At first he was merely bewildered. He had read his daily newspaper, of
course--though not with the stolid regularity with which the average
man does so. And besides, it was pre-eminently a journal of dignity and
good form, with an art column, and a curio column, and a literary page,
and a chess problem, and rather a delicately witty causerie by
"Rapier"; it is to be feared that Dickie absorbed himself in these
items first, and altogether left out most of the topical and
sensational news.
Now, however, he read it. And out of it, the horror of the underworld
swayed up at him. A twilit world, where cisterns dripped, and where
homely, familiar things like gas-brackets and braces and coal-shovels
were turned to dreadful weapons of death. The coroner and the broker's
man and the undertaker sidled in and out of this world, dispassionately
playing their frequent parts.... Stunted boys and girls died for love,
like Romeo and Juliet, leaving behind them badly-punctuated cries of
passion and despair that made Dickie wince as he read them....
Pale but fascinated, Dickie turned over a page, and came to the great
sensation of the moment. "Is Ruth Oliver Guilty?" "Dramatic
Developments." "I Wish You Were Dead, Lucas!"
The account of the first day of the trial filled the entire page, and
dribbled excitedly over on to the next. There was a photograph of Ruth
Oliver, accused of murdering her husband. You could see that she had
gay eyes in a small oval face, and a child's wistful mouth. This must
have been taken while she was very happy.
Dickie had never read through a murder trial before. But he did so now,
every line of it ... and the next day, and the next. Until the woman
who had pleaded "Not guilty" was acquitted. And then he wrote to her,
and asked her to marry him.
And who would dare say of him now that he had feared to meet life in
the raw?
He did not know, of course, that his offer was one among fifty; did not
know that the curious state of mind he was in, between trance and
hysteria, was a very common one to the public after a trial in which
the elements are dramatic or the central figure in any way picturesque.
He did not even know how Ruth Oliver was being noisily besieged by
Pressmen and Editors anxious for her biography; by music-hall and
theatrical managers willing to star her; by old friends curiously proud
of association with her notoriety; by religious fanatics with their
proofs of a strictly localized Deity--"whose Hand has clearly been
outstretched to save you!"; by unhealthy flappers who had Believed in
her all along--(autograph, please).
But not knowing, yet his letter, chivalrous, without ardour, promised
her a cool, quiet retreat from the plague of insects which was buzzing
and stinging in the hot air all about her.... "My house is in a little
square with trees all around it; it is shady and you cannot hear the
traffic. I wonder if you are interested in old china and Japanese
water-colours?..." Finally: "I shall be very proud and happy if you can
trust me to understand how deeply you must be longing for sanctuary
after the sorrowful time you have been through...."
"Sanctuary." She saw it open for her like a cloistered aisle between
cold pillars. He offered her, not the emotional variations, intolerable
to her weariness just then, of a new devotion; but green shaded rooms,
and the beauty of old things, and a little old-fashioned gentleman's
courtesy.... So, ignoring the fifty other offers of marriage which had
assailed her, she wrote to Dickie Maybury and asked him to come and see
her.
He went, still in a strangely exultant mood, in which his will acted as
easily and yet as fantastically as though it were on a slippery
surface. And if he had met Hal Burnham on his way back from his visit
to Ruth Oliver he would undoubtedly have swaggered a little.
Nevertheless, he was thinking of Ruth, too, as well as of his own
dare-devilry in thus seizing reality with both hands. Ruth's face, much
older and more tormented than it had been in the photograph, had still
that elusive quality which had from the beginning and through all the
period of her trial haunted him. It outraged his refinement that any
woman with the high looks and the breeding of his own class should have
been for any space of time the property of a coarse public. As _his_
wife, the insult should be tenderly rectified.... "The poor child! the
poor sweet child!" He felt almost godlike with this new power upon him
of acting, on impulse.
As for the peril of death which for a short while had threatened her,
that was a fact too stark and hideous for contemplation: even with
Dickie's altered appetite for primitive adventure....
They did not leave town after their quiet, matter-of-fact wedding at
the registrar's. A journey, in Dickie's eyes, would have seemed too
blatant an interruption to his everyday existence, as though he were
tactlessly emphasising to his wife the necessity of a break and a
complete change; she might even think--and again "poor child!" that
events should have rubbed into such super-sensitiveness--that he was
slightly ashamed of his act, and was therefore hustling her and himself
out of sight. So they went straight home. And Mrs. Derrick said:
"Indeed, sir," when informed that her new mistress was the Ruth Oliver
who had recently been acquitted of the charge of murdering her husband;
she neither proffered a motherly bosom to Ruth, nor did she tender a
haughty resignation from Mr. Maybury's service; but said she hoped it
wouldn't be expected of her, under the new circumstances, to arrive
earlier, nor to leave later, because she couldn't do it. As for
Dickie's friends, most of them were of the country-house variety whom
he visited once a year; next autumn would show whether Ruth would be
included in those week and week-end invitations. Meanwhile, those few
dwelling in London marvelled in a detached sort of way at Dickie's
feat, liked Ruth, and pronounced it a shame that she should have been
accused. Hal Burnham, the indirect promoter of the match, had returned
to China.
Nobody was unkind; no word jarred; life was padded in dim brocade--Ruth
drew a long breath, and was at peace. She was perfectly happy, watching
Dickie. And Dickie was at play again, enjoying his collection and his
_objets d'art_, and even his daily habits, with the added appreciation
of a gambler who had staked, but miraculously, not lost them. Because,
after all, anything might have resulted from his tempestuous decision
at all costs to get into contact with naked actuality; all that _had_
resulted was the presence in his house of a slim, grave woman who
dressed her hair like a very skilful and not at all unconscious
Madonna; whose taste was as fastidious as his own, and whose radiantly
human smile had survived in vivid contrast to something quenched from
her voice and shadowed in her eyes. A woman who, with a "May I?" of
half-laughing reverence, discovered that she could slip on to her
exquisite feet one pair after another from his collection of the shoes
of dead queens--"It sounds like a ballade--Austin Dobson, I
think--except that they're not all powder-and-patch queens."
For she had an excellent feel of period--the texture of it, the fine
shades of language, the outlook; Dickie hated people who had a blunt
sense of period and in a jumbled fashion referred to old Venetian lace,
and the Early Spanish School, and Louise de la Vallière, and a play by
Wycherley indiscriminately as "historical."
Yes, Dickie had certainly been lucky, and, like a wise man, he did not
strain his star to another effort. The big thing--well, he had squared
up to it--and, truth to say, he had been fearfully shaky and uncertain
about his capacity to do so when Hal had first roused his pride in the
matter. Now the little things again, the little beautiful things--he
had earned them.
Anyway, he could not have a newspaper in the house nowadays, for Ruth's
sake--he owed it to Ruth to shut out for ever those cries of horror and
fear and violence from the battering underworld.
"What I love about the way we live, Dickie, is that the just-rightness
of it all flows on evenly the whole time; one can be certain of it.
Most people get it set aside for them in stray lumps--picture galleries
and churches and a holiday on the Continent. And all the rest of their
time is just-wrongness."
Dickie wondered how much of her existence with Lucas Oliver had been
"just-wrongness"--or indeed "all-wrongness." But he never disturbed her
surface of creamy serenity by referring to the husband who had been
murdered by "some person or persons unknown."
He and Ruth were the most harmonious of comrades, but never, so far,
confidential. Perhaps Dickie overdid tact and non-intrusiveness; or
perhaps Ruth, in her very passion of gratitude to him, was yet checked
for ever from passionate expression by the memory that her innermost
love and her innermost hate, wrung into words, had once, and not so
long ago, been read aloud and commented upon in public court and in
half the homes of England.
One evening, sitting together in front of the fire, they drifted into
talk of their separate childhoods.
"There was a garden in mine," said Ruth.
"And in mine--a Casino garden!" His eyes twinkled. "Palm trees like
giant pineapples, and flower beds in a pattern, and a fountain--"
"Oh, you poor little Continental kiddie!"
He shrugged his shoulders. "The ways of the Lord are thoughtful and
orderly. Why should He have wasted a heavenly wilderness of gnarled old
apple-trees on a small boy who hated climbing?"
"You can't have hated climbing--if you hang that on your wall." She
nodded towards the quayside picture. "Surely you must have played
'pirates and South Seas' with your brothers."
"I had none. A sister, that's all--who carried a sunshade." "I had no
sisters; but there was a girl next door--and her brother."
"I note in jealous anguish of spirit," remarked Dickie. "that you do
not simply say 'a girl and boy next door.'"
Ruth's mischievous laugh affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not
very high--I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me a
pull from the top."
"Tommy was ungallant enough to leave the wall to you?"
"There were cherries in his garden--sweet black cherries. And only
crab-apples in ours."
"He might have filled his pockets with cherries, and then climbed.
No--I reject Tommy, he was unworthy of you. I may have been a horrid
little Casino brat, I may even have worn a white satin sailor-suit with
trousers down to my ankles--"
"Oh!" Ruth winced.
"I may have danced too well, and I understood too early the art of
complimenting ladies whose hats were too big and whose eyes were too
bright.... But once, after Annunciata Maddalena's nose had bled over
this same sailor-suit, I said it was my own nose, because I knew how
bitterly she was ashamed of her one bourgeois lapse...."
"Tommy would have disowned her, instead of owning the nose. Oh, I grant
you the nobler nature ... but it breaks my heart that you didn't have
the wild English garden and the cherries and the grubby old dark-blue
jersey."
"If we have a kiddie--" Dickie began softly, his mouth puckered to its
special elvish little smile. Then he met her eyes lapping him round
with such velvet tenderness--that Dickie suddenly knew he was loved,
knew that impulsively she was going to tell him so, and breathlessly
happier than he had ever been before, waited for it--
"I _did_ kill my husband. They acquitted me, but I was guilty. It was
an accident. I was so afraid. They would never have believed it could
be an accident. But I had to, in self-defence."
And now she had told him she loved him.
Only Dickie was too numb to recognise the form her confession of love
had taken; love, as always, was clamouring to be clearly seen--naked,
if need be, blood-guilty, if need be--but _seen_ ... and then swept up,
sin and all, by another love big enough to accept this truth, also, as
essentially part of her.
Ruth waited several seconds for Dickie to speak. Then she got up, and
strolled over to the picture, and said, examining intently, as though
for the first time, the woman in the doorway: "I'm not sorry, Dickie.
That is to say, I'm sorry, of course, if I've shattered an illusion of
yours, but--I can't be melodramatic, you know, not even to the extent
of using the word 'murderess' on myself. If I hadn't killed Lucas--"
"He would have killed you?" So he was able to utter quite natural and
coherent sounds! Dickie was surprised.
"Yes--" But Ruth found that, after all, she could not tell Dickie much
about Lucas. Lucas had not been a pleasant gentleman to live with--and
there were things that Dickie was too fine himself, and too innocent,
to realise. The only comprehension in this thoroughly well-groomed
atmosphere of soft carpets and dim silken panels and miniatures and
rare frail china might have come from the woman in the doorway of that
incongruous picture ... a woman sullenly patient, brutalised, but--yes,
her man might quite easily have been another Lucas.
For that which Dickie had always thought of as mysterious, elusive,
was, to Ruth's eyes, only sorrowful wisdom.
"Come here, Ruth."
She dragged her eyes away from the picture; crossed the room; broke
down completely, her head on his knees, her shuddering body crouched
closely to the floor: "When you've--been frightened--and have to live
with it--and it doesn't even stop at night--for weeks and months and
years--one's nerves aren't quite reliable.... They've no right to call
that murder, have they? have they, Dickie? When you've been afraid for
a long time--and there's no one you can tell about it except the person
who _makes_ the _fear_...."
But Dickie was all that she had perilously dared to hope he would be at
this crisis. He soothed her and healed her by his loyalty; promised,
without her extorting it, that he would never tell a soul what she had
just told him; pixie-shy, yet he spoke of his personal need of
her--and more than anything else she had desired to hear this. He
mentioned some trivial intimate plans for their unbroken, unchanged
future together, so as to reassure her of its continuance. He even made
her laugh.
In fact, for a last appearance in the _rôle_ of a gallant little
gentleman, Dickie did not do so badly.
He woke in the night from a bad dream--with terror clinging thickly
about his senses. But it did not slowly dissolve and release him, as
nightmare is wont to do. It remained--so that he lay still as a man in
his winding-sheet, afraid to move--remembering--
"I _did_ kill my husband."
Yes--that was it. In the room with him was a strange woman who had
killed her husband.
Not Ruth--but a strange woman. How had she got into the room with him?
She had killed her husband. And now, _he_ was her husband.
He lay motionless, but his imagination began to crawl.... What might
happen to a man shut up alone in a house with a woman who--murdered?
His imagination began to race--and he lost control of it. Murder ...
with dry, sandy throat and a kicking heart, Dickie had to pay for his
audacity in imagining he was big enough to claim life in the raw.
"Not big enough! Not big enough!"--the goblins of the underworld
croaked at him in triumphant chorus.... They capered ... they snapped
their fingers at him ... they spun him down to where fear was ... he
had delivered himself to them, by not being big enough.
"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--which was bigger, Mrs. Bigger or the baby?"
The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void--and
over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the
answer, trying to forget fear....
"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--"
He dared not fall asleep ... with the woman who had killed her husband,
alone in the room with him ... alone in the house with him.
A stir from the other bed, and one arm flung out in sleep. Dickie's
knees jerked violently--his skin went cold and sticky with sweat. "You
fool--it's only Ruth!"
But she _did_ it--she did it once. There are people who can't kill, and
a few, just a very few, who can. And because they can, they are
different, and have to be shut away from the herd.
But--but this woman. They've made a ghastly mistake--they've let her go
free--and I can't tell anyone ... nobody knows, except me and Ruth----
Ah, yes--a quivering sigh of relief here--Ruth knows, too--Ruth, my
wife--ruth means pity....
There is no Ruth ... there never was ... quite alone except for a
strange, strange woman--the kind that gets shut away and kept by
herself....
* * * * *
To this bondage had Dickie's nerves delivered him. The custom of
punctilious courtesy, so deeply ingrained as to mean in his case the
impossibility of wounding another, decreed that some pretence must be
kept up before Ruth. But with one shock she divined the next morning
the significant change in him, and bowed her head to it. What could she
do? She loved him, but she had overrated the capacity of his spirit.
There had never been any courage, only kindness and sweetness and
chivalry--all no good to him, now that courage was wanted. She had made
a mistake in telling him the truth.
Suffering--she thought she had suffered fiercely with Lucas, she
thought she had suffered while she was being ignominiously tried for
her life--but what were either of these phases compared with the
helpless bitterness of seeing Dickie, whom she loved, afraid of her?
Even her periodic fits of wild arrogant passion, which usually, when
they surged past restraint, wrecked and altered whatever situation was
hemming her in, and left gaps for a passage through to something
else--even these had now to be curbed. Useful in hate, they were
impotent in love. So Ruth recognised in her new humility. But when one
day, seized by panic at having spoken irritably to her, Dickie hastily
tried to propitiate her, to ingratiate himself so that she might spare
him, might let him live a little longer, then Ruth felt she must cry
aloud under the strain of this subtle torture. Why, he was her lover,
her man, her child.... In thought, her arm shaped itself into a crook
for his head to lie there; her fingers smoothed out the drawn
perplexity of his brows; her kisses were cool as snow on his hot,
twitching little mouth; her voice, hushed to a lullaby croon, promised
him that nobody should hurt him, nobody, while she was there to heal
and protect--
"Sleep, baby, sleep,
The hills are white with sheep----"
Over and over again she lulled herself with the old rhyme, for
comfort's sake. But Dickie she could not comfort, since, irony of
ironies, she was the cause of his pitiful breakdown. Why, if she spoke,
he started; if she moved towards him, he shrank. Yet still Ruth dreamt
that if he would only let her touch him, she could bring him
reassurance. But meanwhile his appetite was meagre, the rare half-hours
he slept were broken with evil dreams, from which he awoke whimpering.
He did not care any more about the little beautiful things he had
collected and grouped about him, but sat for hours listless and blank;
his appearance a grotesque parody of the trim and dapper Dickie Maybury
of the past--what could it matter how he looked with death slicing so
close to him?
"The master seems poorly of late, don't he, ma'am? His digestion ain't
strong. P'r'aps something 'as disagreed with 'im." Thus Mrs. Derrick,
taking her part in the drama, as the simple character who makes
speeches of more significant portent than she is aware of.
Something had, indeed, disagreed with Dickie. In the slang phrase: "He
had bitten off more than he could chew."
And the goblins were hunting him; whispering how she would creep up to
him stealthily from behind, this woman who killed ... and put her arms
round him, and put her fingers to his throat--that was one way.
Other ways there were, of course. He must learn about them all, so as
to be watchful and prepared. Self-defence ... accident. Of course, they
always said it was accident. He knew that now, for the evening
crime-sheets began to appear in the flat again, and Dickie studied
them, in place of the _villanelles_, the graceful essays, the
_belles-lettres_ of his former choice. Ruth saw him, with his delicate
shaking hands clutching the newspapers, his mild eyes bright with
sordid fascination. He was ill, certainly; and brain-sick and
oppressed; and she yearned for his illness to show itself a tangible,
serious matter; a matter of bed and doctor and complete prostration and
unwearied effort on the part of his nurse. "My darling--my darling....
He did everything for me, when I most needed it. And now, I can do
nothing.... It isn't fair!"
She stood by one of the open windows of the pretty Watteau
sitting-room. The lamps had just sprung to fiery stars in the blue
glamorous twilight of the square; the fragrance of wet lilac blew up to
her, and a blackbird among the bushes began to sing like mad ... the
fist which was cruelly squeezing Ruth's spirit seemed slowly to
unclench ... and suddenly it struck her that things might be made worth
while again for her and Dickie.
After all, how insane it was for him to be huddling miserably, as she
knew he would be, in the arm-chair of his study, gazing with forlorn
eyes at the squalid columns, which it had grown too dark for him to
decipher. She had a vision of what this very evening might yet hold of
recovered magic, if only she had the courage to carry out her simple
cure of his head drawn down on to her left breast, just where her heart
was beating. "Dickie, it's _all right_, you know--it's only Ruth I
You've been sitting with your bogies all the time the white lilac has
been coming out----"
A faint smile lay at last on Ruth's mouth, and in the curve of her
tired eyelids. She went softly into the study. The door was open....
Dickie sprang to his feet with a yell of terror as her hands came round
his neck from behind. He clutched at the revolver in his pocket and
fired, at random, backwards.... In the wall behind them was the round
dark mark of a merciful bullet. And----
"Dickie--oh, Dickie--when you've been frightened--and have to live with
it--and it doesn't even stop at nights--do you understand, now, how it
happens? They've no right to call _that_ murder, have they, Dickie?"
And now, indeed, understanding that the awful act of killing could be,
in a rare once or twice, a human accident for the frightened little
human to commit--understanding, Dickie was shocked back to sanity.
"Dear, dear Ruth----" Why, this stranger woman was no stranger, after
all, but Ruth, his own sweet wife. Dickie was tired, and he knew he
need not explain things to her. He laid his head down on her left
breast, just where the heart was beating.