The Narrow Corner by W. Somerset Maugham
“ ‘You mustn’t blame the boy too much, Jim,’ mother said.
“He made a sort of impatient movement with his hand. I almost thought he wasn’t thinking about me at all. It sent a chill down my spine. He spoke at last.
“ ‘It looks very much like a put-up job between those two,’ he said. ‘Hudson has been rather difficult lately. I shouldn’t be surprised if there was blackmail behind it. And she double-crossed him.’
“ ‘What’s Fred to do?’ said mother.
“Father looked at me. You know, he looked just as mild as always and his voice had the same rather pleasant note in it. ‘If he’s caught, he’ll hang,’ he said. Mother gave a shriek and father frowned a little. ‘Oh, I’m not going to let him hang,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid. He can escape that by going out now and shooting himself.’ ‘Jim, d’you want to kill me?’ said mother. ‘Unfortunately that wouldn’t help us much,’ he said. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Your shooting yourself,’ he said. ‘The thing’s got to be hushed up. We can’t afford a scandal. We’re going to have a stiff fight at the election, and with me out of it and all this we shouldn’t have much chance.’ ‘Father, I’m so awfully sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t doubt that,’ he said. ‘Fools and blackguards generally are when they have to take the consequences of their actions.’
“We were all silent for a bit and then I said, ‘I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be the best thing if I went and shot myself.’ ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he said, ‘that would only make things worse. D’you think the newspapers are such fools that they wouldn’t put two and two together? Don’t talk. Let me think.’ We sat like mutes. Mother was holding my hand. ‘There’s the woman to deal with, too,’ he said at last. ‘We’re in her clutches all right. Nice to have her as a daughter-in-law.’ Mother didn’t dare say a word. Father leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. A little smile came into his eyes. ‘Fortunately we live in the most democratic country in the world,’ he said. ‘Nobody is above corruption.’ He liked saying that. He looked at us for a minute or two. He had a way of thrusting out his jaw when he’d made up his mind to do something and meant to put it through that I knew as well as mother did. ‘I suppose it’ll be in the paper to-morrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and see Mrs. Hudson. I think I know what she’s going to say. If she sticks to her story, barring accidents I don’t think anyone can prove anything. It looks to me as if she’d worked it all out pretty thoroughly. The police will question her, but I’ll see they don’t interview her without my being present.’ ‘And what about Fred?’ said mother. Father smiled again. You’d have sworn butter couldn’t melt in his mouth. ‘Fred’ll go to bed and stay there,’ he said. ‘By a merciful interposition of providence there’s a lot of scarlet fever about, an epidemic practically; to-morrow or the next day we’ll rush him off to the fever hospital.’ ‘But why?’ asked mother. ‘What’s the use of that?’ ‘My dear,’ said father, ‘it’s the best way I know of keeping someone out of the way for a few weeks with perfect security.’ ‘But supposing he catches it?’ said mother. ‘He’d be acting natural,’ he said.
“In the morning father rung up my boss and said I’d got a temperature and he didn’t half like the look of it. He was keeping me in bed and had sent for the doctor. The doctor came all right. He was my uncle, mother’s brother, and he’d attended me since I was born. He said he couldn’t say for certain, it looked like scarlet fever, but he wouldn’t send me to the hospital till the symptoms declared themselves. Mother told the cook and the maid that they weren’t to come near me, and she’d look after me herself.
“The evening paper was full of the murder. Mrs. Hudson had gone to the pictures by herself, and when she came home and went into the sitting-room she had found the body of her husband. They didn’t keep a servant. You don’t know Sydney, but the house was a sort of little villa in a quarter they’d been developing; it stood in its own ground, and the next house was twenty or thirty yards away. Florrie didn’t know the people who lived in it, but she ran there and battered on the door till they opened it. They were in bed and asleep. She told them her husband had been murdered and asked them to come quickly; they ran along, and there he was lying all heaped up on the floor. The man from the other house remembered after a while that he’d better call up the police. Mrs. Hudson was hysterical. She threw herself on her husband, screaming and crying, and they had to drag her away.
“Then there were all the details that the reporters had managed to pick up. The police doctor thought the man had been dead two or three hours. Strangely enough he’d been shot with his own revolver, but the possibility of suicide was dismissed at once. When Mrs. Hudson had collected herself a bit she told the police that she’d spent the evening at a picture palace. She had part of the ticket still in her bag, and she had spoken while there to two people she knew. She explained that she had decided to go to the pictures that evening because her husband had arranged to go to Newcastle. He’d come home shortly before six and told her he wasn’t going. She said she’d stay at home with him and get him his supper, but he told her to go as she’d intended. Someone was coming to see him on important business, and he wanted to be alone. She went out and that was the last she saw of him alive. There were signs of a terrific struggle in the room. Hudson had evidently fought desperately for his life. Nothing had been stolen from the house, and the police and the reporters at once jumped to the conclusion that the crime had a political motive. Passions run pretty high politically in Sydney, and Pat Hudson was known to be mixed up with some very rough characters. He had a lot of enemies. The police were prosecuting their enquiries, and the public were asked to inform them if they had seen a suspicious-looking person, possibly an Italian, in the neighbourhood or in a tram coming away from there who bore signs of having been engaged in a fight. A couple of nights later an ambulance came to our house and I was taken to the hospital. They kept me there for three or four days, and then I was slipped out and brought to the place where the Fenton was waiting for me.”
“But that cable,” said the doctor. “How did they manage to get the death certificate?”
“I know no more than you do. I’ve been trying to puzzle it out. I didn’t enter the hospital as myself, I was told to call myself Blake. I’ve been asking myself if someone else didn’t go in as me. They’d done all they could in the papers to pretend there wasn’t an epidemic, but there was, and the hospital was crowded. The nurses were just run off their feet, and there was a lot of confusion. It’s pretty clear that someone died and was buried in my place. Father’s clever, you know, and he wouldn’t stick at much.”
“I think I should like to meet your father,” said Dr. Saunders.
“It’s struck me that perhaps people got suspicious. After all we must have been seen about together, and they may have started asking questions. I expect the police went into it all pretty thoroughly. I daresay father thought it safer to have me die. I expect he got a lot of sympathy.”
“It may be that’s why she hanged herself,” said the doctor.
Fred started violently.
“How did you know that?”
“I read it in the paper Erik Christessen brought the other night from Frith’s.”
“Did you know it was anything to do with me?”
“No, not till you began to tell me. Then I remembered the name.”
“It gave me an awful turn when I read it.”
“Why d’you think she did it?”
“It said in the paper she’d been worried by malicious gossip. I don’t think father would be satisfied till he got even with her. D’you know, I think the thing that made him see red was that she’d wanted to marry into his family. He must have got a lot of pleasure when he told her I was dead. She was horrible, and I hated her, but, by God, she must have loved me to do that.” Fred hesitated for a moment reflectively. “Father knew the whole story. I shouldn’t put it past him to tell her that I’d confessed before my death and the police were going to arrest her.”
&n
“Anyway, she’s out of it,” said Fred. “And I’ve got to go on.”
“You surely don’t regret her?”
“Regret her? She’s ruined my life. And the rotten thing is that the whole thing happened by the merest chance. I never intended to have an affair with her. I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known she was going to take it seriously. If father had let me go out fishing that Sunday, I shouldn’t even have met her. I don’t know what to make of anything. And except for that I should never have come to this blasted island. I seem to bring misfortune wherever I go.”
“You should put a little vitriol on your handsome face,” said the doctor. “You are certainly a public danger.”
“Oh, don’t sneer at me. I’m so awfully unhappy. I’ve never cared for a chap like I cared for Erik. I shall never forgive myself for his death.”
“Don’t think he killed himself on your account. You had very little to do with that. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, he killed himself because he couldn’t survive the shock of finding out that the person whom he’d endowed with every quality and every virtue was, after all, but human. It was madness on his part. That’s the worst of being an idealist; you won’t accept people as they are. Wasn’t it Christ who said, forgive them, for they know not what they do?”
Fred stared at him with perplexed and haggard eyes.
“But you’re not a religious man, are you?”
“Sensible men are all of the same religion. And what is that? Sensible men never tell.”
“My father wouldn’t say that. He’d say that sensible men don’t go out of their way to give offence. He’d say, it looks well to go to church and you must respect the prejudices of your neighbours. He’d say, what is the good of getting off the fence when you can sit on it very comfortably? Nichols and I have talked about it all. You wouldn’t believe it, but he can talk about religion by the hour. It’s funny, I’ve never met a meaner crook, or a man who had less idea of decency, and yet he honestly believes in God. And hell, too. But it never strikes him that he may go there. Other people are going to suffer for their sins and serve ’em damn well right. But he’s a stout fellow, he’s all right, and when he does the dirty on a friend it isn’t of any importance; it’s what anyone would do under the circumstances, and God isn’t going to hold that up against him. At first I thought he was just a hypocrite. But he isn’t. That’s the odd thing about it.”
“It shouldn’t make you angry. The contrast between a man’s professions and his actions is one of the most diverting spectacles that life offers.”
“You look at it from the outside and you can laugh, but I look at it from the in, and I’m a ship that’s lost its bearings. What does it all mean? Why are we here? Where are we going? What can we do?”
“My dear boy, you don’t expect me to answer, do you? Ever since men picked up a glimmer of intelligence in the primeval forests, they’ve been asking those questions.”
“What do you believe?”
“Do you really want to know? I believe in nothing but myself and my experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consistent dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be.”
“But that’s quite incredible,” cried Fred.
“That is no reason for me to hesitate to believe it,” smiled the doctor.
“Well, I’m not prepared to be made a fool of. If life won’t fulfil the demands I make on it, then I have no use for it. It’s a dull and stupid play, and it’s only waste of time to sit it out.”
The doctor’s eyes twinkled and a grin puckered his ugly little face.
“Oh, my dear boy, what perfect nonsense you talk. Youth, youth! You’re a stranger in the world yet. Presently, like a man on a desert island, you’ll learn to do without what you can’t get and make the most of what you can. A little common sense, a little tolerance, a little good humour, and you don’t know how comfortable you can make yourself on this planet.”
“By giving up all that makes life worth while. Like you. I want life to be fair. I want life to be brave and honest. I want men to be decent and things to come right in the end. Surely that’s not asking too much, is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s asking more than life can give.”
“Don’t you mind?”
“Not much.”
“You’re content to wallow in the gutter.”
“I get a certain amount of fun from watching the antics of the other creatures that dwell there.”
Fred gave his shoulder an angry shrug and a sigh was wrung from him.
“You believe nothing. You respect nobody. You expect man to be vile. You’re a cripple chained to a bath-chair and you think it’s just stuff and nonsense that anyone should walk or run.”
“I’m afraid you don’t very much approve of me,” the doctor suggested mildly.
“You’ve lost heart, hope, faith and awe. What in God’s name have you got left?”
“Resignation.”
The young man jumped to his feet.
“Resignation? That’s the refuge of the beaten. Keep your resignation. I don’t want it. I’m not willing to accept evil and ugliness and injustice. I’m not willing to stand by while the good are punished and the wicked go scot-free. If life means that virtue is trampled on and honesty is mocked and beauty is fouled, then to hell with life.”
“My dear boy, you must take life as you find it.”
“I’m fed up with life as I find it. It fills me with horror. I’ll either have it on my own terms or not at all.”
Rhodomontade. The boy was nervous and upset. It was very natural. Dr. Saunders had little doubt that in a day or two he would be more sensible, and his reply was designed to check this extravagance.
“Have you ever read that laughter is the only gift the gods have vouchsafed to man that he does not share with the beasts?”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Fred sullenly.
“I have acquired resignation by the help of an unfailing sense of the ridiculous.”
“Laugh, then. Laugh your head off.”
“So long as I can,” returned the doctor, looking at him with his tolerant humour, “the gods may destroy me, but I remain unvanquished.”
Rhodomontade? Perhaps.
The conversation might have proceeded indefinitely if at that moment there had not come a knock on the door.
“Who the devil is that?” cried Fred irascibly.
A boy who spoke a little English came in to say that someone wished to see Fred, but they could not understand who it was. Fred, shrugging his shoulders, was about to go when an idea struck him and he stopped.
“Is it a man or a woman?”
He had to repeat the question in two or three different ways before the boy caught his meaning. Then with a smile brightened by the appreciation of his own cleverness, he answered that it was a woman.
“Louise.” Fred shook his head with decision. “You say, Tuan sick, no can come.”
The boy understood this and withdrew.
“You’d better see her,” said the doctor.
“Never. Erik was worth ten of her. He meant all the world to me. I loathe the thought of her. I only want to get away. I want to forget. How could she trample on that noble heart!”
Dr. Saunders raised his eyebrows. Language of that sort chilled his sympathy.
“Perhaps she’s ve
“I thought you were a cynic. You’re a sentimentalist.”
“Have you only just discovered it?”
The door was slowly opened, pushed wide, silently, and Louise stood in the doorway. She did not come forward. She did not speak. She looked at Fred, and a faint, shy, deprecating smile hovered on her lips. You could see that she was nervous. Her whole body seemed to express a timid uncertainty. It had, as much as her face, an air of appeal. Fred stared at her. He did not move. He did not ask her to come in. His face was sullen and in his eyes was a cold and relentless hatred. The little smile froze on her lips and she seemed to give a gasp, not with her mouth, but with her body, as though a sharp pain pierced her heart. She stood there, for two or three minutes, it seemed, and neither of them moved an eyelash. Their eyes met in an insistent stare. Then, very slowly, and as silently as when she opened it, she drew the door to and softly closed it on herself. The two men were left alone once more. To the doctor the scene had appeared strangely, horribly pathetic.
xxix
THE Fenton sailed at dawn. The ship that was to take Dr. Saunders to Bali was due in the course of the afternoon. She was to stay only just long enough to take on cargo, and so, towards eleven, hiring a horse-cab, the doctor drove out to Swan’s plantation. He thought it would be uncivil to go without saying good-bye.
When he arrived he found the old man sitting in a chair in the garden. It was the same chair as that in which Erik Christessen had sat on the night when he saw Fred come out of Louise’s room. The doctor passed the time of day with him. The old man did not remember him, but he was spry enough and asked the doctor a number of questions without paying any attention to the replies. Presently Louise came down the steps from the house. She shook hands with him. She bore no sign that she had passed through an emotional crisis, but greeted him with that composed and winning smile that she had had the first time he saw her on the way back from the bathing pool. She wore a brown sarong of batik and a little native coat. Her very fair hair was plaited and bound round her head.