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Cains jawbone -cains
Psychotherapy (Psy12)
Our Lady of Fatima University
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I sit down alone at the appointed table and take up my pen to give all whom it may con- cern an exact account of what may happen. Call me nervous, call me fey, if you will; at least this little pen, this mottled black and silver Aquarius, with its nib specially tempered to my order in Amsterdam, is greedy. It has not had much work since it flew so nimbly for the dead old man. As I watch the sea, Casy Ferris passes with down-dropped eyes. Of course, to-day is the day. Her father reminds me of a valetudi- narian walrus. But she has, I suppose, to have somebody. St. Lazarus-in-the-Chine is full, no doubt, already. I think she is rash ; but it is none of my business. Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, my heart remembers how. Strange that he comes into my head so much to-day. I hope it’s over some flotsam fish that the birds are making whau- pee. But all the nice gulls love a sailor. Ugh.
I plunged for the last time. The few remaining figures and letters swam as they came up to me. Then I took them in. There were no more. I glanced about me. I felt I was getting my money’s worth. London is like that ; it accepts the wanderer home with a sort of warm indifference. The woman’s beauty was, I surmised, profound ; her creamy dress, contrasting with her vivid colouring, showed to me, though more as white against a gay brick sepulchre than snow against roses. Yes it was a dreadful beauty, as far as I could see, and I recalled the stark phrases : Which swept an hundred thousand souls away ; yet I alive. But he was not ; the writer had strangely died to-day. And again they continued this wretched course three or four days : but they were every one of them carried into the great pit before it was quite filled up. Where was Henry? Ah, he was standing by her, close enough to touch the small buoyant face that topped her pillared neck most like a bell-flower on its bed. Would he appreciate?
At my meeting with Clement yesterday, he had been quite specific : less than twenty thousand yards as average---seventeen thousand six hundred to be exact---full ration of the assassin’s wonderful substance, a little act of justice at the end of less than a week, and then the glorious stuff galore for ever. I felt excellent as I took my second pill. At least I was on my way, for I had come upon the major half of a publishing firm ; they had always been very good to me, what with Austin Freeman, Oppenheim and Mary Roberts Rinehart. O my mother was loath to have her go away, all the week she thought of her, she watched for her many a month. And then there was a forgotten line. But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again. I thought it a pity that Hodder was not there : what a sweet name for a village! My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes. No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair. I have no chair.
And I really think I would have preferred the Maestro Jimson’s title, now that this piled abomination is actually before me. But the queen can do no wrong. The rain that came heavily is drying off lightly. There, jauntily tripping from the edge of one puddle to another is crisp Sir Roland Mowthalorn, shuddering old thing, intent to buy the day’s buttonhole from gin-faced Annie behind the church. I remember clearly, perhaps because I ought to have my wits about me for another purpose, how Sir Roland’s father, Sir Weedon, once saw Henry taking the part of Lesurques and mixed him up with Le Cirque d’Hiver. Instead of really explaining, she points me gaily to a little boy about, she says, to tumble into the sea. Perhaps he has already tumbled in. In the snowy cumulus above the orange there seems to be now a hole. She tells me to mash all with a spoon. If she had said a mashie. But she is so beautiful. Can I suspect her?
I had gone to sleep the night before after rereading Typhoon. It had always struck me as a remarkable work. Now was the hour when Charles Victor Hugo Renard-Beinsky had risen untimely for the sake of the investigating judge. But the very phrase struck chill like the slap of the Firth of Forth above the heart, wading out over the coal dust in the morning. I had investigated ; but who would believe an investigator who had not stirred from Baker Street? I was a judge, but with no sombre little cap, and no machinery to make my judgements effective. I felt I needed something. Would I be comforted by a Jew’s lime and the concomitant odour? I tried, and felt relieved. Someone had advised me, a few days before, to read Conrad in search of his Youth, or in Search of a Father, was it? But I had always found Conrad unreadable, as far from English as the Poles, and did not mean to try again.
Could I be developing a green-eyed streak? I investigated the body before me with the aid of a powerful glass. At least I always thought of it as powerful, because I never could quite understand how it worked. I knew I ought to have the body as long as possible. At last I was satisfied. I measured the distance carefully with my eye : a good forty inches, I made it. I gathered from his talk that Guido looked his last to-day on the sausage place---furtively I knew how excellent---and that Kilmarnock and Belmerino completely lost their heads. But whether or not this was cause and effect I couldn’t make out. I wished for the hundredth time I had a better brain. Later she was wearing the same bow---I loathed bows myself---and that time he found them and trimmed the left end. Then he turned what he was holding a bit ; so that it pushed its way right through. Then he twiddled the black knobby thing, and Mr. Hall burst in upon us. The knobby thing was black and red.
The sound of the bell, as of a boding gnat, just came to me. The finger causing it was, I knew, the index of a most skilful hand, one I had commanded, one that would pluck me from embarrassment, and yet one I vaguely distrusted. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of responsibility.... One had to be in the key for such things. I felt I should enjoy it as I got used to it. The bell again, and then a far sensation of feet. I was glad the man had come ; time was not unlimited. I remembered that, when I was returning after a fortnight’s absence during which my assistant Charles Day had deputised for me in my lectures on mineralogy at Peebles University, a tactless hand had left on the blackboard : “Let us work while it is yet Day ; for the Knight cometh when no man can work.”
Then came Hyacinth’s day. He laughed when he remembered that, as we were walking round the garden, and said it was too late for Jasmine’s day at any rate. I liked to hear him laugh, and thought it was absurd for him to be called after what the man Boots didn’t understand. The latter’s way of expressing himself seemed to me childish ; why should we, of all people, use singular for plural and plural for singular? They went back two days and formulated their bet, till I could have howled. If he got the third point, she’d owe him a box of a hundred Egyptian cigarettes---Gourdoulis, and if she won, he’d give her three pairs of Etam dawn mist, ten inches. They looked so bright about it all. She drooped long seed pearl things right over the soup. Ear-drops, as my mother had called them, I never could abide ; probably because I belonged to the other side of the family. My mistress wore them ; was it for that that I had begun to tire of her already?
Rintrah, where has thou hid thy bride? Weeps she in desert shades? Alas! my Rintrah, bring the lovely jealous Ocalythron.
Then against a possible invasion of my privacy, I touched my white cheeks until they blushed. My luck was not in. He was a typically farm-labourer, with what thy’d call in Bloomsbury a Newdigate fringe. Just like that sort of a poet, I supposed they’d mean. He anchored himself heavily, consciously waving an empty pipe. Henry was now stooping over the other body, whistling between its teeth. What would I have done, I wondered? Really this sort of thing was native to me in a way. I wished there were water without going for it. I remembered, of course, that there was a conduit dating from 1597 standing here in the market place. But that was of little use to me. On the whole, I thought I would have as much nerve as my dear hero. But one never knew.
My ears were becoming attuned, and for the first time I heard clearly what the woman was saying : “Are you going to leave everything to me?” she asked, and I could have sworn her companion started. Then seeing, or thinking he saw, his mistake, he answered : “You must do just as you think fit, May.” After all it was none of my business. Some fragments of dejected flesh still lay among the rests of the spilled wine. At my sign, Henry stooped and made all clean again. And there was no immediate call for me to listen further, for there came a pause during which both seemed busy with their thoughts. And I too thought. The voice was like and yet not like that of Janetta Sheringham. How we had laughed that day in the hay field when John sat on the buttered rolls, and we devised games out of straws, and we thought the cricket a war-horse, barded and chaufroned too, real fairy, with wings all right.
Now, I considered, in my dear Lyons it would be coming of age hours, and I wondered if they would ever do that over here. I fancied what self-consciousness and preciosity there would be, for instance, if the B.B. ever took it up. A strange institution ; but the nursed fuse was always interesting. Yes, if sitting at the familiar table with Bart chewing at my moccasins, I could have broadcast it all, I would have left the mighty heart of England to deal with it. On that very day, I recalled, another terrible thing happened. John Hewit and Sarah Drew, just engaged to be married, were working together in a field of barley when they were both struck by lightning. Alexander, the only noteworthy Pope of my native land, was demonstrably affected. And my namesake wrote a letter, in which he said that Sarah’s left eye was injured, and there appeared a black spot on her breast. Her lover was all over black ; but not the least sign of life was found in either.
One’s eyebrows were one’s own, I always thought. Though I did remember a case---Aunt Mary’s, to be precise---when it was not so. She had met him after the explosion, of course ; and when it became a question of dinner and the Highgate Empire, actually with performing quaggas, she put herself in the hands of the man who made up for, if anything could make up for, the Russian ballet. And they dropped, naturally, like two fuzzy caterpillars into the clear soup at supper. The old days. The Highgate Empire, where Wilkie Bard, as Lauder did not say, sang o’ his love and fondly sae did I o’ mine. At last the two little horrors ceased in their shrill claim and counter-claim for sweaty quasi-transparencies of colour, and goggled at me while I put black to mine. Bill always called them two dark flapper moons. Should I make an effort and go back to Henry? He was ready to love. That at least was obvious.
Yesterday he got in another of his own kind, who agreed she’d done it all herself. He twiddled the polished knob and Mr. Hall came into the room again. I heard him muttering that it was appropriate the Human Comedy couldn’t possibly have gone on beyond to-day. I, rather surprisingly, liked music. Surprisingly, that is, to anyone who did not know that my people came from the same place as the McCrimmons, that famous race of hereditary music makers. I was rather astonished to hear him saying something about someone who was by virtue first, then choice, a queen. Tell me, if she were not design’d th’ eclipse and glory of her kind. So I pulled his sleeve. He pulled my ears, and said it was Wotton, which I didn’t think it was, and that she had only just come to Falkland. I made a low noise and at once knew I had done the wrong thing. Usually he just said William Sydney Porter, which I offended ; but then he said something much worse.
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, my great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Next day I would have to pay for all I had had of solace, and for all I would have later. It would, I thought, have seemed impossible to link Will’s friend Ben with Will’s wife, and yet they went off together, or at least on that same day : the bricklayer out of Annandale and the inheritor of the second-best bed : strange bedfellows. Underneath this stone, he had said, doth lie as much Beauty as could die ; but of course he hadn’t been talking about her. Nor had either had anything to do with my waking, my strong tea, and my first pill. That all happened by the Mole, and there was the oldest brass in England, saying : SIRE : IOHAN : DAUBERNOUN : CHIVALER : GIST : ICY : DEV : DE : SA : ALME : EYT : MERCY. Good enough. We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two.
To reckon with Henry! That was never easy. Just beyond the laurels, I turned sharply and there he was, bending over the body of his latest victim. There was blood all about. I called to him sharply and he seemed dazed. Afterwards I brought in my rough old friend Calabar Bean to help me---this on the very day when I had proved digitalis purpurea, though I did not know if the profession prescribe it usually as such, a signal wash out. But why should this aspect have come into my head? Far, far from here the Adriatic breaks in a warm bay among the green Illyrian hills. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Read Mark Twain and inwardly digest. But I had to keep my wits about me. He pottered about with me and succeeded at last in making friends with Henry. Already he felt that I was leading him to the fountain Ponce de Leon sought, where he who drinks is deathless. And he was not so far wrong.
He always talked to me about murder, when we were alone together. And that day he told me it was the birthday of a good one in prison. John and Cornelius, the Dort people ; I can’t say I understood very much. But I liked his name, and showed him so, for he had always been very clement to me, even about that cat Jasmine. By the bye, Tusitala and Flora had both come over to our place. Of course you might say that was nothing to make a song about. But others had not agreed. And just as I was feeling how much I loved him, he put on funny clothes and went away. I lowered myself and made love to Flora. It was quite late when he came back with her. He had always told me that I was absurdly sensitive. It might be so. Explain it how you will, when I first set eyes on her I felt no vibration, no hint at all, of my latter end. I was banished and slept miserably with Flora.
After I might just as easily have been a literary bloke, like Jeremy Taylor or Eugene Sue. I told myself that all art was one. There might be superficial differences in their work, but they had, in the words of the old song, gone the same way home. When was it? Why, to-day, if I mistook not. I felt I must take a grip of my failing, in so far, that was, as it distorted the time factor. But in that case I knew I was right. To think of time---of all that retrospection, to think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward. Have you guessed you yourself would not continue? Have you dreaded these earth beetles? But it occurred to me that to think of time with my delight would have got him guessing. I woke to the consciousness that I had done very little in my life. Not Dolittle but Didlittle. What was a did little? Didling, perhaps, or didlet. It was at the former that I woke to consciousness that morning.
The girl had left Henry by this time, thank God. She was an obvious whey-face. She didn’t seem capable for a moment of understanding those first two killings of his. He was being a dear. He had sent the rector’s aunt away, as he explained to the girl, like a bee with a sore bonnet. A foreign touch. Killing time, yes. I was doing that. It was funny how idly the mind worked ; or seeming idly. Perhaps there was something in heredity after all. I pondered to its direction. An accent was a terrible thing, I thought. Killing timewouldn’t be so good. I realised that I was impressionable, that I liked a good murder. But Hodge, once settled, wasn’t in the least like a singer. He had a wen, and scratched his left whisker. I supposed it would be different to suddenly develop a wen for someone. Different and messier. He asked me about Ben Wade, hitherto merely mutely unemployed, and of course I said the right thing.
I had seen, day after day, every sunlit or night obscured detail of the funny old house I had visited so many years ago. Through it, handsome, cadaverous and so quiet, had walked Death himself, tapping unnoticed at the very walls of the mansions of life ; trying here, failing there, lightly fingering for the sign of a breach. A tiny opening. Apparently the person who slept in the lock-up at that county town on the Severn, or perhaps woke, would hear this time. I had found that I could face my usual mixture of Peaberry Mysore and Blue Mountain. I had made certain havoc of two on toast, their silver skins laced with their golden blood. To think of the tiny Clem mixed up, nay, a prime mover, in such affairs. Useful, courteous little chip of a bat. He had hushed my brat for me when he was only six, one morning on which I had wanted to go out for a walk.
I found myself by that one of the windows which overlooked the stone broach spire---a rarity in Kent---of Pluckley church, and the light would strike my book from over my right shoulder. I drew a volume from my pocket ; blind-tooled on the green in a double circle was a single star above what was perhaps a sea. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person, and I wondered if such a reason for marriage would ever have occurred to me. I had never married, and scarcely felt like beginning now. It was the tenth edition, of 1917. No, Sir ; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself. Not a woman had entered as yet. I was in for a ticklish business, and I knew it. Forging ahead, I supposed they would call it, since the woman was not yet dead. You might not hear of her again.
The others did not seem similarly impressed. Phrases of this and that came to half my ear, duet by rill and corncrake. Rill vaunted the pleasure of speeding, and corncrake gave warnings like an over-driven oak about to fall. I remembered how I had listened for the same sound on that awful night in Paris, when I did not know what I know now. And again, in this very place for another reason, Henry would remember. To lose even two like these two, swallowed by the night, was apt to break a balance in one, to suggest that it was time to square accounts. Caseus, ah! And nothing lean or hungry here at all. A friend in the nick of time. I would have no more. My hand dropped to my hip pocket. I had to reckon with Henry. Yet could I? This nomenclature business had often bothered me. Sometimes I felt sudden enough, as if my head would burst sometimes but triturative. Was I a bomb, or only slow and godly and exceeding small?
I was a little consoled for the weeping weather by the fact that Gainsborough had gone out to-day. And, now I came to think of it, Henry had also gone to-day ; poor Henry, who had stayed uncomfortably after his meeting with Clément yesterday. Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune, I changed. Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. But that would be scanned. Or rather it wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to fit. I had woken that morning pleasantly near the sea, at yesterday’s capricious place of appointment with the man who gave me my instructions and all I wanted beside. Did Wodehouse know it, I wondered. Of its Earl he had said that he stood gazing out over his domain, drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against. All I wanted beside, I had thought. Hadn’t Chesterton said something about it’s being hemp at both ends? My job might prove him right.
He was picking round among all she had left behind and found a box with his name on it. Also it said, for he read it, I always pay my debts. Unwrapped, it seemed to be a hundred box of Gourdoulis. I had never seen him so moved. He started reading a letter from a woman, dead the same day. I had yours but yesterday, it sai, though dated the third of February, in which you suppose me to be dead and buried. I have already let you know I am still alive, he went on, but to say truth, I look upon my present circumstances to be exactly the same with those of departed spirits. I don’t think he ever said any more. Happily I was behind the armchair. He just opened the box. I had never seen him so moved. There were little bits of stuff like black pineapple on the carpet. I knew he could never be his old collected self again, and that my gray hairs would go down in sorrow to the grave.
It was a petty employ for one of my reputation ; you would not hear, I felt, much more of it. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. I have spoken of ironic comment. There was, I thought, little chance of that. I wondered if he had ever been an innocent child feeding among the pantries. But that was no fit time for such musings. He took foolish occasion to tell me who he was ; as if I did not know. Bills should always be met squarely. I turned to the man, and his gaze soon fell before mine. He had always spoken as if his throat were full of jelly. Now with a leer, he emitted sounds through this quag which shaped themselves into hints at some perpetual reward for valuable services rendered. But even then I had not made up my mind. It was, I said to myself, a bad workman who could not play one tool against another.
Death’s clumsy fingered, that was the really frightful thing : I had seen them, beneath a debonair smile, fumbling so long about their business. I realised that I would have to do something. This time, of course, the male incarcerated at the place of Hotspur’s death could not hear. I looked across the table to the great brimming bowl of yellow jasmine ; young Alexander had sent him up the night before with an invitation to a private view of the Paulo Post Avorticists. Then I glanced at the rococo mirror on my left. Well, my parents had seen to it, soon after birth, that I should be one ; but I had never, save during that week in Malta when I met Ronald Firbank and was a trifle jaundiced, been the other. It was terrible to sit there with only the table in front of me, and to know that murder had been committed. He would---I had sensed that---be intrinsicated and concealed, chamber within chamber ; if I durst open the bores, who would believe me?
I was feeling better already, and was glad that a memory, true though dim, had led me to the place. Video meliora proboque ; but I could not, for all my covert glances, see the modelling of the fossettes of the elbows of the woman sitting so near me. Were they, I wondered, like Sonia Gordon’s, triangular dimples with shadow in them? Poor Sonia Gordon. I pondered on that tragic fortnight at Southend : the pier with its electrical railway, and my cousin’s rash act, and Sonia’s lapse. Her temperament was against her. Still you couldn’t have an omelette without breaking eggs. And mine was excellent. “You would get off with a whole skin, would you?” I cried softly, as I stabbed once. And even as I did so, I thought of skinny old Marat in his slipper bath, the nightcap about his forehead, the dim light of the candle, the shadow at the door, the stealthy tread of Charlotte Brontë with the undulled blade. There was something wrong.
She said it didn’t matter what they had done, because she was still an M., and she’d got another one. That was he. She showed us some delicate undercoats, all raw liver colour, very lovely, and proved it. But she had, too, a passion for getting new things, and I was sorry for his sake. After all, in all my life with him, I had only had one coat, and that an inherited one. True, it was long and graceful, and fitted beautifully, which was more than could be said for some of hers. Combe, I had always thought, was where one pottered after rabbits. But there was a George too, because he said so. He called him a Free Knowledgist, though it didn’t seem to me he gave much away. He said this was his last day. I didn’t care. But I heard them say they were two all for that year ; she said one of his was vicarious and I could not understand what the vicar had to do with it. They made a bet.
What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious. Now that I was approaching journey’s end, I began to ask myself disconcerting questions. It would be terrible if she turned out to be Flecker’s one. And some to Flecker turn to pray, and I toward thy bed. But I had probably got it wrong. Yet it was all right. Her spelling was different and it was long ago. Yes, but supposing she came of the family of Jack’s visitor, with Thornhill, who promised the opera? I could never be sure of that. I took a pill. But it was worth it. Yes, it was worth it. The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden. He certainly could put that sort of thing over, the dear old bean. Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves. Thames Ditton’s sister, as Eric Parker calls her---and one remembered the Irishman’s malapropism in the same tale---had soon passed. Long she was ; but I did not linger to pay court to her.
Cains jawbone -cains
Course: Psychotherapy (Psy12)
University: Our Lady of Fatima University
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