Witching Hill

"God bless my soul, no more would I!" cried the crammer heartily. "I aimed low on purpose not to do more than wing them; there's my bullet in the door to say so, whereas theirs fairly whistled past my head on its way through that upstairs window. They're a most desperate gang of sportsmen, I assure you."

"There's certainly something to be said for keeping a revolver," observed Uvo, eyeing the brace now lying on the cast-iron chimneypiece.

"Do you mean to say you haven't got one?" cried Colonel Cheffins.

"I do. I wouldn't keep one even out in Egypt. I hate the beastly things," said Uvo Delavoye.

"But why?"

"Oh, I don't know. There's something so uncanny about them. They lie so snug in your pocket, and you needn't even take them out to send yourself to Kingdom Come!"

"Why yourself, Mr. Delavoye?"

"You never know. You might go mad with the beastly thing about you."

"God bless my soul!" cried the colonel, with cocked eyebrows. "You might go mad while you're shaving, and cut yourself too deep, for that matter!"

"Or when you're waiting for a train, or looking out of a window!" I put in, to laugh Uvo out of the morbid vein which I understood in him but others might easily misconstrue. I could see the two young pupils exchanging glances as I spoke.

"No," he replied, laughing in his turn, to my relief; "none of those ways would come as easy, and they'd all hurt more. However, to be quite serious, I must own it isn't the time or place for these little prejudices against the only cure for the present epidemic. And yet for my part I'd always rather trust to one of my Soudanese weapons, with which you couldn't have an accident if you tried."

Over the way, his own rooms were freely hung with murderous trophies acquired in the back-blocks of the Nile; but I felt more and more that Uvo Delavoye was wilfully misrepresenting himself to these three strangers; and the best I could hope was that a certain dash of sardonic gaiety might lead them to suppose that it was all his chaff.

"Well," said the colonel, "if those are your views I only hope you haven't many "valuables" in the house."

"On the contrary, colonel, everything we've got over there is a few sizes too big for its place, and our plate-chest simply wouldn't go into the strong-room of the local bank. So where do you think we keep it?"

"I've no idea."

"In the bathroom!" cried Uvo Delavoye, with the shock of laughter which was the refreshing finish of some of his moodiest fits. But you had to know him to appreciate his subtle shades, especially to separate the tangled threads of grim fun and gay earnest, and I feared that the gallant little veteran was beginning to regard him as a harmless lunatic. A shake of his bald head was all his comment on the statement that moved Delavoye himself to sudden mirth. And on the whole I was thankful when the return of a man-servant with a nervous constable, grabbed out of the fog by a lucky dip, provided us with an excuse for groping our way across the road.

"What on earth made you talk all that rot about revolvers?" I grumbled as we struck his gate.

"It wasn't rot. I meant every word of it."

"The more shame for you, if you did; but you know very well you don't."

"My dear Gilly, I wouldn't live with one of those nasty little weapons for worlds. I – I couldn't, Gilly – not long!"

He had me quite tightly by the hand.

"I'm coming in with you," I said. "You're not fit to be alone."

"Oh, yes, I am!" he laughed. "I haven't got one of those things yet, and I shall never get one. I'd rather thieves broke in and stole every ounce of silver in the place."

So we parted for what was left of the night, instead of turning it into day as we often did with less excuse; and for once my powers of sleep deserted me. But it was not the attempted burglary, or any one of its sensational features, that kept me awake; it was the lamentable conversation of Uvo Delavoye on the subject of fire-arms, and that no longer as affecting other minds, but as revealing his own. I had often heard him indulge his morbid fancies, but never so gratuitously or before strangers. To me he could and would say anything, but of late he had been less free with me and I more anxious about him. He had now been over eighteen months on the shelf. That was his whole trouble. It was not that he was ever seriously ill, but that he was always well enough to worry because he was no better or fitter for work. His mind raced like an engine, and the futile wear and tear was beginning to tell on the whole machinery. To be sure, he had written a little in a desultory way, but I never thought his heart was in his pen, and his fastidious taste was a deterrent rather than a spur. Yet he railed about the bread of idleness, said a man should be fit or dead, and that his mother and sister would be better off without him. Those ladies were again from home, and the fact did not make it easier to dissociate such sayings from an unhealthy horror of loaded revolvers.

So you may think what I felt the very next evening – which I did insist on spending at No. 7 – when the distasteful conversation was renewed and developed to the point of outrage. Daylight and less fog had failed to reveal any trace whatever of the thieves, and it became evident that the colonel's moral victory (he had lost a few spoons) was also a regrettably bloodless one. I saw no more of him during a day of vain excitement, but at night his card was brought up to Uvo's room, and the old fellow followed like a new pin.

I was in those days none too nice about my clothes, and both of us young fellows were more or less as we had been all day; but the sight of the dapper coach in his well-cut dinner jacket, with shirt-front shining like his venerable pate, and studded with a couple of good pearls, might well have put us to the blush. Under his arm he carried a big cigar-box, and this he presented to Delavoye with a courtly sparkle.

"You rushed to our aid last night, Mr. Delavoye, and we nearly shot you for your pains!" said the colonel. "Pray accept a souvenir which in your hands, I hope, and in similar circumstances, is less likely to end in so much smoke."

Uvo lifted the lid and the gas-light flashed from the plated parts of a six-chambered revolver with a six-inch barrel. It was one of the deadly brace that we had seen on the colonel's chimneypiece in the middle of the night.

"I can't take it from you," said Delavoye, shrinking palpably from the pistol. "I really am most grateful to you, Colonel Cheffins, but I've done nothing to deserve such a handsome gift."

"I beg to differ," said the colonel, "and I shall be sorely hurt if you refuse it. You never know when your turn may come; after your own account of that plate-chest, I shan't lie easy in my bed until I feel you are properly prepared against the worst."

"But my poor mother would rather lose every salt-cellar, Colonel Cheffins, than have a man shot dead on her stairs."

"I shouldn't dream of shooting him dead," replied the colonel. "I shouldn't even go as far as I went last night, if I could help it. But with that barrel glittering in your hand, Mr. Delavoye, I fancy you'd find it easier to keep up a conversation with some intrusive connoisseur."

"Is it loaded?" I asked as Uvo took the weapon gingerly from its box.

"Not at the moment, and I fear these few cartridges are all I can spare. I only keep enough myself for an emergency. I need hardly warn you, by the way, against pistol practice in these little gardens? It would be most unsafe with a revolver of this calibre. Why, God bless my soul, you might bring down some unfortunate person in the next parish!"

I entirely agreed, but Delavoye was not attending. He was playing with the colonel's offering as a child plays with fire, with the same intent face and meddlesome maladroitness. It was a mercy it was not loaded. I saw him wince as the hammer snapped unexpectedly; then he kept on snapping it, as though the sensation fascinated ear or finger; and just as I found myself enduring an intolerable suspense, Uvo ended it with a reckless light in his sunken eyes.

"I'm a lost man, Gilly!" said he, with a grim twinkle for my benefit. "I was afraid I should be if I once felt it in my paw. It's extraordinarily kind of you, Colonel Cheffins, and you must forgive me if I seem to have been looking your gift in the barrel. But the fact is I have always been rather chary of these pretty things, and I must thank you for the chance of overcoming the weakness."

His tone was sincere enough. So was the grave face turned upon Colonel Cheffins. But its very gravity angered and alarmed me, and I was determined to have his decision in more explicit terms.

"Then the pistol's yours, is it, Uvo?" I asked, with the most disingenuous grin that I could muster.

"Till death us do part!" he answered. And his laugh jarred every fibre in my body.

I never knew how seriously to take him; that was the worst of his elusive humour, or it may be of my own deficiency in any such quality. I confess I like a man to laugh at his own jokes, and to look as though he meant the things he does mean. Uvo Delavoye would do either – or neither – as the whim took him, and I used sometimes to think he cultivated a wilful subtlety for my special bewilderment. Thus in this instance he was quite capable of assuming an alarming pose to pay me out for any undue anxiety I might betray on his behalf; therefore I had to admire the revolver in my turn, and even to acclaim it as a timely acquisition. But either Uvo was not deceived, or else I was right as to his morbid feeling about the weapon. He seemed unable to lay it down. Sometimes he did so with apparent resolution, only to pick it up again and sit twisting the empty chambers round and round, till they ticked like the speedometer of a coasting bicycle. Once he slipped in one of the cartridges. The colonel looked at me, and I perched myself on the desk at Uvo's side. But the worst thing of all was the way his hand trembled as he promptly picked that cartridge out again.

We had said not a word, but Uvo rattled on with glib vivacity and the laugh that got upon my nerves. His new possession was his only theme. He could no more drop the subject than the thing itself. It was the revolver, the whole revolver, and nothing but the revolver for Uvo Delavoye that night. He was childishly obsessed with its unpleasant possibilities, but he treated them with a grim levity not unredeemed by wit. His bloodthirsty prattle grew into a quaint and horrible harangue eked out with quotations that stuck like burs. More than once I looked to Colonel Cheffins for a disapproval which would come with more weight from him than me; but decanter and syphon had been brought up soon after his arrival, and he only sipped his whisky with an amused air that made me wonder which of us was going daft.

"Talk about bare bodkins, otherwise hollow-ground razors!" cried Uvo, emptying his glass. "I couldn't do the trick with cold steel if I tried; but with a revolver you've only got to press the trigger and it does the rest. Then – I wonder if you even live to hear the row? – then, Gilly, it's a case of that 'big blue mark in his forehead and the back blown out of his head!'"

"That wasn't a revolver," said I, for he had taught me to worship his modern god of letters; "that was the Snider that 'squibbed in the jungle.'"

Delavoye looked it up in his paper-covered copy.

"Quite right, Gilly!" said he. "But what price this from the very next piece?

"'So long as those unloaded gunsWe keep beside the bed,Blow off, by obvious accident,The lucky owner's head.'

"That's a bit more like it than the big blue mark, eh? And my gifted author is the boy who can handle these little dears better than anybody else in the class; he don't only use 'em for moral suasion under arms, but he makes you smell the blood and hear the thunder!"

Colonel Cheffins seemed to have had enough at last; he rose to go with rather a perfunctory laugh, and I jumped up to see him out on the plea of something I had to say about his damaged door and window.

"For God's sake, sir, get your revolver back from him!" was what I whispered down below. "He's not himself. He hasn't been his own man for over a year. Get it back from him before he takes a turn for the worse and – and – "

"I know what you mean," said the colonel, "but I don't believe it's as bad as you think. I'll see what I can do. I might say I've smashed the other, but I mustn't say it too soon or he'll smell a rat. I must leave him to you meanwhile, Mr. Gillon, but I honestly believe it's all talk."

And so did I as the dapper little coach smiled cheerily under the hall lamp, and I shut the door on him and ran up to Uvo's room two steps at a time. But on the threshold I fell back, for an instant, as though that accursed revolver covered me; for he was seated at his desk, his back to the room, his thumb on the trigger – and the muzzle in his right ear.

I crept upon him and struck it upwards with a blow that sent the weapon flying from his grasp. It had not exploded; it was in my pocket before he could turn upon me with a startled oath.

"What are you playing at, my good fellow?" cried he.

"What are you?"

And my teeth chattered with the demand.

"What do you suppose? You didn't think I'd gone and loaded it, did you? I was simply seeing – if you want to know – whether one would use one's forefinger or one's thumb. I've quite decided on the thumb."

"Uvo," I said, pouring out more whisky than I intended, "this is more than I can stick even from you, old fellow! You've gone on and on about this infernal shooter till I never want to see one in my life again. If you meant to blow out your brains this very night, you couldn't have said more than you have done. What rhyme or reason is there in such crazy talk?"

"I didn't say it was either poetry or logic," he answered, filling his pipe. "But it's a devilish fascinating idea."

"The idea of wanton suicide? You call that fascinating?"

"Not as an end. It's a poor enough end. I was thinking of the means – the cold trigger against your finger – the cold muzzle in your ear – the one frightful bang and then the Great What Next!"

"The Great What Next for you," I said, as his eyes came dancing through a cloud of birdseye, "is Cane Hill or Colney Hatch, if you don't take care."

"I prefer the Village mortuary, if you don't mind, Gilly."

"Either would be so nice for your mother and sister!"

"And I'm such a help to them as I am, aren't I? Think of the bread I win and all the dollars I'm raking in!"

"It would be murder as well as suicide," I went on. "It would finish off one of them, if not both."

He smoked in silence with a fatuous, drunken smile, though he was as sober as a man could be. That made it worse. And it was worst of all when the smile faded from the face to gather in the eyes, in a liquid look of unfathomable cynicism, new to me in Uvo Delavoye, and yet mysteriously familiar and repellent.

"Yes; they're certainly a drawback, Gillon, but I don't know that they've a right to be anything more. We don't ask to be put into this world; surely we can put ourselves out if it amuses us."

"'If it amuses us!'"

"But that's the whole point!" he cried, puffing and twinkling as before. "How many people out themselves for no earthly reason that anybody else can see, and have their memory insulted by the usual idiotic verdict? They're no more temporarily insane than I am. It's their curiosity that gets the better of them. They want to go at their best, with all their wits about them, as you or I might want to go to Court. If they could take a return ticket, they would; they don't really want to go for good any more than I do. They're doing something they don't really want to do, yet can't help doing, as half of us are, half our time."

"They're weak fools," I blustered. "They're destructive children who've never grown up, and they ought to be taken care of till they do."

He smiled through his smoke with sinister serenity.

"But we all are children, my dear Gilly, and on the best authority most of us are fools. As for the destructive faculty, it's part of human nature and three parts of modern policy; but our politicians haven't the child's excuse of wanting to know how things are made – which I see at the back of half the brains that get blown out by obvious accident."

"Good-night, Uvo," I said, just grasping him by the arm. "I know you're only pulling my leg, but I've heard about enough for one night."

"Another insulting verdict!" he laughed. "Well, so long, if you really mean it; but do you mind giving me my Webley and Scott before you go?"

"Your what?"

"My present from over the way. It's one of Webley and Scott's best efforts, you know. I had one like it, only the smaller size, when I was out in Egypt."

I thought he had forgotten about the concrete weapon, or rather that he did not know I had picked it up, but expected to find it in the corner where it had fallen when I knocked it out of his hand. My own hand closed upon it in my side pocket, as I turned to face Uvo Delavoye, who had somehow slipped between me and the door.

"So it's not your first revolver?" I temporised.

"No; you've got to have one out there."

"But you didn't think it worth bringing home?"

I was trying to recall his very first remarks about revolvers, after the burglary the night before. And Delavoye read the attempt with his startling insight, and helped me out with impulsive candour.

"You're quite right! I did say I hated the beastly things, but it was a weakness I always meant to get over, and now I have. Do you mind giving me my Webley?"

"What did you do with the other one, Uvo?"

"Pitched it into the Nile, since you're so beastly inquisitive. But I was full of fever at the time, and broken-hearted at cracking up. It's quite different now."

"Is it?"

"Of course it is. I'm not going to do anything rotten. I was only ragging you. Don't be a silly ass, Gillon!"

He was holding out his hand. His face had darkened, but his eyes blazed.

"I'm sorry, Uvo – "

"I'll make you sorrier!" he hissed.

"I can't help it. You couldn't trust yourself in your fever. It's your own fault if I can't trust you now."

He glared at me like a caged tiger, and now I knew the wild sly look in his eyes. It was the look of the Kneller portrait at Hampton Court, but there was no time to think twice about that, with the tiger in him gnashing its teeth in very impotence.

"Oh, very well! You don't get out of this, with my property, if I can help it! I know I'm no match for you in brute strength, but you lay a finger on me if you dare!"

He was almost foaming at the mouth, and the trouble was that I could understand his frenzy perfectly. I would not have stood my own behaviour from any man, and yet I could not have behaved differently if I had tried, for his insensate fury was all of a piece with his delirious talk. I kept my eye on him as on a wild beast, and I saw his roving round the uncouth weapons on the wall. He was edging nearer to them; his hand was raised to pluck one down, his worn face bloated and distorted with his passion. Neither of us spoke; we were past the stage; but in the grate the gas fire burnt with a low reproving roar. And then all at once I saw Uvo turn his head as though his sensitive ear had caught some other sound; his raised hand swept down upon the handle of the door; and as he softly opened it, the other hand was raised in token of silence, and for one splendid second I looked into a face no longer possessed by the devil, but radiant with the keenest joy.

Then I was at his elbow, and our ears bent together at the open door. Gas was burning on the landing as well as in the hall below; everything seemed normal to every sense. I was obliged to breathe before another sound came from any quarter but that noisy stove in the room behind us. And then it was more a vibration of the floor, behind the curtains of the half-landing, than an actual sound. But that was enough; back we stole into Uvo's room.

"They've come," he whispered, simply. "They're in the bathroom – now!"

"I heard."

"We'll go for them!"

"Of course."

He reached down the very weapon he had meant for my skull a minute before. It was a great club, studded with brass-headed nails, and also a most murderous battle-axe, so that the same whirl might fell one foe and cleave another. I had taken it from Uvo, and his dancing eyes were thanking me as he loaded the revolver I had handed him in exchange.

There were three stairs down to the half-landing, but Uvo sat up too late at nights not to know the one that creaked. We reached the old maroon curtain without a sound; behind it was the housemaid's sink on the right, and straight in front the bathroom door with a faint light under it. But the light went out before we reached it, and then the door would not open, and with that there was a smothered hubbub of voices and of feet within. It was like the first shot from an ambuscade, but it was our ambuscade, and Uvo's voice rang out in triumph.

"Down with the door or the devils'll do us yet!"

And they sounded as though they might before bolt or hinges gave. As we brought all our weight to bear, we could hear them huddling out of the window, and somebody whispering sharply, "One at a time; one at a time!" And at that my companion relaxed his efforts inexplicably, but I flew at the key-hole with flat foot and every ounce of my weight behind it; the crash fined off into the scream of splintered wood, and I should have entered head foremost if the man on the other side had not stemmed the torrent of torn woodwork. Even as it was I went down on all fours, and was only struggling to my feet as his figure showed dimly in the open window. Delavoye fired over my head at the same instant, but his revolver "squibbed" like that far-away Snider, and before I could hack with his battle-axe at their rope-ladder, the last of the thieves was safe and sound on terra firma.

"Don't do that!" cried Delavoye. "It's our one chance of nabbing 'em."

And he was out of the window and swinging down the rope-ladder while the ruffians were yet in the yard below. But they did not wait to punish his foolhardihood; the gate into the back garden banged before he reached the ground, and he hardly had it open when the last of the bunch of ropes slid hot through my hands.

"After them!" he grunted, giving chase to shadowy forms across the soaking grass. His revolver squibbed again as he ran. They did not stop to return his fire; but across the strawberry bed, at the end of the garden, the high split fence rattled and rumbled with the weight of the flying gang; and there was a dropping crackle of brushwood on the other side, as I came up with Delavoye under the overhanging branches of the horse-chestnuts.

"Going over after them?" I panted, prepared to follow where he led.

"I'm afraid it's no good now," he answered, peering at his revolver in the darkness. The chambers ticked like the reel of a rod. "Besides, there's one of them cast a shoe or something. I trod on it a moment ago." He stooped and groped in the manure of the strawberry bed. "A shoe it is, Gilly, by all that's lucky!"

"You wouldn't like to dog them a bit further?" I suggested. "The fellow with one shoe won't take much overhauling?"

"No, Gilly," said Delavoye, abandoning the chase as incontinently as he had started it, but with equal decision; "I think it's about time to see what they've taken, as well as what they've left."

Their rope-ladder was still swaying from the bathroom window, and it served our turn again since Uvo was without his key. He climbed up first, and the window flared into a square of gas-light before I gained the sill. The scene within was quite instructive. The family chest was clamped right round with iron bands, like the straps of a portmanteau, and the lock in each band had defied the ingenuity of the thieves; so they had cut a neat hole in the lid and extracted the contents piecemeal. These were not strewn broadcast about the room, but set out with some method on a dressing-table as well as in the basin and the bath. Apparently the stage of selection had been reached when we interrupted the proceedings, and the first thing that struck me was the amount of fine old plate and silver, candelabra, urns, salvers and the like, which had not been removed; but Delavoye was already up to the right armpit in the chest, and my congratulations left him grim.