The Devil at Saxon Wall Read online

  Chapter Three

  ‘and as to the droppings of wax lights upon the dress of the corpse when first discovered in a ditch …’

  THOMAS DE QUINCEY

  On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

  IT WAS ON a Wednesday that Mrs Pike was brought into the house, and on the following Friday Constance gave birth to a son. It had been a tricky business, and Doctor Crevister had dealt with it particularly creditably, he felt. He had never set eyes on Hanley all the time, but he left permission with Mrs Pike for Hanley to see his wife and child if he desired to do so.

  He was given the doctor’s message, and while he was in the bedroom Mrs Pike thought she might as well go down to the kitchen and drink the glass of stout there provided for her.

  On the following Tuesday morning Constance died of septicæmia following puerperal fever, and Hanley wept on Martha Fluke’s shoulder in the dining-room where he had interviewed her on the departure of Doctor Crevister from the house. The doctor was exceedingly angry with Constance for dying, after all the trouble he had taken, but he had little time for lamenting her indifference to his professional skill, for, very shortly afterwards, Mrs Pike’s husband, a sailor home on leave, complained of violent abdominal pains after partaking of food obtained from the cook at Neot House, and Doctor Crevister was called in to attend him. On the second day he seemed almost completely recovered, but during the night he was sick and in considerably worse pain, and early next morning Mrs Pike went again for Doctor Crevister. She was gone for about forty minutes, because the doctor was in bed and had to dress, and in any case it was a good way from her cottage to his house. When she arrived back again with the doctor Pike had disappeared, and the only proof he had been ill again was the mess on the floor and the stench in the unventilated bedroom.

  Every effort appeared to be made by the villagers and the puzzled doctor to find him, but in vain. It seemed as though he had disappeared off the face of the earth, but the thing was only a three days’ wonder, for it was reported that Hanley Middleton suddenly had developed alarming symptoms akin to those of Seaman Pike, and, against all his known inclinations, had been compelled to call in Doctor Crevister. Operated on, the unfortunate patient died. According to written request, the coffin was screwed down immediately Martha Fluke, dark under the eyes and more than usually pallid, had taken a last look at the dead man. Even Constance’s mother, ill with grief at the loss of her daughter, was refused a last look at Hanley.

  Mrs Pike had not only been chosen as midwife but was to remain in the capacity of wet nurse to Constance’s baby boy. This was at the particular request of the mother, who could not bear to think that a child of hers should be suckled by Martha Fluke.

  Martha’s own little boy was then about four months old, and had not been baptised in spite of the vicar’s frequent reminders. Mrs Pike was held up as a model to Martha, who giggled and replied that when her own little baby was as funny and ailing as that of Mrs Pike she would bring it along of a Sunday to be christened. Then, suddenly changing her mind, she promised it should be baptised, and brought it to the church.

  But after Mrs Pike had been caring for the little Middleton about a week, old Mrs Fluke, the witch, appeared at the vicarage with the news that ‘our Martha’s little baby’ was dead of the whooping cough and looked, ‘poor little dear,’ like nothing so much as a three weeks old child, so small and ‘back-to-birth-looking’ he had become.

  There were rumours that the babies had been mixed and given to the wrong mothers, but gradually all rumours save one died down. The persistent rumour was to the effect that Hanley Middleton had been the younger of twin brothers, and that somewhere waiting to claim his inheritance was Carswell Middleton, the elder twin.

  Where the notion of twin brothers came from nobody knew. It was believed to have been started, like a hare, by old Mrs Fluke, but it gained ground and had a large number of adherents. This was the more surprising considering that the village had known Hanley Middleton since the death of his highly eccentric uncle, a man equally convinced that he was the Emperor Hadrian and that twelve shillings made a penny. It was the latter foible which had endeared him particularly to the inhabitants of Saxon Wall. It was Hanley’s odd behaviour which had caused the village to accept him as a genuine Middleton, and when he died Saxon Wall sat tight and, while continuing to employ itself with its dull and sinful concerns, waited for the uncle of Constance’s son to turn up and contest the legitimacy of the child, and carry on the traditional generosity and sinfulness of the Middleton family. Saxon Wall was unaccustomed to the principle that legitimacy was a title to inheritance—for breeding in the village was strictly by the law of natural selection—but old Mrs Fluke, who could back up legal with religious proof—for instance, with the story of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael—and with involved quotations from the marriage service in the English Prayer Book, enlightened and interested them.

  Martha Fluke had conveyed to the altar a half-witted cowman named Passion, and village rumour concluded by fathering Constance’s baby on the gardener and Martha Passion’s on Hanley Middleton. There was nobody to deny the former rumour, so it soon died a natural death, but the latter was so hotly contested by Martha Passion, old Mrs Fluke, and by Passion himself, an undersized moron who was employed by a farmer called Birdseye, that it persisted for long, kept alive by argument, speculation and lewd jest.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Pike, never particularly stable mentally, had been overtaken by idiosyncrasy, and was keeping her baby within doors and out of sight of callers. Her excuse and reason for so doing was that she hid it away lest old Mrs Fluke should afflict it by her possession of the evil eye.

  The Middleton baby—for Constance’s mother refused to take care of it—was soon committed to the care of Hanley’s solicitors, and Neot House was shut up. There was no one to notice whether the ghost of Constance haunted the shuttered rooms or walked the galleries, except on Bank Holidays, when the house was open for inspection at a fee of twopence. For a year or two, interested parties visited the rooms where Hanley and Constance were supposed to have spent their last hours.

  The vicar died, and Doctor Crevister retired, and the Long Thin Man, the village public house, passed into the hands of a couple from Essex. The other long thin man, the patron and familiar, it was said, of old Mother Fluke the witch, still slept in his long barrow on the hill called Guthrum Down, and for eight or nine years the village peaceably returned to its dirt and its lies and its ugly clodhopping sins and its Saturday pint and a half, the last no longer paid for out of Hanley Middleton’s patrimony, but none the less enjoyed, since, apart from any other consideration, it happened to be better beer, and even the inhabitants of Saxon Wall, dead to all other decent feeling, could distinguish and comment upon the difference.

  SECOND MANIFESTATION

  CONVERSATION PIECE

  ‘Everything seemed to me to be transformed and altered into other shapes by the wicked power of sorcery and enchantment, insomuch that I thought that the stones which I found were indurate and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees without the walls of the city, and the running waters, were changed from men into such kind of likenesses. And further, I thought that the statues, images and walls could go, and the oxen and other brute beasts could speak and tell strange news, and that immediately I should see and hear some oracle from the heaven, and from the gleed of the sun.’

  The Golden Ass of LUCIUS APULEIUS, in the translation of William Adlington, edited by F. J. Harvey Darton.

  Chapter One

  ‘I pray thee, friend Bellephoron, sit still, and according to thy accustomed courtesy, declare to us the loss of thy nose and ears.’

  The Golden Ass of LUCIUS APULEIUS, in the translation of William Adlington, edited by F. J. Harvey Darton.

  HANNIBAL JONES HAD earned a dishonest livelihood for seventeen years by writing sentimental novels. It was the less excusable in Jones to get his living this way in that he k
new—none better, since he had lectured in Abnormal Psychology for a year or two in an American University before taking up his rather more nefarious career as author—that such novels as he wrote tended to encourage morbid day-dreaming on the part of their readers, and that cooks and dressmakers, mothers of families, spinsters in all walks of life—even his own female relatives—were developing, because of him and his works, a Cinderella-complex of the most devitalising time-consuming type.

  It was the size of his income which prevented in Jones the acute shame proper to his situation, but, fortunately for the chances of his soul’s salvation, the habit of sentimental writing proved to have grave physical risks as well as pecuniary advantages.

  One day in the early Spring, his publisher invited him to lunch, and put forward a new proposal. Jones listened carefully. The same notion had been in his own mind time and again, but he had put it from him because of the trouble it would be to put in some serious work after all his years of laziness and easy money-making. Said his publisher:

  ‘Why don’t you do some melodramatic stuff? The big scene in your last book was sheer melodrama, and went well. Slums in a riverside district, or in a big port. Plenty of meat, and plenty of sob-stuff, like a film, but solid and fairly long. You know what I mean.’

  Jones took the idea very seriously and began to work very hard. But the harder he worked, the more difficult it seemed to write the book. The result of his labours was disastrous. He became nervous and began to suffer from insomnia, but still he persevered. He collected reference books, newspaper cuttings, statistics and even facts, and at the end of six strenuous weeks he tore up the novel which he had hoped and anticipated, was to be startlingly, arrestingly, nudely modern, and, at the same time, an example of English prose at its best.

  He worked tremendously hard and sent his wife considerable sums of money on condition that she was willing to extend her holiday on the Riviera until the novel was finished. But it was years since he had settled down to serious work. He grew irritable, morose, and quite unlike himself. In addition, he lost weight, he lost appetite; he began to lose interest in the book. His publisher bullied him, at first over the telephone, and then, when Jones refused to answer it, by telegram. With the business acumen which is often, although not invariably, one of the first-fruits of writing solely for money, Jones had insisted upon a substantial advance before he began work on the book, and the publisher was desirous of being assured that Jones really did intend to write the novel. This, under the circumstances, was natural enough, but it goaded almost to insanity the nerve-ridden and harassed author.

  Having at last reassured him by word of mouth in a pithy sentence which, had it appeared in the novel in question, certainly would have been deleted at sight by the Censor, Jones toiled on, despairing but undefeated. Two secretaries gave notice, and the third, a suggestible young man whom Jones’ rapidly collapsing nervous system could not fail to affect, hastened the approaching nervous breakdown by appearing five nights in succession at his employer’s bedside, sleep-walking, and babbling disconnected lines from the poems of William Blake.

  Jones gave him an excellent testimonial and dismissed him. Then, after spending eight weeks in a nursing home, he consulted a famous psycho-analyst—her reputation was sufficiently established for her to be able to continue the use of an out-of-date term with which to describe her profession—and was given an appointment. She was a small but terrifying woman with the grin of a hungry crocodile and sharp black eyes, and her whole appearance and personality were in direct contrast to those of the nerve-ridden, extraordinarily lanky and cadaverous Jones. She put him through the usual tests, physical and mental, cackled at him, prodded him in the ribs with a yellow forefinger and advised him to take up gardening.

  ‘And mind you return your publisher the advance on account of royalties which he paid you,’ she adjured him. Jones, who had not mentioned the advance, was astonished and impressed by her perspicacity, but declined to consider for one moment her advice that he should take up gardening.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘my father had an allotment. Do you know what that is?’

  The little old woman said that she did.

  ‘And on Good Friday mornings,’ continued Jones, ‘It used to be my detestable duty to walk beside him dropping seed potatoes into the holes he made. Since my fifteenth birthday, when the job passed automatically, according to my father’s promise, to my younger brother, I have avoided gardening and never wish to look upon a potato dibber nor a garden fork any more.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said she, ‘get out your third-best car and travel until you find a sufficiently interesting and secluded village. Make yourself part of it. Study the people, but resolve never to write about them in a novel. Love them. Quarrel with them. Begin a lawsuit. Play village cricket.’

  ‘But look here—this book I’m on!’ wailed Jones. ‘I’m contracted to finish it at the end of the next two months. I can’t let my publisher down. It’s essential I should finish the book by September. You don’t understand!’

  ‘Very well,’ said the psycho-analyst. She gave him back his cheque. ‘Go and write. But don’t ask me to appeal to the Commissioners to release you from a lunatic asylum later on.’

  Jones wrote to his publisher, returning the advance, returned her fee to the formidable, reptilian psycho-analyst, closed his flat, got his third-best car from the garage, and started out in quest of his village. It took him nineteen days to discover and annexe the village of Saxon Wall. It was long, straggling and unkempt. It was away from main roads and apparently unacquainted with the progress of what people who put cleanliness before godliness call civilisation. The farmyards of its immediate vicinity smelt sourer, its inhabitants looked more dour and unfriendly, its cottages were uglier in conception, arrangement and colouring and its public house more surprisingly named than any of the others he had passed by or encountered during his tour, so he adopted it at sight, and decided to stay in it a good long time.

  ‘As good a place in which to get over a nervous breakdown as any in England,’ thought Jones, drawing up at the entrance to the Long Thin Man and getting out of the car.

  Over a tankard of beer—the nuttiest he had drunk for years—he invited opinion upon his chances of finding a suitable cottage for the summer.

  ‘Easy,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll tell Birdseye to turn out old Mother Fluke for you. She won’t have paid the rent three months or more.’

  ‘But what will she do?’ asked the humanitarian Jones.

  ‘Her? Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ll tell Birdseye she can have that little cottage that was built sometime back for the barman when he got married, before he went to the war. I haven’t had a barman—haven’t needed one, like—since I’ve been here. It’s a little old tumble-down place enough, because I haven’t looked to keep it in repair, but old Mother Fluke, most likely, won’t live long enough to know much different. I’ll tell Birdseye to put a couple of shillings, say, on to your rent, and I shan’t charge the old woman nothing for my little cottage, say. Then I can settle up with Birdseye, and nobody won’t be the loser as far as I can see.’

  Digesting the ethics and the economics of this delicate manipulation of the facts of the case, Jones agreed, and finished his beer. He never came into contact with the accommodating Birdseye, but by the end of the day everything was settled, including which articles of furniture Mrs Fluke was going to leave behind in the cottage for Jones’ use, and which were going to accompany her to her new home, a little further down the road. Jones had the felicity of assisting to load her belongings on to two perambulators, the property of Mrs Passion and Mrs Pike, the daughter and next-door neighbour respectively, of the old woman he was dispossessing. Of Mrs Fluke herself he saw nothing, she having preceded the perambulators by a quarter of an hour, so that she could decide where everything was to go when it arrived at the cottage. Jones was considerably lightened in conscience to hear from Mrs Passion that ‘mother will be only too glad to
be quit of Birdseye for a bit, with his everlasting coming of a Monday morning for the rent just when she’d got the clothes on the boil and the copper fire going nicely!’

  The Passions, he learned, were to be his next-door neighbours on the other side. They had seen aeroplanes but not motor-coaches, and both thought that the inventions of wireless telegraphy and vacuum cleaners were in direct contravention of the will of God. Of the divine wishes and intentions, Jones soon discovered, the village had wide and infallible knowledge.

  On the second day of his stay he telegraphed to London for a new bed and for various small amenities, and proceeded to make his new quarters habitable. He then began the book for the second time. It was useless. He had dried up completely. He was considerably alarmed. He put his writing materials out of sight; hid his typewriter underneath the bed; went walking every day; explored the countryside and refused to think of work, proposing to court ideas by pretending to ignore them.

  The neighbourhood was pleasing without being in any way remarkable. His favourite walk was across the village green and over the rounded hill called Guthrum Down by way of a stretch of heath, bracken-covered, springy underfoot with heather, and pleasantly bracing.

  There were slow-worms and adders on the common, and Jones found that these creatures were held in peculiar horror by all the village people except old Mrs Fluke, who had a name for being able to make them dance on their tails by moonlight, and spell the names of the angels of darkness by their contortions at witches’ sabbaths.