And the false name..."

"I had no chance with my own. I waited for two years for an opportunity like you gave me. And I did not deceive you. My credentials were exact save for the name. I had all the attainments, the qualifications you required, and I believe that I have served you faithfully—you and Edmund."

"Of course." The Professor made a show of recovering himself, he twisted away from the other and sat down. "And then yesterday—but I wish that you hadn't told me."

"Why, what difference can it make?"

"Well, it's a shock and you spoke just now as if—as if you were—but it's absurd."

"What's absurd?"

"Didn't you say that you had—that you were—?"

"Guilty? I assumed it, yes. I don't say so definitely—let it go. I was acquitted and no one can touch me now, even if I confessed, and I don't intend to confess. We need not talk of it again."

Professor Awkwright sickened; he sat shrunk together in the big cosy, pleasant chair and felt all the agreeable, safe and familiar places of his life laid bare and devastated.

"I should like to think that it isn't true, Joliffe." The little man's eyes were pathetic behind the thick crystals.

"I can prove it if you wish. What difference can it make? There's the boy, our work, the book, all our years together. Whatever I did can't affect any of that?"

"Quite so. Quite so."

The tutor went to bed; he did not seem in the least disturbed, he spoke of the Minoan seals he hoped to finish copying in the morning, and gave his usual "Good night, sir" cheerfully.

The Professor sat alone with his problem.

What ought he to do?

What did he intend to do?

Joliffe was essential to him, to the boy, to the book...where would he find another man who suited him so well, who would be willing to live his kind of life? Who would put up with Edmund?

Professor Awkwright groaned and began to argue speciously with himself.

Joliffe had been acquitted, a victim of a terrible misfortune; it was ten years ago and no one's business; Joliffe had put him under the greatest obligation yesterday—why shouldn't everything go on as before?

"Just forget all about it, eh? Joliffe would never speak of it again."

But there was that stern streak in the Professor that made him soon reject the easy, the convenient way, and all specious, fallacious reasonings.

He grimly tackled himself; the man was almost, on his own confession, a murderer, and one without remorse; the Professor utterly rejected all arguments about the codes of the Cretans, the Elizabethans, Mexico and Chicago and the value of human life; he was an upright, law-abiding man; murder was murder, deceit was deceit; of course it was most extraordinary that a cultured human being like Joliffe...He returned to his own theory of the hidden ape, the ape striking down where it hated, rescuing where it loved; he shuddered before the horrid vision of Joliffe, suddenly agile as a monkey, scaling down those rocks after Edmund...he had wondered how the stiff-limbed man had done it...the Professor checked these crazy, miserable thoughts, he forced himself to be brave and cool.

After all, there was only one thing to be done. Joliffe must go.

Yes, if all the Professor's peace and happiness went with him he must go; that was the only right, reasonable and logical solution of the horrid problem.

And, screwed up to an unnatural courage that he feared would not last till the morning, Professor Awkwright went up at once to Samuel Joliffe's (for so he persisted in naming him) room.

The tutor opened the door to the timid knock of his employer. "I am afraid I must speak to you, Joliffe, at once."

Joliffe wore a camel-hair dressing-gown, rather short in the sleeves, he looked meek, surprised and of an imperturbable innocence; the Professor felt very shaky indeed as he followed him into the neat bedroom.

"Speak to me, sir, at once? About the book?"

Joliffe glanced at a pile of notes on the table by his bedside, but Awkwright glanced at the wireless set, the gramophone, the telephone.

Why had it not occurred to him before that these were outlets for the tutor's personality which was by no means satisfied by the quiet scholarly life that, outwardly, seemed so to content him?

Perhaps he spoke to friends of the old days on the telephone, no doubt he kept in touch with the busy doings of the world by means of the wireless, and indulged personal tastes with the gramophone discs—safety valves all these for a dangerous, complex personality.

"I'm afraid"—Professor Awkwright checked himself with a cowardly clutching at a faint hope—"I suppose it wasn't all a joke about your being Hammerton?"

"It wasn't a joke. I thought I knew you well enough to tell you. But you began to say, am afraid'—?"

"I am afraid that you must go."

"I must go? You mean that I am dismissed?"

"I wouldn't put it like that—"

"But that is what it comes to—"

"I'm afraid so."

Joliffe seemed completely amazed; he took off his glasses, fidgeted with them, returned them to his nose, and asked dully:

"What about the boy?"

"It's dreadful, I know—but—"

"What are you going to tell him?"

"Oh, not the truth—some excuse—I know it is all dreadful," repeated the Professor feebly.

"Dreadful?" repeated Joliffe shortly. "It is absurd. It means that we have never understood each other—indeed, totally mistaken each other—all these years. I thought that, under your little mannerisms, you were a broad-minded man—"

"But a question of—of—"

"Of murder? I never admitted to murder, but if I had? It can't be possible that you take the view of the man in the street about that—think of these ancient peoples we are always studying—"

"It is no use, Joliffe." Professor Awkwright was shuddering with anguish. "You must go."

"And the book?"

The little Professor's drawn face took on a livelier expression of grief.

"The book must be sacrificed"—there was heroism in his supreme renunciation. "I quite agree that you have a large share in it—but to publish it under an assumed name—or under your own!"

"Impossible?"

"Quite impossible, you must see it."

"I don't see it."

They stared at each other with the bitter hostility only frustrated affection can assume; Professor Awkwright's dry and trembling fingers stroked his thin grey beard; he felt quite sick with the temptation to "forget all about it" as he put it childishly to himself—why not, for the book's sake, the boy's sake, hush up the whole affair? It was so long ago and who was to care now?

But the little man's innate integrity was too strong for his intense desires; Joliffe was watching him quietly, with dignity, yet as a prisoner may watch a judge about to pronounce sentence. "I'm happy here and useful," he remarked drily. "And you have nothing to go on but bare suspicion—you might consider that."

"I can't tell you quite what it is, Joliffe—" The Professor's anguish was very stressed and Joliffe's glance darkened into some emotion that seemed (the other man thought) pity mingled with disdain.

"Perhaps," he said, "you are afraid? Of me? Of what you call 'the hidden ape'?"

"That's absurd!" Awkwright made a great effort to give the whole nightmare business a commonplace, almost a jovial, air, to reduce what was so fantastically horrible and had indeed changed the aspect of everything for him, into an affair of everyday—just the giving of "notice" to a secretary, a tutor, who had proved unsuitable—a distasteful business, no more, but he shuddered with the desperate futility of this attempt; he made for the door with an uncontrollable need to get away from Joliffe's gaze.

He had said that it was "absurd" for him to be afraid—but of course he was afraid, horribly afraid, of Joliffe, of his own weakness, of something more powerful than either that seemed to fill the room like a fearful miasma.

But nothing sensational happened; Joliffe said in the most ordinary tones:

"Very well. I will go tomorrow. Of course I shall miss the book. And Edmund."

At the door Professor Awkwright mumbled:

"I shall always remind Edmund that you saved his life—what a great deal he owes you."

"Oh, there won't be any need of that—he'll remember me all right—good night, Professor Awkwright."

The Professor closed the door, and went, not to his bedroom, but to his study where he and Joliffe had worked for so long in complete harmony.

"I'm sure I've done right," he kept saying to himself, "I'm quite sure I've done right." But he found it unbearable to look at the other man's notes, at the neat evidences of his long labor, he found it impossible to rest or in any way to consider the situation calmly, and he could not for a second conceive in what manner he should deal with Edmund when that poor youth discovered that Joliffe was gone.

And there was another torturing horror working in Awkwright's mind.

"I say I am quite sure, but I never shall be quite sure—I mean if he is—or not—"

Professor Awkwright sat quite still for a full quarter of an hour; staring at the materials for his book which showed familiar yet horrible in the shaded electric lamp. He was really hardly able to grasp his misery nor the full value of all that he had sacrificed to a principle; he tried to comfort himself by the sheer strength of his integrity of purpose, the blamelessness of his own motives—but it was useless; he could make himself conscious of nothing but his great personal disaster.

The window had been set open to air the room and Awkwright became gradually conscious of the physical discomfort of the cold draft blowing beneath the blind.

He rose at last heavily, and almost without his own volition to remedy this; exhausted by emotion he stood with the blind in his hand and stared stupidly across the lawn and the shrubbery, faintly lit by the beams of a high moon falling through a mist; he soon forgot that he had risen to shut the window, and stood patiently in the cold air which harshly stirred his loose grey hair.

Suddenly his attention was aroused and held by an object which suddenly swung into the circle of his vision and seemed immediately to become the focus of the midnight landscape and of his own mind.

A thin, darkly clad figure was proceeding across the lawn, half leaping, half crawling through the shadows; the arms looked very long, now and then the lanky, uncouth shape appeared to sink to hands and knees in a scrawling effort at haste.

Professor Awkwright dropped the blind; with no more hesitation than if an imperative hand had seized his collar he swung round, ascended the stairs and crept into Edmund's room.

Until he looked on the bed he did not know why the sight of the ape-like figure had sent him to the boy.

The cosy glow of the carefully sheltered night light showed in the warm flickers of soft illumination a lifeless body on the scarcely disarranged pillow; powerful hands had skilfully strangled Edmund in his sleep.

Again Awkwright found himself at the window, trying now to scream, to signal, to express his scattered soul; again he saw the ape-like figure, running over the fields beyond the garden, towards the gloomy hills; it seemed to proceed with a hideous exultation, a dark joy powerfully expressed in the swinging animal movements, in the triumphant haste towards the wilderness, in the challenging thrown back head which seemed to howl at the moon that swung in an unfathomable, dreadful void.

 

5.—THE AVENGING OF ANN LEETE

Published in Seeing Life! And Other Stories, Hurst & Blackett, London, 1923

This is a queer story, the more queer for the interpretation of passions of strong human heat that have been put upon it, and for glimpses of other motives and doings, not, it would seem, human at all.

The whole thing is seen vaguely, brokenly, a snatch here and there; one tells the tale, strangely another exclaims amaze, a third points out a scene, a fourth has a dim memory of a circumstance, a nine-days' (or less) wonder, an old print helps, the name on a mural tablet in a deserted church pinches the heart with a sense of confirmation, and so you have your story. When all is said it remains a queer tale.

It is seventy years odd ago, so dating back from this present year of 1845 you come to nearly midway in the last century when conditions were vastly different from what they are now.

The scene is in Glasgow, and there are three points from which we start, all leading us to the heart of our tale.

The first is the portrait of a woman that hangs in the parlor of a respectable banker. He believes it to be the likeness of some connection of his wife's, dead this many a year, but he does not know much about it. Some while ago it was discovered in a lumber-room, and he keeps it for the pallid beauty of the canvas, which is much faded and rubbed.

Since, as a young man, I first had the privilege of my Worthy friend's acquaintance, I have always felt a strange interest in this picture; and, in that peculiar way that the imagination will seize on trifles, I was always fascinated by the dress of the lady. This is of dark-green very fine silk, an uncommon color to use in a portrait, and, perhaps, in a lady's dress.