Some Must Watch - Ethel Lina White (best book club books .TXT) 📗

CHAPTER I

THE TREE

 

Helen realized that she had walked too far just as daylight was

beginning to fade.

 

As she looked around her, she was struck by the desolation of the

country. During her long walk, she had met noone, and had passed no

cottage. The high-banked lanes, which blocked her view, were little

better than steepmudslides. On either side of her rose the hills—barren

sepia mounds, blurred by a fine spit of rain.

 

Over all hung a heavy sense of expectancy, as though the valley awaited

some disaster. In the distance—too far away to be even a

threat—rumbled faint, lumpy sounds of thunder.

 

Fortunately Helen was a realist, used to facing hard economic facts, and

not prone to self-pity. Of soaring spirit, yet possessed of sound common

sense, she believed that those thinly-veiled pitfalls over

hell—heaviness of body and darkness of spirit—could be explained away

by liver or atmosphere.

 

Small and pale as a slip of crescent moon, she was only redeemed from

insignificance by her bush of light-red springy hair. But, in spite of

her unostentatious appearance, she throbbed with a passion for life,

expressed in an expectancy of the future, which made her welcome each

fresh day, and shred its interest from every hour and minute.

 

As a child, she pestered strangers to tell her the time, not from a mere

dull wish to know whether it were early or late, but from a specialized

curiosity to see their watches. This habit persisted when she had to

earn her own living under the roofs of fortunate people who possessed

houses of their own.

 

Her one dread was being out of work. She could estimate, therefore, the

scores of replies which had probably been received as a result of the

advertisement for a lady-help at Professor Warren’s country house; and,

as soon as she arrived, at the Summit, she realized that its very

loneliness had helped to remove her from the ranks of the unemployed.

 

It was tucked away in a corner, somewhere at the union of three

counties, on the border-line between England and Wales. The nearest town

was twenty-two miles away—the nearest village, twelve. No maid would

stay at such a forsaken pocket—a pocket with a hole in it—through which

dribbled a chronic shrinkage of domestic labor.

 

Mrs. Oates, who, with her husband, helped to fill the breach, summed up

the situation to Helen, when they met, by appointment, at the Ladies

Waiting Room, at Hereford.

 

“I told Miss Warren as she’d have to get a lady. No one else would put

up with it.”

 

Helen agreed that ladies were a drug in the market. She had enjoyed some

months of enforced leisure, and was only too grateful for the security

of any home, after weeks of stringent economy—since “starvation” is a

word not found in a lady’s vocabulary. Apart from the essential

loneliness of the locality, it was an excellent post, for she had not

only a nice room and good food, but she took her meals with the family.

 

The last fact counted, with her, for more than a gesture of

consideration, since it gave her the chance to study her employers. She

was lucky in being able to project herself into their lives, for she

could rarely afford a seat at the Pictures, and had to extract her

entertainment from the raw material of life.

 

The Warren family possessed some of the elements of drama. The

Professor, who was a widow, and his sister and housekeeper—Miss

Warren—were middle-aged to elderly. Helen classified them as definite

types, academic, frigid, and well-bred, but otherwise devoid of the

vital human interest.

 

Their step-mother, however, old Lady Warren—the invalid in the blue

room—was of richer mold. Blood and mud had been used in her mixture, and

the whole was churned up, thrice daily, by a dose of evil temper. She

was the terror of the household; only yesterday, she had flung a basin

of gruel at her nurse’s head.

 

It had been her natural and ladylike protest against this substitute for

the rare steak, which she preferred, but was unable to chew. As her aim

was excellent, it had achieved the desired result; that morning Oates

had driven the departing nurse into the town, and was coming back, in

the evening, with a fresh target.

 

Helen, who had not yet been brought into contact with the old lady,

rather admired her spirit. The household was waiting for her to die, but

she still called the tune. Every morning, Death knocked politely on the

door of the blue room; and Lady Warren saluted him in her customary

fashion, with a thumb to her nose.

 

Besides this low-comedy relief, Helen suspected the triangle situation,

as represented by the Professor’s son, his daughter-in-law, and the

resident pupil, whom the Professor was coaching for the Indian Civil

Service. The son—a clever, ugly youth—was violently and aggressively

in love with his wife, Simone. She was an unusually attractive girl,

with money of her own, and a wanton streak in her composition.

 

To put it mildly, she was an experimentalist with men. At present, she

was plainly trying to make sentimental history with the pupil, Stephen

Rice—a good-looking casual young sprig, rejected of Oxford. Helen liked

him instinctively, and hoped he would continue to resist the lady.

 

Although her curiosity hovered around the Summit and its inmates, her

duties were her chief interest. The reminder that she had a new job to

hold down made her pull a face as she glanced at her watch.

 

Already the first shadows were beginning to stir, as prelude to the

short interlude between the lights. Very soon it would be dark.

 

A long walk stretched between her and the Summit. She could see it, in

the distance, blocked with solid assurance, against the background of

shrouded hills. But, dividing them, yawned a bowl of empty country,

which dipped down for about a mile, into a tree-lined hollow, before it

climbed up a corresponding slope, to the young plantation on its crest.

 

In spite of her stoicism, Helen’s heart sank faintly at the prospect of

re-passing through that choked dell. Since she had come to the Summit,

she had been struck by the density of the surrounding undergrowth. When

she looked out of the windows, at twilight, the evergreen shrubs on the

lawnseemed actually to move and advance closer to the walls, as though

they were pioneers in a creeping invasion.

 

Feeling secure as in a fortress, she enjoyed the contrast between the

witched garden and the solid house, cheerful with lights and voices. She

was inside and safe. But now, she was outside, and nearly two miles

away.

 

“Idiot” she told herself, “it’s not late. It’s only dark. Scram.”

 

As she was denied the employer’s privilege of abuse, she got even by

saying exactly what she liked to herself. She whipped up her courage by

calling herself a choice collection of names, as she began to run

cautiously, slipping on the slimy camber of the lane, since the rutted

middle was too stony for safety.

 

She kept her eyes fixed on her goal, which seemed to be sinking

gradually into the ground, as she dipped lower and lower. Just before

she lost sight of it, a light gleamed out in the window of the blue

room.

 

It seemed to her a signal, calling her back to a special duty. Every

evening, at twilight, she had to go around the house, locking the doors

and putting the shutters over the windows. Hitherto, she had derided the

job as the limit of precaution; but, here, in the tenebrous solitude, it

assumed an unpleasant significance.

 

There was a connection between it and a certain atmosphere of

tension—excitement in the kitchen, whispers in the drawingroom—which

emanated from a background of murder.

 

Murder. Helen shied instinctively at the word. Her mind was too healthy

to regard crime other than fiction, which turned newspapers into the

sensational kind of reading-matter, which is sold on Railway Station

bookstalls. It was impossible to believe that these tragedies happened

to real people.

 

She forced herself to think of a safer subject.

 

“Suppose I won the Irish Sweep.”

 

But, as the lane dropped deeper, its steep banks shutting out the light,

she discovered that she had a mind above mere supposititious wealth.

Simple pleasures appealed to her more at that moment—the safety of the

kitchen at the Summit, with Mrs. Oates and the ginger cat for company,

and dripping-toast for tea.

 

She made another start.

 

“Suppose I won the Irish Sweep. Someone’s got to win. Out of all the

millions of people in the world, a few people are marked out to win

fortunes. Staggering.”

 

Unfortunately, the thought introduced another equally stupendous.

 

“Yes. And out of all the millions of people who die in their beds, a few

are marked out to be murdered.”

 

She switched off the current of her thoughts, for before her, crouched

the black mouth of the hollow.

 

When she had crossed it, earlier in the afternoon, she had been chiefly

concerned in picking out a fairly dry passage over the rich black mold

formed by leaf-deposits. She had only marked it down as a sheltered spot

in which to search for early primroses.

 

But the promise of spring was now only a mockery. As she advanced, the

place seemed an area of desolation and decay, with wind-falls for crops.

In this melancholy trough—choked with seasonal litter—sound was

reduced to furtive rustles; light was shrunken to a dark miasma, through

which trees loomed with the semblance of men.

 

Suddenly, murder ceased to be a special fiction of the Press. It became

real—a menace and a monstrosity.

 

Helen could no longer control her thoughts, as she remembered what Mrs.

Oates had told her about the crimes. There were four of them—credibly

the work of some maniac, whose chosen victims were girls.

 

The first two murders were committed in the town, which was too far away

from the Summit for the inmates to worry. The third took place in a

village, but still comfortably remote. The last girl was strangled in a

lonely country-house, within a five-mile radius of Professor Warren’s

residence.

 

It was an uncomfortable reminder that the maniac was

growing bolder with success. Each time he penetrated closer into the

privacy of his victim.

 

“The first time, it was just a street-murder,” thought Helen. “Then, he

hid in a garden. After that, he went inside a house. And then—right

upstairs. You ought to feel safe there.”

 

Although she was determined not to yield to panic, and run, she ceased

to pick her way between cart-ruts tilled with water, but plunged

recklessly into muddy patches, whose suction glugged at the soles of her

shoes. She had reached the densest part of the grove, where the trees

intergrew in stunting overcrowding.

 

To her imagination, the place was suggestive of evil. Tattered leaves

still hung to bare boughs, unpleasantly suggestive of rags of decaying

flesh fluttering from a gibbet. A sluggish stream was clogged with dead

leaves. Derelict litter of broken boots