I dropped into my chair and waved my visitor to one that faced me across the table. I could see him better now. He was, all of him, well within the pool of light from the reading lamp, because now I had turned the shade so that the little lake it had spilt over the table left me in shadow, and flooded the chair in which my visitor sat.
I say “in which he sat,” but that’s wrong. Because he didn’t sit in it. He balanced himself, in that precarious way the lower classes have when sitting in the presence of those they term their superiors, on the chair’s front edge. Right forward he was, and, looking at him, I got a silly idea.
So silly that it made me feel for a moment very much as if I was going actually to vomit. The fellow had a great oilskin round him. Oilskin of that patchy, dirty, greeny-yellow which comes to oilskin which has seen many years use upon hard and dangerous seas. And this coat, as he sat there perched like some damned great ugly bird, hung down right to the floor in front of him. It didn’t only just touch the floor; it coiled up on the floor, and made him look as if, perhaps, he hadn’t any legs... As if, perhaps, there was of him only that great bulk of his torso and head and arms balanced by some devilish means on the chair’s edge...
I had to make quite an effort to pull myself together after that silly idea. But I did it all right, and as the light wasn’t on me, but on him, I don’t suppose he could have seen.
I was waiting for him to begin talking. But he seemed to be thinking the same about me. I wanted to look at the time. Wanted to badly. But, d’you know, it cost me what seemed like a full minute to take my eyes off that shapeless bulk, and turn them to the clock. When I did, I saw that if I gave this visitor more than three minutes I should be late. I shouldn’t be at the flat at ten exactly — nor should I be there at half a minute past — not half a minute to. I should be there at a quarter past... And had I not been told that it was at ten o’clock I must come?
So I tried to make myself a bit brusque. I said: “Come on, man. If you want to speak to me, speak up! I can give you” — I looked across at the clock — “exactly nine and a half minutes.” He spoke then, damn him! He said: “You are Mr. Lorimer, sir? The K.C. sir? The Mr. Lorimer who was actin’ for the fellow in that red bicycle case last twelve-month?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to draw things out any longer by answering when it wasn’t necessary. Really, I was waiting for him to get on with it. I tried hard, really very hard, to take in some accurate impression of him. But d’you know, I couldn’t. He was utterly and most determinedly indeterminate. He was a great mass. A shapeless mass with no outlines which man’s eye could take in; no salient points. No incongruity, no congruity...
I don’t mean, you know, that he was fluid or anything crazy like that. I mean that, somehow, I didn’t seem to be able to make my eyes take him in...
And then, just as this was beginning to annoy me, with that half-fearful, half-petty annoyance which the inexplicable often gives a man, he began to speak again. As he began to speak he lifted one of his great arms with a semi-apologetic gesture. It had been hanging down beside the chair, almost out of my sight, but now it came into sight. And it had grasped in a massive indeterminate hand, a little wicker basket. It was the size and shape of those baskets in which old women carry cats; but in that hand it seemed much smaller than this. He stood it upon his knee. Every now and then, with his breathing, it creaked a little. He said, in that small voice which ought to have been incongruous; that small voice which ought to have been ridiculous; that small voice which was neither:
“It’s advice I want, sir. And your advice.” He paused for ten seconds which seemed to me quite ten minutes. He went on then: “It’s like this, sir. I’ve killed some’un, sir...”
D’you know, I very nearly laughed. So nearly that I had to get out my handkerchief and turn what would have been a laugh into an unconvincing cough... I nearly laughed because — I hope I can make this part clear — because this statement seemed, after all the extraordinary-impressiveness (impressiveness is the only word to use) of his entry, his coming, his — well, everything about him — this statement seemed, I say, to have about it a queer, almost bathetic humor. It was a most flagrant anti-climax.
He seemed, now, again to be waiting for me to say something. He sat there in silence. I was silent too. I couldn’t think of anything to say. First, there was that feeling of anti-climactics. Secondly... well, what do you say when a man comes in and says he’s just killed another?
I could hear the little clock on the desk, its hand pointing nearly to the hour of ten. I could hear, with his breathing, the creak of the lid of his quaint little basket, as, with his breathing, the basket moved.
The silence went on. It seemed, to my mind, rather as if there was a contest of some sort going on between us. A. contest in which the loser was the man who first said anything. If that was it, I won all right. Because he suddenly leaned forward, the basket giving a loud creak as his chest came against it. And he said, fixing his eyes on me — to this day I can’t tell what color or size those eyes were; I can’t even tell you where they were in his face — he said:
“So, as I’ve done this, sir, I’m what they call a murd’rer. And I want, sir, to know what’s the best I can do... I’m... ’m sort of out of touch, as you might say, sir...”
He told me then that he was a seaman. He had been away, he said, for seven years. This seven years wasn’t his fault. He was one of the three survivors of the wreck of that unfortunate ship, the Hesperides. Five years it had taken him to get home again... When he had got home...
But now, with the whispered tick-tock of the little clock drumming into my head the minutes of Claire that I was losing, I grew brutal. And this despite that still, terrible, most gripping urgency in the small, dead voice.
I cut him short in mid-sentence. I said: “For God’s sake stop that damned basket squeaking!”
You know, that thing had got on my nerves, all the time creak, creak, creak. It seemed so even, so systematic, that just when I thought I was going to get into the swing of the thing and he able to anticipate the next creak, the time would change. I’d never meant those words to leave me. I was sorry for the way in which I said them.
He stopped talking again, and looked at me. Again I tried to place his eyes but couldn’t. He said: “I’m sorry, sir.” He set the basket down on the floor beside him, but then changed his mind. He lifted it, and with a humbly apologetic gesture which rippled oddly over his bulk, set it upon the edge of my table...
I got up. I said: “You’ve come to ask for my advice, and my advice is this — and it’s good advice; you can take it or leave it. Don’t tell me any more. Go at once to the police. Tell them the whole thing. They’ll put you inside, but that’s got to come. Do it now. Get it over. When they’ve got you inside they’ll ask you who you want to see. Then you can give them my name. They’ll notify me. I’ll come and see you. I’ll do what I can.”
A funny thing happened then. Odd, isn’t it, how I keep laughing. It was funny — damned funny... Funny in the sense of being queer and unexpected. You’d have thought when I’d said that, and like that, for I was pretty short, that he’d have gone on talking. Wouldn’t you, now? But did he? No, he did not. He surged to his feet. Yes, surged is right... He said: