Portrait_of_a_Murderer-5

…And the extraordinary part of it is that it was nothing but an accident, much as if I’d smashed the milk-jug or dropped one of the dinner-plates. Even in my moments of panic I was able to appreciate that. It hadn’t any more significance than those trivialities. The significance lay in the consequences. And those hardly bore thinking about, in all the circumstances.

I was so much taken aback when I saw him slip down to my feet with so little sound it might have been a ghost falling, that at first I was incapable of realising what I’d done. I just stood and stared. I couldn’t believe that he was dead. When at last I did, two things amazed me. The first was the shocking swiftness of death. A minute ago he had been standing in his favourite attitude, patronising me because I was a failure by his standards, that have always seemed to me intolerably contemptible and false, and now he lay there—and he would never, never get up again.

I suppose it isn’t a very ordinary situation. Not many people can have murdered their father in a fit of rage; and so it may be difficult for the majority to believe that I simply couldn’t understand, couldn’t make my mind understand, that is—what had occurred. I repeated over and over again, “He’s dead. I’ve killed him. I’m a murderer. Murderers hang.” But it was no use. I couldn’t believe it, and presently, through sheer repetition, the words ceased to have any meaning at all, and became as incongruous as any casual collection of letters might, if you stared at them long enough. Even the word “murderer,” the word “hang,” meant nothing.

And the second thing that struck me was the effect that death has on people, the instantaneous, humiliating effect. I am thirty-two, but I haven’t come in contact with death much. The only other time I remember was when Hartley died in Paris, and everything was different then. He was not six years old, and he died in agony, and everything was prolonged to a nightmare extent. That wasn’t like death as I had ever conceived it. That was an anguished withering of childhood into a premature decay. There was nothing peaceful or beautiful about him as he lay in his coffin, an absurd white satin affair, with lilies of the valley round that dreadful shrivelled face. That was the sole occasion when I found myself compelled to realise that there is an agony known to men that cannot merely stir, but actually wring the heart. Even now I can’t bear people to talk to me about him, and one of the reasons why I left Paris was because I wanted to settle among people who had never seen him. He’s the one thing, besides my work, that I have cared for in my life, and he has gone out of it. It’s ironical, if you care to stop and think about it, to realise that I married Sophy solely for his sake, and now he’s vanished, and I am left with her and Margot and Eleanor and Dulcie and Anne, and the baby, whose father I most probably am not, though, of course, I can’t find out, and anyway now it has ceased to matter.

But here there was something so shocking, so abominable about death that I stared at my father’s face in a kind of repelled fascination. I had expected something, in adult death at least, of dignity, a certain majesty and grandeur. But there was none, not a trace of heroism. Now that the corners of the mouth were no longer kept under control by the tense jaw—and it’s queer how I had never realised the desperate effort it must have cost him to preserve that aspect of nobility that made men admire him and women feel a peculiar attraction towards him—the muscles sagged to a weak peevishness; his nostrils, that had been finely modelled as a younger man, became pinched and fretful; the eyes were vacant and the whole face, in shedding its handsome scholarly asceticism, that had been so fine a mask during his life, betrayed now an astounding cupidity.

Of course, it didn’t surprise me, any more than it would surprise Richard or Amy or—I fancy—Miles Amery, whom I have always credited with more than the usual amount of commonsense, that isn’t without its shrewd vein of cynicism. And I don’t think he was ever deceived by my father’s manner. He (my father) liked to appear a philosopher, a man of tranquil moods and reflections, and if some company in which he held shares passed its dividend, or if the shares themselves went down a point or two, he’d sulk like a child, refuse food, make the most humiliating scenes about trifles in household expenditure, curtail this or that necessity, and in general behave as though he had lost thousands of pounds.

I looked up and saw the eyes of the first Hildebrand watching me. I was named for him, the famous prince of the Church of the early sixteenth century, whose portrait hangs in one of the recesses of the library. It’s supposed to be immensely valuable. There was another Hildebrand, too, but he was an obscure preaching friar, who took the habit and lived in a manner that we—even I, who pig it in a squalid hole in Fulham, where the ceilings are cracked and the wallpapers speckled with damp and the sanitation unspeakable—should regard as absolutely disgusting. Autres temps, autres modes. It appeared to suit him very well, and shortly after his death so many miracles were reported at his nameless grave that his beatification was accelerated, and perhaps he is now in a superior position to the Cardinal. Which exemplifies the Church’s teaching about the first and the last, and is therefore quite fitting.

This Hildebrand who hangs in the library has the expression of a statesman, a disillusioned statesman who knows his own power and despises it. I am never wholly comfortable when I meet his eyes. But, if it comes to that, I’m never wholly at ease in that room at all. It gives you some notion of the type of man my father was that he could sit there and brood over his financial affairs without a sense of self-abasement or even of discomfort. On second thoughts, I’m not sure it isn’t the kind of room every artist should have to work in—by which I mean, should be compelled to work in. It isn’t a room where such a man could produce scamped work or be satisfied with the second-rate or even with the first-rate that came easily to him. Because it is conceivable that a time comes when the work a man does becomes devoid of effort, and then, of course, he must go forward and experiment with the impossible till that becomes attainable, too, and so on. I doubt if my father had ever experienced a shred of diffidence of that kind. He could strut pompously into that amazing room and sit for hours calculating possible gains and losses, and not even understand that he was hemmed in by the greatest wisdom, beauty, and craftsmanship of the centuries. The walls are lined with the achievements of genius; there are books there crammed with a learning that must make the greatest of all artists ashamed of his own deficiencies. And in a glass-fronted case against one wall is a collection of articles in crystal, amber, and jade so beautiful in their sincerity and perfection that they take the breath away. To say nothing of the embroideries on the chairs and the long couch that half fills the window recess. My father used to have me down there years ago when there was trouble brewing, and for the life of me I could never bring out the elaborate lie I had planned before coming downstairs. But he himself never felt any embarrassment. When I was about seventeen I realised that only two kinds of men could work in such a room—the very humble and the supremely conceited. But, brooding over, and even ashamed of, his insignificance, it did occur to me, as I saw him dead at my feet, that probably he showed here to the worst possible advantage, and might look less despicable in any other room.

I found myself, indeed, saying aloud, “It would be bad luck for any ordinary man to die in here,” and as I spoke I heard the words for the first time, and realised what I had done. It was no longer necessary for me to repeat my formula. The position in all its peril was suddenly quite clear. The fact that I had picked up the oblong of brass, that he used as a paper-weight, with the intention of slamming it on the table to silence him at all costs, and with no idea of striking him with it, wouldn’t for an instant count in my favour. I should never make a level-headed jury understand that when a man of my father’s calibre starts talking about art, and the obligations of the individual to the community (that he doesn’t, of course, consider artists fulfil), he has to be stopped; he becomes intolerable. I felt myself tremble with that mad impotent rage children know when they recognise their powerlessness to insist on their own aspect of a position. A man who could seriously hold his views had no right to go on living; he was so much waste matter. And I have no respect for life qua life, though I have respect for any form of life that fulfils its proper function. Nor do I agree that any mass of men has the right to dictate to the individual, or to any other mass as to the nature of his or their particular function. Everything about my father was futile, his death as much as his life, and since I caused that death I share his futility. Indeed, I have never been so much ashamed of anything, without being in the least sorry. It was foolish, of course, to have married Sophy, but I can find reasons for that. There was Hartley, and I couldn’t have foreseen that he would die when he was five years old. But this was the result of a fit of blind passion, the kind of feeling that insincere and ignoble people create in me. I would have minded so much less if he had had the courage of his convictions and said, “All I care about is what I possess, what belongs to me. That’s my world.” But he had to pretend to be something much finer and nobler than he was, and that’s where he failed completely from the artistic viewpoint. But I realise as well as anyone else that you can’t talk that kind of argument to a jury.

Remembering juries brought me back to a consideration of my position, and I was immediately enraged to think that my life, that has a certain value, should be forfeited on account of his, that was quite worthless. Not, of course, that anyone would agree with my scale of values. None of my family under this roof, not Sophy either. I doubt whether anything that happens to me will affect her. She at least makes no pretence, though I do not appear to like or admire her any better for that. I suspect that at bottom I am as completely illogical as she. I don’t allow that either she or my father has any purpose in life, and therefore they have actually no right to life at all. She has no family pride through which she can be attacked; in all the circumstances it would be unreasonable to look for it. Her own mother had as little reputation as herself, and my family has refused to recognise her existence. With the exception of Isobel, who doesn’t count and has been utterly crushed by my father and Amy, they would not have her near the house, and certainly she wouldn’t be at home here. Not that I think she would be embarrassed and humble to the servants or cringing to my relations. She’d be brazen and underbred—well, I knew she was that when I married her. It is too late in the day to whine now.

My rage was chiefly on my own account. I had at length come to an unalterable decision, had determined to close this drab phase of my experience and return to my place in the only world where I am familiar and can do useful work; and precisely at this juncture a piece of crass stupidity was going to overset all my plans. It was intolerable to me that my father, who had consistently thwarted and disappointed every hope I ever cherished, should be able to continue that work after death, with my connivance. For if I’d flung that brass weight on to the table, as I had intended, instead of swinging round on him with a mad desire to wipe that smooth patronising sneer off his face, even he couldn’t have prevented my putting my plan into action. Somehow I’d have compelled him to help me. He had sworn he wouldn’t, but he would scarcely have allowed it to be said that his grandchildren were in guardians’ homes. In fact, I believe the law could force him to make some provision for them. I told him so.

“I’m clearing out,” I said crudely. “I’m going back to Paris.”

“And what of Sophy and your children?” he demanded.

Some fiend in me prompted me to reply, “There’s yourself, sir, if other provision falls short.”

“I won’t give them a penny,” he shouted, and added that probably half the children weren’t even mine.

I retaliated that English law makes a man responsible for all his wife’s children, regardless of paternity, so long as she remains his wife, and added that he’d be liable for them all, should it come to a question of State support.

He leapt up in a towering rage, screaming abusively that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the bastards, and they could all die in a workhouse for all he cared. I said I didn’t suppose they knew they had a grandfather, as they’d never been allowed within a mile of the house, and my disappearance might be an advantage to them, inasmuch as it would give the whole lot of them a chance to meet one another.

He cried me down; he talked of cumberers and touts and leeches; he reminded me of the times he and Richard have helped me in the past. He orated on improvidence, dishonest improvidence.

What could I say? Of course he’s helped me. He knows my circumstances, and it would be instructive to see how he or Richard could bring up a family on something under five pounds a week. My only retort, that he’d spent precious little on my education and that, without investment, you can’t expect dividends, brought the rejoinder that I’d had my chance, and refused to take it, and had forfeited any further consideration. That was when my temper began to boil over, because he went on to compare the present with the roseate might-have-been—would-have-been according to him, if I’d accepted his judgment. And, of course, he couldn’t leave Sophy alone. He’s never met her, and he couldn’t probably, at any time, understand the peculiar effect she had on me a dozen years ago. She was one of those haggard-looking women who seem a well of suppressed passion, but are really like those cardboard moulds of butter that you see in the windows of dairy-shops. At the time, however, I pictured her as Héloïse or Laura. We drifted apart for a bit, and at first I forgot her, and then went mad for her again and made frantic efforts to find her out. It was then that I discovered she had borne my child. It sobered me considerably; I was just twenty, but I felt I had a wealth of experience, uncommon in men twice my age, behind me. When I saw little Hartley (she hadn’t troubled to have him christened, so I could please myself as to a name) I insisted on marrying his mother. From the first she occupied a secondary place; what that boy meant to me I couldn’t express, and, anyway, it doesn’t matter any more. It didn’t spring, my feeling for him, from any innate love of children. When Sophy began to breed them as thick as rabbits I ignored them as much as I could. Sophy didn’t seem to care about them, either, and she never showed them much attention, beyond feeding them in a haphazard manner and threatening to skin them alive if they weren’t quiet.

Each time a new baby came, I swore it should be the last, but living as we did, pigging it in small rooms on practically no money, I wearing myself out with work and anxiety that unmarried men don’t experience, I fairly naturally broke through my resolutions and took from Sophy any satisfaction I could get. Presently even I had to admit we couldn’t go on; I was making very little money, and one or other of the children was perpetually ill, wanting a doctor or needing medicine, or clamouring for warm clothes. Sophy’s complaints got more and more on my nerves. I couldn’t start work but she’d come plaintively up to the studio, whining that there was insufficient money in the house for the midday meal. I wrote home for money once or twice, and my father sent me a little of that and a great deal of advice and garnered wisdom. But life was becoming impossible for me, and at last, in a frenzy, I accepted an offer of work in a draughtsman’s office in England. I earned four pounds a week, and on the strength of this we took a house in a frowsy terrace in Fulham. Hartley was dead by this time, and in his place were three little girls, and another baby on the way. My job entailed drawing houses about three times their actual scale, so that my employers’ clients were deceived and swindled. I don’t pretend that the ethical position affected me much. What seemed to me unpardonable was that I should be spending the best years of my life in this futile way. I was twenty-seven, and I’ve been at it for five years. And a month ago I made up my mind that, at all costs, I would get out and get back to my own job.

And just as I didn’t concern myself with the men who were cheated by my drawings, so I refused to consider Sophy and her children. I was, by this time, sufficiently cynical to believe that if people chose to allow themselves to be cheated, that was their affair. And I regarded myself among those who had been hoodwinked. I despised myself utterly.

During those five years I worked—in my sense of the word—whenever I could. At first Sophy encouraged me, till she realised it wouldn’t mean more grist to the mill. She would follow me to the studio, saying, “But, Brand, why not do a pretty picture of the bridge? There are always men painting that bridge, and they sell them and come back and do more.”

“And sell those and come back again,” I suggested.

She nodded.

“And that’s your idea for me?”

She became, as usual, abusive, tart, and vulgar. “My idea is that the children shall have shoes and I shall have underclothes that I would not be utterly ashamed to be found in in an accident,” she shrilled.

One becomes accustomed to this outlook at last—that practically everyone really professes and believes it to be more important to earn a living than to do your own job. No doubt I was to blame in getting married, but I wasn’t going to waste my precious leisure painting bloody little pictures of the Battersea Bridge or the view from Hammersmith down to Putney.

My sister, Olivia, was another person who could not leave me alone. I daresay Sophy went to her asking for money, probably taking a child in a ragged frock. I have always detested Olivia, and particularly since she married that smooth-faced double-dealing Jew financier, Eustace Moore. He’s tremendously proud of her; they go about “simply everywhere, my dear,” and she writes damnable bright letters in the Illustrated Weeklies—“Cherry, darling, I simply must tell you of a hat I saw on the boulevard this morning,” and “They do say the most extraordinary thing happened at the Monroe-Phillips’ last night…” Eustace thinks the earth of her because she can look like a lady (his conception of a lady anyhow) and yet makes money like a business woman. They have two sons, called Montague and Arnold, and a car whose photograph gets into the papers. Every now and again Olivia writes to me, or even comes down to Fulham (“Pray for me, darling, I’m going slumming. Yes, my poor relations. Too revolting, isn’t it?”—I can hear her say that to her fashionable friends).

“You mustn’t think me unsympathetic, Brand,” she says in what I believe is known as a liquid voice, “it isn’t that I don’t feel for you. But life is even greater than art, and you have your children to think of. It isn’t as if I couldn’t see your point of view. But Eustace would feel himself dreadfully badly used, and so would the boys, if I didn’t tear myself away when they need me. And yet I’m sure when I’m in the mood I scarcely feel as if any other world existed. It’s all a question of discipline, and even if I do resent Eustace sometimes interrupting me, I comfort myself by thinking that discipline is as necessary in the study—or the studio—as in the nursery.”

“And all this bloody stuff I do at Higginsons is good discipline for me?” I suggested.

She beamed and said yes, it was. For years now, whenever I’ve thought of her or seen her, I have dreamed of getting my own back. Between her and Sophy and my father, things have been almost intolerable. I reminded him of that to-night. You know how it is sometimes, when the dignity of life holds you and you instinctively respond, feeling a kind of nobility in yourself simply for being linked to life. And then there are other days—and this evening was one—when dignity is a word without a meaning, and you feel yourself cheap and vulgar and uncontrolled. That’s called a nervous outburst or hysteria, I believe. It really means a stage when you’ve endured all that’s possible. After the past seven weeks at Fulham this evening’s scene with my father was the last straw. I had known when I came down to King’s Poplars that I wasn’t really ready for the interview; I wanted a little time to get my second wind. But when I saw Richard and Eustace hovering like vultures over a corpse not quite dead enough for them, but prepared with beak and talons to defend their carrion, I knew I dared not wait. My brooding on the kind of life I henceforth proposed to live had given me a quite unfounded optimism, and when I went down to my father I give you my word, though no one will believe me, I did so with an assurance that this time I should make him appreciate my point of view and fall in with my suggestions. Within five minutes I realised the kind of fool I had been. Anticipations and hope might have changed me, but he was the same as ever. I could repeat his strictures for him. Always the same stuff about responsibility and the family name and the value of honourable work. I tried to make him see that it wasn’t honourable, either in essence or in fact, and that for a man of my potentialities to remain there was as bad as theft. Of course, he dismissed all this in the most slighting manner—Fulham oratory he called it—and both our tempers began to split. He was quietly, futilely, impertinently humorous at the expense of men whose shoes he is not fit to black. The scene became increasingly violent; having lost my head, I was soon at the end of my tether. It was then that I seized the paper-weight.

He laughed. “You’re quite right,” he said; “arguments like yours need solid reinforcements.”

And then I struck him, with no more notion of what I was doing in the moment of performance than the weight itself. The moment he dropped, so quietly and without a groan, I felt all passion die out of me. I was small and light and empty. Also I realised that the room was very cold. I looked at the fireplace; the fire had gone out some time ago.

For some time after I came to my senses and saw the position as it actually was, I walked aimlessly round the room, accomplishing nothing. I knew vaguely there were things to be done, but I could not recognise what they were. For a minute I think I expected the door to burst open and all the family to come rushing in pell-mell, in their dressing-gowns, their hair wild, their faces creased with suspicion. Indeed, I even had a vision of them, like a tail-piece to some child’s story. But nothing happened, and I forgot them again. I began to shiver, but that, I think, was only because of the fierce wind raging outside. The Manor at King’s Poplars is built on the side of a steep slope, and is quite unprotected from any rough weather. In the mornings the grass in the pasture is like glass when the sun catches it, and the streams are all frozen over. This Christmas night the earth was as hard and rugged as Christina Rossetti pictures it in her carol. “Wind made moan, Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone.” There were no cattle in the fields now (they’d have been frozen, I think), and no fowl on the ice-bound lakes and streams. The whole aspect was peculiarly desolate. A good many of the neighbouring houses are farms, and here there has been any amount of distress during the hard winter. The land is a tricky employer at the best of times, and this black season had followed a bad harvest; the valleys beneath our windows were full of unemployed men, and there had been ugly stories of rioting near by. For the past twenty-four hours a fierce gale had raged. If you stood still for a moment and listened, it seemed as if the house must come down about your ears; there was so much noise and confusion beyond the window, where the shrubs and trees creaked and groaned in the wind. Indeed, when at last I came back to the body by the window, I had very distinctly the impression of being the only living thing in the place. At that thought, there came to me the curious impression everyone knows, that someone was actually in the room with me, and, lifting my head with a jerk, I saw, with a shock of horror, another face staring into mine. I did not recognise it at first, that dark-skinned face with the head flung back, the lips curled and set, the dark hair swept back with a clean hard decision, the dominant chin, the eyes dark and blazing, the whole countenance irradiated with a vitality that held me dumb. Then I knew who it was. Since my last visit here my father had acquired a French mirror of very beautiful workmanship, that now hung on the opposite wall. And the face that I saw was my own, flashing back at me. I was so much fascinated to know what I looked like when I was off my guard, unconscious and alert, that I stepped over the body and went closer, moved by a curiosity that was even greater than my admiration. So this was the personality I habitually concealed beneath the shabby dress and bearing of a clerk at four pounds ten a week. This was the essential man I had intended to be, who was intended to be myself (I kept twisting the words round to hammer the fact into my startled consciousness), and who had, it seemed, not been entirely conquered by the circumstances of my personal life.

When I saw that keen thrusting face, I thought immediately, “It’s infamous that such a man should spend his life drawing faked plans for Higginsons.” Already, so powerful was the force of the revelation, I was eager to be out and doing my own work. I thought I could detect a new suppleness of wrist, an enlarging of vision, a greater ease of imagination, a more swiftly thronged brain. I foresaw my future, thick, not with success—I anticipated neither that nor the money that accompanies it—but with new conceptions, with experiments, with colossal ideas. As if a dam had burst, or some gate been flung down, I felt these new forces filling me, submerging my timidities and anxieties. I owed it to the self that mirror had revealed to give that man his opportunity. Instinctively I determined to preserve his expression and purpose, to strengthen my own resolution in the days ahead. I always carry about with me a sketch-book and pencil, and this pencil I lend to no one. I’m not precisely superstitious about it, but I don’t lend it for ordinary note-taking. In fact, I don’t lend it at all.

My brain seemed on fire. My hand had a new assurance and zest. I soon transferred to paper that memorable face, and when I had finished I stood admiring my own work, the bold economy of line, the clean strength, the neatness of detail, the sense of vigorous personality the sketch conveyed.

I signed it as usual, with what Sophy calls my melodramatic monogram, and glanced at the calendar for the date. It has always been an idiosyncrasy of mine to sign and date even quite insignificant studies. When I saw the figures “24” on the calendar I remembered that this was Christmas Eve, would soon be Christmas Day. And, looking at the clock, I saw with surprise that the hands pointed to half-past one, and that Christmas Day had actually dawned. I began to scribble 25.12… when I was startled by a sudden tremendous commotion behind me. I turned, dropping the pencil, prepared to face some terrific onslaught. But it was only the wind, that had torn open one of the casement windows, sent the curtains billowing into the room, and swept a blue bowl on to the floor. The room was full of uproar, a succession of blasts and whistles and the peculiar heavy thrashing sound made by tapestry curtains in a storm. I stood aghast. Now, I thought, the whole household will descend, and take me like the proverbial rat. And with the instant death of hope I found I was, surprisingly, not afraid. I stiffened involuntarily, certainly, but I think any man might have done as much; but I neither trembled nor sweated. I still had the sketch in my hand, and I seemed to derive a certain derisive strength from that. I had dropped my pencil when the vase went over, and now, as I stooped to retrieve it, I found to my annoyance that the lead had broken off short. I looked round for a knife, but there was none, and in any case, I reflected an instant later, I didn’t need one now.

Mirabile dictu, no one came. Yet the house was full of people. I thought of them as I had seen them at dinner, so correct and well established, in their fine well-cut clothes, with their perfect manners, their polite meaningless gestures, their aimless chit-chat, their complete ignoring of reality. And yet I daresay that was merely the surface; underneath, Richard and Eustace at all events were agog with eagerness and suspense. But they concealed it well. Still, even in their politeness they managed to make it abundantly clear that I wasn’t of their world, but was here, not even on sufferance, since I hadn’t been invited, but because I had thrust myself upon them. I remembered particularly Olivia in white satin, that her complexion can’t really stand well, and that woman Richard married looking absolutely magnificent in sea-green brocade. It was much too fine a dress to wear in a place like this, but it made her stand out like some figure in a canvas. I don’t care much about portrait-painting myself, but I should appreciate an opportunity of painting her as one of the great symbolic or legendary figures. I have never seen how she could care for Richard, but like the rest of them she puts up a fine bluff.

Thinking of them all, and of my own ambitions, that were never for more than a moment out of my thoughts, I visualised them as a pack of hounds on my trail, and immediately I determined not to be taken. Somehow I must contrive to put them off the scent, lay a false trail, deny having been here. Immediately I began to examine the room, to see what traces of my visit were obvious. The first thing I set eyes on was the paper-weight, lying on the edge of the writing-table where I had put it in that first moment of blank confusion. There was a dark stain on it—blood, of course—and a sliver of bloodstained skin. I turned to my father and saw that where I had struck him the skin of the temple had swelled and become a bluish-purple in colour. There was a long, clearly defined cut just above the eyebrow level. My first hopes of suggesting an accident were dashed. It would be obvious that he had not fallen, but had been struck down. I brooded for a minute on suicide, but that was equally out of the question. A man could scarcely take his own life in that fantastic manner. There remained only one solution, the truth; and that I must twist to make it appear that someone else was guilty. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and polished up the weight. I couldn’t afford to leave tell-tale marks on anything that might be connected with the crime. And, since the handkerchief was now stained, I decided to destroy that before leaving the room. I was sorry, because it was a good handkerchief, of fine silk. I had not held such a handkerchief in my hand since I married. Sophy gives me cheap cotton squares, that I sometimes suspect her of making out of disused sheets; at all events, they never wash satisfactorily, and are generally impounded for one or other of the children, whichever of them at the moment has the inevitable cold in the head. I saw Olivia staring disdainfully at my handkerchief the day before, at lunch, so when, coming down to dinner, I saw that Eustace had dropped one of his silk ones in the doorway of his room, I appropriated it without a twinge of conscience. Isobel teased me about it. Going up in the world, she said I was.

Olivia has a habit that I have always loathed, but that now I might turn to good account. As a child she always knew the extent of her possessions, and ferocious battles were waged as to the ownership of some paltry plaything or scrap of material. I make no doubt that at any moment during her married life she could have reeled off a list of Eustace’s wardrobe and her own, recalling where every article was bought. And if he lost a handkerchief she certainly wouldn’t allow that to be overlooked. I hoped for my own sake that she would discover her loss before anyone raised a hue and cry, for then all that was left of it would be found in the same room as the dead man, and obvious conclusions would be drawn. The fire, unfortunately, was out, and I had to burn the handkerchief by means of lighted matches. It took a good many, for one of Sophy’s economies is to buy cheap foreign matches, whose sticks are often no more than a splinter and snap at the slightest contact. When I’d burnt it completely, holding it down among the ashes with a poker to make sure it remained as evidence, I looked round wondering what next to do. Then a frightful thing happened. All my life, since very early childhood, I’ve been subject to sudden panics, due as a rule to overstrained imagination. As a small boy, for me, also, the hag sat nightly by my pillow; and in moments of panic I suffer a return of these delusions. For instance, at this moment I perceived an exceedingly tall man lounging against the bookcase in the shadow, watching me sardonically. Turning my eyes thence, I discovered a small hunched dwarf among the hangings and draperies of the couch; faces gibbered from the folds of the curtains, and steps sounded in the shadowy corners. The horrid thought came to me that these apparitions had not been apparent until I had closed the window, and the fancy attacked me that I had thus shut myself in with these creatures of fable and imagery. Absurd though it must seem, it was some minutes before I could persuade my overwrought brain to accept the obvious facts, namely that I was allowing myself to be terrified by an accumulation of shadows, echoes, and the effects of a chance draping of hangings and tapestries.

It is astounding how slowly the mind works in times of crisis, when you might suppose it would be more than normally alert. I found myself staring aimlessly round the room with no fixed idea in my mind, except a rigid intention to escape somehow the consequences of what I had done. Not that I underrate murder as a crime; I am even prepared to admit it is the worst of all crimes, since it involves robbing your neighbour of the one thing worth possessing—physical life. Though what value life could have had to such a man as my father I don’t know, particularly as, if accounts are true, he was on the verge of losing even the wretched things he did care for. It was then that I saw the cheque-book lying among the other papers on his desk.

There is a great deal of nonsense talked by men who are neither artists nor poor about the advantages of poverty, of the freedom engendered by small incomes and a corresponding lack of responsibility. Poets who don’t have to earn a weekly wage, but write as they will, sing blithely in praise of our Lady Poverty, and hark back to St. Francis and various other saints, who don’t appear to have had families to support. In any case, they’d be the first to blame us if we tried to shift our burdens and live on the community. And begging wasn’t an offence in those old days. Besides, it’s all wrong. I only wish these lunatics could experience poverty for themselves, real poverty, that would teach them what responsibilities mean when there are insufficient means to cope with them. Life doesn’t send the greatest responsibilities to the men with the most comfortable incomes. They get visited on rich and poor alike. And poverty in the twentieth century means, as I have ample reason to know, cracked ceilings, undignified shifts and excuses, damp-speckled walls, peeling paper, inferior food, the persistent whine of dissatisfied or sickly children, a general crowding together and lack of leisure and privacy both, and all the kindred humiliations of the dispirited poor. I don’t pretend that everyone else feels the lack of space both to move and think and create that I do. I know my father and brother call them luxury, but to me they’re as essential as bread. And so, when I saw the cheque-book, I thought I saw also my opportunity.

Since I had killed a man, I might surely take full advantage of the fact. Later it might return to haunt me; but at least it should not deride my futility, cowardice, lack of enterprise, call it what you like, as well as my crime. I knew my father well enough to realise that, of his estate, not a penny would come to me; nor could I appeal to any of my relatives. But from childhood I have had a certain dexterity in copying signatures. I tried it seriously for the first time when I was a schoolboy of thirteen, and wished to be excused certain work I had decided was useless to me. I forged a letter in my father’s hand, signing it with his usual crabbed scrawl, and handed it in. By pure ill-luck I was found out, some weeks later, by my father encountering the master in question, who raised the point with him. My father’s rage was indescribable. He had a criminal for a son, he declared, a base, prospective (no, actual) felon. I was unfit to mix with decent people, and certainly not with my own family. I had my meals apart, and in addition was thrashed till I could hardly stand. He even suggested that Green should repeat the performance. Luckily the fellow had some sense of humour, and he mildly suggested that the affair had probably begun as a joke, and he was convinced I had had a sufficiently serious lesson. He was right, in so far as I didn’t repeat the experiment while I remained at home, but some months ago, at Higginsons, I became a forger for the second time. There was an older man in our department, a fellow called Wright, a pursy, strutting nonentity, with a great conceit of himself and an intolerable manner. At length he became so disagreeable that a number of us got together and drew up a letter, that I signed with the name of the head of the firm, warning Wright that disquieting rumours had been received concerning his work, and also his attitude towards his juniors. Unless he showed considerable improvement in both respects, the letter continued, he could seek employment elsewhere. There was no need to mention this letter, which was intended for a confidential warning.

The results were stupefying. Wright took the letter in dead earnest; his nerve, his conceit, the foundations of his security were shaken. He had a wife and several children and no private means. Within twenty-four hours his manner had completely changed. He was no longer officious and arrogant; on the contrary, he asked opinions, even cringed, was apologetic, and submissive. It was so simple we were tempted to make a second experiment; but the more sober spirits urged that we had gone far enough, and it would be tempting providence to try again, so we left it at that.

I had these two successes in mind as I drew the cheque-book towards me. At last the possibility of attaining leisure and security lay under my hand. It was dishonest, of course, but my whole life has been stamped with dishonesty. The work I do, my relations with Sophy, my deliberate blindness as to her probable relations with other men—this seemed no worse, and at least it had some purpose. Of course, it was dangerous. It was borne in on me, as I stood wondering how much I dare put myself down for, how dangerous. No one would believe that my father would willingly give me a halfpenny. I should have to contrive some story that would satisfy or at all events silence Richard and Amy and Eustace, who’d be on my heels like a pack of dogs after a fox. But since my present way of living was intolerable, and my life had been trapped in a cul-de-sac whence I saw no other possible escape, I determined to run the risk. I had suffered so much from the humiliations of poverty that anything seemed preferable.

I began, this decision once taken, to find excellent reasons for the forgery. It would, I argued, actually strengthen my hand to produce the cheque, for what earthly motive should I have for murder in that event? This was so subtle an argument that I promptly took a pen from the rack on the table and began to test my skill on a writing-pad lying near at hand. I found I retained the art as skilfully as ever. Any one of those specimens, I think, would have been passed by my father’s bank. So I took up the cheque and in a moment of fine, reckless frenzy filled in a sum of two thousand pounds. Colossal, of course, but I had to make provision for Sophy and the children, and I couldn’t go abroad without a penny in my pocket. In any case, the temptation was too great. I might easily be detected, and, if so, it would be humiliating to have lost freedom for a beggarly five hundred pounds. But when I had signed the cheque and torn it out and filled in the counterfoil, with my father’s customary meticulous detail, I stood there, rather at a loss, feeling I should do something to safeguard myself. For, considering the position, it now seemed obvious to me that the simplest intelligence would realise that I had been the last person to see my father alive. It was unlikely that anyone else would come down to-night. Yet, to save my own skin, I must make it appear that he had had a later visitor than myself. The solution was, of course, a simple one, though it was some time before I hit upon it. I tore out a blank cheque, that I destroyed, filled in the second counterfoil with Eustace’s name, and an amount of ten thousand pounds, and dated that the 25th December. The plan was simplicity itself; anyone turning over the leaves of the cheque-book would leap to the obvious conclusion that Eustace had visited the library after my departure. It being now Christmas Day, there would be no possibility of his arguing that he had received the cheque before the evening.

It seemed to me that I had laid the perfect trap; in addition, there was his handkerchief lying destroyed in the grate. It might, of course, be shown that some other member of the family used silk handkerchiefs, but the association of facts seemed to me invincible. As for the amount, I was aware that Eustace had mentioned a sum of ten thousand pounds as being requisite for the settlement of his affairs.

I chose him instinctively as my victim, because he suited my plan better than anyone else in the house. He needed the money desperately, for one thing. Again, it would be difficult to imagine Richard using violence against his father, whatever his provocation, whereas, I argued, Eustace might easily lose his head. (I think now that I was wrong, but at the time I really did believe in my own argument.) And when I came to consider the position, I realised that, if I had had time for a mature judgment, I should have come to a similar conclusion. Eustace was Olivia’s husband, and I owed her and him and their supercilious young sons a long reckoning. And beyond all these facts, I revelled in the notion of watching that crooked dealer squirm and writhe in an attempt to extricate himself, as his dupes must often have squirmed and wriggled, without an iota of sympathy from him.

My sole desire now was to leave the library before my presence here was discovered. By filling in the second counterfoil I had intensified my peril a hundred times. Moreover, panic was beginning to assail me. To my troubled ears, the house now seemed full of turmoil. I was continually jerking up my head to observe the door, that at every instant seemed about to open. It was all I could do to refrain from crossing the room and flinging it wide to reassure myself that no malevolent presence lurked in the shadows of the hall. Odd shapes, like mysterious birds, flashed across the ceiling. The thunder of the gale at the windows and the chimney were heavy with voices. There were steps on the stairs and faces at the pane. Nevertheless, I beat down the approaching storm of terror, and compelled my imagination to work for my release. Before I left the room, I must evolve some kind of story to account for the magnitude of the cheque; indeed, for its very existence. For the life of me—literally for the life of me—I could not for some time strike any plausible explanation. The only answer to my problem that occurred to me was blackmail, and I knew too little, and Richard probably too much, of my father’s life to be able to play such a card. In my mind I carefully recollected the heated conversation that had preceded the blow that killed him. There had been his comments on art and artists, and his insulting references to my wife. Next, I remembered that I had promised—had even offered to give him a statement in writing—that if he would help me now, I would see to it that neither I nor Sophy nor our children should ever appeal to him again. He had merely laughed in an offensive manner, saying, “Likely story, my dear Brand!” But suppose, my imagination urged, he had not laughed? Suppose he had accepted my undertaking, surely then he might have bought me off handsomely?

I brooded. I had offered him a signed undertaking. And he hadn’t accepted it. But who was to know that? Here were pens, ink, and paper to my hand. I had already proved my ability as a forger. In any case, my blood was warm and my spirit intrepid. I had forgotten to be afraid lest this fresh venture betray me, and in a fine frenzy of excitement I began to write.

What I wrote was something like this:

I, Hildebrand Gray, do hereby agree that in consideration of the sum of two thousand pounds paid to me this day by my father Adrian Gray of the Manor House, King’s Poplars, Grebeshire, I will never again appeal to the said Adrian Gray for assistance in money or otherwise, never permit my wife, Sophy Gray, or any of her children, Margot, Eleanor, Dulcie, Anne, or Ferdinand Gray to approach him for any reason whatsoever. And I voluntarily abandon any claims I may ever have put forward against the said Adrian Gray both for myself and for them. In addition, I agree never to give the said Adrian Gray’s name as a reference in any circumstances whatever or proclaim the relationship except where this is unavoidable.

It seemed to me that, having signed this preposterous declaration, I had now done everything possible to mislead the authorities. Richard and probably Eustace would recognise in its pretentiousness the authentic note of pomposity and inhumanity that had marked my father’s relations with myself. I had written the paper with a pen that lay on the inlaid lacquer inkstand, but I signed it with a cheap one I took from my pocket, pausing to admire my own enterprise. I had allowed my instinct to guide me as to the precise formation of my father’s writing, for it was long since I had heard from him, long enough for me to forget his personal idiosyncrasies. Yet when I re-read my masterpiece I was convinced that, had I not been in the secret, I should not have questioned the genuineness of the paper.

There was nothing more for me to do but contrive to reach my room unperceived. The construction that I hoped everyone would put on the position was that Eustace, in dire straits, had come down in the early hours of the morning to put the position more clearly yet to my father. For I knew, though possibly the old man did not, that Eustace had been sailing very near the wind, and might even find himself involved in criminal proceedings. By leaving my document in a prominent position on the table, I might suggest that he had inadvertently read it, and his anger would at once be roused at the thought of such a wastrel as myself being presented, in any conceivable circumstances, with so large a sum, while he was denied a penny. After that, the interview might become heated; Eustace might confess the desperation of the position, practically compelling my father to part with the ten thousand pounds. Presumably, however, he would only do so on certain conditions, and these might prove not merely humiliating to Eustace, but positively dangerous. My father had a very vitriolic tongue, and Eustace was in a state of considerable nervous tension. Moreover, it would obviously be unsafe to let such a man as Adrian Gray retain a document that might, if produced, involve Eustace in some very difficult explanations, and I doubted whether my father was the type of man to let an advantage of this nature slip. Eustace would, of course, realise that. Possibly my father would gloat openly. The paper-weight lay close at hand. The conclusions the police—I presumed, of course, that this would be an affair for the police—and the family would arrive at would, I hoped, be too obvious to admit of discussion.

On my way to the door I detached the leaf of the calendar for Christmas Eve. The quotation was “Wealth is of the mind, not of the pocket.” The new quotation said, “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” I looked round for a final glance to see if there was anything I had left undone. This was my last chance. Amateur criminals, they say, usually leave some glaring piece of evidence behind them, and their careful work is seldom appreciated. Anything I left now would betray me to the experts. Probably I should not enter this room again till all the formalities were over. I felt extraordinarily sleepy and foolish, and, to keep myself awake, I took up a round black ruler and twisted it in my fingers. When I put it down, I did not attempt to rub it clean of finger-prints. It would be less suspicious to leave some trace of my presence in the room, since I had no intention of denying the interview. The whole family is aware of my trick of taking up any convenient object and handling it while I talk. It is one of the pegs on which they hang their various objections to my character. Indicative of the restless temperament that is never satisfied, they tell one another; no self-control. Then it occurred to me that I might add a little to the general mystification by opening one of the windows; that might suggest the alternative of a criminal from outside. Moreover, it is precisely the type of thing Eustace would do, in such circumstances.

I was surprised to find that it was snowing heavily. And with the snowfall the wind had dropped. Outside, everything was deathly still. There were no lights to be seen; even the snow looked dim. Nor was there a sound inside the house or beyond it.

I decided to switch off the light. If I left it on, it would be discovered by some officious servant, descending early, and the story that was already maturing in my mind depended on my seeing some of the family before the discovery was made. Besides, I was sure Eustace would switch it off. It has always struck me as strange that a man who launches out into his dangerous schemes should have so narrow an imagination. I’ve tested it more than once, and never without a fresh stab of surprise that an ingenuity—I won’t call it a mind—that can evolve these fantastic plans for picking other men’s pockets should be practically blindfolded most of the time.

I was fortunate in meeting no one as I crept upstairs. My room was at the end of a corridor. This is an oddly built house, low and L-shaped, the short arm of the L comprising the servants’ quarters and store and box rooms. As I shut my bedroom door, I seemed to shut all my alarm and terrors outside. I put the thought of what I had done behind me. Whatever mistakes I had made, it was too late to rectify them now. I have the same sensation when I finish a picture. I’ve never messed about with a canvas. When it’s done I let it go. If I want to do something better, I start afresh.

Switching on my light, I saw that against the blind in one of the servants’ rooms a light still burned. I took it for a feeble gas-jet, though it might have been a candle. (It’s indicative of the position of the servants in my father’s house that, when electricity was installed, their rooms retained the old-fashioned gas.) I began to wonder why she stayed up so late, considering that to-morrow would be a heavy day. And what she was doing sitting there so quietly at the window when the rest of the house was abed.

This problem, trifling though it was, intrigued me. I walked across to my own window, that I flung open, dislodging a soft shower of snow. The shadow on the blind moved, the blind was shifted, and I saw a white figure lean forward a little. She had no interest in me—I was sure of that. But “She can’t have a lover in this joyless house” I marvelled, and then some quite material explanation occurred to me, such as tooth-ache, or perhaps she was mending clothes, or even, possibly, she was devout, though I found it hard to believe that such devotion would keep her awake until two o’clock.

She pushed aside the blind and stared out at the snow, but it was too dark for me to distinguish her face. On my rare visits here the servants are always new, and I never pay any heed to them—except Moulton, of course, who has been here for twenty years. I could see that the girl had something in her hand, which by its shape I took to be a book. Her dark shadow, the straight lines of her dress, her artless pose, gave her the appearance of some mediæval figure—say, the Spirit of Christmas. She stood there without stirring for some minutes. Then something startled her. Perhaps she caught sight of my light. Anyway the blind dropped back into place, and she disappeared. A moment later the light was extinguished.

The sight of her had excited and stimulated me, not in any physical way, but in my mind. She seemed the antithesis of the body downstairs, even when that body was quick with life. She was young and vigorous, and, if she had been reading, she was sufficiently steeped in life to lay aside all those tiresome duties that held her during the day, and enter into the new world that books do open for one, even the silliest and most dangerous. So that I continued to stand there, forgetting I had been tired and had meant to collapse immediately on to the bed, thinking of her, not as an individual, but as the symbol of a new hope. I was sorry she had gone, but the memory of her pleased and invigorated me.

Then, for a time, I watched the snow. It had already obliterated landmarks that had been familiar to me since childhood, piling itself softly on my sill; I went to the bed presently and lay down, still watching it fall. It fascinated me in its beauty, its silence, and its persistence. There was no light in my room now—I had switched off the electricity—but the reflection of the snow, and by this I could just distinguish the outlines of the severe ramshackle furniture. The events of the evening, though chiefly, I think, the sight of that girl at the window, had kindled the creative flame in me, and I fell to wondering about the furniture—the carved mahogany dressing-table, with its haughty mirror, its curled claw-feet. How much had that glass reflected, what had the drawers held? I pictured to myself all the scenes that had perhaps occurred in this room, the whole gamut of the emotions the walls had witnessed—passion, despair, misery, patience, joy. A procession of dead and gone Grays and all the nameless guests this room had housed, and who would never forget it because of some occasion of heartbreak or ecstasy it represented, filed past me. And at the end of the procession, perhaps, myself. The murderer. One of them might have been a murderer too, for all I could tell. And I wondered if a member of a later generation, lying wakeful on some crucial night, as I lay wakeful now, would have any conception of the emotions that racked me. I turned over and traced the faded blossoms on the wallpaper with a critical finger. I thought, “These I shall never forget, these lilac roses that never grew on bush or spray, gathered in baskets and tied with true lovers’ knots, never forget their moulding, the fantastic shape that would give a botanist nightmare.” To-night they had a certain life of their own. My own vitality possessed them. I knew it would be hours before I should sleep. Nevertheless I began to undress slowly in the dark. To a man who knows no privacy these minutes of solitude were exquisite. At home there was always Sophy and often a sickly child whose cot was dragged in and put in the inadequate space at the foot of our bed. I thought, if I were a rich man I would often spend nights in hotels for the joy of knowing myself immune from disturbance. To sleep under the same roof as even those to whom you are inescapably tied destroys the charm, though you have a whole private suite. There is always the possibility of invasion by those who have the right to interrupt your privacy. Now for a few hours I was free. When I had undressed I returned to the window; there were trees beyond the glass soughing a little in the subdued wind, and I reflected that there were also trees within, trees that had been carved, hacked, disciplined into unnatural shapes for the service of men, who would shape to their own pleasure everything they touch, including their own kind. So powerfully enticed was my imagination that it seemed to me the noise of the branches came from within rather than without. It would scarcely have surprised me if the tallboy had blossomed into green buds and the chairs burst into leaf. My imagination does this to me sometimes, transporting me into a sphere of pure delight, when the sense of beauty ceases to have any shape or even to pronounce itself as beauty at all, but is a natural environment. But naturally one remains outwardly cold, savage, and morose, in case that treasure, too, is looted.

Out in the darkness, prowling through the snow, I caught a glimpse of twin sparks of green light, the eyes of a wandering cat. I loved it as it moved silently through the dark, disdaining that security that humans and dogs crave, and roaming fearlessly as it would. A line I had read somewhere returned to my mind: “Plundering the secret richness of the night”; a type, I thought, watching those eyes flame at me, and conscious of their heat, of all the unhouselled adventurers of the earth—Cyrano, Traherne, a nameless host, men and women who didn’t want the security my family holds so dear, preferring the unattainable and the unknown.

The cat vanished, seeking its adventure, leaving me to brood on its strange silent appearance. My thoughts slipped irrelevantly from one thing to another, touching different levels, like water dropping from shelf to shelf of rock. I thought about cats. Black ones were popular emblems for Christmas cards. One saw them in ridiculous postures, conveying good wishes in every conceivable manner, from the merely absurd to the insipid and vulgar. There was an enormous grey Persian cat, I remember, that used to fill the window of an undertaker’s establishment in Paris. There was a thin dirty little tabby that howled outside our Fulham windows every night, until in desperation we took it in, and it promptly loosed its fleas on the children. There was the legend of the Cat that walked alone; and that carried me on to the Christmas stories of Michael Fairless, and brought keenly back to recollection a Christmas I spent when I was fifteen in Germany (one of those exchange arrangements by which the youth of both nations are supposed to learn the other’s language). It had been like a fairy story, all of a piece with the painted waxen angels on bright Christmas-trees, the effigies of the Holy Child in innumerable neat mangers, the glittering balls; the donkeys, oxen, and shepherds; windows full of strange-shaped cakes, decorated with gilt bells, Santa Klaus in red and gold and green cloaks, trimmed with fur, a model of a reindeer sleigh loaded with presents, crackers and bonbons, round smiling faces and tight flaxen plaits. It was a long cry from the joyous innocence of that festival to the cynical show we made of it at King’s Poplars, where it became a day of suppressed jealousy and gluttony and criticism, of secret valuations of presents and calculations as to what one had made or lost on one’s personal expenditure.

My thoughts now seemed to move simultaneously in both directions, back to the ardent past, forward to the hopeful future. The snow drifted through the window on to the clothes I had flung on to a chair. I saw this and smiled. So much at ease did I feel, I was like an athlete at the end of a hard race. Already I had achieved. That was the effect of my first murder on me.

Presently I heard the clock strike four. Then I fell asleep. It was Christmas Day, I had my plan in readiness, and I was full of hope.