Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (7 page)

Eric brought him round to Elfrida, greeted her himself, and then introduced Vickers.

Meyer said he never would forget her face when she saw him. He swore she gasped audibly and stared. Most people thought they had met before but they had not, not on this earth anyway. Vickers seemed a little surprised at first, Meyer said, but in a moment or so he was as smitten as she was. She had swept him off his feet entirely. He sat down opposite her and they began to talk, neither of them taking the slightest notice of anyone else in the crowded room. There was something so simple and natural about the way it happened; they just fell in love under everybody’s nose as blatandy as they do in operas. An engagement was announced a week later and Elfrida was overwhelmed with callers and congratulations.

Louis Fyshe was peculiarly apprehensive when he heard the news and moved heaven and earth to get himself introduced to Vickers immediately. When he saw him he seemed relieved but surprised—almost wondering. He exchanged one or two words with him, congratulated them both and then went offsighing and smiling to himself—a poet and a hunchback.

More than probably, Elfrida did not notice him.

She was in love. Her great shapely body seemed on fire with it; her mouth and eyes, always proud, were prouder still. She positively seemed to grow under its influence, finally to unfold her last petals and show herself the perfect flower in its full pride. All the time he stood at her side, wondering at her, glorying in her while lesser men, his one-time rivals, stood round them envying and admiring.

The chapel was crammed at the wedding. When they came down the aisle after the ceremony those tears which are born of the sudden sight of great beauty started to many eyes. A man and his wife, the perfect match.

It was a wonderful idea to dress her in a white medieval gown with her tightly braided hair wound about her sleek head, for as she strode along at his side, her head held very high and her eyes alight with an almost haughty joy, she seemed, as Fyshe had said, a Northern Queen, a queen beside her king.

In full uniform and without a trace of nervousness he dominated her all the time—not too much so that any of her dignity or beauty was lost but just enough to make one realize she was the captive, he the captor.

“God let it happen to restore man’s faith in the world as a world,” said Fyshe.

When they came back from the honeymoon they took a house just off Portman Square. They seemed to fascinate Fyshe, perhaps because they were so different from himself. Anyway, he used to haunt the place and whenever one dropped in he was sure to be there, squatting in some corner, peering out at the two of them with his bright bird’s eyes.

They had a wonderful place there. It suited them and that meant something. Great wide rooms with mighty fireplaces, oak walls and fine pictures. Several Brangwyns, a John and a great battle-piece by an unknown. The furniture was extraordinary; they must have had it made for them. Great heavy oak pieces beautifully carved but weird and barbaric. When you saw her sweeping down the room in one of those plain tight-fitting gowns she affected, you had a curious feeling that you were visiting a twelfth century Danish queen at home.

It was Meyer who first pointed out that something was wrong between the two, although Fyshe must have noticed it long before and kept silent.

Meyer said she was not happy, and furthermore, he said that Vickers was to blame. How, he did not say, because he knew no more than anyone else. Fyshe told the truth of it long after. He knew because he loved her and he used to sit and watch her struggling with herself and every pang she felt was echoed in him.

The crookback should have been a woman, the intuition he had.

Fyshe said she found him out three months after the honeymoon but that she managed to blind herself to it for a year after that

Vickers was weak—horribly weak.

He had no special vices. He drank little, did not gamble, took no great interest in women. Yet there was no special virtue in him on that score; none of these things amused him. There was no greatness, no friendliness, no strength in the man; no warmth, no mental or spiritual life. He was small, weak, pitifully blind and narrow.

His body was the one really noble thing about him and that was magnificent. It would almost seem that his mind had been sacrificed to produce that body with its beauty, its strength, its utter largeness and perfection. In that alone he fitted her. As far as the rest went she might have married almost anyone else and fared better.

It broke Fyshe’s heart to see her for she loved her husband. Loved him with a love which matched the rest of her. A mighty love, a whirling torrential sea of love which she poured out upon him with all the eagerness and generosity of her great heart.

An ordinary man might at least have withstood the flood and remained himself even if he lost her by it, a barbarian like herself could have matched it with his own and they two might have been carried by the force of their mutual loving to the farthest shores of their ambitions; but Vickers, a weak nature, went down before it like a sandcastle. Mentally and spiritually he was drowned in it.

Fyshe said that she refused to admit it to herself. Refused to realise that she had made a mistake, that she had not accomplished her ideal, that after all she had married a small, misfitting man. She clung to her ideal of him even when Vickers proved over and over again that he was nothing but the shell of a giant, that his heart and mind and soul were practically non-existent, and she steeled herself not to look in at him, and cheated herself and held her head high.

This went on for some time. Fyshe said it was terrible to see her.

Time after time she gave him chances to prove himself a man—little chances, little chances which woman-wise she engineered to give him an opportunity to restore her faith in his greatness and his strength, and every time, of course, Vickers let her down. He could not help it. He had to, he was but what he was.

She was patient; pathetically patient, and eager to find a lord and master in him if only he would let her.

Fyshe saw it all. He said he watched her fighting against the inevitable realisation like a fanatic fighting for his creed. It seemed, he said, as if she would not allow it to beat her. As the great waves of fact, made by the myriad drops of little things, beat themselves against her one after another, she refused to be crushed by them. It was her barbarism, as the poet said, it was her Northern barbarism which kept her so steadfastly blind.

She refused to accept her defeat. Refused to acknowledge the trick the gods had played upon her. She had set herself to conquer fate, to conquer fact, to disprove that which existed.

As the months passed the fight became harder. It seemed as if she must become convinced in spite of herself, but she fought on. And every day, so Fyshe said, she grew more and more of a wild thing, more and more beautiful and more and more barbaric.

Then it happened.

Fyshe told the story once years afterwards. There were four of them in his dusty study and his husky drawl sounded strained and emotional in the warm, smoke-misted room.

“He died of pneumonia, you know,” he said, “eighteen months after they were married and she mourned him faithfully and passionately. I came into the room at just that moment when he reached the crisis and gradually took the turn for the worse which killed him.”

He paused deliberately and relit his pipe but no one spoke and presently he went on again.

“He was very ill and I visited them so often that I used to go in and out as I pleased. I knew when I entered that day that Vickers had been practically at death’s door, although I had heard the doctor say that so long as nothing untoward happened such as a draught catching him or the fire going out, he might be expected to recover. I had really gone along to congratulate her on this and I pushed open the door quietly, expecting to be met by a rush of warm, sick-room air. There were curtains hung across the corner where the door was so that no sudden draught could possibly reach the bed. These curtains were thick heavy things, weighted at the ends, yet as I came in they were swaying to and fro. I shut the door quickly, frightened for a moment that I had let in the draught and then I went forward and pulled aside the curtains.

“Vickers lay in the bed hardly breathing, the bedclothes thrown clear of his great chest and neck, while a current of cold rain-soaked air rushed in upon him from the open window. Elfrida was in the room. She stood with her back to me staring out across the square. Her straight back was stiff as a soldier’s and her head was held high and defiant.”

His voice stopped and they sat round and stared at him. He backed farther into his chair and hugged his knee.

‘You—you went out without speaking,” said someone, and his voice sounded strident and unnatural.

“Yes,” said Fyshe. “Without speaking, without a sound. She never knew I came.”

There was another pause, then he said: “The next time I saw her was at the funeral. I daresay you remember it, an extraordinary—a wonderful affair.”

His voice sank to a whisper as he remembered the majesty of it and he rocked backwards and forwards, a grotesque figure in the big chair.

“It was barbaric though,” he went on suddenly. “It horrified some people. They called it vulgar—ostentatious—but it wasn’t, it was magnificent. It was beautiful, sombre, terrible—the funeral of a god. The great house dismantled—the open coffin—the gorgeous pall—it was all majestic, Northern, and, as I said, barbaric. Some fools who didn’t understand her blamed her for it—they said she made a show of Death. I could have killed them. If Elfrida made a show, she made it for the honour of the dead and from no petty, horrible thought of personal glorification. She would not understand such reasoning. She mourned him at the funeral, and she mourned him ever afterwards—her husband, the man she married. Her grief was terrible, freezing, petrifying grief and it was sincere—no woman loved more than Elfrida, no woman grieved more deeply.”

“I don’t see how you make that out,” said Meyer, “if as you say she—”

Fyshe interrupted him.

“Her grief is sincere,” he said, and his black eyes flashed, “she mourns her husband, the man she married. If she had allowed herself to think clearly she would have mourned him a week after her marriage: as it was however, his body had to die before she could allow herself to see that he was dead.”

“Or that he never existed!”

Fyshe smiled curiously.

“Not exactly,” he said, “for from the day she first saw him—he existed—for her. Oh, her grief was sincere, as sincere as her love was. When I went up to her that day, where she sat in the great dim room with the solemn preparations for that mighty funeral going on around us, she looked up at me and I saw in her face a depth of sorrow so deep, so majestic and awful that it struck me dumb, and made me feel I was a little soul incapable of feeling a tenth so much. I mumbled something about Vickers at last and her eyes darkened a little. Then she sighed and looked steadily and honestly into my eyes.

“‘He was a king of men,” she said, ‘my husband”.” Fyshe finished speaking. There was a stir among his listeners and then Meyer spoke again. “I don’t see,” he said obstinately. “She must have been a hypocrite, Fyshe, she killed him—”

“Killed him!” The hunchback poet crouched forward in his chair and stared at the other man in fierce exasperation. “No, she didn’t kill him, Meyer,” he said. “Don’t you understand—she gave him birth!”

When Mr. Albert Campion arrived at the luxury flat, Detective Inspector Stanislaus Oates had just reached the unwelcome conclusion that Chippy Figg was not, after all, guilty of the murder of the man in the sitting-room.

Chippy, who was fidgeting in the kitchenette, his peaky face yellow with anxiety, had been saying so for some time.

“I was with me auntie all the evening,” he was protesting, as Campion, an ineffable glow of well-being about him, appeared in the doorway. “She’ll swear to it, auntie will.”

“I don’t doubt it, my lad,” said Oates gloomily. He turned and caught sight of the slender newcomer in the horn-rimmed spectacles. “Oh, hallo, Campion, glad to see you. Come over here, will you? There’s nothing to grin about, let me tell you.” Taking his old friend by the elbow, he pushed him firmly across the wide passage, now crowded with officials, to the sitting-room. As the door of the brilliantly lit apartment closed behind them his exasperation boiled over. “Ten minutes ago I had a pretty little open-and-shut case to show you, yet the moment you come beaming into it it turns sour on me.”

The smile had vanished from Mr. Campion’s face as his eyes took in the scene. He stood looking down at the heavy figure of a middle-aged man, bald and running badly to fat, which sprawled over the desk before the curtained window.

“Nothing exactly decorative about this,” he observed grimly. “Shot?”

“Yes. From the doorway. Death instantaneous. He’s the owner of the flat and lived alone here.”

“I see. Our friend in the purple suit didn’t do it.”

“Chippy. No. Couldn’t have. That’s the devil of it. Constable Richards, who lives next door to Chippy’s aunt and who overlooks her lighted kitchen from his back door, gives him an alibi.” He paused. “Look, Campion, consider this. It’s now midnight. Two hours ago we were called in by a doctor who lives in the apartment above this one. He—”

Mr. Campion coughed. “Introduce me to the corpse.”

“Well—” Oates hesitated, “—his name was Fane and he wasn’t pleasant. He made money on the turf and more in ways less orthodox.”

“Blacking merchant?”

“No evidence to date but considerable suspicion.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Campion mildly. “Continue with the doctor.”

“He phoned at ten and his story is quite straightforward. He knew Fane slightly and came in here at a quarter to six to give him a draught for a violent headache. Fane refused to go to bed because he was expecting Figg. The doctor left in time to reach a cocktail party some distance away at six.”

“Did the doctor know Figg?”

“Slightly. The whole block did. He’s a colourful figure who always called on Fane on Thursday nights. He does quite a lot of bookmaking.”