By the 19th however, things were much improved and the doctor wanted the patient to go away for a change—preferably without his wife who, said the doctor, ‘petted him too much’. But though brighter, Edwin was now terrified about his health and refused, and on the 23rd his fears seemed—to himself at any rate—justified. Whatever a lumbricoid worm may be, he passed a lumbricoid worm.
By this time it really seems fair to describe the wretched man as half out of his mind with fear, distress and a very understandable self pity. He felt worms constantly wriggling up and down his throat and one night, he told the doctor, he arose and stood before Adelaide as she slept, ‘extracting the vital force from her to himself. And each time he grew a little brighter, fresh disaster struck. Now necrosis of the jaw was suggested and it had a frightening ring to it. On Dec. 31st, New Year’s Eve, yet another stump of tooth must come out.
In preparation for this event, he ate for his breakfast half a dozen oysters and a large helping of jugged hare. On return from the dentist, ‘this remarkable invalid’ had another half dozen oysters, a quantity of mango chutney—all by itself?—cake and tea; and ordered a large haddock for the next morning’s breakfast, saying that he would wake up early in anticipation of this treat.
Alas, he was destined never to wake up again.
Adelaide, meanwhile, had been looking after her husband with a truly devoted assiduity, sitting up with him all night and every night, holding his toe which seems to have afforded him some obscure satisfaction. On December 27th, however, four days before he died, a most curious event had taken place. She had—apparently accidentally—run into the Rev. George Dyson in the street, and had sent him off upon an errand. He was to obtain for her quite a large quantity of chloroform. Edwin had long suffered from an internal complaint, she explained, about which he was too sensitive to speak to anybody, and nothing but chloroform had ever been able to soothe him and send him to sleep. She had previously got it from her friend, the midwife, Annie Walker—this was untrue—but Annie Walker was now abroad. She could not ask the doctor for it as he would never understand how skilled she was in its use.
She said nothing about keeping the matter secret and George could not, later, say why he should have gone such an odd way about obtaining it—going round to three different chemists—collecting the amount in three small bottles—telling lies as to its intended purpose—transferring it all to one bottle and handing it to Adelaide surreptitiously; though that, he explained, was only because Edwin was present.
The bottle was never seen again; and four days later Edwin Bartlett lay dead with a large quantity of chloroform in his stomach.
Adelaide had awoken, she said, at four o’clock in the morning; had turned him on his back, tried to pour brandy down his throat—there was a smell of spilt brandy on his chest and half a glass of it on the mantelpiece within reach of his bed. She had sent the maid for the doctor and called up the landlord. He testified that the room had smelt ‘of paregoric or ether’ and especially the brandy glass.
Edwin’s father arrived. He had long been making not very thickly veiled suggestions that his daughter-in-law was trying to poison her husband and he now kissed his dead son and at the same time sniffed at his lips: and announced that there must be a post mortem. The Rev. George, on the other hand, was concerned only and immediately with Number One. He began to panic about that chloroform and—on his way to chapel to take a service—disposed of the original three small bottles under separate bushes on Wandsworth Common. He then rushed to Adelaide and demanded the return of My Birdie; and receiving no satisfaction from her, proceeded to unburden his heart to friends.
Adelaide, betrayed, sought out the doctor and unburdened hers. She had really wanted the chloroform, she now declared, because Edwin, in his brief moments of returning spirits showed signs of wishing to claim rights which he had never demanded before. Feeling herself to have been almost officially handed over to the Rev. Dyson, she had felt this to be not quite decent. She could hardly explain it to a clergyman, so she had told him a tarradiddle to persuade him to get her the chloroform, privately proposing to sprinkle it on a handkerchief, wave it in her husband’s face and so subdue his unwelcome passions. She had had no occasion to use it, but on that night, the evening of his death, she had felt so bad about keeping a secret from him that she had broken down and confessed it all and handed over the bottle. They had had a talk, ‘serious but amicable’ and he had put the bottle on the mantelpiece by the bedside, turned over and gone to sleep—or to sulk, she rather unexpectedly amended. Next morning she had taken the bottle, not observing whether or not any of the contents was missing, and put it in a drawer of her dressing-table. There the police had—somewhat unaccountably, it must be confessed—overlooked it in their search and when she left the house for ever she had taken it with her and thrown it from the window of the train into a pond. It must be added in Adelaide’s disfavour that at this time the pond in question is said to have been frozen over.
A simple little story—allowing for Adelaide’s undoubted tendency to embroider the truth. It had only one drawback: nobody believed it.
On the other hand…
On the other hand, thundered the medical witnesses at her subsequent trial, it was impossible to administer chloroform to a conscious person without an agonised struggle and outcry: and in this case there had demonstrably been none. And it was equally impossible for anyone unskilled to administer chloroform to an unconscious person, without leaving signs of burning in the throat; and in this case there were none. No attempt at murder by this means had ever been recorded.
So with all the bad will in the world—how could Adelaide have got the chloroform down her husband’s throat?
Suicide and accident were of course canvassed. She had left him for some little time while she went into the next room to prepare herself for the night’s vigil—which for some reason she appears to have spent fully dressed. But if he had then accidentally—or for that matter, purposely—drunk from the bottle, he must have cried out in pain and she must have heard him through the partitioning doors which were all that divided the two rooms. At any rate, she would not have found him when she came back, apparently peacefully at rest. There seemed no alternative to murder. Only—how?
By first rendering him partially insensible by inhalation of the chloroform, suggested the Crown, either while he was asleep (extremely difficult, protested the medical witnesses) or by some sort of persuasion; and then pouring the fatal dose down his throat. But, declared a specialist in such matters, though in a person losing consciousness there might be a moment between the time they were still able to swallow and the failure of that reflex—‘the most careful doctor could not measure or predict its existence’.
Very well, said the Crown (in essence) you know that: but Adelaide didn’t, did she? Suppose she just had a bash and struck the lucky moment?
Or, it has since been suggested, might she not easily have persuaded him to take a dose?—trusting her implicitly as he did and with his deep respect for her ‘learning’. He had been suffering from sleeplessness and nothing else so far had done him any good. (It is put forward in a recent book on the case that Adelaide was in fact a thoroughly wicked woman who all along had been poisoning her husband; that she had borrowed the lumbricoid worm from one of the Newfoundland dogs—not a very charming idea—and introduced it deliberately, further to cast gloom and despondency; and that finally under hypnotism she induced him to take the dose.)
But the question always seems to come back to this—why should she? They all three believed that Edwin had not long to live—or why the arrangement, which undoubtedly existed, about handing her over to the Rev. Dyson? Dyson, by the rules of his church, could not marry for some little time to come, and meanwhile she was free, indeed encouraged, by her husband to spend most of her time with him—curtains drawn, head on knee, My Birdie and all the rest of it. Moreover, no one was ever found to say that to the end she had been anything but an affectionate, te
nderly careful and much loved wife. So why take so appalling a risk?—why with so little care or concealment court a death-sentence for murder? Adelaide was a clever creature, the very readiness and glibness of her innumerable fibs proves that: would she for a moment have trusted George Dyson—a man of God, after all—to keep silent when his purchase of the chloroform became known?—nor had she ever asked him to keep the matter secret. Then—just to tip the stuff down her husband’s throat, leaving no possible alternative to her own guilt when, as must inevitably happen, the cause of his death was proved. No attempt to set the stage for accident or suicide: why the removal of the chloroform bottle which made either impossible? And she was already aware that the embittered old father-in-law was accusing her of causing his son’s illness.
The consensus of opinion is probably that Adelaide Bartlett murdered her husband. This is to some extent on account of her lies—but we are nowadays sufficiently familiar with the phenomenon of the self-dramatist, the compulsive liar?—and the monotony and uselessness of her life would have conduced to both. Mostly, however, it is for lack of any alternative. And yet…
That Adelaide really cared two hoots for the Rev. Dyson, it is impossible to believe—except as a diversion from the tedium of her friendless life. But here was Edwin, however much she may have been devoted to him—with his toothless gums, sloughing and sponging and all the rest of it, with worms imaginary or otherwise crawling up and down his throat, with his crumbling jaw and that ominously suggestive blue line… Not exactly a proposition for a fastidious young woman, already sentimentally inclined elsewhere. And yet how to avoid wounding his feelings in his present extremely manic-depressive condition? She has been used, perhaps, to employing chloroform in her work with the dogs? At any rate, she sets about obtaining some. And sure enough, on New Year’s Eve, after his supper of aphrodisiac oysters, the mango chutney and cake—Edwin shows signs of rising uxorious desires.
Who can say what was done or spoken that night? She genuinely believed, perhaps, that she could quieten him down?—and he detected something and so she confessed it all? Or she had thought of a better plan: she would simply explain to him that her spiritual betrothal to George Dyson—which Edwin himself had promoted—forbade marital relations between them. Either way, she handed over the bottle, left it standing there unused on the mantelshelf—they had a good talk and Edwin turned over and went to sleep.
Or to sulk, Adelaide had said.
Of course it was all nonsense about Edwin and his platonic relations with his wife: another of those tarradiddles so pointless as to suggest a guiltless, pathological cause for all Adelaide’s untruths. The famous ‘single act’ on a Sunday afternoon which had resulted in the stillborn baby, was reduced to commonplace by the testimony of the midwife: ‘On all other occasions a preventative was used.’ Edwin, in his fitful feelings of well-being, was simply asking for his customary cuddle. And for the first time, Adelaide was saying no.
Poor man! He is hateful to himself with his upset stomach and his gums and his necrosis and his lumbricoid worm; and now it seems he is hateful to Adelaide also. She has withdrawn her favours from him; she and George, the admired and beloved friend, appear to be calmly anticipating a near future when he, the obstructive husband, shall be out of the way…
A bottle of chloroform within reach. A glass of brandy to hand. He tips a large dose of the one into the other. The chloroform hangs in the brandy*, suspended at its centre like a yolk in the white of an egg. Wrapped within its cocoon, the dose passes without pain or burning, all at one gulp—down the throat of the suicide.
Adelaide comes back from the other room. Edwin lies doggo. She settles herself for the night.
In the early hours of the morning she awakes; and he is dead.
As we have seen, Adelaide Bartlett was no fool. All along, the horrid old father-in-law has been making overt accusations and now his son is indeed dead, and it is she who has—apparently secretly, and giving false reasons—introduced the fatal dose. What to do? Get rid of the bottle of chloroform, at any rate, just get rid of it and trust to luck; nothing can be worse than leaving it here beside Edwin. Rinse out the glass, spill a bit of brandy around: but get rid of that bottle.
That she put it in her dressing-table drawer, we may take leave to doubt: laced into her corsets, more likely—no one went so far as to search her person. Then to send for the doctor (may he not, considering the patient’s long sickness, issue a death certificate without more ado?)—summon up the landlord, give way to a doubtless quite genuine grief. And when the Rev. George comes rushing round in a state about the chloroform, stamp your foot and cry out, ‘Oh, damn the chloroform!’—that none of it has been used and he had better just forget all about it and pipe down…
George on the contrary piped up and to such effect that he shortly afterwards found himself standing in the dock beside her, both of them charged with murder.
They let him go almost immediately—to testify against her with all the vehemence of his shocked and terrified heart. But then, after all, he believed her guilty.
The jury believed it too; but they couldn’t get round the doctors’ evidence in her defence and they brought in a verdict accordingly. ‘Although we think that grave suspicion attaches to the prisoner…’ The court waited to hear no more: a huge burst of cheering rang out and for the only time in his long and brilliant career, her counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, put his head in his hands and wept.
‘Now that Mrs. Bartlett has been found not guilty of murdering her husband,’ said the wits afterwards, ‘it seems only fair that in the interests of science, she should tell us how she did it.’
* I discovered this myself by experiment.
An Apple for the Teacher
THE WHOLE SUBJECT OF the patter of little feet—once reliable tear-jerker of the theatrical or literary ending—is being reviewed just now in many a home in the light of the Easter hols. The little foot encased in stout leather is not necessarily an unmixed blessing in the house, complete as it invariably is with inextricably knotted laces and a curious flip-flap in front where crêpe rubber has been kicked adrift from the parent sole.
Nor is the frozen toe always quite welcome in the parental bed: thudding through from the nursery at crack of dawn with confidences about collywobbles at the thought of the approaching end-of-term play. Useless to argue that the role of a dog will necessitate only the utterance of ‘Woof, woof!’ at an appropriate moment; at such an hour, morale is low, sensibilities too easily wounded—exception is taken to the word ‘only’, tears and recrimination ensue between parent and child, the feet thump out a morse code of reproach and no-confidence as they stump back, disillusioned, to their own bed. The holidays are off to an all too familiar start.
For the lot of the parent is not nowadays so fool-proof as it was. Once, merely to be free of school was joy enough; now the too happy classrooms release reluctant victims and one finds oneself apprehensive witness to a tearful farewell between pupil and teacher as one drags the child off to the horror of three weeks of nothing but home.
My husband has been complaining recently of this. He considers the teachers much to blame in the matter and at one time seriously considered a suit for alienation of affections. For this purpose, as he daily delivered our daughter to school on the dot of five to nine, he made close observation of the lady about to be sued.
For a long time she presented herself as simply two shapely calves, clad in very bright stockings, appropriately blue, and the hem of a brief skirt—which appeared to be permanently backing out of a tiny, ancient, vividly yellow-painted car. Patience was rewarded, however, by her emerging, if one waited long enough, as a tousled young woman in a turtle necked sweater, clasping in her arms offerings for the broader education of her class of eight-year-olds: a rabbit in a hutch, (zoo-ology), a colony of ants in a glass-topped box (? ecology), a surly mother cat about to have kittens (biology) and an equally disgruntled grass snake, complete with grass, in jar.
Nor
did scholastic enthusiasm stop here. My husband being a medical man, his daughter was approached, in her turn did some wheedling and finally bore off to school in triumph a skull of dubious origins, relic of his student days (anatomy). This was to be returned on the last day of term and, disengaging herself from the parting embraces of his child, Blue Stockings duly advanced upon him, bearing the poor grinning thing tenderly wrapped up in tissue paper in a cardboard box that had doubtless seen many an object of ornithological or palaeological interest in its day.
It had been, she assured him, her charming face alight with earnest happiness, of the utmost value. The children had simply loved it. And it did make such a splendid addition to her own collection—an articulated foot, the skeleton of a carp and simply hundreds of rabbit bones: the class could assemble a bunny almost blindfold now. ‘And I mean,’ said Blue Stockings, raising trustful, eager eyes, ‘having all those bones and things—and the skull especially—it does make the subject live!’
So he has now abandoned all thoughts of litigation; and moreover has begged her to consider the skull her own property. Which leaves us flat with the clatter of little feet for three whole weeks dragging about the house yearning for Blue Stockings and school again; and what are little Peterkin and Wilhelmine to play with now?
Pigeon Pie
‘BUT I DON’T LIKE pigeon pie,’ said Megan for the hundredth time. ‘I don’t like eating poor pigeons.’
‘Nonsense! You yourself made a pork pie out of a pig raised right here on the farm.’
‘The pig was reared to be eaten. That was different.’
‘Well, these pigeons are here to be eaten. So eat them!’ said the woman, suddenly almost screaming. And the sight of the sick white face, now gone stonily indifferent, impelled her to further cruelties. ‘And talking of pigeons, Conway—must we really keep those messy white things of hers, out in the yard?’
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