When a policeman has tried the handle of the door and found it shut, he often, if he is a true guardian of the law, proceeds to examine the windows.
‘Hullo, there, hullo! hullo!’
And a handful of gravel, maybe, rattles against the window-panes. Leaping or creeping out of bed, according to his temperament, the startled householder goes to the window.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, only your window’s unfastened. There arc queer people about tonight —gypsies. You had better come down and fasten it unless you want your silver stolen.’
‘Thank you very much, officer; good-night.’
And down patters paterfamilias in his warm slippers and his dressing-gown, while the constable patrols the garden with comfortable tread. No one dare molest him, not even if he is ever so wicked. And whoever heard of a wicked policeman? thought Ernest, reconnoiting, at some distance, the dining-room window. He tramps through the shrubberies, cats fly before him, his bull’s-eye lantern turns night into day, he could walk through the spinney where the mound is and never turn a hair. And this is how he would open the dining-room window.
It was a sash-window, hanging loose in its grooves. Ernest inserted his pocket-knife in the crevice and started to prize it open. To his delight and dismay the sash began to move. Half an inch higher and he would be able to get his fingers under it. He was using the haft of the knife now, not the blade. The sash began to move more easily. He curled his fingers under and round it. His face, twisted with exertion, stared blankly upon the cream-coloured blind inside. The blind stirred. He must have let in a current of air. He redoubled his exertions. The sash slid up six inches, and then stuck fast. And he could sec why. A hand, pressed flat along the bottom of the sash, was holding it down.
Ernest let go with a cry, and the window was slowly and smoothly closed. He had an impulse to run but he resisted it, and forced himself to walk back to the window. The hand was gone.
Imagine you were a window-cleaner and wanted to open a window and some playful member of the family —a great over-grown lout of a boy, for instance — took it into his head to play a prank like that on you. You know what boys are; they have no mercy; there is a bully embedded in all of them, and pretty near the surface in most. That being so, what would you make of the young gentleman’s interference? What line would you take? Clearly he won’t hurt you, and he can’t, besides, be everywhere at once. Perhaps somebody calls him, or he finds the cat and pulls its tail or blows tobacco-smoke into the spaniel’s eyes. For such a lad as that there arc a hundred distractions; and while you are quietly going on with your job at the drawing-room window he will be making an apple-pie bed for his small sister in the nursery: too engrossed, my dear Ernest, to remember your existence, certainly too much occupied to follow you about.
And it did seem that Ernest the window cleaner was likely to be more successful than Ernest the policeman. Crouching like an animal, his hands hanging down in front of him, keeping close to the wall, brushing himself against creepers, scratched by thorns and blackened by soot, at last he reached the drawing-room window and flung himself on his face beneath the sill. The sill was a low one. Half kneeling, half supporting himself on his elbows, he raised himself till his eyes were level with the glass. The fitful moonlight played on this side of the house; a treacherous light, but it served to show him that the Puck of Stithies was occupied elsewhere. With extreme caution, holding his breath, he negotiated the difficult preliminaries; then he stood up straight, and heaved with all his might. The window rushed up a foot and then stuck. Involuntarily he glanced down: yes, there was the hand, flattened on the frame: there was another hand, holding back the blind, and there was a face, not very distinct, but certainly a face.
It was the hand that Ernest, cowering under the thick umbrage of-the drooping-ash, remembered best. The face was anybody’s face, not really unlike Hubert’s: a ruddy, capable face: not exactly angry, but stern, official-looking. But the odd thing about the hand was that it didn’t seem like the hand of another person. It was larger than Ernest’s, yet he had felt, for the moment that it was presented before his eyes, that it would respond to his volition, move as he wanted it to move. He had been too frightened, at the moment, to act upon this fantastic notion; but couldn’t he act upon it next time? Next time. But why not? Imagine a man of average capabilities, physically none too robust, but with a good headpiece on him. He can afford to spare himself; even when he takes on a job that is strange to him he will find out the easiest way, will know just the right moment to bring to bear what little strength he has. Many a slenderly built chap, at the bidding of necessity, has transformed himself into a passable coal-heaver. But to carry a sack of coal or a sack of anything one needs a knack: it’s no good taking the load into your arms, you must hoist it on to your back. And when you’ve carried a sack or two like that, who knows that your luck mayn’t change? Many a man who carried a sack in his time, in later life has supped with princes.
Ernest scrambled up the slates, slithered down a gully and grasped the balustrade of the battlement. He had found his way instinctively, or did he remember it? If he hadn’t been familiar with the lie of the roofs, even to the point of knowing what slates were loose and would crack or, worse, creak when you trod, how could he have avoided a sprained ankle or a serious fall? Yes, certainly he knew his way about the leads and slates; who wouldn’t, if they had lived in a house from childhood, and loved it, though it frightened them, and wanted to have it, and meant to have it, and what went with it, though by a slip of the pen it belonged to someone else?
The window of the Blue Room was just round the comer. Imagine yourself a steeplejack. How delicious to know, while you went about your work with a crowbar or a hammer or whatever heavy, unwieldy instrument it might be, that there was a railing of stone and mortar, two feet high and six inches thick, between you and the ground! The steeplejack would feel he wasn’t earning his pay when his life was safeguarded like that. Well, here’s a foolproof job! Like putting a grown man in a child’s cot, with a high brass chevaux-de-frisc round it. But nevertheless, rounding the bend, Ernest was overtaken by nausea and lay for some moments stretched out upon the leaden gully, twitching.
But supposing a man was kept out by force from his possessions, or what should have been his? Who would blame him, who would not applaud him, if he went to any reasonable length to recover his property? Should he consult his own safety, or anyone’s safety, when he was engaged upon such an undertaking?
Ernest dragged himself to the window. His head was level with the upper sash which was fast in the wall, and looked as if it was fixed there. But the lower sash was about six inches open, with the fold of a blue blind projecting from it.
Up went the sash a long, long way as it seemed, much farther than the others. But as he lifted it there was a whirring sound; the tegument of the blind vanished. The new proprietor was standing there. Ernest stared at him. Was it the face of the poor man who had come into money and acquired Stithies? Or of the coward who owned it? Or of the policeman who protected it, or of the man who cleaned its windows? Or of the coal-heaver or of the steeplejack or of the man who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way? It seemed in turn to be all these, yet its essential character never changed. Dazed as he was, Ernest remembered to drop his hands. The apparition dropped his; the window was unguarded. Slowly Ernest lowered and advanced his head. But he had not reckoned on his enemy’s faculty for imitation. The simulacrum bowed, leant forward, pressed its face to within three inches of Ernest’s. And as it hung there the last expression faded out of it, and was replaced by a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent. Yet something began to take shape in that mobile, almost fluid tract. Ernest did not wait for it to declare itself, this new visage whose lines he could almost see graven in the air before they settled and bit deep into the flesh.
He was on the drip-stone of the tower now, clinging with his fingers to the sham machicolations. Suppose a man meant to
commit a murder, did he shrink from risking his own life? Wasn’t anything easy to him, in the presence of such a determination? Hadn’t it been easy to him, Ernest, when he stood, some ten years ago, on this same dizzy ledge and found, after three failures, the one vulnerable point of Stithies, the box-room window?
Sweating and gasping he reached the window and clung to the stanchion, his back, weak with exhaustion, bending outwards like a bow. But his prescient tormentor had outstripped him. This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest’s own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.
Punctually at half-past six, in the gathering light, Mrs. Playward passed through the open gateway into the garden of Stithies Court.
‘Bless me,’ she thought. ‘What with the maids away and the young gentleman in bed I shan’t be able to get in.’
The suspicion that she had made the journey for nothing weighed heavily on Mrs. Playward.
‘It’s not as if I am as young as I was,’ she told herself.
But, having come so far, it was worth while to make sure that none of the doors was unlocked. The front door seemed to open of itself, such was her amazement at finding it unfastened. ‘Well, I never,’ she declared. ‘And he always said to be so fidgety about robbers.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘Best to get it over,’ she muttered. ‘If there’s one step there’s eighty.’ Having collected the machinery of her profession she mounted the spiral staircase that led to the box-room. Her eyesight was defective, a fact to which, when reproached for apparent negligence, she often drew the attention of her clients. The staircase was lighted by a couple of slit windows, set deep in the wall. At the second of them she paused, partly to recover her breath, partly to relieve her eyes from the strain of peering into the gloom. By leaning forward she could just see the road below.
‘Well, I declare,’ she muttered, ‘if Polkin hasn’t been and left his overcoat out on the path all night. That good black one he told me he was promised by Mr. Ernest. Some men don’t know when they’re well off.’
Breathing heavily she resumed her journey. The condition of this box-room was heart-breaking, trunks, cardboard boxes, gas-rings, fenders, disused furniture all covered with a layer of dust. But she hardly noticed that because a stranger sight claimed her attention. The casement window was wide open.
She walked towards it. A huge black trunk with a flat top stood directly under the window, and in the dust which thickly coated it there were four curious marks. Two pairs of each. The farther ones, the marks nearest the window, she made out at once. They were the prints of hands. The fingers, pointing into the room, were splayed out and unnaturally elongated; where the hand joined the wrist there was a long shapeless smear. Opposite them, and within an arm’s length, were the other marks. At first they meant nothing to her: two symmetrical black smudges with rounded tops and a thin track of dust between them. The imprint of a man’s knees perhaps? Panic descended on Mrs. Playward. She fled, screaming ‘Mr. Ernest, Mr. Ernest, something has happened in the box-room!’ No one answered her; when she hammered on Mr. Ernest’s door no one replied, and when she went in, the room was empty.
THE THOUGHT
Henry Greenstream had always looked forward to his afternoon walk. It divided the day for him. In ideal circumstances a siesta preceded it and he awoke to a new morning, a false dawn, it is true, but as pregnant with unexpressed promise as the real one. For some weeks now, however, sleep had deserted his after-luncheon cushion; he could get to the brink of unconsciousness, when thoughts and pictures drifted into his mind independently of his will, but not over.
Still, the walk was the main thing even if he started on it a little tired. It calmed, it satisfied, it released. For an hour and twenty-five minutes he enjoyed the freedom of the birds of the air. Impressions and sensations offered themselves to him in an unending flow, never outstaying their welcome, never demanding more from his attention than a moment’s recognition. Lovely and pleasant voices that tonelessly proclaimed the harmony between him, Henry Greenstream, and the spirit of all created things.
Or they had proclaimed it till lately. Lately the rhythm of his thoughts had been disturbed by an interloper, yes, an interloper, but an interloper from within. Like a cuckoo that soon ceased to be a visitor, the stranger had entered his mind and now dwelt there, snatching at the nourishment meant for its legitimate neighbours.
They pined, they grew sickly while Henry Greenstream suckled the parasite.
He knew what it was and whence it came. It was an infection from his conscience which had taken offence at an act so trivial that surely no other conscience would have noticed it. Indeed, he had himself almost forgotten what it originated in —something about a breach of confidence that (reason assured him a thousand times) could have harmed nobody. And when it stirred inside him it was not to remind him of his fault and recall the circumstances of his lapse, but simply to hurt him; to prick the tender tegument which, unpierced, assures comfort to the mind.
If it did not spoil his life it fretted him, reducing his capacity for enjoyment; and most of all did it make its presence felt when he took his afternoon exercise. The aery shapes that then haunted his imagination could not suppress it, nor was the scenery through which he passed such as to distract him from himself. Town gave way to suburb; suburb to ribbon development; only when it was time to turn back did he emerge into the unspoilt countryside. Motors rushed by; an occasional tramp asked for a match; dogs idled on the pavement. All this was uninspiring but at the same time it fostered his mood; even the ugly little houses, with their curtains drawn aside to reveal a plant or a pretentious piece of china, invited pleasing speculations. Confidently he looked forward to his reunion with these humble landmarks. But they had lost their power to draw him out, and lately he had invented a new and less satisfying form of mental pastime. Much less satisfying; for it consisted in counting the minutes that elapsed between one visitation of the Thought and the next. Even so might a Chinese malefactor seek to beguile himself while under the water-torture by calculating the incidence of the drops.
Where the signpost pointed to Aston Highchurch Mr. Greenstream paused. He had been walking half an hour and the Thought had recurred twenty-two times; that was an average of nearly once a minute, a higher average than yesterday, when he had got off with fourteen repetitions. It was in fact a record: a bad record. What could he do to banish this tedious symptom? Stop counting, perhaps? Make his mind a blank? He wandered on with uncertain footsteps unlike his ordinary purposeful stride. Ahead of him the October sun was turning down the sky, behind, the grass (for the fields now began to outnumber the houses) took on a golden hue; above, the clouds seemed too lazy to obey what little wind there was. It was a lovely moment that gathered to itself all the harmony of which the restless earth was capable. Mr. Greenstream opened his heart to the solace of the hour and was already feeling refreshed when ping! the Thought stung him again.
‘I must do something about this,’ thought Mr. Greenstream, ‘or I shall go mad.’
He looked round. To his left, in the hedge beyond the grass verge, was a wicket-gate, and from it a path ran diagonally over the shoulder of a little hill, a shabby asphalt path that gleamed in the sunlight and disappeared, tantalizingly, into the horizon. Mr. Greenstream knew where it led, to Aston Highchurch; but so conservative was he that in all these years of tramping down the main road he had never taken it. He did so now. In a few minutes he was on the high land in what seemed a different world, incredibly nearer the sky. Turning left along a country lane bordered by trees and less agreeably by chicken runs, he kept catching sight of a church; and at length he came to a path that led straight to it across a stubble field. It lay with its back to him, long and low, with a square tower at the further end that gave it the look of a cat resting on tucked-in legs, perhaps beginning to purr.
Mr. Greenstream stopped at the churchyard gate and stared up at the tower to make out what the objects were which, hanging rather crazily at the comers below the parapet, had looked
in the distance like whiskers, and completed the feline impression made by the church. A whiskered church! The idea amused Mr. Greenstream until his watchful tormentor, ever jealous of his carefree moments, prodded him again. With a sigh he entered the porch and listened. No sound. The door opened stiffly to confront him with a pair of doors, green baize this time. He went back and shut the outer door, then the inner ones, and felt he had shut out the world. The church was empty; he had it to himself.
It was years since Mr. Greenstream had been inside a church except on ceremonial occasions or as a sightseer, and he did not quite know what to do. This was a Perpendicular church, light, airy and spacious, under rather than over furnished. The seats were chairs made of wood so pale as to be almost white: they were lashed together with spars, and the whole group, with its criss-cross of vertical and horizontal lines, made an effect that was gay and pretty and in so far as it suggested rigging, faintly nautical.
Mr. Greenstream wandered up the nave but felt a reluctance, for which he could not quite account, to mount the chancel steps: in any case there was little of note there and the east window was evidently modem. Straying back along the north aisle wall he read the monumental inscriptions, black lettering on white marble or white lettering on black marble. Then he came face to face with the stove, an impressive cylinder from which issued a faint crackling. His tour seemed to be over; but he was aware of a feeling of expectancy, as if the church were waiting for him to do something.
‘After all, why not?’ he thought, sinking to his knees. But he could not pray at once —he had lost the habit, he did not know how to begin. Moreover he felt ashamed of coming to claim the benefits of religion when for many years he had ignored its obligations. Such a prayer would be worse than useless; it was an insult; it would put God against him. Then the Thought came with its needle-jab and he waited no longer but prayed vehemently and incoherently for deliverance. But a morbid fear assailed him that it was not enough to think the words, for some of them, perhaps the most operative, might be left out, telescoped or elided by the uncontrollable hurry of his mind, so he repeated his petition out loud. Until he had ceased to speak he did not notice how strange his voice sounded in the empty church, almost as if it did not belong to him. Rising shakily to his feet he blinked, dazzled by the daylight, and stumbled out of the church without a backward look.