position than before with more work to do in order to stand upright. I believe the hardest thing I ever did was to rise from that floor, and unlock that door, whereupon I saw the gas bracket on the little landing, which seemed to be saying: Don't mind me; I'm nothing in this; I'm not even burning. But it was on at the tap, and invisible death poured from it. I tried to close the tap, but my hands were not up to the job. I half fell down the first stairs, where I saw in the darkness the first gas lamp of the half-decorated landing. I saw it in the darkness, and proper breathing was not permitted here either. I would shortly burst; I was a human bomb. I crashed against Vaughan's door; it flew open, and his room was empty, the bed still made up.
In falling, I rolled underneath another gas bracket that played its part in the relay of death-dealing. I regained my feet, but my feet were treacherous, might have belonged to another man altogether. I did not know my hands either, which were stained red by all the coal gas in me. I pushed at Amanda Rickerby's door and she rose instantly from her pillow – instantly and yet drowsily. A bottle and a glass stood on the floor by her bed, but she looked beautiful in her night-dress as she made her strange, dazed enquiry: 'How are you?'
She was not rightly awake; she had taken in a quantity of the gas, and I was not in my right mind, which is why I replied, 'I'm in great shape,' and I may have vomited there and then onto her bedroom carpet, which was not very gentlemanly of me. I took the stool from before her dressing table and pitched it through her window, marvelling that my red hands were up to the job. I came out of the room revolving, and struck Adam Rickerby, who was there in long johns and no shirt. He looked like the strong man at the fair, or the Creature from the Jungle. But he did not look to have been gassed – or not badly. Had the poison reached downstairs? I would consult the man who had laid it on for my benefit.
I pushed at Fielding's door, and entered his room for the second time. He sat on his bed; it was all I could do to stand. I felt tiredness as a great weight pressing me down to the floor. The room was in darkness, and I could not see the gas brackets, but I knew that here too the coal vapour streamed. He wore a suit, and sat on his bed.
'You locked your door, Mr Stringer,' he said, and I somehow gasped out:
'You sound… put-out.'
'No, that was Blackburn,' said Fielding. 'His eye, I mean,' and he gave a little private smile, indicating an object that lay beside him on the bed: the nine inch needle that had been kept in the knife polisher.
He'd done for Blackburn by stabbing into his eye as he slept, no doubt after observing, or over-hearing, whatever creeping about had gone on earlier in the night. The long needle put swiftly into the closed eye – that way there'd be little blood and no noise. He'd meant to do me the same way. But on finding the door locked he'd fixed on a method that took no account of doors, and would bring an end to everything and everyone.
'The gas', he said, from the bed, 'will spare you a deal of trouble even if you don't quite see it. For one thing, you would have been forever buying the lady wine, and she likes the good stuff you know. You would have had to learn all about the best vintages to keep her happy, and you would be starting as far as I can judge, Mr Stringer, from a position of complete ignorance…'
With every new remark that he made more of the truth – which was not quite as Fielding saw it – came home to me. He too was now breathing wrongly, fighting for it, and rocking on the bed as he did so. His dainty feet were raised from the floor, so that he looked like a child too short for the school form. He had put on a soft-tasselled hat for his own death; a species of indoor hat – a smoking hat, as I believed it was called. He was not smoking but held some long implement – not the needle, which was by his side – but some other long implement, which he passed constantly from left to right hand. If I might lay my own hands on either it or the other… But that was impossible without air, and I found myself dreaming – and it was a kind of floating dreaminess – about a gun. That would be so much faster, and I heard myself wasting air by saying, 'I ought to shoot you down.'
How had he carted Blackburn, a big fellow, down the stairs? The window. The bed in the small room was level with it. Fielding might have fed the body through, and it would then have dropped directly to the Prom; Fielding would have sent the suit down after. He himself, in that different world in which everyone could walk, would have descended by the stairs and the streets, and dragged Blackburn into the water.
… But I couldn't believe I had that quite right. It was odds- on that a body dropped into the harbour would turn up again. I stumbled a little way forward.
'Spooning, you would call it,' Fielding was saying. 'He was the first at it, and then you. She spoons with you in the presence of the man who pays the bills. Well, I am sparing you a good deal of expense…'
And he seemed to concentrate hard on taking a breath, as though he might out-think the gas, then the word burst out of him:
'Distemper… costlier than you might think when bought in bulk… wallpaper at a shilling a roll…'
With great effort he took another breath; he was better at it than me. But I could see that it did not come easily, and he now had to pause and fall silent every few words.
'… And the Lady forever changing her mind about the colour.'
It came to me that I was now nearer to him, to the dangerous implement in his hand, and the other one beside him on the bed.
'No!' I said, and I could not say any more, and it was a wasted word into the bargain. But I had meant to say that the Lady's colour was lavender.
Two paces to go before I was at Fielding and the bed. But why kill a man who was dying anyway? I looked to the windows: the first one – closed. To the second one – closed. I should have smashed the glass. I had wasted my time in not doing it, and accordingly I had wasted my life. The room was whirling at lightning speed; my legs were buckling under me and I wanted to be on the floor, stretched right across it; I could not support the weight of my own head. I tried to take a breath but nothing came. I saw bookshelves, a bed, fireplace, Fielding himself, but there was no air in-between any of these objects. I was drowning on dry land, drowning on the first floor but I was not ignorant. Rather, Fielding was. I recalled those late silences of the Lady, which were the true indication of her feelings towards me, which were no feelings at all.
'You tell me… that you have hopes of becoming a… solicitor,' Fielding seemed to be saying, and his voice had gone very high on that last word; he'd fairly squeaked it out. 'But there is no royal road to the acquisition of knowledge… Mr Stringer, you were born to a world of dirt… dirt and dust and coal… and that…'
I managed another step forwards as he unfolded the jewelled implement in his hand.
'Your presumption,' he said, rocking faster now, his face pink, far, far too pink. 'It scarcely… It takes one's breath… It takes the breath…'
I first thought that the implement might be for the fine adjustment of shirt cuffs, for he held it positioned over his left wrist. He made a smooth, practised movement.
'This gas… too… slow,' he said, and he breathed in, making a fearful dry squeaking, before swiftly transferring the implement to his other hand, and moving it over the other wrist. He raised it to his neck, and for an instant I thought: The contraption adjusts shirt collars too – just the thing for a faddish fellow. But Adam Rickerby, standing behind me, called out: 'He'll 'ave blood all over!'
Fielding moved the thing quite slowly and carefully from right to left across his neck.
And he tilted his head at me.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
'And you believe that he'd killed Blackburn?' enquired the Captain.
I had the idea that the question was asked out of duty, that he was now restless, his mind elsewhere. I believed that I had understood most things in the seconds before Fielding's death, and now that I could recall that understanding, I gave my theory in outline to the Captain. And while speaking I thought the thing through in a different way.
All the trinkets in those drawers of Fielding's, too neatly stored in boxes: they signified a lack of love. Oh, he had the friendship of Vaughan all right, and I pictured the two of them in the ship room, smoking silently: Vaughan lying flat on the couch, Fielding sitting daintily, periodically crossing his legs in a different way. But anyone could have the friendship of Vaughan: he was like a spaniel, and about equally given to cocking his leg in public. The love of Amanda Rickerby was a different matter. Ray Blackburn, a handsome, well set-up man of marriage-able age, had been the beneficiary of her love, and she had kept the company badge as a token of it. He had been to Scarborough several times before the fatal night, although never before to Paradise. I saw the two of them about the town,
