Mr. Loomis put down his tea cup. He moved into the hall. He glanced nervously up the stairs. Anxiety, almost identical with genuine concern for his wife, seized him. Hardly knowing whether he was play-acting or not, Mr. Loomis rushed out of the house, ran to the Milton’s front door, and started to bang on it. At length Mamie appeared in a crumpled wrapper, her pinkish hair disheveled.
“Quick... gasped Mr. Loomis. “My wife... gas... door locked. Phone Doctor Heather... quick.”
Mamie grasped an emergency. “Al, come down,” she screamed.
She was on the phone when Al rolled sleepily downstairs, buttoning his trousers as he came. In a few seconds the two men were back in Mr. Loomis’ house.
“This door here,” panted Mr. Loomis outside his wife’s room. “She locked it. I told you... the gas...”
He smelt the gas; he saw Al’s great bulk lurch against the locked door; he heard the hinges creak. But suddenly all this seemed a spectacle fulfilling itself in some remote region of space. Once again Al hurled himself against the door. Mr. Loomis heard the splintering of wood, was conscious of a strengthening of the smell of gas.
Then, brown and pink, the roses of the mat loomed toward him and struck him in the face.
When he came to himself, he was lying on the small, uncomfortable sofa in the living-room downstairs. He was conscious of mental confusion and a vague dread. He was conscious too of Mamie seated by him and bathing his aching forehead. Directly in his path of vision was the text above the mantel. Someone must have turned it around, for THOU LORD SEEST ME stared back at him.
“There, there.” He was aware of the pungent odor of spirits beneath his nostrils. “Come on now. Take a sup of this.”
Mr. Loomis gulped down a mouthful of brandy. He managed to ask: “Is — is Mabel all right?”
Mamie looked down at him and he saw that her good-natured brown eyes were filled with pity.
“It’s best you hear it from me instead of the doctor. She’s gone, poor soul.”
In the tangle of Mr. Loomis’ emotions the principal feeling was wonder. Mabel, the seemingly indestructible, was dead. The thing he had cherished as an impossible dream had actually happened. And now that he had helped to bring it about, he saw with perverse clarity that this was the only success of his life. He had failed as a husband and as a father; he had failed even to amount to anything really important at Tinker and Smythe. It had been left to him to find his true niche as a murderer.
A little murderer, perhaps, a mat-pushing murderer. But a successful one.
The secret joy, which had come at the moment when he first paused outside the bedroom door, seeped through him again-. Who could say now that he was a poor little man?
Mamie had taken his hand and was murmuring to him vague inarticulate sounds of comfort. He yielded luxuriously to her pity.
A few moments later Dr. Heather entered the room. Mr. Loomis, who had not before seen his wife’s new physician, gathered an impression of a solemn young man with a formal face and a precise voice which said:
“I want you to know, Mr. Loomis, that you have my deepest sympathy. I also want to reassure you. Mr. Potts has told me of your — ah — little domestic squabble last night. He is afraid that you may feel responsible for the fact that the gas was not turned off and hence for the — ah — tragedy itself.”
Mr. Loomis found the young man’s pedantic mode of speech difficult to follow. He sat up on the couch, peering in bewilderment.
“In the first place,” continued the doctor, “there was a pane of glass broken in the window. This in itself would have prevented a sufficient concentration of gas to prove lethal. But, as it happens, we may dismiss the gas. Your wife did not die from asphyxiation.”
Mr. Loomis at last understood the words and there rushed back to him a picture of himself the night before banging down the sash after he had shouted to Mabel from the window. Yes, of course, he had broken the pane. Blankly he ventured: “She didn’t die...?”
“Not from asphyxiation. As you know, your wife consulted me a few days ago for what she believed to be indigestion. I examined her and suspected a serious heart condition. I prescribed sedatives and advised her strongly against all exertion or excitement. The episode with the little girl last night must have proved too much for her. She must have had a heart attack soon after she locked herself into the bedroom. She had certainly been dead several hours before the gas started to escape.”
Mr. Loomis, listening and understanding, began to shiver. Mamie put a consoling arm around him.
“And so,” went on Dr. Heather in the tone he had cultivated for sad occasions, “you have no reason to blame yourself for negligence. And, if on the strength of your little disagreement last night, you should be in doubt as to your wife’s affections, I can lay your mind at rest on that score also. When I informed her of her heart condition, she insisted that no mention should be made to you. You had your worries at the office, she said. She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety.” He laid a rather cold hand on Mr. Loomis’ sleeve. “She was a good woman.”
There was more — much more. Dr. Heather seemed to talk interminably about a death certificate, about the fact that an inquest would not be necessary, about funeral arrangements. There were countless telephone calls and through it all, Mamie and Al, friendly and comforting, handled everything. Mr. Loomis, coddled with cups of tea and nips of brandy, got through the day in a state of suspended animation.
But at last it was all over and he was alone. He stood in the middle of the room with his arms limp at his sides. The gray evening light, peering through the window, seemed to muse over the framed wool text above the mantel. Suddenly feeling started again with the violence of a bullet tearing through his flesh.
He had not been a success as a murderer.
He had been a grotesque failure. Mabel had died, as she had lived, on her own initiative. He had been a foolish little man, inflated with self-importance, pushing a mat around ineffectually as a child might push a toy.
The doctor’s voice came back to him:
She did not wish to give you any extra anxiety. She was a good woman.
Mr. Loomis felt dry and hollow as an autumn seedpod. He gazed in agony at the text in front of him.
It was a lie. Even God couldn’t see him. He was too small.
Everyone was very kind. Tinker and Smythe insisted upon a two weeks’ vacation. Miss Henderson wrote a little note of condolence. Dinah Milton, now that the ogress was laid to rest in the Pimlico cemetery, gamboled at will between the two houses. Since Mamie, at best a slipshod mother, was more and more preoccupied with Al, there were blissful hours in which Mr. Loomis could take the little girl walking in Kensington Gardens and gorge her at Lyons’ Tea Shops.
Gradually he began to believe that the Destiny, which had denied him stature, might also yield him rewards.
But on the last night of his holiday, after he had read Dinah to sleep with Black Beauty, this new budding hope was brutally destroyed. Al and Mamie, their faces shining with happiness and Bass, announced the fact that Mamie had finally decided to marry Al. They would immigrate together. The boat for Australia was sailing soon and Al’s papers would suffice for his wife and Dinah.
Mr. Loomis managed to twitter his congratulations but as he lay sleepless and alone in his conjugal bed, he felt all the pangs of disenchantment. Dinah had been a shining prize dangled before him only to be snatched away. The future stretched ahead of him bitterly empty.
But slowly, daringly, the thought of Rose Henderson came to comfort him. Romantic images stole through him as he tossed against the pillows. Miss Henderson looking up from her desk, showing her fine white teeth in a smile of pleasure at his return next day to the office. Miss Henderson’s shy acknowledgement as he thanked her for her letter. Miss Henderson, perhaps, across the table from him in a little restaurant. “Oh, Mr. Loomis, all these years I’ve waited, but I never thought...”