evening minute by minute, like a school exercise. In any case, what was Chad to her but an ill-tempered nuisance? Still she watched George’s purposeful exit to the yard and the lane with reluctance and regret, and would have liked to put a few miles between them until someone, someone who knew how to be more wary for Chad than he was likely to be for himself, had pointed out to him how times and people were changed in the village of Comerford.
A hand reached down through the banisters, and tweaked at the topmost of Io’s brown curls. Green eyes shone upon her quietly from the stairs.
“What did I tell you?” said Pussy, dangling her plaits as deliberately as if they had been baited. “He thinks it’s old Wedderburn! Now what are you going to do about it?”
Five
« ^ »
When they fell into step on the way up the fields, neither of them was in the least surprised. This was the way home for only a handful of people, and Sergeant Felse was not among them, but Chad Wedderburn merely looked at him along his wide, knife-sharp shoulder, and smiled rather wearily, and left it at that. He said: “Hullo! On business?” Over the hill and beyond the ridge of trees was the small, genteelly kept house which had caused him such a panic of claustrophobia when he first came back to it, and the acidulated gentlewoman whom he had found it so hard to recognize as his mother. The likeness had come back into her unchanging face for him after a while, and they had fitted together the creaking parts of their joint life, and found it not so bad a machine, after all; but there were still times when he suddenly felt his heart fail in him, wondering what she had to do with him. She was so well-bred that she could not embarrass him by any parade of pride in him, nor shatter him by too unveiled a love, and altogether he was grateful to her and fond of her. But it could not be called an ecstatic relationship. She provided the background she thought most appropriate; he appreciated and conformed to it as his part of the adjustment. Only now and again did it pinch him badly, after a whole year of practice, and usually he could put up with these times and make no fuss. More than once in Croatia he had tasted surgery without anesthetics; it was a pity if he couldn’t keep silence now when he got the anesthetic without the surgery.
The brown scar was like a pencil mark down his neck from the ear, a very small earnest of what he bore on his body. It drew his mouth and cheek a little awry, George noticed, a thing which was hardly observable by daylight; but now the twilight of a clouded three-quarter moon plucked his face into a deformed smile even when he was not smiling.
“On business, of course!” he said, answering himself equably. “Don’t bother to be subtle about it, just say it. By now we all know that we’re in it up to the neck—some of us rather above the neck, in fact. I know no reason why you shouldn’t look in my direction rather pointedly. I know no reason why I should go out of my way to deny that I killed this particular man. I can hardly be indignant at the suggestion, can I, considering my history?”
His dark cheek, hollow and frail in the half-darkness, twitched suddenly. He looked as if a little sudden light would have shown dully clean through him; too brittle and thin to be able to beat in a man’s head. And yet he spread his own hand in front of him, and looked at it, and flexed it, as if he stood off to regard its secret accomplishments, with awe that they should repose in such an unlikely instrument. The Fourth Form in their innocence had not wondered more at that than he had in his experience. He shivered in a quiet, inescapable disgust, remembering what was supposed to have been the achievement of his manhood. “It’s almost a pity,” he said, “that I can’t make it easy for you, but I don’t know the answer myself.”
“I’m just beginning to find out,” said George, rather ruefully, “what’s meant by routine investigations. They don’t follow any known routine for more than one yard before running off the rails. But if you want to ask the questions and answer them, too, go ahead, don’t mind me.”
“There was the Fleetwood affair,” said Chad, mentally leaning back to get it in focus, “and I’m not going to try and make that any less than it was. Only an incident, maybe, but it was a symptom, too. And I seem to remember saying something rather rash about not wanting to start anything in case I killed him. Has been heard to threaten the life of the deceased man! And there was even the Jim Tugg affair, too; I was a witness to that if I needed any reminders.”
“I didn’t attach too literal a meaning,” said George, “to what you said about killing him, if that’s any comfort to you.”
“Your mistake, I meant it literally. But you may also have observed that, because I was afraid of how it might end, I took good care, even under considerable provocation, not to let it begin.”
“Granted!” said George. “Why go out of your way to make a case for and against, when nobody’s accused you? I should sit back and wait events, if I were you, and not worry about it.”
“I think you wouldn’t. Haven’t you noticed that that’s the one thing none of us can do? Comerford’s too small, and murder, even so piteous a specimen of the art, is too big. Besides, I find your presence conducive to talk, and I’m interested to see how good a case can be made—for and against.” He was indeed talking to the night, which was no more impersonal than Sergeant Felse to him. “I find the motive angle a little under-supplied, don’t you? The Fleetwood affair passed over safely, one doesn’t kill this week for what one felt last week. A little roundabout, too. People do terrible things on behalf of other people, but things even more desperate for themselves. And what had Helmut ever done to me?”
This was more interesting than what George had foreseen, and he fell in with it adaptably enough, moving unhurried .and unstampeded up the leisurely swell of the darkened field, with the vague black ghosts of the straggling hedge trees marching alongside on his right hand. Not too much attention need be paid, perhaps, to the matter, but the manner had peculiarities. Maybe Chad had drunk a little more than usual even tonight, in pursuit of some quiet place he couldn’t find within his mind when sober. Or maybe he was instinctively putting up a barricade of eccentricity about his too questionable, too potential loneliness, to persuade the paths of all official feet to go round him reverently, as for a madman where madmen are holy. Or maybe he was just fed up, too fed up to be careful, and had set out to heave all the probabilities in the teeth of authority, and dare them to sort everything out and make sense of it.
“Jim Tugg suggested a very apposite motive, I thought,” said George mildly. “It would apply to you just as well. He said he had it against Helmut Schauffler that he was the living, walking, detestable proof of a war won at considerable personal cost by one set of men, and wantonly thrown away by others. If the Helmuts, he said, can sidle about the conquering country, only a few years later, hiding their most extreme nastiness behind the skirts of the law, what on earth did we tear our guts out for? I’m bound to say I find it a better motive than a great many which might seem more plausible on the surface.”
“A motive for anger,” said Chad, his voice slow and thoughtful in the dark, “but not for killing—not unless you could be sure that removing one man would make some difference. And of course it wouldn’t.”
“An angry man doesn’t necessarily stop to work out the effects of what he does.”
“Some do. I do. That’s why I didn’t do it. I had some training in calculating results, and doing it quickly, too. It comes almost naturally to me now.”
