Portrait of a Murderer

by Martin Edwards

  The door was opened by his second daughter, Eleanor, a child of nine years old. Her face was a travesty of youth, though the features were immature enough in their pinched and colourless fashion. Her fair hair hung over her eyes and was untidily cut on the nape of her neck. Neither her face nor her hands was clean, and her frock was torn. Yet she would never, in any assembly, be overlooked. It was, perhaps, the expression that held the stranger’s gaze. It was arresting, fierce, and withdrawn. After seeing father and child together, there could be no doubt of their relationship. The little girl, also, had none of the candour and vitality of her years, but resembled a creature perpetually on guard, prepared for any new torment or alarm the days may hold, armed with a bitter stoicism that, in a less inattentive parent, would have touched and cut the heart.

  “Where’s your mother?” Brand asked.

  “She’s upstairs. She didn’t know you were coming to-day.”

  “She doesn’t have to make any preparations for me. Tell her I’m here.”

  He turned into the living-room to the left of the front door; the other side was a blank wall, separating them from the next house. He had neither offered nor expected a kiss or any sign of affection from the young creature whom he had begotten. He heard her going upstairs slowly, and the thought went through his mind, “More fuss with Sophy, I suppose. It’s a wonder she hasn’t killed some of the brats before now.”

  This was a typical sloven’s room—dirty plates on the table, a torn cloth, rags of garments lying about on the chairs, and dust everywhere. But, though he had often railed at his wife for such matters, today he was scarcely aware of them. The present held him in too light a grasp; beyond lay the glittering future, and to that he looked forward, as a traveller, solacing himself with the thought of the sea round the next bend of the road, can face with courage the wind, the heat, and the grit in the air because they will so soon belong to the past.

  Eleanor came back, saying her mother was just coming down.

  “Wasn’t she dressed?” asked Brand indifferently.

  The child shook her head. “She said, ‘God knows there’ll be no peace when he comes back, so we’ll take it while we can.’”

  He looked at her for the first time with curiosity; she had spoken with a certain defiance and spirit, as though to assert herself, not to him, but to her own heart. A momentary sense of fellowship for her loneliness and determination moved him.

  He said, smiling faintly, “Manners aren’t your strong suit, are they? In fact, in a properly constituted household, you’d probably be beaten for that. But, of course, those tests don’t apply here.”

  She folded her hands behind her back, and regarded him steadily. He returned her gaze, and suddenly he saw her tremble. In an instant she had recovered her self-control, but the fear remained in her mind, though her flesh denied it. Observing her more closely, and with a growing sympathy, he realised that she feared he might put that careless threat into action and was resolved to withstand his power, though she could not evade the consequences of it. Even at her age, he thought, she commanded attention, even a kind of respect. Already her personality was forming, and he reflected, “Courage; that’s the answer to her attitude. It’s the one thing that matters. That and knowing the only thing in your life that counts and never letting go.”

  Sophy came in, dragging a shapeless coat over her shoulders; her dark hair straggled from its untidy knot down her back. Her features were sharp, inquisitive, and acquisitive; she had the look of some horrible bird of prey, agape for carrion, and in the very stoop of her shoulders, the curve of her hands, the malevolent gleam of her eyes, she expressed a cruelty innate in her temperament. So shabby did she seem, so poor and ugly and unclean, that Brand was smitten with a feeling compounded of disgust, compassion, amazement, and awe.

  “Can it be true that I was so low, so stripped of all decency, that I was compelled to take any pleasure I could get even from that?” he thought. “My God, I’ve been down. It takes a thing like this to open one’s eyes. Well, this is the end.”

  Sophy said in a harsh voice, “What’s this bastard been telling you? You know what you can expect, you ——, if you’ve been opening your mouth. I never knew such a bloody little liar in all my days,” she added to her husband. “They fall out of her like water out of a tap.”

  Eleanor watched her, pale, defensive, guarded. Brand knew now why the woman had been in bed when he returned. Those prolonged drinking-bouts had been one of the horrors of his married life. Even now she was not sober, and he felt her as some loathsome disease touching and defiling his own life.

  “So you’ve come back?” she said, slumping into a chair.

  “You didn’t expect to see me?”

  She shrugged. “How could I tell?”

  “You thought, like everyone else, that I’d done it?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose you’re very sorry, anyway.”

  Brand asked, “It wouldn’t trouble you, would it, if I were guilty?”

  “Why the hell should it? We weren’t good enough to know him. He’s no loss to us.” And then, leaning forward, her stupid animal face twisted into a leer of mingled greed and coaxing, “How did you get the money, Brand? Don’t tell me he gave it you.”

  Brand replied callously, “Oh, you won’t see a penny of that.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean that cheque’s not worth the paper it’s written on. He’s broke, like the rest of us.”

  “And what are you going to do about that?”

  “Clear out, of course.”

  “You haven’t the money. I know that.”

  Brand’s laughter jarred. “Been through my pockets, have you? God, you’re a decent wife for any man. Anyway, I’m going. What’s it to you where I get my money from?”

  “You mean that? You’re going to desert us?” Her face was dreadful.

  A nerve of brutality in Brand was rasped by her voice, her appearance, the recognition of the havoc she had already wrought in his life, all that she might mean, her frustration of his hopes. He exclaimed bitterly, “Yes, and thank God for the chance.”

  “And we’re to starve, I suppose?”

  They argued furiously, hurling abuse at one another. Sophy shouted that she had five children to maintain. Brand retorted that she had worked before and could work again, and had, doubtless, other money-making devices at her finger-tips.

  “For instance, you might try Ferdinand’s father,” he suggested brutally.

  Sophy became so abusive that even the child, accustomed though she was to such scenes, shivered and withdrew behind the ragged tapestry chair near the fireplace. It was a dreadful scene, not so much on account of the language in which their ugly conversation was couched as in their frank and shameless revelation of themselves one to the other, unconcealed even by the barest of draperies of decency and self-respect. Towards this woman, who invariably aroused all the most bestial passions in his nature, Brand felt himself incapable of pity. Every past occasion of infidelity or ill-usage, every head under which complaints could be lodged, every instant of mutual surrender to a base instinct that neither attempted to clothe in the garments of reticence, all these recollections, bitternesses, occasions of ugliness and cruelty, were flung like actual missiles by one of this deplorable pair at the other. For Brand, it was a lowering of the gates of self-possession that had withstood the tide of his own fears and the suspicions of other people for the past week. As for the woman, she was too far past any considerations of self-respect to be even conscious of the degradation of the scene.

  Presently Brand said carelessly, “Be reasonable, my dear Sophy. Within a month you’ll be as thankful for the change as myself. It’ll give you more scope.” And he laughed.

  Sophy demanded furiously whether he proposed to abandon the children altogether.

  “It won’t make much difference to them,�
�� said Brand. “One man or another…”

  Eleanor felt a sudden reaction from this wild interchange of insults. She, a personality distinct from either of them, with already her own dreams and visions, was being set aside like any inanimate thing that may be alternatively placed on a shelf or in a cupboard, a thing not worthy of consideration. She emerged from behind her chair; her instincts were those of any wild thing that is accustomed to thongs and pursuers.

  “I suppose, mother, when father’s gone, the gentleman who’s been staying with us this week will be here for good, won’t he? I like him. He gives me pence sometimes.”

  The air with which she flung up her small head, the calculated insolence of her bearing towards both parents, stung Sophy to an ungovernable half-drunken rage. She rushed at the child and boxed her ears till Eleanor was dizzy and aghast. Brand, seating himself on the edge of the table, had begun to laugh. As on that occasion on Christmas Day at the Manor, he found himself incapable of immediate control. He seemed unaware of his wife’s treatment of the child, whom she now thrust from the room, crying, “Go on up and wait for me. I’ll teach you to hold your tongue, you little devil, if it kills me.”

  With the abrupt closing of the door Brand’s laughter became more temperate. He said mockingly, “My dear Sophy, I congratulate you. You don’t suppose that child told me anything I didn’t know already? I’m glad to hear the gentleman is likely to be faithful.”

  “Yes, you’d be glad to be free of having to keep me, wouldn’t you? But you won’t get off as easily as that. What if you have got this other fellow taken instead of you? Do you suppose I don’t know you did the murder?”

  Brand, still in that mocking drawl, replied, “Well, and suppose you’re right? What do you expect me to do? Make a magnificent gesture? Gentlemen, you are deceived. Your prisoner is innocent of his crime. Behold the man!” He smote his breast dramatically. “But surely that wouldn’t suit your book? And mightn’t it scare away your devoted protector? After all, a murderer’s widow…” He began to laugh.

  Upstairs, standing in her dingy chemise by the partly opened window (the cords were broken and the window stuck; no one could shut it even in the most bitter weather), the child, Eleanor, caught fragments of this conversation. Her sharp animal brain pieced them together. It did not shock or frighten her that her father should even jeeringly acknowledge his guilt; whether he had killed his father or not was no concern of hers. But she realised that he was going away, and, though she had no affection for him, she regarded him in some sense as a background, and to that extent she resented his going.

  The door opened and Sophy whirled in, her face dark with passion. The child stiffened at the sight of her. The foul words she used fell unheeded on ears to whom lewd language was as natural as the baby-talk of more fortunate children; but even her courage was not finally proof against the fury of her mother’s blows. Bruised and stripped of that quality of self-respect that is a lonely child’s armour against despair, she was helpless in that powerful grasp. It was several minutes before Brand, fallen again into a rhapsody, was aware that the shrieks assailing his mind came from his own house. Flinging himself up the stairs, he rushed into his daughter’s room and dragged her from her mother’s hands.

  “My God, Sophy, isn’t one murder in a family enough for you? Can you never let your filthy temper be?”

  He thrust the stupefied child into bed, saying harshly, “Stop that noise. Why don’t you keep your mouth shut, if you want any peace?”

  Blind anger against these degrading circumstances, and a dreadful fear that a momentary compassion for youth assaulted would destroy his strength, drove him to a ruthless cruelty. When Sophy gibed in spiteful tones, “An affectionate father you are, aren’t you?” he returned, in tones that were deliberately hard, “Oh, it’s her turn now. But let her wait a few years and she’ll be making hell of some man’s life. It’s what women are for.”

  He went into the room they shared and began to fling some clothes into a box. He paid no heed to Sophy’s shrill disclaimers and insults; inside his head a pulse had begun to beat, warning him that not for much longer could he safely remain under the same roof as this woman to whom he was married. As he walked up from the station, he had contemplated a brief and effective scene, never this disgusting exhibition of a man’s worst feelings and compulsions. It was like stepping into a shed full of dirt, and emerging stained and repulsive. He slammed down the lid of the box—it had neither locks nor straps—and carried it into the narrow hall. Sophy followed him, still shouting her accusations against him for a murderer.

  “You wait till the trial begins,” she jeered. “Who’s going to believe your story? Adrian Gray wouldn’t have given you two thousand pounds or even pretended to. Why should he? No one would believe a word you said. You couldn’t frighten him. You don’t count, you don’t, for all your bloody fine opinion of yourself.”

  Escaping from the house, Brand felt all that squalor and shame fall away like the husk of a nut. Now he was, at length, free. He did not contemplate the future except as a blank canvas for the purpose of his own achievement. He did not consider the possibility of a jury releasing Eustace and putting him in the financier’s place. It would be some weeks before the trial was held, and that interim space he regarded as the span of his personal life. During that period he must be uninterrupted, untouched by the wild flurry of suspicion and fear in which this trial would be engulfed. He left England that night, and was instantly swallowed up in the purlieus of the Paris he knew. Anonymous as a shadow he went in and out of the tall, narrow houses, spoke with men at corners and in cafés, drank and worked and conceived, a man so divorced from the occurrences of all previous time that he might have no connection with any other Hildebrand Gray the world had known. It was not fame and not hope that he pursued so relentlessly during that period. Having beheld the work he must do, he proceeded to achieve it; as to the consequences, he found them no concern of his. Like some tense, electric, indomitable spirit of Labour, he exhausted his actual life.

  Part VI

  Witness for the Defence

  1

  Miles Amery, travelling back to town with his wife, observed in troubled tones, “I’m not happy about this, Ruth. I’m in the position of a chap who was at Charterhouse with me. He was an R.C., destined for the priesthood. He was a nice chap, but one day (he was about eighteen) he came to me and said, ‘It’s no good; I can’t go through with this.’ I asked him what was his difficulty. I thought perhaps he was jibbing at the discipline the Catholic Church imposes on her priesthood; they have to go where they’re sent, can’t marry, and so forth. But he said, ‘No,’ it wasn’t that. It was the dogmatic side of it that finished him. ‘I envy your true believer and your convinced atheist,’ he said. ‘I’d stand thankfully in either camp. But I’m in the damnable position of knowing that the Catholic faith is true, without believing a word of it.’ That’s my position at the moment.”

  “About Eustace?”

  “Yes. I know, from all the evidence, that he’s guilty, but I don’t believe an atom of it. To begin with, why should your father have given him that money? Secondly, do you think a man like Eustace, who’s accustomed to risks and evasions, and has been all his life, is going to fling away all his hopes (and they were centred in Mr. Gray) for an infantile flash of temper? It’s so much more typical of Brand than of anyone else in the house that my suspicions, in spite of the evidence, keep turning in his direction. If it had been a premeditated murder, then I’d believe readily enough that Eustace was guilty, and be prepared to swear on oath that it couldn’t be Brand. Psychologically it would be as impossible for him to sustain such a mood as it would be improbable for Eustace to take up a paper-weight and hit another man over the head. You have to remember that the man’s a gambler, a speculator, accustomed to risks; he must have had several narrow shaves before this, and so far he’s managed to come out all right. That kind of experience breeds
a caution—a reckless caution if you like, but a caution nevertheless. It puts a man perpetually on his guard, and though certain things may have the power to break through that guard, I don’t believe your father was one of them. A man of Eustace’s experience doesn’t see red and commit murder because of a few hard words he must have anticipated. Besides, he could make things uncommonly bad for your father, if they were both alive, while, dead, Gray was no manner of use to him. This affair is the London and New York Exchange ramp over again, and I don’t see how your father could have avoided implication. Even if he got off scot free, his reputation was bound to suffer. And there’s something else. That cheque. If Eustace had got his hands on that cheque, no power in this world would have persuaded him to destroy it. Literally, he wouldn’t dare.”

  Ruth said, in distress, “Oh, Miles, you aren’t going to try and come into this on Eustace’s side? Even if he didn’t kill father, what he has done in ruining thousands of poor people who trusted him is much worse. Already there have been heaps of suicides, and what are they but deaths lying at Eustace’s door?”

  Miles touched her hand affectionately. “Don’t forget you’re talking to a lawyer,” he said. “That’s not evidence.”

  But, although he was determined to put the matter out of his mind, since it was clearly no concern of his, he discovered himself examining the evidence during every leisure hour that fell to his lot, endeavouring to trace some leakage, some false trail, some place where the police had gone astray. As always, when this mood was upon him, he lost sight of personalities. He was not pro Eustace or contra Brand. He was for the true explanation and against obscurity.