The Collected Stories

‘This is too serious,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. ‘We cannot continue like this. Something must be done.’

‘I cannot understand –’

‘It happens too often. The strain is too much for me, dear.’

‘I cannot understand it.’

Every precaution had been taken with the gas-fire in the nursery. The knob that controlled the gas pressure was a key and the key was removable. Certainly, the control point was within the child’s reach but one turned it on or off, slipped the key out of its socket and placed it on the mantelpiece. That was the simple rule.

‘You forgot to take out the key,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. In his mind an idea took on a shape that frightened him. He shied away, watching it advance, knowing that he possessed neither the emotional nor mental equipment to fight it.

‘No, no, no,’ Miss Smith said. ‘I never forget it. I turned the fire off and put the key on the mantelpiece. I remember distinctly.’

He stared at her, drilling his eyes into hers, hopelessly seeking the truth. When he spoke his voice was dry and weary.

‘The facts speak for themselves. You cannot suggest there’s another solution?’

‘But it’s absurd. It means he got out of his cot, turned the key, returned to bed and went to sleep.’

‘Or that you turned off the fire and idly turned it on again.’

‘I couldn’t have; how could I?’

Miss Smith’s husband didn’t know. His imagination, like a pair of calipers, grasped the ugly thought and held it before him. The facts were on its side, he could not ignore them: his wife was deranged in her mind. Consciously or otherwise she was trying to kill their child.

‘The window,’ Miss Smith said. ‘It was open when I left it. It always is, for air. Yet you found it closed.’

‘The child certainly could not have done that. I cannot see what you are suggesting.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I am suggesting. Except that I don’t understand.’

‘He’s too much for you, dear, and that’s all there is to it. You must have help.’

‘We can’t afford it.’

‘Be that as it may, we must. We have the child to think of, if not ourselves.’

‘But one child! One child cannot be too much for anyone. Look, I’ll be extra careful in future. After all, it is the first thing like this that has happened for ages.’

‘I’m sorry, dear. We must advertise for a woman.’

‘Please –’

‘Darling, I’m sorry. It’s no use talking. We have talked enough and it has got us nowhere. This is something to be sensible about.’

‘Please let’s try again.’

‘And in the meanwhile? In the meanwhile our child’s life must be casually risked day in, day out?’

‘No, no.’

Miss Smith pleaded, but her husband said nothing further. He pulled hard on his pipe, biting it between his jaws, unhappy and confused in his mind.

Miss Smith’s husband did indeed advertise for a woman to see to the needs of their child, but it was, in fact, unnecessary in the long run to employ one. Because on his third birthday, late in the afternoon, the child disappeared. Miss Smith had put him in the garden. It was a perfectly safe garden: he played there often. Yet when she called him for his tea he did not come; and when she looked for the reason she found that he was not there. The small gate that led to the fields at the back of the house was open. She had not opened it; she rarely used it. Distractedly, she thought he must have managed to release the catch himself. ‘That is quite impossible,’ her husband said. ‘It’s too high and too stiff.’ He looked at her oddly, confirmed in his mind that she wished to be rid of her child. Together they tramped the fields with the police, but although they covered a great area and were out for most of the night they were unsuccessful.

When the search continued in the light of the morning it was a search without hope, and the hopelessness in time turned into the fear of what discovery would reveal. ‘We must accept the facts,’ Miss Smith’s husband said, but she alone continued to hope. She dragged her legs over the wide countryside, seeking a miracle but finding neither trace nor word of her child’s wanderings.

A small boy, so quiet she scarcely noticed him, stopped her once by a sawmill. He spoke some shy salutation, and when she blinked her eyes at his face she saw that he was James Machen. She passed him by, thinking only that she envied him his life, that for him to live and her child to die was proof indeed of a mocking Providence. She prayed to this Providence, promising a score of resolutions if only all would be well.

But nothing was well, and Miss Smith brooded on the thought that her husband had not voiced. I released the gate myself. For some reason I have not wanted this child. God knows I loved him, and surely it wasn’t too weak a love? Is it that I’ve loved so many other children that I have none left that is real enough for my own? Pathetic, baseless theories flooded into Miss Smith’s mind. Her thoughts floundered and collapsed into wretched chaos.

‘Miss Smith,’ James said, ‘would you like to see your baby?’

He stood at her kitchen door, and Miss Smith, hearing the words, was incapable immediately of grasping their meaning. The sun, reflected in the kitchen, was mirrored again in the child’s glasses. He smiled at her, more confidently than she remembered, revealing a silvery wire stretched across his teeth.

‘What did you say?’ Miss Smith asked.

‘I said, would you like to see your baby?’