A Man of Forty (24 page)

“I see. Thank you,” said Spencer. “ Forgive me for interrupting your story. You were just going to tell us about the murder, I fancy?”

Trewin said gently : “ Tell us precisely what happened. That will be the best way.”

“It was a kind of accident,” said Lydia. “ But, yes, I did it, and I'm not trying to get out of it. I suppose I was mad at the time. Everything went black for a moment, and then, there he was, lying on the floor in a… well, you know, you've seen him.” She put up her hands, covering her eyes. “ I didn't know whether he was dead or not. I… touched him. I spoke. And then… then I ran away. I wasn't in the room more than a minute.”

Trewin repeated in a tone of mild astonishment : “ You weren't in the room more than a minute?”

“Did I say that?” said Lydia. “ I meant, not more than a minute after I… after he fell. We had a quarrel. He'd done me, us, my stepdaughter, a great injury. He'd behaved very badly indeed. When I reproached him he insulted me, and…” Her voice trailed off into silence.

“And…?” said Trewin.

“I've told you,” she cried, with sudden passion. “ Must I keep on telling you?”

“ We've got this far,” said Trewin. “ You reproached him with his bad conduct towards your stepdaughter. And then he insulted you. Whereupon ... what did you do?”

“I… everything went black,” stammered Lydia.

“Ah, yes,” said Trewin. “ Everything went black, to be sure. That's where that piece comes in. And so you ran away, and presently, after worrying it over, you rang up Dr. Grove from a call-box in Hanford Road, thinking that if by any merciful chance the poor laddie had not yet succumbed to his injuries, as the phrase goes, he'd maybe respond to medical attention.”

“Yes,” said Lydia.

“But, look here——” began Spencer.

“Permit me, Mr. Spencer,” said Trewin, raising a forefinger. “ There's still one little point you haven't touched on, Mrs. Brome. You've told us when you killed him. You've told us why you killed him. But you haven't told us
how
you killed him.”

Lydia sat silent, with averted face. She knew she could not bear much more of this questioning. She wished passionately that they would take her away and lock her up without further talk. She had confessed : what more did they want? She wondered, with anguish, where David was at this moment; and with bitter self-reproach she wished she had spent those two hours, her last of hours of freedom, in finding out when the boats left for France, instead of inviting disaster by telephoning to Dr. Grove. In her heart she had known he was dead, hadn't she? But no, it had been impossible to
know,
impossible not to hope there was still a chance, impossible to let him lie there untended. And these three impossibles had brought her to where she was, and might, unless she were very careful and cunning, have con-sequences even more disastrous.

“You haven't yet told us
how
you killed him,” Dr. Trewin repeated.

“You must know that without being told,” she answered sullenly.

“Nevertheless,” said Spencer, “ we should like you to tell us.”

“Oh, why must you go on tormenting me?” Lydia cried. “ I'm tired to death.”

“Let me help you to answer the question accurately,” said Trewin. “ Look, Mrs. Brome; Have you ever seen this before?”

In the hand he held out to her lay a very neat, very bright little pistol : small enough to be carried conveniently in a lady's handbag.

Lydia stared : first at the pistol, then at Trewin.

“Well?” said Trewin. “ Do you recognize it?”

Lydia nodded. Her heartbeats thumped in her ears.

“It is yours?”

“Yes.”

“And this is what you killed Mr. Swinford with?”

“Yes,” said Lydia.

“Dear me, dear me!” said Trewin. “ And no sign of a bullet-wound.”

“What did you say?”

Spencer took command again. “ The deceased wasn't killed with a gun at all. Now look, Mrs. Brome, you've done your best, or your worst, and we're not blaming you. But it'll save a lot of trouble all round if you help me find your husband. We shall find him sooner or later, with or without your help. But you don't want to be charged with being an accessory, I suppose?”

“I don't know why you should suppose that, Spencer,” said Trewin, with a bland smile, “ seeing that she's done her best to be charged with being the principal.”

Stevenage suddenly said : “ If you'll take my advice, ma'am, you'll answer no more questions.”

“What I said about being charged as an accessory,” said Spencer, “ goes for you too, Stevenage, if you obstruct the police.”

“Wives and husbands,” Stevenage continued, “ can't be forced to give evidence against each other. That's the law, that is.”

“You read too many detective tales, my friend,” said Spencer sourly.

“One too many for you, sir, I daresay,” agreed Stevenage.

Lydia rose to her feet, as if to go. “ There's one thing I'll tell you about my husband. If I knew where he was I'd tell you that, but I don't. If he's not at home I don't know where he is.”

“Well, madam?” said Trewin.

“Yes, there's one thing I can tell you, and that's this. He hasn't been himself lately. I've been very anxious. I'm afraid he's a little… unbalanced. Mentally, I mean.”

“Yes, yes,” said Trewin soothingly. “ That'll doubtless be the ultimate line of defence. It's a point, you may be sure, that will be very carefully looked into, when the time comes.”

But the time delayed its coming. Five days were to pass before David Brome could be found, and meanwhile——

It would be no bad thing, I feel, to insert here another chapter about Mrs. Parzloe at Bell Green : again washing up, again hearing a knock at the front door, again thinking that perhaps this was the bit of good news she was always vaguely expecting. To repeat that pattern, with significant variations, would serve to bring out Mrs. Parzloe's special quality. A spirit of pleased expectation keeps her nimble and eager from day to day, and since it relates to nothing in particular, and so cannot suffer disappointment, it survives any number of disasters, small and large. Survives and will survive : I must make that clear, or the tender-hearted reader, if there is such a person in these days, will find her story intolerable. Intolerable it is, to the onlooker ; and bad enough, God knows, for Mrs. Parzloe herself; but she will live through it and remain inwardly unsmutched. She will descend into hell; she will suffer bewilderment and desolation; but being herself a wellspring of charity and humour she will not, after the first shock, be over-surprised at the lack of these things in others. Fifty years of seeing the funny side of things won't make it funny to be sent to prison for doing a simple kindness to Lily Elver ; but the fun, grim or gay, of being alive so long, the what-d'you-call-it of being Katie Parzloe and having or not having Arthur for a husband and pretty proud Bertha for a daughter, has somehow deprived her of the power, if ever she had it, of bearing malice. She is safe, therefore, from the worst disaster, the poison in the mind ; and, frightened and forlorn though she must be, she's not likely to take an overdose of self-pity.

The visits of these two men, who have a cab outside in which they invite her to go with them to “ the station,” follows logically enough upon that other visit, the first of several that Lily Elver paid her. Lily paid her not only visits, alas, but small sums of money as well : very small sums indeed they were, as the prosecution, which perhaps didn't much like its job, was the first to point out. (That was at the police court.) Mrs. Parzloe had a struggle to make ends meet, having the house to keep going and, apart from odds and ends of charing, only an occasional ill-paying or non-paying lodger to keep it going with ; Lily, on the other hand, earned, as she insisted, good money for her age ; and there were expenses which had to be met, including the cost of something which Counsel for the Crown, before Mr. Justice Rump, referred to as “ an instrument,” modestly lowering his voice as he uttered the sinister syllables. Sorry he really was,
because with a plea of Guilty before him he had no interest in piling it on, and it was notorious that the ancient Rump, a venerable figure and a brilliant lawyer, with a mind beautifully tempered to impartiality in judgment of evidence, was yet a raw savage, demon-haunted and vindictively self-righteous, in his attitude to sex. But there it was in the Crown's brief : no dodging it. All that the Crown could do, and did, was to say that the prisoner, whose previous character seemed to have been excellent, had made little or no attempt to prevent the crime being brought home to her, and that the young woman Elver had made a rapid and complete recovery.

I don't think there's any point in telling the whole affair in detail : the investigation, the arrest, the charge, the committal, and all the incidentals. It would be impossible to do so without approaching the neighbourhood of the not quite nice. Lily herself was a prude where print was concerned : she liked her fiction guaranteed free from any infection of reality. She was profoundly grateful, however, to Mrs. Parzloe. In fact, Lily's gratitude was Mrs. Parzloe's undoing. Afterwards, when she heard what had happened, she blamed herself bitterly for giving Edith that letter to post, though she couldn't in reason have been expected to know that Edith Camshaw had a secret mission to extirpate sin from the earth. Sin, for poor Edith, meant always sex. She had, I suppose, her own reasons for equating the two ; but those reasons would be largely hidden from herself, and I should get no thanks for probing into them. In this matter she was at one with Mr. Justice Rump. He, better than most, and better far than the police, who at first showed little eagerness to act on her information, would have understood her motive and applauded her punitive zeal. He believed, as she did, that only by continual hacking at the root of all evil could life be kept in a state of passable decency. What the Rumps and the Camshaws feel on this point follows logically, or pathologically, from what they are.

Yes, it would be both dreary and painful to tell the story in detail. Nor could I bear to dwell on Mrs. Parzloe's feelings : her childlike surprise, her fears, her foolish hopes, her idiotic confidence that since she hadn't meant any harm, and in fact hadn't done any, not to
say
harm, she would be let off with a good talking-to. Not that that wasn't bad enough : a person couldn't help feeling the disgrace of it and the loneliness, could they? But she could face that, since she'd got to. What she couldn't at once bring herself to face were the alternatives or additions to a good talking-to. It never occurred to her that the magistrate wouldn't dispose of the whole business, one way or the other : and when they told her she had got to stay in prison until the
time came for her to go through it all in another court, and before a judge this time they said (trying, not unkindly, to make it sound like a treat), she did, there's no denying it, cry a little. She stood hunched up in a corner of her cell and cried to herself, quietly for the most part, but with an occasional little half-stifled squeak such as you may hear from small children in a similar plight. However, it was soon over. “ Just look at
me
!” she said. There was no one to look at her just then. She was alone, and likely to be so for some time. Well never say die. Maybe things'll come right in the end. If it wasn't for the disgrace to Bertha… she'll take it hard, Bertha will.

She was grateful to everybody for not being unkind to her, and she was grateful beyond measure to the young man who undertook to defend her. Such a nice gentleman he was, not at all cross, though she wasn't paying him a penny piece. Cautious though he was in what he promised her, it was his cheerfulness, you might almost call it breeziness, that fortified her silly, stubborn hope. With one like him to speak for her, it was as good as certain that the judge would understand, and let her off with a caution. And so it seemed, when the moment came. With a wardress each side of her she ascended the stairs that emerged suddenly, dramatically, into the middle of the court-room, into the wide dock. And there, opposite, was the judge in his scarlet. And there, below, facing the jury-box on her left, was a handsome, severe young man in wig and gown whom she recognized, but only just, as nice Mr. Robinson. And another, rather like him but older, sat on the same seat with him, side by side. She stood as straight as she could ; trapped now, and trembling ; very glad of the presence of those nice wardresses. A third bewigged personage, at a word from the judge, told her she might sit down ; and then one of the high-up ones, not Mr. Robinson, was on his feet and telling the judge all about her. Tears came into her eyes as she listened to him, so kind he was, never a harsh word.

After him, came Mr. Robinson, to say how sincerely sorry she was, to repeat and emphasize what had already been said of her good character, to point out that the lamentable crime had been committed not for gain but from a mistaken idea of kindness, to stress the fact that Miss Elver was physically (he would not say morally) none the worse for her experience, and to submit, with great respect, that the prisoner having already suffered much in distress of mind, and spent some little time in custody, this was a case in which his lordship might consider it proper, and consistent with his duty, to decide that she had already been sufficiently punished for a crime which he, Counsel, it went without saying, did not for a moment attempt to excuse in itself
but haying regard to the comparatively innocent intention, or rather, to put it another way, to the absence of any mercenary motive, he did venture to urge… and so on and so on.

Perhaps he said too much. But whatever he had said or not said would have made no difference. “ In view of what learned counsel has urged on your behalf,” said Rump, “ I am going to be very lenient with you, very lenient indeed. You will go to prison for twelve months.” He said much more than that, though it hurt him to speak of a crime so abominable ; but that was the conclusion of the matter. Twelve months.