Robert Arthur looked positively cheerful. “Thank you very much. I should be delighted.” He replaced the monocle in his eye as he beamed at Mrs. Chaddlewick. “Your interest in my—my Atlantis experience is very gratifying—very. Some people think I just make it up.”
“Oh, but you couldn’t possibly, could you?” cried the lady. “I’m frightfully like that myself—spooky, I mean. So I really do understand. And I’m tremendously interested.” Her placidly sensual eyes were turned full upon the face of Mr. Kewdingham.
“She takes these things very seriously,” said Mr. Chaddlewick, moving towards the door.
“So do I,” said Robert Arthur, gently releasing the soft hand of Pamela Chaddlewick, and thinking that she must have married George for his money.
He walked down to the gate with them, while the old man shuffled upstairs again, and Bertha stood alone in the drawing-room.
Bertha stood alone in the drawing-room, wondering how long it would be before she reached the limit of her capacity for endurance.
5
After Mr. and Mrs. Kewdingham had finished their tea—in silence—there was another visitor. The maid was out, so Mrs. Kewdingham opened the door to Dr. Wilson Bagge.
The doctor was a trim, slick little man with a ruddy face, a brushy auburn moustache, and rather wild, roving blue eyes. But the wildness was all in the eyes, perceptible only to the observant. In manner he was tight, punctilious and extremely careful. He spoke with a studied modulation, picking his words in a delicate though snappy fashion, like a smart little bird picking up grains on the tin floor of a cage. Indeed, he was not unlike a well-behaved little bird, a twinkling fellow, always fresh and always dainty, hopping away unruffled through the garden of life. So he seemed at first; but when you saw the quick dancing flash in his eyes, the sudden electric flicker of something wild and incalculable, something active though controlled, you wondered if he was altogether trustworthy.
The sullen, humiliated face of Mrs. Kewdingham sparkled up warmly as soon as she saw the doctor on the doorstep. He was a family friend, the constant, though not too expensive, attendant of Robert Arthur. In fact, a number of his visits were purely social.
“Ah, doctor! How nice of you to look in. Come along upstairs.”
She was looking pale and rather nervous, but it suited her. A momentary flash came into the blue eyes of the doctor, a little snippet of blue fire like a spark out of a flint, but he spoke with deliberate formality.
“I was calling at Number Eight, and so I thought I would just pop in for a minute. How’s your husband?”
“Oh, he’s—”
But Robert Arthur, recognising the chirrupy voice, had come out on the landing.
“Hullo, Bagge! You’re the very man I wanted to see. I’ve got something for you to look at, my boy!”
The doctor put his hat and coat in the hall and ascended the stairs with Mrs. Kewdingham. When they entered the drawing-room Robert Arthur was fumbling among his tottering boxes. He was glad of this timely relief, and he smiled in his most engaging manner. Doctor Bagge astutely noted the smile, he noted the strange excitement of Robert Arthur, and he knew there had been a row.
“Now look here, Bagge.” Robert Arthur produced a little glass-topped box with a beetle inside it. “What about this one? It’s the rare type mentioned by Sylvester. I got it on the churchyard wall at Easton-under-Frogg the other day.”
Bertha moodily took up a basket full of socks and began to busy herself with the interminable task of darning.
The cabinets rattled, the boxes flopped, the tins clattered, the wretched collection began to disgorge its dilapidated treasures.
From time to time the doctor glanced at Mrs. Kewdingham. Her head was bent over her work, but he could see that she was angry and sorrowful. Then the door-bell tinkled faintly. Robert Arthur looked at his watch.
“That will be Smith,” he said. “You know Smith? The Secretary of our League. He wants to see me about some business. Don’t go. I shall have a word with him in the dining-room. I’ll come back in a minute.” And he ran down the stairs.
The doctor felt embarrassed. He pushed some corks and cards on the table, took up a swallow-tailed butterfly and stared at it with a critical frown. As he did so he knew that Bertha raised her head, looked at him for a moment and then bent over her work again. The door below had opened and shut, and they could hear Kewdingham talking to another man in the hall. The doctor wanted to speak. He wanted to show that he was sympathetic, friendly; that he understood the situation. Bertha was a quick, intelligent woman; no fool. Like other unhappy people, she had a reputation for sarcasm. The only words that came into the doctor’s mind were “damned nonsense”, and they were hardly appropriate. So he said in a hollow, dry and purely conversational tone:
“Is Michael quite well?”
“Oh, yes, thank you,” said Bertha, knowing that he was not interested in her answer. “What do you really think of all that rubbish?” She jerked her head towards one of the cabinets.
The doctor shut himself up in a shell of impenetrable decorum.
“Come, come! You mustn’t call it rubbish,” he said. “Why, there’s remarkable industry in all this, and a very considerable degree of skill in arrangement.”
Bertha frowned; then she plunged her hand roughly into her work-basket, drawing out of it a tattered grey sock which she appeared to study with close attention. And then she looked up with an abrupt, uncanny smile.
“You need not be a humbug,” she said. “Not with me.”
Again there was a sound of voices in the hall, the front door was opened and shut, and Robert Arthur could be heard coming up the stairs.
“Very well,” said the doctor quietly, and he nodded his head in a perky, bird-like way. He understood.
“Ah!” said Robert Arthur, coming back into the room, “we shall be very busy in the League before long. This election, and one thing and another…Are you in sympathy with our work?”
“Well,” replied the doctor, with an almost demure quality of reticence in his voice, “I can only speak as an outsider.”
“But you mustn’t be an outsider!” Kewdingham was obviously excited. “Only just now I was saying to Smith how extremely useful you would be in the League—a man of your influence, and all that sort of thing. He agreed with me. Why—do you know? Shufflecester is full of Bolsheviks. We have a secret list of them, and I can assure you that you would be astonished if you saw it.”
“That is very probable,” said Bertha grimly.
Robert Arthur ignored the interruption. “My dear fellow, I wish you could see your way to joining the League.”
The doctor became even more impenetrable, more discreet. “Well, Kewdingham, I could hardly give you a promise. Of course I am entirely in favour of those who seek to maintain order by legitimate and rational means; but I can hardly believe that we are threatened by anything very sudden or very violent.”
“Rational means—yes, I agree. But you don’t know as much as we do, if you’ll allow me to say so. When the band was playing ‘God save the King’ in the Town Hall the other night, Cliffe saw a fellow standing with his hat on. So he got behind the fellow quietly and knocked the hat off his head. It then appeared that he was a chemist. Well—I mean to say—”
“No, Kewdingham; I still don’t believe that anything dreadful is going to happen. We are a slow-going, easy people, we are constitutional, we are homely; and our police are remarkably efficient.”
“True. But when these agitators try to persuade people that wages might be higher, and that war is wrong, and nonsense of that sort—what are we to do? After all, if they let the cat out of the bag, we can’t sit down under it.”
And again the great Kewdingham collection opened its dismal jaws, disgorging its innumerable and indescribable bits and pieces, its meaningless odds and ends. For a while the doctor endured it with prim patience,
cocking his little head to one side in the gravest manner. Then he had to go. And before he went he smiled in a particularly subtle way at Mrs. Kewdingham. Poor lady! he thought, poor lady!—I know what’s the trouble, and I really am most terribly sorry for her. Perhaps I may be able to help in some way—who knows?
6
Mrs. Kewdingham invariably retired to bed long before her husband came upstairs. While he was reading, or fiddling about with his collection, she just got up and walked out of the room, and as soon as she was in bed she pretended to be asleep. It was a recognised convention, a dreary convention, by means of which they avoided the necessity for saying “good night” to each other…
On the night which followed the scene with the Chaddlewicks, Bertha was in her room soon after ten o’clock. Something on Robert Arthur’s dressing-table drew her attention. It was a photograph of herself, taken at the time of her engagement. The photograph was in a silver frame, and the glass had cracked across from one corner to the other.
“That’s unlucky,” she said.
Then she slipped off her dress and saw herself, white in the tall mirror.
“It’s unlucky,” she repeated. “My God!—it’s terribly unlucky.”
Chapter II
1
Doctor Wilson Bagge plays a very strange part in the Kewdingham drama, and we must know something more about him before we proceed.
The doctor was a widower. His wife, an exasperating invalid, had died rather suddenly—indeed, suddenly enough to cause a certain amount of whispered suspicion. And yet he had been a most patient, attentive and apparently devoted husband. An old aunt, who left him £15,000, had also died suddenly, after he had been called in by her regular doctor.
When his wife died he was badly upset, and went away to Italy for six weeks. After his return, the postman delivered quite a number of letters addressed to the doctor in a sprawling feminine hand, and with Firenze on the post-mark. When he received these letters the little man was curiously disturbed. On one occasion, after getting a letter with a Firenze post-mark, he had rushed up to London in his car.
Now you are to observe that Doctor Wilson Bagge was extremely correct. So trim, meticulous and polite, he was almost inhuman. He had a miniature pomposity, but he quickly checked any sign of disrespect by a sudden glare of his electric blue eyes—for one alarming moment all the primness faded and he looked positively dangerous. But he was never angry. No fierce or bitter word ever came out of that small, pursy mouth. No one could charge him with indiscretion.
And yet, in spite of the curious rumours about his wife, and in spite of his odd little ways, he was popular. It is true that he had no intimate friends, but then he had no professed enemies. He was very gentle and very kind. He was never hard on people, and he did a lot of good, careful work for nothing. Whenever he was able to do so, he read the morning lessons in the Church of St. Egwulf.
To women he was unquestionably attractive; perhaps because they were piqued or puzzled by the little blue demon who flickered up so quickly, even when the doctor was saying the most ordinary things. There were no scandals about Dr. Wilson Bagge; at any rate, no definite scandals—and that is as much as you can expect in a country town, where even vicars have to be careful. The two elderly women who kept house for him had nothing to say, except that he was a kind and a generous master.
His few amusements were extremely simple. If he had an hour to spare, he would go off to Pluck’s Gutter for a little fishing, or he would go for a walk on Dewlash Downs. Always by himself. He did not seem to avoid people, but he was a solitary man, with all the sleek independence of a cat. He was not considered unmanly, and he occasionally drank a glass of sherry (never more than one) at the Conservative Club. After all, he was busy. He had a very fair practice; and a more than fair share, according to the other doctors, of the profitable old women. In the sick-room he was at his best, never flippant, never depressing, never foolishly confident.
Among the peculiarities of the doctor was the singular, old-fashioned practice of running a small dispensary. He did this, so he said, in order that poor people could get what they needed without having to pay the wickedly exorbitant rates charged by the chemist, and in many cases without paying anything at all. He also said that he liked to have a free hand with his medicines—whatever he meant by that. And he often declared that nothing was more grateful to him than a quiet hour in his dispensary, nothing so truly sedative as the complicated smell of his drugs, the subtle prevalence of medical odours. Looking round him at the lucid whiteness of his bowls and basins, the sparkle of his chromium taps, the beautifully trim order of his jars and bottles, he would say to some privileged visitor: “Ah, my boy! No man is fit to be called a doctor unless he really is a medicine-man. Those bottles are full of mystery and experience—magic, power, death or healing—but more of mystery than anything else. We ought not to pretend to know so much, when we really know so little. The secret of all practice is experiment. Yes, my boy! Healing is an art, it’s intuitive, experimental, perhaps inspired!” Then he would suddenly whisk round again, shutting himself up in his impenetrable shell of mere politeness.
A man with an extensive knowledge of criminal types (such men are unfortunately rare) might have suspected that Doctor Bagge had the makings of a poisoner.
So often the poisoner is the last man who would be suspected by the ordinary person. His exquisite respectability and his almost invariable refinement throw dust in the eyes even of those who are not incapable of observation. He is kind, he is plausible. You are told of his deeds of unobtrusive generosity. His outlines, moral and physical, are as clean as if he was cut out of a piece of stiff cardboard. Precise, dainty, there is a kind of mechanical restraint about him.
What has become of his emotions? Are they smothered? Are they subdued by heavy doses of moral atropine? He has got to express himself in some way, and how will he do it? You feel there is something unnatural and ominous in this even composure.
Wilson Bagge was a good physician. He loved what he truly described as his art. New theories, new discoveries excited him. He read eagerly the latest monographs, he took the medical journals, and he often visited the laboratories of his old hospital in London. Sir James Macwithian, the eminent gynaecologist, used to enjoy a talk with Doctor Wilson Bagge, and greatly admired his acuteness in portraying the action of glucosides in the body. And it may be doubted if Doctor Bagge was ever happier than when he stood in a white coat by the side of Sir James Macwithian’s microscope.
For some years Bagge had been studying the medical uses of aluminium. He considered, rightly, that we ought to increase our knowledge, whether in medicine or in toxicology, of the pharmacological action of this very interesting metal. People had been poisoned, it was alleged, by the mere use of aluminium vessels in the kitchen, and yet hardly anything was known of these cases. They were hushed up. There was a disappointing lack of postmortem opportunities. But here was a grisly problem which really ought to be investigated. And that was not all. The value of aluminium in practical therapy was only beginning to dawn upon the medical imagination. Professor Kolhaus, in his remarkable experiments with colloidal hydroxide of alum, was leading the way; but that was only a start.
Bagge, as we have seen, loved his dispensary. It might be said that his dispensary was a hobby, a recreation. It was more than this, however; for mere dispensing is no fun without experiment. And you have no idea what delightful experiments may be carried out with various preparations of alum.
The doctor had a small but well-chosen laboratory equipment, so he was able to test all manner of ingenious theories.
His methods were purely scientific. First of all there was the phase of cogitation, the mental phase. Then came the mixing and measuring in the dispensary. After that, of course, the launch of a new discovery into the living body of a patient. Once, it is true, he had been a little too venturesome: an elderly woman had died. But then she wo
uld have died soon in any case—and her death was remarkably instructive.
At the time of our story, Wilson Bagge was contemplating a grand experiment. He had succeeded in producing an alum compound, and he was now anxious to watch the effect of this compound on the human organism. There might be a certain danger; if he increased the proportion of chlorate there would be a very definite danger. He would have to make a careful choice. And he did not hesitate: he chose Robert Arthur Kewdingham.
2
Mrs. Bella Poundle-Quainton and her spinster daughter Ethel lived in a large Victorian house on the edge of the town. The old lady was genial in character and ample in proportion, living cheerfully and charitably in the simplified world of the aged. If she had a weakness it was an undiscerning belief in the honour, virtue and ability of those who were related to her by ties of blood. Ethel was very tall and angular; she exposed a good deal of her cartilaginous bosom, but she was a woman of stern morality, devoted to her mother and perpetually occupied in works of unobtrusive kindness. On the day after the Chaddlewick episode, Kewdingham was having tea with these excellent women.
“Yes,” Aunt Bella said, “we are not sorry the Pardishes have gone. They were not very nice people, I’m afraid.”
“They hung up their washing,” Ethel explained, “on a high line right above our wall.”
“Such colours!” Aunt Bella continued. “It was like a—what is it they call them?—like a flag day. So we had to write a very serious letter, telling them it was quite impossible for us to ask a gentleman to have tea in our garden. The new people are very pleasant, I believe. Mr. and Mrs. Fadshaw and their grown-up daughter. Mr. Fadshaw is interested in fossil fishes, or something like that: he is a gentleman, of course.”
“And how is Bertha?” said Ethel, with a vague, fugitive smile.
Robert Arthur looked exceedingly grave. His mouth opened, emitting a sound between a groan and a sigh.
“I have been rather worried about her lately,” he said. “Ever since they laid the new drains by the cathedral she has been decidedly off colour. So irritable, you know. Only yesterday she was frightfully rude to—to the Chaddlewicks.” He was on the point of saying “to Mrs. Chaddlewick”, but somehow or other he felt the inhibition of a guilty mind.
Family Matters Page 3