A plain man, suffering the consequences for the actions of a creature enchanted, now disappeared. The white walls are fact. Geometry is a fact, – or so they say, – but didn’t some one suggest that in anothe
r planetary system the laws of geometry might be reversed? This cell is geometrical; square floor, square ceiling, square walls, square window intersected by bars. Geometrical shadows, Euclidean angles. White light. Did I, or did I not, do this, that, and the other? I did, but . . . No buts. Facts are facts. Yes or no. Geometrical questions require geometrical answers. If A be equal to B, then C . . . But either I am mad, or they are mad, or the King’s English no longer means what it used to mean.
In the dock again. Amazing statements, in substance true, in essence madly false. He must neither interrupt nor attempt to justify. All these events, which dance round him pointing crooked fingers, disfiguring their aspects into such caricatures, all these events came about so naturally, so inevitably. He knows that, as a lesson learnt, though the enchantment is gone from him. If he might speak, even, what should he relate of that experience? If he might speak! But when he speaks he damns himself. His counsel speaks for him, well-primed, so far as his client’s idea of honour has been allowed to prime him; but Lomax knows all the time that his life is of no real consequence to his counsel, except in so far as success provides advertisement; he knows that after the trial is over, one way or the other, his counsel will meet the opposing counsel in the lobby and stop to joke with him, “Got the better of you that time”, or, “Well, you were too much for me”.
Meanwhile his counsel has been eloquent, in an academic way. Lomax has nothing to complain of. The opening speech for the defence. A simple defence: murder at the victim’s request; a man threatened by a mortal disease. An act of friendship; an exaggerated act of friendship, it may be said; but shall it be called the less noble for that? But Lomax sees it coldly; he judges dispassionately, as though the story were not his own. Here stands this man; the jury will hear him tell how, out of compassion for a man he barely knew, he exposed himself to the utmost risk; even the precautions of common prudence were neglected by him in the urgency and delicacy of the circumstances. Another man would have refused this friendly office; or, accepting it, would have ensured his personal safety by a written assurance; or, thirdly, would have hurried from the house before the death had taken place. Not so the prisoner. Prisoner had remained for two hours with the dead body of his friend in the room, dealing with his private papers according to instructions previously received. (Here the prisoner was observed to show some signs of emotion.) Again, the prisoner might have pleaded not guilty; but, regretting his inaccuracies at the time of the inquest, had refused to do so. He was determined to tell the whole truth and to throw himself upon the mercy of the jury.
Lomax realised fully the impossible task his obstinacy had imposed upon his unfortunate counsel.
He realised too, however, that the difficulties improved the game, from the point of view of his counsel. How great would his triumph be, supposing . . .! And, after all, it was nothing but a game.
“A hopeless fellow,” said counsel to his wife that night, over his port. “I never had to deal with such a case, – never. Of course, if I can get him off, I’m made,” and he fell to ruminating, and his wife, who was in love with him, knew better than to interrupt.
How strange a colour were faces in the mass! A face examined separately and in detail was pink, porous, distinctive with mouth and eyebrows, but taken collectively they were of a uniform buff, and wore but one expression, of imbecile curiosity. Upturned, vacuous curiosity. Lomax had a prolonged opportunity for looking down upon such a mass. Here and there he picked out a face he knew, – Artivale, Robert Whitaker, the captain of the Nereid – and wondered vaguely what strands had drawn them all together at that place. Only by an effort of concentration could he connect them with himself. The voice went on, telling the truth on his behalf. The jury leaned forward to stare at him. The judge, with a long face and dewlaps like a blood-hound, up under his canopy, drew pictures on his blotting-paper. Outside in the streets, sensational posters flowered against the railings with the noonday editions. The Coati in the Zoo waggled his snout; at Mme. Tussaud’s the waxen murderers stood accumulating dust in the original dock of the Old Bailey; the Nereid, stripped of her wings, swayed a forlorn hulk in the mud at Brightlingsea.
The prosecution was thick with argument. It bore down upon Lomax like a fog through which he could not find his way. He heard his piteous motives scouted; he heard the exquisite ridicule: he saw a smile of derision flicker across the jury. And he sympathised. He quite saw that he could not expect to be believed. If only Bellamy had not left him that fortune, he might have stood a chance. But he would not be so ungenerous as to criticise Bellamy.
That was the first day of the prosecution. Lomax at night in his cell was almost happy: he was glad to endure this for Bellamy’s sake. He had loved Bellamy. He was glad to know at last how much he had loved Bellamy. And his privilege had been to spare Bellamy years of intolerable life. He never stopped to argue that Bellamy might just as well have performed the function for himself; for Bellamy was a coward, – had said so once and for all, and Lomax had accepted it. Lomax did not sleep much that night, but a sort of exultation kept him going: he had saved Bellamy, Artivale would have the money, and it was still just possible that to Miss Whitaker he had rendered a service. Not much of a service, certainly, to provide her with a convicted murderer upon whom to father her child; but, between himself and his own conscience, he knew that his intentions had been honourable. His brain was perfectly clear that night. He knew that he must hold on to those three things, and he would go compensated to the scaffold.
On the second day two of his three things were taken from him.
The first was the harder to bear. Post-mortem had revealed no mortal disease in the exhumed body. Lomax, lack-lustre in the dock, stirred to brief interest: so Bellamy, too, had been of the same company? But what Bellamy had really believed would now never be known.
The second concerned Miss Whitaker. Before she was called, the court was cleared, counsel submitting that the evidence about to be produced was of too delicate and private a character for publication. Ah, thought Lomax, here is a delicacy they can understand! He sat quiet while feet shuffled out of the court, herded away by a bailiff. Then when the doors were closed he heard the now familiar voice: Evelyn Amy Whitaker.
She was in the witness-box. She was very much frightened, but she had been subpoenaed, and Robert had terrorised her. She would not look at Lomax. Was she resident at 40 College Buildings, Kensington? She was. She had known the prisoner since April of the present year. She had met him on Mr. Bellamy’s yacht. They had sailed from Southampton to Alexandria and from thence had travelled by train to Cairo. In Cairo she had married the prisoner.
Here Lomax’s counsel protested that the evidence was irrelevant.
Counsel for the Crown maintained that the evidence was necessary to throw light upon the prisoner’s character, and the objection was overruled.
Examination continued: the marriage took place entirely at the prisoner’s suggestion. He had appeared very strange, and insisted upon wearing coloured spectacles even when not in the sun, – but here another protest was raised, and allowed by his lordship. Prisoner had always been very much interested in Mr. Bellamy, and occasionally said he could not understand him; also asked witness and Mr. Artivale their opinion. She had never heard Mr. Bellamy make any reference to his health. She had known Mr. Bellamy and the prisoner to be closeted for long talks in Mr. Bellamy’s cabin.
Cross-examined by counsel for the defence: was it not a fact that she had led the prisoner to believe that she was with child by a man then living abroad? and that prisoner’s suggestion of marriage was prompted by considerations of chivalry? Certainly not.
Dr. Edward Williams, of Harley Street, gynaecologist, examined: he had attended the witness, and could state upon oath that she was not in the condition described. The lady was, in fact, he might add, a virgin.
Lomax listened to this phantasmagoria of truth and untruth. He could have thanke
d the doctor for the outstanding and indubitable accuracy of his statement. It shone out like a light in darkness.
His lordship, much irritated: “I cannot have this.”
As your lordship pleases.
But the jury looked paternally at Miss Whitaker, thinking that she had had a lucky escape.
And again Lomax sympathised with the scepticism of the jury. Again he saw that he could not expect to be believed. “People don’t do such things”; men were not quixotic to that extent. Of course they could not believe. Why, he himself, in his pre-spectacle days, would not have believed. He scarcely believed now. The spectacles were really responsible; but it would only make matters worse to tell the jury about the spectacles. There was no place for such things in a tribunal; and, since all life was a tribunal, there should be no place for such things in life. The evidence for the defence was already sufficiently weak. Lomax had never known the name of the doctor who had given Bellamy his death-sentence, and advertisement had failed to produce him. Artivale, an impassioned witness, had had his story immediately pulled to pieces. Lomax himself was examined. But it all sounded very thin. And now that he was deprived of his spectacles – was become again that ordinary man, that Arthur Lomax getting through existence, with only the information of that fantastic interlude, as though it concerned another man, the information rather than the memory, since it existed now for him in words and not in sensation, – now that he was returned to his pre-spectacle days, he could survey his story with cold hard sense and see that it could bear no relation to a world of fact. It was a mistake, he had always known that it was a mistake, to mix one’s manners. And for having permitted himself that luxury, he was about to be hanged. It was perhaps an excessive penalty, but Lomax was not one to complain.
Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir Page 5