"What are you thinking about, Teddy Bear?"
"Nothing."
There was a silence. Mr. Hutton remained motionless, his elbows on the
parapet of the terrace, his chin in his hands, looking down over
Florence. He had taken a villa on one of the hilltops to the south of
the city. From a little raised terrace at the end of the garden one
looked down a long fertile valley on to the town and beyond it to the
bleak mass of Monte Morello and, eastward of it, to the peopled hill of
Fiesole, dotted with white houses. Everything was clear and luminous in
the September sunshine.
"Are you worried about anything?"
"No, thank you."
"Tell me, Teddy Bear."
"But, my dear, there's nothing to tell." Mr. Hutton turned round,
smiled, and patted the girl's hand. "I think you'd better go in and have
your siesta. It's too hot for you here."
"Very well, Teddy Bear. Are you coming too?"
"When I've finished my cigar."
"All right. But do hurry up and finish it, Teddy Bear." Slowly,
reluctantly, she descended the steps of the terrace and walked towards
the house.
Mr. Hutton continued his contemplation of Florence. He had need to be
alone. It was good sometimes to escape from Doris and the restless
solicitude of her passion. He had never known the pains of loving
hopelessly, but he was experiencing now the pains of being loved. These
last weeks had been a period of growing discomfort. Doris was always
with him, like an obsession, like a guilty conscience. Yes, it was good
to be alone.
He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and opened it; not without
reluctance. He hated letters; they always contained something
unpleasant--nowadays, since his second marriage. This was from his
sister. He began skimming through the insulting home-truths of which it
was composed. The words "indecent haste," "social suicide," "scarcely
cold in her grave," "person of the lower classes," all occurred. They
were inevitable now in any communication from a well-meaning and
right-thinking relative. Impatient, he was about to tear the stupid
letter to pieces when his eye fell on a sentence at the bottom of the
third page. His heart beat with uncomfortable violence as he read it. It
was too monstrous! Janet Spence was going about telling everyone that he
had poisoned his wife in order to marry Doris. What damnable malice!
Ordinarily a man of the suavest temper, Mr. Hutton found himself
trembling with rage. He took the childish satisfaction of calling
names--he cursed the woman.
Then suddenly he saw the ridiculous side of the situation. The notion
that he should have murdered anyone in order to marry Doris! If they
only knew how miserably bored he was. Poor, dear Janet! She had tried to
be malicious; she had only succeeded in being stupid.
A sound of footsteps aroused him; he looked round. In the garden below
the little terrace the servant girl of the house was picking fruit. A
Neapolitan, strayed somehow as far north as Florence, she was a specimen
of the classical type--a little debased. Her profile might have been
taken from a Sicilian coin of a bad period. Her features, carved
floridly in the grand tradition, expressed an almost perfect stupidity.
Her mouth was the most beautiful thing about her; the calligraphic hand
of nature had richly curved it into an expression of mulish bad
temper.... Under her hideous black clothes, Mr. Hutton divined a
powerful body, firm and massive. He had looked at her before with a
vague interest and curiosity. To-day the curiosity defined and focused
itself into a desire. An idyll of Theocritus. Here was the woman; he,
alas, was not precisely like a goatherd on the volcanic hills. He called
to her.
"Armida!"
The smile with which she answered him was so provocative, attested so
easy a virtue, that Mr. Hutton took fright. He was on the brink once
more--on the brink. He must draw back, oh! quickly, quickly, before it
was too late. The girl continued to look up at him.
"_Ha chiamito_?" she asked at last.
Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility
every time.
"_Scendo_" he called back to her. Twelve steps led from the garden to
the terrace. Mr. Hutton counted them. Down, down, down, down.... He saw
a vision of himself descending from one circle of the inferno to the
next--from a darkness full of wind and hail to an abyss of stinking mud.
V
For a good many days the Hutton case had a place on the front page of
every newspaper. There had been no more popular murder trial since
George Smith had temporarily eclipsed the European War by drowning in a
warm bath his seventh bride. The public imagination was stirred by this
tale of a murder brought to light months after the date of the crime.
Here, it was felt, was one of those incidents in human life, so notable
because they are so rare, which do definitely justify the ways of God to
man. A wicked man had been moved by an illicit passion to kill his wife.
For months he had lived in sin and fancied security----only to be dashed
at last more horribly into the pit he had prepared for himself. Murder
will out, and here was a case of it. The readers of the newspapers were
in a position to follow every movement of the hand of God. There had
been vague, but persistent, rumours in the neighbourhood; the police had
taken action at last. Then came the exhumation order, the post-mortem
examination, the inquest, the evidence of the experts, the verdict of
the coroner's jury, the trial, the condemnation. For once Providence had
done its duty, obviously, grossly, didactically, as in a melodrama. The
newspapers were right in making of the case the staple intellectual food
of a whole season.
Mr. Hutton's first emotion when he was summoned from Italy to give
evidence at the inquest was one of indignation. It was a monstrous, a
scandalous thing that the police should take such idle, malicious gossip
seriously. When the inquest was over he would bring an action for
malicious prosecution against the Chief Constable; he would sue the
Spence woman for slander.
The inquest was opened; the astonishing evidence unrolled itself. The
experts had examined the body, and had found traces of arsenic; they
were of opinion that the late Mrs. Hutton had died of arsenic poisoning.
Arsenic poisoning.... Emily had died of arsenic poisoning? After that,
Mr. Hutton learned with surprise that there was enough arsenicated
insecticide in his green-houses to poison an army.
It was now, quite suddenly, that he saw it: there was a case against
him. Fascinated, he watched it growing, growing, like some monstrous
tropical plant. It was enveloping him, surrounding him; he was lost in a
tangled forest.
When was the poison administered? The experts agreed that it must have
been swallowed eight or nine hours before death. About lunch-time? Yes,
about lunch-time. Clara, the parlour-maid, was called. Mrs. Hutton, she
remembered, had asked her to go and fetch her medicine. Mr. Hutton had
volunteered to go instead; he had gone alone. Miss Spence--ah, the
memory of the storm, the white aimed face! the horror of it all!--Miss
Spence confirmed Clara's statement, and added that Mr. Hutton had come
back with the medicine already poured out in a wineglass, not in the
bottle.
Mr. Hutton's indignation evaporated. He was dismayed, frightened. It was
all too fantastic to be taken seriously, and yet this nightmare was a
fact it was actually happening.
M'Nab had seen them kissing, often. He had taken them for a drive on the
day of Mrs. Hutton's death. He could see them reflected in the
wind-screen, sometimes out of the tail of his eye.
The inquest was adjourned. That evening Doris went to bed with a
headache. When he went to her room after dinner, Mr. Hutton found her
crying.
"What's the matter?" He sat down on the edge of her bed and began to
stroke her hair. For a long time she did not answer, and he went on
stroking her hair mechanically, almost unconsciously; sometimes, even he
bent down and kissed her bare shoulder. He had his own affairs, however,
to think about. What had happened? How was it that the stupid gossip had
actually come true? Emily had died of arsenic poisoning. It was absurd,
impossible. The order of things had been broken, and he was at the mercy
of an irresponsibility. What had happened, what was going to happen? He
was interrupted in the midst of his thoughts.
"It's my fault--it's my fault!" Doris suddenly sobbed out. "I shouldn't
have loved you; I oughtn't to have let you love me. Why was I ever
born?"
Mr. Hutton didn't say anything but looked down in silence at the abject
figure of misery lying on the bed.
"If they do anything to you I shall kill myself."
She sat up, held him for a moment at arm's length, and looked at him
with a kind of violence, as though she were never to see him again.
"I love you, I love you, I love you." She drew him, inert and passive,
towards her, clasped him, pressed herself against him. "I didn't know
you loved me as much as that, Teddy Bear. But why did you do it--why did
you do it?"
Mr. Hutton undid her clasping arms and got up. His face became very red.
"You seem to take it for granted that I murdered my wife," he said.
"It's really too grotesque. What do you all take me for? A cinema hero?"
He had begun to lose his temper. All the exasperation, all the fear and
bewilderment of the day, was transformed into a violent anger against
her. "It's all such damned stupidity. Haven't you any conception of a
civilised man's mentality? Do I look the sort of man who'd go about
slaughtering people? I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love
with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand
that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which
you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me
to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go
about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it."
Mr. Hutton stamped towards the door. He had said horrible things, he
knew--odious things that he ought speedily to unsay. But he wouldn't.
He closed the door behind him.
"Teddy Bear!" He turned the handle; the latch clicked into place. Teddy
Bear! The voice that came to him through the closed door was agonised.
Should he go back? He ought to go back. He touched the handle, then
withdrew his fingers and quickly walked away. When he was half-way down
the stairs he halted. She might try to do something silly--throw herself
out of the window or God knows what! He listened attentively; there was
no sound. But he pictured her very clearly, tiptoeing across the room,
lifting the sash as high as it would go, leaning out into the cold night
air. It was raining a little. Under the window lay the paved terrace.
How far below? Twenty-five or thirty feet? Once, when he was walking
along Piccadilly, a dog had jumped out of a third-storey window of the
Ritz. He had seen it fall; he had heard it strike the pavement. Should
he go back? He was damned if he would; he hated her.
He sat for a long time in the library. What had happened? What was
happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could
find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its
horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with
tears; he wanted so passionately to live. "Just to be alive." Poor Emily
had wished it too, he remembered: "Just to be alive." There were still
so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer
delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as
seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the
Tuscan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to
the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet
southern wines--Tear of Christ and Blood of Judas--others would drink
them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes
between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty
perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering
unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He
would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt
that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he
had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as
wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God
existed after all.
He felt that he would like to pray. Forty years ago he used to kneel by
his bed every evening. The nightly formula of his childhood came to him
almost unsought from some long unopened chamber of the memory. "God
bless Father and Mother, Tom and Cissie and the Baby, Mademoiselle and
Nurse, and everyone that I love, and make me a good boy. Amen." They
were all dead now all except Cissie.
His mind seemed to soften and dissolve; a great calm descended upon his
spirit. He went upstairs to ask Doris's forgiveness. He found her lying
on the couch at the foot of the bed. On the floor beside her stood a
blue bottle of liniment, marked "Not to be taken"; she seemed to have
drunk about half of it.
"You didn't love me," was all she said when she opened her eyes to find
him bending over her.
Dr. Libbard arrived in time to prevent any very serious consequences.
"You mustn't do this again," he said while Mr. Hutton was out of the
room.
"What's to prevent me?" she asked defiantly.
Dr. Libbard looked at her with his large, sad eyes. "There's nothing to
prevent you," he said. "Only yourself and your baby. Isn't it rather bad
luck on your baby, not allowing it to come into the world because you
want to go out of it?"