I
'What's that you're saying about murder?' asked Mrs Cheswardine as she
came into the large drawing-room, carrying the supper-tray.
'Put it down here,' said her husband, referring to the supper-tray, and
pointing to a little table which stood two legs off and two legs on the
hearth-rug.
'That apron suits you immensely,' murmured Woodruff, the friend of the
family, as he stretched his long limbs into the fender towards the
fire, farther even than the long limbs of Cheswardine. Each man
occupied an easy-chair on either side of the hearth; each was very
tall, and each was forty.
Mrs Cheswardine, with a whisk infinitely graceful, set the tray on the
table, took a seat behind it on a chair that looked like a toddling
grand-nephew of the arm-chairs, and nervously smoothed out the apron.
As a matter of fact, the apron did suit her immensely. It is
astounding, delicious, adorable, the effect of a natty little domestic
apron suddenly put on over an elaborate and costly frock, especially
when you can hear the rustle of a silk petticoat beneath, and more
especially when the apron is smoothed out by jewelled fingers. Every
man knows this. Every woman knows it. Mrs Cheswardine knew it. In such
matters Mrs Cheswardine knew exactly what she was about. She delighted,
when her husband brought Woodruff in late of a night, as he frequently
did after a turn at the club, to prepare with her own hands--the
servants being in bed--a little snack of supper for them. Tomato
sandwiches, for instance, miraculously thin, together with champagne or
Bass. The men preferred Bass, naturally, but if Mrs Cheswardine had a
fancy for a sip of champagne out of her husband's tumbler, Bass was not
forthcoming.
Tonight it was champagne.
Woodruff opened it, as he always did, and involuntarily poured out a
libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured,
ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art of opening
champagne.
Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.
'You're all nerves tonight,' Woodruff laughed, 'and you've made me
nervous,' And at length he got some of the champagne into a tumbler.
'No, I'm not,' Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.
'Yes, you are, Vera,' Woodruff insisted calmly.
She smiled. The use of that elegant Christian name, with its faint
suggestion of Russian archduchesses, had a strange effect on her,
particularly from the lips of Woodruff. She was proud of it, and of her
surname too--one of the oldest surnames in the Five Towns. The
syllables of 'Vera' invariably soothed her, like a charm. Woodruff, and
Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the whole of her life; and
she was thirty. They had all three lived in different houses at the top
end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley. Woodruff fell in love with her first,
when she was eighteen, but with no practical result. He was a
brown-haired man, personable despite his ungainliness, but he failed to
perceive that to worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a
young woman with large eyes and an emotional disposition. Cheswardine,
who had a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing.
She fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon. She adored him,
feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were depths
of his mind which she would never plumb. Woodruff, after being best
man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically, and found his
chief joy in just these suppers. The arrangement suited Vera; and as
for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they had always been fast
friends.
'I asked you what you were saying about murder,' said Vera sharply,
'but it seems--'
'Oh! did you?' Woodruff apologized. 'I was saying that murder isn't
such an impossible thing as it appears. Anyone might commit a murder.'
'Then you want to defend, Harrisford? Do you hear what he says,
Stephen?'
The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the Five
Towns that November. People read, talked, and dreamt murder; for
several weeks they took murder to all their meals.
'He doesn't want to defend Harrisford at all,' said Cheswardine, with a
superior masculine air, 'and of course anyone might commit a murder. I
might.'
'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff, gazing
at Vera.
'Charlie! Why, the blood alone--'
'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.
'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed
philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought, by
just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China and make
himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything about it! How
many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in China at the end
of a week!'
'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine grimly.
'Not one,' said Woodruff.
'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men began
their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in disturbing
her. She hated to see life in a queer light. She hated to think.
'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what
prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the fear of
being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the corpse, and so
on.'
Vera shuddered.
'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very much
more wicked than lots of other things.'
'Usury, for instance,' Cheswardine put in.
'Or bigamy,' said Woodruff.
'But an Englishman COULDN'T kill a mandarin in China by just wishing
it,' said Vera, looking up.
'How do we know?' said Woodruff, in his patient voice. 'How do we know?
You remember what I was telling you about thought-transference last
week. It was in Borderland.'
Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it
angered her to be plunging about in a bog.
'I think it's simply silly,' she remarked. 'No, thanks.'
She said 'No, thanks' to her husband, when he tendered his glass.
He moved the glass still closer to her lips.
'I said "No, thanks,"' she repeated dryly.
'Just a mouthful,' he urged.
'I'm not thirsty.'
'Then you'd better go to bed,' said he.
He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly. She did not dislike it.
But she had various ways of going. Tonight it was the way of an
archduchess.