The Tiger In the Smoke (31 page)

He did not think that his perceptions were deadened and he could not imagine where he might have been misled, but he was always ready to admit that he might have overlooked something important. The fact that he had done so was not his fault. No one had thought to tell him that the Canon never used the word ‘poor' to describe man or woman merely because they were no longer alive. That habit in one of his profession would have struck him as either illogical or rude.

All his household knew this so well that it had not occurred to the old man to explain it to Luke. When Uncle Hubert spoke of a fellow human being as poor, he meant to convey that either by accident or intention they had done something wrong.

—

WHEN CANON AVRIL
had made sure that the front door was locked, somewhat to the amusement of Sergeant Picot, who was seated in front of it, he went to bed, or he would have done so had not Miss Warburton appeared in his path with a cup of steaming milk-food in her hand.

She was in her dressing-gown and was so determined not to be in any way embarrassed that she achieved a skittishness not at all suitable in the circumstances.

‘So there you are at last, you roistering old man!' she announced loudly. ‘Sitting up until I don't know when, chatting to policemen. Here, take this and do drink it down. I've put something in it to make you sleep, for if you don't have a good night you'll only be fagged out tomorrow, and goodness knows what that's going to bring forth if today is anything to go by.'

Avril looked down at her kind plain face, soft now with a flush of belated youthfulness, and smiled at her with great fondness. Neither of his sisters had been in the least like her, but he wished they had been. Dear ‘Decimal Dot'! She was very good to him.

He thanked her gravely for the milk, which he had no intention of drinking, and took it carefully into his bedroom, which was on the ground floor just behind the sitting-room, while she lingered against the doorpost, dying to gossip but quite incapable of taking a step inside.

‘Hubert,' she said briskly, ‘suppose this murderer comes here looking for Martin's letter? Oh, I know he'll be caught at once. The house is infested with detectives. But – well, it won't be very nice, will it?'

‘Who for?' He could not resist teasing her, she looked so worldly-wise.

‘Oh, don't!' She might have been ten suddenly and he eleven. ‘I know I'm old-fashioned about these things, but there's been no word of St Petersgate Square in the newspapers yet, and do you know, I'm very glad indeed. Besides,' she added with the brightness of the truly unimaginative, ‘he might kill us all.'

‘The man will not come here.' The Canon spoke with complete authority, but she was loath to let the subject drop.

‘How do you know?'

Avril frowned. He was wondering what she would say if he explained that he knew Havoc would not come to the house because he, Avril, seemed to have arranged that he should not. He could imagine her face changing just as Mrs Cash's face had changed when he had knocked at her door that afternoon and made the unprecedented request that she should come and hunt through his house for some papers he had mislaid.

He could still see the look, first of incredulity and then of fear, on that broad bold countenance, and his soul still writhed when he remembered the knowing smile which had followed and heard again the abominable words.

‘No, Canon. I won't come out. I've got a cold. But you needn't worry. We'll take your word for it. There's nothing to read at the rectory.'

The speed with which she had given a meaning to his request, and the quick diagnosis of the weakness to which she had ascribed his motive in making it, still shocked him.

It filled him with doubt, too. Had he made the move because he guessed more than he admitted to himself and was afraid for his household? Or had he known, subconsciously, that a trap would be set at the rectory and he could not bear that even the wildest of animals should step into it? Or had he merely obeyed an impulse so strong that it could have been called a compulsion? Honestly he did not know. There had been no plan in his mind, of that he was certain, for now he came to think of it the letter was in the house at that time, although he had not known it. The idea of taking such an extraordinary step had come to him without ulterior motive as soon as he had heard the story from his nephew and he had acted upon it there and then, telling Campion he had a call to make and must go out. It was only after Mrs Cash had reacted that he had wondered at himself and her.

Miss Warburton bore with his silence but misunderstood his expression.

‘Oh, you
are
worried, aren't you?' she said with concern. ‘That's why I want you to sleep. Drink that up. Otherwise I suppose you'll read – What were you thinking of reading tonight, Hubert?'

He nearly told her
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, but desisted because that would have been unkind. In common with so many worthy ladies of her age, she was fascinated by what she was pleased to call the ‘Theory of the Thing', and he knew she was itching to discover how he would approach the problem of Havoc from a professional point of view.

Theology and Christian Morals, thought old Avril grimly, all of them neatly locked up in great books to the making of which there was no end. If only it were true. If only anyone could tell anybody else anything. If only one could know by being told.

‘Do tell me, Hubert,' said Miss Warburton, and she was very sweet.

‘My dear girl,' he said seriously, ‘if you confronted a physician with a patient whom even you as an unpractised observer could see was certainly about to die, what would you think of the stupid fellow if he rushed off to his library and began to read?'

She missed the point completely. ‘Oh, so you mean you know what to do with him? Then why can't you tell me?'

‘I mean I don't know,' said old Avril, wagging a finger at her vehemently, ‘and if ever I do, it will not be because I have read it, but because when I read it or hear it or have it thrust inescapably under my nose it will then have pleased the Almighty to cram its reality into my thick and unworthy skull. Or, if you prefer it, life will then have so turned me about that the eye which is necessary for that particular piece of seeing will then be focused upon the fact. Now that really is all there is to it, my dear. You run along, or you'll catch cold. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm is the one if you're frightened. Good night.'

He began to remove his jacket and she hurried off at once, as he had known she would. Left to himself in the dark little bedroom which had been his wife's private parlour when they had used the whole house as a single residence, he covered the cup of milk with a book lest he should forget and drink it inadvertently. He did not want to sleep. Now was no time to deaden the perceptions with any drug, anger, or aspirin. He had just seen how the boy Luke had been hampered. Avril approved of Luke. A dear fellow, he reflected; untried as yet of course, but sound and shrewd and very likeable. How amazingly close he had come to the truth – always supposing it was the truth.

Old Avril did not know. If he had, then perhaps it would have been his duty to tell. He was not too sure about this last point, but he felt reasonably certain that his heart would have directed him rightly had the occasion arisen. As it was he did not know, and to have presumed knowledge would have made mischief.

He remembered his dear silly Margaret, with her wide eyes which were like Meg's eyes but not nearly so wise, sobbing out her confession on that third day of her last illness when they had both known what was in store. What a silly wayward little tale it had been! The changes in money values during the First World War had taken her by surprise. Avril's masterful unmarried sister, who had managed his monetary affairs until she died, had not been sympathetic towards her extravagance and so she had borrowed. It had been such a trivial sum and the woman Cash had made her pay so much, not only in money but in agony. Avril's face grew stern as he remembered, and relaxed again as he also remembered that mercifully it was not for him to judge.

He had been angry at the time, though, and his anger had deadened his perceptions and he had paid for it. He was still paying for it. He could not remember. He could not recall what it was exactly that she had said as she lay sobbing on his shoulder, with the fear of death upon her sweet stupid mind. Had she said she had actually seen another child in the open coffin, or had it been merely that she had been told to say that she had seen the boy when she had not? Avril could not tell. All he could remember was her pain.

He had thrust the widow Cash out of his universe from that moment on. It had not occurred to him to take any material revenge such as to dispossess her of her cottage. It was not so much that he was above it as that the idea never entered his head. His only notion of his ultimate personal rebuke of another human being was to cut him off, to shut him out of his heart, to eschew him, in fact, as evil. The move was not disciplinary, but self-protective. Mrs Cash must have observed a coldness in him, but that was all. He made no attempt to avoid her, and when she knelt in church before him he included her in his blessing, for not to have done so would have been presumptuous, since in that house he was a servant.

But as he stood remembering, his shirt half over his head, he felt himself growing angry again. It terrified him, and he prayed against it hastily lest he should lose his understanding. Avril had only one prayer which he used in private nowadays. He had reached that stage in his development when its few lines seemed to him to contain the absolute maximum which, from a purely personal point of view, he dared ask of his Creator. As he climbed out of his clothes, folding each garment carefully as he had been taught sixty years before, he repeated it, drawing the blessed sense out of every exact word.

‘Our Father …'

When he came to the part which was most important of all to him that night, he paused and said it twice.

‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.'

That was it. That was what he meant. Lead us not into temptation, for of that we have already enough within us and must resist it as best we can in our own way. But deliver us, take us away, hide us from Evil. From that contamination of death cover us up.

That was his prayer, and tonight it was not going to be answered. He noticed
that
when he found that he had put on his thick bedroom slippers, the ones with the leather soles. He was preparing to move about that night.

It occurred to him that the psychologists could explain that phenomenon and could tell him how his subconscious mind was planning to do something that his ordinary upper mind shrank from. What fun all that sort of thing was! What a delightful study! He pulled himself together. There he was, as usual, sneaking off into the luxury of idle intellectualism, lazing, arranging to be elsewhere when the new task, and he felt it coming very close, was about to be put before him.

He got into his dressing-gown to go up to the bathroom. It was quite a journey to the first floor, and Meg, who loved that sort of conceit, had made him a robe from the formula laid down in the archives of a thirteenth-century monastery. The directions had been easy to follow: ‘Of stout black woollen cloth take four equal pieces, each as long as the height of the Bro. from nape to heel, and as wide as will stretch across his shoulders from elbow to elbow. Let the first cover his left breast and the second his right, and the third shall cover him behind. Then let the fourth piece be folded into three, and of these the first shall be for his left arm, the second for his right, and the third and last for his head. So shall he be covered and two ells of rope encompass his middle.'

Avril had objected to the rope as theatrical and used a pyjama cord, but the simplicity and warmth of the garment pleased him, and his household were used to meeting his cowled figure striding down the draughty passages. The unfortunate Sergeant Picot, however, who had not been warned, had the shock of his life when, on turning at a sound, he saw ‘a black monk' behind him near the foot of the stairs. The Canon was carrying the cup of milk. He was most anxious not to hurt Dot's feelings by letting her find the draught untouched in the morning, and was preparing a little guiltily to pour it away. Picot's violent start on catching sight of him, however, struck him as clear evidence of overstrained nerves, and he handed him the sedative with relief, delighted to find a good use for it.

The sergeant was not a milk drinker, but he had not eaten since a belated lunch and had a long cold night in front of him. He took it as a very kind thought of the old gentleman's. He expected the stuff to taste unpleasant and was not surprised when it did. He drank it down to the dregs, unaware that Miss Warburton had added two of the barbituric sleeping-tablets which her doctor had given her after her latest attack of influenza. One had made her sleep like a log, but she put in two because she did want Hubert to have a good night. When Avril returned from his bath, Picot was nodding peacefully at his post.

Once back in his room, completely ignorant of what he had done, Avril still pottered about, waiting for something, he knew not what. He recognized his own mood. It was one which had come to him very seldom, perhaps only four or five times in his whole life, and always it had preceded some experience in which he had been called upon to play a principal but not particularly personal part. Its chief characteristic was its strange sense of absolute peace.

For a fleeting moment he perceived it quite clearly and recognized that he had no existence, no will, no responsibility save in obedience. He was aware most vividly of the great stream of the world's life on which he floated. He felt it above and below him, gathering speed, moving faster and faster towards unknown rapids. He could almost see the dark waters and hear their roar. But he himself was very quiet, very small, but alert and ready to fulfil his purpose, only fearful lest he should miss the opportunity when it came. Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.