Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  Mrs. Watkins stood and looked at her husband as he sprawled at his ease in the most comfortable of the drawing-room chairs.

  “Henry,” she said, “would you like some of that sloe gin your brother sent you? You haven’t tried it yet.”

  “I don’t mind trying a glass,” said Henry good-naturedly, yawning in her face.

  His wife paused at the door. She came back a step or two. “You’ve not changed your mind,” she asked, “about the children’s futures?”

  “No! Why should I change my mind?” said Henry. “Do I ever change my mind? They can make as much fuss as they like, but the man who pays the piper calls the tune!”

  “I’ve heard you say that before,” said his wife reflectively.

  “I daresay you’ll hear me say it again!” said Henry with a laugh.

  Mrs. Watkins’s hand went toward the handle of the door; she did not think she would ever hear Henry say this favorite maxim again; but still she lingered.

  “Hurry up with that liqueur!” said her husband.

  Mrs. Watkins went into the pantry and took out a liqueur glass. She poured a little sloe gin into it, then she put down the bottle and left the pantry. She went into the children’s dark-room—they were allowed that for their photography.

  She still had the glass in her hand. There was a bottle on the highest shelf. She took it down and measured it carefully with her eye. The children’s manual of photography and the medical dictionary in Henry’s dressing-room had been a great help to her.

  She poured out into the deep red of the sloe gin some of the contents of the bottle; it looked very white and harmless and hardly smelt at all. She wondered if it was enough, and she tipped up the bottle a little to make sure. She used a good deal more than the medical dictionary said was necessary, but the medical dictionary might have underestimated Henry’s constitution. She put the bottle back where she found it, and returned to the pantry. There she filled up the liqueur-glass with more sloe gin.

  She saw Paul on a garden seat through the window. “I wish you’d come out, Mother,” he said impatiently.

  “I will in a minute, dear,” she answered quietly. Then she went back to her husband. “Here it is, Henry,” she said.

  “What a slow woman you are!” he grumbled. “Still I must say you have a steady hand.”

  She held the full glass toward him and watched him drink it in a gulp.

  “It tastes damned odd,” said Henry thoughtfully. “I don’t think I shall take any more of it.”

  Mrs. Watkins did not answer; she took up the liqueur-glass and went back into the pantry.

  She took out another glass, filled it with sloe gin, drank it, and put it on the pantry table.

  The first glass she slipped up her long sleeve and went out into the garden.

  “I thought you were never coming, Mother!” Paul exclaimed. “Oh, I do feel so sick about everything! If this kind of thing goes on, I shall do something desperate. I know I shall. I sometimes think I should like to kill father.”

  Mrs. Watkins drew a long breath of relief. Once or twice lately it had occurred to her while she was thinking things over in church that Paul might get desperate and attack his father. He couldn’t now.

  “Don’t talk like that, dear,” she said gently. “I sometimes think your father can’t help himself. Besides, it’s very natural he should want you and Hetty to have money; he values money.”

  “He doesn’t want us to have it!” Paul exclaimed savagely. “He only wants to keep us in his power because we haven’t got it, and can’t get away! What money has he ever given you—or ever let us have for our own freedom?”

  Mrs. Watkins looked up at the substantial house and around the well-stocked garden. Henry had gone in especially for cabbages. She looked as if she were listening for something.

  “I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Paul,” she said at last. “I want you to go up to Hetty’s room and bring her out into the garden. She ought to have some air. The evenings are beginning to draw in. It’ll be church time presently.”

  “But if I bring her down, won’t he come out and upset her?” Paul demanded.

  “I don’t think he is coming out again,” said Mrs. Watkins. She watched her son disappear into the house, and then walked on into the thick shrubbery at the end of the garden. She slipped the liqueur-glass out of her sleeve and broke it into fragments against the garden wall, then she covered the pieces with loose earth.

  She had hardly finished before she heard a cry from the house. “Mother! Mother! Oh, Mother!”

  “I’ve done the best I can,” she said suddenly, between the kitchen garden and the house.

  There was an inquest the following week, and Mrs. Watkins, dressed in decent black, gave her evidence with methodical carefulness.

  Her husband had been quite well before dinner, she explained. At dinner he had been a little disturbed with one of the children, but nothing out of the ordinary at all. He had merely said a few sharp words. After dinner he had gone to sit in the drawing-room, and at his request she had brought him a glass of sloe gin sent him by his brother; when he had finished it she had carried the glass back into the pantry. She did not see him again. The maids were not downstairs at the time. The glass was examined, the pantry was examined, the whole household was examined. The parlor maid had hysterics, and the cook gave notice to the coroner for asking her if she kept her pans clean. The verdict was death through misadventure, though a medical officer declared that poison was evidently the cause.

  It was considered possible that Henry had privately procured it and taken it himself.

  It is true he had no motive for suicide, but there was still less motive for murder. Nobody wished ardently that Henry might live, but, on the other hand, nobody benefitted by his interesting and mysterious death—that is to say, nobody but Henry’s family; and it is not considered probable that well-dressed, respectable people benefit by a parent’s death.

  Mrs. Watkins was never tempted to confession; and she continued to gaze just as fixedly at St. Peter and the sardines every Sunday. She thought about quite different subjects now; but she still had a nice quiet time.

  It was the day before Hetty’s wedding to the young architect that Mrs. Watkins made her final approach to the question of her husband’s death. She never referred to it afterwards.

  “Do you know, Mummy darling,” Hetty said, “I was sure there were a dozen liqueur-glasses in the cupboard. I always looked after them myself. Father was so particular about them; and they put back the horrid inquest one, I know, and yet I can only find eleven.”

  Mrs. Watkins looked at her daughter with a curious expression, then she asked abruptly, “Are you very happy, child?” Hetty assented radiantly. Her mother nodded. “And Paul,” said Mrs. Watkins thoughtfully, “he seems very contented in his painting. He wants me to go with him to Paris. He always did want to go to Paris.”

  “Paul can’t be as happy as I am,” Hetty triumphantly assured her, “because he hasn’t got Dick—but it does seem as if both our wildest dreams had come true in the most extraordinary way, doesn’t it, Mummy?”

  Mrs. Watkins did not answer her daughter at once. She turned toward the cupboard. She seemed to be counting the broken set over again.

  “Well, I don’t think it matters about that liqueur-glass,” she said finally. “I’m not as particular as your father.”

  THE PIN-PRICK

  May Sinclair

  (1863–1946)

  Mary Amelia St. Clair, who wrote under the pseudonym of “May Sinclair,” was best known in her lifetime as a modernist, a literary critic (she was the first to use the phrase “stream of consciousness”), a suffragist, and the author of twenty-three novels, several short story collections, in addition to extensive poetry. Her reputation has dimmed considerably since her death, and today, when she is remembered, it is for her criticism and her mainstream work, such as The Life of Harriett Frean (1922). That she wrote excellent supernatural fiction will lik
ely come as a surprise to even those who know her work.

  Sinclair’s life was a difficult one. Her father went bankrupt, became an alcoholic, and died before she reached adulthood, and her mother was inflexibly religious. Sinclair was only allowed one year at college before she was summoned home to act as a caretaker for her brothers, four of whom were dying of a congenital heart condition. Sinclair was forced to write professionally to support her family from 1896 and was not free of the ties of family until 1901, after the death of her mother. Literary success followed the 1904 publication of The Divine Fire, and for the next twenty-seven years Sinclair was a highly respected member of London’s literateurs. After a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in the late 1920s, she moved to Buckinghamshire with her companion/housekeeper. After the move she only published a handful of stories and one collection, The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), and the last fifteen years of her life were spent in quiet isolation. She was forgotten even by her friends when she died.

  But ars longa, vita brevis (art is long; life is short), and while only one of her novels is still in print, many of her wonderful supernatural stories can be found online—to the great pleasure of those who find them. Classics like “The Villa Désirée” (1921), “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (1922), and “The Nature of the Evidence” (1923) combine psychological realism and the supernatural to chilling effect. “The Pin-Prick” straddles the line between purely realistic and the supernatural, perhaps leaning toward realism, although no one would deny that there is horror to be found here.

  WHAT? THAT’S ONE of poor May Blissett’s things, the one she used to say she’d leave me in her will, because, she said, she knew I’d be kind to it. Her reasons were always rather quaint. She spoke of it as if it were a live thing that could be hurt or made happy.

  I’ve tried to be kind to it. I’ve framed it as it ought to be framed, and hung it in not too bad a light. I—I’ve consented to live with it.

  You needn’t look at it like that. Of course I know it isn’t a bit alive in our sense. She couldn’t draw, she could only paint a little; her inspiration was reminiscent, and she got hung more than once in the Academy. She was like so many of them. But she had a sense of beauty, of color, of decoration, and, at her best, a sort of magic queerness that was suggested irresistibly even when the things didn’t quite come off.

  That this hasn’t come off—not quite—is really, to me, what makes it so poignantly alive. It’s a bit of her, a little sensitive, palpitating shred, torn off from her and flung there—all that was left of her. It stands for her mystery, her queerness, her passionate persistence, and her pluck. To anybody who knew her the thing’s excruciatingly alive.

  It’s so alive, so much her, that Frances Archdale wonders how I can bear to live with it, with the terrible reproach of it. She insisted that we—or, rather, that she—was responsible for what happened. But that’s the sort of thing that Frances always did think.

  Certainly she was responsible for May’s coming here. She was with her when she was looking over the studio above mine, the one that Hanson had—it had been empty nearly a year—and she brought her in to me. I was to tell her whether the studio would do or not. I think, when it came to the point, Frances wanted to saddle me with the responsibility. There were no other women in the studios—never had been; they’re uncomfortable enough for a man who isn’t fastidious; there’s no service to speak of; and May Blissett purposed to live alone.

  I looked at her and decided instantly that it wouldn’t do. You had only to look at her to see that it wouldn’t. She was small and presented what Frances called the illusion of fragility—an exquisite little person in spite of her queerness. She had one of those broad-browed, broad-cheeked, and suddenly pointed faces, with a rather prominent and intensely obstinate chin. The queerness was in her long eyes and in the way her delicate nose broadened at the nostrils and in the width of her fine mouth, so much too wide for the slenderly pointed face, and in the tiny scale of the whole phenomenon. She was swarthy, with lots of very dark, crinkly hair. There was something subtle about her, and something that I felt, God forgive me, as mysteriously and secretly malign.

  Even if we had wanted women in the studios at all, I didn’t want that woman. So I told her that it wouldn’t do.

  She looked at me straight with her long, sad eyes, and said: “But it’s just what I’m hunting for. Why won’t it do?”

  I could have sworn that she knew what I was thinking.

  I said there would be nobody to look after her. And Frances cut in, to my horror, “There would be you, Roly.”

  It was only one of her inconsiderate impulses, but it annoyed me and I turned on her. I said, “Has your friend seen that studio next to yours?” I knew that it was to let, and Frances knew that I knew. I suspected her of concealing its existence from May Blissett. She didn’t want her near her; she didn’t like the responsibility. I wished her to know that it was her responsibility, not mine. I wasn’t going to be saddled with it.

  Her face—the furtive guilt of it—confirmed my suspicion as we stared at each other across the embarrassment we had created. I ought to have been sorry for Frances. She was mutely imploring me to get her out of it, to see her through. And I wasn’t going to.

  And then May Blissett laughed, an odd little soft laugh that suggested some gentle but diabolic appreciation of our agony.

  “That wouldn’t do.”

  I was remorseless and said in my turn: “Why wouldn’t it? You’d be near Miss Archdale.”

  She said: “We don’t either of us want to be so near. We should get in each other’s way most horribly—just because we like each other. I shouldn’t be in your way, Mr. Simpson.”

  She was still exquisite, but at the same time a little sinister.

  I remember trying to say something about the inference not being very flattering, but Frances got in first.

  “She doesn’t mean that she doesn’t like you, Roly. What she means is—”

  “What I mean is that, as Frances knows me and likes me a little—you said you did”—(It was as if she thought that Frances was going to say she didn’t. She flung her a look that was not sinister, not sinister at all—purely exquisite—exquisitely incredulous, exquisitely shy. And she went on with her explanation)—“I should be on her mind. And I couldn’t be on your mind, you know.”

  I said, “Oh, couldn’t you!”

  But she took no notice. She said, “No, if I come here—and I’m coming”—(She got up to go. She was absolutely determined, absolutely final)—“we must make a compact never”—(she was most impressive)—“never to get in each other’s way. It’s no use for Frances and me to make a compact. We couldn’t keep it for five minutes.”

  She had the air, under all her incredulity, of paying high tribute to their mutual affection.

  “I’m coming here to work, and I want to be alone. What’s more, I want to feel alone.”

  “And you think,” I said, “I’ll make you feel it?”

  She said, “I hope so.”

  She had put herself between Frances and the door. She said: “You’d better stay and explain it if he doesn’t understand. I’m going.”

  She went like a shot, and I gathered that her precipitance was to give me the measure of her capacity for withdrawal.

  Frances stayed. I could see her stiffening herself to meet my wrath.

  “Frances,” I said, “how could you?”

  Frances was humble and deprecating—for her. She said, “Roly, she really won’t be in your way.”

  “She will be in it,” I said, “most abominably. You know we’re not supposed to have women here.”

  “I know; but she’s not like a woman. She was trying to tell you that she wasn’t. She isn’t. She isn’t—really—quite human. You won’t have to do any of the usual things.”

  I asked her what she meant by the usual things, and she became instantly luminous. She said, “Well—she won’t expect you to fall in love with her.”
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  I’m afraid I said, Heaven only knew what she’d expect. But Frances walked over me with “And you needn’t expect her to fall in with you.”

  And she put it to me, if there’d been a chance of that sort of thing happening, if May had been dangerous, would she have risked it? (We were engaged in those days.) Would she have gone out of her way to plant her up there over my head? Would she have asked me to look after her if she had—well—required looking after? And she reminded me that she wasn’t a fool.

  As for May, that sort of thing was beyond her.

  “Is it,” I said, “beyond any woman? I wouldn’t put it—”

  “Past her?” she snatched me up. “Perhaps not. But she’s past it. Gone through it all, my dear. She’s utterly beyond. Immune.”

  I said: “Never. A face with that expression—that half-malign subtlety. She might do things.”

  And Frances turned on me. You know how she can turn. Malign subtlety! Malign suffering. The malignity was not in the things she’d do, poor lamb, but in the things that had been done to her. And then she sat down and told me a few of them—told me what, in fact, May had gone through.

  First of all, she had lost all her people—father, mother, brothers, and sisters. (She was the youngest of a large family.) That was years and years ago, and she was only thirty-two now, so you may judge the frantic pace of the havoc. And by way of pretty interlude her father had gone mad—mad as a hatter. May had looked after him. Then they lost all their money. (That was a mere detail.) Then she married a man who left her for another woman. Left her with a six-months’-old baby to bring up. Then the child died and she divorced him—he dragged her through horrors. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, her lover—I beg her pardon, the man who loved her—was drowned before her eyes in a boating accident. Nothing, Frances said, had happened since then. What could, when everything had happened? As for doing things, there was nothing poor May wanted to do except pictures. And if she thought she could do them better here over my head, wouldn’t I be a brute to try and stop her?