But there were still greater perplexities in store for those readers who were following this story that the world very quickly forgot and that probably no longer matters to anyone. Another daily paper, El Universal, gave, on January 3, an all-too-different version of the discovery of the body of a man who, for this article’s writer, had borne the name “Herbert Gore,” as if he had guessed the pseudonym used by Ewart for his fantastic tales and had decided to use it in describing his death, which seemed fictitious. The disturbingly contradictory paragraph was this one: “Since the police found no pistol, the hypothesis of Señor Mellado was accepted as certain, that is, that Señor Gore had received the wound that caused his death when he was on the balcony of his room, sitting in an armchair, because on said article of furniture a large blood stain was found, which demonstrates that he was there when he received the mortal wound.” This is truly an unresolvable contradiction, and not only because the other paper, Excélsior, made absolutely no mention of any such armchair or stain. If Ewart stepped onto the balcony out of simple curiosity when he heard the shots (“Mr. Graham believes,” said Excelsior on the following day, “that his friend, on hearing shots fired, went out onto the balcony to see what it was all about and that his curiosity was explicable given that he was a soldier who for many months had continually heard the rat-a-tat of artillery and the booming of cannon”), it makes no sense that he would take the trouble to lug an armchair out there beforehand, nor that he would do so after hearing the shots, as if preparing to spend a long time watching a spectacle that he can’t have seen much of in the distance with his one blind eye. If, on the contrary, the armchair was not on the balcony, but showed the blood, then Ewart couldn’t have died “instantaneously”; he would have had to take a few steps before collapsing into its softness and leaving that stain on the upholstery, but in that case the body couldn’t have been found stretched out on the balcony, as its discoverer stated and the hotel administrator reconfirmed, unless, after having soiled the chair, Ewart had dragged himself back to the balcony to call out for help from there, a rather futile thing when the street was full of the rousing “rat-a-tat” of firecrackers and pistol shots. Nor does it seem probable that, even if death was not instantaneous, he would have had time to do much strolling about. Señor Mellado, it has to be said in passing, must have been a disastrously bad detective if the fact of not finding any weapon in the room struck him as conclusive proof that the bullet had come from outside, as if murderers were in the habit of leaving their firearms next to their victims in order to make the police’s work that much easier. And Stephen Graham’s explanation of Ewart’s curiosity is entirely unnecessary: a man does not need to have heard the famous rat-a-tat for months during a war in order to take a look out at the street, whether or not shots are being fired there.
There was something excessive in the statement by Graham that was reprinted by the newspapers on January 4 in unusually complete form: not only were the principal and secondary facts of the life and personality of Ewart given — his origins, his books — but also all the random circumstances that had brought him to Mexico which I related earlier, including his great distress at the lack of a change of clothes. Excélsior noted: “Señora Graham explains that he stayed in the city waiting for his luggage, since he was known in London social circles as an exemplarily well dressed person, and the fact of not receiving his short pants (trunks) was greatly irritating to him. ‘It was just an accident that he travelled to Mexico.’ ” The first sentence is so absurd — making elegance depend on a pair of shorts, and if they were underwear the thing is even more demented, it wouldn’t have ruined him to buy himself a pair of local zaragüelles—that we may suspect an erroneous translation of the word “trunks” here. In any case, the Mexican reporters had the undeniable merit of extracting a few words from the silent and mysterious Mrs. Graham, who does not generally appear, by mention or description, in a speaking or active role, and hardly even as a passive presence, in her husband’s travel books, even when she accompanied him from the first day of the expedition to the last (Rose Savory was her maiden name, it would seem). According to Excélsior, she added yet another line about Ewart, perhaps superfluous if it wasn’t in answer to a specific question: “He had a very pleasant personality, in the opinion of all those who knew him, and he had no enemies, Señora Graham stated.” She was being rather audacious here, no doubt, for the second of her claims is a difficult one to make about the winner of a great victory, though perhaps by 1923 he had ceased to have enemies.
But even stranger than the declarations made in situ by the matrimonial pair was the mise-en-scène of the death that Graham offered at the end of his aforementioned book, The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, after painstakingly recalling and recounting all that the two men of the trio said and did on that 31st of December which for one of them would become the final day of all years. They separated at about 11:30 p.m., strange that they didn’t stay together only half an hour longer to celebrate the arrival of 1923 and raise a glass to the future. “Then he went to his hotel and we went to ours,” says Graham in his book, “and the pandemonium increased till midnight, when it burst into hell let loose.” And he adds with total certainty, as if he had been peering through the keyhole at Ewart’s room or there inside it, neither supposing nor conjecturing but simply stating, “Wilfrid went straight to his hotel, undressed, washed, got into his pyjamas, put a blade into his safety razor, and evidently had intended to have a shave before going to bed, when he had been attracted by some new happening down in the street below. He went to the window, and at the same moment a spent bullet went right through his eye and he fell back into the room a dead man.” One more stroke of bad luck, or chance or fate or destiny if you like: a “spent bullet” or a cold bullet or a dead bullet is a bullet that has begun to lose angle and velocity in its trajectory. I won’t be the one to explain how it’s possible that a bullet that didn’t leave an exit wound but did remain lodged at the back of a skull had managed to “spend” itself or “grow cold” in its flight, for I know nothing about ballistics or obliqueness and less still about the science of postmortem examination. But that is what Graham wrote, “a spent bullet,” and what another writer, Hugh Cecil picked up and repeated, seventy-one years later.
True, the detail doesn’t much matter; in the end almost nothing about this death is explicable, including, for example, the fact that the Mexican newspapers, in all their great attention to detail, didn’t mention the corpse’s pyjamas. And it seems a major narrative licence on Graham’s part — if that was what it was, a licence — to decide that Ewart washed first and only then put a new blade in his safety razor, and did so, what’s more, in the absurd intention of going to bed freshly shaven, an impractical measure if ever there was, since the beard will grow back during the night and the interested party will arise in the morning needing, in all likelihood, another shave; it makes very little sense to shave at the end of the day if no nocturnal appointment awaits and there will be no one to appreciate the smoothness of your cheeks. It is no less strange that, according to Graham, Ewart fell “back into the room a dead man,” for as this phrase depicts the scene, there was no longer either balcony or armchair to receive the plummeting body. And though this could be understood merely as an attempt to dramatize what is already dramatic, it is equally impossible for Graham to have known that the bullet passed through his friend’s eye “at the very moment” he went out to the balcony, and not, for example, after he had lingered there for some time, admiring the pandemonium. In any case, Graham doesn’t do much dramatizing of his narrative, far less, of course, than its impromptu Mexican chroniclers.