To the unscientific reader the strangest part of this story will perhaps be the fact that Parker is still with his old master, a wonderful example of the perfect butler. Professor Boyd Thompson was able to forgive Parker because he understood him. And he learned to understand Parker in those moments of agony, when his keen intellect and his awakened heart taught him, through his love for Lucilla, the depth of that gulf of fear which lies between the quick and the dead.
The Head
1
When your personal appearance is best described by the enumeration of your clothes, your character by the trade mark on the gilt waistband of your cigar, and your profession ‘just anything that comes along, don’t you know’, you are not exactly the right man in the right place, when you find yourself up to your knees in mud, your carriage with a wheel off lying prone in a ditch several fields off, and your chance of getting to the house, where a music hall star has given you an inconvenient rendezvous, less than the least crumb of the biscuit you wish you had put in your pocket before starting.
Morris Diehl cursed his luck in the grey of a winter’s dusk. His driver had left the carriage and gone back with the horses to the inn where he had lunched. His boots were full of water, his high hat seamed and scratched by the skeleton-fingered trees that leaned here and there over the stone walls. His cigar, long since cold, its end wet and flattened and gnawed, lay foul between his lips. He threw it away. He was lost, beyond a doubt lost, on these confounded Derbyshire hills, where every field is just the same as every other field, and the stone walls have no more of individual distinction than the faint blue-grey lines of a copy book.
If he had only had the sense to stay where the coachman had left him or, better still, at the inn, the inn down in the valley, where the Station was – where there were lights, and voices and things to drink. Tottie de Vere, the star on whom hung all the hopes of his newest venture – a company for promoting cafés chantants in Manchester, Liverpool, and Bolton – Tottie de Vere had declined to give any appointment save this: he might call on her between six and seven at Sir Alexander Brisbane’s, the grey house with acres of glass, ten miles from anywhere. And he had tried to keep the appointment, tried with unreasonable determination, and there he was.
Lights and voices – and things to drink. To eat, also. For Mr Diehl was not only thirsty. He was hungry as well, and cold and lonely. He thought of the Strand and the lights of the Strand, lights from restaurants and theatres, where one smelt French cooking, and the patchouli, and the Regalias. These were to him what, to some of us, the home pastures and the scent of stocks and wood smoke are. He had waited by the carriage till he had grown certain that all men were alike and that his driver would, warmed and comforted in the ale-house, not be such a fool as to keep his promise and come back ‘with a trap’. He had walked up and down the road for a while, the bleak wind nuzzling in between his neck and the fur collar of his big coat; and then he had started to reach Sir Alexander’s on foot, seen a light, and been beguiled by it to what he esteemed a short-cut. Even if it were not Sir Alexander’s light yet any light meant a possible fire – shelter, at any rate, from that too intimate North-Easter.
He was going now, difficultly towards the light. Across the fields and over the eternal sameness of grey walls – black, they seemed, in that sombre twilight of cold stars. Beyond the last wall was a little hill brook. He was in it almost knee-deep before he guessed at anything worse than the cold muddy pastures. The next wall had a gate; he saw the blacker blank and made for it. His fur-lined coat caught on its hasp and ripped, loudly. And his hat was struck by some silly arch or other above the gate, and fell, rolling hollowly on the flags.
‘Damn,’ said Mr Diehl. ‘Oh, damn and blast.’ He groped for the hat in the dark dampness, found it; and then he was at the door of the cottage whose windows, all alight, had beckoned him from afar.
‘There must be a wedding or a wake,’ said he. ‘Copy, either way.’ He was, casually, a journalist when financial enterprises were cold to him.
He knocked. He had not been conscious of any movement in the house, but now he was conscious of a cessation of movement, and of a silence, as though something inside the house were holding its breath.
‘Who’s there?’ The voice came from behind the door – low down, as though the speaker had been trying to look out into the dark through the keyhole.
‘I’ve lost my way,’ said Mr Diehl.
‘You’ll find it – some way or other,’ said the voice.
‘I’m very wet – and tired. I should be very grateful for a night’s lodging, Sir.’
He added the Sir because the note of the voice was distinctly feminine, and he saw that the door would open more readily to one whose honesty of purpose was so clear and fine, that it could persist even in the face of the conviction that there was ‘a man in the house’. Mr Diehl’s mind – it was not the mind of a fool – pictured a faded woman, her terror at this late visit soothed and charmed by the solid compliments it was part of his trade to sow broadcast, with both hands, on any soil. The harvest, he knew, rarely failed.
‘Ah, have pity,’ he said, all the pathos of a hundred melodramas reinforcing the earnest pleading of gross physical discomfort. ‘I am lost on these wild moors – I shall die if you do not assist me. Have pity on me and God will reward you.’
‘You can go back the way you came,’ said the voice.
‘I shall die,’ he said, piteously, but very distinctly, as his elocution master had taught him in the days when he meant to be an actor. ‘I shall die if you turn me away. My death will be at your door – Ah, save me, for the love of God.’
‘For the love of God?’ the voice repeated slowly. ‘For the love … ’
The rest was lost in the rusty withdrawal of bolts. The door creaked open a brilliant inch.
‘No-one’s crossed this door this ten years past,’ said the voice – ‘but I can’t let a human creature perish by fire or by cold. For the love of God, come in.’ The door was flung back. Within was a little square hall or lobby – narrow stairs led up in front of Mr Diehl. To the right, a closed door; to the left, the outer door held open.
‘Go and stand on the stairs,’ said the thin treble voice, ‘ ’til I get the door shut.’
From the stairs Morris watched to see the door closed by that spare, fluttering woman’s form. But it was a man who shut the door and barred it, and then turned to the visitor the cold, calm face of one wholly self-possessed.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Since you are here, I’ll do what I can for you. Get off your wet things. I’ll go and fetch you a change.’
Diehl, alone in a firelit kitchen, threw off the wet fur coat across a brown wood settle, loosened his squelching patent leather boots, and heard above him the muffled sound of footsteps on old worm-eaten boards, the creak of old beams, the opening and shutting of drawers and presses.
He had got to bare feet and a costume like that of a Corsican brother in reduced and muddy circumstances when his host returned, an armful of clothing over his arm.
‘Here,’ he said in his thin treble, ‘get into these. It’ll be easy. I was a bigger man than ever you’ll be.’
He was, now, a smaller man – smaller by the stooping shoulders, the narrow chest, the yellow leanness of wrists and neck, by, in a word, age. He was an old man, white-haired and pale. Nothing was young in face and figure, save only the eyes – and they would not have shone amiss in the face of an adventurer of twenty.
Hot gin and water, the generous half of a plate-pie, one’s feet in borrowed large shoes among the grey ashes, to whose centre fire had been forced to life by big bellows …
Morris Diehl expanded – and, when expanded, he looked better than in his fur coat. He was resolved to stay the night. He pledged his host again and again in the hot sugary drink, adding strength to the other’s glass from the brown demijohn, whenever the old man left the fire for more wood, or to fill the kettle, or to bring out his tobacco jar from the disused oven
where he stored it – ‘to keep moist,’ he said. He grew more cordial, and Diehl, who was by nature an actor anywhere but on the boards, which paralysed him, set so gay a tune of good fellowship that the other’s mind soon danced to it.
‘I’m glad I let you in. Yes, by God, I’m glad I broke my vow. You’re a good fellow, sir, pardoning the liberty, and this night’s the whitest I’ve known for ten years. How old would you take me to be, now?’
The question was awkward. As a woman of thirty is said to subtract passionately to make a total of twenty-seven, so men who are far gone in their seventies will add to their years, and claim your amazed admiration as gaffers of eighty-six.
Diehl looked hard at the old man. He would have liked to rest his decision on the spinning of a coin.
‘Not much past sixty,’ struck him as a tactful compromise.
The old man laughed, well pleased, as it seemed.
‘I’m forty-three, come Lady Day, and seven days beyond,’ he said. ‘I was born on All Fools’ Day, three-and-forty years ago, and christened April by the same token, like the fool I am. April Vane’s my name. “Vane by name and vain by nature,” they used to say when I was a young man – though you wouldn’t think it to look at me now.’
‘I beg your pardon.’ Diehl had no other counter ready.
‘Not at all, sir, not at all,’ the old man rejoined. ‘It ’ud be a wonder if you could guess my age. Why, my hair went white like you see it – in three days.’
‘You had some shock, I suppose,’ said Morris, and he sipped the hot gin, ‘it’s a sad world, God help us.’
‘I don’t tell my story to strangers,’ said the other, with shrill, sudden dignity.
‘I trust,’ said Diehl in his best manner, ‘that I can sympathise with another man’s sorrows without seeking to thrust myself into his confidence.’
Even as he spoke, he saw how well the old man, the remote house, the air of mystery, would serve him in an article for the Daily Bellower – could he but learn the secret of this hermit’s grief. He saw the headlines:
AN ENGLISH HERMIT
TRAGIC STORY
A BROKEN LIFE
‘No,’ said the other; ‘no – of course not. You’re a gentleman. Anyone could see that. Let alone your fur coat.’
‘I’ve known trouble myself,’ said the guest, and told a tale. A long tale full of pathetic incidents, a tale whose dénouement may have been suggested by the prostrate stump of his cigar against the leg of the table – by that, or by something more subtle.
‘I saw my angel girl,’ he ended, ‘at the window of that burning house. How could I save her? I rushed forward. “Darling,” I cried, “I am coming to rescue you!” I plunged among the burning débris, and knew no more, ’til I woke in hospital with a broken heart – and this.’
He pulled up his sleeve and showed a scar, got in a drunken fight with a Jew in Johannesburg – the weapons, whisky bottles.
‘They cured my face burns,’ he added, smoothing his heavy moustache, ‘these hardly show, even by daylight, but that scar I shall carry to my grave.’
There was a silence. Then, ‘Why did you go on living?’ asked the other man, his voice tense as the string of a violin.
‘I … oh … my poor old mother,’ said Diehl, whose mother had died in giving birth to him, her only child; ‘for her sake, don’t you know, and my little sister.’
‘I went on living,’ said the other man, and now his voice was no longer like stretched wire, but like the sharp, unyielding blade of a steel poignard. ‘I went on living because … ’
There was a silence. Diehl could almost hear his heart beat, so sure he was that there was here material for headlines – so keen was he to secure it.
He sighed elaborately. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it is a relief to tell your troubles to someone who understands.’
He was quite right to say it. He really sometimes had a wonderful flair for the things to be said and not to say.
‘Does it really?’ asked the man with the young eyes – ‘relief, I mean? I’ve lived here ten years, and never a word except when I bought the things I needed. Does talking help? Are you sure? Doesn’t it open the old wounds wide till the blood squirts out of them? Don’t you wish afterwards that you’d held your silly tongue? Aren’t you ashamed, and afraid, and sick with yourself for every word that’s passed your lips about her?’
‘No,’ said Diehl slowly, stretching his feet towards the ashes’ red centre, ‘no; but then I’ve never told my story before to anyone but you. There’s something about you – I don’t know what it is – that makes me feel I can trust you. So I’m glad I’ve told you my story. If it’s not bored you?’
The last five words were a false lead, but the other man did not notice it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘you may be right; and perhaps if I told someone I could trust, my brain and heart would leave off feeling as though they were going to burst, and make my clean floor all in a mess. You don’t think I’m mad, do you?’
It was just what he was thinking, so, suddenly very anxious to be alone, with a locked door between him and his host, he said hastily: ‘Not at all. But I see I’ve awakened painful memories with my talk. Will you let me sleep here – on the settle – on the floor – anywhere – I don’t want a bed. I won’t give an ounce of trouble. May I?’
‘May you what?’
‘Spend the night,’ said Diehl and, laboriously explaining, added, ‘sleep here, you know.’
‘In this house?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes.’ The answer was very strong, very definite. ‘You shall sleep here in this house – if you can. But first I should like to show you the reason why I never sleep in this house. I sleep in the croft when it’s warm, and, when it’s winter, in the barn. But I keep the lights burning all night in every room.’
‘I don’t half like this,’ Morris Diehl told himself, and perceived that attractive headlines may be bought too dearly. Aloud he said: ‘I’m so tired, I could sleep anywhere. I believe I’m almost asleep now. Won’t you show me whatever it is tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow may never come,’ said the host cheerfully. ‘I’ll go first – just to turn the lights full up and that. Then you shall see.’
He went out, quite quietly and soberly, and Mr Diehl shivered. Now that he was warm and gin-filled, the bleak, windy hillside, in the chessboard of those confounded stone walls, seemed a safety lightly thrown away.
‘Alone with a lunatic,’ he mused, ‘in a house a hundred miles from anywhere.’ He fingered a short broad knife, whose sheath fitted closely against his hip.
‘If the worst comes to the worst – in self-defence,’ he assured himself. ‘But all the same, I jolly well wish I was jolly well out of it. Silly lunatic!’
‘Come, now!’ said the voice of the silly lunatic, and said it so trustfully, yet so compellingly, that Mr Diehl rose and followed it, half reassured, half curious, and wholly overmastered.
‘It’s in the cellar,’ said the voice; ‘people do pry so.’
Mr Diehl drew back; he could not help it.
‘You’re not afraid of a cellar,’ said the voice; ‘besides, it’s what we call a basement in London.’
Morris Diehl felt his knife’s comforting weight and followed the voice.
The stairs were of stone, broad and shallow – there were many of them. The wavering, yellow light of the lamp the other man carried showed the stairs neatly yellowed, as the Mid Country lovingly yellows the stones which make the floors to its homes.
The stairs ended in a flagged passage, with doors. Outside the right-hand door the lamp-bearer paused.
‘You told me your story with words,’ said he. ‘I never heard so many words all different in all my born days. I haven’t got no power of jaw like that there. You told me your story; and it’s the same as my story. That’s why I’m a-going to show you my story. ‘’Cause I can’t use my tongue worth tuppence – but my hands I can. Now, don’t you be frightened; it a
in’t real.’
Mr Diehl reassured himself with a laugh.
‘I’m not so easily frightened,’ he said.
‘Nor don’t you laugh neither,’ said the old man, with sudden, breathless intensity. ‘I couldn’t answer for myself what I should do, if you was to laugh in there. It’s the work of my hands. And I love the work of my hands, same as Almighty God did. Don’t you go to laugh in there, sir, or it’ll be the worse for both of us. But you wouldn’t,’ his voice grew suddenly tender, ‘ain’t you showed me your ’art – put it into my ’and to look at? Don’t I know you?’
The dramatic instinct told Mr Diehl to hold out his hand, in the dim lamplight, and press the other man’s, with a fine show of manly emotion.
‘I was a stone-mason by trade,’ said the host, ‘apprenticed in the King’s Road, Chelsea, I was; that’s how I got the hang of it.’
Mr Diehl had a sudden, swift vision of an elaborate monument erected in the cellar, over the body of the victim of homicidal mania.
‘Now,’ said the other, and flung open the door.
Mr Diehl was prepared for a shock of some sort, but he was not prepared for the shock he got.
The opened door disclosed a village street, lit warm and red, a village street at night. It was the village where the inn was that he wished he had stayed at – where the lights were, and the voices, and the drinks. There, by the same token was the Inn, its sign emblazoned with the arms of the local landowner, lit redly by the flames of conflagration. There was the square church tower, flushed against a dark sky, the tombstones in the raised churchyard, gleaming rosy beneath the yew shadows. There was a crowd in the street – men with pails and cans of water. This side of the Inn, half the street was in flames; from the window of a burning house a girl leaned out; below, a man, holding a ladder, was in act to plant it against the window. At his feet lay a body – a dead man, as it seemed, but not dead by burning. Blood showed at mouth and nose. The whole thing was worked out, with wax and wood and paint and paper, and a dozen odd, yet adequate, materials, at much less than half life-size, but so perfect were the perspective and the proportion, that the scene would have appeared to a spectator half-way up the village street just as, and not otherwise than, it now appeared to the spectator at the cellar door. The peculiar and desperate terror – the mad, splendid heroism that fire engenders – these were here, visible to the onlooker.