Striding Folly (6 page)

    ‘If he come, I go,’ said the stranger. ‘It is very good of you.’ He had somehow oozed his way into the house without any direct invitation and was removing his hat and overcoat. He was a big man with a short, thick curly beard and tinted spectacles, and he spoke in a deep voice with a slight foreign accent. ‘My name,’ he added, ‘is Moses. I represent Messrs. Cohen & Gold of Farringdon Street, the manufacturers of electrical fittings.’

    He grinned widely, and Mr Mellilow’s heart contracted. Such haste seemed almost indecent. Before the site was even taken! He felt an unreasonable resentment against this harmless Jew. Then, he rebuked himself. It was not the man’s fault. ‘Come in,’ he said, with more cordiality in his voice than he really felt, ‘I shall be very glad to give you a game.’

    ‘I am very grateful,’ said Mr Moses, squeezing his great bulk through into the sitting-room. ‘Ha! you are working out the
Record’s
two-mover. It is elegant but not profound. You will not take long to break his back. You permit that I disturb?’

    Mr Mellilow nodded, and the stranger began to arrange the board for play.

    ‘You have hurt your hand?’ inquired Mr Mellilow.

    ‘It is nothing,’ replied Mr Moses, turning back the glove he wore and displaying a quantity of sticking-plaster. ‘I break my knuckles trying to start the dam’ car. She kick me. Bah! a trifle. I wear a glove to protect him. So, we begin?’

    ‘Won’t you have something to drink first?’

    ‘No, no, thank you very much. I have refreshed myself already at the inn. Too many drinks are not good. But do not let that prevent you.’

    Mr Mellilow helped himself to a modest whisky and soda and sat down to the board. He won the draw and took the white pieces, playing his king’s pawn to king’s fourth.

    ‘So!’ said Mr Moses, as the next few moves and countermoves followed their prescribed course, ‘the
gluco piano
, hey? Nothing spectacular. We try the strength. When we know what we have each to meet, then the surprises will begin.’

    The first game proceeded cautiously. Whoever Mr Moses might be, he was a sound and intelligent player, not easily stampeded into indiscretions. Twice Mr Mellilow baited a delicate trap; twice, with a broad smile, Mr Moses stepped daintily out between the closing jaws. The third trap was set more carefully. Gradually, and fighting every step of the way, black was forced behind his last defences. Yet another five minutes and Mr Mellilow said gently, ‘Check;’ adding, ‘and mate in four.’ Mr Moses nodded. ‘That was good.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘One hour. You give me my revenge, hey? Now we know one another. Now we shall see.’

    Mr Mellilow agreed. Ten minutes past nine. Creech would not come now. The pieces were set up again. This time, Mr Moses took white, opening with the difficult and dangerous Steinitz gambit. Within a few minutes Mr Mellilow realised that, up till now, his opponent had been playing with him in a double sense. He experienced that eager and palpitating excitement which attends the process of biting off more than one can chew. By half-past nine, he was definitely on the defensive; at a quarter to ten, he thought he spied a way out; five minutes later, Mr Moses said suddenly: ‘It grows late: we must begin to push a little,’ and thrust forward a knight, leaving his queen
en prise
.

    Mr Mellilow took prompt advantage of the oversight – and became aware, too late, that he was menaced by the advance of a white rook.

    Stupid! How had he come to overlook that? There was an answer, of course . . . but he wished the little room were not so hot and that the stranger’s eyes were not so inscrutable behind the tinted glasses. If he could manoeuvre his king out of harm’s way for the moment and force his pawn through, he had still a chance. The rook moved in upon him as he twisted and dodged; it came swooping and striding over the board, four, six, eight squares at a time; and now the second white rook had darted out from its corner; they were closing in upon him – a double castle, twin castles, a castle and its mirror-image: O God! it was his dream of striding towers, smooth and yellow and painted. Mr Mellilow wiped his forehead.

    ‘Check!’ said Mr Moses. And again, ‘Check!’ And then, ‘Checkmate!’

    Mr Mellilow pulled himself together. This would never do. His heart was thumping as though he had been running a race. It was ridiculous to be so much overwrought by a game of chess; and if there was one kind of man in the world that he despised, it was a bad loser. The stranger was uttering some polite common-place – he could not tell what – and replacing the pieces in their box.

    ‘I must go now,’ said Mr Moses. ‘I thank you very much for the pleasure you have so kindly given me . . . Pardon me, you are a little unwell?’

    ‘No, no,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘It is the heat of the fire and the lamp. I have enjoyed our games very much. Won’t you take anything before you go?’

    ‘No, I thank you. I must be back before the good Potts locks me out. Again, my hearty thanks.’

    He grasped Mr Mellilow’s hand in his gloved grip and passed out quickly into the hall. In another moment he had seized hat and coat and was gone. His footsteps died away along the cobbled path.

    Mr Mellilow returned to the sitting-room. A curious episode; he could scarecly believe that it had really happened. There lay the empty board, the pieces in their box, the
Record
on the old oak chest with a solitary tumbler beside it; he might have dozed off and dreamed the whole thing for all the trace the stranger’s visit had left. Certainly the room was very hot. He threw the french window open. A lop-sided moon had risen, chequering the valley and the slope beyond with patches of black and white. High up and distant, the Folly made a pale streak upon the sky. Mr Mellilow thought he would walk down to the bridge to clear his head. He groped in the accustomed corner for his goloshes. They were not there. ‘Where on earth has that woman put them?’ muttered Mr Mellilow. And he answered himself, irrationally but with complete conviction: ‘My goloshes are up at the Folly.’

    His feet seemed to move of their own accord. He was through the garden now, walking quickly down the field to the little wooden foot-bridge. His goloshes were at the Folly. It was imperative that he should fetch them back; the smallest delay would be fatal. ‘This is ridiculous,’ thought Mr Mellilow to himself. ‘It is that foolish dream running in my head. Mrs Gibbs must have taken them away to clean them. But while I am here, I may as well go on; the walk will do me good.’

    The power of the dream was so strong upon him that he was almost surprised to find the bridge in its accustomed place. He put his hand on the rail and was comforted by the roughness of the untrimmed bark. Half a mile uphill now to the Folly. Its smooth sides shone in the moonlight, and he turned suddenly, expecting to see the double image striding the fields behind him. Nothing so sensational was to be seen, however. He breasted the slope with renewed courage. Now he stood close beneath the tower – and with a little shock he saw that the door at its base stood open.

    He stepped inside, and immediately the darkness was all about him like a blanket. He felt with his foot for the stair and groped his way up between the newel and the wall. Now in gloom, now in the gleam of a loophole, the stair seemed to turn endlessly. Then, as his head rose into the pale glimmer of the fourth window, he saw a shapeless blackness sprawled upon the stair. With a sudden dreadful certainty that
this
was what he had come to see, he mounted further and stooped over it. Creech was lying there dead. Close beside the body lay a pair of goloshes. As Mr Mellilow moved to pick them up, something rolled beneath his foot. It was a white chess-rook.

The police surgeon said that Creech had been dead since about nine o’clock. It was proved that at eight-fifty he had set out towards the wicket gate to play chess with Mr Mellilow. And in the morning light the prints of Mr Mellilow’s goloshes were clear, leading down the gravelled path on the far side of the lawn, past the sun-dial and the fish-pond and through the sunk garden and so over the muddy field and the footbridge and up the slope to the Folly. Deep foot-prints they were and close together, such as a man might make who carried a monstrous burden. A good mile to the Folly and half of it uphill. The doctor looked inquiringly at Mr Mellilow’s spare form.

    ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘I could have carried him. It’s a matter of knack, not strength. You see—’ he blushed faintly, ‘I’m not really a gentleman. My father was a miller and I spent my whole boyhood carrying sacks. Only I was always fond of my books, and so I managed to educate myself and earn a little money. It would be silly to pretend I couldn’t have carried Creech. But I didn’t do it, of course.’

    ‘It’s unfortunate,’ said the superintendent, ‘that we can’t find no trace of this man Moses.’ His voice was the most unpleasant Mr Mellilow had ever heard – a sceptical voice with an edge like a saw. ‘He never come down to the Feathers, that’s a certainty. Potts never set eyes on him, let alone sent him up here with a tale about chess. Nor nobody saw no car neither. An odd gentleman this Mr Moses seems to have been. No footmarks to the front door? Well, it’s cobbles, so you wouldn’t expect none. That his glass of whisky by any chance, sir? . . . Oh? he wouldn’t have a drink, wouldn’t he? Ah! And you played two games of chess in this very room? Ah! very absorbing pursoot, so I’m told. You didn’t hear poor Mr Creech come up the garden?’

    ‘The windows were shut,’ said Mr Mellilow, ‘and the curtains drawn. And Mr Creech always walked straight over the grass from the wicket gate.’

    ‘H’m!’ said the superintendent. ‘So he come, or somebody come, right up on to the verandah and sneaks a pair of goloshes; and you and this Mr Moses are so occupied you don’t hear nothing.’

    ‘Come, Superintendent,’ said the Chief Constable, who was sitting on Mr Mellilow’s oak chest and looked rather uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think that’s impossible. The man might have worn tennis-shoes or something. How about fingerprints on the chessmen?’

    ‘He wore a glove on his right hand,’ said Mr Mellilow, unhappily. ‘I can remember that he didn’t use his left hand at all – not even when taking a piece.’

    ‘A very remarkable gentleman,’ said the superintendent again. ‘No fingerprints, no footprints, no drinks, no eyes visible, no features to speak of, pops in and out without leaving no trace – a kind of a vanishing gentleman.’ Mr Mellilow made a helpless gesture. ‘These the chessmen you was using?’ Mr Mellilow nodded, and the superintendent turned the box upside-down upon the board, carefully extending a vast enclosing paw to keep the pieces from rolling away. ‘Let’s see. Two big ’uns with crosses on the top and two big ’uns with spikes. Four chaps with split-open ’eads. Four ’orses. Two black ’uns – what d’you call these? Rooks, eh? Look more like churches to me. One white church – rook if you like. What’s gone with the other one? Or don’t these rook-affairs go in pairs like the rest?’

    ‘They must both be there,’ said Mr Mellilow. ‘He was using two white rooks in the end-game. He mated me with them . . . I remember  . . .’