The Blotting Book (8 page)

"Oh, this will do very well," said Morris. "I am so thirsty."

"You have dined?" asked his host quietly.

"No; I don't think I did. I wasn't hungry."

The Cromwellian clock chimed a remnant half hour.

"Half-past," said Morris, filling his glass again. "You expect him then,
don't you?"

"Mills is not always very punctual," said Mr. Taynton.

For the next quarter of an hour the two sat with hardly the interchange
of a word. From outside came the swift steady hiss of the rain on to
the shrubs in the garden, and again the clock chimed. Morris who at
first had sat very quiet had begun to fidget and stir in his chair;
occasionally when he happened to notice it, he drank off the port with
which Mr. Taynton hospitably kept his glass supplied. Sometimes he
relit a cigarette only to let it go out again. But when the clock
struck he got up.

"I wonder what has happened," he said. "Can he have missed his train?
What time ought he to have got in?"

"He was to have got to Falmer," said Mr. Taynton with a little
emphasis on the last word, "at a quarter to seven. He spoke of walking
from there."

Morris looked at him with a furtive sidelong glance.

"Why, I—I might have met him there," he said. "I went up there again
after I left you to tell Sir Richard you would call to-morrow."

"You saw nothing of him?" asked the lawyer.

"No, of course not. Otherwise—There was scarcely a soul on the road; the
storm was coming up. But he would go by the downs, would he not?"

"The path over the downs doesn't branch off for a quarter of a mile below
Falmer station," said Mr. Taynton.

The minutes ticked on till ten. Then Morris went to the door.

"I shall go round to his rooms to see if he is there," he said.

"There is no need," said his host, "I will telephone."

The instrument hung in a corner of the room, and with very little delay,
Mills's servant was rung up. His master had not yet returned, but he had
said that he should very likely be late.

"And he made an appointment with you for half-past nine?" asked
Morris again.

"Yes. I cannot think what has happened to detain him."

Morris went quickly to the door again.

"I believe it is all a trick," he said, "and you don't want me to meet
him. I believe he is in his rooms the whole time. I shall go and see."

Before Mr. Taynton could stop him he had opened the front-door and banged
it behind him, and was off hatless and coatless through the pouring
perpendicular rain.

Mr. Taynton ran to the door, as if to stop him, but Morris was already
halfway down the street, and he went upstairs to the drawing-room. Morris
was altogether unlike himself; this discovery of Mills's treachery seemed
to have changed his nature. Violent and quick he always was, but to-night
he was suspicious, he seemed to distrust Mr. Taynton himself. And, a
thing which his host had never known him do before, he had drunk in that
half hour when they sat waiting, close on a bottle of port.

The evening paper lay ready cut for him in its accustomed place, but for
some five minutes Mr. Taynton did not appear to notice it, though evening
papers, on the money-market page, might contain news so frightfully
momentous to him. But something, this strangeness in Morris, no doubt,
and his general anxiety and suspense as to how this dreadful knot could
unravel itself, preoccupied him now, and even when he did take up the
paper and turn to the reports of Stock Exchange dealings, he was
conscious of no more than a sort of subaqueous thrill of satisfaction.
For Boston Copper had gone up nearly a point since the closing price of
last night.

It was not many minutes, however before Morris returned with matted and
streaming hair and drenched clothes.

"He has not come back," he said. "I went to his rooms and satisfied
myself of that, though I think they thought I was mad. I searched them
you understand; I insisted. I shall go round there again first thing
to-morrow morning, and if he is not there, I shall go up to find him in
town. I can't wait; I simply can't wait."

Mr. Taynton looked at him gravely, then nodded.

"No, I guess how you are feeling," he said, "I cannot understand what
has happened to Mills; I hope nothing is wrong. And now, my dear boy, let
me implore you to go straight home, get off your wet things and go to
bed. You will pay heavily for your excitement, if you are not careful."

"I'll get it out of him." said Morris.

Morris, as Mr. Taynton had advised, though not because he advised it, had
gone straight home to the house in Sussex Square. He had stripped off his
dripping clothes, and then, since this was the line of least resistance
he had gone to bed. He did not feel tired, and he longed with that aching
longing of the son for the mother, that Mrs. Assheton had been here, so
that he could just be in her presence and if he found himself unable to
speak and tell her all the hideous happenings of those last days, let her
presence bring a sort of healing to his tortured mind. But though he was
conscious of no tiredness, he was tired to the point of exhaustion, and
he had hardly got into bed, when he fell fast asleep. Outside, hushing
him to rest, there sounded the sibilant rain, and from the sea below
ripples broke gently and rhythmically on the pebbly beach. Nature, too,
it seemed, was exhausted by that convulsion of the elements that had
turned the evening into a clamorous hell of fire and riot, and now from
very weariness she was weeping herself asleep.

It was not yet eleven when Morris had got home, and he slept dreamlessly
with that recuperative sleep of youth for some six hours. Then, as within
the secret economy of the brain the refreshment of slumber repaired the
exhaustion of the day before, he began to dream with strange lurid
distinctness, a sort of resurrection dream of which the events of the two
days before supplied the bones and skeleton outline. As in all very vivid
and dreadful dreams the whole vision was connected and coherent, there
were no ludicrous and inconsequent interludes, none of those breakings
of one thread and hurried seizures of another, which though one is
dreaming very distinctly, supply some vague mental comfort, since even to
the sleeper they are reminders that his experiences are not solid but
mere phantasies woven by imperfect consciousness and incomplete control
of thought. It was not thus that Morris dreamed; his dream was of the
solid and sober texture of life.

He was driving in his motor, he thought, down the road from the house at
Falmer Park, which through the gate of a disused lodge joins the main
road, that leads from Falmer Station to Brighton. He had just heard from
Sir Richard's own lips who it was who had slandered and blackened him,
but, in his dream, he was conscious of no anger. The case had been
referred to some higher power, some august court of supreme authority,
which would certainly use its own instruments for its own vengeance. He
felt he was concerned in the affair no longer; he was but a spectator of
what would be. And, in obedience to some inward dictation, he drove his
motor on to the grass behind the lodge, so that it was concealed from the
road outside, and walked along the inside of the park-palings, which ran
parallel with it.

The afternoon, it seemed, was very dark, though the atmosphere was
extraordinarily clear, and after walking along the springy grass inside
the railings for some three hundred yards, where was the southeastern
corner of the park enclosure, he stopped at the angle and standing on
tip-toe peered over them, for they were nearly six feet high, and looked
into the road below. It ran straight as a billiard-cue just here, and was
visible for a long distance, but at the corner, just outside the
palings, the footpath over the downs to Brighton left the road, and
struck upward. On the other side of the road ran the railway, and in this
clear dark air, Morris could see with great distinctness Falmer Station
some four hundred yards away, along a stretch of the line on the other
side of it.

As he looked he saw a puff of steam rise against the woods beyond the
station, and before long a train, going Brightonward, clashed into the
station. Only one passenger got out, and he came out of the station into
the road. He was quite recognisable even at this distance. In his dream
Morris felt that he expected to see him get out of the train, and walk
along the road; the whole thing seemed pre-ordained. But he ceased
tiptoeing to look over the paling; he could hear the passenger's steps
when he came nearer.

He thought he waited quietly, squatting down on the mossy grass behind
the paling. Something in his hands seemed angry, for his fingers kept
tearing up the short turf, and the juice of the severed stems was red
like blood. Then in the gathering darkness he heard the tip-tap of
footsteps on the highway. But it never occurred to him that this
passenger would continue on the highroad; he was certainly going over the
downs to Brighton.

The air was quite windless, but at this moment Morris heard the boughs of
the oak-tree immediately above him stir and shake, and looking up he saw
Mr. Taynton sitting in a fork of the tree. That, too, was perfectly
natural; Mr. Taynton was Mills's partner; he was there as a sort of
umpire. He held a glass of port wine in one hand, and was sipping it in a
leisurely manner, and when Morris looked up at him, he smiled at him,
but put his finger to his lips, as if recommending silence. And as the
steps on the road outside sounded close he turned a meaning glance in the
direction of the road. From where he sat high in the tree, it was plain
to Morris that he must command the sight of the road, and was, in his
friendly manner, directing operations.

Suddenly the sound of the steps ceased, and Morris wondered for the
moment whether Mills had stopped. But looking up again, he saw Mr.
Taynton's head twisted round to the right, still looking over the
palings. But Morris found at once that the footsteps were noiseless, not
because the walker had paused, but because they were inaudible on the
grass. He had left the road, as the dreamer felt certain he would, and
was going over the downs to Brighton. At that Morris got up, and still
inside the park railings, followed in the direction he had gone. Then
for the first time in his dream, he felt angry, and the anger grew to
rage, and the rage to quivering madness. Next moment he had vaulted the
fence, and sprang upon the walker from behind. He dealt him blows with
some hard instrument, belabouring his head, while with his left hand he
throttled his throat so that he could not scream. Only a few were
necessary, for he knew that each blow went home, since all the savage
youthful strength of shoulder and loose elbow directed them. Then he
withdrew his left hand from the throttled throat of the victim who had
ceased to struggle, and like a log he fell back on to the grass, and
Morris for the first time looked on his face. It was not Mills at all; it
was Mr. Taynton.

The terror plucked him from his sleep; for a moment he wrestled and
struggled to raise his head from the pillow and loosen the clutch of the
night-hag who had suddenly seized him, and with choking throat and
streaming brow he sat up in bed. Even then his dream was more real to him
than the sight of his own familiar room, more real than the touch of
sheet and blanket or the dew of anguish which his own hand wiped from his
forehead and throat. Yet, what was his dream? Was it merely some
subconscious stringing together of suggestions and desires and events
vivified in sleep to a coherent story (all but that recognition of Mr.
Taynton, which was nightmare pure and simple), or
had it happened
?

With waking, anyhow, the public life, the life that concerned other
living folk as well as himself, became predominant again. He had
certainly seen Sir Richard the day before, and Sir Richard had given him
the name of the man who had slandered him. He had gone to meet that man,
but he had not kept his appointment, nor had he come back to his flat in
Brighton. So to-day he, Morris, was going to call there once more, and if
he did not find him, was going to drive up to London, and seek him there.

But he had been effectually plucked from further sleep, sleep had been
strangled, and he got out of bed and went to the window. Nature, in any
case, had swept her trouble away, and the pure sweet morning was
beginning to dawn in lines of yellow and fleeces of rosy cloud on the
eastern horizon.

All that riot and hurly-burly of thunder, the bull's eye flashing of
lightning, the perpendicular rain were things of the past, and this
morning a sky of pale limpid blue, flecked only by the thinnest clouds,
stretched from horizon to horizon. Below the mirror of the sea seemed as
deep and as placid as the sky above it, and the inimitable freshness of
the dawn spoke of a world rejuvenated and renewed.

It was, by his watch, scarcely five; in an hour it would be reasonable to
call at Mills's flat, and see if he had come by the midnight train. If
not his motor could be round by soon after six, and he would be in town
by eight, before Mills, if he had slept there, would be thinking of
starting for Brighton. He was sure to catch him.

Morris had drawn up the blind, and through the open window came the cool
breath of the morning ruffling his hair, and blowing his nightshirt close
to his skin, and just for that moment, so exquisite was this feeling of
renewal and cleanness in the hour of dawn, he thought with a sort of
incredulous wonder of the red murderous hate which had possessed him the
evening before. He seemed to have been literally beside himself with
anger and his words, his thoughts, his actions had been controlled by a
force and a possession which was outside himself. Also the dreadful
reality of his dream still a little unnerved him, and though he was
himself now and awake, he felt that he had been no less himself when he
throttled the throat of that abhorred figure that walked up the noiseless
path over the downs to Brighton, and with vehement and savage blows
clubbed it down. And then the shock of finding it was his old friend whom
he had done to death! That, it is true, was nightmare pure and simple,
but all the rest was clad in sober, convincing garb of events that had
really taken place. He could not at once separate his dream from reality,
for indeed what had he done yesterday after he had learned who his
traducer had been? He scarcely knew; all events and facts seemed
colourless compared to the rage and mad lust for vengeance which had
occupied his entire consciousness.