There are some natures so constituted that, due to be hung at ten
o'clock, they will play chess at eight. Such men invariably rise.
They make especially good bishops, editors, judges, impresarios, Prime
ministers, money-lenders, and generals; in fact, fill with exceptional
credit any position of power over their fellow-men. They have spiritual
cold storage, in which are preserved their nervous systems. In such men
there is little or none of that fluid sense and continuity of feeling
known under those vague terms, speculation, poetry, philosophy. Men
of facts and of decision switching imagination on and off at will,
subordinating sentiment to reason... one does not think of them when
watching wind ripple over cornfields, or swallows flying.
Keith Darrant had need for being of that breed during his dinner at
the Tellassons. It was just eleven when he issued from the big house in
Portland Place and refrained from taking a cab. He wanted to walk that
he might better think. What crude and wanton irony there was in his
situation! To have been made father-confessor to a murderer, he--well
on towards a judgeship! With his contempt for the kind of weakness which
landed men in such abysses, he felt it all so sordid, so “impossible,”
that he could hardly bring his mind to bear on it at all. And yet
he must, because of two powerful instincts--self-preservation and
blood-loyalty.
The wind had still the sapping softness of the afternoon, but rain had
held off so far. It was warm, and he unbuttoned his fur overcoat. The
nature of his thoughts deepened the dark austerity of his face, whose
thin, well-cut lips were always pressing together, as if, by meeting,
to dispose of each thought as it came up. He moved along the crowded
pavements glumly. That air of festive conspiracy which drops with the
darkness on to lighted streets, galled him. He turned off on a darker
route.
This ghastly business! Convinced of its reality, he yet could not see
it. The thing existed in his mind, not as a picture, but as a piece of
irrefutable evidence. Larry had not meant to do it, of course. But it
was murder, all the same. Men like Larry--weak, impulsive, sentimental,
introspective creatures--did they ever mean what they did? This man,
this Walenn, was, by all accounts, better dead than alive; no need to
waste a thought on him! But, crime--the ugliness--Justice unsatisfied!
Crime concealed--and his own share in the concealment! And yet--brother
to brother! Surely no one could demand action from him! It was only a
question of what he was going to advise Larry to do. To keep silent, and
disappear? Had that a chance of success? Perhaps if the answers to
his questions had been correct. But this girl! Suppose the dead man's
relationship to her were ferreted out, could she be relied on not
to endanger Larry? These women were all the same, unstable as water,
emotional, shiftless pests of society. Then, too, a crime untracked,
dogging all his brother's after life; a secret following him wherever he
might vanish to; hanging over him, watching for some drunken moment, to
slip out of his lips. It was bad to think of. A clean breast of it?
But his heart twitched within him. “Brother of Mr. Keith Darrant, the
well-known King's Counsel”--visiting a woman of the town, strangling
with his bare hands the woman's husband! No intention to murder,
but--a dead man! A dead man carried out of the house, laid under a dark
archway! Provocation! Recommended to mercy--penal servitude for life!
Was that the advice he was going to give Larry to-morrow morning?
And he had a sudden vision of shaven men with clay-coloured features,
run, as it were, to seed, as he had seen them once in Pentonville, when
he had gone there to visit a prisoner. Larry! Whom, as a baby creature,
he had watched straddling; whom, as a little fellow, he had fagged; whom
he had seen through scrapes at college; to whom he had lent money time
and again, and time and again admonished in his courses. Larry! Five
years younger than himself; and committed to his charge by their mother
when she died. To become for life one of those men with faces like
diseased plants; with no hair but a bushy stubble; with arrows marked on
their yellow clothes! Larry! One of those men herded like sheep; at the
beck and call of common men! A gentleman, his own brother, to live that
slave's life, to be ordered here and there, year after year, day in,
day out. Something snapped within him. He could not give that advice.
Impossible! But if not, he must make sure of his ground, must verify,
must know. This Glove Lane--this arch way? It would not be far from
where he was that very moment. He looked for someone of whom to make
enquiry. A policeman was standing at the corner, his stolid face
illumined by a lamp; capable and watchful--an excellent officer, no
doubt; but, turning his head away, Keith passed him without a word.
Strange to feel that cold, uneasy feeling in presence of the law! A grim
little driving home of what it all meant! Then, suddenly, he saw that
the turning to his left was Borrow Street itself. He walked up one side,
crossed over, and returned. He passed Number Forty-two, a small house
with business names printed on the lifeless windows of the first and
second floors; with dark curtained windows on the ground floor, or was
there just a slink of light in one corner? Which way had Larry turned?
Which way under that grisly burden? Fifty paces of this squalid
street-narrow, and dark, and empty, thank heaven! Glove Lane! Here it
was! A tiny runlet of a street. And here--! He had run right on to the
arch, a brick bridge connecting two portions of a warehouse, and dark
indeed.
“That's right, gov'nor! That's the place!” He needed all his
self-control to turn leisurely to the speaker. “'Ere's where they found
the body--very spot leanin' up 'ere. They ain't got 'im yet. Lytest--me
lord!”
It was a ragged boy holding out a tattered yellowish journal. His lynx
eyes peered up from under lanky wisps of hair, and his voice had the
proprietary note of one making “a corner” in his news. Keith took the
paper and gave him twopence. He even found a sort of comfort in the
young ghoul's hanging about there; it meant that others besides himself
had come morbidly to look. By the dim lamplight he read: “Glove Lane
garrotting mystery. Nothing has yet been discovered of the murdered
man's identity; from the cut of his clothes he is supposed to be
a foreigner.” The boy had vanished, and Keith saw the figure of a
policeman coming slowly down this gutter of a street. A second's
hesitation, and he stood firm. Nothing obviously could have brought him
here save this “mystery,” and he stayed quietly staring at the arch. The
policeman moved up abreast. Keith saw that he was the one whom he had
passed just now. He noted the cold offensive question die out of the
man's eyes when they caught the gleam of white shirt-front under the
opened fur collar. And holding up the paper, he said:
“Is this where the man was found?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still a mystery, I see?”
“Well, we can't always go by the papers. But I don't fancy they do know
much about it, yet.”
“Dark spot. Do fellows sleep under here?”
The policeman nodded. “There's not an arch in London where we don't get
'.m sometimes.”
“Nothing found on him--I think I read?”
“Not a copper. Pockets inside out. There's some funny characters about
this quarter. Greeks, Hitalians--all sorts.”
Queer sensation this, of being glad of a policeman's confidential tone!
“Well, good-night!”
“Good-night, sir. Good-night!”
He looked back from Borrow Street. The policeman was still standing
there holding up his lantern, so that its light fell into the archway,
as if trying to read its secret.
Now that he had seen this dark, deserted spot, the chances seemed to him
much better. “Pockets inside out!” Either Larry had had presence of mind
to do a very clever thing, or someone had been at the body before the
police found it. That was the more likely. A dead backwater of a place.
At three o'clock--loneliest of all hours--Larry's five minutes' grim
excursion to and fro might well have passed unseen! Now, it all depended
on the girl; on whether Laurence had been seen coming to her or going
away; on whether, if the man's relationship to her were discovered, she
could be relied on to say nothing. There was not a soul in Borrow Street
now; hardly even a lighted window; and he took one of those rather
desperate decisions only possible to men daily accustomed to the instant
taking of responsibility. He would go to her, and see for himself. He
came to the door of Forty-two, obviously one of those which are only
shut at night, and tried the larger key. It fitted, and he was in a
gas-lighted passage, with an oil-clothed floor, and a single door to his
left. He stood there undecided. She must be made to understand that he
knew everything. She must not be told more than that he was a friend of
Larry's. She must not be frightened, yet must be forced to give her very
soul away. A hostile witness--not to be treated as hostile--a matter for
delicate handling! But his knock was not answered.
Should he give up this nerve-racking, bizarre effort to come at a basis
of judgment; go away, and just tell Laurence that he could not advise
him? And then--what? Something must be done. He knocked again. Still no
answer. And with that impatience of being thwarted, natural to him, and
fostered to the full by the conditions of his life, he tried the other
key. It worked, and he opened the door. Inside all was dark, but a
voice from some way off, with a sort of breathless relief in its foreign
tones, said:
“Oh! then it's you, Larry! Why did you knock? I was so frightened. Turn
up the light, dear. Come in!”
Feeling by the door for a switch in the pitch blackness he was conscious
of arms round his neck, a warm thinly clad body pressed to his own; then
withdrawn as quickly, with a gasp, and the most awful terror-stricken
whisper:
“Oh! Who is it?”