The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (6 page)

The brutish Jupiter had left the birdless apple tree to follow his master into the night.

“Go back!” pleaded Bostock at intervals, and Jupiter would pause and stare at him meaningfully. Then, when the friends went on, he would follow after with the quick, stiff-legged walk of an elderly but still powerful cat, no longer able to hunt for himself, but eager for others to oblige.

Though the two friends were as familiar with the way to Dr. Bunnion's as with each other's pockets, it now became mysterious and uncanny. The solemnity of the night and the desperate nature of their journey lent an unearthly aspect to the well-worn streets. The houses—now the tombs of sleep—seemed curiously insubstantial, as if their very walls had only been bodied forth by the dreams within and a touch would dissolve them into wide vistas . . .

But Bostock and Harris were real. No dream could have bodied them forth, and no touch could have dissolved them. They crept among the shadowy plots of half-built houses where ambitious builders were extending the scope of the town. Stealthily they removed a ladder and carried it with them until they reached the school.

All was in darkness. The academy was wrapped round and round in a deep silence. Harris pointed upward. Miss Alexander's room lay under the roof at the side of the house. The mystery of the
academy's upper architecture was as an open book to a mind like Harris's.

Harris smiled. The window was open to the warm night. He nodded. Nature herself was on the side of the two friends. Cautiously the ladder was raised and settled against the wall. Harris signaled to Bostock to mount while he steadied the ladder's foot.

Bostock shook hands with Harris and began to mount. As he did so, a rapid shape passed Harris. Jupiter, with hungry green eyes, had gone up after his master. Harris saw them enter the window almost together, with Jupiter scrambling over Bostock's shoulder.

Harris waited. For a moment there was silence. Then there was a loud and dreadful cry followed by the sound of something heavy falling. Then Jupiter reappeared and descended the ladder with Bostock after him, at a great speed. Bostock looked very white. Harris paused till Bostock was down, then the two friends fled for their lives. They did not stop running until they were back in Bostock's garden. There they leaned against the apple tree, while in the branches above them, Jupiter cleaned the blood from his claws.

A terrible thing had happened. Inflamed by vengeance, lust and wine, Ralph Bunnion had accomplished his monstrous errand. Unseen by the other wanderers in the night, he had somehow unraveled the maze of passages, stairs and corners and found out Tizzy Alexander's room. A wolfish smile had
disfigured his handsome features. Quietly he'd opened the door. Then had struck disaster. The bed was empty, but the room was not. A shape of strange, inhuman aspect was at the window. Outlined against the sky, it seemed to Ralph's crimsoned mind to be part man and part beast. From its human shoulders reared the wicked head of a cat.

Courageously he'd stumbled forward, hands outstretched. He was in such a mood to attack angels and devils alike. He reached out—when, for a second time, the concerns of Bostock and Harris crossed the purpose of the headmaster's son.

The brutish Jupiter flew at the intruder in the darkened room, savaged his face and fled, hissing with alarm. Nor was Bostock far behind. Ralph Bunnion shrieked and fell with a sound like thunder. The house shook, and the wanderers in the night came rushing upon the scene before there was any chance of escape.

They found him lying drunkenly beside Tizzy Alexander's tumbled bed, and even in the uncertain candlelight it was plain there had been further damage done to his unlucky face. Denial—even if he'd been in a condition to make one—would have been hopeless, and the little academy quaked in the grip of confusion, anger and fear.

Events which by skill, compromise and good will might have been halted, were now whirled out of all sensible men's control on their fatal course of calamity. Dr. Bunnion could no longer uphold the innocence of his moaning, bleeding son, and Major
Alexander did not see how he could avoid avenging his daughter's honor.

Shortly before dawn, when Mr. Brett had at last managed to forget his own wretched situation sufficiently to fall into a light sleep, he was awakened by yet another knocking at his door. Savagely he cried out, “Go away! For God's sake, leave me in peace! All of you, go to hell!”

Outside the door, poor bewildered Tizzy Alexander sobbed quietly and went away.

THE BELLS OF
St. Nicholas's wrinkled the morning air as they summoned the town to prayer. Dully the two distressed households understood it to be Sunday and they must needs carry their griefs and perplexities to church to thank God for being alive.

“Let us pray,” suggested Mr. Hudson, the vicar, when the time came, and the congregation knelt—some opening their hearts for relief from private anguish and others endeavoring to close them against the prying eyes of the Almighty. Chief among the former were Mrs. Harris and Tizzy Alexander, and chief among the latter were Bostock and Harris.

Not even God can help me now, thought Harris as he peered around the well-filled pews for a sight of
Ralph Bunnion, who, it turned out, had been the last living soul to clap eyes on Adelaide and had left her only he knew where. After the night's disaster, it was plain that Adelaide was not in the school. He had some confused notion of throwing himself on the school hero's mercy, confessing all (or nearly all) and imploring his aid. But Ralph Bunnion was nowhere to be seen.

Sadly, Harris glanced sideways to where the sturdy Bostock knelt with closed eyes and open mouth. He envied his friend his slow, simple mind that was not tormented with dreadful thoughts. Though Bostock might never reach the heights that he, Harris, sometimes knew, he would never plummet to the depths that he, Harris, was now in.

A great loneliness fell upon Harris as round about him prayers of all descriptions rose in silence to the church's roof. He felt himself to be the outcast of creation against whom every man's hand was raised. Then he looked at Bostock again and was briefly consoled. Bostock was his companion and friend; he was just as involved as Harris himself and would, therefore, be bound to suffer at his side. At once Harris felt less lonely and more a part of the common fate of mankind.

Mr. Hudson nodded to his flock. He was a shaggy man with large hands and large feet, and as he began to snap and bark his sermon from the pulpit, was the very image of a pious sheepdog with a sharp eye for strays.

As the town was becoming quite fashionable of
late by reason of an interest in sea bathing, Mr. Hudson thought it necessary to touch on the extreme difficulty of rich men entering the Kingdom of Heaven unaided. The poor were all right—here he smiled encouragingly at the fisherfolk at the back—but the rich—here he frowned at the private pews—stood in need of assistance. Though he didn't say it outright, he implied pretty strongly that they weren't likely to get such assistance from God direct. Their only chance lay through the proper channels. That was what churches were for. And St. Nicholas's in particular. They were not likely to do better elsewhere . . . even though the actual building stood in need of repair. Exposed as it was to the winds from the sea, even the house of God was subject to the elements. The roof leaked. Money was required to restore it. And where should such money come from? From those who would benefit. From this very congregation who prayed and expected their prayers to be answered.

Here Mr. Hudson paused so that the equity of the arrangement might sink in. Harris felt in his pockets and wondered how much he could afford on the chance of a quick return. He had reached the final pit of despair in which anything was worth trying.

He had a shilling and a sixpence. Strenuously he wrestled with his conscience, arguing that Mr. Hudson would never know that if he gave the sixpence, a shilling had been withheld. But God would know, said a pious voice within. “Yah!” snarled Harris,
whose faith was a rubbery commodity and tended to shift out of the way under pressure. “Who cares?”

He fished in his pockets and came upon a battered brass button that a horse had trodden flat. He mused. Why the sixpence when the button would make as good a noise in the collecting box? After all, it was the thought that counted—and Mr. Hudson would certainly
think
it was money.

When the service ended, Harris frowned and dropped the button in the box. The vicar smiled and wagged his clasped hands behind his back, and Bostock, seeing Harris's gesture, sighed and put in a shilling, which was all he had.

“Well!” said Harris, challenging the great host of heaven. “Now show me you're really there! Where's Adelaide?”

The congregation had left the cool shadows of the church and were out in the pagan sunshine.

“Answer me!” muttered Harris, looking up defiantly at the golden pastures of the universe. “Or you'll be the loser!”

Thus Harris barbed his soul and aimed it at the sky—to bring down an angel, or nothing. That he himself had not been absolutely honest in this trial of faith did not disturb him in the least. On the contrary, he argued with Jesuitical subtlety that the Almighty now had every opportunity for displaying His vaunted understanding and forgiveness.

He waited while round about he heard the clatter of gossip and the salty grumbling of fisherfolk as the Sunday town, in homespun and starfish ribbons,
jostled him out of their homeward way. But nothing came to him from the invisible God. Instead, sturdily stumping across the graveyard, came Bostock. He had left his family, gone out of his way to raise his hat, with furious blushes, to the wild, slender Miss Harris, and come to join his friend.

Harris, who was at the very crisis of belief, looked depressed, and Bostock wondered how he might cheer him up. He did not like to see Harris miserable.

“I expect she'll turn up somewhere, Harris,” he mumbled, and laid his hand timidly on his friend's narrow shoulder.

Harris turned. “Bosty, old friend,” he whispered. “There ain't no God.”

The words struck Bostock like a blow in the stomach. They were so strange and unexpected.

“The sky's empty, old friend,” went on Harris grimly. “There's just us, Bosty.”

“What, you and me?” Bostock was shaken to the depths of his soul.

“No,” said Harris irritably. “Mankind. All of us down here. We're all there is, Bosty. The rest is—is air.”

“Are you sure, Harris?” asked Bostock pleadingly. He knew he hadn't the intellect to question his friend, but at the same time he did not want to abandon his own beliefs without a struggle. They meant a great deal to him, and had it been anyone else but wise old Harris who'd shaken them, he'd have clouted him without more ado. “How—how do you
know
?”

Harris frowned. He did not care to admit that his
reason was chiefly that he'd received no answer to his gift of the brass button.

“But there
must
be a God,” urged Bostock desperately.

“Why, old friend?”

“Because—because of everything. Look about you, Harris! All the grass and trees and different animals and flowers—who made them if not God?”

“Somebody else,” said Harris bleakly. The friends stared at one another, Harris as still and somber as the headstones among which they stood, and Bostock swaying slightly, as if rocking on a sea of doubt. Bostock turned his small, fierce eyes from side to side, ranging the wide landscape as if trying to see it in some other light than the bright sun's. Painfully he stared from the soft, silken sea to the green velvet folds of the Downs. Not two miles off he saw the tiny village of Preston clustering like a brood of kittens about the wise gray church whose square head watched over the cottages, ready to call them back if they strayed into danger. Bostock's eyes began to fill with tears. Passionately he struggled to reject Harris's grim philosophy, and to bring his friend back into the warm, motherly world.

“Look, Harris—look!” he muttered, pointing to the village but unable to put his thoughts into words.

Wearily Harris looked. “What is it, old friend?”

“The—the church,” said Bostock incoherently, and hoped Harris would understand.

Harris gazed at the aged building that looked, from where he stood, to be no better than a child's
toy. “Poor, poor Bosty,” he whispered pityingly. He was half sorry for the damage he'd done his friend, but nevertheless the truth was more sacred than anything else; nothing was worse than worshiping a lie. Just how Harris, whose mind was furtive in the extreme, managed to believe in this philosophy, was a mystery as deep as life. But then, he was a scientist.

“Yes, Bosty—another church.”

He stopped. His heart quickened.
Another
church. In his mind's eye he saw once more the horseman and the baby of the previous night, and in a blaze of understanding he guessed what had happened. Ralph Bunnion, with Adelaide in his arms, for some reason or another must have ridden
past
St. Nicholas's and on to the church at Preston!

The lights came on in his eyes. He thumped Bostock on the back. “Now I know, old friend!”

“I don't want to hear it,” said Bostock bitterly, thinking Harris had shifted the heavens still farther afield.

“He took her to Preston,” said Harris. “
That's
where Adelaide went!”

“Oh,” said Bostock. “I thought you meant God.”

“What's God got to do with it? Come on, Bosty!”

He set off at a smart trot toward Preston and Bostock followed after. All questions of faith and belief had vanished from Harris's mind. He left the gates of heaven swinging open, so to speak, for God to resume His leasehold until he, Harris, chose to foreclose again.

When the friends reached Preston, Harris's
inspiration was confirmed. Ingeniously they fell into conversation with a boy and learned that a baby had indeed been left in the church on the previous night. But almost at once their lifted hopes were dashed to the ground. They were too late. The baby had already been taken to the poorhouse in Brighton.