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Bernard began moving about the room restlessly. He would go to the window, stand there awhile staring out at the people hurrying past, then come back to the fireplace and sit down. But he couldn’t stay quiet for long. After a glance at his paper, he would rise from his chair and go to the window again.
“I wish you’d stay still,” his wife said at last. And then, a few minutes later, she exclaimed, “Why don’t you put on your hat and coat and go out?”
Bernard, with a rather shamed expression, did as she suggested. As he put on his hat and coat and stepped out, he told himself that he was only human; it was natural to be thrilled and excited by the dreadful, extraordinary thing that had just happened so close by. Ellen wasn’t reasonable about such things. How queer and disagreeable she had been that very morning—angry with him for going out to hear what all the commotion was about, and even more angry when he came back and said nothing to avoid upsetting her!
Meanwhile, Mrs. Bernard forced herself to go down to the kitchen. As she entered the low, whitewashed room, a tremor of fear and quick terror came over her. She turned and did something she had never done before in her life, something she had never heard of anyone else doing in a kitchen: she bolted the door.
But, finding herself alone, shut off from everyone, she was still beset by a strange, uncanny dread. It felt as if she were locked in with an invisible presence that mocked, jeered, reproached, and threatened her by turns.
Why had she allowed, nay encouraged, Daisy to go away for two days? Daisy, at least, was company—kind, young, unsuspecting company. With Daisy, she could be her old sharp self. It was such a comfort to be with someone to whom she need not say anything. With Bernard, she was pursued by a sick feeling of guilt and shame. She was the man’s wedded wife—in his stolid way, he was very kind to her, and yet she was keeping something from him that he certainly had a right to know.
Not for worlds, however, would she have told Bernard of her dreadful suspicion—nay, her almost certainty.
At last, she went to the door and unlocked it. Then she went upstairs and turned out her bedroom. That made her feel a little better.
She longed for Bernard to return, yet in a way, she was relieved by his absence. She wanted to feel him nearby, yet she welcomed anything that took her husband out of the house.
As Mrs. Bernard swept and dusted, trying to put her whole mind into what she was doing, she constantly asked herself what was going on upstairs. What a good rest the lodger was having! But that was only natural. Mr. Basset, as she well knew, had been up late last night—or rather, early this morning.
Suddenly, the drawing-room bell rang. But instead of going up immediately, as she generally did, she first hurriedly prepared the lodger’s simple meal, which was both his luncheon and breakfast combined.
Then, very slowly, with her heart beating queerly, she walked up. Just outside the sitting room—for she felt sure that Mr. Basset was there already, waiting for her—she rested the tray on the top of the banisters and listened. For a few moments, she heard nothing; then through the door came the high, quavering voice with which she had become so familiar:
“‘She saith to him, stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.’”
There was a long pause. Mrs. Bernard could hear the leaves of the Bible being turned over eagerly, busily; and then again Mr. Basset broke out, this time in a softer voice:
“‘She hath cast down many wounded from her; yea, many strong men have been slain by her.’” And in a softer, lower, plaintive tone came the words: “‘I applied my heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom and the reason of things; and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness.’”
As she stood there listening, a feeling of keen distress and spiritual oppression came over Mrs. Bernard. For the first time in her life, she envisioned the infinite mystery, the sadness and strangeness, of human existence.
Poor Mr. Basset—poor unhappy, distraught Mr. Basset! An overwhelming pity blotted out, for a moment, the fear and loathing she had been feeling for her lodger.
She knocked at the door, then took up her tray.
“Come in, Mrs. Bernard.” Mr. Basset’s voice sounded feebler, more toneless than usual.
She turned the handle of the door and walked in. The lodger was not sitting in his usual place; he had moved the small round table where his candle generally rested when he read in bed, and placed it by the drawing-room window. On it lay an open Bible and a Concordance. As his landlady entered, Mr. Basset hastily closed the Bible and began staring dreamily out of the window at the sordid, hurrying crowd of men and women now sweeping along the Marylebone Road.
“There seem to be a great many people out today,” he observed without looking around.
“Yes, sir, there do,” Mrs. Bernard replied, her voice steady but her heart racing.
She busied herself with laying the cloth and putting out the breakfast-lunch, all the while seized with a mortal, instinctive terror of the man sitting there.
At last, Mr. Basset got up and turned around. She forced herself to look at him. How tired, how worn he appeared, and—how strange.
Walking towards the table where his meal lay, he rubbed his hands together with a nervous gesture—one she recognized as a sign of something that had pleased him. Mrs. Bernard remembered that he had rubbed his hands together in this way when he first saw the room upstairs and realized it contained a large gas stove and a convenient sink.
What Mr. Basset was doing now also reminded her in an odd way of a play she had once seen—a play to which a young man had taken her when she was a girl, unnumbered years ago, and which had thrilled and fascinated her. “Out, out, damned spot!” the tall, fierce, beautiful actress had cried, twisting her hands together just as the lodger was doing now.
“It’s a fine day,” said Mr. Basset, sitting down and unfolding his napkin. “The fog has cleared. I do not know if you will agree with me, Mrs. Bernard, but I always feel brighter when the sun is shining, as it is now, at any rate, trying to shine.” He looked at her inquiringly, but Mrs. Bernard could not speak. She only nodded. However, that did not seem to affect Mr. Basset adversely.
He had acquired a great liking and respect for this well-balanced, taciturn woman. She was the first woman for whom he had experienced any such feelings in many years.
He looked down at the still-covered dish and shook his head. “I don’t feel as if I could eat very much today,” he said plaintively. Then he suddenly took a half-sovereign out of his waistcoat pocket.
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Mrs. Bernard noticed that it was not the same waistcoat Mr. Basset had been wearing the day before.
“Mrs. Bernard, may I ask you to come here?”
After a moment of hesitation, his landlady obeyed him.
“Will you please accept this little gift for the use you kindly allowed me to make of your kitchen last night?” he said quietly. “I tried to make as little mess as I could, Mrs. Bernard, but—the truth is, I was carrying out a very elaborate experiment.”
Mrs. Bernard held out her hand. She hesitated, then took the coin. The fingers that brushed lightly against her palm were icy cold—cold and clammy. Mr. Basset was evidently not well.
As she walked down the stairs, the winter sun, a scarlet ball hanging in the smoky sky, glinted in on Mr. Basset’s landlady, casting blood-red gleams—so it seemed to her—onto the piece of gold she held in her hand.
The day went by as other days had in that quiet household, but there was far greater animation outside than usual.
Perhaps because the sun was shining for the first time in days, all of London seemed to be making a holiday in that part of town.
When Bernard finally returned, his wife listened silently as he recounted the extraordinary excitement reigning everywhere. After he had been talking for a long while, she suddenly shot him a strange look.
“I suppose you went to see the place?” she said.
Guiltily, he acknowledged that he had.
“Well?”
“Well, there wasn’t much to see—not now. But, oh, Ellen, the audacity of him! If the poor soul had had time to cry out—which they don’t believe she did—someone would’ve heard her. They say that if he keeps doing it like this—in broad daylight—he might never be caught. He must’ve blended in with the crowd within seconds of what he’d done!”
During the afternoon, Bernard bought papers recklessly—he must have spent the best part of sixpence. But despite all the supposed and suggested clues, there was nothing—nothing new to read, less even than before. The police, it was clear, were at a complete loss. Mrs. Bernard began to feel curiously better, less tired, less ill, less—terrified than she had felt throughout the morning.
And then something happened that shattered the quietude of the day with dramatic suddenness.
They had just finished their tea, and Bernard was reading the latest paper he had run out to buy, when suddenly there came a loud, thundering, double knock at the door.
Mrs. Bernard looked up, startled. “Whoever can that be?” she said.
But as Bernard got up, she quickly added, “You sit down. I’ll go myself. Sounds like someone after lodgings. I’ll soon send them packing!”
She left the room, but not before another loud double knock echoed through the house.
Mrs. Bernard opened the front door. Standing there was a stranger—a big, dark man with fierce, black mustaches. Somehow, he immediately suggested a policeman to Mrs. Bernard’s mind.
This notion was confirmed by his very first words. “I’m here to execute a warrant!” he exclaimed in a theatrical, hollow tone.
With a weak cry of protest, Mrs. Bernard suddenly threw out her arms as if to bar the way; she turned deadly white—but then, in an instant, the supposed stranger’s laugh rang out, loud, jovial, and familiar.
“There now, Mrs. Bernard! I never thought I’d take you in as well as all that!”
It was Jerry Chandler—Jerry Chandler dressed up, as he occasionally did for his work.
Mrs. Bernard began laughing—helplessly, hysterically, just as she had on the morning of Daisy’s arrival, when the newspaper-sellers had come shouting down the Marylebone Road.
“What’s all this about?” Bernard came out, looking concerned.
Young Chandler, looking sheepish, shut the front door. “I didn’t mean to upset her like this,” he said, looking foolish. “’Twas just my silly nonsense, Mr. Bernard.” Together, they helped her into the sitting room.
But once there, Mrs. Bernard’s hysteria worsened; she threw her black apron over her face and began to sob hysterically.
“I made sure she’d know who I was when I spoke,” the young fellow continued apologetically. “But there now, I have upset her. I am sorry!”
“It don’t matter!” she exclaimed, throwing the apron off her face, though tears still streamed from her eyes as she sobbed and laughed by turns. “Doesn’t matter one bit, Jerry! ’Twas stupid of me to be so taken aback. But that murder that happened close by, it’s just upset me—upset me altogether today.”
“Enough to upset anyone—that was,” acknowledged the young man ruefully. “I’ve only come in for a minute. I shouldn’t be here while I’m on duty like this—”
Jerry Chandler glanced longingly at the remnants of the meal still on the table.
“You can take a minute to have a bite and a sup,” said Bernard hospitably. “Then you can tell us any news, Jerry. We’re right in the thick of things now, aren’t we?” He spoke with evident enjoyment, almost pride, in the gruesome fact.
Jerry nodded. Already his mouth was full of bread and butter. He waited a moment, then said, “Well, I have got one piece of news—not that I suppose it’ll interest you much.”
They both looked at him—Mrs. Bernard suddenly calm, though her chest still heaved from time to time.
“Our boss has resigned!” said Jerry Chandler slowly, impressively.
“No! Not the Commissioner of Police?” exclaimed Bernard.
“Yes, he has. He can’t bear what’s being said about us any longer—and I don’t blame him! He did his best, and so have we all. The public has gone daft—in the West End, that is, today. As for the papers, well, they’re something cruel—that’s what they are. And the ridiculous ideas they print! You’d never believe the things they ask us to do—and they’re quite serious about it.”
“What do you mean?” questioned Mrs. Bernard. She genuinely wanted to know.
“Well, the Courier declares there ought to be a house-to-house investigation—all over London. Just think of it! Everybody to let the police search their houses, from garret to kitchen, just to see if The Rose Killer isn’t hiding there. Dotty, I call it! Why, it’d take us months just to do that one job in a city like London.”
“I’d like to see them dare come into my house!” said Mrs. Bernard angrily.
“Well, you see, it’s this way. The newspapers were always saying how extraordinary it was that The Rose Killer chose such peculiar times to strike—times when no one’s about. Now, doesn’t it stand to reason that the fellow, reading all that, and seeing the sense of it, said to himself, ‘I’ll go on another tack this time’? Just listen to this!” He pulled a strip of paper, part of a column cut from a newspaper, out of his pocket.
“’AN EX-LORD MAYOR OF LONDON ON THE ROSE KILLER"
‘Will the murderer be caught? Yes,’ replied Sir John, ’he will certainly be caught—probably when he commits his next crime. A whole army of bloodhounds, metaphorical and literal, will be on his track the moment he draws blood again. With the whole community against him, he cannot escape, especially when it is remembered that he chooses the quietest hour in the twenty-four to commit his crimes. “‘Londoners are now in such a state of nerves—if I may use the expression, in such a state of funk—that every passer-by, however innocent, is looked at with suspicion by his neighbor if his avocation happens to take him abroad between the hours of one and three in the morning.’ “I’d like to gag that ex-Lord Mayor!” concluded Jerry Chandler wrathfully.
Just then, the lodger’s bell rang.
“Let me go up, my dear,” said Bernard, noticing his wife still looked pale and shaken.
“No, no,” she said hastily. “You stay down here and talk to Jerry. I’ll look after Mr. Basset. He may want his supper a bit earlier today.”
Slowly, painfully, feeling as if her legs were made of cotton wool, she dragged herself up to the first floor, knocked at the door, and then went in.
“You did ring, sir?” she asked in her quiet, respectful way.
Mr. Basset looked up. She thought—but later reminded herself it might have been just her imagination—that for the first time, the lodger looked frightened, frightened and cowed.
“I heard a noise downstairs,” he said fretfully, “and I wanted to know what it was all about. As I told you, Mrs. Bernard, when I first took these rooms, quiet is essential to me.”
“It was just a friend of ours, sir. I’m sorry you were disturbed. Would you like the knocker taken off tomorrow? Bernard can do it if you don’t like the sound of knocks.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t put you to such trouble as that.” Mr. Basset looked relieved. “Just a friend of yours, was it, Mrs. Bernard? He made a great deal of noise.”
“Just a young fellow,” she said apologetically. “The son of one of Bernard’s old friends. He often comes here, sir; but he never gave such a great big double knock before. I’ll speak to him about it.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Bernard. I would really prefer you did nothing of the kind. It was just a passing annoyance—nothing more!”
She waited a moment. How strange that Mr. Basset said nothing of the hoarse cries which had turned the road outside into a perfect Bedlam every hour or two throughout the day. But no, Mr. Basset made no allusion to what might well have disturbed any quiet gentleman at his reading.
“I thought maybe you’d like to have supper a little earlier tonight, sir?”
“Just whenever you like, Mrs. Bernard—whenever it’s convenient. I do not wish to put you out in any way.”
She felt herself dismissed and, going out quietly, closed the door behind her.
As she did so, she heard the front door banging shut. She sighed—Jerry Chandler was really a very noisy young fellow.