David. David Ross, fifteen, puts down the black pencil and stares at his four cards: the STUDY, the CONSERVATORY, Miss Scarlet, and the Rope. As early as the fifth grade, when Jacob, home from Columbia, had sat down and taught him to play, David had begun to notice flaws in the game. Of the total of twenty-one cards (six suspect cards, six weapon cards, nine room cards), three were placed in the black envelope in the center of the board and eighteen were dealt to the players. When three people played, each person received six cards; but when four people played, two received five cards and two only four cards—a distinct disadvantage for the four-card players, each of whom had one less clue to the murder than the five-card players did. The unfairness had disturbed him; and although it was partly rectified by the fact that the deal passed from player to player, David had always secretly discounted games with four players. All that afternoon he had waited eagerly for Jacob, assuring his mother that things would be all right, calming Marian, who had arrived from Manhattan on the 10:48, and imagining elaborate, desperate explanations for Jacob’s lateness (the train from Boston had been delayed an hour; Jacob had gone out to change a five-dollar bill in order to call and had missed the train; he hadn’t called because he was afraid of missing the next train, which was due any minute but had also been delayed). When Jacob finally pulled into the driveway four minutes before dinner with an unknown girl in an unknown car, David’s relief at seeing Jacob, his sense that things would be all right now, was mixed with a sharp disappointment: there will be four players, the games won’t count.
Doors and passages. On the board there are seventeen doors, all exactly the same: yellow, with four gray panels. Like the furniture, they are pictured from above, in sharp perspective: they are inverted trapezoids, the top of each door being nearly twice the length of the bottom. The four corner rooms have a single door each; the DINING ROOM, the BILLIARD ROOM, and the LIBRARY, two doors each; the HALL, three doors; the BALLROOM, four. In addition to their single doors, each of the corner rooms has a SECRET PASSAGE, indicated by a black square containing a yellow arrow. When a token is in any of the four rooms containing a SECRET PASSAGE, it may, on its turn, advance immediately to the room diagonally opposite. The doors and passages are the secret life of the game, for they permit the tokens to enter and leave the nine rooms, and it is solely in the rooms, and not in the yellow squares or central rectangle, that play takes place, by means of continual guesses at the three cards concealed in the black envelope.
The pleasures of secret passages. Professor Plum walks in the SECRET PASSAGE between the LOUNGE and the CONSERVATORY. He enjoys traversing the house this way: the passage corresponds to something secretive, dark, and wayward in his temperament. The erratic earthen path, the dank stone walls, the dim yellow glow of irregularly placed kerosene lanterns, the spaces of near-dark, all these soothe and excite him, and bring back those boyhood rambles along the bank of the brook in the wood behind his father’s house. He thinks of Pope’s tunnel at Twickenham, of the emergence of eighteenth-century English gardens from the rigidity of French and Italian forms, of the grove of hickory trees in the wood, of asymmetrical architecture and the cult of genius. Professor Plum does not suffer from delusions of boldness. Part of the pleasure of the serpentine dark lies in knowing that he is walking between two well-known points, the LOUNGE and the CONSERVATORY, and it is precisely this knowledge that permits him to experience a pleasurable shiver at the appearance of a lizard in the path, the fall of a mysterious pebble, the ambiguous shadows that might conceal the murderer, the sudden extinction of a lantern on the wall.
A woman of mystery. Miss Scarlet enters the BALLROOM and sees with relief that she is alone. The silent piano, the empty window seat, the polished parquet floor, the high ceiling, the gloom of early evening coming through the high windows and making a twilight in the dying room, all these comfort her in a melancholy way, as if she might lose herself in the mauve shadows. And yet, as she crosses the floor to the window seat, she imagines herself observed, in her evening dress of close-fitting red silk (tight across the hips, flared below the knees, dropping to midcalf), takes note of the firm delicate neck, the soft waves and curls of her short blond hair, the slight but firm-set shoulders, the long svelte stride, the motion of hips under the small, elegant waist: a woman desirable and untouchable, a woman of mystery. She detests the Colonel. She detests him even as she imagines his eyes following her slow, swinging walk across the echoing room; detests his faintly flushed cheeks, his bristly brown-and-gray mustache, the small purplish vein at the side of his nose, the short neat hairs on the backs of his fingers, above all, those melancholy and relentless eyes. They are organs of touch, those eyes—she can feel his indecent gaze brushing the back of her neck, rubbing lightly against her calves, drawing itself like a silk scarf between the insides of her thighs, brushing and lightly rubbing. His eyes appear to include her in a conspiracy: let us, my dear, by all means continue this little farce of civility, but let us not pretend that you do not wish to be released from your restlessness by the touch of my thumbs against your stiffening nipples. The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded loveless rooms.
A warm night in August. It is nearly midnight on a warm August night in southern Connecticut. 11:56, to be exact. Through the screened windows of the Ross back porch comes a sharp smell of fresh-cut grass and the dank, salt-mud, low-tide smell from the Sound three blocks away. A stirring of warm air moves through the porch and touches the lightly sweating foreheads of the four Clue players. Six sounds can be distinguished: the shrill of crickets, the gravelly crunch of footsteps passing along the street at the side of the house, the rising and falling hiss of a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler, the faint music of a jukebox from a seaside bar ten blocks away where the summer people from New York and New Jersey have their cottages, the soft rush of trucks on the distant thruway, the hum of the air conditioner in the bedroom window of the neighboring house near the back porch. These sounds mingle with the snap of a pretzel, the scritch-scratch of a pencil, the click of an ice cube, the soft clatter of a tumbling die. The glow of porchlight spills beyond the screens and touches faintly the catalpa in the side yard. A solitary passerby, walking on the gravel at the side of the road, sees, through branches of Scotch pine and the exposed portion of the screens, the four players in their island of light, distinguishes a woman’s bending shoulder, a white upper arm, a tumble of dark thick hair, and feels a yearning so deep that he wants to cry out in anguish, though in fact he continues steadily, even cheerfully, on his way.
A pause on the way to the kitchen. Mrs. Peacock, proceeding toward the KITCHEN from the LOUNGE, pauses not far from a door to the DINING ROOM. Through the half-open door she can see part of the mahogany table, the branch of a silver candlestick, the gleam of the cut-glass bowl on the sideboard. Mrs. Peacock appears to be waiting for something, there by the partly open door. Does she expect to see a line of red blood trickling through the door, does she expect to hear the sound of a candlestick thunking against a skull? Her lavender dress is a trifle mussed from the day’s exertions, really it is far too warm in these airless corridors, she must look a fright. In the KITCHEN she will drink a glass of cool water. Mrs. Peacock prides herself on looking neat. She has always been attractive in a girlish sort of way, though too short: she has always had to look up into faces, as if offering herself for inspection: please notice my nice smile. Not like Edith White: all eyes turned when she entered a room. Mrs. Peacock thought he had noticed, but evidently she had been mistaken. Why is she lingering in the airless corridor? What is she waiting for? Through the half-open door of the DINING ROOM she can hear the silence, falling drop by drop.
Susan. Susan Newton glances up from her cards—the HALL, the LOUNGE, Colonel Mustard, the Lead Pipe, the Kni
fe—and sees again the fatal profile: the line of David’s nose and upper lip exactly reproduces the line of Jacob’s, except for some faint difference difficult to account for. Is there more calm in David’s profile, less sense of inner force pushing outward into form? Susan is continually startled and disturbed by the physical likenesses among the Ross children: Marian has Jacob’s eye-brows and cheekbones, though her face and features are wider—she is less elegant, less beautiful than Jacob. Susan is struck by how all the Ross faces register emotions sharply, as if her own emotions were unable to find expression in her face, as if her face were an instrument less developed than theirs. The harmony of the faces at the card table excites her but shuts her out: she is so clearly alien. Although David’s kindness has touched her, she senses Marian’s dislike. Marian is a powerful woman with lines of tension between her eyebrows and a surprisingly rich, throaty laugh. It’s as if she is continually releasing herself from some constriction through the act of laughter. Jacob has been cold to Susan all evening. She is angry at him for making her come unannounced on David’s birthday, for making them late, for making her an accomplice. He has been sharp with her lately, unkind, impulsive, autocratic. She understands that his anger at himself, his furious disappointment, is making him desperate: perhaps he wishes to confirm his sense of failure by failing with her. The understanding does not help, for she can feel Jacob removing himself from her in a series of small, precise withdrawals. He will leave her soon, her homme fatal, she can feel it in her bones, and in her unhappiness she turns again to look at David, startled to see, in the long, slightly upturned upper lip, the thick, nervous eyelashes, the devastating hook of hair over the crisp collar, a purer, gentler Jacob. “Mrs. White,” Susan says. “In the kitchen. With the rope.”
Mr. Green hesitates. Mr. Green, formerly the Reverend Green, stands frozen in the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, watching Miss Scarlet advance toward the window seat. He wishes to step noiselessly from the room and vanish along a corridor, but he fears that his slightest motion will startle her into attention. Mr. Green does not dislike Miss Scarlet, but she makes him uneasy; young women in general make him uneasy. He does not know where to look when he speaks to them, and in particular he does not know where to look when he speaks to Miss Scarlet. To look away is rude; to stare into her restless, twilight-colored eyes is unthinkable; to fasten his attention on her full small mouth is to have the sensation of being about to be swallowed; to lower his eyes, even for an instant, to her distinctly separate breasts is an indecency. Mr. Green is a bachelor of thirty-eight who lives with his mother and still sleeps in his boyhood room. The same bookcase that once held Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Kidnapped, and The Three Musketeers now holds Skeat’s English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day, the thirteen volumes of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Celtic Scotland by W. F. Skene (3 volumes), the county volumes of the English Place-Name Society, all the volumes published by the Early English Text Society, including 194 volumes (up to 1933) of the Old Series and 126 volumes (discontinued in 1921) of the Extra Series, as well as philological quarterlies, dialect dictionaries, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English grammars and morphologies, and miscellaneous publications of the Camden Society, the Pipe Roll Society, the Canterbury and York Society, the Scottish Text Society, the Caxton Society, and the Rolls Series. A tendency toward the eccentric, held in check and made respectable by faith, has been released and accentuated by the loss of faith. Mr. Green has a passion for English place-names (he is the author of “A Contribution to the Study of Cheshire Place-Names of Scandinavian Origin,” published in Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire), obsolete card games (ombre, primero, noddy, ruff and honour), gem lore, Pictish history, ogham inscriptions, a theory of Wyatt’s versification according to which a strong pause is the equivalent of a stressed syllable and a line contains an irregular number of unstressed syllables, pre-Celtic Britain, and the history of armor. Mr. Green walks twenty miles a day and is subject to attacks of melancholy. He is comfortable only in the presence of children and elderly women; he fears the Colonel, likes Mrs. White, and is especially fond of Mrs. Peacock, who reminds him of a favorite aunt. In a properly regulated society, he has been known to say wryly, all girls on their twelfth birthday would be removed to Scottish castles, from which they would be released on their sixtieth birthday after forty-eight years of instruction in harmony, prosody, and needlepoint. In the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, Mr. Green is riven with distress. If she should discover him, standing in the shadows, his silence will be impossible to explain. It might even appear that he has been spying on her, as she walks in her nervous stride across the long floor of the BALLROOM, swinging her hips, swinging her hips, touching herself on the sleeve, running a hand along the side of her hair, touching herself on the hip. Mr. Green has come from the LIBRARY, bearing with him a book on Norman castles that now lies on a chair with claw-and-ball feet beside his left leg. He cannot pick up the book without fear of being heard by Miss Scarlet, who is approaching the window seat. She will sit down and see him standing in silence across the room. He must not appear to be aware of her when she sees him, but when he looks away he feels that she is turning to look at him, now, this very moment, and he looks back abruptly to make certain that he has not yet been seen. It occurs to him that he cannot possibly pretend to have been unaware of her long walk across the echoing floor. His position is worsening by the moment.
A secret. David’s love for his brother runs so deep that he feels it as an oppression in his chest. David feels there is something wrong with him: he imagines other people too intensely. He has forgiven Jacob for his lateness, which he attributes to some difficulty or sorrow in Jacob’s life, but he has no clear sense of Jacob’s trouble and is hurt at being excluded from it. David feels older than Jacob, as if he were the one who could give comfort. He can sense Marian’s anger at Jacob, her dislike of Susan, and Marian’s own trouble, which he detects in her eyes, in her self-disparaging remarks, and in an occasional tone of voice. He feels sympathy for Susan, whose uneasiness is plain to him; he is disturbed by Jacob’s coldness to her and desires to be kind to her, in part to make up for his own initial disappointment at her presence. He sees that she is pretty, possibly beautiful, though he observes this neutrally, since it is not a kind of prettiness or beauty that attracts him: there is something cool and sculptural about it, a beauty of the moon. He admires most of all the color of her hair, a light brownish red shot through with threads of blond. The thought of her hair disturbs him, for he has a shameful secret: he imagines the pubic hair of all women, even of his sister, a habit that began at the age of twelve when he saw his first nude photograph in one of his father’s photography annuals. David thinks continually about the bodies of women; although he is without sexual experience, he has a strong sense of sexual corruption. He feels that if Susan knew what he was thinking she would be shocked and would despise him; and as he studies his cards—he knows that either Mrs. White or Mrs. Peacock is the murderer—he feels a burst of gentleness toward Susan, as if she must be protected from himself.
Cards. There are twenty-one cards: six suspect cards, six weapon cards, and nine room cards. Each suspect card shows a large, colored token in the foreground and, behind it, the head and shoulders of the suspect, in two colors or three. Each weapon card pictures a weapon in a single color: yellow or blue. Although the rooms on the board are gray, and the furniture in black outline, each room card shows a pale orange room with furniture in two, three, four, or five colors (red, yellow, blue, and two distinct shades of green). Three cards—the CONSERVATORY, the HALL, and the Wrench—have been lost over the years and have been replaced by traditional playing cards labeled appropriately. Thus David’s CONSERVATORY card is a seven of clubs with the word Conservatory printed in blue ballpoint across the top; Susan’s HALL is a two of spades with the word Hall printed across the middle; and
Marian’s Wrench is a five of diamonds with the word Wrench printed above the central diamond.
Nymph reclining. As Colonel Mustard silently enters the BALLROOM by the door nearest the BILLIARD ROOM, he is aware of two things: Miss Scarlet sitting at the window seat with her back to him in one of her ludicrous attitudes (head lifted, hands loosely locked over one raised knee, a show of white stocking, glossy heel dangling: Miss Scarlet exists as a series of tableaux vivants, animated from time to time by little bursts of hysteria) and Mr. Green standing in a corner intently studying his pocket watch. The Colonel’s decision follows swiftly: get rid of Green, rearrange the picture on the couch (Nymph Reclining: a study in rose and marble, disposed upon a background of red plush velvet, the whole set off by tumbled white silk underthings, glossy ink-black pubic curls, and a brilliant silver chain dangling from one languorous wrist). “I say, Green,” remarks the Colonel, “have you the…”—time, he would have said, but Mr. Green turns abruptly, cracking his elbow against the wall and gasping with pain, while from the window seat comes another gasp and a rustle of rearrangement: Nymph Upright, Tense, and Cold. Legs sharp as scissors, the long femurs shut tight like the silver sides of a nutcracker: crack crack, a scattering of broken shells. It occurs to the Colonel that there may be a certain satisfaction in disencumbering Miss Scarlet of her propriety.
The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series) Page 2