They return at evening A book of ghost stories
falling in love with Miss Pascal, and that it would make me exquisitely
happy so to do. I could hardly realise Ethel existed, and felt quite
care-free whether she did or not. I knew the reaction must come, but
for the moment I was anæsthetised and thinking only of the morrow.
I called for Margaret early. The Franks are pleasant hunting, shooting
and horticultural nonentities, and I think they were a little
astonished at my precipitance; for my reputation is not exactly that
of one who chooses to spend a whole day alone with a strange female.
But it was the happiest day I had ever spent. I found in Margaret just
that congruent complement of myself--association with which makes life
worth living--and nothing else does. She was twenty-nine, very straight
and strong. Her features I never have bothered about, though I gathered
that a good many other men had. She has an admirable instinct for
pictures, music and the written word, and her critical sense is quick
and certain. I gathered she had practised at all three for a time,
but had gallantly renounced each in turn, realising she could never
transcend mediocrity. “I prefer,” she said, “to criticise the successes
of others happily, than to face my own failures with angry tears in my
eyes. In many a second-rate painter and writer is buried a first-rate
critic. A little talent is a cruel thing.”
In the afternoon I took her for a fifty-mile run. Driving a car is one
of my few accomplishments, and a lust for speed one of the very few
unexpected traits in my character (a capacity for flinging my wife down
a row of steps is the only other one I can recall).
My Ponitz has done 110 miles an hour at Brooklands and is the fastest
car on the road I have ever known. Motor shop is the most boring
of all, for fooling about with a car is for most people merely a
substitute for thought. It is not so with me. Timid by nature, I
resolved to conquer this timidity. Driving was an agony to me at first;
I imagined a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent
pedestrian, but slowly I gained confidence, and then my curious,
restless mania for speed asserted itself.
I asked Margaret if she minded fast driving. “Go ahead,” she replied,
“and I’ll tell you afterwards.” There was a perfect three-mile straight
on the way home, and we touched eighty. She was in her element. “Take
me again,” she cried. “It was simply glorious, and I’ve never seen such
perfect control. I don’t mean to be personal, but it seemed to me you
became a different person as soon as we reached sixty, somehow defiant
and austere.”
“How far would you like to go next time?” I asked. “Past the Plunge
of Plummet?” and felt a fool for asking. She looked at me sharply and
flushed slightly.
“Your wife might have something to say to that. By the way, when is she
coming back?”
“Not yet awhile,” I answered irritably. “Would you like to come
to-morrow?”
“I’d love it,” said Margaret, “but till I know you better you mustn’t
take me too far.” She said that lightly, but with a certain emphasis.
My recent social experiences had taught me that the average young woman
of her class was at best a _demi-vierge_, and such a remark from such
an one would merely have implied encouragement for a casual intrigue,
but I knew Margaret hadn’t a trace of the promiscuous rip in her
make-up, and I knew she knew I loved her, and that she mistrusted her
powers of resistance. This went to my heart.
So it began, and it moved swiftly. A few days later we decided that it
was impossible for her to stay on with the Franks and continue to see
me each day. So I took a flat in Paris, and there we lived together.
“In sin,” you suggest, number two. If you like to, call it so. When one
has lost and found oneself in a woman, what the respectable sensualist
focuses his smutty spectacles upon and the Law deliciously terms
“misconduct” becomes of the most petty importance. It is not quite
negligible, for in that hopeless, tantalising longing for complete
fusion, when four eyes almost become two, and two minds just not one,
when in fleeting seconds of ecstasy the illusion of this complete
unison is attained, that mechanical conjunction is inevitable. But
to those who love imaginatively and therefore hunger and thirst and
lust and strive to isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, this
physically compelled commonplace loses its significance. It was only
Margaret who could make me dread to die.
I told Ethel I should be abroad for a while, but she showed no
interest in the information. By the time a month was up Margaret and I
were just not one person, and I the unhappiest man in the world, for
even if the view Prometheus enjoyed from his eyrie was the loveliest in
the world, he must for ever have turned his eyes away from it to search
for that speck in the sky. And often when I was alone with Margaret and
for the moment utterly happy and at peace, it seemed that Ethel’s face
crept in between us, and once again I felt that foul longing to get my
hands to her throat. She would never divorce me. I knew it, and I could
not force permanently on Margaret the uneasy, furtive alternative. She
would have accepted it gladly and made the best of it, but I could not
do it. “You preferred to murder your wife,” I hear you murmur with some
irony, number two. Yes, number two, I preferred to murder my wife.
We travelled back together, and I drove Margaret back to her flat in
Gloucester Place. On the way we were held up by a traffic block at the
Marble Arch. A car halted beside us, and as I glanced casually at it it
seemed familiar. And then I saw Ethel, smoking a cigarette and talking
to an elderly man with jackal’s eyes. She saw me a second later. The
cigarette dropped from her hand, and she craned forward to see who was
with me, and then the dam broke and we went on down Great Cumberland
Place.
“That was my wife in that car,” I said to Margaret.
I saw her hand tremble. “Did she see us? Does it matter?”
“She certainly saw me,” I replied, “and it matters not at all. But if I
know her, she’s the most frightened woman in London.”
We parted miserably and uncertainly, comforting each other with vague
hopes of some solution.
When I got back to Paradown, Ethel was waiting for me. She was shaking
with the rage of terror as she rushed at me.
“Who was that woman you were with? Someone you picked up in Paris, I
suppose. That’s what you call working at your rotten book! Who is she?”
“A Miss Pascal,” I said.
“Have you been living in Paris together?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yes,” I said wearily.
“Oh, you are, are you? and planning to get rid of me. Well, I’m afraid
you won’t find it so easy. Remember this; I’ll never divorce you or
give you a chance to divorce me. You beast and hypocrite! Pretending
to be so cold and pious, and then sneaking off to Paris with the first
low woman you can find!”
I said nothing. The only chance to bring her scenes to a close was to
keep silence. Replying merely fed them.
“Can’t you speak, you beastly fool? Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No,” I replied, “but I think we’d do better to separate.”
“Oh, you do! Well, you’ve had my answer. I’ll never leave you. I’ve
seen you look like a fiend at me, as if you wished I were dead, but if
I were, I’d still come between you and that strumpet.”
The application of that disgusting epithet to Margaret began to rouse
the killer in me, but I rallied all my self-control to subdue it.
“Well, then,” I said, “there’s no need for such a scene as this. If you
insist, you shall remain my wife in name, but in nothing more. I cannot
inhabit the same house with you, but I will make you as generous an
allowance as I can afford.”
“I imagine,” sneered Ethel, “that when that little drab has been
through your pockets it won’t be so generous!”
I got up to leave the room, and this completely destroyed the remnant
of her self-control. Her lips pouring out a stream of foul abuse,
she came for me, struck me with all her force in the mouth, spat in
my face, and then rushed over to my writing table, opened the drawer
which contained all the notes I had been working on for the last six
months, and flung them by handfuls in the fire. Something snapped in
my brain. When she had finished she ran from the room, and I followed
her stealthily. She went through the door into the garden to get
air, I suppose. Just as she reached the top step I seized her by the
shoulders and hurled her down. Her head struck the bottom step, and she
writhed over on to her back and lay still. Trembling with horror and
yet elation, I crept back to my study, and the butler found her an hour
later.
Well, number two, there is my story. I suppose rather a commonplace
sex-crime narrative. I’ll read it again in ten years’ time. I wonder if
I shall believe it ever happened!
PART TWO
_Which consists of a letter written by Sir Arthur Paradown to his
friend, Mr. Weldon, the Coroner._
My dear Weldon,
Seven months ago you held an inquest on my first wife. It will now
be your dubious pleasure to perform that office on me, and I am
sending you with this letter an account of the events leading up to
that first inquest; this will reveal the incidents leading up to the
second. And I am doing so because I have a favour to ask of you.
Can you forget for a few hours the fact that I was a murderer, and
remember that I was a fairly conscientious landowner and did my best
for the County and helped a few people to be a little happier? If
you can, do you think you can be a little unprofessional and tell
the Jury that I have written you a private letter which explains my
suicide, and that it has persuaded you that I was not insane, and
then treat these documents as secret? What harm can it do! And it
can do good, for my present wife is expecting to have a child in six
months’ time, and I do not want the stigma of my insanity to rest on
Margaret’s baby. Will you do this for me? Read what follows, and then
decide----
Murderer’s sob-stuff is a peculiarly repellent brand, so I will merely
state that when, six months later, I married Margaret, I knew for the
first time utter cloudless happiness--for just six weeks, and then one
evening after dinner, when we were sitting in my study, the telephone
bell rang. Margaret took off the receiver and listened for a moment.
“It’s making such a weird noise,” she said.
“Give it to me,” I replied, and put it to my ear.
“You thought you were rid of me, didn’t you, you murderer! But as you
killed me, I shall kill you!”
I knew the voice.
I made a casual remark, lest Margaret should suspect something was
wrong, and went out into the garden to recover from what had been a
terrific shock, and to regain my balance.
“Subjective or objective?” That is the old, old question on these
occasions. In the first case I was mad, subject to hallucinations, in
the second--well, then, a mystery of a different sort. There was little
to choose between the alternatives. I certainly felt as sane as ever,
but perhaps murder itself is a symptom of deep-rooted mental disease
which could break out in other ways. My whole being rejected this
hypothesis. But I had a dreadful certainty that in either case my doom
had been spoken. This certainly must have branded itself upon my face,
for Margaret was only half persuaded there was nothing wrong when I
went in again.
I had three days’ respite.
Margaret tolerated broadcasting, and our set was in use on most
evenings. I used to stop work and come in to hear the news. On this
occasion, after the usual ponderous catalogue of minutiæ, listeners,
as usual, were promised a “Little Piano Music” as a reward for their
patience. Instead--as far as I was concerned, a voice suddenly cried