Appleby's End (23 page)

Appleby divested himself of Luke Raven's inky cloak. “Stinkweed was rife in the ditches,” he said, “and ruddocks were like little leaping flames in every hedge. Once Billy gets going on Gammer Bidewell's story he will leave our rural novelists standing. Did you ever hear of the howling and hollering head?”

“Never.” Robert had snatched another paper. “Listen to this, Appleby. dream voyage's grisly end. young sculptress' ordeal.”

“Sculptress? A capital word, sure to be specially pleasing to Judith.” Appleby picked up a paper on his own account. “strange death in snow,” he read. “Rather tame, that one. Good Lord! haystack refugees find heyhoe rigid. There's talent there.”

“There's atrocious vulgarity, you mean.” Robert Raven spoke with mild heat. “I'm afraid all this will upset Everard very much. Ever since he started in on this popular work – cheap encyclopaedias and so forth – he's been a bit touchy… Who was Gaffer Odgers?”

“Gaffer Odgers?” Appleby was dismayed.

“Listen.
‘An old friend of the Raven family, Detective Inspector John Appleby of Scotland Yard, a brilliant young officer frequently in the public eye since his association a number of years ago with the ghastly case of Gaffer Odgers' oven.'
… It sounds unpleasant.”

“And it was unpleasant. By the way, when I marry Judith I shall retire.”

“Is that so?” In his ferocious fashion, Robert looked more cheerful. “D'you do anything yourself?”

“Do anything? Oh, I see. Well, not water-colours, or anything like that. But I was going to be a farmer before I took to police work, and I expect I'll go back to that.”

“Capital. See you keep Judith a big barn. I should divide it up, if I were you.” Robert was unexpectedly practical. “Two-thirds studio and one-third nursery, so that she can potter to and fro. As the family increases the proportions will be reversed. Of course, one day she'll have Dream.”

“Surely Mark will have that.”

“Not a marrying sort – and certainly won't want to live as the bachelor country squire. I'd advise you, by the way, to see to the drains. And talking of drains” – Robert picked up another paper – “can anything be done about all this?”

“I'm afraid not. You see, this is a mere mild beginning; just what rather conservative local journalists were able to get off this morning. The people camped outside now are the experts, and in the morning papers you'll see them really begin to exploit the business.” Appleby glanced rapidly down another column. “So far, the really sensational element hasn't been tapped. The local people haven't got on to it. When the odd connections with your father's stories begin to emerge the Dream affair will inevitably be raised to the rank of a first-class sensation. I've had some experience in these matters, and I'm afraid there's no avoiding it. Not even if, like the Farmers over at Tiffin Place, you were pals with half the newspaper proprietors in England. And I suppose you're not?”

“Newspaper people?” Robert was horrified. “Dear me, no. Everard's publishing people are bad enough. Except for their cigars.”

“Cigars?” It was Everard Raven's voice, and a moment later the harassed owner of Dream stepped from amid a congeries of Kurds at the foot of the Regency staircase. “Cigars?” Everard threaded his way forward, rather like somebody with a minor speaking part advancing through a crowd of supers. “My dear fellow – my dear John – I'm extremely glad to see you back. This is a very sudden decision of Judith's, but I assure you we are all very pleased – though Clarissa may take a little humouring, I think I ought to say.” And Everard shook hands with evident warmth. “In addition to which, it has its providential aspect. I mean that you are just the person to advise us in this very embarrassing situation in which we find ourselves. Now, what was I saying?”

“You were saying ‘cigars',” said Robert helpfully.

“That's it! D'you know, one of these reporter fellows offered me a cigar? In my own house – and a person I'd never seen in my life before! It is very difficult to know what to do in such untoward situations.”

“And what, in fact, did you do?” Robert asked.

“I bowed formally, and rang for Rainbird. Unfortunately, Rainbird didn't come. And the fellow didn't in the least understand that I was displeased by his lack of breeding. So I took the cigar. It seemed the simplest thing to do.” Everard looked from Robert to Appleby, vaguely troubled. “An entirely trivial incident, of course. But this sort of thing takes one sadly out of one's depth. And – do you know? – one of Adolphus' waxworks is missing. Apparently it has been gone for quite a while. Rainbird says he thought it had gone to be repaired. Who ever heard of repairing a waxwork? Particularly one of Adolphus'.” Everard checked himself in this rambling and looked about him in a pathetically bemused way. “But I am altogether forgetting more important things. A suitcase has arrived for you, my dear fellow, and dinner is at half past eight. And, most important of all” – and Everard beamed with sudden and complete cheerfulness – “here is Mark, who will no doubt find Judith for you. Mark, my dear chap, here is your brother-in-law waiting for you to say the right thing.”

Mark Raven had appeared from somewhere beneath the staircase; his yellow locks were filmed with cobweb and he was clutching several dusty bottles. “I've found some of Herbert's Mouton Rothschild,” he said, “and a stray case of Bristol Cream. So we can look on the bright side, after all.” He came forward, shook hands, and stood contemplating Appleby with a sort of malicious remorse. “At the best of times I should say there was only one tolerable way of looking at a projected marriage, and that's through the virtual opacity of a glass of decent claret.” Mark glanced from Appleby to his cousins, tossed his head violently, and suddenly ferociously scowled. “Confound it all,” he said.. “It's a bit thick.”

Everard was distressed. “Really, Mark, I'm sure we ought to be extremely pleased. The acquaintance may be short, but if Judith–”

“Don't be silly.” Obscurely furious, Mark banged down the Mouton Rothschild in a spine-chilling way on a table. “I knew this was going to happen, the way she looked at him in that railway carriage.”

Appleby smiled. “But I felt,” he interrupted, “that I was being looked at rather like an unhewn block of soapstone.”

Precisely. That was exactly it.” Mark's malicious grin momentarily returned; then he scowled again. “Let them marry, by all means. He seems quite a decent chap–”

Robert Raven, who had been peering at the claret, turned round again with the air of one who has a decisive card to play. “And he's going to farm,” he announced.

“–quite a decent chap; and I should say that in Judith he gets a bargain as women go. So far, so good. But what I'm saying is–”

“And here is Luke.” Everard turned to where his melancholic brother, in a dinner jacket and a frayed boiled shirt obscured behind an enormous tie, was descending the staircase with a gloomy deliberation suggestive of a skeleton about to keep a date with a feast. “Luke, my dear fellow, you will be delighted to welcome John, I am sure. And, Mark, if there is to be claret – and I wholly approve – it ought to have been brought up hours ago. How upsetting a state of siege is! Do you know, those people were climbing in by the servants' hall, so that I had to order that the shutters be put up? Now, what was I saying?”

“The claret,” said Robert.

“To be sure – the claret. Mark, take it to Rainbird and see what he can do.” He turned to Appleby. “And Robert will take you along to the studio. Judith has been working quite steadily all day.”

“Except” – Luke Raven spoke for the first time, and in sepulchral tones – “when being subjected to the indignity of interview by the police.”

“But it might have been very much worse.” Everard, harassed as he was, seemed determined to see the bright side of things. “This fantastic publicity” – he waved a hand as if to indicate the present strange assemblage on the lawns outside – “is very distressing, of course. But think how much more upsetting it would be for Clarissa and Judith if the first dreadful suspicions had proved true!” Everard turned to Appleby. “Perhaps you haven't yet heard? The affair of Heyhoe has grown even more unaccountable, but at the same time rather less grim. We were much shocked by the tenor of the police enquiries this morning. There was minute questioning as to what had happened to each of us after the accident at the ford. As it chanced, we had all separated in quest of assistance, and finally made our journeys home independently. We could not, therefore, render any account of one another's movements. Judge of our horror, then, when it began plainly to appear that some of us were being held suspect of a most atrocious crime!” Everard Raven paused, glanced about him, and shook his head in sudden vexation. “Mark has taken the claret,” he said, “but quite forgotten the sherry. And I do like to see sherry in a decanter. But – dear me! – I fear I have quite lost the thread of what I was saying.”

“Suspect of a most atrocious crime,” said Robert.

“Precisely! It was plainly in these people's mind that some of us had wantonly seized upon this faithful old fellow and buried him in the snow, there to await–”

“But the doctors turned it down.” Robert Raven, hitherto extremely patient, seemed to feel that Heyhoe's death was occasion for more matter and less words. “We got a couple of competent ones over later in the morning. And they're quite sure for reasons of their own that the old man died first and was forced into the snowdrift afterwards. He had a bottle of gin, it seems; and he went wandering about in the snow, and the gin was too much for him. Then somebody found him, dead as a doornail, and played this queer trick. As Everard says, it makes the whole affair more unaccountable than ever.”

“I think not.” Appleby shook his head decidedly. “There are one or two rather puzzling elements in the whole matter, it can't be denied. For instance, there is a little affair of a piece of cake which is at present worrying me a good deal. But if there was reason to suppose that Heyhoe had been murdered, I should be very puzzled and worried indeed.”

Everard Raven looked bewildered. “I'm afraid I don't at all follow you. Can you tell us why?”

“Because Murder and the Fine Arts are never bedfellows – whatever De Quincey may say.”

But for once even a literary allusion appeared to give no pleasure to the editor of the
New Millennium
. He passed his hand over his brow. “How much I wish,” he exclaimed, “that this was all over! Coming upon the usual quiet tenor of our life at Dream, it is really very disturbing – very disturbing indeed.”

Luke Raven, who had been communing quietly with a Kurd in a corner, raised first his eyes and then his long and beautiful hands. Broodingly he gazed at these, as if taking satisfaction in penetrating to their enduring skeleton. “Disturbing?” he echoed. “Know that what disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb.” He took out his watch and gazed at it as one who knows that every second spans out man's mortality. “I wonder,” he said, “if they managed to get any potatoes? There arc few things so good as a roast potato for allaying the fever of the bone.”

 

 

Judith Raven put down her mallet. “Well?” she said presently.

“Appleby's End.” Appleby looked at his affianced bride with a good deal of natural curiosity. “I think we might begin with that. Is there a story of Ranulph's called Appleby's End?”

“Yes. The place had that name before there was a railway station. And I suppose it caught his eye.”

“I see. And is it about a man who is invited to stay at a strange house with sinister consequences?”

“He doesn't get married.” On Judith's face there was a faint replica of Mark's malicious smile. “But sinister is the word. Spooky doings in long, gusty corridors, with the carpets rising on the floors and the rain driving and the ivy tapping on the window panes. And madness ending all.”

“You're not mildly apprehensive? You won't mind being tied for life to a madman?”

“I'm not apprehensive.”

“Or annoyed?”

Judith frowned. “That's very hard to answer. If Ranulph's ghost brought you here for sinister purposes – ineffective, mind you, so I'm not apprehensive – he at least
did
bring you here. I'm not quarrelling with him. Come and look at the Appleby Memorial.”

They turned round and faced the long studio, which occupied the ground floor of an entire wing of the house. Now somewhat ineffectively lit by lamps slung near the ceiling, it showed as vast and cavernous; and its chilliness on this winter evening was accentuated by the familiar marmoreal glitter of Theodore Raven's massive statuary. Colossal torsos, involved figure compositions, prowling or crouching animals lay about without care of disposition as in some Cyclopean fantasy; near at hand they writhed and contorted themselves in an ecstasy of eternally thwarted muscular effort; farther off, shadows compassionately enfolded them until in the recesses of the studio they lost distinguishable form and showed like icebergs looming in a mist, their cold breath going out before them. But what lent strangeness to the scene was the fact that these inferior productions of Theodore's genius had become a quarry for the exploring chisel of his descendant. Some had radically changed their very mode of being. Of Thusnelda in Chains only a pair of manacled limbs remained; the rest of her had been worked over with a cunningly obliterating hand until she showed like a vast pebble long polished by an infinite sea – a pebble deep within which slumbered some rudimentary vital form. Others had undergone a metamorphosis startlingly partial. General Wolfe reading Gray's Elegy before Quebec displayed the musing soldier unconscious that his legs were turned to gnarled roots and his arms to branches – while behind him stood an untouched aide-de-camp, stolidly regardless of this martial Daphne's leafy change. Stout Cortez stared at the Pacific as intently as was possible to one whose head had turned to a flaming torch, and Xerxes as he wrote his Cartel of Defiance to Mount Athos was ignorant that his broad back had taken on the form of a chest of drawers. But these surrealist flights were in a minority; on stands and trestles all about the room were Judith's Objects: spheres and cubes and ovals in groups of two and three and four – conversation pieces from some private universe in which the abstractions of solid geometry owned a mysterious life of their own.