Five Tales

J >> John Galsworthy >> Five Tales


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
'em 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?"

With a glacial shiver down his own spine, Keith answered

"A friend of Laurence. Don't be frightened!"

There was such silence that he could hear a clock ticking, and the sound
of his own hand passing over the surface of the wall, trying to find the
switch. He found it, and in the light which leaped up he saw, stiffened
against a dark curtain evidently screening off a bedroom, a girl
standing, holding a long black coat together at her throat, so that
her face with its pale brown hair, short and square-cut and curling up
underneath, had an uncanny look of being detached from any body. Her
face was so alabaster pale that the staring, startled eyes, dark blue or
brown, and the faint rose of the parted lips, were like colour stainings
on a white mask; and it had a strange delicacy, truth, and pathos, such
as only suffering brings. Though not susceptible to aesthetic emotion,
Keith was curiously affected. He said gently:

"You needn't be afraid. I haven't come to do you harm--quite the
contrary. May I sit down and talk?" And, holding up the keys, he added:
"Laurence wouldn't have given me these, would he, if he hadn't trusted
me?"

Still she did not move, and he had the impression that he was looking at
a spirit--a spirit startled out of its flesh. Nor at the moment did it
seem in the least strange that he should conceive such an odd thought.
He stared round the room--clean and tawdry, with its tarnished gilt
mirror, marble-topped side-table, and plush-covered sofa. Twenty years
and more since he had been in such a place. And he said:

"Won't you sit down? I'm sorry to have startled you."

But still she did not move, whispering:

"Who are you, please?"

And, moved suddenly beyond the realm of caution by the terror in that
whisper, he answered:

"Larry's brother."

She uttered a little sigh of relief which went to Keith's heart, and,
still holding the dark coat together at her throat, came forward and sat
down on the sofa. He could see that her feet, thrust into slippers, were
bare; with her short hair, and those candid startled eyes, she looked
like a tall child. He drew up a chair and said:

"You must forgive me coming at such an hour; he's told me, you see." He
expected her to flinch and gasp; but she only clasped her hands together
on her knees, and said:

"Yes?"

Then horror and discomfort rose up in him, afresh.

"An awful business!"

Her whisper echoed him:

"Yes, oh! yes! Awful--it is awful!"

And suddenly realising that the man must have fallen dead just where he
was sitting, Keith became stock silent, staring at the floor.

"Yes," she whispered; "Just there. I see him now always falling!"

How she said that! With what a strange gentle despair! In this girl of
evil life, who had brought on them this tragedy, what was it which moved
him to a sort of unwilling compassion?

"You look very young," he said.

"I am twenty."

"And you are fond of--my brother?"

"I would die for him."

Impossible to mistake the tone of her voice, or the look in her eyes,
true deep Slav eyes; dark brown, not blue as he had thought at first.
It was a very pretty face--either her life had not eaten into it yet,
or the suffering of these last hours had purged away those marks;
or perhaps this devotion of hers to Larry. He felt strangely at sea,
sitting there with this child of twenty; he, over forty, a man of the
world, professionally used to every side of human nature. But he said,
stammering a little:

"I--I have come to see how far you can save him. Listen, and just answer
the questions I put to you."

She raised her hands, squeezed them together, and murmured:

"Oh! I will answer anything."

"This man, then--your--your husband--was he a bad man?"

"A dreadful man."

"Before he came here last night, how long since you saw him?"

"Eighteen months."

"Where did you live when you saw him last?"

"In Pimlico."

"Does anybody about here know you as Mrs. Walenn?"

"No. When I came here, after my little girl died, I came to live a bad
life. Nobody knows me at all. I am quite alone."

"If they discover who he was, they will look for his wife?"

"I do not know. He did not let people think I was married to him. I was
very young; he treated many, I think, like me."

"Do you think he was known to the police?"

She shook her head. "He was very clever."

"What is your name now?"

"Wanda Livinska."

"Were you known by that name before you were married?"

"Wanda is my Christian name. Livinska--I just call myself."

"I see; since you came here."

"Yes."

"Did my brother ever see this man before last night?"

"Never."

"You had told him about his treatment of you?"

"Yes. And that man first went for him."

"I saw the mark. Do you think anyone saw my brother come to you?"

"I do not know. He says not."

"Can you tell if anyone saw him carrying the--the thing away?"

"No one in this street--I was looking."

"Nor coming back?"

"No one."

"Nor going out in the morning?"

"I do not think it."

"Have you a servant?"

"Only a woman who comes at nine in the morning for an hour."

"Does she know Larry?"

"No."

"Friends, acquaintances?"

"No; I am very quiet. And since I knew your brother, I see no one.
Nobody comes here but him for a long time now."

"How long?"

"Five months."

"Have you been out to-day?"

"No."

"What have you been doing?"

"Crying."

It was said with a certain dreadful simplicity, and pressing her hands
together, she went on:

"He is in danger, because of me. I am so afraid for him." Holding up his
hand to check that emotion, he said:

"Look at me!"

She fixed those dark eyes on him, and in her bare throat, from which the
coat had fallen back, he could see her resolutely swallowing down her
agitation.

"If the worst comes to the worst, and this man is traced to you, can you
trust yourself not to give my brother away?"

Her eyes shone. She got up and went to the fireplace:

"Look! I have burned all the things he has given me--even his picture.
Now I have nothing from him."

Keith, too, got up.

"Good! One more question: Do the police know you, because--because of
your life?"

She shook her head, looking at him intently, with those mournfully true
eyes. And he felt a sort of shame.

"I was obliged to ask. Do you know where he lives?"

"Yes."

"You must not go there. And he must not come to you, here."

Her lips quivered; but she bowed her head. Suddenly he found her quite
close to him, speaking almost in a whisper:

"Please do not take him from me altogether. I will be so careful. I will
not do anything to hurt him; but if I cannot see him sometimes, I shall
die. Please do not take him from me." And catching his hand between her
own, she pressed it desperately. It was several seconds before Keith
said:

"Leave that to me. I will see him. I shall arrange. You must leave that
to me."

"But you will be kind?"

He felt her lips kissing his hand. And the soft moist touch sent a queer
feeling through him, protective, yet just a little brutal, having in it
a shiver of sensuality. He withdrew his hand. And as if warned that she
had been too pressing, she recoiled humbly. But suddenly she turned,
and stood absolutely rigid; then almost inaudibly whispered: "Listen!
Someone out--out there!" And darting past him she turned out the light.

Almost at once came a knock on the door. He could feel--actually feel
the terror of this girl beside him in the dark. And he, too, felt
terror. Who could it be? No one came but Larry, she had said. Who else
then could it be? Again came the knock, louder! He felt the breath of
her whisper on his cheek: "If it is Larry! I must open." He shrank back
against the wall; heard her open the door and say faintly: "Yes. Please!
Who?"

Light painted a thin moving line on the wall opposite, and a voice which
Keith recognised answered:

"All right, miss. Your outer door's open here. You ought to keep it shut
after dark."

God! That policeman! And it had been his own doing, not shutting the
outer door behind him when he came in. He heard her say timidly in her
foreign voice: "Thank you, sir!" the policeman's retreating steps, the
outer door being shut, and felt her close to him again. That something
in her youth and strange prettiness which had touched and kept him
gentle, no longer blunted the edge of his exasperation, now that he
could not see her. They were all the same, these women; could not speak
the truth! And he said brusquely:

"You told me they didn't know you!"

Her voice answered like a sigh:

"I did not think they did, sir. It is so long I was not out in the town,
not since I had Larry."

The repulsion which all the time seethed deep in Keith welled up at
those words. His brother--son of his mother, a gentleman--the property
of this girl, bound to her, body and soul, by this unspeakable event!
But she had turned up the light. Had she some intuition that darkness
was against her? Yes, she was pretty with that soft face, colourless
save for its lips and dark eyes, with that face somehow so touchingly,
so unaccountably good, and like a child's.

"I am going now," he said. "Remember! He mustn't come here; you mustn't
go to him. I shall see him to-morrow. If you are as fond of him as you
say--take care, take care!"

She sighed out, "Yes! oh, yes!" and Keith went to the door. She was
standing with her back to the wall, and to follow him she only moved her
head--that dove-like face with all its life in eyes which seemed saying:
'Look into us; nothing we hide; all--all is there!'

And he went out.

In the passage he paused before opening the outer door. He did not want
to meet that policeman again; the fellow's round should have taken him
well out of the street by now, and turning the handle cautiously, he
looked out. No one in sight. He stood a moment, wondering if he should
turn to right or left, then briskly crossed the street. A voice to his
right hand said:

"Good-night, sir."

There in the shadow of a doorway the policeman was standing. The fellow
must have seen him coming out! Utterly unable to restrain a start, and
muttering "Goodnight!" Keith walked on rapidly:

He went full quarter of a mile before he lost that startled and uneasy
feeling in sardonic exasperation that he, Keith Darrant, had been taken
for a frequenter of a lady of the town. The whole thing--the whole
thing!--a vile and disgusting business! His very mind felt dirty and
breathless; his spirit, drawn out of sheath, had slowly to slide
back before he could at all focus and readjust his reasoning faculty.
Certainly, he had got the knowledge he wanted. There was less danger
than he thought. That girl's eyes! No mistaking her devotion. She would
not give Larry away. Yes! Larry must clear out--South America--the
East--it did not matter. But he felt no relief. The cheap, tawdry room
had wrapped itself round his fancy with its atmosphere of murky love,
with the feeling it inspired, of emotion caged within those yellowish
walls and the red stuff of its furniture. That girl's face! Devotion;
truth, too, and beauty, rare and moving, in its setting of darkness and
horror, in that nest of vice and of disorder!... The dark archway; the
street arab, with his gleeful: "They 'ain't got 'im yet!"; the feel of
those bare arms round his neck; that whisper of horror in the darkness;
above all, again, her child face looking into his, so truthful! And
suddenly he stood quite still in the street. What in God's name was he
about? What grotesque juggling amongst shadows, what strange and ghastly
eccentricity was all this? The forces of order and routine, all the
actualities of his daily life, marched on him at that moment, and swept
everything before them. It was a dream, a nightmare not real! It was
ridiculous! That he--he should thus be bound up with things so black and
bizarre!

He had come by now to the Strand, that street down which every day he
moved to the Law Courts, to his daily work; his work so dignified and
regular, so irreproachable, and solid. No! The thing was all a monstrous
nightmare! It would go, if he fixed his mind on the familiar objects
around, read the names on the shops, looked at the faces passing. Far
down the thoroughfare he caught the outline of the old church, and
beyond, the loom of the Law Courts themselves. The bell of a fire-engine
sounded, and the horses came galloping by, with the shining metal,
rattle of hoofs and hoarse shouting. Here was a sensation, real and
harmless, dignified and customary! A woman flaunting round the corner
looked up at him, and leered out: "Good-night!" Even that was customary,
tolerable. Two policemen passed, supporting between them a man the worse
for liquor, full of fight and expletives; the sight was soothing, an
ordinary thing which brought passing annoyance, interest, disgust.
It had begun to rain; he felt it on his face with pleasure--an actual
thing, not eccentric, a thing which happened every day!

He began to cross the street. Cabs were going at furious speed now
that the last omnibus had ceased to run; it distracted him to take this
actual, ordinary risk run so often every day. During that crossing of
the Strand, with the rain in his face and the cabs shooting past, he
regained for the first time his assurance, shook off this unreal sense
of being in the grip of something, and walked resolutely to the corner
of his home turning. But passing into that darker stretch, he again
stood still. A policeman had also turned into that street on the other
side. Not--surely not! Absurd! They were all alike to look at--those
fellows! Absurd! He walked on sharply, and let himself into his house.
But on his way upstairs he could not for the life of him help raising a
corner of a curtain and looking from the staircase window. The policeman
was marching solemnly, about twenty-five yards away, paying apparently
no attention to anything whatever.




IV

Keith woke at five o'clock, his usual hour, without remembrance. But
the grisly shadow started up when he entered his study, where the lamp
burned, and the fire shone, and the coffee was set ready, just as when
yesterday afternoon Larry had stood out there against the wall. For a
moment he fought against realisation; then, drinking off his coffee, sat
down sullenly at the bureau to his customary three hours' study of the
day's cases.

Not one word of his brief could he take in. It was all jumbled with
murky images and apprehensions, and for full half an hour he suffered
mental paralysis. Then the sheer necessity of knowing something of the
case which he had to open at half-past ten that morning forced him to a
concentration which never quite subdued the malaise at the bottom of his
heart. Nevertheless, when he rose at half-past eight and went into
the bathroom, he had earned his grim satisfaction in this victory of
will-power. By half-past nine he must be at Larry's. A boat left London
for the Argentine to-morrow. If Larry was to get away at once, money
must be arranged for. And then at breakfast he came on this paragraph in
the paper:

"SOHO MURDER.

"Enquiry late last night established the fact that the Police have
discovered the identity of the man found strangled yesterday morning
under an archway in Glove Lane. An arrest has been made."

By good fortune he had finished eating, for the words made him feel
physically sick. At this very minute Larry might be locked up, waiting
to be charged-might even have been arrested before his own visit to the
girl last night. If Larry were arrested, she must be implicated. What,
then, would be his own position? Idiot to go and look at that archway,
to go and see the girl! Had that policeman really followed him home?
Accessory after the fact! Keith Darrant, King's Counsel, man of mark! He
forced himself by an effort, which had something of the heroic, to drop
this panicky feeling. Panic never did good. He must face it, and see. He
refused even to hurry, calmly collected the papers wanted for the day,
and attended to a letter or two, before he set out in a taxi-cab to
Fitzroy Street.

Waiting outside there in the grey morning for his ring to be answered,
he looked the very picture of a man who knew his mind, a man of
resolution. But it needed all his will-power to ask without tremor: "Mr.
Darrant in?" to hear without sign of any kind the answer: "He's not up
yet, sir."

"Never mind; I'll go in and see him. Mr. Keith Darrant."

On his way to Laurence's bedroom, in the midst of utter relief, he had
the self-possession to think: 'This arrest is the best thing that could
have happened. It'll keep their noses on a wrong scent till Larry's got
away. The girl must be sent off too, but not with him.' Panic had ended
in quite hardening his resolution. He entered the bedroom with a feeling
of disgust. The fellow was lying there, his bare arms crossed behind his
tousled head, staring at the ceiling, and smoking one of many cigarettes
whose ends littered a chair beside him, whose sickly reek tainted the
air. That pale face, with its jutting cheek-bones and chin, its hollow
cheeks and blue eyes far sunk back--what a wreck of goodness!