Death Comes to Cambers

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘Do you mean Sir Albert Cambers may have taken possession of the jewellery?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘Better ask him,’ Eddy retorted. ‘I don’t mean anything because I don’t know anything. If the things are missing, someone’s got them.’ He stared and frowned and flung down his unsmoked cigarette. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I suppose there’s just the chance it may turn up. She might have sent it to the bank for safety?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about the jewellery to you last night?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. She wouldn’t have been likely to, would she? We talked about how the work was getting on, and about the fuss Andrews was making, and that’s all.’

  ‘She said nothing about going out?’

  ‘That night? Good Lord, no; not at that time of night.’

  ‘You can’t suggest any reason – any possibility...?’

  ‘No. At least...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it’s nothing much, only I do remember... you know what sort of a woman Lady Cambers was?’

  ‘I knew her very slightly. I thought she seemed very pleasant and friendly.’

  Eddy grinned again – so wide a grin it seemed he became little else but grin incarnate.

  ‘Some people would tell you she always was – to good looking, presentable young men like you and me.’ He paused to let his grin grow wider still, little possible as that had seemed before. ‘Not that I claim to be in the Public Attraction No. 1 class and don’t go and imagine I mean anything more than I say. I don’t. If anyone tells you anything of the sort, you can wash it out. She was always ready to take an interest in any deserving cause, and if the deserving cause happened to be young and male, with bright blue eyes and a damask cheek, she didn’t object. But it never went beyond friendly interest. I’m telling you because some people may drop you hints that was why she spent rather a lot of coin on helping me establish my theories – not that there’s much bright blue eye or damask cheek about me, but you see the idea? Well, perhaps if I had had a beard a foot long and a bald head, the old girl mightn’t have been so willing to part. But that’s all.’

  Bobby wondered if that was all or if this confidence meant more than appeared on the surface. But all he said was: ‘You were saying you thought there might be some reason why she wanted to go out.’

  ‘Not quite that. Only there is this. You know she always thought you ought to do just what she said. Of course, always because it was best for you. But she knew, and she let you know she knew. That’s why hubby got out.’

  ‘Sir Albert?’

  ‘Yes, I expect he found it a bit trying to be with someone who was always right – especially when she wasn’t. And not only right for herself, but for you, too. She always – knew. For your own good, of course. Why, she would even start in to tell me things about my work! Well, one of her pet fads was about traps for rabbits – she thought the sort that are used about here are cruel. She was right enough there. She often was – right, I mean. I hate the things myself. They are worse even than those new mouse-traps – break-back, they call them. All right when they work, but sometimes they catch the poor little beast by one paw or the tail or something. It’s all right to keep mice and rabbits down. I know that. But I always use the old-fashioned trap that catches them alive, and then you can give them a whiff of gas that does them in without their knowing it. Lady Cambers was rather keen about all that; she was a big subscriber to the Anti-trap Society or whatever they call it, and she wanted all the tenants on the estate to use the new trap. Well, they all promised all right, but promising’s one thing and doing’s another, and I know she wasn’t too sure they all kept to it. The parson – Andrews, you know – was as keen about it as she was, and he told her things he had heard. I heard her say once she would see for herself one night, and it’s just possible that’s what she was after, and that she took the suit-case with her to bring back any of the steel traps she happened to find. Of course, that’s only an idea of my own. Very likely there’s nothing in it. I don’t suppose I should ever have thought of it, if you hadn’t worried on about my being able to tell you something to help. Well, if that’s a help, there it is.’

  ‘It’s an idea that may be worth following up,’ Bobby agreed. ‘Only it’s murder that’s happened, and it seems a long way from a steel trap for rabbits to – murder.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ agreed Eddy. ‘Wash it out, then.’

  Bobby asked one or two more questions. But Eddy seemed to have exhausted all he had to say, and Bobby asked presently: ‘If Mr. Andrews supported Lady Cambers about this and talked to her about it, they were on good terms except...’

  ‘Except about me,’ interposed Eddy. ‘That’s right. They backed each other up in lots of ways. She was quite bucked when he preached that divorce was a mortal sin. Not that she believed it herself. But she wanted everyone else to, because what she wanted was to get Sir Albert back. And she would have, too, in the long run.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know, so can’t say. But she would have managed it somehow. She was that sort. Fair means or foul, she would have had him again, and, if you ask me, Sir Albert knew it and was dead-scared. That’s my idea.’

  ‘She seems to have been a woman of strong character.’

  ‘She meant to go her way. If it was your way, too, well and good and all O.K. If it wasn’t, then there were squalls. Mind you, it was always your own good she was thinking of, only she knew it such a darn sight better than you did. I had some myself, but not much, because she backed me up all right in what really mattered. She spent a lot to help what I’m doing here, and she told me she had put aside enough to see me through three years. That was what I put as the outside limit. Now I suppose all that’s washed out. Sir Albert won’t take any bally notice of what she said – nor would anyone else, I suppose. She never put anything in writing – and then there’ll be Andrews doing his best to double-cross me.’

  ‘What is it exactly you’re doing?’ Bobby asked. ‘I’ve heard some vague sort of talk about the Missing Link, and that’s all.’

  ‘They’ve all got hold of the Missing Link,’ observed Eddy. ‘They have no idea what it means, though, and it happens that’s just exactly what I’m not after.’

  ‘Not?’

  ‘No. I mean to prove there never was a link, missing or not. People seem to think evolution means inch by inch and little by little, like Eric.’

  ‘Eric?’ repeated Bobby, into whose ambit that masterpiece had never penetrated.

  ‘School prize,’ explained Eddy briefly. ‘Most people think evolution means a slow, gradual change of fish into land animal, for instance. It doesn’t. It just happens – sudden, dramatic, a jump. A fish is hatched with gills that don’t function properly – in water. Probably it suffocates, can’t breathe. But one freak fish of that kind discovers through some accident that it can breathe all right in air. In other words, it’s got lungs instead of gills. But there was never a link, never a gill changing slowly into a lung. A link would have meant equally faulty functioning in both air and water, and why quit uncomfortable water for equally unsuitable air? Why give up accustomed water for unaccustomed air unless there was some advantage? There had to be something dramatic, something forcible and sudden, to chuck the fish, quite content in the water, out on dry land that must have been uncomfortable and difficult at first. Think of leaving cool, flowing water you could dodge about in, up or down, any way you wanted, for dry ground you could only crawl on slowly and painfully. No fish in its senses would have dreamed of it unless it had been obliged to. Same with man. Man was originally one of the apes, one of the less successful species. That’s plain enough. Well, you know what the difference is now between ape and man?’

  ‘A good many, aren’t there?’

  ‘I mean the fundamental difference. It isn’t the tail. Man has that, or the rudiments of it. It isn’t mind. The ape has the rudiments of that all right. It’s the hand. Man can turn it, pronate it, gr
asp with it, as the ape can’t. There’s the difference. Man is the creature, not of his mind, but of his hand.’

  ‘Do you mean that Mr. Andrews...?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what it’s all about. That’s why he shouts blasphemy. That’s why he does all he jolly well can to stop me going on with my work. He wants us to believe man is all mind. I mean to show that man is all hand. Man is just an ape who has learnt to use his hand, that’s all. So Andrews bawls blasphemy – because he’s afraid. He daren’t face the truth. He knows he would have to change all his ways of thinking, all his beliefs and so on, and he just can’t face up to it. And when you’re afraid like that, well, you’re capable of anything, aren’t you?’

  CHAPTER 14

  ON THE ORIGINS OF MAN

  Bobby looked at his watch. He knew he ought to be getting back to Cambers House, where his shorthand notes were awaiting transcription, and yet he felt this conversation was throwing a certain amount of light on the psychological outlook of at least some of the actors in the tragedy. Eddy, talking eagerly and excitedly, as if he wished Bobby to understand his position, went on quickly.

  ‘That’s my theory. Man was just an ape, like others of the species. Then one day a little ape was born with the ability to turn his hand right round. We’ve still a slight difficulty about that. We don’t pronate our hands quite easily. But this special little ape, half a million years ago, found he could use tools better than the others could. All apes use elementary tools – a stone or a stick. But this ability to turn the hand gave this one little ape an advantage. He became the boss of the tribe. He chose the females he fancied; he founded a family; he handed on his special ability to his offspring; and there starts Man, no more an ape, beginning his long career that leads to Shakespeare and to our own time.’

  ‘It’s very interesting,’ agreed Bobby. ‘What did Lady Cambers think of it?’

  ‘She was keen on it. I’m not sure how far she saw what it meant. I didn’t press that side so long as she paid up. You see, my theory means that mind is the creature of the machine. The machine – the hand – came first. Then came mind, as its product. That knocks out the bishops when they tell you mind can only have come from mind. I show that mind comes from the use of the tool. When you use a tool you have to think, or it’s no good. First you do a thing. Then you think about it. Knocks out superstitious fancy about special creation and so on. That’s what Andrews saw. I’ll give him credit for that. He saw clearly enough what it meant. He couldn’t argue, so he excommunicated, as he called it, and, if he could, he would have had me burnt alive. I can tell you he looked murder, and the Spanish Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield, all right, when he came here once and wanted to preach. I cut him short, though. I told him to wait a bit and I would have proof he could rub his nose against if he liked, it would be so plain.’

  ‘Is that what all this digging outside is about?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘You mean my pot-holes?’

  ‘Pot-holes?’

  ‘Technical term,’ explained Eddy lightly. ‘I take it you don’t know anything about archaeology?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t,’ Eddy observed. ‘Few do – especially archaeologists. What I’m working on is the origin of man. That’s what I’ll call my book when it comes out – The Origin of Man. It’ll be as big a thing as Darwin’s Origin of Species – bigger.’

  Bobby looked at him sharply. For a moment he thought the other was joking, but it was perfectly plain that what had been said had been meant literally, that Eddy Dene really saw himself as the pupil, the successor, of Darwin, the carrier-on of the Darwinian torch to heights the earlier master never dreamed of.

  ‘My book,’ Eddy added, very simply, ‘will be a landmark in human thought – after it has been published mental processes will never be quite the same again.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bobby, slightly overwhelmed at this claim, and by the calm manner in which it was put forward. ‘Well, of course. I don’t know anything about all that.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ agreed Eddy, as one might say to a toddling child that as yet it knew nothing of some subject it had heard discussed by its elders.

  ‘Have you always been interested in that sort of thing?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about that. When my people took over the – the shop – Bobby noticed that he hesitated for a fraction of a second over the word, as though he found it unpleasant to pronounce – ‘there was an old sketch-book lying about. It had belonged to a man named Winders, an old chap in the village. He had got interested in archaeology picking up eoliths. There are plenty lying about here, you know. You can fill your pockets with them any day, as well as with flints of a later period.’

  ‘What are – eoliths, did you call them?’

  Eddy went across to one of the shelves running round the walls of the shed, and took up three or four roughly shaped stones.

  ‘Dawn stones,’ he said. ‘The first step man took when he stopped being an ape and started to become a man.’ Bobby looked at them with interest. To him they did not seem to show much sign of human handiwork. But Eddy handled them with reverence.

  ‘It may be half a million years since they were worked,’ he said slowly. ‘How many generations does that mean? All in their turn, all passing away again. Four generations to a century – how many individuals to a century? Think of all that long slow interminable procession through the ages – years and centuries and millenniums – while the ape was struggling to be primaeval man, and primaeval man to be man barbarian, and the barbarian to be man as we know him to-day; and think of the years and the centuries and millenniums before us till man can call himself civilized – and when you think of it all, can you believe that one life, one little life in all that, counts for as much as we seem to think it does, to judge by the fuss we make when one goes out?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bobby simply, ‘every brick in a building counts, every soldier in an army. One brick out of place, one soldier sleepy or cowardly, may ruin everything.’

  Eddy shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘That’s the sentimental view,’ he pronounced. ‘I find it a little hard to suppose any one ordinary individual counts against the enormous background of the past.’ He put down on the table the eolith he had been holding. ‘There’s a theory they aren’t human work at all,’ he went on, ‘but they are all right. You have only to hold them to feel the human touch. It’s how we began. Now we’ve got to the aeroplane and the wireless – and the daily Press. To-morrow – but ask the daily Press about that. And all comes from the accident that a few odd hundreds of thousands of years ago a freak ape was born with the power to pronate his hand. That was what I found in that sketch-book I told you about. There were sketches that showed both the ape formation and the human quite plainly. The difference was picked out by the use of different colours. Winders, the man it belonged to, was a wheelwright about here. Then he took to digging wells – and to bone-setting. He had quite a reputation for treating sprains and so on. And for finding water. There’s lots of water here, but it runs underground and wants finding – even the stream at the bottom of the field dries up at times, for no known reason. A bit awkward for a farmer who wants a permanent water-supply. Apparently old Winders always knew where you could sink a well. It was when he was digging one for Mr. Hardy, the man who rents Mounts Farm, that he came across some fossil bones, dating from back in the tertiary period, I should think. Perhaps the pliocene, perhaps the eocene. That’s a difference, but in this business you need a wide margin. Anything within a hundred thousand years is getting warm. Winders couldn’t read or write, but he had eyes in his head, which is more than most have, and he could draw. He spotted the different formation in the wrist-bones – he saw some were purely human and some purely ape, yet they came from the same spot. Well, you see what that means?’

  ‘Not very clearly,’ Bobby confessed.

  ‘It means we can put our finger, if I’m right, here and now on the very spot
where man became man. Not in any mythical Garden of Eden early one morning, but right here at that one moment – and there’s the fossil to show. No special creation, but just a freak – a sport. Proves that mind is only a function of the body – a result of the accident of a freak ape baby being born with a slightly different formation of the bones of the wrist, so he could use tools, and in order to do so had to think. Well, that’s how thought came into the world.’

  Eddy was speaking now with an intensity of belief that seemed, as it were, to light up his personality with a kind of inner fire. He looked taller even; his eyes were bright and fervent. Bobby reflected that when Eddy called the vicar a ‘fanatic’ he was making use of a word that could with equal justice have been applied to himself. But then science, just as much as religion, has always had its fanatics and its bigots; it has more than once tried to establish something like an inquisition. If it had the power, even to-day it would probably have its autos-da-fé for those who refused to subscribe to the true faith – for the osteopath, the scoffer at vaccines, the supporter of any theory not yet generally accepted.

  Why, only that week-end Bobby remembered he had been reading an article in which a very learned professor traced the Oedipus complex and the castration motive as implicit all through the study of Esperanto!

  But then, after all, that is only to say that the scientist, like the priest, is human, and that humanity has always found it less trouble to stone its prophets than to change its way of thinking.

  And Bobby found himself wondering to what the clash of these two fanaticisms – the scientific and the religious – might not in this affair have given birth. Yet, even so, what bearing could there be upon the tragedy it was his business to investigate? Eddy was going on talking. He said: ‘Well, now, then, you can see for yourself, when 1 get my book out, it means the whole current of contemporary thought has got to change. All superstition will be ended for good. People will see the truth of things – see them as they are. There’ll be no more putting up with slums and starvation here and now in the hope of golden crowns and harps hereafter. Man will be himself at last, standing on his own legs, putting his trust in himself, and not in flopping down on his knees to ask an old man with a beard to do conjuring-tricks.’