‘Are they full-size—life-size, as it were?’
‘The two things aren’t quite the same,’ said Bettisher with a grin. ‘But there’s no harm in telling you this: Dick’s like all collectors. He prefers rarities, odd shapes, dwarfs, and that sort of thing. Of course any anatomical peculiarity has to have allowance made for it in the coffin. On the whole his specimens tend to be smaller than the general run—shorter, anyhow. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘You’ve told me a lot,’ said Valentine. ‘But there was another thing.’
‘Out with it.’
‘When I imagined we were talking about perambulators—’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘I said something about their being empty. Do you remember?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then I said something about them having mannequins inside, and he seemed to agree.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well, he couldn’t have meant that. It would be too—too realistic’
‘Well, then, any sort of dummy.’
‘There are dummies and dummies. A skeleton isn’t very talkative.’
Valentine stared.
‘He’s been away,’ Bettisher said hastily. ‘I don’t know what his latest idea is. But here’s the man himself.’
Munt came into the room.
‘Children,’ he called out, ‘have you observed the time? It’s nearly seven o’clock. And do you remember that we have another guest coming? He must be almost due.’
‘Who is he?’ asked Bettisher.
‘A friend of Valentine’s. Valentine, you must be responsible for him. I asked him partly to please you. I scarcely know him. What shall we do to entertain him?’
‘What sort of man is he?’ Bettisher inquired.
‘Describe him, Valentine. Is he tall or short? I don’t remember.’
‘Medium.’
‘Dark or fair?’
‘Mouse-coloured.’
‘Old or young?’
‘About thirty-five.’
‘Married or single?’
‘Single.’
‘What, has he no ties? No one to take an interest in him or bother what becomes of him?’
‘He has no near relations.’
‘Do you mean to say that very likely nobody knows he is coming to spend Sunday here?’
‘Probably not. He has rooms in London, and he wouldn’t trouble to leave his address.’
‘Extraordinary the casual way some people live. Is he brave or timid?’
‘Oh, come, what a question! About as brave as I am.’
‘Is he clever or stupid?’
‘All my friends are clever,’ said Valentine, with a flicker of his old spirit. ‘He’s not intellectual: he’d be afraid of difficult parlour games or brilliant conversation.’
‘He ought not to have come here. Does he play bridge?’
‘I don’t think he has much head for cards.’
‘Could Tony induce him to play chess?’
‘Oh, no, chess needs too much concentration.’
‘Is he given to wool-gathering, then?’ Munt asked. ‘Does he forget to look where he’s going?’
‘He’s the sort of man,’ said Valentine, ‘who expects to find everything just so. He likes to be led by the hand. He is perfectly tame and confiding, like a nicely brought up child.’
‘In that case,’ said Munt, ‘we must find some childish pastime that won’t tax him too much. Would he like Musical Chairs?’
‘I think that would embarrass him,’ said Valentine. He began to feel a tenderness for his absent friend, and a wish to stick up for him. ‘I should leave him to look after himself. He’s rather shy. If you try to make him come out of his shell, you’ll scare him. He’d rather take the initiative himself. He doesn’t like being pursued, but in a mild way he likes to pursue.’
‘A child with hunting instincts,’ said Munt pensively. ‘How can we accommodate him? I have it! Let’s play “Hide-and-Seek.” We shall hide and he shall seek. Then he can’t feel that we are forcing ourselves upon him. It will be the height of tact. He will be here in a few minutes. Let’s go and hide now.’
‘But he doesn’t know his way about the house.’
‘That will be all the more fun for him, since he likes to make discoveries on his own account.’
‘He might fall and hurt himself.’
‘Children never do. Now you run away and hide while I talk to Franklin,’ Munt continued quietly, ‘and mind you play fair, Valentine—don’t let your natural affections lead you astray. Don’t give yourself up because you’re hungry for your dinner.’
The motor that met Hugh Curtis was shiny and smart and glittered in the rays of the setting sun. The chauffeur was like an extension of it, and so quick in his movements that in the matter of stowing Hugh’s luggage, putting him in and tucking the rug round him, he seemed to steal a march on time. Hugh regretted this precipitancy, this interference with the rhythm of his thoughts. It was a foretaste of the effort of adaptability he would soon have to make; the violent mental readjustment that every visit, and specially every visit among strangers, entails: a surrender of the personality, the fanciful might call it a little death.
The car slowed down, left the main road, passed through white gateposts and followed for two or three minutes a gravel drive shadowed by trees. In the dusk Hugh could not see how far to right and left these extended. But the house, when it appeared, was plain enough: a large, regular, early nineteenth-century building, encased in cream-coloured stucco and pierced at generous intervals by large windows, some round-headed, some rectangular. It looked dignified and quiet, and in the twilight seemed to shine with a soft radiance of its own. Hugh’s spirits began to rise. In his mind’s ear he already heard the welcoming buzz of voices from a distant part of the house. He smiled at the man who opened the door. But the man didn’t return his smile, and no sound came through the gloom that spread out behind him.
‘Mr. Munt and his friends are playing “Hide-and-Seek” in the house, sir,’ the man said, with a gravity that checked Hugh’s impulse to laugh. ‘I was to tell you that the library is home, and you were to be “He”, or I think he said, “It”, sir. Mr. Munt did not want the lights turned on till the game was over.’
‘Am I to start now?’ asked Hugh, stumbling a little as he followed his guide,—‘or can I go to my room first?’
The butler stopped and opened a door. ‘This is the library,’ he said. ‘I think it was Mr. Munt’s wish that the game should begin immediately upon your arrival, sir.’
A faint coo-ee sounded through the house.
‘Mr. Munt said you could go anywhere you liked,’ the man added as he went away.
Valentine’s emotions were complex. The harmless frivolity of his mind had been thrown out of gear by its encounter with the harsher frivolity of his friend. Munt, he felt sure, had a heart of gold which he chose to hide beneath a slightly sinister exterior. With his travelling graves and charnel-talk he had hoped to get a rise out of his guest, and he had succeeded. Valentine still felt slightly unwell. But his nature was remarkably resilient, and the charming innocence of the pastime on which they were now engaged soothed and restored his spirits, gradually reaffirming his first impression of Munt as a man of fine mind and keen perceptions, a dilettante with the personal force of a man of action, a character with a vein of implacability, to be respected but not to be feared. He was conscious also of a growing desire to see Curtis; he wanted to see Curtis and Munt together, confident that two people he liked could not fail to like each other. He pictured the pleasant encounter after the mimic warfare of Hide-and-Seek—the captor and the caught laughing a little breathlessly over the diverting circumstances of their reintroduction. With every passing moment his mood grew more sanguine.
Only one misgiving remained to trouble it. He felt he wanted to confide in Curtis, tell him something of what had happened during the day; and this he could not do without being disloyal to his host. Try
as he would to make light of Munt’s behaviour about his collection, it was clear he wouldn’t have given away the secret if it had not been surprised out of him. And Hugh would find his friend’s bald statement of the facts difficult to swallow.
But what was he up to, letting his thoughts run on like this? He must hide, and quickly too. His acquaintance with the lie of the house, the fruits of two visits, was scanty, and the darkness did not help him. The house was long and symmetrical; its principal bedrooms lay on the first floor. Above were servants’ rooms, attics, boxrooms, probably—plenty of natural hiding-places. The second storey was the obvious refuge.
He had been there only once, with Munt that afternoon, and he did not specially want to revisit it; but he must enter into the spirit of the game. He found the staircase and went up, then paused: there was really no light at all.
‘This is absurd,’ thought Valentine. ‘I must cheat.’ He entered the first room to the left, and turned down the switch. Nothing happened: the current had been cut off at the main. But by the light of a match he made out that he was in a combined bed-and-bathroom. In one corner was a bed, and in the other a large rectangular object with a lid over it, obviously a bath. The bath was close to the door.
As he stood debating he heard footsteps coming along the corridor. It would never do to be caught like this, without a run for his money. Quick as thought he raised the lid of the bath, which was not heavy, and slipped inside, cautiously lowering the lid.
It was narrower than the outside suggested, and it did not feel like a bath, but Valentine’s inquiries into the nature of his hiding-place were suddenly cut short. He heard voices in the room, so muffled that he did not at first know whose they were. But they were evidently in disagreement.
Valentine lifted the lid. There was no light, so he lifted it farther. Now he could hear clearly enough.
‘But I don’t know what you really want, Dick,’ Bettisher was saying. ‘With the safety-catch it would be pointless, and without it would be damned dangerous. Why not wait a bit?’
‘I shall never have a better opportunity than this,’ said Munt, but in a voice so unfamiliar that Valentine scarcely recognized it.
‘Opportunity for what?’ said Bettisher.
‘To prove whether the Travelling Grave can do what Madrali claimed for it.’
‘You mean whether it can disappear? We know it can.’
‘I mean whether it can effect somebody else’s disappearance.’
There was a pause. Then Bettisher said: ‘Give it up. That’s my advice.’
‘But he wouldn’t leave a trace,’ said Munt, half petulant, half pleading, like a thwarted child. ‘He has no relations. Nobody knows he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t here. We can tell Valentine he never turned up.’
‘We discussed all that,’ said Bettisher decisively, ‘and it won’t wash.’
There was another silence, disturbed by the distant hum of a motorcar.
‘We must go,’ said Bettisher.
But Munt appeared to detain him. Half imploring, half whining, he said:
‘Anyhow, you don’t mind me having put it there with the safety-catch down.’
‘Where?’
‘By the china-cabinet. He’s certain to run into it.’
Bettisher’s voice sounded impatiently from the passage:
‘Well, if it pleases you. But it’s quite pointless.’
Munt lingered a moment, chanting to himself in a high voice, greedy with anticipation: ‘I wonder which is up and which is down.’
When he had repeated this three times he scampered away, calling out peevishly: ‘You might have helped me, Tony. It’s so heavy for me to manage.’
It was heavy indeed. Valentine, when he had fought down the hysteria that came upon him, had only one thought: to take the deadly object and put it somewhere out of Hugh Curtis’s way. If he could drop it from a window, so much the better. In the darkness the vague outline of its bulk, placed just where one had to turn to avoid the china-cabinet, was dreadfully familiar. He tried to recollect the way it worked. Only one thing stuck in his mind. ‘The ends are dangerous, the sides are safe.’ Or should it be, ‘The sides are dangerous, the ends are safe?’ While the two sentences were getting mixed up in his mind he heard the sound of ‘coo-ee,’ coming first from one part of the house, then from another. He could also hear footsteps in the hall below him.
Then he made up his mind, and with a confidence that surprised him put his arms round the wooden cube and lifted it into the air. He hardly noticed its weight as he ran with it down the corridor. Suddenly he realized that he must have passed through an open door. A ray of moonlight showed him that he was in a bedroom, standing directly in front of an old-fashioned wardrobe, a towering, majestic piece of furniture with three doors, the middle one holding a mirror. Dimly he saw himself reflected there, his burden in his arms. He deposited it on the parquet without making a sound; but on the way out he tripped over a footstool and nearly fell. He was relieved at making so much clatter, and the grating of the key, as he turned it in the lock, was music to his ears.
Automatically he put it in his pocket. But he paid the penalty for his clumsiness. He had not gone a step when a hand caught him by the elbow.
‘Why, it’s Valentine!’ Hugh Curtis cried. ‘Now come quietly, and take me to my host. I must have a drink.’
‘I should like one, too,’ said Valentine, who was trembling all over. ‘Why can’t we have some light?’
‘Turn it on, idiot,’ commanded his friend.
‘I can’t—it’s cut off at the main. We must wait till Richard gives the word.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I expect he’s tucked away somewhere. Richard!’ Valentine called out, ‘Dick!’ He was too self-conscious to be able to give a good shout. ‘Bettisher! I’m caught! The game’s over!’
There was silence a moment, then steps could be heard descending the stairs.
‘Is that you, Dick?’ asked Valentine of the darkness.
‘No, Bettisher.’ The gaiety of the voice did not ring quite true.
‘I’ve been caught,’ said Valentine again, almost as Atalanta might have done, and as though it was a wonderful achievement reflecting great credit upon everybody. ‘Allow me to present you to my captor. No, this is me. We’ve been introduced already.’
It was a moment or two before the mistake was corrected, the two hands groping vainly for each other in the darkness.
‘I expect it will be a disappointment when you see me,’ said Hugh Curtis in the pleasant voice that made many people like him.
‘I want to see you,’ declared Bettisher. ‘I will, too. Let’s have some light.’
‘I suppose it’s no good asking you if you’ve seen Dick?’ inquired Valentine facetiously. ‘He said we weren’t to have any light till the game was finished. He’s so strict with his servants; they have to obey him to the letter. I daren’t even ask for a candle. But you know the faithful Franklin well enough.’
‘Dick will be here in a moment surely,’ Bettisher said, for the first time that day appearing undecided.
They all stood listening.
‘Perhaps he’s gone to dress,’ Curtis suggested. ‘It’s past eight o’clock.’
‘How can he dress in the dark?’ asked Bettisher.
Another pause.
‘Oh, I’m tired of this,’ said Bettisher. ‘Franklin! Franklin!’ His voice boomed through the house and a reply came almost at once from the hall, directly below them. “We think Mr. Munt must have gone to dress,’ said Bettisher. “Will you please turn on the light?’
‘Certainly, sir, but I don’t think Mr. Munt is in his room.’
‘Well, anyhow—’
‘Very good, sir.’
At once the corridor was flooded with light, and to all of them, in greater or less degree according to their familiarity with their surroundings, it seemed amazing that they should have had so much difficulty, half an hour before, in finding their way about. Even
Valentine’s harassed emotions experienced a moment’s relaxation. They chaffed Hugh Curtis a little about the false impression his darkling voice had given them. Valentine, as always the more loquacious, swore it seemed to proceed from a large gaunt man with a hare-lip. They were beginning to move towards their rooms, Valentine had almost reached his, when Hugh Curtis called after them:
‘I say, may I be taken to my room?’
‘Of course,’ said Bettisher, turning back. ‘Franklin! Franklin! Franklin, show Mr. Curtis where his room is. I don’t know myself.’ He disappeared and the butler came slowly up the stairs.
‘It’s quite near, sir, at the end of the corridor,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, with having no light we haven’t got your things put out. But it’ll only take a moment.’
The door did not open when he turned the handle.
‘Odd! It’s stuck,’ he remarked: but it did not yield to the pressure of his knee and shoulder. ‘I’ve never known it to be locked before,’ he muttered, thinking aloud, obviously put out by this flaw in the harmony of the domestic arrangements. ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll go and fetch my key.’
In a minute or two he was back with it. So gingerly did he turn the key in lock he evidently expected another rebuff; but it gave a satisfactory click and the door swung open with the best will in the world.
‘Now I’ll go and fetch your suitcase,’ he said as Hugh Curtis entered.
‘No, it’s absurd to stay,’ soliloquized Valentine, fumbling feverishly with his front stud, ‘after all these warnings, it would be insane. It’s what they do in a “shocker”, linger on and on, disregarding revolvers and other palpable hints, while one by one the villain picks them off, all except the hero, who is generally the stupidest of all, but the luckiest. No doubt by staying I should qualify to be the hero: I should survive; but what about Hugh, and Bettisher, that close-mouthed rat-trap?’ He studied his face in the glass: it looked flushed. ‘I’ve had an alarming increase in blood-pressure: I am seriously unwell: I must go away at once to a nursing home, and Hugh must accompany me.’ He gazed round wretchedly at the charmingly appointed room, with its chintz and polished furniture, so comfortable, safe, and unsensational. And for the hundredth time his thoughts veered round and blew from the opposite quarter. It would equally be madness to run away at a moment’s notice, scared by what was no doubt only an elaborate practical joke. Munt, though not exactly a jovial man, would have his joke, as witness the game of Hide-and-Seek. No doubt the Travelling Grave itself was just a take-in, a test of his and Bettisher’s credulity. Munt was not popular, he had few friends, but that did not make him a potential murderer. Valentine had always liked him, and no one, to his knowledge, had ever spoken a word against him. “What sort of figure would he, Valentine, cut, after this nocturnal flitting? He would lose at least two friends, Munt and Bettisher, and cover Hugh Curtis and himself with ridicule.