Thomas H. Huxley - "The Origin of Species"

Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Jeremiah"

Kate Douglas Wiggin - "A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story"

E. P. Roe - "Taken Alive"

The Woman in Black

E >> E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley >> The Woman in Black




Mrs Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she had yet
shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had begun to ring and
give play to a natural expressiveness that must hitherto have been dulled, he
thought, by the shock and self-restraint of the past few days. Now she turned
swiftly from the window and faced him as she went on, her beautiful face
flushed and animated, her eyes gleaming, her hands moving in slight emphatic
gestures, as she surrendered herself to the impulse of giving speech to things
long pent up.

'The people,' she said. 'Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must be for
any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the
background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or
arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some
of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step
out of that into another world where you have to be very rich, shamefully
rich, to exist at all--where money is the only thing that counts and the first
thing in everybody's thoughts--where the men who make the millions are so
jaded by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves
with when they have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even
duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for
display and silly amusements and silly immoralities; do you know how awful
that life is? Of course I know there are clever people, and people of taste in
that set, but they're swamped and spoiled, and it's the same thing in the end;
empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I'm exaggerating, and I did make friends and have
some happy times; but that's how I feel after it all. The seasons in New York
and London--how I hated them! And our house-parties and cruises in the yacht
and the rest--the same people, the same emptiness.

'And you see, don't you, that my husband couldn't have an idea of all this.
His life was never empty. He did not live it in society, and when he was in
society he had always his business plans and difficulties to occupy his mind.
He hadn't a suspicion of what I felt, and I never let him know; I couldn't, it
wouldn't have been fair. I felt I must do something to justify myself as his
wife, sharing his position and fortune; and the only thing I could do was to
try, and try, to live up to his idea about my social qualities... I did try. I
acted my best. And it became harder year by year... I never was what they call
a popular hostess, how could I be? I was a failure; but I went on trying... I
used to steal holidays now and then. I used to feel as if I was not doing my
part of a bargain--it sounds horrid to put it like that, I know, but it was
so--when I took one of my old school-friends, who couldn't afford to travel,
away to Italy for a month or two, and we went about cheaply all by ourselves,
and were quite happy; or when I went and made a long stay in London with some
quiet people who had known me all my life, and we all lived just as in the old
days, when we had to think twice about seats at the theatre, and told each
other about cheap dressmakers. Those and a few other expeditions of the same
sort were my best times after I was married, and they helped me to go through
with it the rest of the time. But I felt my husband would have hated to know
how much I enjoyed every hour of those returns to the old life.

'And in the end, in spite of everything I could do, he came to know .... He
could see through anything, I think, once his attention was turned to it. He
had always been able to see that I was not fulfilling his idea of me as a
figure in the social world, and I suppose he thought it was my misfortune
rather than my fault. But the moment he began to see, in spite of my
pretending, that I wasn't playing my part with any spirit, he knew the whole
story; he divined how I loathed and was weary of the luxury and the brilliancy
and the masses of money just because of the people who lived among them--who
were made so by them, I suppose .... It happened last year. I don't know just
how or when. It may have been suggested to him by some woman--for they all
understood, of course. He said nothing to me, and I think he tried not to
change in his manner to me at first; but such things hurt--and it was working
in both of us. I knew that he knew. After a time we were just being polite and
considerate to each other. Before he found me out we had been on a footing
of--how can I express it to you?--of intelligent companionship, I might say.
We talked without restraint of many things of the kind we could agree or
disagree about without its going very deep... if you understand. And then that
came to an end. I felt that the only possible basis of our living in each
other's company was going under my feet. And at last it was gone.

'It had been like that,' she ended simply, 'for months before he died.' She
sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her body
after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was hastily sorting
out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the frankness of Mrs Manderson's
story. He was amazed at the vigorous expressiveness in her telling of it. In
this vivid being, carried away by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole
personality, he had seen the real woman in a temper of activity, as he had
already seen the real woman by chance in a temper of reverie and unguarded
emotion. In both she was very unlike the pale, self-disciplined creature of
majesty that she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went
something like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into his
mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little knot of
ideas... she was unique not because of her beauty but because of its being
united with intensity of nature; in England all the very beautiful women were
placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt up the best of their beauty;
that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast this sort of spell on him
before; when it was a question of wit in women he had preferred the brighter
flame to the duller, without much regarding the lamp. 'All this is very
disputable,' said his reason; and instinct answered, 'Yes, except that I am
under a spell'; and a deeper instinct cried out, 'Away with it!' He forced his
mind back to her story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible
conviction. It was all very fine; but it would not do.

'I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say, or than I
wanted to learn,' he said slowly. 'But there is one brutal question which is
the whole point of my enquiry.' He braced his frame like one preparing for a
plunge into cold waters. 'Mrs Manderson, will you assure me that your
husband's change toward you had nothing to do with John Marlowe?'

And what he had dreaded came. 'Oh!' she cried with a sound of anguish, her
face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then the hands
covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among the cushions at
her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of black hair, and her
body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a foot turned inward
gracelessly in an abandonment of misery. Like a tall tower suddenly breaking
apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly weeping.

Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity he
placed his envelope exactly in the centre of the little polished table. He
walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and in a few minutes
was tramping through the rain out of sight of White Gables, going nowhere,
seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce effort to kill and trample the
raving impulse that had seized him in the presence of her shame, that
clamoured to him to drag himself before her feet, to pray for pardon, to pour
out words-- he knew not what words, but he knew that they had been straining
at his lips--to wreck his self-respect for ever, and hopelessly defeat even
the crazy purpose that had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness
in disgust, by babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a
husband not yet buried, to a woman who loved another man.

Such was the magic of her tears, quickening in a moment the thing which, as
his heart had known, he must not let come to life. For Philip Trent was a
young man, younger in nature even than his years, and a way of life that kept
his edge keen and his spirit volcanic had prepared him very ill for the
meeting that comes once in the early manhood of most of us, usually--as in his
case, he told himself harshly--to no purpose but the testing of virtue and the
power of the will.

CHAPTER XI: Hitherto Unpublished

My Dear Molloy:---This is in case I don't find you at your office. I have
found out who killed Manderson, as this dispatch will show. This was my
problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It definitely charges an
unsuspected person with having a hand in the crime, and practically accuses
him of being the murderer, so I don't suppose you will publish it before his
arrest, and I believe it is illegal to do so afterwards until he has been
tried and found guilty. You may decide to publish it then; and you may find it
possible to make some use or other before then of the facts I have given. That
is your affair. Meanwhile, will you communicate with Scotland Yard, and let
them see what I have written? I have done with the Manderson mystery, and I
wish to God I had never touched it. Here follows my dispatch.--P.T.

Marlstone, June 16th. I begin this, my third and probably my final dispatch to
the Record upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a
strong sense of relief, because in my two previous dispatches I was obliged,
in the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which would,
if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and possibly have
led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness and resource. These
facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess, no liking for the story of
treachery and perverted cleverness which I have to tell. It leaves an evil
taste in the mouth, a savour of something revolting in the deeper puzzle of
motive underlying thc puzzle of the crime itself, which I believe I have
solved.

It will be remembered that in my first dispatch I described the situation as I
found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday morning. I told how the body
was found, and in what state; dwelt upon the complete mystery surrounding the
crime, and mentioned one or two local theories about it; gave some account of
the dead man's domestic surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed
description of his movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a
little fact which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of
whisky much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an abstract of
the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim report was made at
my request by other representatives of the Record. That day is not yet over as
I write these lines; and I have now completed an investigation which has led
me directly to the man who must be called upon to clear himself of the guilt
of the death of Manderson.

Apart from the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before his
usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor points of oddity
about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to thousands of those
who have read the accounts in the newspapers: points apparent from the very
beginning. The first of these was that, whereas the body was found at a spot
not thirty yards from the house, all the people of the house declared that
they had heard no cry or other noise in the night. Manderson had not been
gagged; the marks on his wrists pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and
there had been at least one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is
the fact that in murders with firearms, especially if there has been a
struggle, the criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd
fact seemed all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin the butler was a
bad sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the window open,
faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body was found.

The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was Manderson's
leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that he had risen and
dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch and chain, and had gone
out of doors without remembering to put in this plate, which he had carried in
his mouth every day for years, and which contained all the visible teeth of
the upper jaw. It had evidently not been a case of frantic hurry; and even if
it had been, he would have been more likely to forget almost anything than
this denture. Any one who wears such a removable plate will agree that the
putting it in on rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as
eating, to say nothing of appearances, depend upon it.

Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at the
moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in the
shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious question
how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.

With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the first
few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much ingenuity
had been directed to concealing.

I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity of its
furnishing, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes and shoes,
and the manner of its communication with Mrs Manderson's room. On the upper of
the two long shelves on which the shoes were ranged I found, where I had been
told I should find them, the pair of patent leather shoes which Manderson had
worn on the evening before his death. I had glanced over the row, not with any
idea of their giving me a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a
judge of shoes, and all these shoes were of the very best workmanship. But my
attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this particular pair.
They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes, very thin in the sole,
without toe- caps, and beautifully made, like all the rest. These shoes were
old and well worn; but being carefully polished, and fitted, as all the shoes
were, upon their trees, they looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a
slight splitting of the leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp--a
splitting at the point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the
upper. It is at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this
sort is forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong
stitching across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining
this stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The splitting
was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the torn
edges having come together again on the removal of the strain, there was
nothing that a person who was not something of a connoisseur of shoe-leather
would have noticed. Even less noticeable, and indeed not to be seen at all
unless one were looking for it, was a slight straining of the stitches uniting
the upper to the sole. At the toe and on the outer side of each shoe this
stitching had been dragged until it was visible on a close inspection of the
join.

These indications, of course, could mean only one thing--the shoes had been
worn by some one for whom they were too small.

Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well shod,
and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet. Not one of
the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained, bore similar marks;
they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself into tight shoe-leather.
Some one who was not Manderson had worn these shoes, and worn them recently;
the edges of the tears were quite fresh.

The possibility of some one having worn them since Manderson's death was not
worth considering; the body had only been found about twenty-six hours when I
was examining the shoes; besides, why should any one wear them? The
possibility of some one having borrowed Manderson's shoes and spoiled them for
him while he was alive seemed about as negligible. With others to choose from
he would not have worn these. Besides, the only men in the place were the
butler and the two secretaries. But I do not say that I gave those
possibilities even as much consideration as they deserved, for my thoughts
were running away with me, and I have always found it good policy, in cases of
this sort, to let them have their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train
at Marlstone early that morning I had been steeped in details of the Manderson
affair; the thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly the moment had
come when the daemon wakes and begins to range.

Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in contact
with difficult affairs of any kind. Swiftly and spontaneously, when chance or
effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any system of baffling
circumstances, one's ideas seem to rush to group themselves anew in relation
to that fact, so that they are suddenly rearranged almost before one has
consciously grasped the significance of the key-fact itself. In the present
instance, my brain had scarcely formulated within itself the thought,
'Somebody who was not Manderson has been wearing these shoes,' when there flew
into my mind a flock of ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon
this new notion. It was unheard- of for Manderson to drink much whisky at
night. It was very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when
found--the cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
unlike him not to wash when he rose, and to put on last night's evening shirt
and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch in the
waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its reception. (In my
first dispatch I mentioned all these points, but neither I nor any one else
saw anything significant in them when examining the body.) It was very
strange, in the existing domestic situation, that Manderson should be
communicative to his wife about his doings, especially at the time of his
going to bed, when he seldom spoke to her at all. It was extraordinary that
Manderson should leave his bedroom without his false teeth.

All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together, drawn from
various parts of my memory of the morning's enquiries and observations. They
had all presented themselves, in far less time than it takes to read them as
set down here, as I was turning over the shoes, confirming my own certainty on
the main point. And yet when I confronted the definite idea that had sprung up
suddenly and unsupported before me--'It was not Manderson who was in the house
that night'--it seemed a stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was
certainly Manderson who had dined at the house and gone out with Marlowe in
the car. People had seen him at close quarters. But was it he who returned at
ten? That question too seemed absurd enough. But I could not set it aside. It
seemed to me as if a faint light was beginning to creep over the whole expanse
of my mind, as it does over land at dawn, and that presently the sun would be
rising. I set myself to think over, one by one, the points that had just
occurred to me, so as to make out, if possible, why any man masquerading as
Manderson should have done these things that Manderson would not have done.

I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in forcing
his feet into Manderson's narrow shoes. The examination of footmarks is very
well understood by the police. But not only was the man concerned to leave no
footmarks of his own: he was concerned to leave Manderson's, if any; his whole
plan, if my guess was right, must have been directed to producing the belief
that Manderson was in the place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn
upon leaving footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so.
The maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson always
left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the shoe-shelves
later in the morning, after the body had been found.

When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false teeth, an
explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair broke upon me at
once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its owner. If my guess was right,
the unknown had brought the denture to the house with him, and left it in the
bedroom, with the same object as he had in leaving the shoes: to make it
impossible that any one should doubt that Manderson had been in the house and
had gone to bed there. This, of course, led me to the inference that Manderson
was dead before the false Manderson came to the house, and other things
confirmed this.

For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
position. If my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson's shoes had
certainly had possession of Manderson's trousers, waistcoat, and shooting
jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and Martin had seen the
jacket--which nobody could have mistaken--upon the man who sat at the
telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if my guess was right) that
this unmistakable garment was a cardinal feature of the unknown's plan. He
knew that Martin would take him for Manderson at the first glance.

And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing that had
escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the unquestioned
assumption that it was Manderson who was present that night, that neither I
nor, as far as I know, any one else had noted the point. Martin had not seen
the man's face, nor had Mrs Manderson.

Mrs Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I have
said, I had a full report made by the Record stenographers in court) had not
seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I shall show presently.
She had merely spoken with him as she lay half asleep, resuming a conversation
which she had had with her living husband about an hour before. Martin, I
perceived, could only have seen the man's back, as he sat crouching over the
telephone; no doubt a characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had
worn his hat, Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in
the back of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been
of about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from the
jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.

I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The
thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his mimicry was
good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points assured, only some
wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.

To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the entrance by the
window instead of by the front door will already have occurred to any one
reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost certainly have been
heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just across the hall; he might
have met him face to face.

Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much importance
to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a household of eight
or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it should go in that way on
that evening. Martin had been plainly quite dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed
to me now that many a man--fresh, as this man in all likelihood was, from a
bloody business, from the unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part
still to play--would turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a
drink before sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and
success, he probably drank more.

But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was before
him: the business--clearly of such vital importance to him, for whatever
reason--of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a body of
convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson; and this with
the risk--very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how unnerving!--of the
woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking and somehow discovering
him. True, if he kept out of her limited field of vision from the bed, she
could only see him by getting up and going to the door. I found that to a
person lying in her bed, which stood with its head to the wall a little beyond
the door, nothing was visible through the doorway but one of the cupboards by
Manderson's bed-head. Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household,
he would think it most likely that Mrs Manderson was asleep. Another point
with him, I guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and
wife, which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their
usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known to all
who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if Mrs
Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed presence of her
husband.

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.