He thought indignantly of that endless dreary labour of housework. Day after day, year after year. Making beds, that they might be unmade. Cooking to fill bellies eternally empty. Washing up what the next meal was to make dirty again. Scrubbing the floor for muddy boots to defile. Darning and patching that yet more holes might be made. It was like the labouring of Sisyphus and the Danaids, hopeless and interminable—or would have been interminable (except by his mother’s death) if he hadn’t been able to send her those two pounds a week out of his salary. She could get a girl in now to help with the hardest work. But she still did more than enough to make rubber belts unnecessary. What a life! And in the world of fur coats and Songe nègre they complained of boredom and fatigue, they had to retire into nursing homes for rest cures. If they could lead her life for a bit! And perhaps they’d be made to, one of these days (he hoped so), even in England.
Illidge thought with satisfaction of those ex-officers of the Tsar driving taxis and working in factories, those ex-countesses with their restaurants and cabarets and hat shops, of all the ex-rich of Russia, all over the world, from Harbin and Shanghai to Rome and London and Berlin, bankrupt, humiliated, reduced to the slavish estate of the common people on whom they had once parasitically lived. That was good, that served them right. And perhaps it might happen here too. But they were strong here, the fat-reducers and the fur-coated; they were numerous, they were an organized army. But the army had lost its chief. He had got his packet. Embodied beastliness and plutocracy, he lay there behind the screen. But his mouth had been open and the muscles of his face, before the reeking handkerchief had covered it, had twitched grotesquely. Illidge shuddered. He looked again for indignant distraction and justification at the picture of the young lady in the two-hundred-guinea fur, of the young lady stepping, naked but coyly towelled, out of her reducing bath. Strumpets and gluttons! They belonged to the class that Webley had fought to perpetuate. The champion of all that was vile and low. He had got what he deserved, he had …
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Spandrell suddenly, looking up from his book. The sound of his voice in the silence made Illidge start with an uncontrollable terror. “I’d absolutely forgotten. They get stiff, don’t they?” He looked at Illidge. “Corpses, I mean.”
Illidge nodded. He drew a deep breath and steadied himself with an effort of will.
“What about getting him into the car, then?” He sprang up and walked quickly round the screen, out of sight. Illidge heard the latch of the house door rattling. He was seized with a sudden horrible terror: Spandrell was going to make off, leaving him locked in with the body.
“Where are you going?” he shouted, and darted off in panic pursuit. “Where are you going?” The door was open, Spandrell was not to be seen, and the thing lay on the floor, its face uncovered, open-mouthed and staring secretly, significantly, as though through spy-holes, between half-closed eyelids. “Where are you going?” Illidge’s voice had risen almost to a scream.
“What is the excitement about?” asked Spandrell as the other appeared pale and with desperation in his looks on the doorstep. Standing by Webley’s car, he was engaged in undoing the tightly stretched waterproof which decked in all that part of the open body lying aft of the front seats. “These thingumbobs are horribly hard to unfasten.”
Illidge put his hands in his pockets and pretended that it was merely an idle curiosity that had brought him out with such precipitation.
“What are you doing?” he asked offhandedly.
Spandrell gave a final tug; the cover came loose along the whole length of one side of the car. He turned it back and looked in. “Empty, thank goodness,” he said, and, stretching his hand, he played imaginary octaves, span after span, over the coachwork. “Say four feet wide,” he concluded, “by about the same in length. Of which half is taken up by the seat. With two foot six of space under the cover. Plenty of room to curl up in and be very comfortable. But if one were stiff?” He looked enquiringly at Illidge. “A man could be got in, but not a statue.”
Illidge nodded. Spandrell’s last words had made him suddenly remember Lady Edward’s mocking commentary on Webley. “He wants to be treated like his own colossal statue—posthumously, if you see what I mean.”
“We must do something quickly,” Spandrell went on, “before the stiffness sets in.” He pulled back the cover and, laying a hand on Illidge’s shoulder, propelled him gently into the house. The door slammed behind them. They stood looking down at the body.
“We shall have to pull the knees up and the arms down,” said Spandrell.
He bent down and moved one of the arms toward the side. It returned, when he let go, halfway to its former position. Like a puppet, Spandrell reflected, with elastic joints. Grotesque rather than terrible; not tragical, but only rather tiresome and even absurd. That was the essential horror—that it was all (even this) a kind of bad and tedious jape. “We shall have to find some string,” he said. “Something to tie the limbs into place.” It was like amateur plumbing, or mending the summer house oneself; just rather unpleasant and ludicrous.
They ransacked the house. There
