“What is it, Mr. Kinstrey?” said Arthur. He was fumbling with the end of a faded old bathrobe and trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes. “Is anything the matter?”
Kinstrey glared at him. “Get out of here!” he shouted. “And put some coffee on. Or get me a brandy or something.”
“I’ll put some coffee on,” said Arthur. He went shuffling away in his slippers, still half asleep.
“Well,” said Madge Kinstrey over her coffee cup at breakfast, “I hope you got your tantrum over and done with this morning. I never heard such a spectacle—squalling like a spoiled brat.”
“You can’t hear spectacles,” said Kinstrey, coldly. “You see them.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
No, you don’t, thought Kinstrey, you never have; never have, nev-er have, nev-er have. Would he ever get that damned rhythm out of his head? It struck him that perhaps Madge had no subconscious. When she lay on her back, her eyes closed; when she got up, they opened, like a doll’s. The mechanism of her mind was as simple as a cigarette box; it was either open or it was closed, and there was nothing else, nothing else, nothing else . . .
The whole problem turns on a very neat point, Kinstrey thought as he lay awake that night, drumming on the headboard with his fingers. William James would have been interested in it; Henry, too, probably. I’ve got to ignore this thing, get adjusted to it, become oblivious of it. I mustn’t fight it, I mustn’t build it up. If I get to screaming at it, I’ll be running across that wet grass out there in my bare feet, charging that bird as if it were a trench full of Germans, throwing rocks at it, giving the Rebel yell or something, for God’s sake. No, I mustn’t build it up. I’ll think of something else every time it pops into my mind. I’ll name the Dodger infield to myself, over and over: Camilli, Herman, Reese, Vaughan, Camilli, Herman, Reese . . .
Kinstrey did not succeed in becoming oblivious of the whip-poor-will. Its dawn call pecked away at his dreams like a vulture at a heart. It slowly carved out a recurring nightmare in which Kinstrey was attacked by an umbrella whose handle, when you clutched it, clutched right back, for the umbrella was not an umbrella at all but a raven. Through the gloomy hallways of his mind rang the Thing’s dolorous cry: nevermore, nevermore, nevermore, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will . . .
One day, Kinstrey asked Mr. Tetford at the post office if the whip-poor-wills ever went away. Mr. Tetford squinted at him. “Don’t look like the sun was brownin’ you up none,” he said. “I don’t know as they ever go away. They move around. I like to hear ’em. You get used to ’em.”
“Sure,” said Kinstrey. “What do people do when they can’t get used to them, though—I mean old ladies or sick people?”
“Only one’s been bothered was old Miss Purdy. She darn near set fire to the whole island tryin’ to burn ’em out of her woods. Shootin’ at ’em might drive ’em off, or a body could trap ’em easy enough and let ’em loose somewheres else. But people get used to ’em after a few mornings.”
“Oh, sure,” said Kinstrey. “Sure.”
That evening in the living room, when Arthur brought in the coffee, Kinstrey’s cup cackled idiotically in its saucer when he took it off the tray.
Madge Kinstrey laughed. “Your hand is shaking like a leaf,” she said.
He drank all his coffee at once and looked up savagely. “If I could get one good night’s sleep, it might help,” he said.
“That damn bird! I’d like to wring its neck.”
“Oh, come, now,” she said, mockingly. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly. Remember the mouse we caught in the Westport house? You took it out in the field and let it go.”
“The trouble with you—” he began, and stopped. He opened the lid of a cigarette box and shut it, opened and shut it again, reflectively. “As simple as that,” he said.
She dropped her amused smile and spoke shortly. “You’re acting like a child about that silly bird,” she said. “Worse than a child. I was over at the Barrys’ this afternoon. Even their little Ann didn’t make such a fuss. A whip-poor-will frightened her the first morning, but now she never notices them.”
“I’m not frightened, for God’s sake!” shouted Kinstrey. “Frightened or brave, asleep or awake, open or shut—you make everything black or white.”
“Well,” she said, “I like that.”
“I think the bird wakes you up, too,” he said. “I think it wakes up Arthur and Margaret.”
“And we just pretend it doesn’t?” she asked. “Why on earth should we?”
“Oh, out of some fool notion of superiority, I suppose. Out of—I don’t know.”
“I’ll thank you not to class me with the servants,” she said coldly. He lighted a cigarette and didn’t say anything. “You’re being ridiculous and childish,” she said, “fussing about nothing at all, like an invalid in a wheel chair.” She got up and started from the room.
“Nothing at all,” he said, watching her go.
She turned at the door. “Ted Barry says he’ll take you on at tennis if your bird hasn’t worn you down too much.” She went on up the stairs, and he heard her close the door of her room.
He sat smoking moodily for a long time, and fell to wondering whether the man’s wife in “The Raven” had seen what the man had seen perched on the pallid bust of Pallas just above the chamber door. Probably not, he decided. When he went to bed, he lay awake a long while trying to think of the last line of “The Raven.” He couldn’t get any farther than “Like a demon that is dreaming,” and this kept running through his head. “Nuts,” he said at last, aloud, and he had the oddly disturbing feeling that it wasn’t he who had spoken but somebody else.
Kinstrey was not surprised that Madge was a little girl in pigtails and a play suit. The long gray hospital room was filled with poor men in will chairs, running their long, sensitive fingers around the rims of empty coffee cups. “Poor Will, poor Will,” chanted Madge, pointing her finger at him. “Here are your spectacles, here are your spectacles.” One of the sick men was Arthur, grinning at him, grinning at him and holding him with one hand, so that he was powerless to move his arms or legs. “Hurt a fly, hurt a fly,” chanted Madge. “Whip him now, whip him now!” she cried, and she was the umpoor in the high chair beside the court, holding a black umbrella over her head: love thirty, love forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four. His feet were stuck in the wet concrete on his side of the net and Margaret peered over the net at him, holding a skillet for a racquet. Arthur was pushing him down now, and he was caught in the concrete from head to foot. It was Madge laughing and counting over him: refer-three, refer-four, refer-five, refer-will, repoor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will . . .
The dream still clung to Kinstrey’s mind like a cobweb as he stood in the kitchen in his pajamas and bare feet, wondering what he wanted, what he was looking for. He turned on the cold water in the sink and filled a glass, but only took a sip, and put it down. He left the water running. He opened the breadbox and took out half a loaf wrapped in oiled paper, and pulled open a drawer. He took out the bread knife and then put it back and took out the long, sharp carving knife. He was standing there holding the knife in one hand and the bread in the other when the door to the dining room opened. It was Arthur. “Who do you do first?” Kinstrey said to him, hoarsely. . .
The Barrys, on their way to the beach in their station wagon, drove into the driveway between the house and the barn. They were surprised to see that, at a quarter to eleven in the morning, the Kinstrey servants hadn’t taken in the milk. The bottle, standing on the small back porch, was hot to Barry’s touch. When he couldn’t rouse anyone, pounding and calling, he climbed up on the cellar door and looked in the kitchen window. He told his wife sharply to get back in the car. . . .
The local police and the state troopers were in and out of the house all day. It wasn’t every morning in the year that you got called out on a triple murder and suicide.
I
t was just getting dark when Troopers Baird and Lennon came out of the front door and walked down to their car, pulled up beside the road in front of the house. Out in back, probably in the little strip of wood there, Lennon figured, a whip-poor-will began to call. Lennon listened a minute. “You ever hear the old people say a whip-poor-will singing near the house means death?” he asked.
Baird grunted and got in under the wheel. Lennon climbed in beside him. “Take more’n a whip-poor-will to cause a mess like that,” said Trooper Baird, starting the car.
The Macbeth Murder Mystery
IT WAS a stupid mistake to make,” said the American woman I had met at my hotel in the English lake country, “but it was on the counter with the other Penguin books—the little sixpenny ones, you know, with the paper covers—and I supposed of course it was a detective story. All the others were detective stories. I’d read all the others, so I bought this one without really looking at it carefully. You can imagine how mad I was when I found it was Shakespeare.” I murmured something sympathetically. “I don’t see why the Penguin-books people had to get out Shakespeare’s plays in the same size and everything as the detective stories,” went on my companion. “I think they have different-colored jackets,” I said. “Well, I didn’t notice that,” she said. “Anyway, I got real comfy in bed that night and all ready to read a good mystery story and here I had ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’—a book for high-school students. Like ‘Ivanhoe.’ ” “Or ‘Lorna Doone,’ ” I said. “Exactly,” said the American lady. “And I was just crazy for a good Agatha Christie, or something. Hercule Poirot is my favorite detective.” “Is he the rabbity one?” I asked. “Oh, no,” said my crime-fiction expert. “He’s the Belgian one. You’re thinking of Mr. Pinkerton, the one that helps Inspector Bull. He’s good, too.”
Over her second cup of tea my companion began to tell the plot of a detective story that had fooled her completely—it seems it was the old family doctor all the time. But I cut in on her. “Tell me,” I said. “Did you read ‘Macbeth’?” “I had to read it,” she said. “There wasn’t a scrap of anything else to read in the whole room.” “Did you like it?” I asked. “No, I did not,” she said, decisively. “In the first place, I don’t think for a moment that Macbeth did it.” I looked at her blankly. “Did what?” I asked. “I don’t think for a moment that he killed the King,” she said. “I don’t think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty—or shouldn’t be, anyway.” “I’m afraid,” I began, “that I—” “But don’t you see?” said the American lady. “It would spoil everything if you could figure out right away who did it. Shakespeare was too smart for that. I’ve read that people never have figured out ‘Hamlet,’ so it isn’t likely Shakespeare would have made ‘Macbeth’ as simple as it seems.” I thought this over while I filled my pipe. “Who do you suspect?” I asked, suddenly. “Macduff,” she said, promptly. “Good God!” I whispered, softly.
“Oh, Macduff did it, all right,” said the murder specialist. “Hercule Poirot would have got him easily.” “How did you figure it out?” I demanded. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t right away. At first I suspected Banquo. And then, of course, he was the second person killed. That was good right in there, that part. The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim.” “Is that so?” I murmured. “Oh, yes,” said my informant. “They have to keep surprising you. Well, after the second murder I didn’t know who the killer was for a while.” “How about Malcolm and Donalbain, the King’s sons?” I asked. “As I remember it, they fled right after the first murder. That looks suspicious.” “Too suspicious,” said the American lady. “Much too suspicious. When they flee, they’re never guilty. You can count on that.” “I believe,” I said, “I’ll have a brandy,” and I summoned the waiter. My companion leaned toward me, her eyes bright, her teacup quivering. “Do you know who discovered Duncan’s body?” she demanded. I said I was sorry, but I had forgotten. “Macduff discovers it,” she said, slipping into the historical present. “Then he comes running downstairs and shouts, ‘Confusion has broke open the Lord’s anointed temple’ and ‘Sacrilegious murder has made his masterpiece’ and on and on like that.” The good lady tapped me on the knee. “All that stuff was rehearsed,” she said. “You wouldn’t say a lot of stuff like that, offhand, would you—if you had found a body?” She fixed me with a glittering eye. “I—” I began. “You’re right!” she said. “You wouldn’t! Unless you had practiced it in advance. ‘My God, there’s a body in here!’ is what an innocent man would say.” She sat back with a confident glare.
I thought for a while. “But what do you make of the Third Murderer?” I asked. “You know, the Third Murderer has puzzled ‘Macbeth’ scholars for three hundred years.” “That’s because they never thought of Macduff,” said the American lady. “It was Macduff, I’m certain. You couldn’t have one of the victims murdered by two ordinary thugs—the murderer always has to be somebody important.” “But what about the banquet scene?” I asked, after a moment. “How do you account for Macbeth’s guilty actions there, when Banquo’s ghost came in and sat in his chair?” The lady leaned forward and tapped me on the knee again. “There wasn’t any ghost,” she said. “A big, strong man like that doesn’t go around seeing ghosts—especially in a brightly lighted banquet hall with dozens of people around. Macbeth was shielding somebody!” “Who was he shielding?” I asked. “Mrs. Macbeth, of course,” she said. “He thought she did it and he was going to take the rap himself. The husband always does that when the wife is suspected.” “But what,” I demanded, “about the sleepwalking scene, then?” “The same thing, only the other way around,” said my companion. “That time she was shielding him. She wasn’t asleep at all. Do you remember where it says, ‘Enter Lady Macbeth with a taper’?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, people who walk in their sleep never carry lights!” said my fellow-traveler. “They have a second sight. Did you ever hear of a sleepwalker carrying a light?” “No,” I said, “I never did.” “Well, then, she wasn’t asleep. She was acting guilty to shield Macbeth.” “I think,” I said, “I’ll have another brandy,” and I called the waiter. When he brought it, I drank it rapidly and rose to go. “I believe,” I said, “that you have got hold of something. Would you lend me that ‘Macbeth’? I’d like to look it over tonight. I don’t feel, somehow, as if I’d ever really read it.” “I’ll get it for you,” she said. “But you’ll find that I am right.”
I read the play over carefully that night, and the next morning, after breakfast, I sought out the American woman. She was on the putting green, and I came up behind her silently and took her arm. She gave an exclamation. “Could I see you alone?” I asked, in a low voice. She nodded cautiously and followed me to a secluded spot. “You’ve found out something?” she breathed. “I’ve found out,” I said, triumphantly, “the name of the murderer!” “You mean it wasn’t Macduff?” she said. “Macduff is as innocent of those murders,” I said, “as Macbeth and the Macbeth woman.” I opened the copy of the play, which I had with me, and turned to Act II, Scene 2. “Here,” I said, “you will see where Lady Macbeth says, “I laid their daggers ready. He could not miss ’em. Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.’ Do you see?” “No,” said the American woman, bluntly, “I don’t.” “But it’s simple!” I exclaimed. “I wonder I didn’t see it years ago. The reason Duncan resembled Lady Macbeth’s father as he slept is that it actually was her father!” “Good God!” breathed my companion, softly. “Lady Macbeth’s father killed the King,” I said, “and, hearing someone coming, thrust the body under the bed and crawled into the bed himself.” “But,” said the lady, “you can’t have a murderer who only appears in the story once. You can’t have that.” “I know that,” I said, and I turned to Act II, Scene 4. “It says here, ‘Enter Ross with an old Man.’ Now, that old man is never identified and it is my contention he was old Mr. Macbeth, whose ambition it wa
s to make his daughter Queen. There you have your motive.” “But even then,” cried the American lady, “he’s still a minor character!” “Not,” I said, gleefully, “when you realize that he was also one of the weird sisters in disguise!” “You mean one of the three witches?” “Precisely,” I said. “Listen to this speech of the old man’s. ‘On Tuesday last, a falcon towering in her pride of place, was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.’ Who does that sound like?” “It sounds like the way the three witches talk,” said my companion, reluctantly. “Precisely!” I said again. “Well,” said the American woman, “maybe you’re right, but—” “I’m sure I am,” I said. “And do you know what I’m going to do now?” “No,” she said. “What?” “Buy a copy of ‘Hamlet,’ ” I said, “and solve that!” My companion’s eyes brightened. “Then,” she said, “you don’t think Hamlet did it?” “I am,” I said, “absolutely positive he didn’t.” “But who,” she demanded, “do you suspect?” I looked at her cryptically. “Everybody,” I said, and disappeared into a small grove of trees as silently as I had come.
The Man Who Hated Moonbaum
AFTER they had passed through the high, grilled gate they walked for almost a quarter of a mile, or so it seemed to Tallman. It was very dark; the air smelled sweet; now and then leaves brushed against his cheek or forehead. The little, stout man he was following had stopped talking, but Tallman could hear him breathing. They walked on for another minute. “How we doing?” Tallman asked, finally. “Don’t ask me questions!” snapped the other man. “Nobody asks me questions! You’ll learn.” The hell I will, thought Tallman, pushing through the darkness and the fragrance and the mysterious leaves; the hell I will, baby; this is the last time you’ll ever see me. The knowledge that he was leaving Hollywood within twenty-four hours gave him a sense of comfort.
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