The office clock struck five. Mr. Loomis looked up at it and frowned. Mr. Loomis hated and feared five o’clock as most men fear death. And for him it was the death of each day’s life since it meant leaving the office. It was only in the office that Mr. Loomis felt himself a man of stature and importance.
He closed his ledger and with a little sigh carried it over to the safe. He spent as long as he could tidying up his already meticulous desk. He arranged his pencils in a neat row, first vertical then changing them to horizontal; he shuffled his inkpots and next went to fetch his hat and coat. As he appeared from the cloakroom, wearing his old bowler and his black coat with its worn velveteen collar, he looked like any tired little man in post-blitz London. His moustache was frayed like his cuffs; his front teeth needed attention; and he stooped too much for a man of fifty.
His office day was over. Now there remained only the pleasure of saying good night to Miss Henderson. Mr. Loomis hastened his footsteps slightly as, passing downstairs, he saw there was still a light in Mr. Tinker’s office. Rose Henderson was secretary to the president. She was also sales manager and occasionally—for Tinker & Smythe dealt largely in patent medicines for children—Mother’s Service Manager. The latter term was used when she signed letters dealing with the Croup Elixir or the Worm Eliminant which were two of the firm’s best sellers.
“Been kept busy, Miss Henderson?” It was the usual formula repeated almost daily for years.
“So so, Mr. Loomis. I’m just finishing off a few letters.”
Rose Henderson looked up and smiled, showing almost perfect teeth. Unfortunately they were her only really good feature. Her nose was too wide, and behind their rimless glasses, her eyes were too small. Her hair always looked like the nest of a clean but untidy heron. Nevertheless, Mr. Loomis liked her appearance.
In fact, being an incurable romantic, he had been perhaps a shade in love with her for quite a number of years. Oh, it was a perfectly respectable sentiment, for Mr. Loomis was very much a married man. Indeed, he would not have known Miss Henderson’s Christian name had he not, as the firm’s cashier, had to make out a salary check to Rose K. Henderson every month. Sometimes he wondered what the K. stood for.
It had all started with the faded snapshot of herself which Miss Henderson had shown to Mr. Loomis, just for a lark, about ten years ago, at the picnic celebrating Mr. Tinker’s wedding. It portrayed barelegged little Rosie Henderson at the age of eight, happily sucking a stick of candy rock on the sands of Burnham-on-Sea. Mr. Loomis had purloined this picture shamelessly and kept it face downwards in a locked drawer of his desk at home. Occasionally, he took it out and thought to himself how Miss Henderson, who must now be about forty, should by rights be the mother of several little girls who looked just like that. And perhaps he thought that if he and Miss Henderson …
But, no. It must be repeated that Mr. Loomis was married to a most estimable and faithful wife whose lips had never touched liquor, tobacco, or those of any man but her husband.
“Well, good night, Mr. Loomis.”
“Good night, Miss Henderson.”
Mr. Loomis put on his bowler again and passed out into the thick miasma which is Clerkenwell on a January evening. He saw with some satisfaction that there was quite a long queue waiting for the Pimlico bus. With any luck he would miss the first one, possibly the second, and thus delay the ineluctable moment when he would have to knock on his front door and find himself at home.
As he waited, his fingers ran mechanically through his pockets. The contents would have disgraced any self-respecting schoolboy. There were two lumps of sugar, the rock cake (twopence extra) carefully saved from his tea. There was also a cough lozenge, half a biscuit wrapped in an old invoice and two of the firm’s medium-sized manila envelopes. Into one of these Mr. Loomis squeezed his squirrel hoard with some satisfaction, for these fragments were offerings intended for the gratification of his most recently acquired “daughter.”
Mr. Loomis, a father who had missed his vocation, adored little girls. He had had scores of “daughters” and he had wooed them in scores of different ways. There was blue-eyed Lucy Green of the ringlets whose heart he had won with fretwork toys made secretly in his own tiny workshop. There was short-haired, freckle-faced Belinda Wren (now a mother herself) for whom he had ransacked his wife’s rag bag to make stuffed dolls and teddy bears. There were many others, plain and pretty, whose faces had lit up eagerly at the sight of Daddy “Bloomers.”
His latest love was Dinah Milton, who had recently come to live with her mother in the house next door. She was a wisp of a child with an appetite which would have done credit to a regiment of guardsmen. But Mr. Loomis saw her skinny little frame through rosy spectacles, for she reminded him a tiny bit—oh, such a tiny bit—of the little girl whose faded snapshot he kept locked in his drawer.
There was something particularly touching about Dinah’s greediness because the shortage of food in England was hard on hungry little girls. An added bond was the fact that Mrs. Loomis disapproved monumentally of the easygoing habits of Dinah’s mother. That she disapproved of Dinah herself went without saying. Mrs. Loomis’ childlessness had not made her sympathetic towards the offspring of others.
The bus disgorged Mr. Loomis at last and he made his way through the gloom of the familiar streets, past little brick houses, all alike, until he reached the one which was called his home.
He slowly climbed the steps and gave an almost inaudible rap on the knocker. He was not trusted with a latchkey of his own.
The door was opened by his wife, a large, not uncomely woman with a complexion, once peachlike, now purpling to damson plum.
“You’re late, Loomis,” she said in the voice of one who has said the same thing many times before. “Kept late at the office, I suppose?”
“No, no, my dear.” Mr. Loomis pecked hurriedly at the damson of his wife’s cheek. “It’s these bus queues. Really, I don’t know what London’s coming to.”
He moved crabwise to hang his coat and hat in the hall cupboard, fearful lest his wife’s X-ray eye might detect the contraband in his pocket.
“Well, don’t blame me if dinner’s burnt to a crisp.” Mrs. Loomis turned her broad back and flounced into the kitchen, while her husband made his way into the parlor, where he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lit the wall gas bracket. Electricity had not yet reached this particular section of London.
Mr. Loomis sat down gingerly on one of the hard chairs by the small gas fire which he did not dare to light until after the evening meal. He surveyed the room gloomily without noticing that it was, as usual, scrupulously clean and scrupulously tidy. He knew only that it was scrupulously dull.
His eyes settled on the framed wool text above the mantel—THOU LORD SEEST ME.
“Loomis, dinner’s on the table.”
Mr. Loomis rose obediently and after retrieving the manila envelopes from his overcoat in the hall closet, passed into the tiny dining room. There was a clean cloth on a neatly set table which bore a whale steak smothered with onions. There was also a dish of fried potatoes, another of Brussels sprouts, and bread, and margarine. It was as good a dinner, so Mrs. Loomis averred every evening, as they were sitting down to in Buckingham Palace.
It was also a familiar dinner. And his wife’s dinnertime conversation was equally familiar. Mr. Loomis only half listened as Mabel told of her indomitable prowess in pushing to the head of the butcher’s queue; of her tactical success in wheedling a little extra flour from the grocer; of the shocking moral laxity of her neighbors in general and, in particular, of Mrs. Milton next door.
“…bottles and bottles of beer … men at all hours of the day and night … that brat of hers … it’s my belief she’s no better than her mother. Sitting on our garden wall with her bare legs hanging down … at this time of year … bare skinny legs….”
While Mr. Loomis chewed his Antarctic steak, vague sentimental pictures passed through his mind of little Dinah Milton on the wall, waiting hopefully for the tidbits that he always tried to bring home for her. Incongruously, the bare skinny legs merged into another pair of childish legs as seen in a discolored photograph snapped at Burnham-on-Sea.
“Bare legs in January!” Mrs. Loomis had risen heavily and started to remove the plates. It was one of her many admirable qualities that she seldom allowed her husband in the kitchen. This virtue, however, rendered far more difficult Mr. Loomis’ task of stealing morsels for his insatiable pet cormorant next door. He took advantage of his wife’s absence to slip a small square of bread and margarine from his plate into the manila envelope in his pocket.
Mrs. Loomis returned from the kitchen bearing a dish of six delicious-looking jam tarts. As she withdrew again for the inevitable custard, her husband made some lightning calculations. Dare he risk stealing a tart now? No, Mabel was not, as he well knew, like the proverbial mother bird who can count only to two or three. Perhaps he could claim that an overwhelming greed had constrained him to pop one of them into his mouth without waiting for her. No, alas. For she knew only too well that greed was not one of his weaknesses and this would only be inviting suspicion.
But his luck was in. Mrs. Loomis was so carried away by the iniquities of Dinah and her mother that she noticed nothing. By the end of dinner Mr. Loomis had been able to secrete one and three-quarter tarts in the manila envelope.
Now every sensible wife will agree—and many who are not so sensible—that there comes a time in a man’s day, usually in the evening after supper, when he should feel free to go around to the nearest pub and discuss a game of darts with the boys over a pint or two of mild and bitter. But Mrs. Loomis believed that the place for the husband, when not safely in his office, was definitely at home. And Mr. Loomis, whether he believed it or not, was obliged to agree with her. This evening he sat in his chair before the now-lit gas fire and pretended to listen to his wife’s daily recital of her own perfections. In fact, he was not listening; his thoughts were wandering along unexpected and incurably romantic avenues.
Lately they had been walking these avenues with increasing frequency, but they had taken the first step into this make-believe land some years ago, after his wife had discovered the doll’s house he had made for little Lucy Green and had insisted on presenting it herself—not to Lucy Green, but to some orphanage which she helped piously to support. Mr. Loomis’ anger had been none the less violent for being unexpressed, nor had it been quick to fade. The next morning, as he took his ledgers out of the office safe, his eyes had settled on a small green bottle which stood on the poison shelf. On its label they had traced the word santonin.
Now Mr. Loomis was not a chemist, but he liked to think that his long association with Tinker & Smythe had given him a little more knowledge of drugs than that normally possessed by the layman. Mr. Loomis knew that minute quantities of santonin were used in the firm’s Worm Eliminant. He also knew that it was poison—a powerful but rarely used poison whose effects might well baffle the normal medical practitioner familiar with the toxic symptoms produced by arsenic, cyanide, or strychnine.
From that day on the small green bottle had become very important in Mr. Loomis’ daydreams. They were nothing but dreams, of course—daring fantasies in which, by some eccentric accident, the bottle of santonin and Mabel … These thoughts remained in Mr. Loomis’ mind as unfinished symphonies.
Now, as his wife’s voice ground relentlessly on, colored reveries floated before him—little Dinah Milton and a jam tart, little Rosie Henderson and the stick of candy rock, Mabel and the little green bottle….
At last the time came for Mrs. Loomis to retire, which left Mr. Loomis a chance to retire also—not at once to the conjugal bed, but to the small den which was the one place he could almost call his own. Here he was planning to prepare the parcels of scraps for delivery to Dinah Milton.
Just as he was entering the den, he heard his wife’s voice from the bathroom.
“Light the gas and the gas fire in the bedroom, Loomis. And shut the windows. It’s turned a bit nippy.”
Mr. Loomis did as he was bid and then, having also lit the gas bracket in his den, sat down at his small, homemade desk. With one ear cocked towards the bathroom, he drew out the manila envelopes and made two neat piles of the foodstuffs they contained. That done, he returned them to their envelopes which he wrapped around with string. Then, measuring off about ten feet of slack, he lowered the parcels out of the window so that they dangled a few feet above his wife’s chrysanthemum bed below.
With a pleasant tingle of excitement he gave a long, low whistle to signify to his young conspirator next door that the coast was clear.
Almost at once a small nightgowned form appeared at an open attic window in the Milton house.
“All right, Daddy Bloomers?” whispered Dinah.
For an answer Mr. Loomis jigged the food packages up and down on the end of the string, and Dinah disappeared from the window.
Mr. Loomis knew that this method of delivery was melodramatic and quite unnecessarily dangerous, but he employed it because it made him feel that he and Dinah were living in some fairy tale, a prince and princess banded together against the wicked ogress who might at any minute pop out and catch them red-handed. This was the only spice to his home-life; it brought a heightening of every sensation—somewhat similar to that which he had felt during the worst days of the London blitz.
At length a small white figure emerged from the back door of the Milton house. Dinah scrambled over the wall which separated the two gardens. Crouching in the shadows like an experienced commando, the little girl ran to the chrysanthemum bed where she trampled relentlessly over the plants in her eagerness.
Sitting angler-fashion at the window, Mr. Loomis felt a tug on his line and released the string. Immediately, he heard the kitchen door slam and his heart missed a beat as he saw the figure of his wife standing, large and formidable, in the narrow pathway, blocking Dinah’s sole avenue of escape.
For a moment the child stood irresolute; then, deciding to make a dash for it, she crouched again and ran under Mrs. Loomis’ outstretched arm.
But that lady was too quick for her. Sensing her opponent’s strategy, she pounced with surprising agility and grabbed Dinah by the tails of her flowing nightgown.
“Caught you, my fine miss,” she panted. “Trampling on my chrysanthemums.” She swung her free hand and delivered several hard slaps to Dinah’s face and head. “Thief! Wicked little thief!”
Quivering with outrage, Mr. Loomis shouted, but his voice did not seem to carry. He rushed into the bedroom, tugged open the window just above his wife’s head and cried: “Stop it, Mabel. Stop it at once! The child is not stealing. I told her she might come over.”
Surprised by this unexpected attack, Mrs. Loomis looked up, momentarily weakening her grasp. Dinah was quick to seize her opportunity. Wriggling herself free and leaving a large piece of her nightgown in her captor’s hand, she dropped her packages and made for the dividing wall as if all the trolls of Grimm and Andersen were after her.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute, Loomis.”
But Mr. Loomis’ only reply was to slam down the bedroom window. He hardly noticed that he shattered a pane of glass as he did so. Angrier than he had ever been in his life, he withdrew to his den for the inevitable encounter.
Soon Mrs. Loomis swept up the stairs, carrying two manila envelopes and trailing the string behind her like the tail of a comet. Her face was blotched with purple wrath.
“Food!” she screamed. “My food! Giving my food to that skinny little daughter of a cheap …”
The words exploded in a violent hiccough. Mabel had been addicted to hiccoughs recently and they were almost the only force strong enough to stem her overflowing indignation.
“It’s only scraps,” cried Mr. Loomis. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“Scraps! My jam tarts—scraps!”
Mrs. Loomis just managed to expel these words, but they were destined to be her swan song, for now a veritable hurricane of hiccoughing swept over her. Muttering something about: “My indigestion—now see what you’ve done,” she hiccoughed her way out of the den and into the bathroom where, Mr. Loomis knew, she was taking the sedative which Dr. Heather had prescribed for her last week. In a few moments he heard her go into the bedroom where she slammed and locked the door noisily behind her.
But Mr. Loomis felt by no means ready for bed. Indignation had given him unwonted courage. Those carefully hoarded morsels were meant for Dinah. Dinah should have them. He scooped up the crumbled remnants of food and put them back into the envelopes. Then, without even bothering to go on tiptoe past the bedroom door, he made his way down to the kitchen pantry where he found the two remaining jam tarts. Defiantly he put these also into one of the envelopes and proceeded to the house of his next-door neighbor.
His ring at the bell was answered by a rather pretty little woman with a crumpled pink dress and a great deal of crumpled pinkish hair. Her face was heavily made-up, but her eyes, smiling and friendly, gave her an expression of almost childish naïveté.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “You’re Mr. Bloomers from next door, aren’t you? Do come in.”
Mr. Loomis followed her into the hall, stammered an apology for his wife’s action, offered the manila envelopes for Dinah and expressed a hope that she was none the worse for the encounter.
“So that’s what all the shindig was about!” Mrs. Milton gave a careless laugh and peeped into one of the envelopes. “Oh, my! Jam tarts. What’s a box or two on the ears if you get jam tarts? I’ll pop ’em up to Dinah while you make yourself comfy in there.”
She indicated the open door of the living room which, when he entered it, was warm and cosy, smelling pleasantly like an inn parlor. The wireless was going merrily and there were several bottles of beer, some full, some empty, on the center table. An enormous man rose to his feet.
“Name of Potts,” he said, holding out a large, horny hand. “Al Potts and pleased to meet you.”
Mr. Loomis murmured his name and indicated that the pleasure was mutual.
“So you’re Bloomers, eh? Mamie’s Dinah don’t talk of nothing but her Daddy Bloomers.” Al Potts winked and poured out a tumbler of beer. “Here, have a drink, Bloomers.”
For a moment Mr. Loomis hesitated. He had not touched any alcoholic beverage since his fire-watching days. But this had turned out to be a new, reckless type of evening.
“Thank you, Mr. Potts. I could do with a drop.”
As he seated himself and sipped at his beer, Al continued: “She’s a greedy kid, Dinah, but you can’t blame ’em these days. We none of us get enough solids. But I myself am more of a one for the liquids.” He laughed heartily at his own joke and then drained his glass.
Mrs. Milton returned to the room. “Dinah says thank Daddy Bloomers and give him a big kiss.” She looked archly at Al. “What would you say if I was to do it, Al?”
Al grunted good-naturedly.
“And she sent another message to another party with words in it a kid didn’t ought to know, so I told her to hush her mouth and eat up her tarts.”
The beer was making Mr. Loomis a trifle giddy. “Mabel had no business to slap the child. I told her off myself. Yes, I told her off good and proper.” Mr. Loomis expanded his meager chest.
“You did?” queried Mamie admiringly.
“I certainly did. And she went off to bed and—she locked the door.”
Mamie said: “Well, I never.” Al refilled Mr. Loomis’ glass. As the warmth engendered by the beer increased, Mr. Loomis felt that the “telling-off” was worth enlarging upon. It was gratifying and unfamiliar to have a sympathetic audience. Their casual friendliness was most gratifying too. Soon they were all chatting with pleasant intimacy. Al, who was a smalltime contractor, expressed his dissatisfaction with current conditions in England and announced that he had decided to emigrate to Australia. With a broad grin he confided that he was trying to persuade Mamie to marry him and come along. Mamie laughed and called him “a card” and “a caution.” Later, after another round of beer, she sat on his lap. It was so free and relaxing. Mr. Loomis found it delightful.
And all the time, adding a touch of rhapsody, was the thought of the little girl, her hunger sated by jam tarts, curled happily asleep upstairs, dreaming, perhaps, of her Daddy Bloomers.
In his own happiness Mr. Loomis lost count of time and was only brought back to a sense of the hour when a voice on the wireless announced the familiar nightly message: “Residents of the Pimlico district are warned again that, because of the present coal crisis, the gas will be shut off at the main in three minutes—that is at eleven o’clock. Service will be resumed at five-thirty tomorrow morning. If your gas is on now—whether for lighting, cooking, or heating—turn it off immediately.”
“Well,” exclaimed Mr. Loomis in a happy haze, “eleven o’clock already, I declare. I had no idea.”
Despite his hostess’ coaxing offer of a nightcap, Mr. Loomis took his leave and let himself into his own cold, dark hall. The familiar chilliness and the knowledge that instead of the slumbering Dinah, Mabel lay asleep upstairs, did not cool his exhilaration. Mabel, he knew, would become a reality in the morning. But now was now. He groped his way up the stairs and through the darkness of his den to the couch, where he fell into a warm sleep.
Dreams of children lulled him all night, culminating with a dream in which he was walking on the sands of Burnham-on-Sea with Dinah clutching one hand and little Rosie Henderson clutching the other. Both little girls were sucking gay pink sticks of candy rock. They romped together on the sands; they paddled; they made castles; they rode donkeys.
Then something went wrong with the dream. A great purple cloud formed over the sea. It began to swoop towards them. The little girls, scuffing and dancing, seemed to notice nothing. Mr. Loomis knew that it was some new horrible form of gas invasion. He tried to shout out to warn them: “The gas … the gas …”
But his voice would not sound. He heaved himself up in a mighty effort to throw off the dream tentacles that held him immobile. Then, conscious of a bump, he woke up to find himself on the floor, having rolled off his narrow couch in his struggles.
Vaguely he looked at his watch and saw in the thin early light that it was twenty-five minutes to six. He sat up on the floor and sniffed. Still half in the dream, he was certain he could smell gas. All nonsense, of course. But was it nonsense? Mr. Loomis held his breath and listened. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He could detect a faint hissing from the neighborhood of the gas bracket above his desk. The smell was growing stronger, too. In a flash he remembered the unfamiliar pleasures of last night. Before going over to the Miltons’, he had lit the gas in his den, but in his rapturous return he had forgotten, since the company had stopped the flow, that the tap was still on. He ran to the wall and turned it off at the bracket. The hissing ceased. Then he threw the window wide open, admitting cold gusts of morning air.
Feeling shaky but rather important from such a near brush with disaster, Mr. Loomis put on his carpet slippers and dressing gown, went out into the passage, and closed the den door. As was his regular custom, he proceeded to the kitchen and filled the kettle preparatory to making morning tea, a cup of which he habitually took to his wife in bed.
As he applied a lighted match to the gas ring, another chord was struck in his memory. Last night, before the quarrel, he had, at his wife’s request, lit the gas fire in the bedroom. Mabel was a sound sleeper who fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. It was her invariable habit to leave the gas burning for him to turn off when he came to bed which, in normal circumstances, was far earlier than the gas company’s deadline of eleven o’clock. In addition, she had last night taken one of the sedatives prescribed by Dr. Heather. Even though she had locked the door against him, it was more than likely that she had fallen asleep without remembering to turn off the gas fire.
Acting on automatic reflex, Mr. Loomis was out of the kitchen in a twinkling and running anxiously up the stairs. He reached the bedroom door and standing breathless on the thick woollen mat at its threshold, tried the handle.
It did not yield.
“Mabel,” he called. “Mabel.”
There was no reply.
Mr. Loomis sniffed. His nostrils were still tainted by the odor of gas from the den, but there was unquestionably another leak here. It came from the crack beneath the bedroom door. Mabel always slept with the windows closed. She was lying in there suffocating to death.
“Mabel!”
Mr. Loomis rattled ineffectually at the doorknob and then spun around for something with which to break down the heavy wood panels. Panic came and went. Its place was taken by a strange feeling almost of awe, as if Mr. Loomis were in the presence of Destiny herself.
Mabel had locked the door against him. Mamie and Al were aware of this fact. It was Mabel herself who had been responsible for all the trivial little actions which had led to this moment. His private dream of the santonin bottle—even at its most roseate—had always involved some impossibly aggressive act from Mr. Loomis himself. But here was the dream in reality. By the obscure workings of Destiny, Mabel and the santonin bottle—disguised now as a gas fire—had met, and in such a manner that no overt act was demanded from him. No act, no courage, no skill—no risk.
For a long moment Mr. Loomis stood quite still. Slowly he felt a terrible secret pleasure stir and scurry through him like a mouse.
Deliberately, he stooped. He picked up the pink and brown mat, decorated with roses, which Mabel had worked on before the war. He pushed it forward so that it tightly blocked the air passage between the bottom of the door and the floor boards.
He stood for another moment, sniffing the pungent but diminished odor, feeling a sensation far headier than the fisherman’s thrill when Dinah had tugged at the string. Then he returned to the kitchen and made a pot of tea. He carried it into the living room and sat down with it in the least uncomfortable chair. The bleak morning light revealed the embroidered text hanging above the fireplace: THOU LORD SEEST ME. Mr. Loomis crossed to it and carefully turned its face to the wall. He sat down again and picked up his teacup.
He felt larger, somehow, than he had ever felt in his life.
One will never know—one cannot even imagine—what were the thoughts that passed through Dr. Crippen’s mind immediately after he had killed his wife and disposed of her remains in the cellar. One shudders from speculating on the images which drifted through the warped brain of George Joseph Smith after he had drowned his various brides in cheap tin bathtubs. The murderer’s mind is a closed book, not to be opened by the impious fingers of average citizens like ourselves who have perhaps never been tempted to perpetrate this, the most spectacular and usually the most heinous of all crimes. And so one cannot, one dare not, try to delineate with any accuracy the mental processes of Mr. Loomis as he sat there in his unfriendly but scrupulously tidy living room, sipping his second and then his third cup of early morning tea.
Perhaps he thought merely of the absurdly convincing story he would tell the authorities when they came to investigate; perhaps he brooded on the humiliations, the soul privations he had suffered at his wife’s hands; perhaps he dreamed of Miss Henderson, of a vaguely happy future with a dynasty of little girls which they might found together; or perhaps he merely toyed with the new, immensely exotic realization that he was a murderer—that by moving a mat rather than breaking a door, he had joined irrevocably that twilight confederacy of wife-slayers along with Crippen, Smith, Greenwood, Armstrong, and Landru.
As he sat there, while the noises of London started to clatter outside, he glanced every now and then at his watch. Six o’clock … six-twenty … six forty-five … Mabel always rose to make breakfast at seven. What would be thought later if her husband had not detected the disaster by that hour?
Mr. Loomis put down his teacup. He moved into the hall. He glanced nervously up the stairs. Anxiety, almost identical with genuine concern for his wife, seized him. Hardly knowing whether he was play-acting or not, Mr. Loomis rushed out of the house, ran to the Miltons’ front door, and started to bang on it. At length Mamie appeared in a crumpled wrapper, her pinkish hair dishevelled.
“Quick …” gasped Mr. Loomis. “My wife … gas … door locked. Phone Doctor Heather … quick.”
Mamie grasped an emergency. “Al, come down,” she screamed.
She was on the phone when Al rolled sleepily downstairs, buttoning his trousers as he came. In a few seconds the two men were back in Mr. Loomis’ house.
“This door here,” panted Mr. Loomis outside his wife’s room. “She locked it. I told you … the gas …”
He smelt the gas; he saw Al’s great bulk lurch against the locked door; he heard the hinges creak. But suddenly all this seemed a spectacle fulfilling itself in some remote region of space. Once again Al hurled himself against the door. Mr. Loomis heard the splintering of the wood, was conscious of a strengthening of the smell of gas.
Then, brown and pink, the roses of the mat loomed towards him and struck him in the face.
When he came to himself, he was lying on the small, uncomfortable sofa in the living room downstairs. He was conscious of mental confusion and a vague dread. He was conscious, too, of Mamie seated by him and bathing his aching forehead. Directly in his path of vision was the text above the mantel. Someone must have turned it around, for THOU LORD SEEST ME stared back at him.
“There, there.” He was aware of the pungent odor of spirits beneath his nostrils. “Come on now. Take a sip of this.”
Mr. Loomis gulped down a mouthful of brandy. He managed to ask: “Is—is Mabel all right?”
Mamie looked down at him and he saw that her good-natured brown eyes were filled with pity.
“It’s best you hear it from me instead of the doctor. She’s gone, poor soul.”
In the tangle of Mr. Loomis’ emotions the principal feeling was wonder. Mabel, the seemingly indestructible, was dead. The thing he had cherished as an impossible dream had actually happened. And now that he had helped to bring it about, he saw with perverse clarity that this was the only success of his life. He had failed as a husband and as a father: he had failed even to amount to anything really important at Tinker & Smythe. It had been left to him to find his true niche as a murderer.
A little murderer, perhaps, a mat-pushing murderer. But a successful one.
The secret joy, which had come at the moment when he first paused outside the bedroom door, seeped through him again. Who could say now that he was a poor little man?
Mamie had taken his hand and was murmuring to him vague inarticulate sounds of comfort. He yielded luxuriously to her pity.
A few moments later Dr. Heather entered the room. Mr. Loomis, who had not before seen his wife’s new physician, gathered an impression of a solemn young man with a formal face and a precise voice which said: “I want you to know, Mr. Loomis, that you have my deepest sympathy. I also want to reassure you. Mr. Potts has told me of your—ah—little domestic squabble last night. He is afraid that you may feel responsible for the fact that the gas was not turned off and hence for the—ah—tragedy itself.”
Mr. Loomis found the young man’s pedantic mode of speech difficult to follow. He sat up on the couch, peering in bewilderment.
“In the first place,” continued the doctor, “there was a pane of glass broken in the window. That in itself would have prevented a sufficient concentration of gas to prove lethal. But, as it happens, we may dismiss the gas. Your wife did not die from asphyxiation.”
Mr. Loomis at last understood the words and there rushed back to him a picture of himself the night before banging down the sash after he had shouted to Mabel from the window. Yes, of course, he had broken the pane. Blankly he ventured: “She didn’t die…?”
“Not from asphyxiation. As you know, your wife consulted me a few days ago for what she believed to be indigestion. I examined her and suspected a serious heart condition. I prescribed sedatives and advised her strongly against all exertion or excitement. The episode with the little girl last night must have proved too much for her. She must have had a heart attack soon after she locked herself into the bedroom. She had certainly been dead several hours before the gas started to escape.”
Mr. Loomis, listening and understanding, began to shiver. Mamie put a consoling arm around him.
“And so,” went on Dr. Heather in the tone he had cultivated for sad occasions, “you have no reason to blame yourself for negligence. And, if on the strength of your little disagreement last night, you should be in doubt as to your wife’s affections, I can lay your mind at rest on that score also. When I informed her of her heart condition, she insisted that no mention should be made to you. You had your worries at the office, she said. She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety.” He laid a rather cold hand on Mr. Loomis’ sleeve. “She was a good woman.”
There was more—much more. Dr. Heather seemed to talk interminably about a death certificate, about the fact that an inquest would not be necessary, about funeral arrangements. There were countless telephone calls and through it all, Mamie and Al, friendly and comforting, handled everything. Mr. Loomis, coddled with cups of tea and nips of brandy, got through the day in a state of suspended animation.
But at last it was all over and he was alone. He stood in the middle of the room with his arms limp at his sides. The grey evening light, peering through the window, seemed to muse over the framed wool text above the mantel. Suddenly, feeling started again with the violence of a bullet tearing through his flesh.
He had not been a success as a murderer.
He had been a grotesque failure. Mabel had died, as she had lived, on her own initiative. He had been a foolish little man, inflated with self-importance, pushing a mat around ineffectually as a child might push a toy.
The doctor’s voice came back to him: She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety. She was a good woman.
Mr. Loomis felt dry and hollow as an autumn seedpod. He gazed in agony at the text in front of him.
It was a lie. Even God couldn’t see him. He was too small.
Everyone was very kind. Tinker & Smythe insisted upon a two weeks’ vacation. Miss Henderson wrote a little note of condolence. Dinah Milton, now that the ogress was laid to rest in the Pimlico cemetery, gambolled at will between the two houses. Since Mamie, at best a slipshod mother, was more and more preoccupied with Al, there were blissful hours in which Mr. Loomis could take the little girl walking in Kensington Gardens and gorge her at Lyons’ Tea Shops.
Gradually he began to believe that the Destiny, which had denied him stature, might also yield him rewards.
But on the last night of his holiday, after he had read Dinah to sleep with Black Beauty, this new budding hope was brutally destroyed. Al and Mamie, their faces shining with happiness and beer, announced the fact that Mamie had finally decided to marry Al. They would emigrate together. The boat for Australia was sailing soon and Al’s papers would suffice for his wife and Dinah.
Mr. Loomis managed to twitter his congratulations, but as he lay sleepless and alone in his conjugal bed, he felt all the pangs of disenchantment. Dinah had been a shining prize dangled before him only to be snatched away. The future stretched ahead of him bitterly empty.
But slowly, daringly, the thought of Rose Henderson came to comfort him. Romantic images stole through him as he tossed against the pillows. Miss Henderson looking up from her desk, showing her fine white teeth in a smile of pleasure at his return next day to the office. Miss Henderson’s shy acknowledgment as he thanked her for her letter. Miss Henderson, perhaps, across the table from him in a little restaurant. Oh, Mr. Loomis, all these years I’ve waited, but I never thought …
Why not? Why shouldn’t it happen? Hadn’t the dream of the santonin bottle come true? These new fantasies explored the future with a delicious sense of certainty.
Mr. Loomis crept out of bed and fumbled the photograph from his wallet. He did not need to turn on the gas to remember every detail of that childish body, those wistful eyes and the solemn face absorbed with the candy rock.
He put the photograph under his pillow and drifted into a soothing sleep.
At precisely a quarter to two the next afternoon Mr. Loomis passed the open door of Mr. Tinker’s office and saw, as he had hoped, that Miss Henderson was standing by the desk, sorting papers. He stepped across the threshold and she glanced up. “Oh, Mr. Loomis, I didn’t see you.”
Mr. Loomis wasn’t seeing her, either. He was seeing something which he had built out of dreams, a never-never-land creature at once a little barelegged girl and the mother of other little barelegged girls yet to come.
“I wish to thank you for your letter of sympathy, Miss Henderson. I deeply appreciated it.”
Miss Henderson flushed a heavy pink. “Oh, of course I had to write.”
It was all beginning in a fashion so similar to Mr. Loomis’ imaginary dialogue that he drifted even farther into unreality. He was not the recently widowed cashier and she was not Miss Rose K. Henderson, Mother’s Service Manager. They were characters in a debonair romance.
“I was wondering, Miss Henderson, if you would do me the great pleasure of dining with me one night.”
Miss Henderson’s flush was an unbecoming carmine now. “Well, I mean, I am sure it would be very nice. But I live with my mother. She’s old and not very strong. I always …”
“A little French restaurant,” continued Mr. Loomis, his mating gallantry undisturbed. “In Soho perhaps. A quiet little dinner. Wine?”
Miss Henderson patted nervously at the heron’s nest above her thick spectacles. “Wine? I never touch wine, Mr. Loomis. And, really, I mean, isn’t it rather premature? So soon, I mean, after your wife …”
“I have kept this,” confided Mr. Loomis, producing the photograph from his wallet. “A dear little girl with bare legs.”
“Really!” Miss Henderson snatched the photograph from him. “Really, Mr. Loomis!”
The tone of her voice edged into Mr. Loomis’ reverie. Dimly he was aware that the dialogue was not progressing as it should. He blinked and, actually looking at her for the first time, saw the awkward flush, the eyes, prudish and outraged behind the opaque lenses, watching him as if suspicious of his sobriety.
“Miss Henderson, I was not suggesting anything …”
“Really, Mr. Loomis, this is most embarrassing. I think it would be better if we forgot the whole episode.”
There they were. The words were spoken. They could not be taken back. Mr. Loomis accepted their inevitability, and with that clarity which now seemed so often to plague him, he realized that this last dream had also been meaningless. It was too late to search for the little girl of the photograph in the barren, middle-aged spinster which was the reality of Rose K. Henderson—thirty years too late.
“Yes, Miss Henderson,” he said meekly, much as in the old days he had said: “Yes, Mabel.”
Still icily clear in his mind, he returned to his own office, and sat down behind his open ledger. Dinah was gone; little Rosie Henderson was only a faded photograph. For the first time he realized that in losing his wife he had lost the only thing he had ever really had. For all her acrimonies, her scoldings, Mabel had been a frame for existence. Without the frame was blankness. Perhaps, if he had killed her, there might have been some perverse sense of achievement to support him. But he had only tried to kill her, failed, and lost her anyway.
Mr. Loomis made an effort to reach some communion with the ledger entries which had once been his friends. But even they eluded him and he began gropingly to see that his love of his work at Tinker & Smythe had been inextricably tied to his dread of homegoing. Now that dread was removed and replaced by—nothing.
Mr. Loomis struggled with the ledger. For hours, it seemed, he poured over a single column until the precise little pounds, shillings, and pence danced before his eyes like midges.
It was no good. He closed the book and carried it automatically to the safe. He swung open the door and put the ledger in its appointed place. As he did so, his eyes fell on the poison shelf—on the little green bottle of santonin crystals.
He knew at once what to do. It was as if the next step, which had never figured in his daydreams at all, was something he had rehearsed a thousand times. He took down the bottle, shook crystals into his palm, and replaced the bottle on its shelf. Carefully he closed the safe and went down the passage to the washroom. The crystals dissolved quickly in the paper cup of water. Mr. Loomis raised the cup to his lips and drank.
As he felt the bitter taste in his mouth, a tingle almost of relief passed through him. Perhaps, vaguely, he realized that here at last was an enterprise at which he could not fail.
After he had dropped the empty cup into the wastebasket, Mr. Loomis returned to his own office and sat down to wait. He was without feelings now. He had read somewhere that the first symptom of santonin poisoning was a visual illusion in which everything seemed tinged with yellow.
On the wall in front of him was a calendar. He had hardly noticed it before. A charming little thatched cottage nestled on the bank of a millpond. A small boy—or was it a small girl?—sat fishing on the flowery brink of the water. Evening light lulled the whole scene in a placid golden glow …
Mr. Loomis was perfectly aware of the fact that someone had entered the room. He even knew it was Miss Griffin, one of the junior typists, and when she said: “There’s a gentleman to see you. Shall I send him in?” he heard her and nodded his assent. Both Miss Griffin and the office were beautiful, bathed in the golden sunset of the calendar.
When Miss Griffin’s sparse figure was replaced by that of a large, burly man, Mr. Loomis immediately recognized Al Potts. He didn’t wonder why Al should be standing there in his office. It only surprised him mildly that Dinah’s stepfather-to-be should shine with such a heavenly light.
“Well, Bloomers, hope you don’t mind me barging in this way.” Mr. Loomis heard the words distinctly and once again gave his regal nod.
“I wanted to catch you before you got home. There’s been a kind of to-do and I’ve come to ask a favor.”
Al was shifting his weight from one large foot to the other—a dancing bear in a world of gold.
“It’s this way, Bloomers. Mamie and me broke the news to Dinah today and she’s taken it real bad. Been carrying on all afternoon, bawling that she won’t go to beastly old Australia, that she won’t ever leave her Daddy Bloomers.”
Mr. Loomis was light as a piece of paper, floating up, up. But he listened and happiness floated with him.
“Can’t do a thing with her,” continued Al Potts, “and while she was bawling, Mamie and me got to thinking. To begin with life’s going to be pretty rugged; no time, no place really for a kid. So we was wondering, seeing Dinah’s so head over heels in love with her Daddy Bloomers, we was wondering if you’d let us leave her with you, say for a year—till we get settled …
“If you was to say yes, it would be a real act of friendship,” concluded Al Potts, “and it’ll make Dinah the happiest little monkey in the world.”
The joy was so intense now that it was almost an agony. Everything was gleaming—gleaming gold. Dinah wouldn’t leave her Daddy Bloomers. Dinah was going to be his after all. The gold was sand, a vast stretch of golden sand by the summer sea. Dinah was jumping and prancing, her pigtails flying, the gulls curving above her in the gentle golden sky. Look, she had turned! She was running towards him and as she ran, there was another golden child running with her, a solemn little girl clutching a stick of rock.
Laughing, sporting, Dinah and Rosie came nearer and nearer. In ecstasy Mr. Loomis stretched out his hands to them.
“Hey, Bloomers,” shouted Al Potts, “what’s up? What’s the matter?”
“Happy.” Mr. Loomis’ outflung arms sank onto the desk. “So happy …”
As his head dropped forward onto his hands, the office clock struck five.