What Derek said was perfectly true, and I knew it better than he did. The doctor had told me that the poor chap hadn’t an earthly chance. He wasn’t a bit interested in life, and I honestly think he’d sooner have poisoned himself with a last dose or two than flickered out gradually. A streak of good-fellowship in my nature kept on urging me to let him have the stuff. At the same time, I knew that it would kill him off—the doctor had warned me of that; and as there was still three weeks or so to run before he turned twenty-five, that would mean that grandpapa’s fifty thousand came into my pocket, where it was needed, instead of being handed over to a beastly Insurance Company, which wouldn’t even say thank you for it.
I leant over a bridge across the river; and all the time my mind was back at the Gudgeon, with the open window and the sun streaming in, and the motors buzzing over Eaton Bridge, and that fool peacock on the lawn. I remembered exactly how you said that if I were waiting to murder a man and he fell into the river, I should find myself jumping in to rescue him. I remember what you said about sticking to the rules of the game, because it was the only thing to do. And I remembered how I’d protested, and sworn that I’d do nothing of the kind; and how old-fashioned I thought you. Well, here I was, in very much the required position. Here was a man I’d always hated, and I couldn’t summon up any respect for him even on his deathbed. He’d been spreading himself, only a fortnight or so before, in an attempt to get me hanged on a false charge of murder. It wasn’t a question of killing him; it was only a question of providing him, at his own earnest demand, with a kind of drug which had come to be necessary to his happiness, but which, quite incidentally, would kill him if he took it. It was a kind of Philip Sidney touch; and my reward for it would be fifty thousand down—fifty thousand which poor old grandpapa never meant to go out of the family.
And the awful thing was that I found you were right. It wasn’t that your wishes in the matter had any influence with me; you hadn’t expressed a wish, you’d only made a prophecy. And all my conscious reaction on that was an intense desire to prove you wrong; to be able to write and tell you that you were wrong. And yet I couldn’t do it; some curious inhibition stood in my way. It can hardly have been a moral scruple, for I don’t remember having any these last four or five years. It wasn’t the fear of being found out, because Derek was in such a dicky state anyhow that nobody would have been surprised at his pegging out any time. It was just an absurd something. There was nothing for it but to stick to the rules—leave it to chance whether Derek lived till his birthday or not. My hand (not my mind, not my will) dropped the packet very deliberately into the river.
Next day this French girl turned up, and that seemed to brace Derek a bit; the doctor admitted that it was a slight rally, but said there was still no hope. The days dragged on, and by the night of September the second I found myself in a curious state of equilibrium. I wasn’t wanting Derek to die, or wanting him to live. I wasn’t even personally interested, so it seemed to me, in the question whether he lived or died. I was simply a detached spectator, with only a spectator’s excitement about the game Fate was playing with Derek and with me. I went to bed with an effort, and when I got up I found there was a priest buzzing round, which made me think for a moment that it was all over. But it wasn’t; Derek died about ten o’clock on his birthday morning, looking ridiculously happy.
Well, I hadn’t cheated; and if that was virtue in me, the virtue will jolly well have to be its own reward. My stepfather has raised a job for me out in the States, a job which means “starting at the bottom,” in the discouraging modern phrase. So I am going to turn into Mr. Quirk after all. The European creases of my mind will all be flattened out in that world of engaging simplicity; and if we ever meet again (which is improbable) you will find me explaining to you that two and two makes four on the other side.
Don’t for the Lord’s sake condole with me, or congratulate me. The thing had got to happen; it has happened; and I’m glad I didn’t interfere.
Colophon
The Footsteps at the Lock
was published in 1928 by
Ronald A. Knox.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Reimer,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Iona Vaughan, David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg and Distributed Proofreaders Canada
for
Faded Page Canada
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Lock Gate,
a painting completed before 1863 by
William Mulready.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009
