The Bath Mysteries (26 page)

But tonight there was a warmer, almost an apologetic, tone about the formalities ensuing on Lawrence's arrival. Bobby even had the impression that had Lawrence insisted he might have been allowed to go home again. He showed himself, however, amenable to every suggestion, content to be passive in their hands, though still not so much indifferent as too absorbed in his own thoughts to have time to spare for other matters. There was no objection whatever on his part to the suggestion that he might be willing to spend what remained of the night at the Yard, so that there would be no delay in the morning in beginning those interviews, by his consent to take part in which, the C.I.D. officials explained, they would feel themselves put under so great an obligation.

As for Bobby, convinced by all this that either the case against Lawrence was very black indeed, and probably blacker still against someone else, or else that no case existed at all, he was told he had done well in producing Lawrence, and even better in performing that feat on a footing of such amiability and friendliness.

“Always best, to bring 'em in as if you loved 'em,” the officer in charge said to him approvingly; and, by way of reward, told him to be sure to be on hand in good time next day – next day being purely a figure of speech, since by now it was nearly five in the morning, all this and the formalities on Lawrence's arrival having taken up a good deal of time.

So Bobby returned home, went upstairs to look longingly at his bed, passed a contemplative and affectionate hand over the unruffled smoothness of its pillow, then treated himself to a bath and a shave, and to a breakfast consisting largely of hot, black coffee of a strength to daunt the boldest, and so returned to the Yard, where he was greeted with the news that Lawrence was asking for him.

Bobby went accordingly to the room where Lawrence was waiting, and was surprised to find him standing at the window, smoking a cigarette.

“I didn't know you smoked,” he remarked, after they had exchanged brief good mornings.

Lawrence, with an air of considerable, even comical, surprise, contemplated the cigarette between the fingers.

“I don't,” he said. “I mean, I haven't for years. But one of your people gave me a packet, and I forgot I didn't.”

He took another whiff, and seemed to enjoy it and yet still to be surprised at what he was doing. He laid the cigarette down, and said, leaning against the window and looking sideways out of it to where the river flowed brightly in the morning sunshine:

“I wanted to ask you... you told me .. . you said... I mean, is that true what you said about Miss Yates?”

“Yes. Why not?” Bobby answered, in as careless a tone as he could assume. Exaggerating a trifle, he added: “Her sight may go any minute almost – and, when it goes, it goes for good.”

“What... I mean... what for?”

“How should I know?” Bobby retorted. “I never asked, and I don't suppose she would have told me if I had.” After a pause, he added: “I saw her trying it out the other night.”

“Trying what out?”

“Blindness. Trying what it would feel like.”

He told curtly, and rather roughly, how he had watched the girl groping her way along the pavement and up the stairs of the house to her room. Lawrence listened with an intensity of interest far removed indeed from the dreadful, frozen indifference that hitherto had seemed to remove him so far from common humanity. But he made no comment at first as he moved restlessly up and down the room, pressing his hands together, fidgeting with the buttons of his coat, trying to moisten with his tongue his dry and twitching lips. He burst out presently into a low cry:

“But why? What for? I can't make it out.”

“Well, it's your affair, not mine,” observed Bobby, with a yawn that began by intention but soon passed beyond control as it cavernously expressed a whole night out of bed. “By the way, what did the Berry, Quick people pay you?”

“Pay me?” repeated Lawrence. “Why? It was never settled exactly. There was always money in the bank, and I took what I wanted when I had to.”

“Then you have no cash by you? I mean, if you wanted to go away somewhere – abroad, for example – in a hurry, perhaps – you couldn't do it, because you have no money by you.”

Lawrence was looking puzzled now. He felt in his pockets, and produced a shilling or two and some copper.

“That's all I've got,” he said, in the same puzzled way. “I get a bill for board and lodging every month, and I draw out money to pay it. Or if I want anything else – I don't often – a new hat, I mean, or something like that... and I don't want to go abroad in a hurry. Why should I?”

“Someone else might think there might be need some day,” observed Bobby; and Lawrence came and sat down opposite and stared at him, though not much with any air of awareness of his presence. He gave, indeed, somewhat an impression of one attempting to recall things seen and experienced on and from a sick bed, between intervals of recurring delirium. At last Bobby broke the silence by saying twice over: “Well? Well?”

“You don't mean,” Lawrence asked then, as it were a great wonder showing itself slowly on his troubled and bewildered features, “you don't mean she's losing her sight scraping coin together so that I could run for it if I had to?”

“Better ask her,” Bobby said, perpetrating another atrocious yam. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Who wouldn't give a kingdom for a bed? Didn't some johnny say that once, or something like it? Well, never mind. Nothing to do with me. I suppose it's a natural idea that police couldn't be trusted to give a fair show to an ex-convict when they had proof of dirty work at the crossroads and they knew he had been hanging around, and so the best thing would be for him to bolt. You aren't listening, are you?” he went on, noting with satisfaction that this chatter had passed unheeded by a Lawrence profoundly lost in his own thoughts. “But tell me this.” He called Lawrence back to his surroundings by the crude method of poking him violently in the ribs. “Did you never wonder how it was the Yates girl turned up at the Berry, Quick Syndicate?”

“I don't think so,” Lawrence answered slowly. “No, I didn't – I suppose, if I thought about it at all, I thought he had sent her.”

“Didn't you recognize her?”

“Not at first; not for a long time, I think. Then I did.”

“And it didn't occur to you to wonder...?” Lawrence shook his head.

“I never wondered about anything,” he said. “I never cared enough. It didn't matter. I was only waiting – I think,” he said slowly and carefully. “I think I felt I was as good as dead. I felt I had died long before, and I was just waiting for – for a grave.”

“Who do you mean by ‘he'? You said, you thought probably ‘he' had sent her.”

“He brought a fur coat for her once,” Lawrence said. “He said I was to give it her; it was an old one his wife had done with, but Miss Yates might be glad of it as we didn't pay her much. So I thought he knew about her, but – now I'm not sure he even knew there had been a change and she had come and the other one gone.”

“Who do you mean – ‘he'?” Bobby asked again.

“I don't know,” Lawrence answered. “Though I think perhaps you do.”

Bobby looked at him doubtfully.

“Never mind what I know,” he said. “How do you mean, you don't know? You must. How can you help?”

“I never saw him in the light,” Lawrence answered. “It was dark when we talked on the Embankment. At the office, it was always dark, too, always late at night when he came. Generally I got a typewritten letter to say what I was to do. Or he rang up. But sometimes he came himself. Then, if I was already there, he switched off the light before he came in. If he was there before me, he would have taken the bulb off. So I never saw him. He said he had to be careful because of certain reasons.”

“You never asked him what they were?”

“No. Why should I? They were his reasons, not mine. He said something once about an official position he held, and so he didn't want it known who he was.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I didn't care. What did it matter? Sometimes I think I was glad I didn't know. But generally I never thought about it. Why should I?”

“Most people would,” Bobby grumbled.

Lawrence seemed to be thinking.

“I wasn't a person," he muttered, more to himself than to Bobby. “They had made me just a thing.”

“Oh, rot,” Bobby snapped impatiently. “You mean, you liked to sit and feel sorry for yourself.”

“Well, well,” Lawrence said, a trifle uneasily. “I don't think it was that,” he protested, but with some doubt in his voice.

“Yes, it was,” Bobby declared positively. “Anyhow, you heard the chap's voice – you would know that again?”

“Yes, I think so; yes, I would. He had a slight stutter. Very slight, but you noticed it. When he began speaking, generally.”

“Oh, a stutter,” Bobby muttered. “A stutter,” he repeated.

“I know his name, too,” Lawrence continued. “It's the same as yours: Owen – Chris Owen. After he had gone once, when I put the bulb back, I saw he had dropped some envelopes on the floor. I suppose he hadn't noticed in the dark, pulled them out by mistake somehow, and let them fall and never knew. I saw the name. It was Chris Owen.”

“The – the address?" Bobby asked, his voice gone small and dry.

“I didn't notice. I tried not to,” Lawrence said. “I knew he didn't want me to know, so I didn't look. Besides, I didn't care; it didn't matter. But I had seen the name. I remembered it.”

“Chris Owen?” Bobby repeated dully. He said, with extreme irritation: “Did you never get to know anything more? You hadn't much curiosity?”

“None,” Lawrence answered. “Dead things have none.”

“Not even at first – the first time you met him.”

“No. I told you. It was dark. He talked to me. He didn't even ask me my name, so why should I ask his? He told me to think it over, and, if I agreed, then to leave a message at a coffee stall that ‘William Priestman agreed.' He said William Priestman was as good a name as any for the time.”

“So it was,” agreed Bobby, grimly remembering.

“Afterwards, he said, I could use my own if I wanted to. I was hungry. He gave me food. That was all I knew or cared to know.”

“It seems – funny,” Bobby said, with doubt in his voice.

“Yes. I dare say. You don't understand. How could you? You have never come out of prison after five years there. You don't know what it's like. I went in a man. I came out a thing. There had been the cat – and mother; what happened to her, I mean. She couldn't stand it – the cat, I mean – knowing I had been tied up, flogged. Got on her nerves, I suppose. Perhaps it did on mine, too. I had heard of it, of course, but I didn't know it was like that – not so much inhuman, if you know what I mean, unhuman rather. You felt you weren't a man any more, just a thing to be tied up and whipped or anything. It's silly talking like this – no one can understand. After I came out I felt like a dead man come from his grave, and I wanted to die again and go back and be done with the filthy thing that's life, but somehow I couldn't kill myself – I don't think I was afraid; I hadn't the will, perhaps, or else it was because of what mother did. I used to wander about the Embankment and the parks – like the others. One night, on the Embankment, I had a turn up with the fellow who was bullying a girl. It was when I saw him pushing a cigarette-end against her wrist... something took hold of me. He went away or I expect I should have killed him – something had come upon me. I felt as if I could have torn him in half as easily as I could a scrap of paper. I never thought of him or the girl again. He had gone, and I told her to get on with her job – easy to see what it was. I don't think I should ever have known it was her again at the office, only for the way she had of looking at me as if... as if”

He paused, letting his voice sink away in wondering bewilderment, and Bobby said:

“As if – what?”

“What 1 wouldn't believe. I knew too much to be taken in any more. I was beginning to understand then why I had been picked up from the Embankment; what I was for – a useful thing again. Well, I didn't care. Things don't care; men and women may, but not things. Besides, he had given me food when I had had nothing to eat for a day or two and not much before that for long enough. A lot of it is all a blur, but I remember the coffee well enough, and how the strength of it went into me, and I remember the sandwiches he bought me, and how hard it was to get them down fast enough. Funny, I mean, funny what coffee and a sandwich mean. Even when your mind's like mine was then – even then, coffee and a sandwich mean a lot. Body and mind, you may be both, and God knows which counts most. Well, he got me a bed as well, and a job, too, and I thought at first – but that doesn't matter, only I was growing human again with a kind of warmth of gratitude, and then I began to understand what was behind it all.”

“What?”

“Money and death,” Lawrence answered dreamily. “His money and your death. I didn't care, only I felt myself grow like a stone again, just as I had been before. I was glad really, I suppose – after all, it was only paying a debt. He had given me food, given me a bed. You don't know what a bed means.”

Bobby, chinking of his own unoccupied so long, was not so sure, but he made no comment.

“When I understood, at last, what it all meant,” Lawrence went on, in the same dreary, reminiscent tone, “I had to laugh.”

He fell silent once again, and Bobby could almost fancy that he heard that laughter, so lost and desolate, so full of – acceptance.

“I had to laugh,” Lawrence continued. “Just for a moment I had let myself think the world wasn't quite what it seemed – not altogether a place where old women drowned, and young girls lied, and men were tied up like packages and parcels. But when I understood just why I had been given that coffee and those sandwiches, just why I had been picked up off the Embankment, why, then I had to laugh because I saw it was all of a piece.”