Through a glass darkly, p.9
Through a Glass, Darkly, page 9
‘I thought we could call it an accident,’ said Gisela.
Mrs Lightfoot started and looked at her with sudden intensity. ‘What else could it be?’
‘Well,’ Gisela hesitated. ‘There’s always the possibility of suicide . . .’
‘Nonsense.’ Mrs Lightfoot was emphatic. ‘We’ll have no scandal here, if you please. I suppose there’ll have to be an inquest, but the verdict is a foregone conclusion – accident. Look at that torn hem and the high-heeled shoe that’s fallen off. That’s how she tripped. There’s no man here I can trust except Spencer, my chauffeur. Go up to the garage and tell him to come down here without speaking to anyone else about it. If he can get the body up to the garage before the party is over, no one else need know about this until we call the police. I don’t want these young girls or their parents to have the shock of seeing her.’
‘But you can’t move the body!’ exclaimed Gisela. ‘Not until the police have seen it.’
‘Surely in these circumstances . . .’
‘Can I be of any assistance?’
The cheerful male voice came from the head of the steps. Both women looked up. Floyd Chase was standing there smiling inanely. It seemed to Gisela that Mrs Lightfoot grew visibly older in that moment. ‘Too late now,’ she muttered.
Chase was coming down the steps. ‘Has someone fainted?’ He was still smiling. ‘Why, it’s Alice!’ He stopped as he neared the last step. ‘My God!’
‘Mr Chase, there has been an accident,’ said Mrs Lightfoot. ‘And you can help us – if you will stand at the head of the steps and keep anyone else from coming down until the body has been removed. I’m sure you’ll understand that we don’t want any of the pupils to see a thing like this.’
He looked at Mrs Lightfoot as if he had not heard a word she said. ‘How did it happen?’ he demanded hoarsely.
‘I don’t know,’ retorted Mrs Lightfoot impatiently. ‘The last time I saw Miss Aitchison she was in the drawing-room talking to you.’
‘We were interrupted by my former wife.’ He spoke in a dazed voice. ‘Alice left us at once. By way of the french window. I had a few words with Dorothea. But I got away from her as soon as I could and came outdoors to look for Alice . . .’
‘And where did your wife go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Floyd!’ On cue came the discontented whimper of Dorothea Chase. ‘What are you doing down there? I’ve been looking for you everywhere – even in the kitchen garden!’ She already had one foot on the top step. Beth, a small figure in white, was tugging at her mother’s hand, trying to pull her down the steps.
‘There she is, mother!’ cried Beth. ‘I didn’t imagine anything. It really happened!’
‘Dorothea!’ Chase started up the steps. ‘Don’t bring the child down here. Please!’
For the first time Gisela felt some sympathy for the man as his wife answered shrewishly: ‘She’s bringing me – I’m not bringing her! And I shall certainly come down now to find out why you don’t want me to! I . . .’
Her voice failed and she stood still, looking down incredulously at the broken body of the dead woman.
‘Elizabeth!’ she exclaimed. ‘Go back upstairs at once!’
But Beth Chase stood beside her mother without moving. She, too, was looking down at the body with a mixture of horror and interest.
Chase swore under his breath. Mrs Lightfoot took a step forward, interposing her full skirt between the child and her view of Alice.
‘Mrs Chase, did you happen to see Miss Aitchison here while you were outdoors, looking for your husband?’
‘No, I was on the other side of the house.’ Mrs Chase answered indifferently, as if she were too dense to catch the import of the question.
‘But I saw her!’
Everyone turned to look at Beth. She seemed unable to realize the effect of the words she had just spoken in her thin, high voice. ‘Mother asked me to find father. I came around on this side of the house by myself. I looked down the garden toward the summerhouse. Miss Aitchison was standing at the head of the steps.’
“What was she doing?’ asked Chase.
‘Talking.’
‘Then . . .’ Mrs Lightfoot forced out the words. ‘She was not alone?’
‘Oh, no, Mrs Lightfoot. I didn’t say she was alone, did I?’
‘Who was with her?’ insisted Chase hoarsely.
‘Another teacher. The pale, thin one who used to teach drawing, Miss Crayle.’
‘That’s impossible!’ cried Gisela. ‘She just called me long distance from New York!’
‘But I saw her, Miss von Hohenems,’ protested Beth. ‘When I told mother she wouldn’t believe me either, so I brought her here to see for herself. Miss Crayle was wearing the blue coat and brown hat just as she always did. When Miss Aitchison came around the corner of the summerhouse, Miss Crayle was standing there, waiting. Miss Aitchison said something I didn’t hear. Then Miss Crayle put out her hand and pushed Miss Aitchison and she screamed and fell backwards – down the steps. Then Miss Crayle went away as she always did – quite quietly, without making a sound . . .’
Chapter Nine
He who cast seven devils out
Of Magdalene
Could hardly do as much, I doubt,
For you, Faustine.
That night officers and trustees of the Murray Hill Hospital held a meeting in the office of the chairman, a newspaper publisher. It was after midnight when Basil came out of the building and walked up Broadway toward the Seventh Avenue parking lot where he had left his car.
Peace had made Broadway once more as tawdry as Coney Island. Tired as he was, huge signs of moving neon or electric light forced his attention on this company’s cigarette and that company’s whisky. They were the negation of art – giant, mechanical toys made for overgrown children who delighted in obvious catchwords, primary colours, and simple, repetitive motions.
The combined light of all these signs bathed the grimy asphalt underfoot in a false daylight. When a newsboy thrust a copy of tomorrow morning’s paper into his hand, it was by this sick, unnatural light that he saw the headline on the first page: NECK BROKEN, TEACHER DIES. It was the dateline that held his attention: Brereton, Thursday, 17 November . . . He halted where he was to read the rest.
Miss Alice Aitchison, dramatic coach at the Brereton school for girls near here, was found dead in the school grounds at five o’clock this afternoon by another teacher, Miss Grizel von Hohenstein. The body was lying at the foot of some stone steps leading to a flower garden. According to the police, Miss Aitchison died of a broken neck sustained when she fell down the steps after catching a three-inch heel in the torn hem of an ankle-length housecoat of pale-blue taffeta which she was wearing at the time.
The accident was said to have been witnessed by one of the pupils, Miss Elizabeth Chase, aged thirteen, who ran to inform her mother, then visiting the school, just before Miss von Hohenstein discovered the body independently. Floyd Chase, the child’s father, refused to let reporters interview her, but it is rumoured that she saw Miss Aitchison talking to a former teacher of the school, Miss Faustina Crayle, just before the tragedy.. Miss Crayle, now staying at a midtown hotel in Manhattan, could not be reached for questioning at a late hour this evening.
Miss Aitchison was a daughter of the late Stanley Mordaunt Aitchison, investment banker, who committed suicide in 1945, after suffering financial reverses in Wall Street. The funeral will be private.
Basil thrust the folded paper into his overcoat pocket and hurried on to his car. If ‘Grizel von Hohenstein’ was as near as the reporter could get to Gisela’s name, his story could not be trusted in other details and yet . . . Basil twirled the steering-wheel and the car swung into the stream of uptown traffic.
It was one a.m. when he reached the Fontainebleau, and the lobby was empty. He gave his card to the night clerk. ‘I’m not a reporter and I must see Miss Crayle at once. Will you tell her that I’m downstairs?’
‘Her phones been shut off since six p.m.,’ answered the clerk. ‘She’s probably asleep now and . . .’
‘This is urgent.’
The clerk looked at the card again, then turned to the house telephone. ‘Miss Crayle will be down in a few moments.’
As she crossed the lobby, Basil had his first steady look at her in a clear light. She still seemed greyhound-thin and fragile, but she was no longer romantically ethereal – merely emaciated and bloodless. Her light-tan hair was thin and dry; her milky-blue eyes dreamy, abstracted. She wore a knitted dress of limp brown wool and her sallow skin was marred by a tiny red pimple on one cheek. All that remained of her wraithlike charm in the half-light was her quietness and gentleness.
They found chairs in a corner of the lobby. Basil offered cigarettes, but she declined. ‘You saw her? Mrs Lightfoot?’
‘Yes.’ Basil lit a cigarette for himself and leaned back in his chair. ‘Miss Crayle, where were you this afternoon at five o’clock?’
‘Here, upstairs in my room.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘At five? I was talking to Gisela on the long-distance telephone. I’ve already explained that to a man from the New York Police Department. The Connecticut police sent him to question me this evening. Then reporters began calling me and I had my telephone shut off.’
‘Do you know why the police questioned you?’
‘Because of Alice Aitchison’s death. They said it was just routine.’
‘They always say it’s “just routine”. It never is.’ Basil took the newspaper out of his pocket. ‘Read this, please.’
She got as far as the second paragraph. Then the paper dropped from her hand. ‘But that’s impossible! I wasn’t anywhere near Brereton this afternoon. My telephone call to Gisela proves it.’
‘That’s probably why you were not questioned any further.’
‘Fortunately I can prove that I was here all day. There’s only this one entrance at the Fontainebleau. The elevator men, the room clerks, the doormen all know me by sight. They know I didn’t go out all afternoon or evening.’
‘What about fire stairs? Or service entrance?’
‘The police checked all that. You can only reach the service entrance by going through the restaurant kitchen. A cook and two helpers were there all afternoon. And the fire stairs open into the kitchen corridor. No one could have gone through without being seen and heard.’
‘What did you do after your telephone conversation with Gisela?’
‘After . . .? Why I – I went to sleep.’
‘At five in the afternoon?’
‘Yes. I felt sleepy while I was talking to Gisela. Since I came here, I’ve fallen into the habit of sleeping a little in the afternoon especially when I’ve had tea.’
Basil nodded, understanding the things she had not said. She was so stunned by her dismissal from Brereton – so listless and defeated and bored – that she sought escape from reality in daytime sleep, like an old woman or a baby, unable to sustain the burden of consciousness for any length of time.
The chill he felt did not come entirely from the raw November night. A sleepwalker will carry out in his sleep an impulse which he has previously suppressed in his waking state . . .
‘Did you ever have any impulse to kill Alice Aitchison?’
‘Oh, no!’ She seemed sincerely shocked. But such an impulse would have to be suppressed, unconscious. She would not know anything about it.
‘You didn’t like her, did you?’
‘No,’ admitted Faustina. ‘I can’t say I liked her. She was crude and she was always rather unkind to me. Sometimes I hated her . . .’
Again Basil nodded. He could see Faustina hating Alice – the weak hating the strong, calling her own weakness ‘refinement’ and the other’s strength ‘crudeness’. Those who cannot strike their enemies in the flesh strike at phantoms of their enemies in the safety and freedom of their own minds. To hate anyone is to wish for his obliteration and there is only one way to obliterate a human being – by death. Children know this instinctively when they shout: I hate you! I wish you were dead! Had Faustina lain down this afternoon with a sadistic fantasy of Alice’s death in her mind? Had she slipped into sleep with that death-wish her last waking thought? Had she then risen in a sleepwalker’s trance and . . .?
No. The time element made it impossible. Asleep or awake, Faustina could not leave the Fontainebleau unseen, could not get to Connecticut from New York in the few minutes that intervened between her telephone call to Gisela and Alice Aitchison’s death. Unless . . . an unconscious mind could gather unto itself enough vital energy to project some purely visual image or reflection of itself on the air . . . rainbows and mirages do not exist in normal terms of space-time . . .
Death by wishing – the crime attributed to witches from time immemorial. He smiled at the quaint, archaic idea, yet atavism gave it a curiously strong pull at the soft underside of the mind, like a rip tide . . .
‘No doubt the Connecticut police decided that Elizabeth Chase was mistaken or hysterical. After all, she’s only thirteen. But – she saw something, Miss Crayle. What was it?’
‘I – I don’t know.’
‘I think you do know – or suspect.’
The blue eyes blurred as they slipped out of focus. She sat still and lifeless, as if she had withdrawn from the surface of her body into some dream of her own, more comforting than reality.
What had Black Andie’s father said of Tod Lapraik? I think folk have burned for dreams like yon . . . In the broad Scots, it was more impressive: I think folk hae brunt far dwams like yon . . . And it was true. In other times, hundreds of Faustina Crayles had charred alive, writhing and shrieking, a human sacrifice to the gods of ignorance and terror . . .
‘Come, Miss Crayle! You’re not playing fair with me. Yesterday you knew what Mrs Lightfoot was going to tell me. Let’s begin at the beginning. Why did you leave the Maidstone School last year?’
She started and winced. As if it were painful to return to the surface of her body and communicate with the world outside herself. Still she was silent. She would not give him a lead.
‘Are you asking me to believe that you do not know the old English tradition of the fetch – the phantom double of a living man? The same thing as the German doppelgänger, literally, the double-goer? If that were so, you would not have borrowed Gisela’s copy of Goethe.’
He had anticipated various responses – surprise, indignation, denial. It had not occurred to him that she would cover her face with her hands and burst into tears. ‘Dr Willing! What am I going to do?’
He glanced across the lobby to the desk. The clerk was a good forty feet away, his eyes bent on a ledger and, even in despair, Faustina wept quietly. He had not noticed her or anything else in the shadowy corner where they were sitting.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before you sent me to Mrs Lightfoot?’
‘I didn’t send you!’ She protested weakly. ‘It was you who insisted on going. And I – I don’t know anything.’ Her hands dropped. She turned her face toward him in an agony of distress, unconscious of reddened eyelids and stained cheeks. ‘I’ve never seen – it. I don’t know what – it is. I know only what people told me at Maidstone. Now – I suppose it’s happened again at Brereton. But I didn’t know. Mrs Lightfoot wouldn’t tell me. I couldn’t ask her. I did think she might tell you. That’s why I let you go. And I couldn’t tell you a thing like that before you went. You would have laughed. Or you would have thought me neurotic. A year ago I would have thought anyone insane who took such a thing seriously. But I knew that if you heard it from Mrs Lightfoot, you wouldn’t laugh. You’d listen to her, even if you didn’t believe what she said. At the worst you’d think she was the neurotic instead of me.’
‘Do you think Mrs Lightfoot is neurotic?’
‘Was Miss Maidstone neurotic? And all the other teachers and pupils and servants in both schools? Dr Willing, when you’ve lost your job twice because of a thing, you don’t laugh and say it’s all imagination. I don’t know what this thing is. It may not be what they say it is. But it isn’t imaginary. There’s something – I mean, something real. And it isn’t me myself. I know I’m not a fraud. You don’t know that, of course. You can’t, because you have only my word for it. But I do know it. What remains? That I do these things unconsciously? That’s physically impossible. Even in a sleepwalking state, I could not be in two places at the same time and that’s what they tell me has happened – more than once. Are they all conspiring to play an elaborate hoax on me? I cannot see people as dissimilar as Miss Maidstone in Virginia and Arlene Murphy in Connecticut involved in the same pointless conspiracy, solemnly acting out a futile farce over a period of twelve months just to discomfit me. So now what remains? I don’t know, but – I’m afraid.’
She looked beyond him, into the brightly lighted vacancy of the lobby. ‘Have you any idea what all this is like for me? How desperately I keep asking myself all the old unanswered questions: What is life for? Why were human beings made? Why do we assume so confidently that God is good, when He is so much more likely to be evil? Are we an accident of chemistry, without beginning or end or purpose? Super-colloids, acting out a heartless comedy? Are we a dream of God’s, as the Buddhists believe? Is that why, in early childhood, you stare at your face in the mirror and look at your hands and feet and say to yourself: I am me. I am Faustina Crayle. I am not anyone else. Yet, no matter how hard you try to realize your identity something inside you goes on feeling that it’s not quite true. That you are only Faustina Crayle temporarily and locally That you could so easily be someone else. That’s what makes life so dreamlike – your own sense of your own unreality . . .
‘I’ve read all the standard books on philosophy, science, and religion. They have nothing to do with the urgency of real life and personal problems. Do these men, playing a sort of intellectual chess with themselves, have any idea how ordinary people in trouble long for an answer that satisfies both heart and reason? You ask for bread and they give you – words. How can I live with a thing like this all the rest of my life? What is going to become of me?’ Again she began to weep softly. Basil waited until she had tired herself out. Then he said, patiently: ‘Tell me what happened at Maidstone.’
