The Complete Simon Iff (7 page)

The magician turned to André. “Good! Now—how did you spend the week of the great storm?”

“Billiards, mostly,” stammered André taken by surprise. “Chess, too, and some card games. I sketched of course, nearly all day. Eleanor had some needlework. Poor Harry was very bored; he did nothing much.”

“And Cudlipp buried himself a good deal of anthropology?”

“Yes; he had Frazer’s ’Golden Bough’ all the time “The boy broke off, and stared. “How did you know that?” he said, aghast.

“A little bird told me,” said Simon lightly.

All of a sudden Major sprang to his feet. “Then Cudlipp killed his son,” he shouted, “Oh! Simple Simon, what a fool I’ve been!” And he suddenly broke down in spasm on spasm of sobs. “I promised these gentlemen,” said Simon, taking no notice of the outburst, “that I would force a confession from you this afternoon. I think this is the moment. Come, we are all attention.”

“I certainly cannot hear this senseless slander against my protector without—”

“Hush!” said Simon. “I told you this matter was urgent. I meant what I said. You must catch the nine o’clock train for London.”

“Why?” said the boy, defiantly; “who are you to say this!”

“I am a person who is going to put a letter in the post in an hour’s time; and you had better arrive before the letter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was explaining to these gentlemen at lunch that all crime was the result of conflict; that perverse crime, in particular, was caused by conflict of the conscious and unconscious wills.”

“Don’t you see?” said Major, mastering himself, “it couldn’t be you. You were supremely happy; you had the girl you loved; you had found yourself as an artist. But Cudlipp had thwarted his own inner will all his life; he was meant to bake biscuits; and he had forced himself to do those eye-destroying horrors. But—go on, master!—I still don’t see the whole story.”

“I haven’t told you all the facts yets. Cudlipp’s family was originally Armenian, for one thing, the offspring of some old Babylonian tribe. Then there was the ’Golden Bough’ with its detailed description of various savage rites, especially the sacrifice of the first-born, an idea, by the way, which the Jews only adopted at third or fourth hand from older and autochthonous races. Then the newspapers were filled with long arguments about the Chesidim and ritual murder,3 the trial of that man somewhere in Russia—can’t think of his name—begins with a B—was on at this time. Well, when the suppressed genius of the man for baking biscuits—which may be a passion like another—when that broke out, probably under the strain of the long storm, and the wildness of the whole scene, and possible some sudden realization that this boy here could paint, and he himself never could, why, then his brain snapped. The recent impressions combined with some far strain of atavism, and he resolved upon the murder.”

“I still can’t see why murder,” said Flynn. “Why should not this biscuit-baking genius go into the kitchen and bake biscuits?”

“I want you to recognize the fact, you dear good simple soul, that madmen are a thousand times more logical than the sane. The conclusions of normal men are always balanced by other considerations; we criticize our ideas of proper tailoring, for example, in the spotlight of our check books. The madman doesn’t. He wants clothes; he thinks of nothing else; so he goes down to Savile Row and orders a dozen sable overcoats and thirty dress suits. It’s much more logical, if logic were all!

“So Cudlipp reasoned something like this, as I imagine; ’I’ve wasted forty years trying to paint when I ought to have been baking biscuits; now I must make up for lost time.’ How to do that? The madman’s reason finds it easy The connection between gold and copper coins is an arbitrary one, isn’t it. Yes. Well, if I haven’t got a barrow load of coppers, I can give you a fist full of sovereigns, and it’s just as good. The whole idea of primitive magic (which he had been reading, remember!) rests on arbitrary substitution. The king must die every year, or the sun won’t come back—there’s an arbitrary connection, to begin with, though its based on false reasoning, or rather on correct reasoning from false observation. Now the king doesn’t want to die; so he takes a criminal, labels him king, and kills him. Every one is happy. So this man seeks to satisfy his genius, suppressed for forty years, in a night. Surely it must be through some monstrous act of violence and horror! That is madman’s logic. Then, as I said before, some ancestral memory in the subconscious self influenced his recent impression, and that gave the form to the idea. It is also conceivable that he had a real purpose, thought that the sacrifice of the first-born might enable him to become a painter. Gilles de Retz murdered over 800 children in his endeavor to make gold4. I But of this theory I have no evidence. However, the rest stands.”

André de Bry listened with white lips to this speech.

“Now will you confess?” asked the magician, with mild persistence.

“I don’t see why I should.”

“Because you are still looking at the past. Can’t you foresee the future?”

“Ought I to kill myself?”

“Be serious, sir!” reprimanded Simon. “I see that I must tell you more. So far I have told you how I know that Cudlipp killed his son, and how he came to do it. You may or may not know why he did it but you must know that he did it, if only by a process of exclusion. Then—what will he do next?”

The boy began to smile. “Oh Eleanor is with an aunt” he said: “she’s safe enough.”

“Now we begin to confess indirectly” continued Simon. “But what will he do? Is he conscious of his act? You see, I must know all. I was already sure that you would never have left Eleanor in danger. But there are other problems”

“I’m beaten,” said Andre. “I’ll tell you all I know.”

“Good.”

V

“It was I who discovered the body of poor Harry; for I had risen with the first light, intending to paint. I needn’t go into the events of that day, much; it was all suspicion, perfectly hellish. I haven’t your reasoning powers, Mr. Iff, and I didn’t think he had done it, particularly. He pretended to suspect me, of course. We can see now, thanks to you, that his whole life has been one long hypocrisy, that he has been pretending to be an artist, just like any other fraud. His deadly earnestness about it only made it worse; I see that now. But I didn’t see it then; to me he was just a bad painter, and I looked no deeper. Well, by dinner time our nerves were all on edge; Eleanor’s, naturally, more than any. After dinner I said I would go to bed, meaning to snatch an hour’s sleep and then to watch Eleanor’s door all night. I had told her to have her companion in her room—the poor old lady was glad enough to have company, you can imagine.

Eleanor s manner to me had been strange beyond words; but I only thought that it meant that she suspected me. However, when I said I was going to bed, she jumped up: ’Do play me a hundred up first!’ she cried; ’I’ll go mad if you don’t.’ We went into the billiard room together. She closed the door, and put her back to it. ’André,’ she cried, ’I’ve been insane about this all day, but I’m in a fearful position. Only—I can’t let you go to bed. I must tell you. Papa did it.’ I caught her in my arms, for she was falling. In a moment she recovered. ’Last night,’ she went on, ’I woke with frightful dreams—and I found my nose was bleeding. I lit my candle, and got up to get water. Then I knew suddenly that something was wrong with Harry. I always have known; it’s the twin sympathy.’”

“Damnation!” interrupted Simple Simon in a fury, “I’m getting old. I ought to have known that she knew.”

“You’ve done well enough, sir,” said André; ’it’s been like a miracle to me to hear you. Eleanor went on: ’The moment my nose stopped bleeding I took my black kimono, and went down to Harry’s room. The door was open. I slipped in. It was dark. At that instant I saw the studio door open.’ (They were right opposite, Mr. Iff). ’I knew there would be all kinds of trouble if I were caught wandering about the house at that time of night. I kept still. I could see through the crack of the door. Papa was silhouetted against the light in the studio. He had a wash hand basin, carrying it carefully. I heard him give a short harsh laugh and say aloud: “Now I begin to live.” He went down the little corridor by Harry’s room.’ (It leads to a pepperbox turret. Harry’s room has a window on to that corridor.) ’I went to the side window. I saw papa throw the basin over the cliff. Then he went back, and down the main corridor to his room. I felt for Harry in his bed. He wasn’t there. I found matches. The room was empty. I went into the lighted studio. I saw Harry at once, and knew he was dead. I fainted, when I came to myself I was in my own bedroom. I must have walked there without knowing. A few minutes later, I suppose, the alarm came. Forgive me; I ought to have told you before; you must have suffered fearfully. But I stopped her. ’It’s best, I think, that you have told me now,’ I said, ’we must save him. We must be on our guard, and do nothing.’ We noted Cudlipp’s conduct. It became clear that he would hide his crime to the end, even to letting me be hanged for it. I told her that I would never speak to her again if she interfered, that I would die for the honor of her family. I made her swear by her dead mother. I doubted at first if he were aware of what he had done, but his manner left no doubt. For instance, he made no inquiry into the mystery of the basin missing from his room, and never spoke of it in court. So we knew.”

“You’re a very noble and very wrong-headed young man,” said Simon; “you don’t really think we can leave things as they are, do you? Observe what is happening now. The explosion in the man’s brain once over, habit has resumed its sway. He’s the hypocritical bourgeois once more—but with the memory of that most fearful deed to lash him. If I know anything of men, it will prey upon his mind; and we shall have either another murder, or, more likely, suicide. Your sacrifice and Eleanor’s will be useless. This is what has to be done: You and I will go to London together to-night. In the morning we will confide in two alienists. We will all go to Cudlipp House; the doctors will certify him insane, he must consent to our terms. He must put himself in the charge of a medical attendant and a male nurse, and he must go away with them, so that he never returns.

“The newspapers will be told that the shock of recent events has undermined his health, and that he has been ordered a complete change of scene.

“We shall then go to Eleanor. and tell her what has been done; you will marry her here in Paris; I will arrange with the Consulate for secrecy; and you will yourself seek change of scene for a year or so. You, Major, will supply him with money if he needs it; you can get rid of some of those canvases, I suppose?”

Major nodded.

“And you, Flynn, will invent a way up those cliffs, and a story about a maniac vampire, ending with his confession and suicide, to round it off nicely; we must clear this lad of that ghastly ’not proven’ business.

“That is a job,” said Flynn, “which I shall most thoroughly enjoy doing. But now you must all comand dine with me; we have no time to lose, if we mean to catch that nine o’clock train.”

VI

Two years later a certain pretty French Countess was enthusiastic at the Salon des Beaux Arts, over the six South Sea Island pictures of a new Sociétaire. “André de Bry?” she said to her escort the great sculptor Major; “isn’t that the young man who was accused of poor Bibi Sangsue’s last murder?”

“The maniac vampire! yes; the fools! as if anyone could mistake Bibi’s handiwork!”

“Truth is certainly stranger that fiction; Bibi’s career sounds like the wildest imagination. Doesn’t it?”

“It does,” said Major solemnly. “But perhaps you knew him?”

“At one time,” murmured the Countess, with a blush and a droop of the eyelids, “at one time—well—rather intimately!”

“I,” said Major, “knew only his father and mother!”

“He thought he saw a banker’s clerk

Descending from a bus;

He looked again, and saw it was

A hippopotamus.”

I

It was a sunny Saturday in April at Prince’s Golf Club at Mitcham, and Macpherson, London manager of the Midlothian and Ayrshire Bank, had the honor at the seventeenth tee. Unfortunately, he was one down. His opponent had been playing wonderful golf; and the Scotsman thought his best chance was to scare him with an extra long drive. It came off brilliantly; the ball flew low, far, and true, up the fairway. Normally, he calculated to outdrive his opponent twenty yards; but this time it looked as if it might be fifty. The other stepped to the tee. “No!” he said to the caddy, “I’ll just take a cleek.” Macpherson looked round. This was sheer insanity. What in Colonel Bogey’s name possessed the man? Was he trying to lose the game?

The cleek shot lay fully eighty yards behind the drive. They walked after their balls, Macpherson still wondering what was in the wind. His opponent might still have reached the green with a brassie for his second, though it would have been a wonderful shot. Instead, he took a mashie and played a long way short. “What ails the man?” thought Macpherson. “He’s fair daft.” He came up with his ball. Should he take an iron or a spoon? “Never up, never in!” he decided at last, still wondering at his opponent’s actions, and took the spoon. “I must spare it,” he thought. And so well did he spare it that he topped it badly! Thoroughly rattled, he took his iron for the third. The ball went clear over the green into a most obnoxious clump of whins. The other man chipped his third to the green, and Macpherson gave up the hole and the match; also a half-crown ball, which hurt him.

By the time they had played the bye, he had recovered his temper. “Man!” he said, “but you’re a wunner. An auld man like ye — an’ ye keep your caird under your years, A’m thinking.” “Yes,” said his opponent, “I’m round in eighty-one.” “It’s juist a meeracle! Tell me noo, for why did ye tak’ your cleek to the seventeenth?”

“That’s a long story, Mr. Macpherson.”

“Ye’ll tell me o’er a sup o’ the bairley bree.”

They sat down on the porch of the club, and began to talk.

“When we stood on that tee,” said the old man, “I didn’t watch your ball; I watched your mind. I saw you were set on breaking my heart with your drive; so I just let you have it your own way, and took a cleek. As we walked, I still watched your thinking; I saw that you were not attending to your own play, how to make sure of a four, but to mine, which didn’t concern you at all. When it came to your second, your thoughts were all over the place; you were in doubt about your club, took the wrong one, doubted again about how to play the shot — then you fluffed it. But I had won the hole before we ever left the tee.”