by Otto Penzler
“Scendo,” he called back to her. Twelve steps led from the garden to the terrace. Mr. Hutton counted them. Down, down, down, down … He saw a vision of himself descending from one circle of the inferno to the next—from a darkness full of wind and hail to an abyss of stinking mud.
FOR A GOOD many days the Hutton case had a place on the front page of every newspaper. There had been no more popular murder trial since George Smith had temporarily eclipsed the European War by drowning in a warm bath his seventh bride. The public imagination was stirred by this tale of a murder brought to light months after the date of the crime. Here, it was felt, was one of those incidents in human life, so notable because they are so rare, which do definitely justify the ways of God to man. A wicked man had been moved by an illicit passion to kill his wife. For months he had lived in sin and fancied security—only to be dashed at last more horribly into the pit he had prepared for himself. Murder will out, and here was a case of it. The readers of the newspapers were in a position to follow every movement of the hand of God. There had been vague, but persistent, rumors in the neighborhood; the police had taken action at last. Then came the exhumation order, the post-mortem examination, the inquest, the evidence of the experts, the verdict of the coroner’s jury, the trial, the condemnation. For once Providence had done its duty, obviously, grossly, didactically, as in a melodrama. The newspapers were right in making of the case the staple intellectual food of a whole season.
Mr. Hutton’s first emotion when he was summoned from Italy to give evidence at the inquest was one of indignation. It was a monstrous, a scandalous thing that the police should take such idle, malicious gossip seriously. When the inquest was over he would bring an action for malicious prosecution against the Chief Constable; he would sue the Spence woman for slander.
The inquest was opened; the astonishing evidence unrolled itself. The experts had examined the body, and had found traces of arsenic; they were of opinion that the late Mrs. Hutton had died of arsenic poisoning.
Arsenic poisoning … Emily had died of arsenic poisoning? After that, Mr. Hutton learned with surprise that there was enough arsenicated insecticide in his greenhouses to poison an army.
It was now, quite suddenly, that he saw it: there was a case against him. Fascinated, he watched it growing, growing, like some monstrous tropical plant. It was enveloping him, surrounding him; he was lost in a tangled forest.
When was the poison administered? The experts agreed that it must have been swallowed eight or nine hours before death. About lunchtime? Yes, about lunchtime. Clara, the parlormaid, was called. Mrs. Hutton, she remembered, had asked her to go and fetch her medicine. Mr. Hutton had volunteered to go instead; he had gone alone. Miss Spence—ah, the memory of the storm, the white, aimed face! the horror of it all!—Miss Spence confirmed Clara’s statement, and added that Mr. Hutton had come back with the medicine already poured out in a wineglass, not in the bottle.
Mr. Hutton’s indignation evaporated. He was dismayed, frightened. It was all too fantastic to be taken seriously, and yet this nightmare was a fact—it was actually happening.
M’Nab had seen them kissing, often. He had taken them for a drive on the day of Mrs. Hutton’s death. He could see them reflected in the windscreen, sometimes out of the tail of his eye.
The inquest was adjourned. That evening Doris went to bed with a headache. When he went to her room after dinner, Mr. Hutton found her crying.
“What’s the matter?” He sat down on the edge of her bed and began to stroke her hair. For a long time she did not answer, and he went on stroking her hair mechanically, almost unconsciously; sometimes, even, he bent down and kissed her bare shoulder. He had his own affairs, however, to think about. What had happened? How was it that the stupid gossip had actually come true? Emily had died of arsenic poisoning. It was absurd, impossible. The order of things had been broken, and he was at the mercy of an irresponsibility. What had happened, what was going to happen? He was interrupted in the midst of his thoughts.
“It’s my fault—it’s my fault!” Doris suddenly sobbed out. “I shouldn’t have loved you; I oughtn’t to have let you love me. Why was I ever born?”
Mr. Hutton didn’t say anything, but looked down in silence at the abject figure of misery lying on the bed.
“If they do anything to you I shall kill myself.”
She sat up, held him for a moment at arm’s length, and looked at him with a kind of violence, as though she were never to see him again.
“I love you, I love you, I love you.” She drew him, inert and passive, towards her, clasped him, pressed herself against him. “I didn’t know you loved me as much as that, Teddy Bear. But why did you do it—why did you do it?”
Mr. Hutton undid her clasping arms and got up. His face became very red. “You seem to take it for granted that I murdered my wife,” he said. “It’s really too grotesque. What do you all take me for? A cinema hero?” He had begun to lose his temper. All the exasperation, all the fear and bewilderment of the day, was transformed into a violent anger against her. “It’s all such damned stupidity. Haven’t you any conception of a civilized man’s mentality? Do I look the sort of man who’d go about slaughtering people? I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn’t insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won’t allow one to have. I don’t know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I’m a murderer. I won’t stand it.”
Mr. Hutton stamped towards the door. He had said horrible things, he knew—odious things that he ought speedily to unsay. But he wouldn’t. He closed the door behind him.
“Teddy Bear!” He turned the handle; the latch clicked into place. “Teddy Bear!” The voice that came to him through the closed door was agonized. Should he go back? He ought to go back. He touched the handle, then withdrew his fingers and quickly walked away. When he was halfway down the stairs he halted. She might try to do something silly—throw herself out of the window or God knows what! He listened attentively; there was no sound. But he pictured her very clearly, tiptoeing across the room, lifting the sash as high as it would go, leaning out into the cold night air. It was raining a little. Under the window lay the paved terrace. How far below? Twenty-five or thirty feet? Once, when he was walking along Piccadilly, a dog had jumped out of a third-story window of the Ritz. He had seen it fall; he had heard it strike the pavement. Should he go back? He was damned if he would; he hated her.
He sat for a long time in the library. What had happened? What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. “Just to be alive.” Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: “Just to be alive.” There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tuscan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines—Tear of Christ and Blood of Judas—others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all.
He felt that he would like to pray. Forty years ago be used to kneel by his bed every evening. The nightly formula of his childhood came to him almost unsought
from some long unopened chamber of the memory. “God bless Father and Mother, Tom and Cissie and the Baby, Mademoiselle and Nurse, and everyone that I love, and make me a good boy. Amen.” They were all dead now—all except Cissie.
His mind seemed to soften and dissolve; a great calm descended upon his spirit. He went upstairs to ask Doris’s forgiveness. He found her lying on the couch at the foot of the bed. On the floor beside her stood a blue bottle of liniment, marked “Not to be taken”: she seemed to have drunk about half of it.
“You didn’t love me,” was all she said when she opened her eyes to find him bending over her.
Dr. Libbard arrived in time to prevent any very serious consequences. “You mustn’t do this again,” he said while Mr. Hutton was out of the room.
“What’s to prevent me?” she asked defiantly.
Dr. Libbard looked at her with his large, sad eyes. “There’s nothing to prevent you,” he said. “Only yourself and your baby. Isn’t it rather bad luck on your baby, not allowing it to come into the world because you want to go out of it?”
Doris was silent for a time. “All right,” she whispered. “I won’t.”
Mr. Hutton sat by her bedside for the rest of the night. He felt himself now to be indeed a murderer. For a time he persuaded himself that he loved this pitiable child. Dozing in his chair, he woke up, stiff and cold, to find himself drained dry, as it were, of every emotion. He had become nothing but a tired and suffering carcass. At six o’clock he undressed and went to bed for a couple of hours’ sleep. In the course of the same afternoon the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of “Willful Murder,” and Mr. Hutton was committed for trial.
MISS SPENCE WAS not at all well. She had found her public appearances in the witness box very trying, and when it was all over she had something that was very nearly a breakdown. She slept badly, and suffered from nervous indigestion. Dr. Libbard used to call every other day. She talked to him a great deal—mostly about the Hutton case.… Her moral indignation was always on the boil. Wasn’t it appalling to think that one had had a murderer in one’s house. Wasn’t it extraordinary that one could have been for so long mistaken about the man’s character? (But she had had an inkling from the first.) And then the girl he had gone off with—so low class, so little better than a prostitute. The news that the second Mrs. Hutton was expecting a baby—the posthumous child of a condemned and executed criminal—revolted her; the thing was shocking—an obscenity. Dr. Libbard answered her gently and vaguely, and prescribed bromide.
One morning he interrupted her in the midst of her customary tirade. “By the way,” he said in his soft, melancholy voice, “I suppose it was really you who poisoned Mrs. Hutton.”
Miss Spence stared at him for two or three seconds with enormous eyes, and then quietly said, “Yes.” After that she started to cry.
“In the coffee, I suppose.”
She seemed to nod assent. Dr. Libbard took out his fountain pen, and in his neat, meticulous calligraphy wrote out a prescription for a sleeping draught.
TEA FOR TWO
LAURIE YORK ERSKINE
When the famous case involving Major Herbert Armstrong filled newspapers in the early 1920s, Aldous Huxley loosely used the facts as the basis for his short story “The Gioconda Smile.” This headline-making case featured a mousey-looking officer who evidently poisoned his wife with arsenic, which he claimed was to eliminate the dandelions in his garden. The prosecution found his attack on the dandelions to be a trifle too zealous, as he had 20 packets of arsenic in his possession while only 19 dandelions ravaged his garden. When his wife passed away (February 22, 1921), he made a brief entry in his diary: “K died.” It was learned that he had a mistress, who was conceded by the prosecution to be innocent of complicity in the murder, and so had her identity protected by being referred to only as Madame X, a colorful sobriquet that went on to be used as the title of several books and films.
In “The Gioconda Smile,” Huxley provided a fictional denouement, which may or may not have some basis in fact. The famous story was read by Erskine, who decided to provide a somewhat different version of events—no less believable than Huxley’s.
Erskine was a fairly prolific author who achieved lasting fame by creating the heroic figure of a dozen books and several movies, Renfrew of the Royal Mounted Police.
“Tea for Two” was first published in Collier’s magazine in 1936.
TEA FOR TWO
BY LAURIE YORK ERSKINE
THE ABRUPT AND UNTIMELY DEATH of Alden Buxtree, falling close upon the triumphant success of his novel, THE STRANGEFLEET CASE, afforded a melancholy satisfaction to all who knew him. To his friends it provided the opportunity of recalling days when he had in no way merited the praise, prestige, and prosperity which success had brought him, while to his enemies it gave the privilege of reciting without danger of denial many anecdotes which proved the intimacy of their acquaintance with him. Among the few who spoke of his departure with regret was the beautiful but disquieting Mrs. Enderby.
“You see,” she would say, “there was something about him …” And she would gaze into distance as if she saw, outlined on the remote wallpaper, the embodiment of that indescribable something. “I met him at the Tavernhams, you know, hardly a week before he died; but I could feel it—like little waves, you know—vibrations between us. He had genius. I know it. That’s why I bought his collection of books—though I admit it didn’t come up to what I’d expected… .” She would smile, as if with a secret knowledge of meanings inscrutable to others. “… After he died. It was so brief … our friendship, you know. On Thursday afternoon we met, and on the following Wednesday morning they found him dead.”
That Alden Buxtree had come to tea with her at her “flat” on the afternoon preceding that fatal Wednesday morning was a detail which she never deemed it necessary to mention.
The rooms which Mrs. Enderby called her “flat” composed a small apartment overlooking the East River, which she said reminded her of the Thames. Buxtree was impressed by the flowery cosiness of the flat. He had travelled widely in England gathering material for THE STRANGEFLEET CASE, but he had never seen anything so English. He said so.
“I knew you’d understand,” she replied. “And now you must make yourself comfortable while I get you some tea. My maid is out today, and we can be quite alone.” She retired into the small kitchen, leaving Buxtree to luxuriate in the reflection of how softly, yieldingly feminine she appeared in the lustrous pearl-grey gown in which she had draped her small, ripe figure; of how definitely she had made it plain that he was to regard this visit as essentially private, between themselves, and of how admirably she had ensured that privacy. He congratulated himself upon these harbingers of imminent romance.
Emerging from the kitchen with tea things, Florence Enderby disappointed him. As an approach to romantic intimacy, it was the simple habit of Alden Buxtree to talk about himself, but Mrs. Enderby wouldn’t have it. She talked about tea, both as a beverage and as a social institution. She deplored the American cocktail and deprecated the failure of Americans to regard tea as a time of day instead of as an exhibition of silverware. One missed the cosiness, the informality—but there! Mr. Buxtree could understand. He had been so much in England. His books showed it. He loved it—that she knew … and, sugar?
“One,” said Buxtree. He watched with pleasure the graceful movement of her small, shapely hand and the white, rounded forearm from which the silken sleeve fell back as she delved with a silver spoon in the bowl of granulated sugar.
“Loaf sugar,” she remarked, “is an American custom which evades me.”
“I’m glad you found my book captured something of the English atmosphere.” Buxtree brought the conversation firmly back to first principles.
“It made me feel I was back,” she smiled, “in a small village I knew in Cambridgeshire. How was it you knew the people so well?” Her hazel-green eyes smiled directly into his as she handed him the cup and saucer. “The cakes,�
� she explained, “are something I make myself. Not those. Let us save those for later.” She had an odd, girlish quality, he decided, that belied the deep sophistication of her glance—but bafflingly cool, tantalizingly reserved, and self-contained. Buxtree consoled himself with a piece of substantial, plain cake with carraway seeds in it. “But your book was cruel,” she said.
“Cruel,” Buxtree mouthed the word fondly. Like all authors, he was delighted to be considered cruel.
“You see,” she said, “I think you’re a very clever person, and I think you know a great deal more than even your lovely book betrayed; but the deadly logic with which you hounded poor Eva Tredgold down and had them hang her in the last chapter struck me as gorgeously ruthless.”
“Life,” the enchanted Buxtree reminded her, “is ruthless.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never given that much thought,” she said. “But you see, I was in Cambridgeshire at the time of that hideous Armitage case, so I know where you got your plot.” She sparkled upon him like a mischievous schoolgirl. “Only poor Mr. Armitage,” she pointed out, “went all alone to the gallows for poisoning wife, while the lady of his heart was acquitted of complicity in the crime without even her name being brought into it. That makes you just twice as ruthless as life, does it not?”
Buxtree smiled indulgently. “A novelist,” he explained, “must be true to himself. I admit THE STRANGEFLEET CASE was based upon a very close study of the Armitage poisoning case, but I may say in confidence,”—he assumed an authoritative air which in the past had done much to win him an enviable unpopularity—“that I had access to private information which was not introduced at the trial; and according to the evidence it provided, I had to find Eva Tredgold guilty, and to condemn her. I had no choice.”
“But what of the poor woman in the original case—do try another bit of seedcake! —of course, it’s perfectly obvious that she loved poor Mr. Armitage entirely too much; but after all, it was proved, wasn’t it, that she had sailed— for America, wasn’t it?—before the poison was actually administered to poor Mrs. Armitage?”