The Thousandth Woman

"Well – to the back of his house! I expected to meet my man on the river."

"Was that how you missed him more or less?"

"I suppose it was."

Scruton ruminated a little, broke into his offensive laugh, and checked it instantly of his own accord. "This is really interesting," he croaked. "You get to London – at what time was it?"

"Nominally three twenty-five; but the train ran thirteen minutes late," said Hilton Toye.

"And you're on the river by what time?" Scruton asked Cazalet.

"I walked over Hungerford Bridge, took the first train to Surbiton, got a boat there, and just dropped down with the stream. I don't suppose the whole thing took me very much more than an hour."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" said Toye.

"Yes, I was. It was I who telephoned to the house and found that Craven was out motoring; so there was no hurry."

"Yet you weren't going to see Henry Craven?" murmured Toye.

Cazalet did not answer. His last words had come in a characteristic burst; now he had his mouth shut tight, and his eyes were fast to Scruton. He might have been in the witness-box already, a doomed wretch cynically supposed to be giving evidence on his own behalf, but actually only baring his neck by inches to the rope, under the joint persuasion of judge and counsel. But he had one friend by him still, one who had edged a little nearer in the pause.

"But you did see the man you went to see?" said Scruton.

Cazalet paused. "I don't know. Eventually somebody brushed past me in the dark. I did think then – but I can't swear to him even now!"

"Tell us about it."

"Do you mean that, Scruton? Do you insist on hearing all that happened? I'm not asking Toye; he can do what he likes. But you, Scruton – you've been through a lot, you know – you ought to have stopped in bed – do you really want this on top of all?"

"Go ahead," said Scruton. "I'll have a drink when you've done; somebody give me a cigarette meanwhile."

Cazalet supplied the cigarette, struck the match, and held it with unfaltering hand. The two men's eyes met strangely across the flame.

"I'll tell you all exactly what happened; you can believe me or not as you like. You won't forget that I knew every inch of the ground – except one altered bit that explained itself." Cazalet turned to Blanche with a significant look, but she only drew an inch nearer still. "Well, it was in the little creek, where the boat-house is, that I waited for my man. He never came – by the river. I heard the motor, but it wasn't Henry Craven that I wanted to see, but the man who was coming to see him. Eventually I thought I must have made a mistake, or he might have changed his mind and come by road. The dressing-gong had gone; at least I supposed it was that by the time. It was almost quite dark, and I landed and went up the path past the back premises to the front of the house. So far I hadn't seen a soul, or been seen by one, evidently; but the French windows were open in what used to be my father's library, the room was all lit up, and just as I got there a man ran out into the flood of light and – "

"I thought you said he brushed by you in the dark?" interrupted Toye.

"I was in the dark; so was he in another second; and no power on earth would induce me to swear to him. Do you want to hear the rest, Scruton, or are you another unbeliever?"

"I want to hear every word – more than ever!"

Toye cocked his head at both question and answer, but inclined it quickly as Cazalet turned to him before proceeding.

"I went in and found Henry Craven lying in his blood. That's gospel – it was so I found him – lying just where he had fallen in a heap out of the leather chair at his desk. The top right-hand drawer of his desk was open, the key in it and the rest of the bunch still swinging! A revolver lay as it had dropped upon the desk – it had upset the ink – and there were cartridges lying loose in the open drawer, and the revolver was loaded. I swept it back into the drawer, turned the key and removed it with the bunch. But there was something else on the desk – that silver-mounted truncheon – and a man's cap was lying on the floor. I picked them both up. My first instinct, I confess it, was to remove every sign of manslaughter and to leave the scene to be reconstructed into one of accident – seizure – anything but what it was!"

He paused as if waiting for a question. None was asked. Toye's mouth might have been sewn up, his eyes were like hatpins driven into his head. The other two simply stared.

"It was a mad idea, but I had gone mad," continued Cazalet. "I had hated the victim alive, and it couldn't change me that he was dead or dying; that didn't make him a white man, and neither did it necessarily blacken the poor devil who had probably suffered from him like the rest of us and only struck him down in self-defense. The revolver on the desk made that pretty plain. It was out of the way, but now I saw blood all over the desk as well; it was soaking into the blotter, and it knocked the bottom out of my idea. What was to be done? I had meddled already; how could I give the alarm without giving myself away to that extent, and God knows how much further? The most awful moment of the lot came as I hesitated – the dinner-gong went off in the hall outside the door! I remember watching the thing on the floor to see if it would move.

"Then I lost my head – absolutely. I turned the key in the door, to give myself a few seconds' grace or start; it reminded me of the keys in my hands. One of them was one of those little round bramah keys. It seemed familiar to me even after so many years. I looked up, and there was my father's Michelangelo closet, with its little round bramah keyhole. I opened it as the outer door was knocked at and then tried. But my mad instinct of altering every possible appearance, to mislead the police, stuck to me to the last. And I took the man's watch and chain into the closet with me, as well as the cap and truncheon that I had picked up before.

"I don't know how long I was above ground, so to speak, but one of my father's objects had been to make his retreat sound-tight, and I could scarcely hear what was going on in the room. That encouraged me; and two of you don't need telling how I got out through the foundations, because you know all about the hole I made myself as a boy in the floor under the oilcloth. It took some finding with single matches; but the fear of your neck gives you eyes in your finger-ends, and gimlets, too, by Jove! The worst part was getting out at the other end, into the cellars; there were heaps of empty bottles to move, one by one, before there was room to open the manhole door and to squirm out over the slab; and I thought they rang like a peal of bells, but I put them all back again, and apparently … nobody overheard in the scullery.

"The big dog barked at me like blazes – he did again the other day – but nobody seemed to hear him either. I got to my boat, tipped a fellow on the towing path to take it back and pay for it – why haven't the police got hold of him? – and ran down to the bridge over the weir. I stopped a big car with a smart shaver smoking his pipe at the wheel. I should have thought he'd have come forward for the reward that was put up; but I pretended I was late for dinner I had in town, and I let him drop me at the Grand Hotel. He cost me a fiver, but I had on a waistcoat lined with notes, and I'd more than five minutes in hand at Charing Cross. If you want to know, it was the time in hand that gave me the whole idea of doubling back to Genoa; I must have been half-way up to town before I thought of it!"

He had told the whole thing as he always could tell an actual experience; that was one reason why it rang so true to one listener at every point. But the sick man's sunken eyes had advanced from their sockets in cumulative amazement. And Hilton Toye laughed shortly when the end was reached.

"You figure some on our credulity!" was his first comment.

"I don't figure on anything from you, Toye, except a pair of handcuffs as a first instalment!"

Toye rose in prompt acceptance of the challenge. "Seriously, Cazalet, you ask us to believe that you did all this to screen a man you didn't have time to recognize?"

"I've told you the facts."

"Well, I guess you'd better tell them to the police." Toye took his hat and stick. Scruton was struggling from his chair. Blanche stood petrified, a dove under a serpent's spell, as Toye made her a sardonic bow from the landing door. "You broke your side of the contract, Miss Blanche! I guess it's up to me to complete."

"Wait!"

It was Scruton's raven croak; he had tottered to his feet.

"Sure," said Toye, "if you've anything you want to say as an interested party."

"Only this – he's told the truth!"

"Well, can he prove it?"

"I don't know," said Scruton. "But I can!"

"You?" Blanche chimed in there.

"Yes, I'd like that drink first, if you don't mind, Cazalet." It was Blanche who got it for him, in an instant. "Thank you! I'd say more if my blessing was worth having – but here's something that is. Listen to this, you American gentleman: I was the man who wrote to him in Naples. Leave it at that a minute; it was my second letter to him; the first was to Australia, in answer to one from him. It was the full history of my downfall. I got a warder to smuggle it out. That letter was my one chance."

"I know it by heart," said Cazalet. "It was that and nothing else that made me leave before the shearing."

"To meet me when I came out!" Scruton explained in a hoarse whisper. "To – to keep me from going straight to that man, as I'd told him I should in my first letter! But you can't hit these things off to the day or the week; he'd told me where to write to him on his voyage, and I wrote to Naples, but that letter did not get smuggled out. My warder friend had got the sack. I had to put what I'd got to say so that you could read it two ways. So I told you, Cazalet, I was going straight up the river for a row – and you can pronounce that two ways. And I said I hoped I shouldn't break a scull – but there's another way of spelling that, and it was the other way I meant!" He chuckled grimly. "I wanted you to lie low and let me lie low if that happened. I wanted just one man in the world to know I'd done it. But that's how we came to miss each other, for you timed it to a tick, if you hadn't misread me about the river."

He drank again, stood straighter, and found a fuller voice.

"Yet I never meant to do it unless he made me, and at the back of my brain I never thought he would. I thought he'd do something for me, after all he'd done before! Shall I tell you what he did?"

"Got out his revolver!" cried Cazalet in a voice that was his own justification as well.

"Pretending it was going to be his check-book!" said Scruton through his teeth. "But I heard him trying to cock it inside his drawer. There was his special constable's truncheon hanging on the wall – silver mounted, for all the world to know how he'd stood up for law and order in the sight of men! I tell you it was a joy to feel the weight of that truncheon, and to see the hero of Trafalgar Square fumbling with a thing he didn't understand! I hit him as hard as God would let me – and the rest you know – except that I nearly did trip over the man who swore it was broad daylight at the time!"

He tottered to the folding-doors, and stood there a moment, pointing to Cazalet with a hand that twitched as terribly as his dreadful face.

"No – the rest you did – the rest you did to save what wasn't worth saving! But – I think – I'll hold out long enough to thank you – just a little!" He was gone with a gibbering smile.