The narrow passage was packed with people. Presently two stout official forms in blue came shouldering their way through.
‘’Ere,’ said the foremost, ‘wot’s all this about? Pass along there, pass along.’
‘Press,’ said Hector and Andrews in unison.
‘Oh, all right,’ said the policeman. ‘Now then, missus, let’s get along up. We’ve got the warrant. Where is it? Third floor. Right you are.’
The procession tramped heavily up. On the top floor stood Mr J. Higgins with the seventh milk-bottle in his hand.
The policemen gave a huge concerted sniff.
‘Somethink in there all right,’ said the larger of the two. ‘Ere, missus, take them kids along out o’ the way. No place for them.’
He strode to the door and beat upon it, summoning that which lay behind it to open in the name of the law.
There was no answer. How could there be any answer?
‘Gimme that crow-bar.’
The policeman set the bar to the lock and heaved. There was a crack. He heaved again. The lock shuddered and gave. As the door swung slowly back, a huge crowd of flies rose, zooming, from something close behind it.
In a pleasant hotel coffee-room at Clacton, a young man smiled at his wife over the breakfast table.
‘Better than Buttercup Road, eh, Helen?’ he said.
‘It’s marvellous. Oh, Hugh! I think I should have gone cracked in that ghastly place. Isn’t it luck? Isn’t it luck your getting that cheque? Just in time.’
‘Yes, just in time. I was about at the last gasp, old girl. Afraid I was a bit. I was a fool to get so hysterical. My nerves were all to pieces.’
‘I know, dear. It doesn’t matter a bit. I was a fool to get so hysterical. It was a wonderful idea just to come away and get out of it all. Do you know, when you brought the news, and I could run out and buy new clothes – oh, Hugh! It was heavenly. That was the most marvellous bit. And when I was sitting at Liverpool Street waiting for you to come, I had to keep pinching the parcels to be sure it wasn’t all a dream.’
‘Yes, I know. I didn’t know if I was on my head or my heels, either. I nearly missed the train as it was – I had just to stay and finish up that last chapter.’
‘I know. But you did catch it.’
‘I did. But – I’ve never told you. I clean forgot about stopping the milk, as you told me.’
‘Blow the milk. We needn’t count pennies now.’
‘Hear, hear!’
The young man opened his paper. Then his face suddenly became convulsed.
‘My God! Look at this!’
The girl stared at the headlines.
‘Oh, Hugh! How awful! That horrible Mrs Bowles! And that silly old Nosey-Parker from downstairs! Wild-eyed man with a suspicious appearance – good gracious, Hugh! We’ll never dare to go back. But, I say, dear, what’s all this about a smell?’
‘Smell?’
The young man slowly flushed a deep crimson.
‘Hugh!’ said his wife. ‘You don’t mean to say you left that haddock on the table!’
DILEMMA
I have no idea who started the imbecile discussion. I think it must have been Timpany. At any rate, it is just the futile and irritating sort of topic that Timpany would start at the end of a long day’s fishing. By the time I had settled with the landlord about a boat for the next morning and had come back to the smoking-room, they were hard at it, and had got to the problem about the Chinaman.
You know that one. If you could get a million pounds, without any evil consequences to yourself, by merely pressing a button which would electrocute a single unknown Chinaman ten thousand miles away – would you press the button? Everybody seemed to have an opinion on the point, except the sallow-faced Stranger who was not of our party.
He was modestly hidden behind a book, and I was rather sorry for him, hemmed in as he was in a corner by Timpany and his friend Popper, who are the world’s champion talkers. The Colonel said Woof! of course he’d press the button. Too many damned Chinamen in the world anyway – too many damned people altogether.
And I said most people would do a lot for a million pounds.
And the Padre said (as of course he had to) that nothing could justify taking the life of a fellow-creature. And Timpany said, Think of the good one could do with a million pounds, and old Popper said it all depended on the character of the Chinaman – he might have lived to be another Confucius – and from that the talk drifted to still sillier problems, such as, if you had the choice between rescuing a diseased tramp or the Codex Sinaiticus, which would you save?
Timpany said that it was all very well to say that no decent man would hesitate for a moment (I was the silly ass who had committed myself to this sentiment). Didn’t we remember that something very like that had happened once, and the awful fuss there was about it? He meant, he said, that old affair of the Davenant-Smith manuscripts.
The Padre remembered Davenant-Smith was the man who lost his life in Bunga-Bunga, researching into the cause and treatment of sleeping sickness. He was a martyr to science, if ever there was one.
Timpany agreed and went on to describe how Davenant-Smith’s papers, containing all his valuable results, were sent home to his widow. There was a whole trunkful of them, not yet sorted or classified or even read. Mrs Davenant-Smith had got hold of a bright young medico to prepare them for publication. And that night a fire broke out in her house.
I remembered then and exclaimed, ‘Oh, yes; a drunken butler and a paraffin lamp, wasn’t it?’
Timpany nodded. It had all happened in the middle of the night – a thatch and timber house, no water and the local fire-brigade ten miles off. To cut a long story short, the young medico had had to choose between saving the papers or the sodden old fool of a butler. He chucked the papers out first, and when he went back for the butler, the roof fell in and he couldn’t get through to him.
I heard the Padre murmur ‘Terrible!’ and noticed that though the Stranger in the corner pretended to turn over a page of his book, he kept his melancholy dark eyes fixed on Timpany.
‘All this came out at the inquest,’ Timpany went on. ‘The medico got a pretty stiff gruelling. He explained that he believed the manuscripts to be of immense value to humanity, whereas he knew no particular good of the butler.
‘He was severely reprimanded by the coroner, and but for the fact that the fire had started in the butler’s bedroom, he might have found himself in a very unpleasant position. As it was, the jury decided that the butler was probably dead of suffocation before the alarm was given.
‘But it broke the medico, of course. Nobody would think of calling in a doctor who took realistic views about human life, and thought a few thousand sick niggers in the bush more important than a butler in the hand. What happened to the poor devil I don’t know. I believe he changed his name and went abroad. Anyway, somebody else did the work on the manuscripts, which form as you probably know, the basis for our whole modern practice with regard to sleeping sickness. I suppose the Davenant-Smith treatment must have saved innumerable lives. Now, Padre, was that young medico a martyr or a murderer?’
‘God knows,’ said the Padre. ‘But I think, in his place, I should have tried to rescue the butler.’
‘Woof!’ said the Colonel. ‘Damned awkward. Drunken old ruffian’s no loss. Too many of ’em about – no good to anybody. But all the same, damned unpleasant thing, letting a man burn to death.’
‘Sleeping sickness is pretty unpleasant, too,’ observed the Stranger. ‘I’ve seen a lot of it.’
‘And what is your own opinion, sir?’ inquired the Padre.
‘The young doctor was a fool,’ said the Stranger, with bitter emphasis. ‘He should have known that the world is run by sentimentalists. He deserved everything he got.’
Old Popper turned and considered the Stranger with a slow and thoughtful eye.
‘The terms of that problem were comparatively simple,’ he observed. ‘The papers were undo
ubtedly valuable and the butler undoubtedly worthless. Now I could tell you of a problem that really was a problem. The thing actually happened to me – years ago, many years ago. And even now – especially now – it gives me the jim-jams to think about it.’
The Colonel grunted, and Timpany said:
‘Go on, Popper; tell us the story.’
‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Popper. ‘I’ve tried not to dwell upon it. I’ve never mentioned it from that day to this. I don’t think—’
‘Perhaps if you told us now,’ said the Padre, ‘it might relieve your mind.’
‘I rather doubt it,’ said Popper. ‘Of course, I know I can count upon your sympathy. But perhaps that’s the worst part of it.’
We made suitable noises, and the Stranger said, rather primly, but with a queer kind of eagerness:
‘I should very much like to hear your experience.’
Old Popper looked at him again. Then he rang the bell and ordered a double whisky.
‘Very well,’ he said, when he had put it down. ‘I’ll tell you. I won’t mention names, but you may possibly remember the case. It happened when I was quite a youngster, and was working as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. We were instructed for the defence of a certain man – a commercial traveller – who was accused of murdering a girl. The evidence against him looked pretty formidable, but we were convinced, from his manner, that he was innocent, and we were, naturally, extremely keen to get him off. It would be a feather in our caps, and besides – well, as I say, we believed he was an innocent man.
‘The case came up before the magistrate, and things didn’t look any too good for our client. The defence was an alibi, but unfortunately he could bring no evidence at all to prove it. His story was that after having a row with the girl (which he admitted) he had left her in a country lane – where she was afterwards found dead, you understand – and had driven away without noticing where he was going.
‘He said he remembered going into some pub or other and getting exceedingly drunk and then driving on and on till he came to a wood, where he got out and went to sleep for a bit. He said he thought he must have woken up again about three o’clock in the morning, when it was still dark.
‘He had no idea where he was, but after going through a lot of side-roads and small villages which he couldn’t put a name to, he had fetched up, round about six o’clock, in a town which we will call Workingham. He had spoken to nobody after leaving the pub earlier in the evening, and the only other bit of help he could give us was that he thought he had lost a pair of woollen gloves at some time during his wanderings.
‘The police theory, of course, was that after leaving the pub, he had gone back and strangled the girl and had then driven straight through to Workingham. The murder hadn’t taken place till after midnight, if one could trust the medical evidence, but there was plenty of time for him to do the job and get to Workingham by six. The case went up for trial, and we didn’t feel any too happy about it, though there was something about the man that made us believe he was telling the truth.
‘Well, two days after the first hearing, we got a letter from a man living in a village about twenty miles from Workingham, who said he had some information for us, and I was sent up to interview him. He turned out to be a shifty-looking person of the labouring class, and after a good deal of argument and a ten-bob note had passed between us, he more or less admitted that he got his living by poaching. His story was that on the night of the murder, he had been setting snares in a wood near his village. He said that he had visited one particular snare just after 10 o’clock and again at one in the morning. He had seen no man and no car, but on his second visit to the snare, he had found a pair of woollen gloves, lying close beside it. He had taken the gloves home and said nothing about them to anybody, but after reading the report of the magistrate’s inquiry, he had thought it his duty to communicate with us. He also made it pretty obvious that he expected a reward for his testimony.
‘He showed me the gloves, which corresponded fairly closely to the description given by our client. Not that that proved very much, because they had been described in court and might have been purchased for the occasion. Still, there they were, and if they did belong to our client, and he had left them in a wood near Workingham before one a.m., he couldn’t possibly have been doing a murder at midnight eighty miles away. It did seem as though we might be able to get them identified, either by somebody who knew our man or through the manufacturer. I took down a statement from the poacher and set off home, carrying the gloves in my handbag.
‘I had no car in those early days, and had to return by rail – a nasty cross-country journey in a ramshackle local train with no corridor. It was a dark November night, with a thick fog, and everything running late.
‘I don’t remember the crash. We found out afterwards that the London express had somehow over-run the signals and rammed us from behind just before we cleared the points. All I knew was that something hit me with a noise like Doomsday, and that, after what seemed an endless age, I was crawling out from under a pile of wreckage, with blood running into my mouth from a bad cut on my head. I had been snoozing with my feet up on the seat, otherwise I should have been cut clean in two, for when I did get clear, I could see that the three rear coaches of the local had been telescoped. The engine of the express had turned over and set fire to the wreckage, and the place was an inferno. The dead and injured were sprawled about everywhere, and the survivors were working like navvies to extricate the unfortunate devils who were trapped in the blazing coaches. The groaning and screaming were simply ghastly. Booh!! I won’t dwell on that, if you don’t mind. You might touch the bell, Timpany. George, bring me another whisky. Same as before.
‘As soon as I got my wits about me,’ continued Popper, ‘I remembered the gloves in my handbag. I must get them out, I thought. I couldn’t find anyone to help me, and the flames, were already licking up the side of the coach. Where the bag had got to I had no idea, but somewhere underneath all that mass of twisted iron and broken woodwork was the evidence that might save our client’s life.
‘I was just starting in to hunt for it, when I felt a clutch on my arm. It was a woman.
‘“My baby,” she said. “My little boy! In there!”
‘She pointed to the compartment next to mine. The fire was just beginning to take hold, and when I peered in I could see the child in the light of the flames. It was lying on the underside of the overturned coach, pinned in by some timbers which had saved it from being crushed to death, but I didn’ t see how we were going to shift all that stuff before the fire got to it. The woman was shaking me in a kind of frenzy. “Be quick!” she said. “Be quick! It’s too heavy – I can’t lift it. Be quick!” Well, there was only one thing to do. I had another shot at getting help, but everybody seemed to have their hands full already. I clambered through the window and clawed about in the wreckage till I could reach down and satisfy myself that the boy was still alive.
‘All the time I was doing it, you know, I could smell and hear the fire crackling and crunching the bones of my own compartment – eating up my bag and my papers and the gloves and everything. Each minute spent in saving the child was a nail in my client’s coffin. And – do remember this – I felt certain that the man was absolutely innocent.
‘And yet, you see, it was a pretty slender chance. The gloves might not be his, and even if they were, the evidence might not save him. Or, take it the other way. Even without the gloves, the jury might not believe his story.
‘And there was no doubt about the baby. There it was, alive and howling. And its mother was working frantically beside me, tugging at blazing planks and cutting herself, on broken window glass, and calling out to the child all the time. What could I do? Though, you know, I had serious doubts whether we shouldn’t lose both the child and the evidence.
‘Well, anyhow, just when I was giving up hope, two men came along to lend a hand and we managed to lift the wreckage free and ge
t the boy out. It was touch and go. His frock was alight already.
‘And by that time my own compartment was nothing but a roaring furnace. There was nothing left. Not a thing. When we hunted through the red-hot ashes in the morning, all we could find was the brass lock of my handbag.
‘We did our best of course. We got the poacher to court, but he didn’t stand up very well under cross-examination. And the whole thing was so vague. You can’t identify a pair of gloves from a description, and we failed absolutely to find anybody who had seen the car near the wood that night. Perhaps, after all, there never was a car.
‘Rightly or wrongly, we lost the case. Of course, we might have lost it anyway. The man may even have been guilty – I hope he was. But I can see his face now, as it looked when I told my story. I can see the foreman giving his verdict, with his eyes everywhere but on the prisoner.’
Popper stopped speaking, and put his hands over his face.
‘Was the fellow hanged?’ asked the Colonel.
‘Yes,’ said Popper in a stifled tone, ‘yes, he was hanged.’
‘And what,’ inquired the Padre, ‘became of the baby?’
Popper lowered his hands in a hopeless gesture.
‘He was hanged too. Last year. For the murder of two little girls. It was a pretty revolting case.’
There was a long silence. Popper finished his drink and stood up.
‘But you couldn’t have foreseen that,’ ventured the Padre at length.
‘No,’ said Popper, ‘I couldn’t have foreseen it. And I knew you will say that I did the right thing.’
The Stranger got up in his turn and laid his hand on Popper’s shoulder. ‘These things cannot be helped,’ he said. ‘I am the man who saved the Davenant-Smith manuscripts and I have my nightmares too.’
‘Ah! but you’ve paid your debt,’ said Popper quickly. ‘I’ve never had to pay, you see.’
‘Yes,’ said the other man thoughtfully, ‘I’ve paid, and time has justified me. One does what one can. What happens afterwards is no business of ours.’