Miss Marple and Mystery (74 page)

‘No, no.’ Hamer leaned forward eagerly. ‘They develop. Each time I see a little more. It’s difficult to explain. You see, I’m always conscious of reaching a certain point – the music carries me there – not direct, but a succession of
waves
, each reaching higher than the last, until the highest point where one can go no further. I stay there until I’m dragged back. It isn’t a place, it’s more a
state
. Well, not just at first, but after a little while, I began to understand that there were other things all round me waiting until I was able to perceive them. Think of a kitten. It has eyes, but at first it can’t see with them. It’s blind and has to learn to see. Well, that was what it was to me. Mortal eyes and ears were no good to me, but there was something corresponding to them that hadn’t yet been developed – something that wasn’t
bodily
at all. And little by little that grew . . . there were sensations of light . . . then of sound . . . then of colour . . . All very vague and unformulated. It was more the knowledge of things than seeing or hearing them. First it was light, a light that grew stronger and clearer . . . then sand, great stretches of reddish sand . . . and here and there straight long lines of water like canals –’

Seldon drew in his breath sharply. ‘
Canals!
That’s interesting. Go on.’

‘But these things didn’t matter – they didn’t count any longer. The real things were the things I couldn’t see yet – but I heard them . . . It was a sound like the rushing of wings . . . somehow, I can’t explain why, it was glorious! There’s nothing like it here. And then came another glory –
I saw them
– the Wings! Oh, Seldon, the Wings!’

‘But what were they? Men – angels – birds?’

‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see – not yet. But the colour of them!
Wing colour
– we haven’t got it here – it’s a wonderful colour.’

‘Wing colour?’ repeated Seldon. ‘What’s it like?’ Hamer flung up his hands impatiently. ‘How can I tell you? Explain the colour blue to a blind person! It’s a colour you’ve never seen – Wing colour!’

‘Well?’

‘Well? That’s all. That’s as far as I’ve got. But each time the coming back has been worse – more painful. I can’t understand that. I’m convinced my body never leaves the bed. In this place I get to I’m convinced I’ve got no
physical
presence. Why should it hurt so confoundly then?’

Seldon shook his head in silence. ‘It’s something awful – the coming back. The
pull
of it – then the pain, pain in every limb and every nerve, and my ears feel as though they were bursting. Then everything
presses
so, the weight of it all, the dreadful sense of imprisonment. I want light, air, space – above all
space
to breathe in! And I want freedom.’

‘And what,’ asked Seldon, ‘of all the other things that used to mean so much to you?’

‘That’s the worst of it. I care for them still as much as, if not more than, ever. And these things, comfort, luxury, pleasure, seem to pull opposite ways to the Wings. It’s a perpetual struggle between them – and I can’t see how it’s going to end.’

Seldon sat silent. The strange tale he had been listening to was fantastic enough in all truth. Was it all a delusion, a wild hallucination – or could it by any possibility be true? And if so, why
Hamer
, of all men . . . ? Surely the materialist, the man who loved the flesh and denied the spirit, was the last man to see the sights of another world.

Across the table Hamer watched him anxiously. ‘I suppose,’ said Seldon slowly, ‘that you can only wait. Wait and see what happens.’

‘I can’t! I tell you I can’t! Your saying that shows you don’t understand. It’s tearing me in two, this awful struggle – this killing long-drawn-out fight between – between –’ He hesitated.

‘The flesh and the spirit?’ suggested Seldon.

Hamer stared heavily in front of him. ‘I suppose one might call it that. Anyway, it’s unbearable . . . I can’t get free . . .’

Again Bernard Seldon shook his head. He was caught up in the grip of the inexplicable. He made one more suggestion.

‘If I were you,’ he advised, ‘I would get hold of that cripple.’

But as he went home he muttered to himself: ‘
Canals
– I wonder.’

Silas Hamer went out of the house the following morning with a new determination in his step. He had decided to take Seldon’s advice and find the legless man. Yet inwardly he was convinced that his search would be in vain and that the man would have vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up.

The dark buildings on either side of the passageway shut out the sunlight and left it dark and mysterious. Only in one place, half-way up it, there was a break in the wall, and through it there fell a shaft of golden light that illuminated with radiance a figure sitting on the ground. A figure – yes, it was the man!

The instrument of pipes leaned against the wall beside his crutches, and he was covering the paving stones with designs in coloured chalk. Two were completed, sylvan scenes of marvellous beauty and delicacy, swaying trees and a leaping brook that seemed alive.

And again Hamer doubted. Was this man a mere street musician, a pavement artist? Or was he something more . . .

Suddenly the millionaire’s self-control broke down, and he cried fiercely and angrily: ‘Who are you? For God’s sake, who are you?’

The man’s eyes met his, smiling. ‘Why don’t you answer? Speak, man, speak!’

Then he noticed that the man was drawing with incredible rapidity on a bare slab of stone. Hamer followed the movement with his eyes . . . A few bold strokes, and giant trees took form. Then, seated on a boulder . . . a man . . . playing an instrument of pipes. A man with a strangely beautiful face –
and goat’s legs
. . .

The cripple’s hand made a swift movement. The man still sat on the rock, but the goat’s legs were gone. Again his eyes met Hamer’s.

‘They were evil,’ he said.

Hamer stared, fascinated. For the face before him was the face of the picture, but strangely and incredibly beautified . . . Purified from all but an intense and exquisite joy of living.

Hamer turned and almost fled down the passageway into the bright sunlight, repeating to himself incessantly: ‘It’s impossible. Impossible . . . I’m mad – dreaming!’ But the face haunted him – the face of Pan . . .

He went into the Park and sat on a chair. It was a deserted hour. A few nursemaids with their charges sat in the shade of the trees, and dotted here and there in the stretches of green, like islands in a sea, lay the recumbent forms of men . . .

The words ‘a wretched tramp’ were to Hamer an epitome of misery. But suddenly, today, he envied them . . .

They seemed to him of all created beings the only free ones. The earth beneath them, the sky above them, the world to wander in . . . they were not hemmed in or chained.

Like a flash it came to him that that which bound him so remorse-lessly was the thing he had worshipped and prized above all others – wealth! He had thought it the strongest thing on earth, and now, wrapped round by its golden strength, he saw the truth of his words. It was his money that held him in bondage . . .

But was it? Was that really it? Was there a deeper and more pointed truth that he had not seen? Was it the money or was it his own love of the money? He was bound in fetters of his own making; not wealth itself, but love of wealth was the chain.

He knew now clearly the two forces that were tearing at him, the warm composite strength of materialism that enclosed and surrounded him, and, opposed to it, the clear imperative call – he named it to himself the Call of the Wings.

And while the one fought and clung the other scorned war and would not stoop to struggle. It only called – called unceasingly . . . He heard it so clearly that it almost spoke in words.

‘You cannot make terms with me,’ it seemed to say. ‘For I am above all other things. If you follow my call you must give up all else and cut away the forces that hold you. For only the Free shall follow where I lead . . .’

‘I can’t,’ cried Hamer. ‘I can’t . . .’

A few people turned to look at the big man who sat talking to himself. So sacrifice was being asked of him, the sacrifice of that which was most dear to him, that which was part of himself.

Part of himself
– he remembered the man without legs . . .

‘What in the name of Fortune brings you here?’ asked Borrow.

Indeed the East-end mission was an unfamiliar background to Hamer.

‘I’ve listened to a good many sermons,’ said the millionaire, ‘all saying what could be done if you people had funds. I’ve come to tell you this: you can have funds.’

‘Very good of you,’ answered Borrow, with some surprise. ‘A big subscription, eh?’

Hamer smiled dryly.

‘I should say so. Just every penny I’ve got.’
‘What?’

Hamer rapped out details in a brisk businesslike manner. Borrow’s head was whirling.

‘You – you mean to say that you’re making over your entire fortune to be devoted to the relief of the poor in the East-end with myself appointed as trustee?’

‘That’s it.’

‘But why –
why?
’

‘I can’t explain,’ said Hamer slowly. ‘Remember our talk about vision last February? Well, a vision has got hold of me.’

‘It’s splendid!’ Borrow leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. ‘There’s nothing particularly splendid about it,’ said Hamer grimly. ‘I don’t care a button about poverty in the East-end. All they want is grit!
I
was poor enough – and I got out of it. But I’ve got to get rid of the money, and these tom-fool societies shan’t get hold of it. You’re a man I can trust. Feed bodies or souls with it – preferably the former. I’ve been hungry, but you can do as you like.’

‘There’s never been such a thing known,’ stammered Borrow. ‘The whole thing’s done and finished with,’ continued Hamer. ‘The lawyers have fixed it up at last, and I’ve signed everything. I can tell you I’ve been busy this last fortnight. It’s almost as difficult getting rid of a fortune as making one.’

‘But you – you’ve kept
something?
’

‘Not a penny,’ said Hamer cheerfully. ‘At least – that’s not quite true. I’ve just two pence in my pocket.’ He laughed.

He said goodbye to his bewildered friend, and walked out of the mission into the narrow evil-smelling streets. The words he had said so gaily just now came back to him with an aching sense of loss. ‘Not a penny!’ Of all his vast wealth he had kept nothing. He was afraid now – afraid of poverty and hunger and cold. Sacrifice had no sweetness for him.

Yet behind it all he was conscious that the weight and menace of things had lifted, he was no longer oppressed and bound down. The severing of the chain had seared and torn him, but the vision of freedom was there to strengthen him. His material needs might dim the Call, but they could not deaden it, for he knew it to be a thing of immortality that could not die.

There was a touch of autumn in the air, and the wind blew chill. He felt the cold and shivered, and then, too, he was hungry – he had forgotten to have any lunch. It brought the future very near to him. It was incredible that he should have given it all up; the ease, the comfort, the warmth! His body cried out impotently . . . And then once again there came to him a glad and uplifting sense of freedom.

Hamer hesitated. He was near the Tube station. He had twopence in his pocket. The idea came to him to journey by it to the Park where he had watched the recumbent idlers a fortnight ago. Beyond this whim he did not plan for the future. He believed honestly enough now that he was mad – sane people did not act as he had done. Yet, if so, madness was a wonderful and amazing thing.

Yes, he would go now to the open country of the Park, and there was a special significance to him in reaching it by Tube. For the Tube represented to him all the horrors of buried, shut-in life . . . He would ascend from its imprisonment free to the wide green and the trees that concealed the menace of the pressing houses.

The lift bore him swiftly and relentlessly downward. The air was heavy and lifeless. He stood at the extreme end of the platform, away from the mass of people. On his left was the opening of the tunnel from which the train, snakelike, would presently emerge. He felt the whole place to be subtly evil. There was no one near him but a hunched-up lad sitting on a seat, sunk, it seemed, in a drunken stupor.

In the distance came the faint menacing roar of the train. The lad rose from his seat and shuffled unsteadily to Hamer’s side, where he stood on the edge of the platform peering into the tunnel.

Then – it happened so quickly as to be almost incredible – he lost his balance and fell . . .

A hundred thoughts rushed simultaneously to Hamer’s brain. He saw a huddled heap run over by a motor bus, and heard a hoarse voice saying: ‘Dahn’t yer blime yerself, guv’nor. Yer couldn’t ’a done nothin’.’ And with that came the knowledge that
this
life could only be saved, if it were saved, by himself. There was no one else near, and the train was close . . . It all passed through his mind with lightning rapidity. He experienced a curious calm lucidity of thought.

He had one short second in which to decide, and he knew in that moment that his fear of Death was unabated. He was horribly afraid. And then the train, rushing round the curve of the tunnel, powerless to pull up in time.

Swiftly Hamer caught up the lad in his arms. No natural gallant impulse swayed him, his shivering flesh was but obeying the command of the alien spirit that called for sacrifice. With a last effort he flung the lad forward on to the platform, falling himself . . .

Then suddenly his Fear died. The material world held him down no longer. He was free of his shackles. He fancied for a moment that he heard the joyous piping of Pan. Then – nearer and louder – swallowing up all else – came the glad rushing of innumerable Wings . . . enveloping and encircling him . . .

‘In a Glass Darkly’ was first published in the USA in Collier’s, July 1934, and then in Woman’s Journal, December 1934. However, its very first public airing was on 6 April 1934 when Agatha Christie read the story on BBC Radio’s National Programme. No recording of this 15-minute performance is known to exist.

‘I’ve no explanation of this story. I’ve no theories about the why and wherefore of it. It’s just a thing – that happened.

All the same, I sometimes wonder how things would have gone if I’d noticed at the time just that one essential detail that I never appreciated until so many years afterwards. If I
had
noticed it – well, I suppose the course of three lives would have been entirely altered. Somehow – that’s a very frightening thought.

For the beginning of it all, I’ve got to go back to the summer of 1914 – just before the war – when I went down to Badgeworthy with Neil Carslake. Neil was, I suppose, about my best friend. I’d known his brother Alan too, but not so well. Sylvia, their sister, I’d never met. She was two years younger than Alan and three years younger than Neil. Twice, while we were at school together, I’d been going to spend part of the holidays with Neil at Badgeworthy and twice something had intervened. So it came about that I was twenty-three when I first saw Neil and Alan’s home.

We were to be quite a big party there. Neil’s sister Sylvia had just got engaged to a fellow called Charles Crawley. He was, so Neil said, a good deal older than she was, but a thoroughly decent chap and quite reasonably well-off.

We arrived, I remember, about seven o’clock in the evening. Everyone had gone to his room to dress for dinner. Neil took me to mine. Badgeworthy was an attractive, rambling old house. It had been added to freely in the last three centuries and was full of little steps up and down, and unexpected staircases. It was the sort of house in which it’s not easy to find your way about. I remember Neil promised to come and fetch me on his way down to dinner. I was feeling a little shy at the prospect of meeting his people for the first time. I remember saying with a laugh that it was the kind of house one expected to meet ghosts in the passages, and he said carelessly that he believed the place was said to be haunted but that none of them had ever seen anything, and he didn’t even know what form the ghost was supposed to take.

Then he hurried away and I set to work to dive into my suitcases for my evening clothes. The Carslakes weren’t well-off; they clung on to their old home, but there were no menservants to unpack for you or valet you.

Well, I’d just got to the stage of tying my tie. I was standing in front of the glass. I could see my own face and shoulders and behind them the wall of the room – a plain stretch of wall just broken in the middle by a door – and just as I finally settled my tie I noticed that the door was opening.

I don’t know why I didn’t turn around – I think that would have been the natural thing to do; anyway, I didn’t. I just watched the door swing slowly open – and as it swung I saw into the room beyond.

It was a bedroom – a larger room than mine – with two bedsteads in it, and suddenly I caught my breath.

For at the foot of one of those beds was a girl and round her neck were a pair of man’s hands and the man was slowly forcing her backwards and squeezing her throat as he did so, so that the girl was being slowly suffocated.

There wasn’t the least possibility of a mistake. What I saw was perfectly clear. What was being done was murder.

I could see the girl’s face clearly, her vivid golden hair, the agonized terror of her beautiful face, slowly suffusing with blood. Of the man I could see his back, his hands, and a scar that ran down the left side of his face towards his neck.

It’s taken some time to tell, but in reality only a moment or two passed while I stared dumbfounded. Then I wheeled round to the rescue . . .

And on the wall behind me, the wall reflected in the glass, there was only a Victorian mahogany wardrobe. No door open – no scene of violence. I swung back to the mirror. The mirror reflected only the wardrobe . . .

I passed my hands across my eyes. Then I sprang across the room and tried to pull forward the wardrobe and at that moment Neil entered by the other door from the passage and asked me what the hell I was trying to do.

He must have thought me slightly barmy as I turned on him and demanded whether there was a door behind the wardrobe. He said, yes, there was a door, it led into the next room. I asked him who was occupying the next room and he said people called Oldham – a Major Oldham and his wife. I asked him then if Mrs Oldham had very fair hair and when he replied dryly that she was dark I began to realize that I was probably making a fool of myself. I pulled myself together, made some lame explanation and we went downstairs together. I told myself that I must have had some kind of hallucination – and felt generally rather ashamed and a bit of an ass.

And then – and then – Neil said, ‘My sister Sylvia,’ and I was looking into the lovely face of the girl I had just seen being suffocated to death . . . and I was introduced to her fiancé, a tall dark man
with a scar down the left side of his face
.

Well – that’s that. I’d like you to think and say what you’d have done in my place. Here was the girl – the identical girl – and here was the man I’d seen throttling her – and they were to be married in about a month’s time . . .

Had I – or had I not – had a prophetic vision of the future? Would Sylvia and her husband come down here to stay some time in the future, and be given that room (the best spare room) and would that scene I’d witnessed take place in grim reality?

What was I to do about it?
Could
I do anything? Would anyone – Neil – or the girl herself – would they believe me?

I turned the whole business over and over in my mind the week I was down there. To speak or not to speak? And almost at once another complication set in. You see, I fell in love with Sylvia Carslake the first moment I saw her . . . I wanted her more than anything on earth . . . And in a way that tied my hands.

And yet, if I didn’t say anything, Sylvia would marry Charles Crawley and Crawley would kill her . . .

And so, the day before I left, I blurted it all out to her. I said I expect she’d think me touched in the intellect or something, but I swore solemnly that I’d seen the thing just as I told it to her and that I felt if she was determined to marry Crawley, I ought to tell her my strange experience.

She listened very quietly. There was something in her eyes I didn’t understand. She wasn’t angry at all. When I’d finished, she just thanked me gravely. I kept repeating like an idiot, ‘I
did
see it. I really did see it,’ and she said, ‘I’m sure you did if you say so. I believe you.’

Well, the upshot was that I went off not knowing whether I’d done right or been a fool, and a week later Sylvia broke off her engagement to Charles Crawley.

After that the war happened, and there wasn’t much leisure for thinking of anything else. Once or twice when I was on leave, I came across Sylvia, but as far as possible I avoided her.

I loved her and wanted her just as badly as ever, but I felt somehow that it wouldn’t be playing the game. It was owing to me that she’d broken off her engagement to Crawley, and I kept saying to myself that I could only justify the action I had taken by making my attitude a purely disinterested one.

Then, in 1916, Neil was killed and it fell to me to tell Sylvia about his last moments. We couldn’t remain on formal footing after that. Sylvia had adored Neil and he had been my best friend. She was sweet – adorably sweet in her grief. I just managed to hold my tongue and went out again praying that a bullet might end the whole miserable business. Life without Sylvia wasn’t worth living.

But there was no bullet with my name on it. One nearly got me below the right ear and one was deflected by a cigarette case in my pocket, but I came through unscathed. Charles Crawley was killed in action at the beginning of 1918.

Somehow that made a difference. I came home in the autumn of 1918 just before the Armistice and I went straight to Sylvia and told her that I loved her. I hadn’t much hope that she’d care for me straight away, and you could have knocked me down with a feather when she asked me why I hadn’t told her sooner. I stammered out something about Crawley and she said, ‘But why did you think I broke it off with him?’ and then she told me that she’d fallen in love with me just as I’d done with her – from the very first minute.

I said I thought she’d broken off her engagement because of the story I told her and she laughed scornfully and said that if you loved a man you wouldn’t be as cowardly as that, and we went over that old vision of mine again and agreed that it was queer, but nothing more.

‘Well, there’s nothing much to tell for some time after that. Sylvia and I were married and we were very happy. But I realized, as soon as she was really mine, that I wasn’t cut out for the best kind of husband. I loved Sylvia devotedly, but I was jealous, absurdly jealous of anyone she so much as smiled at. It amused her at first, I think she even rather like it. It proved, at least, how devoted I was.

As for me, I realized quite fully and unmistakably that I was not only making a fool of myself, but that I was endangering all the peace and happiness of our life together. I knew, I say, but I couldn’t change. Every time Sylvia got a letter she didn’t show to me I wondered who it was from. If she laughed and talked with any man, I found myself getting sulky and watchful.

At first, as I say, Sylvia laughed at me. She thought it a huge joke. Then she didn’t think the joke so funny. Finally she didn’t think it a joke at all –

And slowly, she began to draw away from me. Not in any physical sense, but she withdrew her secret mind from me. I no longer knew what her thoughts were. She was kind – but sadly, as though from a long distance.

Little by little I realized that she no longer loved me. Her love had died and it was I who had killed it . . .

The next step was inevitable, I found myself waiting for it – dreading it . . .

Then Derek Wainwright came into our lives. He had everything that I hadn’t. He had brains and a witty tongue. He was good-looking, too, and – I’m forced to admit it – a thoroughly good chap. As soon as I saw him I said to myself, ‘This is just the man for Sylvia . . .’

She fought against it. I know she struggled . . . but I gave her no help. I couldn’t. I was entrenched in my gloomy, sullen reserve. I was suffering like hell – and I couldn’t stretch out a finger to save myself. I didn’t help her. I made things worse. I let loose at her one day – a string of savage, unwarranted abuse. I was nearly mad with jealousy and misery. The things I said were cruel and untrue and I knew while I was saying them how cruel and how untrue they were. And yet I took a savage pleasure in saying them . . .

I remember how Sylvia flushed and shrank . . .

I drove her to the edge of endurance.

I remember she said, ‘This can’t go on . . .’

When I came home that night the house was empty – empty. There was a note – quite in the traditional fashion.

In it she said that she was leaving me – for good. She was going down to Badgeworthy for a day or two. After that she was going to the one person who loved her and needed her. I was to take that as final.

I suppose that up to then I hadn’t really believed my own suspicions. This confirmation in black and white of my worst fears sent me raving mad. I went down to Badgeworthy after her as fast as the car would take me.

She had just changed her frock for dinner, I remember, when I burst into the room. I can see her face – startled – beautiful – afraid.

I said, ‘No one but me shall ever have you. No one.’

And I caught her throat in my hands and gripped it and bent her backwards.

Suddenly I saw our reflection in the mirror. Sylvia choking and myself strangling her, and the scar on my cheek where the bullet grazed it under the right ear.

No – I didn’t kill her. That sudden revelation paralysed me and I loosened my grasp and let her slip on to the floor . . .

And then I broke down – and she comforted me . . . Yes, she comforted me.

I told her everything and she told me that by the phrase ‘the one person who loved and needed her’ she had meant her brother Alan . . . We saw into each other’s hearts that night, and I don’t think, from that moment, that we ever drifted away from each other again . . .

It’s a sobering thought to go through life with – that, but for the grace of God and a mirror, one might be a murderer . . .

One thing did die that night – the devil of jealousy that had possessed me so long . . .

But I wonder sometimes – suppose I hadn’t made that initial mistake – the scar on the
left
cheek – when really it was the
right
– reversed by the mirror . . . Should I have been so sure the man was Charles Crawley? Would I have warned Sylvia? Would she be married to me – or to him?

Or are the past and the future all one?

I’m a simple fellow – and I can’t pretend to understand these things – but I saw what I saw – and because of what I saw, Sylvia and I are together in the old-fashioned words – till death do us part. And perhaps beyond . . .’