Something would reach out of the night around him, something which was watching him now, with a laugh in its throat; observing him drop speed from fifty miles an hour to forty-five, and then to forty; smiling to see him peer through the windscreen at the road ahead.
It, or its minion, lurked in every side turning, ready to shoot out at him in splintering collision; sat at the wheel of each oncoming car, drunk and unfit to be driving; laid its hand upon the over-burdened boughs of the snow-covered trees under which he passed, ready to drop a branch in his path.
It wasn’t even snowing now, and he stopped the windscreen wiper, and the road ahead lay clear and white in the moonlight, but Bartels knew that that made no difference to the inevitable end. He dropped speed still further, to thirty-five miles an hour, and slowed down at each side turning; and hugged the side of the road when a lorry rumbled up from behind and passed him and thundered on.
He drove carefully, tense and alert, but he knew it made no difference because he knew now that the something which would reach out for him would not take such obvious forms as he had imagined.
He knew it, because each time he took some precaution he heard it giggle delightedly in his ear, like a sadistic young schoolboy torturing a frog.
He knew it would not operate through an engine defect, or a mechanical defect of any kind; nor through a puncture, or a tyre burst. Nothing so prosaic as that.
He crawled through Esher at twenty miles an hour, and when he had passed through the town, and came to the first traffic roundabout on the way back, and joined the bypass, he felt better.
His nerve returned, and he increased speed.
There was no more giggling in his ear; the schoolboy stood back, the frog made off afresh. There was nothing to fear now, except time.
The bypass stretched ahead, broad, sometimes gently curving, well illuminated in the appropriate places, and properly controlled by traffic lights and roundabouts. There were no side turnings where danger could lurk, and ample room for cars to pass.
When he came to the double carriageway, he increased speed to fifty. He felt ashamed of the time he had wasted through his overcautious driving, but not unhopeful that he would arrive home with a quarter of an hour or more to spare.
Beatrice rarely started going to bed before 10.30 or 10.45; sometimes not till 11.15. He pictured himself going into the flat, greeting her as she sat by the fire having her final cup of weak China tea. Then casually going into the bedroom, and taking the bottle from the bedside.
After that, he would have to throw the altrapeine down the drain in the bathroom, and wash out the bottle and throw it in the dustbin, or put it in his overcoat pocket; it would be of no further importance, anyway.
The one he had bought at lunch time, the one containing the remains of pure stomach powder, he would leave by the bedside. If she was in the bedroom he would announce that he had left the dinner early because he had not been feeling very well, and ask if he could have the remains of her medicine. She would certainly agree. He smiled at how easy it would be.
The frog was getting uppish, now.
The path of sin was not so tortuous after all, it was straightening out nicely, and as to the future, as to Lorna, that, too, could be considered in due course. He passed the second and third roundabouts, thinking of sin, and the Seven Deadly Sins, which are said to be Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony, Anger, Envy, and Sloth; and he tried to discover which it was that had led him to his present position.
He was not proud; indeed, in some ways he was rather meek. He did not covet Lorna, because covetousness involved desiring that which belonged to somebody else, and Lorna belonged to nobody.
He did not lust after her, either; his feelings were too gentle, too tender, and above all too protective; and the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins did not seem to come into the picture.
What, then, had been the driving force?
He wondered if the secret lay in some sort of secondary products of the Seven Deadly Sins, and toyed with the thought in a morbid desire to lay bare the basic defect in his character.
He tried to persuade himself that in wishing to shelter Lorna from the difficulties of the world, he was in reality wishing to see himself as the knight errant, the recipient of her gratitude and praise; a desire which was possibly a watery by-product of pride and lust. By the bonds of marriage, he belonged to Beatrice, yet he wished to belong to Lorna: was this, in some twisted, inverted form, a manifestation of covetousness? He shook his head. It was all far-fetched and unconvincing.
Far ahead, he could see the lights of the fifth roundabout, and glanced at the clock and saw that he was now making good time.
He reverted to the consideration of lust, because it was something to do, something to keep his mind off what he might find when he got home.
Expressed in its simplest form the position was that he, Bartels, wanted a certain woman. To get her, he was prepared to kill. That was it, there you had it: you had to put from your mind the excuses, the consoling thoughts of doing things for Lorna’s good. You were not conscious of lust, of any overwhelming carnal desires, but the mere fact that you were prepared to kill to get her indicated that they were there in your subconscious.
But what of the much-extolled virtues of pity and mercy? If it were not for pity and mercy, he thought bitterly, I could have walked out on Beatrice like millions of other husbands have done in the past, and will do in the future.
The scandal would be short-lived, and you don’t go to prison for it. They don’t hang you for it. But they hang you if you kill your wife just because you have so much pity in you that you cannot leave her in loneliness.
If things went wrong, he would be ranked with Crippen. He would be portrayed as a callous monster in the eyes of posterity. But who knows what went on in the mind of the little man called Crippen? Who knows? thought Bartels again.
He was drawing near to the fifth roundabout when he thought of how he would feel if he were put in prison, perhaps not even hanged, just put in prison, for years, behind locked doors.
Shut in, in a tiny cell, for hours on end each day and night. So that the walls pressed in on you, and the ceiling pressed down upon you, nearer and nearer, and closer and closer, and you could bang on the door and break the skin on your hands, and scream yourself hoarse, and it did not avail. And when the lights went out, there was the darkness, thick and cloying, and that suffocated you; and what with the darkness and the walls, you knew you were not really in a prison at all.
You were buried alive.
You were in your coffin, deep under the earth, slowly suffocating to death, in the darkness and the loneliness and the silence of the earth. Nobody would release you because nobody could hear you, and everybody thought you were dead, and nobody knew the doctor had made a mistake, and you had merely been in a cataleptic trance; feeling yourself being put in a shroud, and hearing the coffin lid come down, and feeling the swaying motion of the coffin-bearers, and the sound of the earth falling remorse-lessly above your head; falling, and falling, and falling, more and ever more of it, till the sounds grew fainter and only the silence remained.
He was shivering again now, fighting against the old, the dark shocking terrors, his hands wet upon the wheel.
He was near to the roundabout, when the black cat, emblem of good luck, but young and inexperienced, ran swiftly across the road before his car. Its ears were laid back, its tail arched like a squirrel’s.
For a second he had glimpsed the young cat’s eyes, green fire in the light of his headlamps, and then it was in front of him.
Bartels didn’t run it over.
He might have done so, had he had time to think it all out, but he acted instinctively, as he was bound to do, in the only way in which he, Philip Bartels, could have been expected to act.
Bartels braked.
If there had not been any snow, it might have been all right. If the coach, approaching from the right, with its lighted interior, had been a few minutes earlier, or later, it might not have been so bad, either.
As the car swung in a circle, darted sideways, hit the TURN LEFT sign, he heard the screaming of the coach brakes, and saw it swerve ineffectually, and crash with its fender into his own car, and felt the stab of pain in his side. It was only then that he felt afraid.
Even then it was only for a second.
