So I put in a polite “Dear me, most extraordinary!” with which she had to be content. “When I got up,” she continued, “I could hardly stand, my foot hurt me so; and I’ve been limping ever since. And the most extraordinary thing is that there’s a red mark on my foot, like a scar.” Another expectant pause. But still no word from Chawdron. He sat there with his mouth tight shut, and the lines that divided his cheeks from that wide simian upper lip of his were as though engraved in stone. The Fairy looked at him and saw that she had taken hopelessly the wrong line. Was it too late to remedy the mistake? She put the new plan of campaign into immediate execution. “But you poor Nunky Benny!” she began, in the sort of tone in which you’d talk to a sick dog. “How selfish of me to talk about my ailments, when you’re lying there with your poor foot bandaged up!” The dog began to wag his tail at once. The beatific look returned to his face. He took her hand. I couldn’t stand it. “I think I’d better be going,” I said; and I went.’
‘But the foot?’ I asked. ‘The stabbing pain at exactly half past eleven?’
‘You may well ask. As Chawdron himself remarked, when next I saw him, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ’ Tilney laughed. ‘The Fairy had triumphed. After he’d had his dose of mother love and Christian charity and kittenish sympathy, he’d been ready, I suppose, to listen to her story. The stabbing pain at eleven-thirty, the red scar. Strange, mysterious, unaccountable. He discussed it all with me, very gravely and judiciously. We talked of spiritualism and telepathy. We distinguished carefully between the miraculous and the super-normal. “As you know,” he told me, “I’ve been a good Presbyterian all my life, and as such have been inclined to dismiss as mere fabrications all the stories of the Romish saints. I never believed in the story of St Francis’s stigmata, for example.
But now I accept it!” Solemn and tremendous pause. “Now I know it’s true.” I just bowed my head in silence. But the next time I saw M‘Crae, the chauffeur, I asked a few questions. Yes, he had seen Miss Spindell that day he drove the Bugatti up to London and came back with the Rolls. He’d gone into the secretaries’ office to see if there were any letters to take down for Mr Chawdron, and Miss Spindell had run into him as he came out. She’d asked him what he was doing in London and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to answer, in spite of Mr Chawdron’s orders, except the truth. It had been on his conscience ever since; he hoped it hadn’t done any harm. “On the contrary,” I assured him, and that I certainly wouldn’t tell Mr Chawdron. Which I never did. I thought . . . But good heavens!’ he interrupted himself; ‘what’s this?’ It was Hawtrey, who had come in to lay the table for lunch. She ignored us, actively. It was not only as though we didn’t exist; it was as though we also had no right to exist. Tilney took out his watch. ‘Twenty past one. God almighty! Do you mean to say I’ve been talking here the whole morning since breakfast?’
‘So it appears,’ I answered.
He groaned. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘you see what it is to have a gift of the gab. A whole precious morning utterly wasted.’
‘Not for me,’ I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps not. But then for you the story was new and curious. Whereas for me it’s known, it’s stale.’
‘But for Shakespeare so was the story of Othello, even before he started to write it.’
‘Yes, but he wrote, he didn’t talk. There was something to show for the time he’d spent. His Othello didn’t just disappear into thin air, like my poor Chawdron.’ He sighed and was silent. Stone-faced and grim, Hawtrey went rustling starchily round the table; there was a clinking of steel and silver as she laid the places. I waited till she had left the room before I spoke again. When one’s servants are more respectable than one is oneself (and nowadays they generally are), one cannot be too careful.
‘And how did it end?’ I asked.
‘How did it end?’ he repeated in a voice that had suddenly gone flat and dull; he was bored with his story, wanted to think of something else. ‘It ended, so far as I was concerned, with my finishing the Autobiography and getting tired of its subject. I gradually faded out of Chawdron’s existence. Like the Cheshire Cat.’
‘And the Fairy?’
‘Faded out of life about a year after the Affair of the Stigmata. She retired to her mystic death-bed once too often. Her pretending came true at last; it was always the risk with her. She really did die.’
The door opened; Hawtrey re-entered the room, carrying a dish.
‘And Chawdron, I suppose, was inconsolable?’ Inconsolability is, happily, a respectable subject.
Tilney nodded. ‘Took to spiritualism, of course. Nemesis again.’
Hawtrey raised the lid of the dish; a smell of fried soles escaped into the air. ‘Luncheon is served,’ she said, with what seemed to me an ill-concealed contempt and disapproval.
‘Luncheon is served,’ Tilney echoed, moving towards his place. He sat down and opened his napkin. ‘One meal after another, punctually, day after day, day after day. Such is life. Which would be tolerable enough if something ever got done between meals. But in my case nothing does. Meal after meal, and between meals a vacuum, a kind of . . .’ Hawtrey, who had been offering him the sauce tartare for the past several seconds, here gave him the discreetest nudge. Tilney turned his head. ‘Ah, thank you,’ he said, and helped himself.
The end
