'No,' I said, feeling in my pockets; 'I must have left it at your
house.'
'Well,' she said, 'that's strange. I looked for it to show it to Mrs
Colclough, but I couldn't see it.'
This was not surprising. I did not want Mrs Colclough to read the
journalistic obituary until she had given me her own obituary of Fuge.
'It must be somewhere about,' I said; and to Mrs Colclough: 'I suppose
you knew him pretty well?'
'Oh, bless you, no! I only met him once.'
'At Ilam?'
'Yes. What are you going to do, Oliver?'
Her husband was opening the piano.
'Bob and I are just going to have another smack at that Brahms.'
'You don't expect us to listen, do you?'
'I expect you to do what pleases you, missis,' said he. 'I should be a
bigger fool than I am if I expected anything else.' Then he smiled at
me. 'No! Just go on talking. Ol and I'll drown you easy enough. Quite
short! Back in five minutes.'
The two men placed each his wine-glass on the space on the piano
designed for a candlestick, lighted cigars, and sat down to play.
'Yes,' Mrs Colclough resumed, in a lower, more confidential tone, to
the accompaniment of the music. 'You see, there was a whole party of us
there, and Mr Fuge was staying at the hotel, and of course he knew
several of us.'
'And he took you out in a boat?'
'Me and Annie? Yes. Just as it was getting dusk he came up to us and
asked us if we'd go for a row. Eh, I can hear him asking us now! I
asked him if he could row, and he was quite angry. So we went, to
quieten him.' She paused, and then laughed.
'Sally!' Mrs Brindley protested. 'You know he's dead!'
'Yes.' She admitted the rightness of the protest. 'But I can't help it.
I was just thinking how he got his feet wet in pushing the boat off.'
She laughed again. 'When we were safely off, someone came down to the
shore and shouted to Mr Fuge to bring the boat back. You know his quick
way of talking.' (Here she began to imitate Fuge.) '"I've quarrelled
with the man this boat belongs to. Awful feud! Fact is, I'm in a
hostile country here!" And a lot more like that. It seemed he had
quarrelled with everybody in Ilam. He wasn't sure if the landlord of
the hotel would let him sleep there again. He told us all about all his
quarrels, until he dropped one of the oars. I shall never forget how
funny he looked in the moonlight when he dropped the oar. "There,
that's your fault!" he said. "You make me talk too much about myself,
and I get excited." He kept striking matches to look for the oar, and
turning the boat round and round with the other oar. "Last match!" he
said. "We shall never see land tonight." Then he found the oar again.
He considered we were saved. Then he began to tell us about his aunt.
"You know I'd no business to be here. I came down from London for my
aunt's funeral, and here I am in a boat at night with two pretty
girls!" He said the funeral had taught him one thing, and that was that
black neckties were the only possible sort of necktie. He said the
greatest worry of his life had always been neckties; but he wouldn't
have to worry any more, and so his aunt hadn't died for nothing. I
assure you he kept on talking about neckties. I assure you, Mr Loring,
I went to sleep--at least I dozed--and when I woke up he was still
talking about neckties. But then his feet began to get cold. I suppose
it was because they were wet. The way he grumbled about his feet being
cold! I remember he turned his coat collar up. He wanted to get on
shore and walk, but he'd taken us a long way up the lake by that time,
and he saw we were absolutely lost. So he put the oars in the boat and
stood up and stamped his feet. It might have upset the boat.'
'How did it end?' I inquired.
'Well, Annie and I caught the train, but only just. You see it was a
special train, so they kept it for us, otherwise we should have been in
a nice fix.'
'So you have special trains in these parts?'
'Why, of course! It was the annual outing of the teachers of St Luke's
Sunday School and their friends, you see. So we had a special train.'
At this point the duettists came to the end of a movement, and Mr
Brindley leaned over to us from his stool, glass in hand.
'The railway company practically owns Ilam,' he explained, 'and so they
run it for all they're worth. They made the lake, to feed the canals,
when they bought the canals from the canal company. It's an artificial
lake, and the railway runs alongside it. A very good scheme of the
company's. They started out to make Ilam a popular resort, and they've
made it a popular resort, what with special trains and things. But try
to get a special train to any other place on their rotten system, and
you'll soon see!'
'How big is the lake?' I asked.
'How long is it, Ol?' he demanded of Colclough. 'A couple of miles?'
'Not it! About a mile. Adagio!'
They proceeded with Brahms.
'He ran with you all the way to the station, didn't he?' Mrs Brindley
suggested to Mrs Colclough.
'I should just say he did!' Mrs Colclough concurred. 'He wanted to get
warm, and then he was awfully afraid lest we should miss it.'
'I thought you were on the lake practically all night!' I exclaimed.
'All night! Well, I don't know what you call all night. But I was back
in Bursley before eleven o'clock, I'm sure.'
I then contrived to discover the Gazette in an unsearched pocket, and I
gave it to Mrs Colclough to read. Mrs Brindley looked over her shoulder.
There was no slightest movement of depreciation on Mrs Colclough's
part. She amiably smiled as she perused the GAZETTE'S version of Fuge's
version of the lake episode. Here was the attitude of the woman whose
soul is like crystal. It seems to me that most women would have
blushed, or dissented, or simulated anger, or failed to conceal vanity.
But Mrs Coclough might have been reading a fairy tale, for any emotion
she displayed.
'Yes,' she said blandly; 'from the things Annie used to tell me about
him sometimes, I should say that was just how he WOULD talk. They seem
to have thought quite a lot of him in London, then?'
'Oh, rather!' I said. 'I suppose your sister knew him pretty well?'
'Annie? I don't know. She knew him.'
I distinctly observed a certain self-consciousness in Mrs Colclough as
she made this reply. Mrs Brindley had risen and with wifely
attentiveness was turning over the music page for her husband.