III
The padre had driven up from Poperinghe in the dark, in the side car of a motorcycle. He sat beyond the table, talking of Jotham Rust, Everbe Corinthia’s brother and Simon’s son, whom I had seen three times in my life.
Yesterday I saw Jotham for the third and last time, arraigned before a court martial for desertion: the scarecrow of that once sturdy figure with its ruddy, capable face, who had pulled George out of the lock with a boat-hook that afternoon three years ago, charged now for his life, offering no extenuation nor explanation, expecting and asking no clemency.
“He does not want clemency,” the padre said. The padre was a fine, honest man, incumbent of a modest living in the Midlands somewhere, who had brought the kind and honest stupidity of his convictions into the last place on earth where there was room for them. “He does not want to live.” His face was musing and dejected, shocked and bewildered.
“There comes a time in the life of every man when the world turns its dark side to him and every man’s shadow is his mortal enemy. Then he must turn to God, or perish.
Yet he . . . I cannot seem . . .” His eyes held that burly bewilderment of oxen; above his stock his shaven chin dejected, but not vanquished yet. “And you say you know of no reason why he should have attacked you?”
“I never saw the man but twice before,” I said. “One time was night before last, the other was . . . two — three years ago, when I passed through his father’s lock in a skiff while I was at Oxford. He was there when his sister let us through. And if you hadn’t told me his sister’s name, I wouldn’t have remembered him then.”
He brooded. “The father is dead, too.”
“What? Dead? Old Simon dead?”
“Yes. He died shortly after the — the other. Rust says he left his father after the sister’s funeral, talking with the sexton in Abingdon churchyard, and a week later he was notified in London that his father was dead. He says the sexton told him his father had been giving directions about his own funeral.
The sexton said that every day Simon would come up to see him about it, made all the arrangements, and that the sexton joked him a little about it, because he was such a hale old chap, thinking that he was just off balance for the time with the freshness of his grief. And then, a week later, he was dead.”
“Old Simon dead,” I said. “Corinthia, then Simon, and now Jotham.” The candle flame stood steady and unwavering on the table.
“Was that her name?” he said. “Everbe Corinthia?” He sat in the lone chair, puzzlement, bewilderment in the very shape of his shadow on the wall behind him. The light fell on one side of his face, the major’s crown on that shoulder glinting dully. I rose from the cot, the harness of the leg creaking with explosive loudness, and leaned over his shoulder and took a cigarette from my magneto case tobacco-box, and fumbled a match in my single hand. He glanced up.
“Permit me,” he said. He took the box and struck a match. “You’re fortunate to have escaped with just that.” He indicated my sling.
“Yes, sir. If it hadn’t been for my leg, I’d have got the knife in my ribs instead of my arm.”
“Your leg?”
“I keep it propped on a chair beside the bed, so I can reach it easily. He stumbled over it and waked me. Otherwise he’d have stuck me like a pig.”
“Oh,” he said. He dropped the match and brooded again with his stubborn bewilderment. “And yet, his is not the face of an assassin in the dark. There is a forthrightness in it, a — a — what shall I say? a sense of social responsibility, integrity, that . . .
And you say that you — I beg your pardon; I do not doubt your word; it is only that — Yet the girl is indubitably dead; it was he who discovered her and was with her until she died and saw her buried. He heard the man laugh once, in the dark.”
“But you cannot slash a stranger’s arm simply because you heard a laugh in the dark, sir. The poor devil is crazy with his own misfortunes.”
“Perhaps so,” the padre said. “He told me that he has other proof, something incontrovertible; what, he would not tell me.”
“Then let him produce it. If I were in his place now . . .”
He brooded, his hands clasped on the table. “There is a justice in the natural course of events. . . . My dear sir, are you accusing Providence of a horrible and meaningless practical joke? No, no; to him who has sinned, that sin will come home to him. Otherwise . . . God is at least a gentleman. Forgive me: I am not — You understand how this comes home to me, in this unfortunate time when we already have so much to reproach ourselves with.
We are responsible for this.” He touched the small metal cross on his tunic, then he swept his arm in a circular gesture that shaped in the quiet room between us the still and sinister darkness in which the fine and resounding words men mouthed so glibly were the vampire’s teeth with which the vampire fed. “The voice of God waking His servants from the sloth into which they have sunk. . . .”
“What, padre?” I said. “Is the damn thing making a dissenter of you too?”
He mused again, his face heavy in the candle light. “That the face of a willful shedder of blood, of an assassin in the dark? No, no; you cannot tell me that.”
I didn’t try. I didn’t tell him either my belief that only necessity, the need for expedition and silence, had reduced Jotham to employing a knife, an instrument of any kind; that what he wanted was my throat under his hands.
He had gone home on his leave, to that neat little dovecote beside the lock, and at once he found something strained in its atmosphere and out of tune. That was last summer, about the time I was completing my course at the Observers’ School.
Simon appeared to be oblivious of the undercurrent, but Jotham had not been home long before he discovered that every evening about dusk Corinthia quitted the house for an hour or so, and something in her manner, or maybe in the taut atmosphere of the house itself, caused him to question her. She was evasive, blazed suddenly out at him in anger which was completely unlike her at all, then became passive and docile.
Then he realized that the passiveness was secretive, the docility dissimulation; one evening he surprised her slipping away. He drove her back to the house, where she took refuge in her room and locked the door, and from a window he thought he caught a glimpse of the man disappearing beyond a field. He pursued, but found no one.
For an hour after dusk he lay in a nearby coppice, watching the house, then he returned. Corinthia’s door was still locked and old Simon filled the house with his peaceful snoring.
Later something waked him. He sat up in bed, then sprang to the floor and went to the window. There was a moon and by its light he saw something white flitting along the towpath.
He pursued and overtook Corinthia, who turned like a vicious small animal at the edge of the coppice where he had lain in hiding. Beyond the towpath a punt lay at the bank. It was empty. He grasped Corinthia’s arm. She raged at him; it could not have been very pretty.
Then she collapsed as suddenly and from the tangled darkness of the coppice behind them a man’s laugh came, a jeering sound that echoed once across the moonlit river and ceased. Corinthia now crouched on the ground, watching him, her face like a mask in the moonlight.
He rushed into the coppice and beat it thoroughly, finding nothing. When he emerged the punt was gone. He ran down to the water, looking this way and that. While he stood there the laugh came again, from the shadows beneath the other shore.
He returned to Corinthia. She sat as he had left her, her loosened hair about her face, looking out across the river. He spoke to her, but she did not reply. He lifted her to her feet. She came docilely and they returned to the cottage. He tried to talk to her again, but she moved stonily beside him, her loosened hair about her cold face. He saw her to her room and locked the door himself and took the key back to bed with him. Simon had not awakened. The next morning she was gone, the door still locked.
He told Simon then and all that day they sought her, assisted by the neighbors. Neither of them wished to notify the police, but at dusk that day a constable appeared with his notebook, and they dragged the lock, without finding anything. The next morning, just after dawn, Jotham found her lying in the towpath before the door.
She was unconscious, but showed no physical injury. They brought her into the house and applied their spartan, homely remedies, and after a time she revived, screaming. She screamed all that day until sunset. She lay on her back screaming, her eyes wide open and perfectly empty, until her voice left her and her screaming
