John Antony Grunch was one of the mildest, most innocent men I ever
knew. He had a wife to whom he was devoted with a dog-like devotion;
he went to church; he was shy and reserved, and he held a mediocre
position in a firm of envelope-makers in the City. But he had a
romantic soul, and whenever the public craving for envelopes fell
off--and that is seldom--he used to allay his secret passion for
danger, devilry and excitement by writing sensational novels. One of
these was recently published, and John Antony is now dead. The novel
did it.
Yet it was a very mild sort of “shocker,” about a very ordinary murder.
The villian simply slew one of his typists in the counting-house with a
sword-umbrella and concealed his guilt by putting her in a pillar-box.
But it had “power,” and it was very favourably reviewed. One critic
said that “the author, who was obviously a woman, had treated with
singular delicacy and feeling the ever-urgent problem of female
employment in our great industrial centres.” Another said that the
book was “a brilliant burlesque of the fashionable type of detective
fiction.” Another wrote that “it was a conscientious analysis of a
perplexing phase of agricultural life.” John thought that must refer to
the page where he had described the allotments at Shepherd’s Bush. But
he was pleased and surprised by what they said.
What he did _not_ like was the interpretation offered by his family and
his friends, who at once decided that the work was the autobiography
of John Antony. You see, the scene was laid in London, and John lived
in London; the murdered girl was a typist, and there were two typists
in John’s office; and, to crown all, the villian in the book had a
boar-hound, and John himself had a Skye terrier. The thing was as plain
as could be. Men he met in the City said, “How’s that boar-hound of
yours?” or “I like that bit where you hit the policeman. When did you
do that?” “_You_,” mark you. Old friends took him aside and whispered,
“Very sorry to hear you don’t hit it off with Mrs. Grunch; I always
thought you were such a happy couple.” His wife’s family said, “Poor
Gladys! what a life she must have had!” His own family said, “Poor
John! what a life she must have led him to make him go off with that
adventuress!” Several people identified the adventuress as Miss Crook,
the Secretary of the local Mother’s Welfare League, of which John was a
vice-president.
The fog of suspicion swelled and spread and penetrated into every
cranny and level of society. No servants would come near the house, of
if they did they soon stumbled on a copy of the shocker while doing the
drawing-room, read it voraciously and rushed screaming out of the front
door. When he took a parcel of washing to the post-office the officials
refused to accept it until he had opened it and shown that there were
no bodies in it.
The animal kingdom is very sensitive to the suspicion of guilt. John
noticed that dogs avoided him, horses neighed at him, earwigs fled
from him in horror, caterpillars madly spun themselves into cocoons as
he approached, owls hooted, snakes hissed. Only Mrs. Grunch remained
faithful.
But one morning at breakfast Mrs. Grunch said, “Pass the salt, please,
John.” John didn’t hear. He was reading a letter. Mrs. Grunch said
again, “Pass the salt, please, John.” John was still engrossed. Mrs.
Grunch wanted the salt pretty badly, so she got up and fetched it.
As she did so she noticed that the handwriting of the letter was the
handwriting of A Woman. Worse, it was written on the embossed paper
of the Mother’s Welfare League. It must be from Miss Crook. _And it
was._ It was about the annual outing. “Ah, ha!” said Mrs. Grunch. (I am
afraid that “Ah, ha!” doesn’t really convey to you the sort of sound
she made, but you must just imagine.) “Ah, ha! So _that_’s why you
couldn’t pass the salt!”
Mad with rage, hatred, fear, chagrin, pique, jealousy and indigestion,
John rushed out of the house and went to the office. At the door of the
office he met one of the typists. He held the door open for her. She
simpered and refused to go in front of him. Being still mad with rage,
hatred, chagrin and all those other things, John made a cross gesture
with his umbrella. With a shrill, shuddering shriek of “Murder!” the
girl cantered violently down Ludgate Hill and was never seen again.
Entering the office, John found two detectives waiting to ask him a few
questions in connection with the Newcastle Pig-sty Murder, which had
been done with some pointed instrument, probably an umbrella.
After that _The Daily Horror_ rang up and asked if he would contribute
an article to their series on “Is Bigamy Worth While?”
Having had enough rushing for one day John walked slowly out into the
street, trying to remember the various ways in which his characters
had committed suicide. He threw himself over the Embankment wall into
the river, but fell in a dinghy which he had not noticed; he bought
some poison, but the chemist recognised his face from a photograph in
the Literary Column of _The Druggist_ and gave him ipecacuanha (none of
you can spell that); he thought of cutting his throat, but broke his
thumb-nail trying to open the big blade, and gave it up. Desperate, he
decided to go home. At Victoria he was hustled along the platform on
the pretence that there is more room in the rear of trains. Finally he
was hustled on to the line and electrocuted.
And everybody said, “So it _was_ true.”