Ричард Марш
The Coward Behind the Curtain
CHAPTER VIII
MR FRAZER GOES SHOPPING
The morning was bright and clear; the air was sweet and buoyant; the food was good, the man and the girl were hungry, they both made an excellent meal. And, while they ate and drank, and, between whiles, talked, each, more or less furtively, took stock of the other. Dorothy found that the hazy impression she had formed of the stranger overnight was not in the least bit like him. He was younger than she had thought. She was not much of a judge of men's years; since her experience of them was so extremely limited, it was hardly likely that she would be. In the darkness she had set him down as somewhere in the forties; now, in the bright sunshine, which ages some of us, she supposed him to be somewhere in the early thirties. There was about him an appearance of vigour-the vigour which goes with youth-for which she was unprepared. Then, too, he was so much better-looking than she had taken him to be-perhaps in thinking so she was influenced by the accident that she was dark and he was fair. His eyes were very blue, and very bright; the skin of his face and neck, though slightly tanned, was delicate as any girl's; his hair and beard were flaxen. He was taller, too, than she had imagined-when he stood up she saw that he must be at least six feet; his shoulders were so broad, he held himself so straight, there was about him such a glow of health and strength, that it did her good to look at him. And his attire suited him well; or she thought it did-certainly there could scarcely have been less of it. He wore no cap or coat or waistcoat; his canvas shirt was open at the neck; his grey flannel trousers had as belt a handkerchief of scarlet silk; he was shod with stout brown shoes. It was a costume suited to fine weather out-of-doors; and, free and easy as it was, both it and the wearer pleased the lady's undoubtedly inexperienced eyes.
What impression she made on him it was not easy to determine; not impossibly the morning light had brought a surprise also to him. One felt, not only that she puzzled him, but that the puzzle continually grew. In his speech he owned as much. When the dish and the plates were empty he regarded her with a whimsical smile.
"It's good to eat when you're hungry."
"Yes," she agreed; "it is."
"Do you know that it's past eleven o'clock; and that when I'm abroad in this house of mine I make it a rule to have all signs of breakfast cleared away before the clock strikes eight."
She began to stammer.
"I beg your pardon; I am so sorry; it's all my fault; but I-I did sleep so late. Now I-I won't hinder you any longer; I'll go." She stood up. "I-don't quite know where; I-I don't know this part of the country very well-I am very much obliged for all you've done for me; you-you've been very kind. I have no money; but when I have I'll-I'll pay you for what you've done, if you'll let me know to what address to send."
"I think you're very stupid."
She crimsoned.
"Good-bye."
"I also think that you're ill-mannered."
She had turned to go; but there was something in the quiet finality of his tone which caused her to turn to him again.
"Why?"
"I think you're the first because you speak of paying for what, you ought to know, I'm only too glad to give; as if I were the sort of person to accept money from a lady who has been my guest!"
"I beg your pardon; I-I'm so stupid."
"I said you were. I think that you're the second because, no sooner are you through your own meal than you rush off, before your host has finished."
"I thought you had; I did not mean to be ill-mannered; I thought you wanted me to go."
"You are mistaken. It is another rule of mine-and this is a rule which I don't propose to break-when I am done with the actual eating and drinking, to smoke a pipe; I regard that pipe as an integral part of my breakfast. I don't know why you should wish to deprive me of it."
"I don't; I didn't know you wanted another; I saw you smoking one just now, before we began."
"That was because breakfast was unwontedly delayed; also that is no reason why now I shouldn't have another. When I am enjoying my breakfast pipe I like, when opportunity offers, to have a chat. You spoke of payment. I suggest that your payment takes the form of sitting down and talking to me till I have smoked my pipe right out. Have you any particular objection?"
"I don't mind staying, if you want me to, till you-you've done your pipe."
"Thank you; then will you have the goodness to resume your seat while I load up? One can't talk to a person who will persist in standing."
She sank down again upon the turf. As he crammed the tobacco into the bowl of his briar she regarded the tablecloth with doubtful eyes.
"Can I-can I clear away the things, and wash up for you?"
"No, you can't; all you can do is sit still, and talk. Let me begin by introducing myself; my name is Frazer-Eric Frazer. You were so kind as to tell me last night that yours was Dorothy. As it is unusual for a man to address a woman by her Christian name after such a short acquaintance as ours hath been, may I ask you to tell me what your surname is, so that we can start fair?"
She hesitated; then told him a falsehood; she herself could not have said why.
"My name is Greenwood."
Somehow, the instant she had spoken, she felt he doubted. He looked at her, over the lighted match which he was holding to the bowl of his pipe; and, though she did not try to meet his glance, she knew that in it there was something sceptical.
"Greenwood? – your name is Greenwood? Dorothy Greenwood-Miss Greenwood. Thank you; I am flattered by the confidence in me which your telling me your name implies." Having completed the operation of lighting his pipe, folding his arms across his chest, he observed her with a steady attention which made her feel curiously uncomfortable. She began to wish that, ill-mannered or not, she had gone when she said she would. Nor were matters improved when he began to ask her questions; which he did in a cool, level voice which, for some cause, jarred upon her nerves. "You were so good as to inform me, also last night, when I inquired how it was that I was so fortunate as to be favoured with your society, that you came from the road. Now the road runs both ways; which one did you come from?"
Summoning her courage she looked at him with what she meant to be defiance.
"I would rather not tell you, if you don't mind."
"That's better; much better." What he meant she did not know; yet she felt that it was something which she would rather he did not mean. He went on: "Do I understand that, not knowing this country very well, you are journeying you don't know where-without money, without luggage, without even a hat on your head?"
Again she tried to defy him.
"I can't help your asking questions; but I'm not forced to answer them if I'd rather not; and I would rather not."
His manner, if anything, was blander than ever; her attitude did not seem to wound his sensibilities one bit.
"Quite right; you are perfectly right; if you don't want to answer, don't; never be coerced into answering a question which you don't want to answer. Impertinent curiosity is not to be encouraged. There is so much interest taken in our goings and our comings, merely because some people deem them peculiar, that the liberty of the subject threatens to become seriously abridged. I know what I am speaking of; I have suffered from that kind of thing myself. By the way, this morning, while you were still fast asleep in bed I-went shopping."
He laid a stress on the last two words which caused her to prick up her ears; she herself did not know why.
"Shopping? Where?"
She looked about her, as if she expected to find a shop, or shops, in sight. He shook his head.
"No, not here; there are no shops upon the heath that I am aware of; and I know it pretty well. I ought to. Where I went shopping was to a town called Newcaster. Have you ever heard of it?" Newcaster was the town from which she had fled the night before. So soon as he spoke of it a dreadful feeling began to come over her that she knew what was the point which he was approaching. She tried to shake the feeling off; but it would not be shaken. With beating pulses she sat and watched him drawing closer and closer. "Newcaster," he explained, speaking with what seemed to her to be hideous deliberation, "is a town not far from here; an old town; a racing town; it is to horse racing that, in all human probability, it owes its continued flourishing condition-for it continues to flourish. One of its numerous meetings is taking place now; there is to be racing on this heath to-day. You hear that humming and buzzing sound which comes and goes, so that now it fills all the air, and now seems completely to die away." She had heard it, and had vaguely wondered what it was. "If you were to go to the top of that bank you would understand-it is the noise made by the people who are going to the races; on foot, in motor cars, in vehicles of all sorts and kinds, and by the people who are already there. The race-course is over yonder, about two miles from where we are. A great crowd will be there to-day; and, though it's early, probably thousands are there already. It's all open country between it and us; and, on a day like this, with what breeze there is blowing from it towards us, sound travels. You'll know when a race begins by the noise the people make; and when it ends, by the comparative silence which follows." He paused to puff at his pipe. As he did so the humming and buzzing sound of which he had spoken grew distinctly louder. He pointed upwards with the stem of his pipe. "You hear?"
"Yes," she said; "I hear."
He stayed still a little longer, as if to listen.
"It dies away; perhaps the wind has changed a point or two; these light breezes seldom blow from exactly the same quarter many minutes together." He returned to the subject from which he had diverged. "In Newcaster I made one or two small purchases-even my larder must be occasionally restocked, especially when I've a guest whom I desire to honour-and, having made them, I paid a call-at a hotel." Again he paused; then added: "A hotel called 'The Bolton Arms'-perhaps, if you have any knowledge of Newcaster, you may be acquainted with 'The Bolton Arms.'" She was; that was the name of the hotel to which her guardian had taken her yesterday; in which so much had happened. A sort of paralysis seemed to be settling about her heart, so that she could scarcely breathe, or move. She wished that he would get on faster; come quicker to the point to which some instinct told her he was coming. His drawling speech was bad enough, but each time he paused it was as if he had given a tug at the hook which he had got in her throat. "It's a hotel which I know very well, 'The Bolton Arms'-very well indeed, considering. The landlord is a man named Elsey; of him also I have some personal knowledge, and of his wife. Not a bad fellow, in his way, is Elsey, though of late years he has grown so much that, metaphorically, he has to take a larger size in boots, and in hats. His wife has also grown. It's odd how people do grow when, as they suppose, they become people of importance. When I last saw John Elsey I should have said that his consciousness of his own dignity had put him on a perch which it would not be easy to get him off. Yet when I saw him this morning he was off it with a vengeance. I have seldom seen a man mentally, morally, physically, in a more lamentable state than he was. Poor Elsey!" Once more there was one of those pauses which so distressed her. He seemed to be in an introspective mood; as if he were contemplating a picture which was present to his mind's eye. Yet-the feeling was growing in her, that, all the while, he watched her as a cat might watch a mouse. She avoided his glance; keeping her eyes fixed on the sugar-basin which was on the tablecloth in front. In some indefinable way, though with all her faculties she hung upon his words, she noticed how the flies were making free with the sugar; she soon began to count them as they came and went. And, all the while, she was trying to brace herself, so that she might maintain an unruffled front when the blow fell, which she knew was coming. If only her heart would not play such fantastic tricks, and he would get on faster! His drawl seemed to be getting more pronounced. "On such a day as this one finds it hard to credit that in the world there's tragedy. In the winter it is different; winter is itself a tragedy. But, when nature's radiant, and the sun's in a cloudless heaven, surely all's right with the world, and comedy's the only fare. When I reached 'The Bolton Arms Hotel,' in Newcaster, the world was even more-riant-it's a word which the French use, for which I can't hit on an exact translation. Do you know French?" She nodded. "Then you'll know what I mean-than it is now; for, to my thinking, there's nothing like the first sweetness of a summer morning. Then, again, there are persons whom one does not find it easy to associate with tragedy; God seems to have intended them to strut through life as unconscious comedians; and the unconscious comedian's the finest of all. Elsey's such a one. Have you, by any chance ever seen the man?" She was silent; he went on. "Although I daresay that the possession on which he most prides himself is his dignity, in reality he's the most undignified of men. Surely there's no tragedy where there's no dignity. Tragedy's austere; Elsey never could be that. Yet, last night, there was a tragedy at 'The Bolton Arms'; and it seems that Elsey played a leading part in it. And the strangest thing was that, as he told me all there was to tell, the inherent comicality of the man made him the most tragic figure imaginable. Here's the story as it was told to me by Elsey; with addenda by other hands." She had known, all along, that it was coming. With clenched fists, and tightly closed lips, she waited for him to tell her what she knew so much better than he did. In the tale as he had it, however, she found that there were variants which to her were strange. "Among the guests at 'The Bolton Arms' was a man named Emmett, of whom I know a thing or two. Last evening, after dinner, he was found in his chair, seated at the table, dead. Someone had killed him. It seems that his head had been smashed in with a champagne bottle, the broken fragments of which were found upon the floor. The irony of it! – because, of all the things in this world there were few which George Emmett loved better than champagne. They laid him on the table, at which he had just done himself so well; and, a doctor having certified that he was dead, they left him there, alone, in the room in which he had dined and died." She knew, although she did not look at him, that he had taken the pipe out of his mouth, to press the tobacco closer; and she felt his eyes upon her face. She wondered what was coming next. It proved to be hardly what she had expected. Nothing could have been more casual than his tone and manner. To her, the very indifference with which he spoke seemed to heighten the effect of what he said. "There was the dead man on the table in the room. Some time after they had left him there there came a crash from within the room which, according to my informant, shook the house. That might have been an exaggeration, about shaking the house; because 'The Bolton Arms' is a substantial, solidly built, old-time structure, which, I should say, is not easily shaken. At anyrate there came a noise from within that room which was so loud, and so curious, that all the people in the hotel seem to have heard it, and most of them went rushing off to learn what it was. Elsey was among the first. When he got to the door he was confronted by an unexpected difficulty; he, the landlord, couldn't get into the room. The inspector of police had taken away, not only the ordinary key, but the pass-key also; to make sure that, in his absence, no one should get in. So the only thing, if they wanted to get in, was to send for the inspector, and the key. They sent for him. While he was coming they hung about outside the room. They must have been an odd sight-Elsey, his wife, his guests, and his servants, as they stood there listening. It seems that, considering there was nothing in the room but a corpse, some amazing sounds issued from it. Elsey says he never heard anything like them; they were indescribable. He knocked, he even says he hammered, at the door again and again, demanding to be told who was inside; and what whoever it was was doing; and similar cognate questions; but both his hammerings and his questions went unanswered; and apparently unheeded. The noises had ceased before the inspector came; he pooh-poohed the notion that there ever had been any. But he stopped pooh-poohing when he entered the room. They had left the dead man stretched out on his back on the table; they found him on his face on the floor, with his knees drawn up beneath him. The natural presumption would have been, since he was dead, that somebody must have pushed him off the table on to the floor; but when the doctor came he knocked that theory on the head. He declared that, in the first place, he had not been really dead; that when they left him alone he had returned to some sort of consciousness; that, probably, in his struggles to attract attention he had tumbled from the table on to the floor; to a man in his condition a serious matter; and that fall had finished him; for this time he certainly was dead. Isn't that an odd story?" Although he paused, as if for her to answer, she said nothing; she was waiting for what was yet to come. And, presently, it came; as she knew it would do.
"The tale has a postscript; and, as they say is sometimes the case with a lady's, it seems to me to be the most pregnant part of it. When they got into the room, and found the dead man lying on his face upon the floor, they also found that the blind before the only window was drawn right up, and the window itself was open at its widest, which seems a trifle; but then trifles are often of such importance. The man who waited on George Emmett at dinner declared that the blind was down and the window shut before dinner began; and more, much more, Elsey, his wife, and the inspector, are all three convinced that the blind was down, and the window shut, when they left the dead man alone in the room. Had the window been open it would have attracted their attention; because the wind was on that side of the house, and, apart from the draught, they could not help noticing the curtains being blown about-as they were being blown about when they found it open then. But if the window had been closed then, it must have been opened since, in which case the question arises-by whom. And here comes what seems to me to be the queerest part of this really queer story. Doesn't it strike you as being a rather curious tale?" Again he paused, as if for her to answer, but still she held her peace-she still waited. It was like the game the cat plays with the mouse; he was coming nearer and nearer, presently he would pounce. The problem she had to consider-though it was still unshaped-was, could she elude him when he did? It seemed to her that his eyes observed her more and more keenly as he continued. "George Emmett had a lady with him when he arrived at 'The Bolton Arms Hotel'-an elderly lady; well advanced in years, stout and unwieldy; with grey hair and a false front; the sort of person one who knew the man would expect to find in his society." She winced at this description, she felt that he was speaking with malice prepense. "In spite of her grey hairs she seems to have been a mysterious sort of person. She dined with him; she was in the room with him when the waiter last saw him alive, but when, some little while after, he came in and found him dead, she had vanished: and she has remained vanished ever since. It hasn't been for want of looking for her. They looked for her, not only in her own bedroom, but in everybody else's bedroom also; it seems that they looked in every room in the house; in every nook and cranny of it to boot: nowhere was a trace or her to be seen. They were puzzled; but that open window with the blind drawn up set them thinking; when they found on a splinter of wood, at the top of the window, a small piece of material, which looked as if it had been torn out of a woman's dress, they thought still harder; and came to a conclusion which was hardly flattering to themselves. It had not occurred to them to look for her in the room itself; nor what an excellent hiding-place was a recess and a curtained window. While they hunted for her upstairs and down, high and low, all the time she was in the room itself-the room in which George Emmett was done to death; she had never left it. She was there when the waiter discovered him, as he supposed, dead on his seat, she was still there when they left him, as they thought, dead on the table. Whether she was there when he came back to life; and, if so, what took place between them, she only knows. She had gone when they returned and found the dead man on the floor; she had opened the window, and made her exit through it; and, in going, had, unknowingly, left behind that pattern of her frock which may prove to be a very awkward piece of evidence against her, when, one day, she's found. She possibly supposes that she's done rather a smart thing in getting away, as she thinks, scot-free. But has she? She's covered herself, in consequence, with more than a suspicion of murder. They're reasoning this way. They say that it was she who used that champagne bottle to so much purpose; and that was why she hid, like a coward, behind the curtains, when the waiter came into the room; and why she stayed hidden; and when the coast, as she thought, was clear, dropped, at the peril of her life, from the window. And because they're accounting, in that way, for her singular behaviour, all Newcaster is hot-foot after her; and, so I'm told, they're having placards printed, describing her, and offering a reward for her apprehension." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe with his boot; blew down the stem to make sure that it was clear; then went on. "There's one item I may add to make the tale complete. They've not only her description, they've her name. It appears that, for some reason, George Emmett did not enter her name in the register when he entered his own; but when it dawned on them that she was missing they opened the box in which her clothes were, and found that all, or nearly all of them, were marked-'D. Gilbert.' 'D' might stand for Dorothy, mightn't it? – which is by way of being a coincidence, but, of course, Gilbert has no affinity with Greenwood. Miss Gilbert seems to be rather a remarkable old lady; isn't that how she strikes you?"
