Part 2

She had a curiously deep and individual voice, and one can fall in love with a voice at first hearing, as I did. While we inspected the sorry and dismembered collation, each drawn, quartered and impaled remnant fluttering in the breeze, I appraised her. I had learned bitterly to distrust women’s looks, so I paid little attention to her physical attributes. It was a certain combination of sweetness and intelligence, of gentleness and determination, and her all-pervading rightness, which lulled and soothed and stirred and excited me. She told me afterwards that I had the same immediate effect on her. A certain tension established itself, a happy unease.

When we parted I asked her if she would like me to show her over a part of the estate which was specially famous for its birds and beasts, for I had forbidden my keepers to shoot or trap there. She said she would love it, and I arranged to fetch her in the car early next day.

I found my mood had completely changed. I could even examine Ethel’s photograph with a whistling ease, for everything else I had a bounding pulse and a flattering eye. And I knew why--it was because I was falling in love with Miss Pascal, and that it would make me exquisitely happy so to do. I could hardly realise Ethel existed, and felt quite care-free whether she did or not. I knew the reaction must come, but for the moment I was anæsthetised and thinking only of the morrow.

I called for Margaret early. The Franks are pleasant hunting, shooting and horticultural nonentities, and I think they were a little astonished at my precipitance; for my reputation is not exactly that of one who chooses to spend a whole day alone with a strange female. But it was the happiest day I had ever spent. I found in Margaret just that congruent complement of myself--association with which makes life worth living--and nothing else does. She was twenty-nine, very straight and strong. Her features I never have bothered about, though I gathered that a good many other men had. She has an admirable instinct for pictures, music and the written word, and her critical sense is quick and certain. I gathered she had practised at all three for a time, but had gallantly renounced each in turn, realising she could never transcend mediocrity. “I prefer,” she said, “to criticise the successes of others happily, than to face my own failures with angry tears in my eyes. In many a second-rate painter and writer is buried a first-rate critic. A little talent is a cruel thing.”

In the afternoon I took her for a fifty-mile run. Driving a car is one of my few accomplishments, and a lust for speed one of the very few unexpected traits in my character (a capacity for flinging my wife down a row of steps is the only other one I can recall).

My Ponitz has done 110 miles an hour at Brooklands and is the fastest car on the road I have ever known. Motor shop is the most boring of all, for fooling about with a car is for most people merely a substitute for thought. It is not so with me. Timid by nature, I resolved to conquer this timidity. Driving was an agony to me at first; I imagined a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent pedestrian, but slowly I gained confidence, and then my curious, restless mania for speed asserted itself.

I asked Margaret if she minded fast driving. “Go ahead,” she replied, “and I’ll tell you afterwards.” There was a perfect three-mile straight on the way home, and we touched eighty. She was in her element. “Take me again,” she cried. “It was simply glorious, and I’ve never seen such perfect control. I don’t mean to be personal, but it seemed to me you became a different person as soon as we reached sixty, somehow defiant and austere.”

“How far would you like to go next time?” I asked. “Past the Plunge of Plummet?” and felt a fool for asking. She looked at me sharply and flushed slightly.

“Your wife might have something to say to that. By the way, when is she coming back?”

“Not yet awhile,” I answered irritably. “Would you like to come to-morrow?”

“I’d love it,” said Margaret, “but till I know you better you mustn’t take me too far.” She said that lightly, but with a certain emphasis.

My recent social experiences had taught me that the average young woman of her class was at best a _demi-vierge_, and such a remark from such an one would merely have implied encouragement for a casual intrigue, but I knew Margaret hadn’t a trace of the promiscuous rip in her make-up, and I knew she knew I loved her, and that she mistrusted her powers of resistance. This went to my heart.

So it began, and it moved swiftly. A few days later we decided that it was impossible for her to stay on with the Franks and continue to see me each day. So I took a flat in Paris, and there we lived together. “In sin,” you suggest, number two. If you like to, call it so. When one has lost and found oneself in a woman, what the respectable sensualist focuses his smutty spectacles upon and the Law deliciously terms “misconduct” becomes of the most petty importance. It is not quite negligible, for in that hopeless, tantalising longing for complete fusion, when four eyes almost become two, and two minds just not one, when in fleeting seconds of ecstasy the illusion of this complete unison is attained, that mechanical conjunction is inevitable. But to those who love imaginatively and therefore hunger and thirst and lust and strive to isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, this physically compelled commonplace loses its significance. It was only Margaret who could make me dread to die.

I told Ethel I should be abroad for a while, but she showed no interest in the information. By the time a month was up Margaret and I were just not one person, and I the unhappiest man in the world, for even if the view Prometheus enjoyed from his eyrie was the loveliest in the world, he must for ever have turned his eyes away from it to search for that speck in the sky. And often when I was alone with Margaret and for the moment utterly happy and at peace, it seemed that Ethel’s face crept in between us, and once again I felt that foul longing to get my hands to her throat. She would never divorce me. I knew it, and I could not force permanently on Margaret the uneasy, furtive alternative. She would have accepted it gladly and made the best of it, but I could not do it. “You preferred to murder your wife,” I hear you murmur with some irony, number two. Yes, number two, I preferred to murder my wife.

We travelled back together, and I drove Margaret back to her flat in Gloucester Place. On the way we were held up by a traffic block at the Marble Arch. A car halted beside us, and as I glanced casually at it it seemed familiar. And then I saw Ethel, smoking a cigarette and talking to an elderly man with jackal’s eyes. She saw me a second later. The cigarette dropped from her hand, and she craned forward to see who was with me, and then the dam broke and we went on down Great Cumberland Place.

“That was my wife in that car,” I said to Margaret.

I saw her hand tremble. “Did she see us? Does it matter?”

“She certainly saw me,” I replied, “and it matters not at all. But if I know her, she’s the most frightened woman in London.”

We parted miserably and uncertainly, comforting each other with vague hopes of some solution.

When I got back to Paradown, Ethel was waiting for me. She was shaking with the rage of terror as she rushed at me.

“Who was that woman you were with? Someone you picked up in Paris, I suppose. That’s what you call working at your rotten book! Who is she?”

“A Miss Pascal,” I said.

“Have you been living in Paris together?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Yes,” I said wearily.

“Oh, you are, are you? and planning to get rid of me. Well, I’m afraid you won’t find it so easy. Remember this; I’ll never divorce you or give you a chance to divorce me. You beast and hypocrite! Pretending to be so cold and pious, and then sneaking off to Paris with the first low woman you can find!”

I said nothing. The only chance to bring her scenes to a close was to keep silence. Replying merely fed them.

“Can’t you speak, you beastly fool? Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“No,” I replied, “but I think we’d do better to separate.”

“Oh, you do! Well, you’ve had my answer. I’ll never leave you. I’ve seen you look like a fiend at me, as if you wished I were dead, but if I were, I’d still come between you and that strumpet.”

The application of that disgusting epithet to Margaret began to rouse the killer in me, but I rallied all my self-control to subdue it.

“Well, then,” I said, “there’s no need for such a scene as this. If you insist, you shall remain my wife in name, but in nothing more. I cannot inhabit the same house with you, but I will make you as generous an allowance as I can afford.”

“I imagine,” sneered Ethel, “that when that little drab has been through your pockets it won’t be so generous!”

I got up to leave the room, and this completely destroyed the remnant of her self-control. Her lips pouring out a stream of foul abuse, she came for me, struck me with all her force in the mouth, spat in my face, and then rushed over to my writing table, opened the drawer which contained all the notes I had been working on for the last six months, and flung them by handfuls in the fire. Something snapped in my brain. When she had finished she ran from the room, and I followed her stealthily. She went through the door into the garden to get air, I suppose. Just as she reached the top step I seized her by the shoulders and hurled her down. Her head struck the bottom step, and she writhed over on to her back and lay still. Trembling with horror and yet elation, I crept back to my study, and the butler found her an hour later.

Well, number two, there is my story. I suppose rather a commonplace sex-crime narrative. I’ll read it again in ten years’ time. I wonder if I shall believe it ever happened!

PART TWO

_Which consists of a letter written by Sir Arthur Paradown to his friend, Mr. Weldon, the Coroner._

My dear Weldon,

Seven months ago you held an inquest on my first wife. It will now be your dubious pleasure to perform that office on me, and I am sending you with this letter an account of the events leading up to that first inquest; this will reveal the incidents leading up to the second. And I am doing so because I have a favour to ask of you. Can you forget for a few hours the fact that I was a murderer, and remember that I was a fairly conscientious landowner and did my best for the County and helped a few people to be a little happier? If you can, do you think you can be a little unprofessional and tell the Jury that I have written you a private letter which explains my suicide, and that it has persuaded you that I was not insane, and then treat these documents as secret? What harm can it do! And it can do good, for my present wife is expecting to have a child in six months’ time, and I do not want the stigma of my insanity to rest on Margaret’s baby. Will you do this for me? Read what follows, and then decide----

Murderer’s sob-stuff is a peculiarly repellent brand, so I will merely state that when, six months later, I married Margaret, I knew for the first time utter cloudless happiness--for just six weeks, and then one evening after dinner, when we were sitting in my study, the telephone bell rang. Margaret took off the receiver and listened for a moment.

“It’s making such a weird noise,” she said.

“Give it to me,” I replied, and put it to my ear.

“You thought you were rid of me, didn’t you, you murderer! But as you killed me, I shall kill you!”

I knew the voice.

I made a casual remark, lest Margaret should suspect something was wrong, and went out into the garden to recover from what had been a terrific shock, and to regain my balance.

“Subjective or objective?” That is the old, old question on these occasions. In the first case I was mad, subject to hallucinations, in the second--well, then, a mystery of a different sort. There was little to choose between the alternatives. I certainly felt as sane as ever, but perhaps murder itself is a symptom of deep-rooted mental disease which could break out in other ways. My whole being rejected this hypothesis. But I had a dreadful certainty that in either case my doom had been spoken. This certainly must have branded itself upon my face, for Margaret was only half persuaded there was nothing wrong when I went in again.

I had three days’ respite.

Margaret tolerated broadcasting, and our set was in use on most evenings. I used to stop work and come in to hear the news. On this occasion, after the usual ponderous catalogue of minutiæ, listeners, as usual, were promised a “Little Piano Music” as a reward for their patience. Instead--as far as I was concerned, a voice suddenly cried out, “Sir Arthur Paradown murdered me, his wife, on March 9th.”

I gripped my chair and glanced at Margaret, but she was placidly reading. “It’s very clear to-night,” she said.

It was ridiculous and yet dreadful. I felt a deep horror of myself, an awful sense of isolation and distress. The question was--could I face this persecution? But then, I might be mad! I’d see a specialist the next day. In any case I was involved in something foul. My loathing for Ethel was such that, had she been with me, I would have strangled her in cold blood.

The specialist found nothing the matter, and was obviously puzzled at my visit. I told him I fancied I heard sounds which were imperceptible to others. It sounded vague and lame. He made a few obvious remarks about possible over-work, which were so nauseatingly inadequate to my trouble that I hurried away. Of course I’d only gone to him in panic, it was a witch-doctor I needed.

Margaret, as arranged, rang me up at the club at lunch-time. Just as she had finished reciting a list of things she wanted me to do for her, her voice went blurred, and through it came another: “Are you beginning to be sorry you murdered me? You can tell me when I come to you at Paradown.”

In the agonised daze which from then on always ensued on these occasions, I drove back home. “When I come to you.” What had she meant by that?

When Margaret came out to greet me, I took her in my arms and kissed her, and let the small, clean fraction of my soul sink into her.

“What’s the matter, my darling?” she asked, looking anxiously into my eyes.

“Sweetest,” I replied, “if I should die, think only this of me. I adored you. There might have been a time for such a word.” I felt unstrung, diseased, clinging to her, yet forced from her by that deadly secret she never could nor should share.

“What is it, Arthur, my dearest? You’ve suddenly changed. Something has happened. Tell me! Tell me! Whatever it is you can tell _me_.”

A surging, clanging fury of despair and self-pity raced through me and then suddenly left me, left me limp and lying with a certain despair and subtlety about over-work and liver and moodiness, rounded off with a desperate sort of “Soon be all right again” coda.

Margaret forced some sort of reassurance on herself and went to bed. I stayed up with my thoughts.

The bitterest knowledge which flays the brain of those who are at once vile and highly sensitive is that of the misery they inflict on those who love them. I know some who with a hardy egoism declare that the simple must suffer and the complex must cause them to suffer, that that is an inexorable law of life, and that the sufferings of the simple are simple, tolerable little pangs, those of the complex insufferable agonies, and that the only judge of a complex temperament should be another equally complex. Alas, when murder is the symptom of complexity that flattering unction fails of its purpose. Ethel had timed her re-entry well. She just gave me time to realise the full extent of the happiness of which she would deprive me, and she doubled my misery by reflecting it back again from Margaret. How I longed to get my hands on her!

Just before going up to bed I went out into the garden. As I came through the door I saw her standing there on the top step with her back to me, just as at that other time. And then it seemed as though I was rent and torn apart, and that a shadow leapt from me, a furtive poised thing, which took her by the shoulders and hurled her--hurled her----

Margaret found me lying there, and, poor darling, sent for dear old Fritaker, who tried to pretend his feet were scientifically pacing the bottom when he was hopelessly out of his depth.

“Nervous strain,” he diagnosed. “Bed, and feeding up,” he prescribed. I felt like quoting _Macbeth_ to him.

Yet bed and feeding up and an aching determination to spare Margaret contrived to patch me up, and for fleeting moments I felt some little reassurance. The “symptoms” of my disorder were not renewed, still I felt that Ethel knew her business, and would torture me with finesse. In that case could I train myself to nerve myself against her? Could I face the worst she could do, leading otherwise a normal, sufficiently tolerable existence? Could I deceive and so protect Margaret? I must fight for her. My rotting brain might merely be breeding these phantoms in its corruption, though relatively there seemed to me little difference between being haunted by Ethel objectively and haunting myself with her subjectively. In any case I would fight. I sent for my lawyer and had my affairs put finally in order, and a week later got up and resumed my normal life. And for some days nothing happened, and I began to wonder if, perhaps, I had had some obscure nervous disorder--a lesion which had healed itself.

And then one evening, just before dusk, when Margaret was in the garden, I had occasion to go up to my dressing-room for some papers. I opened the door. There was a coffin almost at my feet, housing a shrouded figure. There was a dark patch where the head of this figure should have been, and from it came something which slithered writhing down the shroud, and then the figure began slowly to rise.

I shut the door and cowered shuddering in the passage. When I felt I had strength to move I went down, drank a glass of brandy, and kept out of Margaret’s way till dinner. But by that time she was seriously frightened about me and watching me closely, so she knew at once I had had a “relapse.” I assured her that such ups and downs were to be expected, but agreed to go up to London with her for a change. Anything to make her happy, and one place was as good as another to one in my case. We went up the next day.

I was out alone seeing my publisher the next morning, and when I got back to the hotel I asked the lift-attendant if my wife was in. He said she was, as he’d seen a lady entering our suite. She was not there, however, so I asked him if he was quite certain, and he said that he was. Just then his bell rang, and a moment later he came up again with Margaret. His face was a study in astonishment. I tipped him and told him it was all right. I imagine he suspected that Salt Lake City was my spiritual home.

I only mention this little incident, Weldon, as evidence that these appearances were, up to a point at least, perceived by others, and therefore some evidence of my sanity.

What undermined and pierced me was that as my life grew more shadowed Margaret and I were being prised apart. She was still my darling, and the fact that she loved me the sole justification for my living, but I felt I was living in an extra dimension, as it were, that the shadow of what I had done and what I was suffering was erecting a barrier between us, and soon I should be alone with my secret, isolated and yet in some deadly way still Ethel’s husband. I could see that Margaret felt this vaguely, too, and that she knew something was sweeping us apart. I used to wonder miserably how I seemed to her, and what torturing, confused, despairing realisation must have come to her. If only I could have told her! But her belief in me was all I had to cling to, and I could not tell her that I had flung Ethel down those steps! And yet, if I could have got my hands on Ethel’s throat, I’d have been a murderer again. That obscene, meagre, despicable, mercenary, murdered fool! The best thing I ever did was to crack that evil little skull. She may have had her revenge, but if there are steps in Hell--melodrama! and likely to make a bad impression on you, my dear Weldon.

My poor darling Margaret thought a little amusement would be good for me, so we went to see some picture by Charlie Chaplin that evening. It would have done me more good if Ethel hadn’t come in and sat down next to me and begun to produce the picture, for something went snap in my head and there were the steps at Paradown, and Ethel came out, and I behind her, and down she went, and then her crushed and bleeding face grew and grew and thrust itself into mine. And I found myself back at Paradown in bed in my room and Margaret, white and wretched, and with a certain dread and despair on her face, bending over me. And then I remembered, and could not face her eyes. That was yesterday morning.