________________________________________________
Woodruff, in stating that Vera was all nerves that evening, was
quite right. She was. And neither her husband nor Woodruff knew
the reason.
The reason had to do most intimately with frocks.
Vera had been married ten years. But no one would have guessed it,
to watch her girlish figure and her birdlike ways. You see, she
was the only child in the house. She often bitterly regretted the
absence of offspring to the name and honour of Cheswardine. She
envied other wives their babies. She doted on babies. She said
continually that in her deliberate opinion the proper mission of
women was babies. She was the sort of woman that regards a
cathedral as a place built especially to sit in and dream soft
domestic dreams; the sort of woman that adores music simply
because it makes her dream. And Vera's brown studies, which were
frequent, consisted chiefly of babies. But as babies amused
themselves by coming down the chimneys of all the other houses in
Bursley, and avoiding her house, she sought comfort in frocks. She
made the best of herself. And it was a good best. Her figure was
as near perfect as a woman's can be, and then there were those
fine emotional eyes, and that flutteringness of the pigeon, and an
ever-changing charm of gesture. Vera had become the best-dressed
woman in Bursley. And that is saying something. Her husband was
wealthy, with an increasing income, though, of course, as an
earthenware manufacturer, and the son and grandson of an
earthenware manufacturer, he joined heartily in the general Five
Towns lamentation that there was no longer any money to be made
out of 'pots'. He liked to have a well-dressed woman about the
house, and he allowed her an incredible allowance, the amount of
which was breathed with awe among Vera's friends; a hundred a
year, in fact. He paid it to her quarterly, by cheque. Such was
his method.
Now a ball was to be given by the members of the Ladies' Hockey
Club (or such of them as had not been maimed for life in the
pursuit of this noble pastime) on the very night after the
conversation about murder. Vera belonged to the Hockey Club (in a
purely ornamental sense), and she had procured a frock for the
ball which was calculated to crown her reputation as a mirror of
elegance. The skirt had--but no (see the columns of the
Staffordshire Signal for the 9th November, 1901). The mischief was
that the gown lacked, for its final perfection, one particular
thing, and that particular thing was separated from Vera by the
glass front of Brunt's celebrated shop at Hanbridge. Vera could
have managed without it. The gown would still have been brilliant
without it. But Vera had seen it, and she WANTED it.
Its cost was a guinea. Well, you will say, what is a guinea to a
dainty creature with a hundred a year? Let her go and buy the
article. The point is that she couldn't, because she had only six
and sevenpence left in the wide world. (And six weeks to
Christmas!) She had squandered--oh, soul above money!--twenty-five
pounds, and more than twenty-five pounds, since the 29th of
September. Well, you will say, credit, in other words, tick? No,
no, no! The giant Stephen absolutely and utterly forbade her to
procure anything whatever on credit. She was afraid of him. She
knew just how far she could go with Stephen. He was great and
terrible. Well, you will say, why couldn't she blandish and cajole
Stephen for a sovereign or so? Impossible! She had a hundred a
year on the clear understanding that it was never exceeded nor
anticipated. Well, you will discreetly hint, there are certain
devices known to housewives.... Hush! Vera had already employed
them. Six and sevenpence was not merely all that remained to her
of her dress allowance; it was all that remained to her of her
household allowance till the next Monday.
Hence her nerves.
There that poor unfortunate woman lay, with her unconscious tyrant
of a husband snoring beside her, desolately wakeful under the
night-light in the large, luxurious bedroom--three servants
sleeping overhead, champagne in the cellar, furs in the wardrobe,
valuable lace round her neck at that very instant, grand piano in
the drawing-room, horses in the stable, stuffed bear in the hall--
and her life was made a blank for want of fourteen and fivepence!
And she had nobody to confide in. How true it is that the human
soul is solitary, that content is the only true riches, and that
to be happy we must be good!
It was at that juncture of despair that she thought of mandarins.
Or rather--I may as well be frank--she had been thinking of
mandarins all the time since retiring to rest. There MIGHT be
something in Charlie's mandarin theory.... According to Charlie,
so many queer, inexplicable things happened in the world. Occult--
subliminal--astral--thoughtwaves. These expressions and many more
occurred to her as she recollected Charlie's disconcerting
conversations. There MIGHT.... One never knew.
Suddenly she thought of her husband's pockets, bulging with
silver, with gold, and with bank-notes. Tantalizing vision! No!
She could not steal. Besides, he might wake up.
And she returned to mandarins. She got herself into a very morbid
and two-o'clock-in-the-morning state of mind. Suppose it was a
dodge that DID work. (Of course, she was extremely superstitious;
we all are.) She began to reflect seriously upon China. She
remembered having heard that Chinese mandarins were very corrupt;
that they ground the faces of the poor, and put innocent victims
to the torture; in short, that they were sinful and horrid
persons, scoundrels unfit for mercy. Then she pondered upon the
remotest parts of China, regions where Europeans never could
penetrate. No doubt there was some unimportant mandarin, somewhere
in these regions, to whose district his death would be a decided
blessing, to kill whom would indeed be an act of humanity.
Probably a mandarin without wife or family; a bachelor mandarin
whom no relative would regret; or, in the alternative, a mandarin
with many wives, whose disgusting polygamy merited severe
punishment! An old mandarin already pretty nearly dead; or, in the
alternative, a young one just commencing a career of infamy!
'I'm awfully silly,' she whispered to herself. 'But still, if
there SHOULD be anything in it. And I must, I must, I must have
that thing for my dress!'
She looked again at the dim forms of her husband's clothes,
pitched anyhow on an ottoman. No! She could not stoop to theft!
So she murdered a mandarin; lying in bed there; not any particular
mandarin, a vague mandarin, the mandarin most convenient and
suitable under all the circumstances. She deliberately wished him
dead, on the off-chance of acquiring riches, or, more accurately,
because she was short of fourteen and fivepence in order to look
perfectly splendid at a ball.
In the morning when she woke up--her husband had already departed
to the works--she thought how foolish she had been in the night.
She did not feel sorry for having desired the death of a fellow-
creature. Not at all. She felt sorry because she was convinced, in
the cold light of day, that the charm would not work. Charlie's
notions were really too ridiculous, too preposterous. No! She must
reconcile herself to wearing a ball dress which was less than
perfection, and all for the want of fourteen and fivepence. And
she had more nerves than ever!
She had nerves to such an extent that when she went to unlock the
drawer of her own private toilet-table, in which her prudent and
fussy husband forced her to lock up her rings and brooches every
night, she attacked the wrong drawer--an empty unfastened drawer
that she never used. And lo! the empty drawer was not empty. There
was a sovereign lying in it!
This gave her a start, connecting the discovery, as naturally at
the first blush she did, with the mandarin.
Surely it couldn't be, after all.
Then she came to her senses. What absurdity! A coincidence, of
course, nothing else? Besides, a mere sovereign! It wasn't enough.
Charlie had said 'rich for life'. The sovereign must have lain
there for months and months, forgotten.
However, it was none the less a sovereign. She picked it up,
thanked Providence, ordered the dog-cart, and drove straight to
Brunt's. The particular thing that she acquired was an exceedingly
thin, slim, and fetching silver belt--a marvel for the money, and
the ideal waist decoration for her wonderful white muslin gown.
She bought it, and left the shop.
And as she came out of the shop, she saw a street urchin holding
out the poster of the early edition of the Signal. And she read on
the poster, in large letters: 'DEATH OF LI HUNG CHANG.' It is no
exaggeration to say that she nearly fainted. Only by the exercise
of that hard self-control, of which women alone are capable, did
she refrain from tumbling against the blue-clad breast of Adams,
the Cheswardine coachman.
She purchased the Signal with well-feigned calm, opened it and
read: 'Stop-press news. Pekin. Li Hung Chang, the celebrated
Chinese statesman, died at two o'clock this morning.--Reuter.'
Read next: PART VI - THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN: CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART VI - THE MURDER OF THE MANDARIN: CHAPTER I
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
