Portrait of a Murderer Read online

  “I’m clearing out,” I said crudely. “I’m going back to Paris.”

  “And what of Sophy and your children?” he demanded.

  Some fiend in me prompted me to reply, “There’s yourself, sir, if other provision falls short.”

  “I won’t give them a penny,” he shouted, and added that probably half the children weren’t even mine.

  I retaliated that English law makes a man responsible for all his wife’s children, regardless of paternity, so long as she remains his wife, and added that he’d be liable for them all, should it come to a question of State support.

  He leapt up in a towering rage, screaming abusively that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the bastards, and they could all die in a workhouse for all he cared. I said I didn’t suppose they knew they had a grandfather, as they’d never been allowed within a mile of the house, and my disappearance might be an advantage to them, inasmuch as it would give the whole lot of them a chance to meet one another.

  He cried me down; he talked of cumberers and touts and leeches; he reminded me of the times he and Richard have helped me in the past. He orated on improvidence, dishonest improvidence.

  What could I say? Of course he’s helped me. He knows my circumstances, and it would be instructive to see how he or Richard could bring up a family on something under five pounds a week. My only retort, that he’d spent precious little on my education and that, without investment, you can’t expect dividends, brought the rejoinder that I’d had my chance, and refused to take it, and had forfeited any further consideration. That was when my temper began to boil over, because he went on to compare the present with the roseate might-have-been—would-have-been according to him, if I’d accepted his judgment. And, of course, he couldn’t leave Sophy alone. He’s never met her, and he couldn’t probably, at any time, understand the peculiar effect she had on me a dozen years ago. She was one of those haggard-looking women who seem a well of suppressed passion, but are really like those cardboard moulds of butter that you see in the windows of dairy-shops. At the time, however, I pictured her as Héloïse or Laura. We drifted apart for a bit, and at first I forgot her, and then went mad for her again and made frantic efforts to find her out. It was then that I discovered she had borne my child. It sobered me considerably; I was just twenty, but I felt I had a wealth of experience, uncommon in men twice my age, behind me. When I saw little Hartley (she hadn’t troubled to have him christened, so I could please myself as to a name) I insisted on marrying his mother. From the first she occupied a secondary place; what that boy meant to me I couldn’t express, and, anyway, it doesn’t matter any more. It didn’t spring, my feeling for him, from any innate love of children. When Sophy began to breed them as thick as rabbits I ignored them as much as I could. Sophy didn’t seem to care about them, either, and she never showed them much attention, beyond feeding them in a haphazard manner and threatening to skin them alive if they weren’t quiet.

  Each time a new baby came, I swore it should be the last, but living as we did, pigging it in small rooms on practically no money, I wearing myself out with work and anxiety that unmarried men don’t experience, I fairly naturally broke through my resolutions and took from Sophy any satisfaction I could get. Presently even I had to admit we couldn’t go on; I was making very little money, and one or other of the children was perpetually ill, wanting a doctor or needing medicine, or clamouring for warm clothes. Sophy’s complaints got more and more on my nerves. I couldn’t start work but she’d come plaintively up to the studio, whining that there was insufficient money in the house for the midday meal. I wrote home for money once or twice, and my father sent me a little of that and a great deal of advice and garnered wisdom. But life was becoming impossible for me, and at last, in a frenzy, I accepted an offer of work in a draughtsman’s office in England. I earned four pounds a week, and on the strength of this we took a house in a frowsy terrace in Fulham. Hartley was dead by this time, and in his place were three little girls, and another baby on the way. My job entailed drawing houses about three times their actual scale, so that my employers’ clients were deceived and swindled. I don’t pretend that the ethical position affected me much. What seemed to me unpardonable was that I should be spending the best years of my life in this futile way. I was twenty-seven, and I’ve been at it for five years. And a month ago I made up my mind that, at all costs, I would get out and get back to my own job.

  And just as I didn’t concern myself with the men who were cheated by my drawings, so I refused to consider Sophy and her children. I was, by this time, sufficiently cynical to believe that if people chose to allow themselves to be cheated, that was their affair. And I regarded myself among those who had been hoodwinked. I despised myself utterly.

  During those five years I worked—in my sense of the word—whenever I could. At first Sophy encouraged me, till she realised it wouldn’t mean more grist to the mill. She would follow me to the studio, saying, “But, Brand, why not do a pretty picture of the bridge? There are always men painting that bridge, and they sell them and come back and do more.”

  “And sell those and come back again,” I suggested.

  She nodded.

  “And that’s your idea for me?”

  She became, as usual, abusive, tart, and vulgar. “My idea is that the children shall have shoes and I shall have underclothes that I would not be utterly ashamed to be found in in an accident,” she shrilled.

  One becomes accustomed to this outlook at last—that practically everyone really professes and believes it to be more important to earn a living than to do your own job. No doubt I was to blame in getting married, but I wasn’t going to waste my precious leisure painting bloody little pictures of the Battersea Bridge or the view from Hammersmith down to Putney.

  My sister, Olivia, was another person who could not leave me alone. I daresay Sophy went to her asking for money, probably taking a child in a ragged frock. I have always detested Olivia, and particularly since she married that smooth-faced double-dealing Jew financier, Eustace Moore. He’s tremendously proud of her; they go about “simply everywhere, my dear,” and she writes damnable bright letters in the Illustrated Weeklies—“Cherry, darling, I simply must tell you of a hat I saw on the boulevard this morning,” and “They do say the most extraordinary thing happened at the Monroe-Phillips’ last night…” Eustace thinks the earth of her because she can look like a lady (his conception of a lady anyhow) and yet makes money like a business woman. They have two sons, called Montague and Arnold, and a car whose photograph gets into the papers. Every now and again Olivia writes to me, or even comes down to Fulham (“Pray for me, darling, I’m going slumming. Yes, my poor relations. Too revolting, isn’t it?”—I can hear her say that to her fashionable friends).

  “You mustn’t think me unsympathetic, Brand,” she says in what I believe is known as a liquid voice, “it isn’t that I don’t feel for you. But life is even greater than art, and you have your children to think of. It isn’t as if I couldn’t see your point of view. But Eustace would feel himself dreadfully badly used, and so would the boys, if I didn’t tear myself away when they need me. And yet I’m sure when I’m in the mood I scarcely feel as if any other world existed. It’s all a question of discipline, and even if I do resent Eustace sometimes interrupting me, I comfort myself by thinking that discipline is as necessary in the study—or the studio—as in the nursery.”

  “And all this bloody stuff I do at Higginsons is good discipline for me?” I suggested.

  She beamed and said yes, it was. For years now, whenever I’ve thought of her or seen her, I have dreamed of getting my own back. Between her and Sophy and my father, things have been almost intolerable. I reminded him of that to-night. You know how it is sometimes, when the dignity of life holds you and you instinctively respond, feeling a kind of nobility in yourself simply for being linked to life. And then there are other days—and this evening was one—when di
gnity is a word without a meaning, and you feel yourself cheap and vulgar and uncontrolled. That’s called a nervous outburst or hysteria, I believe. It really means a stage when you’ve endured all that’s possible. After the past seven weeks at Fulham this evening’s scene with my father was the last straw. I had known when I came down to King’s Poplars that I wasn’t really ready for the interview; I wanted a little time to get my second wind. But when I saw Richard and Eustace hovering like vultures over a corpse not quite dead enough for them, but prepared with beak and talons to defend their carrion, I knew I dared not wait. My brooding on the kind of life I henceforth proposed to live had given me a quite unfounded optimism, and when I went down to my father I give you my word, though no one will believe me, I did so with an assurance that this time I should make him appreciate my point of view and fall in with my suggestions. Within five minutes I realised the kind of fool I had been. Anticipations and hope might have changed me, but he was the same as ever. I could repeat his strictures for him. Always the same stuff about responsibility and the family name and the value of honourable work. I tried to make him see that it wasn’t honourable, either in essence or in fact, and that for a man of my potentialities to remain there was as bad as theft. Of course, he dismissed all this in the most slighting manner—Fulham oratory he called it—and both our tempers began to split. He was quietly, futilely, impertinently humorous at the expense of men whose shoes he is not fit to black. The scene became increasingly violent; having lost my head, I was soon at the end of my tether. It was then that I seized the paper-weight.

  He laughed. “You’re quite right,” he said; “arguments like yours need solid reinforcements.”

  And then I struck him, with no more notion of what I was doing in the moment of performance than the weight itself. The moment he dropped, so quietly and without a groan, I felt all passion die out of me. I was small and light and empty. Also I realised that the room was very cold. I looked at the fireplace; the fire had gone out some time ago.

  2

  For some time after I came to my senses and saw the position as it actually was, I walked aimlessly round the room, accomplishing nothing. I knew vaguely there were things to be done, but I could not recognise what they were. For a minute I think I expected the door to burst open and all the family to come rushing in pell-mell, in their dressing-gowns, their hair wild, their faces creased with suspicion. Indeed, I even had a vision of them, like a tail-piece to some child’s story. But nothing happened, and I forgot them again. I began to shiver, but that, I think, was only because of the fierce wind raging outside. The Manor at King’s Poplars is built on the side of a steep slope, and is quite unprotected from any rough weather. In the mornings the grass in the pasture is like glass when the sun catches it, and the streams are all frozen over. This Christmas night the earth was as hard and rugged as Christina Rossetti pictures it in her carol. “Wind made moan, Earth was hard as iron, Water like a stone.” There were no cattle in the fields now (they’d have been frozen, I think), and no fowl on the ice-bound lakes and streams. The whole aspect was peculiarly desolate. A good many of the neighbouring houses are farms, and here there has been any amount of distress during the hard winter. The land is a tricky employer at the best of times, and this black season had followed a bad harvest; the valleys beneath our windows were full of unemployed men, and there had been ugly stories of rioting near by. For the past twenty-four hours a fierce gale had raged. If you stood still for a moment and listened, it seemed as if the house must come down about your ears; there was so much noise and confusion beyond the window, where the shrubs and trees creaked and groaned in the wind. Indeed, when at last I came back to the body by the window, I had very distinctly the impression of being the only living thing in the place. At that thought, there came to me the curious impression everyone knows, that someone was actually in the room with me, and, lifting my head with a jerk, I saw, with a shock of horror, another face staring into mine. I did not recognise it at first, that dark-skinned face with the head flung back, the lips curled and set, the dark hair swept back with a clean hard decision, the dominant chin, the eyes dark and blazing, the whole countenance irradiated with a vitality that held me dumb. Then I knew who it was. Since my last visit here my father had acquired a French mirror of very beautiful workmanship, that now hung on the opposite wall. And the face that I saw was my own, flashing back at me. I was so much fascinated to know what I looked like when I was off my guard, unconscious and alert, that I stepped over the body and went closer, moved by a curiosity that was even greater than my admiration. So this was the personality I habitually concealed beneath the shabby dress and bearing of a clerk at four pounds ten a week. This was the essential man I had intended to be, who was intended to be myself (I kept twisting the words round to hammer the fact into my startled consciousness), and who had, it seemed, not been entirely conquered by the circumstances of my personal life.

  When I saw that keen thrusting face, I thought immediately, “It’s infamous that such a man should spend his life drawing faked plans for Higginsons.” Already, so powerful was the force of the revelation, I was eager to be out and doing my own work. I thought I could detect a new suppleness of wrist, an enlarging of vision, a greater ease of imagination, a more swiftly thronged brain. I foresaw my future, thick, not with success—I anticipated neither that nor the money that accompanies it—but with new conceptions, with experiments, with colossal ideas. As if a dam had burst, or some gate been flung down, I felt these new forces filling me, submerging my timidities and anxieties. I owed it to the self that mirror had revealed to give that man his opportunity. Instinctively I determined to preserve his expression and purpose, to strengthen my own resolution in the days ahead. I always carry about with me a sketch-book and pencil, and this pencil I lend to no one. I’m not precisely superstitious about it, but I don’t lend it for ordinary note-taking. In fact, I don’t lend it at all.

  My brain seemed on fire. My hand had a new assurance and zest. I soon transferred to paper that memorable face, and when I had finished I stood admiring my own work, the bold economy of line, the clean strength, the neatness of detail, the sense of vigorous personality the sketch conveyed.

  I signed it as usual, with what Sophy calls my melodramatic monogram, and glanced at the calendar for the date. It has always been an idiosyncrasy of mine to sign and date even quite insignificant studies. When I saw the figures “24” on the calendar I remembered that this was Christmas Eve, would soon be Christmas Day. And, looking at the clock, I saw with surprise that the hands pointed to half-past one, and that Christmas Day had actually dawned. I began to scribble 25.12… when I was startled by a sudden tremendous commotion behind me. I turned, dropping the pencil, prepared to face some terrific onslaught. But it was only the wind, that had torn open one of the casement windows, sent the curtains billowing into the room, and swept a blue bowl on to the floor. The room was full of uproar, a succession of blasts and whistles and the peculiar heavy thrashing sound made by tapestry curtains in a storm. I stood aghast. Now, I thought, the whole household will descend, and take me like the proverbial rat. And with the instant death of hope I found I was, surprisingly, not afraid. I stiffened involuntarily, certainly, but I think any man might have done as much; but I neither trembled nor sweated. I still had the sketch in my hand, and I seemed to derive a certain derisive strength from that. I had dropped my pencil when the vase went over, and now, as I stooped to retrieve it, I found to my annoyance that the lead had broken off short. I looked round for a knife, but there was none, and in any case, I reflected an instant later, I didn’t need one now.

  Mirabile dictu, no one came. Yet the house was full of people. I thought of them as I had seen them at dinner, so correct and well established, in their fine well-cut clothes, with their perfect manners, their polite meaningless gestures, their aimless chit-chat, their complete ignoring of reality. And yet I daresay that was merely the surface; underneath, Richard and Eusta
ce at all events were agog with eagerness and suspense. But they concealed it well. Still, even in their politeness they managed to make it abundantly clear that I wasn’t of their world, but was here, not even on sufferance, since I hadn’t been invited, but because I had thrust myself upon them. I remembered particularly Olivia in white satin, that her complexion can’t really stand well, and that woman Richard married looking absolutely magnificent in sea-green brocade. It was much too fine a dress to wear in a place like this, but it made her stand out like some figure in a canvas. I don’t care much about portrait-painting myself, but I should appreciate an opportunity of painting her as one of the great symbolic or legendary figures. I have never seen how she could care for Richard, but like the rest of them she puts up a fine bluff.

  Thinking of them all, and of my own ambitions, that were never for more than a moment out of my thoughts, I visualised them as a pack of hounds on my trail, and immediately I determined not to be taken. Somehow I must contrive to put them off the scent, lay a false trail, deny having been here. Immediately I began to examine the room, to see what traces of my visit were obvious. The first thing I set eyes on was the paper-weight, lying on the edge of the writing-table where I had put it in that first moment of blank confusion. There was a dark stain on it—blood, of course—and a sliver of bloodstained skin. I turned to my father and saw that where I had struck him the skin of the temple had swelled and become a bluish-purple in colour. There was a long, clearly defined cut just above the eyebrow level. My first hopes of suggesting an accident were dashed. It would be obvious that he had not fallen, but had been struck down. I brooded for a minute on suicide, but that was equally out of the question. A man could scarcely take his own life in that fantastic manner. There remained only one solution, the truth; and that I must twist to make it appear that someone else was guilty. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and polished up the weight. I couldn’t afford to leave tell-tale marks on anything that might be connected with the crime. And, since the handkerchief was now stained, I decided to destroy that before leaving the room. I was sorry, because it was a good handkerchief, of fine silk. I had not held such a handkerchief in my hand since I married. Sophy gives me cheap cotton squares, that I sometimes suspect her of making out of disused sheets; at all events, they never wash satisfactorily, and are generally impounded for one or other of the children, whichever of them at the moment has the inevitable cold in the head. I saw Olivia staring disdainfully at my handkerchief the day before, at lunch, so when, coming down to dinner, I saw that Eustace had dropped one of his silk ones in the doorway of his room, I appropriated it without a twinge of conscience. Isobel teased me about it. Going up in the world, she said I was.