Portrait of a Murderer

of heartbreak or ecstasy it represented, filed past me. And at the end of the procession, perhaps, myself. The murderer. One of them might have been a murderer too, for all I could tell. And I wondered if a member of a later generation, lying wakeful on some crucial night, as I lay wakeful now, would have any conception of the emotions that racked me. I turned over and traced the faded blossoms on the wallpaper with a critical finger. I thought, “These I shall never forget, these lilac roses that never grew on bush or spray, gathered in baskets and tied with true lovers’ knots, never forget their moulding, the fantastic shape that would give a botanist nightmare.” To-night they had a certain life of their own. My own vitality possessed them. I knew it would be hours before I should sleep. Nevertheless I began to undress slowly in the dark. To a man who knows no privacy these minutes of solitude were exquisite. At home there was always Sophy and often a sickly child whose cot was dragged in and put in the inadequate space at the foot of our bed. I thought, if I were a rich man I would often spend nights in hotels for the joy of knowing myself immune from disturbance. To sleep under the same roof as even those to whom you are inescapably tied destroys the charm, though you have a whole private suite. There is always the possibility of invasion by those who have the right to interrupt your privacy. Now for a few hours I was free. When I had undressed I returned to the window; there were trees beyond the glass soughing a little in the subdued wind, and I reflected that there were also trees within, trees that had been carved, hacked, disciplined into unnatural shapes for the service of men, who would shape to their own pleasure everything they touch, including their own kind. So powerfully enticed was my imagination that it seemed to me the noise of the branches came from within rather than without. It would scarcely have surprised me if the tallboy had blossomed into green buds and the chairs burst into leaf. My imagination does this to me sometimes, transporting me into a sphere of pure delight, when the sense of beauty ceases to have any shape or even to pronounce itself as beauty at all, but is a natural environment. But naturally one remains outwardly cold, savage, and morose, in case that treasure, too, is looted.

Out in the darkness, prowling through the snow, I caught a glimpse of twin sparks of green light, the eyes of a wandering cat. I loved it as it moved silently through the dark, disdaining that security that humans and dogs crave, and roaming fearlessly as it would. A line I had read somewhere returned to my mind: “Plundering the secret richness of the night”; a type, I thought, watching those eyes flame at me, and conscious of their heat, of all the unhouselled adventurers of the earth—Cyrano, Traherne, a nameless host, men and women who didn’t want the security my family holds so dear, preferring the unattainable and the unknown.

The cat vanished, seeking its adventure, leaving me to brood on its strange silent appearance. My thoughts slipped irrelevantly from one thing to another, touching different levels, like water dropping from shelf to shelf of rock. I thought about cats. Black ones were popular emblems for Christmas cards. One saw them in ridiculous postures, conveying good wishes in every conceivable manner, from the merely absurd to the insipid and vulgar. There was an enormous grey Persian cat, I remember, that used to fill the window of an undertaker’s establishment in Paris. There was a thin dirty little tabby that howled outside our Fulham windows every night, until in desperation we took it in, and it promptly loosed its fleas on the children. There was the legend of the Cat that walked alone; and that carried me on to the Christmas stories of Michael Fairless, and brought keenly back to recollection a Christmas I spent when I was fifteen in Germany (one of those exchange arrangements by which the youth of both nations are supposed to learn the other’s language). It had been like a fairy story, all of a piece with the painted waxen angels on bright Christmas-trees, the effigies of the Holy Child in innumerable neat mangers, the glittering balls; the donkeys, oxen, and shepherds; windows full of strange-shaped cakes, decorated with gilt bells, Santa Klaus in red and gold and green cloaks, trimmed with fur, a model of a reindeer sleigh loaded with presents, crackers and bonbons, round smiling faces and tight flaxen plaits. It was a long cry from the joyous innocence of that festival to the cynical show we made of it at King’s Poplars, where it became a day of suppressed jealousy and gluttony and criticism, of secret valuations of presents and calculations as to what one had made or lost on one’s personal expenditure.

My thoughts now seemed to move simultaneously in both directions, back to the ardent past, forward to the hopeful future. The snow drifted through the window on to the clothes I had flung on to a chair. I saw this and smiled. So much at ease did I feel, I was like an athlete at the end of a hard race. Already I had achieved. That was the effect of my first murder on me.

5

Presently I heard the clock strike four. Then I fell asleep. It was Christmas Day, I had my plan in readiness, and I was full of hope.

Part III

Christmas Day

1

The snow had ceased some hours when Brand awoke. It was very early and he could detect no sound in the darkened house. His watch, that he had forgotten to wind, stood at three o’clock. The surface of the snow, that lay thickly on every object visible from the window, had been frozen by the wind,