The Best British Short Stories of 1922 Part 51

"Oh, you poor little Continental kiddie!"

He shrugged his shoulders. "The ways of the Lord are thoughtful and orderly. Why should He have wasted a heavenly wilderness of gnarled old apple-trees on a small boy who hated climbing?"

"You can't have hated climbing--if you hang that on your wall." She nodded towards the quayside picture. "Surely you must have played 'pirates and South Seas' with your brothers."

"I had none. A sister, that's all--who carried a sunshade." "I had no sisters; but there was a girl next door--and her brother."

"I note in jealous anguish of spirit," remarked d.i.c.kie. "that you do not simply say 'a girl and boy next door.'"

Ruth's mischievous laugh affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not very high--I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me a pull from the top."

"Tommy was ungallant enough to leave the wall to you?"

"There were cherries in his garden--sweet black cherries. And only crab-apples in ours."

"He might have filled his pockets with cherries, and then climbed.

No--I reject Tommy, he was unworthy of you. I may have been a horrid little Casino brat, I may even have worn a white satin sailor-suit with trousers down to my ankles--"

"Oh!" Ruth winced.

"I may have danced too well, and I understood too early the art of complimenting ladies whose hats were too big and whose eyes were too bright.... But once, after Annunciata Maddalena's nose had bled over this same sailor-suit, I said it was my own nose, because I knew how bitterly she was ashamed of her one bourgeois lapse...."

"Tommy would have disowned her, instead of owning the nose. Oh, I grant you the n.o.bler nature ... but it breaks my heart that you didn't have the wild English garden and the cherries and the grubby old dark-blue jersey."

"If we have a kiddie--" d.i.c.kie began softly, his mouth puckered to its special elvish little smile. Then he met her eyes lapping him round with such velvet tenderness--that d.i.c.kie suddenly knew he was loved, knew that impulsively she was going to tell him so, and breathlessly happier than he had ever been before, waited for it--

"I _did_ kill my husband. They acquitted me, but I was guilty. It was an accident. I was so afraid. They would never have believed it could be an accident. But I had to, in self-defence."

And now she had told him she loved him.

Only d.i.c.kie was too numb to recognise the form her confession of love had taken; love, as always, was clamouring to be clearly seen--naked, if need be, blood-guilty, if need be--but _seen_ ... and then swept up, sin and all, by another love big enough to accept this truth, also, as essentially part of her.

Ruth waited several seconds for d.i.c.kie to speak. Then she got up, and strolled over to the picture, and said, examining intently, as though for the first time, the woman in the doorway: "I'm not sorry, d.i.c.kie.

That is to say, I'm sorry, of course, if I've shattered an illusion of yours, but--I can't be melodramatic, you know, not even to the extent of using the word 'murderess' on myself. If I hadn't killed Lucas--"

"He would have killed you?" So he was able to utter quite natural and coherent sounds! d.i.c.kie was surprised.

"Yes--" But Ruth found that, after all, she could not tell d.i.c.kie much about Lucas. Lucas had not been a pleasant gentleman to live with--and there were things that d.i.c.kie was too fine himself, and too innocent, to realise. The only comprehension in this thoroughly well-groomed atmosphere of soft carpets and dim silken panels and miniatures and rare frail china might have come from the woman in the doorway of that incongruous picture ... a woman sullenly patient, brutalised, but--yes, her man might quite easily have been another Lucas.

For that which d.i.c.kie had always thought of as mysterious, elusive, was, to Ruth's eyes, only sorrowful wisdom.

"Come here, Ruth."

She dragged her eyes away from the picture; crossed the room; broke down completely, her head on his knees, her shuddering body crouched closely to the floor: "When you've--been frightened--and have to live with it--and it doesn't even stop at night--for weeks and months and years--one's nerves aren't quite reliable.... They've no right to call that murder, have they? have they, d.i.c.kie? When you've been afraid for a long time--and there's no one you can tell about it except the person who _makes_ the _fear_...."

But d.i.c.kie was all that she had perilously dared to hope he would be at this crisis. He soothed her and healed her by his loyalty; promised, without her extorting it, that he would never tell a soul what she had just told him; pixie-shy, yet he spoke of his personal need of her--and more than anything else she had desired to hear this. He mentioned some trivial intimate plans for their unbroken, unchanged future together, so as to rea.s.sure her of its continuance. He even made her laugh.

In fact, for a last appearance in the _role_ of a gallant little gentleman, d.i.c.kie did not do so badly.

He woke in the night from a bad dream--with terror clinging thickly about his senses. But it did not slowly dissolve and release him, as nightmare is wont to do. It remained--so that he lay still as a man in his winding-sheet, afraid to move--remembering--

"I _did_ kill my husband."

Yes--that was it. In the room with him was a strange woman who had killed her husband.

Not Ruth--but a strange woman. How had she got into the room with him?

She had killed her husband. And now, _he_ was her husband.

He lay motionless, but his imagination began to crawl.... What might happen to a man shut up alone in a house with a woman who--murdered?

His imagination began to race--and he lost control of it. Murder ...

with dry, sandy throat and a kicking heart, d.i.c.kie had to pay for his audacity in imagining he was big enough to claim life in the raw.

"Not big enough! Not big enough!"--the goblins of the underworld croaked at him in triumphant chorus.... They capered ... they snapped their fingers at him ... they spun him down to where fear was ... he had delivered himself to them, by not being big enough.

"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--which was bigger, Mrs. Bigger or the baby?"

The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void--and over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the answer, trying to forget fear....

"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--"

He dared not fall asleep ... with the woman who had killed her husband, alone in the room with him ... alone in the house with him.

A stir from the other bed, and one arm flung out in sleep. d.i.c.kie's knees jerked violently--his skin went cold and sticky with sweat. "You fool--it's only Ruth!"

But she _did_ it--she did it once. There are people who can't kill, and a few, just a very few, who can. And because they can, they are different, and have to be shut away from the herd.

But--but this woman. They've made a ghastly mistake--they've let her go free--and I can't tell anyone ... n.o.body knows, except me and Ruth---- Ah, yes--a quivering sigh of relief here--Ruth knows, too--Ruth, my wife--ruth means pity....

There is no Ruth ... there never was ... quite alone except for a strange, strange woman--the kind that gets shut away and kept by herself....

To this bondage had d.i.c.kie's nerves delivered him. The custom of punctilious courtesy, so deeply ingrained as to mean in his case the impossibility of wounding another, decreed that some pretence must be kept up before Ruth. But with one shock she divined the next morning the significant change in him, and bowed her head to it. What could she do? She loved him, but she had overrated the capacity of his spirit.

There had never been any courage, only kindness and sweetness and chivalry--all no good to him, now that courage was wanted. She had made a mistake in telling him the truth.

Suffering--she thought she had suffered fiercely with Lucas, she thought she had suffered while she was being ignominiously tried for her life--but what were either of these phases compared with the helpless bitterness of seeing d.i.c.kie, whom she loved, afraid of her?

Even her periodic fits of wild arrogant pa.s.sion, which usually, when they surged past restraint, wrecked and altered whatever situation was hemming her in, and left gaps for a pa.s.sage through to something else--even these had now to be curbed. Useful in hate, they were impotent in love. So Ruth recognised in her new humility. But when one day, seized by panic at having spoken irritably to her, d.i.c.kie hastily tried to propitiate her, to ingratiate himself so that she might spare him, might let him live a little longer, then Ruth felt she must cry aloud under the strain of this subtle torture. Why, he was her lover, her man, her child.... In thought, her arm shaped itself into a crook for his head to lie there; her fingers smoothed out the drawn perplexity of his brows; her kisses were cool as snow on his hot, twitching little mouth; her voice, hushed to a lullaby croon, promised him that n.o.body should hurt him, n.o.body, while she was there to heal and protect--

"Sleep, baby, sleep, The hills are white with sheep----"

Over and over again she lulled herself with the old rhyme, for comfort's sake. But d.i.c.kie she could not comfort, since, irony of ironies, she was the cause of his pitiful breakdown. Why, if she spoke, he started; if she moved towards him, he shrank. Yet still Ruth dreamt that if he would only let her touch him, she could bring him rea.s.surance. But meanwhile his appet.i.te was meagre, the rare half-hours he slept were broken with evil dreams, from which he awoke whimpering.

He did not care any more about the little beautiful things he had collected and grouped about him, but sat for hours listless and blank; his appearance a grotesque parody of the trim and dapper d.i.c.kie Maybury of the past--what could it matter how he looked with death slicing so close to him?

"The master seems poorly of late, don't he, ma'am? His digestion ain't strong. P'r'aps something 'as disagreed with 'im." Thus Mrs. Derrick, taking her part in the drama, as the simple character who makes speeches of more significant portent than she is aware of.

Something had, indeed, disagreed with d.i.c.kie. In the slang phrase: "He had bitten off more than he could chew."