________________________________________________
'What's that you're saying about murder?' asked Mrs Cheswardine as
she came into the large drawing-room, carrying the supper-tray.
'Put it down here,' said her husband, referring to the supper-
tray, and pointing to a little table which stood two legs off and
two legs on the hearth-rug.
'That apron suits you immensely,' murmured Woodruff, the friend of
the family, as he stretched his long limbs into the fender towards
the fire, farther even than the long limbs of Cheswardine. Each
man occupied an easy-chair on either side of the hearth; each was
very tall, and each was forty.
Mrs Cheswardine, with a whisk infinitely graceful, set the tray on
the table, took a seat behind it on a chair that looked like a
toddling grand-nephew of the arm-chairs, and nervously smoothed
out the apron.
As a matter of fact, the apron did suit her immensely. It is
astounding, delicious, adorable, the effect of a natty little
domestic apron suddenly put on over an elaborate and costly frock,
especially when you can hear the rustle of a silk petticoat
beneath, and more especially when the apron is smoothed out by
jewelled fingers. Every man knows this. Every woman knows it. Mrs
Cheswardine knew it. In such matters Mrs Cheswardine knew exactly
what she was about. She delighted, when her husband brought
Woodruff in late of a night, as he frequently did after a turn at
the club, to prepare with her own hands--the servants being in
bed--a little snack of supper for them. Tomato sandwiches, for
instance, miraculously thin, together with champagne or Bass. The
men preferred Bass, naturally, but if Mrs Cheswardine had a fancy
for a sip of champagne out of her husband's tumbler, Bass was not
forthcoming.
Tonight it was champagne.
Woodruff opened it, as he always did, and involuntarily poured out
a libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured,
ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art of opening
champagne.
Mrs Cheswardine tapped her pink-slippered foot impatiently.
'You're all nerves tonight,' Woodruff laughed, 'and you've made me
nervous,' And at length he got some of the champagne into a
tumbler.
'No, I'm not,' Mrs Cheswardine contradicted him.
'Yes, you are, Vera,' Woodruff insisted calmly.
She smiled. The use of that elegant Christian name, with its faint
suggestion of Russian archduchesses, had a strange effect on her,
particularly from the lips of Woodruff. She was proud of it, and
of her surname too--one of the oldest surnames in the Five Towns.
The syllables of 'Vera' invariably soothed her, like a charm.
Woodruff, and Cheswardine also, had called her Vera during the
whole of her life; and she was thirty. They had all three lived in
different houses at the top end of Trafalgar Road, Bursley.
Woodruff fell in love with her first, when she was eighteen, but
with no practical result. He was a brown-haired man, personable
despite his ungainliness, but he failed to perceive that to
worship from afar off is not the best way to capture a young woman
with large eyes and an emotional disposition. Cheswardine, who had
a black beard, simply came along and married the little thing. She
fluttered down on to his shoulders like a pigeon. She adored him,
feared him, cooed to him, worried him, and knew that there were
depths of his mind which she would never plumb. Woodruff, after
being best man, went on loving, meekly and yet philosophically,
and found his chief joy in just these suppers. The arrangement
suited Vera; and as for the husband and the hopeless admirer, they
had always been fast friends.
'I asked you what you were saying about murder,' said Vera
sharply, 'but it seems--'
'Oh! did you?' Woodruff apologized. 'I was saying that murder
isn't such an impossible thing as it appears. Anyone might commit
a murder.'
'Then you want to defend, Harrisford? Do you hear what he says,
Stephen?'
The notorious and terrible Harrisford murders were agitating the
Five Towns that November. People read, talked, and dreamt murder;
for several weeks they took murder to all their meals.
'He doesn't want to defend Harrisford at all,' said Cheswardine,
with a superior masculine air, 'and of course anyone might commit
a murder. I might.'
'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff,
gazing at Vera.
'Charlie! Why, the blood alone--'
'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.
'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed
philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought,
by just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China
and make himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything
about it! How many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in
China at the end of a week!'
'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine
grimly.
'Not one,' said Woodruff.
'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men
began their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in
disturbing her. She hated to see life in a queer light. She hated
to think.
'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what
prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the
fear of being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the
corpse, and so on.'
Vera shuddered.
'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very
much more wicked than lots of other things.'
'Usury, for instance,' Cheswardine put in.
'Or bigamy,' said Woodruff.
'But an Englishman COULDN'T kill a mandarin in China by just
wishing it,' said Vera, looking up.
'How do we know?' said Woodruff, in his patient voice. 'How do we
know? You remember what I was telling you about thought-
transference last week. It was in Borderland.'
Vera felt as if there was no more solid ground to stand on, and it
angered her to be plunging about in a bog.
'I think it's simply silly,' she remarked. 'No, thanks.'
She said 'No, thanks' to her husband, when he tendered his glass.
He moved the glass still closer to her lips.
'I said "No, thanks,"' she repeated dryly.
'Just a mouthful,' he urged.
'I'm not thirsty.'
'Then you'd better go to bed,' said he.
He had a habit of sending her to bed abruptly. She did not dislike
it. But she had various ways of going. Tonight it was the way of
an archduchess.
Read next: PART VI - THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN: CHAPTER II
Read previous: PART V - VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE: CHAPTER IV
Table of content of Grim Smile of the Five Towns
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
