Uncanny Stories — The Victim
Everybody was afraid of him.
Everybody hated him except Mr. Greathead, his master, and Dorsy, his sweetheart.
And even Dorsy now, after yesterday!
Night had come.
On one side the yard gates stood open to the black tunnel of the drive.
On the other the high moor rose above the wall, immense, darker than the darkness.
Steven’s lantern in the open doorway of the garage and Dorsy’s lamp in the kitchen window threw a blond twilight into the yard between.
From where he sat, slantways on the step of the car, he could see, through the lighted window, the table with the lamp and Dorsy’s sewing huddled up in a white heap as she left it just now, when she had jumped up and gone away.
Because she was afraid of him.
She had gone straight to Mr. Greathead in his study, and Steven, sulking, had flung himself out into the yard.
He stared into the window, thinking, thinking.
Everybody hated him.
He could tell by the damned spiteful way they looked at him in the bar of the “King’s Arms”; kind of sideways and slink-eyed, turning their dirty tails and shuffling out of his way.
He had said to Dorsy he’d like to know what he’d done.
He’d just dropped in for his glass as usual; he’d looked round and said “Good-evening,” civil, and the dirty tykes took no more notice of him than if he’d been a toad.
Mrs. Oldishaw, Dorsy’s aunt, _she_ hated him, boiled-ham-face, swelling with spite, shoving his glass at the end of her arm, without speaking, as if he’d been a bloody cockroach.
[Illustration] All because of the thrashing he’d given young Ned Oldishaw.
If she didn’t want the cub’s neck broken she’d better keep him out of mischief.
Young Ned knew what he’d get if he came meddling with _his_ sweetheart.
It had happened yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when he had gone down with Dorsy to the “King’s Arms” to see her aunt.
They were sitting out on the wooden bench against the inn wall when young Ned began it.
He could see him now with his arm round Dorsy’s neck and his mouth gaping.
And Dorsy laughing like a silly fool and the old woman snorting and shaking.
He could hear him.
“She’s my cousin if she _is_ your sweetheart.
You can’t stop me kissing her.
” _Couldn’t_ he!
Why, what did they think?
When he’d given up his good job at the Darlington Motor Works to come to Eastthwaite and black Mr. Greathead’s boots, chop wood, carry coal and water for him, and drive his shabby secondhand car.
Not that he cared what he did so long as he could live in the same house with Dorsy Oldishaw.
It wasn’t likely he’d sit like a bloody Moses, looking on, while Ned— To be sure, he had half killed him.
He could feel Ned’s neck swelling and rising up under the pressure of his hands, his fingers.
He had struck him first, flinging him back against the inn wall, then he had pinned him—till the men ran up and dragged him off.
And now they were all against him.
Dorsy was against him.
She had said she was afraid of him.
“Steven,” she had said, “tha med ’a killed him.
” “Well—p’r’aps next time he’ll knaw better than to coom meddlin’ with _my_ lass.
” “I’m not thy lass, ef tha canna keep thy hands off folks.
I should be feared for my life of thee.
Ned wurn’t doing naw ’arm.
” “Ef he doos it again, ef he cooms between thee and me, Dorsy, I shall do ’im in.
” “Naw, tha maunna talk that road.
” “It’s Gawd’s truth.
Anybody that cooms between thee and me, loove, I shall do ’im in.
Ef ’twas thy aunt, I should wring ’er neck, same as I wroong Ned’s. ” “And ef it was me, Steven?
” “Ef it wur thee, ef tha left me— Aw, doan’t tha assk me, Dorsy.
” “There—that’s ’ow tha scares me.
” “But tha’ ’astna left me—’tes thy wedding claithes tha’rt making.
” “Aye, ’tes my wedding claithes.
” She had started fingering the white stuff, looking at it with her head on one side, smiling prettily.
Then all of a sudden she had flung it down in a heap and burst out crying.
When he tried to comfort her she pushed him off and ran out of the room, to Mr. Greathead.
It must have been half an hour ago and she had not come back yet.
He got up and went through the yard gates into the dark drive.
Turning there, he came to the house front and the lighted window of the study.
Hidden behind a clump of yew he looked in.
Mr. Greathead had risen from his chair.
He was a little old man, shrunk and pinched, with a bowed narrow back and slender neck under his grey hanks of hair.
Dorsy stood before him, facing Steven.
The lamplight fell full on her.
Her sweet flower-face was flushed.
She had been crying.
Mr. Greathead spoke.
“Well, that’s my advice,” he said.
“Think it over, Dorsy, before you do anything.
” That night Dorsy packed her boxes, and the next day at noon, when Steven came in for his dinner, she had left the Lodge.
She had gone back to her father’s house in Garthdale.
She wrote to Steven saying that she had thought it over and found she daren’t marry him.
She was afraid of him.
She would be too unhappy.
[Illustration: Then all of a sudden she had burst out crying ...
] II
That was the old man, the old man.
He had made her give him up.
But for that, Dorsy would never have left him.
She would never have thought of it herself.
And she would never have got away if he had been there to stop her.
It wasn’t Ned.
Ned was going to marry Nancy Peacock down at Morfe.
Ned hadn’t done any harm.
It was Mr. Greathead who had come between them.
He hated Mr. Greathead.
His hate became a nausea of physical loathing that never ceased.
Indoors he served Mr. Greathead as footman and valet, waiting on him at meals, bringing the hot water for his bath, helping him to dress and undress.
So that he could never get away from him.
When he came to call him in the morning, Steven’s stomach heaved at the sight of the shrunken body under the bedclothes, the flushed, pinched face with its peaked, finicking nose upturned, the thin silver tuft of hair pricked up above the pillow’s edge.
Steven shivered with hate at the sound of the rattling, old-man’s cough, and the “shoob-shoob” of the feet shuffling along the flagged passages.
He had once had a feeling of tenderness for Mr. Greathead as the tie that bound him to Dorsy.
He even brushed his coat and hat tenderly, as if he loved them.
Once Mr. Greathead’s small, close smile—the greyish bud of the lower lip pushed out, the upper lip lifted at the corners—and his kind, thin “Thank you, my lad,” had made Steven smile back, glad to serve Dorsy’s master.
And Mr. Greathead would smile again and say, “It does me good to see your bright face, Steven.
” Now Steven’s face writhed in a tight contortion to meet Mr. Greathead’s kindliness, while his throat ran dry and his heart shook with hate.
At meal-times from his place by the sideboard he would look on at Mr. Greathead eating, in a long contemplative disgust.
He could have snatched the plate away from under the slow, fumbling hands that hovered and hesitated.
He would catch words coming into his mind: “He ought to be dead.
He ought to be dead.
” To think that this thing that ought to be dead, this old, shrivelled skin-bag of creaking bones should come between him and Dorsy, should have power to drive Dorsy from him.
[Illustration] One day when he was brushing Mr. Greathead’s soft felt hat a paroxysm of hatred gripped him.
He hated Mr. Greathead’s hat.
He took a stick and struck at it again and again; he threw it on the flags and stamped on it, clenching his teeth and drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss.
He picked up the hat, looking round furtively, for fear lest Mr. Greathead or Dorsy’s successor, Mrs. Blenkiron, should have seen him.
He pinched and pulled it back into shape and brushed it carefully and hung it on the stand.
He was ashamed, not of his violence, but of its futility.
Nobody but a damned fool, he said to himself, would have done that.
He must have been mad.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what he was going to do.
He had known ever since the day when Dorsy left him.
“I shan’t be myself again till I’ve done him in,” he thought.
He was only waiting till he had planned it out; till he was sure of every detail; till he was fit and cool.
There must be no hesitation, no uncertainty at the last minute, above all, no blind, headlong violence.
Nobody but a fool would kill in mad rage, and forget things, and be caught and swing for it.
Yet that was what they all did.
There was always something they hadn’t thought of that gave them away.
Steven had thought of everything, even the date, even the weather.
Mr. Greathead was in the habit of going up to London to attend the debates of a learned Society he belonged to that held its meetings in May and November.
He always travelled up by the five o’clock train, so that he might go to bed and rest as soon as he arrived.
He always stayed for a week and gave his housekeeper a week’s holiday.
Steven chose a dark, threatening day in November, when Mr. Greathead was going up to his meeting and Mrs. Blenkiron had left Eastthwaite for Morfe by the early morning bus.
So that there was nobody in the house but Mr. Greathead and Steven.
Eastthwaite Lodge stands alone, grey, hidden between the shoulder of the moor and the ash-trees of its drive.
It is approached by a bridle-path across the moor, a turning off the road that runs from Eastthwaite in Rathdale to Shawe in Westleydale, about a mile from the village and a mile from Hardraw Pass.
No tradesmen visited it.
Mr. Greathead’s letters and his newspaper were shot into a post-box that hung on the ash-tree at the turn.
The hot water laid on in the house was not hot enough for Mr. Greathead’s bath, so that every morning, while Mr. Greathead shaved, Steven came to him with a can of boiling water.
Mr. Greathead, dressed in a mauve and grey striped sleeping-suit, stood shaving himself before the looking-glass that hung on the wall beside the great white bath.
Steven waited with his hand on the cold tap, watching the bright curved rod of water falling with a thud and a splash.
In the white, stagnant light from the muffed window-pane the knife-blade flame of a small oil-stove flickered queerly.
The oil sputtered and stank.
Suddenly the wind hissed in the water-pipes and cut off the glittering rod.
To Steven it seemed the suspension of all movement.
He would have to wait there till the water flowed again before he could begin.
He tried not to look at Mr. Greathead and the lean wattles of his lifted throat.
He fixed his eyes on the long crack in the soiled green distemper of the wall.
His nerves were on edge with waiting for the water to flow again.
The fumes of the oil-stove worked on them like a rank intoxicant.
The soiled green wall gave him a sensation of physical sickness.
He picked up a towel and hung it over the back of a chair.
Thus he caught sight of his own face in the glass above Mr. Greathead’s; it was livid against the soiled green wall.
Steven stepped aside to avoid it.
“Don’t you feel well, Steven?
” “No, sir.
” Steven picked up a small sponge and looked at it.
Mr. Greathead had laid down his razor and was wiping the lather from his chin.
At that instant, with a gurgling, spluttering haste, the water leaped from the tap.
It was then that Steven made his sudden, quiet rush.
He first gagged Mr. Greathead with the sponge, then pushed him back and back against the wall and pinned him there with both hands round his neck, as he had pinned Ned Oldishaw.
He pressed in on Mr. Greathead’s throat, strangling him.
Mr. Greathead’s hands flapped in the air, trying feebly to beat Steven off; then his arms, pushed back by the heave and thrust of Steven’s shoulders, dropped.
Then Mr. Greathead’s body sank, sliding along the wall, and fell to the floor, Steven still keeping his hold, mounting it, gripping it with his knees.
His fingers tightened, pressing back the blood.
Mr. Greathead’s face swelled up; it changed horribly.
There was a groaning and rattling sound in his throat.
Steven pressed in till it had ceased.
Then he stripped himself to the waist.
He stripped Mr. Greathead of his sleeping-suit and hung his naked body face downwards in the bath.
He took the razor and cut the great arteries and veins in the neck.
He pulled up the plug of the waste-pipe, and left the body to drain in the running water.
He left it all day and all night.
He had noticed that murderers swung just for want of attention to little things like that; messing up themselves and the whole place with blood;
always forgetting something essential.
He had no time to think of horrors.
From the moment he had murdered Mr. Greathead his own neck was in danger; he was simply using all his brain and nerve to save his neck.
He worked with the stern, cool hardness of a man going through with an unpleasant, necessary job.
He had thought of everything.
He had even thought of the dairy.
[Illustration: Steven waited with his hand on the tap ...
] It was built on to the back of the house under the shelter of the high moor.
You entered it through the scullery, which cut it off from the yard.
The window-panes had been removed and replaced by sheets of perforated zinc.
A large corrugated glass sky-light lit it from the roof.
Impossible either to see in or to approach it from the outside.
It was fitted up with a long, black slate shelf, placed, for the convenience of butter-makers, at the height of an ordinary work-bench.
Steven had his tools, a razor, a carving-knife, a chopper and a meat-saw, laid there ready, beside a great pile of cotton waste.
Early the next day he took Mr. Greathead’s body out of the bath, wrapped a thick towel round the neck and head, carried it down to the dairy and stretched it out on the slab.
And there he cut it up into seventeen pieces.
These he wrapped in several layers of newspaper, covering the face and the hands first, because, at the last moment, they frightened him.
He sewed them up in two sacks and hid them in the cellar.
He burnt the towel and the cotton waste in the kitchen fire; he cleaned his tools thoroughly and put them back in their places; and he washed down the marble slab.
There wasn’t a spot on the floor except for one flagstone where the pink rinsing of the slab had splashed over.
He scrubbed it for half an hour, still seeing the rusty edges of the splash long after he had scoured it out.
He then washed and dressed himself with care.
As it was war-time Steven could only work by day, for a light in the dairy roof would have attracted the attention of the police.
He had murdered Mr. Greathead on a Tuesday; it was now three o’clock on Thursday afternoon.
Exactly at ten minutes past four he had brought out the car, shut in close with its black hood and side curtains.
He had packed Mr. Greathead’s suit-case and placed it in the car with his umbrella, railway rug, and travelling cap.
Also, in a bundle, the clothes that his victim would have gone to London in.
He stowed the body in the two sacks beside him on the front.
By Hardraw Pass, half-way between Eastthwaite and Shawe, there are three round pits, known as the Churns, hollowed out of the grey rock and said to be bottomless.
Steven had thrown stones, big as a man’s chest, down the largest pit, to see whether they would be caught on any ledge or boulder.
They had dropped clean, without a sound.
It poured with rain, the rain that Steven had reckoned on.
The Pass was dark under the clouds and deserted.
Steven turned his car so that the headlights glared on the pit’s mouth.
Then he ripped open the sacks and threw down, one by one, the seventeen pieces of Mr. Greathead’s body, and the sacks after them, and the clothes.
It was not enough to dispose of Mr. Greathead’s dead body; he had to behave as though Mr. Greathead were alive.
Mr. Greathead had disappeared and he had to account for his disappearance.
He drove on to Shawe station to the five o’clock train, taking care to arrive close on its starting.
A troop-train was due to depart a minute earlier.
Steven, who had reckoned on the darkness and the rain, reckoned also on the hurry and confusion on the platform.
As he had foreseen, there were no porters in the station entry; nobody to notice whether Mr. Greathead was or was not in the car.
He carried his things through on to the platform and gave the suit-case to an old man to label.
He dashed into the booking-office and took Mr. Greathead’s ticket, and then rushed along the platform as if he were following his master.
He heard himself shouting to the guard, “Have you seen Mr. Greathead?
” And the guard’s answer, “Naw!
” And his own inspired statement, “He must have taken his seat in the front, then.
” He ran to the front of the train, shouldering his way among the troops.
The drawn blinds of the carriages favoured him.
Steven thrust the umbrella, the rug, and the travelling cap into an empty compartment, and slammed the door to.
He tried to shout something through the open window; but his tongue was harsh and dry against the roof of his mouth, and no sound came.
He stood, blocking the window, till the guard whistled.
When the train moved he ran alongside with his hand on the window ledge, as though he were taking the last instructions of his master.
A porter pulled him back.
“Quick work, that,” said Steven.
Before he left the station he wired to Mr. Greathead’s London hotel, announcing the time of his arrival.
He felt nothing, nothing but the intense relief of a man who has saved himself by his own wits from a most horrible death.
There were even moments, in the week that followed, when, so powerful was the illusion of his innocence, he could have believed that he had really seen Mr. Greathead off by the five o’clock train.
Moments when he literally stood still in amazement before his own incredible impunity.
Other moments when a sort of vanity uplifted him.
He had committed a murder that for sheer audacity and cool brain work surpassed all murders celebrated in the history of crime.
Unfortunately the very perfection of his achievement doomed it to oblivion.
He had left not a trace.
Not a trace.
Only when he woke in the night a doubt sickened him.
There was the rusted ring of that splash on the dairy floor.
He wondered, had he really washed it out clean.
And he would get up and light a candle and go down to the dairy to make sure.
He knew the exact place; bending over it with the candle, he could imagine that he still saw a faint outline.
Daylight reassured him.
_He_ knew the exact place, but nobody else knew.
There was nothing to distinguish it from the natural stains in the flagstone.
Nobody would guess.
But he was glad when Mrs. Blenkiron came back again.
On the day that Mr. Greathead was to have come home by the four o’clock train Steven drove into Shawe and bought a chicken for the master’s dinner.
He met the four o’clock train and expressed surprise that Mr. Greathead had not come by it.
He said he would be sure to come by the seven.
He ordered dinner for eight; Mrs. Blenkiron roasted the chicken, and Steven met the seven o’clock train.
This time he showed uneasiness.
The next day he met all the trains and wired to Mr. Greathead’s hotel for information.
When the manager wired back that Mr. Greathead had not arrived, he wrote to his relatives and gave notice to the police.
Three weeks passed.
The police and Mr. Greathead’s relatives accepted Steven’s statements, backed as they were by the evidence of the booking office clerk, the telegraph clerk, the guard, the porter who had labelled Mr. Greathead’s luggage and the hotel manager who had received his telegram.
Mr. Greathead’s portrait was published in the illustrated papers with requests for any information which might lead to his discovery.
Nothing happened, and presently he and his disappearance were forgotten.
The nephew who came down to Eastthwaite to look into his affairs was satisfied.
His balance at his bank was low owing to the non-payment of various dividends, but the accounts and the contents of Mr. Greathead’s cash-box and bureau were in order and Steven had put down every penny he had spent.
The nephew paid Mrs. Blenkiron’s wages and dismissed her and arranged with the chauffeur to stay on and take care of the house.
And as Steven saw that this was the best way to escape suspicion, he stayed on.
Only in Westleydale and Rathdale excitement lingered.
People wondered and speculated.
Mr. Greathead had been robbed and murdered in the train (Steven said he had had money on him).
He had lost his memory and wandered goodness knew where.
He had thrown himself out of the railway carriage.
Steven said Mr. Greathead wouldn’t do _that_, but he shouldn’t be surprised if he had lost his memory.
He knew a man who forgot who he was and where he lived.
Didn’t know his own wife and children.
Shell-shock.
And lately Mr. Greathead’s memory hadn’t been what it was.
Soon as he got it back he’d turn up again.
Steven wouldn’t be surprised to see him walking in any day.
But on the whole people noticed that he didn’t care to talk much about Mr. Greathead.
They thought this showed very proper feeling.
They were sorry for Steven.
He had lost his master and he had lost Dorsy Oldishaw.
And if he _did_ half kill Ned Oldishaw, well, young Ned had no business to go meddling with his sweetheart.
Even Mrs. Oldishaw was sorry for him.
And when Steven came into the bar of the King’s Arms everybody said “Good-evening, Steve,” and made room for him by the fire.
III
Steven came and went now as if nothing had happened.
He made a point of keeping the house as it would be kept if Mr. Greathead were alive.
Mrs. Blenkiron, coming in once a fortnight to wash and clean, found the fire lit in Mr. Greathead’s study and his slippers standing on end in the fender.
Upstairs his bed was made, the clothes folded back, ready.
This ritual guarded Steven not only from the suspicions of outsiders, but from his own knowledge.
By behaving as though he believed that Mr. Greathead was still living he almost made himself believe it.
By refusing to let his mind dwell on the murder he came to forget it.
His imagination saved him, playing the play that kept him sane, till the murder became vague to him and fantastic like a thing done in a dream.
He had waked up and this was the reality; this round of caretaking, this look the house had of waiting for Mr. Greathead to come back to it.
He had left off getting up in the night to examine the place on the dairy floor.
He was no longer amazed at his impunity.
[Illustration] Then suddenly, when he really had forgotten, it ended.
It was on a Saturday in January, about five o’clock.
Steven had heard that Dorsy Oldishaw was back again, living at the “King’s Arms” with her aunt.
He had a mad, uncontrollable longing to see her again.
But it was not Dorsy that he saw.
His way from the Lodge kitchen into the drive was through the yard gates and along the flagged path under the study window.
When he turned on to the flags he saw it shuffling along before him.
The lamplight from the window lit it up.
He could see distinctly the little old man in the long, shabby black overcoat, with the grey woollen muffler round his neck hunched up above his collar, lifting the thin grey hair that stuck out under the slouch of the black hat.
In the first moment that he saw it Steven had no fear.
He simply felt that the murder had not happened, that he really _had_ dreamed it, and that this was Mr. Greathead come back, alive among the living.
The phantasm was now standing at the door of the house, its hand on the door-knob as if about to enter.
But when Steven came up to the door it was not there.
He stood, fixed, staring at the space which had emptied itself so horribly.
His heart heaved and staggered, snatching at his breath.
And suddenly the memory of the murder rushed at him.
He saw himself in the bathroom, shut in with his victim by the soiled green walls.
He smelt the reek of the oil-stove; he heard the water running from the tap.
He felt his feet springing forward, and his fingers pressing, tighter and tighter, on Mr. Greathead’s throat.
He saw Mr. Greathead’s hands flapping helplessly, his terrified eyes, his face swelling and discoloured, changing horribly, and his body sinking to the floor.
He saw himself in the dairy, afterwards; he could hear the thudding, grinding, scraping noises of his tools.
