Kenneth and the Tundish
Ethel did not come down to dinner, and altogether it was an
unsatisfactory, unsatisfying meal! Jaded and worn out, we were really
in need of food. But the meat was neither hot nor cold—the potatoes
uncooked and uneatable—cook being evidently too overcome to attend to
such every-day affairs. Annie, poor girl, looked tired out and not a
little ashamed at having to set such dishes before us. Indeed she
nearly broke down altogether when she informed us that she was sorry
but cook had made no pudding.
“Why on earth not, Annie? Whatever is she thinking of?” The Tundish
exclaimed.
“She says she’s all of a flutter, sir. You know how she goes on. I’d
have made you something or other myself, only she told me nothing
about it until it was too late.”
“You’re a good girl, Annie, and it’s no fault of yours. I’ll see cook
afterward.”
Margaret looked her amusement, and as usual managed to bring in one of
her proverbial sayings. This time it was passably apt, however. “Fools
rush in where angels fear to tread,” she said, glancing round the
table brightly.
Kenneth’s lips curled. The doctor was interfering again.
The telephone bell rang a good half-dozen times before we had
finished, and each time The Tundish got up to answer it without murmur
or protest. I could hear his end of the conversation, which ran almost
word for word alike on each occasion.
“I’m sorry, but she’s gone to lie down and I don’t want to disturb
her.”
“Yes, very sad indeed.”
“Sorry, but I can’t hear what you are saying. This line is very
indistinct. Hello! I’ll let her know that you rang her up.”
Then the receiver was put up and he would return looking amused. “It’s
easy work on the telephone,” he laughed.
“It’s all far too easy,” was Kenneth’s comment.
After dinner we sat about uncomfortably, Margaret curling herself up
like some large cat in one of the big armchairs and busying herself
with her interminable knitting. I felt that, somehow, it would have
been in keeping with her had she produced black wool, but it was still
a pink jumper which had appeared at many odd moments before that
engaged her attention. The two boys strolled up and down the garden
for a time, and then they tried a game of chess.
I went out into the garden with a book and sat under the cedar with
The Tundish. We hardly spoke. He was really reading, I think, from the
regular way he turned the pages of his book, but try as I might, my
own thoughts would wander from the printed page and revert to the
day’s events. But I could not think consecutively. Ethel had set the
seal of terror on us all when she had burst in on us at breakfast time
with her “Do come. I’m afraid,” and from that moment, while the sun
had blazed and scorched, we had passed from distress to distress. Now
the shadow under the garden wall was broadening out across the lawn
toward us. Would that darker shadow, that seemed to threaten this
unruffled man reading so calmly and so peacefully at my side, with its
steady inexorable encroachment, darken his life and then blot him out
forever? Or would a door in the high wall open, slashing the shadow
with a path of light down which he would pass?
Perched high on the center post of the arch that spans the garden walk
where it pierces the hedge of yew, a thrush was filling the air with
its limpid song, and when the deeper notes of the chimes came booming
down from the cathedral tower, he would stop a while, bright head
cocked, alert and listening. Then as they died away he would throw
himself back, and with throbbing throat, fill the air again with pure
ecstasy. The long hot day of death and horror was closing on a note of
peace.
That was my hope, as I sat in the mellowing evening light, but the sun
was not to set before I witnessed yet another angry scene between
Kenneth and the doctor.
He and Ralph came round the end of the house as the thought crossed my
mind. Catching sight of us, they halted, talking urgently together.
Even from where I sat, I could see that Kenneth was obstinately
overriding advice that Ralph was giving. He stood with his legs wide
apart, his hands thrust deep into his trousers pockets, his chin stuck
out, stolid and determined to have his own way! Then they hurried
toward us, Ralph lagging behind a little, half reluctant. I wondered
what new trouble had arisen.
It was the medicine The Tundish had given to Ethel. Margaret had told
them about it.
Kenneth was furious. “I say, is it true about your giving some
medicine to Ethel?” he asked, planting himself straight in front of
the doctor’s chair.
“Yes, quite true. Have you any objection?” The Tundish replied, gently
closing his book, keeping his place with inserted finger, and looking
up with a slow smile and a twinkling eye.
“Objection! I should think I damned well have! I, for one, don’t care
for your way of making up prescriptions.”
“No? Well, if you should be taken ill, Kenneth, and I have to
prescribe, the medicine shall be made up at a chemist’s and delivered
in a sealed bottle. Now, if you will excuse me, I should like to get
on with my book.”
“But Margaret says she has just been up-stairs to find out if Ethel
wanted anything, and her bedroom door is locked and there was no reply
when she knocked,” Ralph urged, looking anxiously up at Ethel’s
bedroom window, in which the blinds were drawn.
“My dear young friend, I told her to lock it myself. I do hope that
Margaret hasn’t waked her up. Now please be sensible and let the poor
girl have what rest she can get. You can do no earthly good by making
any bother. If I have poisoned Ethel’s medicine—which I take it is the
friendly suggestion you are both of you making—she is dead by now, and
nothing that you or any one else could do would save her. If I
haven’t, then isn’t it rather a pity to wake her up merely to satisfy
your curiosity? That’s the logic of the position, but if you feel it
to be your duty, go and have a word with Inspector Brown about it. He
is just packing up his treasures prior to departure.”
This, I felt, was taking things a little too calmly, and I could
understand the frown that had gathered on Ralph’s dark face while the
doctor was speaking. Could not his behavior, which I had described to
myself as calm and unruffled, perhaps be more aptly labeled callous
and cold-blooded? And if so, what revision of ideas and estimates of
possibilities might not then be necessary? Kenneth had turned round
and called out to the inspector at once as he was on the point of
opening the door into Dalehouse Lane. Ralph was hesitant, but Kenneth
took him by the arm and dragged him across the lawn.
While I watched them talking to the inspector, wondering with interest
what that stolid individual would advise them to do, The Tundish had
returned to his book. He was absorbed immediately—lost to the world.
He had given them his advice and that apparently was the end of it as
far as he was concerned.
After a few minutes’ conversation Inspector Brown departed. A brief
consultation between the two boys followed, and then Kenneth came back
to us alone.
“We have decided to do as you asked us,” he said tersely.
“Thank you. I’m very glad to hear it.”
Kenneth came a step nearer. “But if anything happens to
Ethel—I’ll—I’ll kill you.” He spoke very slowly and leaned over toward
the doctor. His fists were clenched, and for a moment I thought that
he was going to strike. The Tundish never moved a muscle.
“Do the hangman out of one job, and give him another? That the idea?”
he laughed pleasantly, and returned once more to his interrupted
reading.
Kenneth controlled himself with difficulty and strode away. A boy went
whistling down the lane. The doctor continued his reading. I looked at
him slyly as he sat quietly engrossed by my side.
“I can’t help sympathizing with Kenneth and Ralph, you know,” I said.
“It isn’t that I suspect you of having had anything to do with
Stella’s death, but——”
“But——?” he interrupted quizzically.
I did not know how to finish my sentence; how to put into words that
would not offend, the feeling I had that there was something
foreboding, something suggestive, in his having made up medicine for
Stella one night, and then again after the terrible disaster for
Ethel. The circumstances were too much alike. Two taper glasses. Two——
“Come, Jeffcock,” he said kindly, when he saw my hesitation, “for
heaven’s sake don’t let the hot weather get on your nerves too.”
“That’s all very well,” I reminded him, “but you must have had some
very similar feelings yourself, or why did you want us to witness your
making up of Ethel’s prescription?”
He looked at me and laughed outright. “Wrong again, I never felt a
qualm. I wanted you and Margaret in the dispensary for a very
different reason.”
I am sure that my astonishment was obvious, but he ignored my surprise
and closed his book saying, “Now I’m going to bed. Thank God, this
awful day is over.”
It was evident that I should get no further information from him as to
his real reasons for our presence in the dispensary, even if I pressed
him. The subject was closed. We walked slowly across the brown
scorched lawn and back to the house.
In the hall we met cook, dirty: and unkempt, a wisp of greasy hair
straggling across her pasty, unhealthy-looking face. She was on her
way up-stairs to bed. The Tundish was as good as his word and asked
her rather sharply why the dinner had been so badly cooked.
She folded her arms across her floppy ample bosom and leered at him
offensively.
“Come, Grace, I want an answer to my question.”
She tilted back her ugly pasty face, half closed her beady eyes, and
nodded slowly backward and forward, the greasy wisp of hair waving
ludicrously with every movement that she made. The leer became an ugly
smile, and then she laughed aloud—a low disturbing laugh. Fat red arms
folded against her untidy dress, she looked revolting as she stood
there nodding at us, leering and laughing in turns.
The doctor gazed at her solemnly, unmoved, showing neither annoyance
nor the disgust that I felt myself. His steady eyes were
disconcerting. Her laughing ceased. Then she wiped the back of her
hand across her mouth, stuck her head forward at the doctor, and
whispered hoarsely, “I knows what I knows, Dr. Wallace.”
She waddled away unsteadily. I turned to The Tundish to see how he
would take it. He was standing immovable, unseeing. Only that same
morning had I seen him standing thus in the doorway as we were having
breakfast—his brain so deep in thought that his eyes, while open wide,
were blind, inanimate and uncontrolled. Then he had muttered, “I can’t
have made a mistake. I simply can’t have made a mistake,” but now he
whispered, nearly inaudibly, “I wonder what she knows, now I wonder
what she knows.”
He came back to life with a start and a smile of amusement at his own
abstraction, told me that he was going straight to bed as he half
expected that he might be called out in the early hours to a case of
indisputable first-aid, and then with one foot on the bottom stair, he
turned to me and said, “And by the way, Jeffcock, if you’ll take my
advice, you’ll lock your bedroom door to-night.”
Then he said, “Good night,” and was gone.