Millie knew.
The white paper with the deckle edge was a letter from Phyllis out of the drawer in the shop, and the blue paper — he remembered it now — the blue paper he had left in the dirty developing bath.
He re-read his own pencilled words as clearly as if his eye had become possessed of telescopic sight:
“Millie dear, this does explain itself, doesn’t it?”
And then his name, signed with a flourish. He had been so pleased with himself when he had written it.
He fought wildly. The coffin was made of glass now, thick, heavy glass which would not respond to his greatest effort.
Millie was hesitating. She had picked up Phyllis’s letter. Now she was reading it again.
He saw her frown and tear the paper into shreds, thrusting the pieces into the pocket of her cardigan.
Henry Brownrigg understood. Millie was sorry for Phyllis. For all her obtuseness she had guessed at some of the girl’s piteous infatuation and had decided to keep her out of it.
What then? Henry Brownrigg writhed inside his inanimate body.
Millie was back at the table now. She was putting something else there. What was it? Oh, what was it?
The ledger! He saw it plainly, the old mottled ledger, whose story was plain for any fool coroner to read and misunderstand.
Millie had turned away now. He hardly noticed her pause before the fireplace. She did not stoop. Her felt-shod slipper flipped the gas-tap over.
Then she passed out of the door, extinguishing the light as she went. He heard the rustle of the thick curtain as she drew the door close. There was an infinitesimal pause and then the key turned in the lock.
She had behaved throughout the whole proceeding as though she had been getting dinner or tidying the spare room.
In his prison Henry Brownrigg’s impotent ghost listened. There was a hissing from the far end of the room.
In the attic, although he could not possibly hear it, he knew the meter ticked every two or three seconds.
Henry Brownrigg saw in a vision the scene in the morning. Every room in the house had the same key, so Millie would have no difficulty in explaining that on awakening she had noticed the smell of gas and, on finding her husband’s door locked, had opened it with her own key.
The ghost stirred in its shell. Once again the earth and earthly incidents looked small and negligible. The oblivion was coming, the darkness was waiting; only now it was no longer exciting darkness.
The shell moved. He felt it writhe and choke. It was fighting — fighting — fighting.
The darkness drew him. He was no longer conscious of the shell now. It had been beaten. It had given up the fight.
The streak of light beneath the blind where the street lamp shone was fading. Fading. Now it was gone.
As Henry Brownrigg’s ghost crept out into the cold a whisper came to it, ghastly in its conviction:
“They never get caught, that kind. They’re too dull, too practical, too unimaginative. They never get caught.”
Louis Golding
Pale Blue Nightgown
One of the most distinguished short stories it has ever been the privilege of “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine” to bring to its readers...
Mr. Dofferty was tall and thin and had big hands and feet. The small boys called him “Lampy,” which was an abbreviation of “Lamppost.” He hated the small boys calling him “Lampy,” not only because he was sensitive about his appearance, but because he hated small boys. He would rather have taken the top form in a refined girls’ school and would have got on very well there. He could have talked about Swinburne with the girls, and about his foreign travels. “Was there ever really a Dolores, Mr. Dofferty?” “Do the young warriors in Kashmir still go out to battle with roses behind their ears?” He would have been very happy in such a place.
But it had not worked out that way. He was getting on in years by the time he got his teacher’s certificate, and he could not pick and choose. He became a pupil-teacher at a boys’ school in Doomington. They were common boys. In the course of time he became headmaster.
He knew that he deserved better things. He let it be known that he had traveled about the East quite a lot in his young days; and it was true, for he had been the son of a noncommissioned officer out in India. Later, he was employed on a tea plantation in Ceylon. When that failed, he came to England to take up teaching.
He was very proud of having traveled in the East. His “sanctum,” as he called it, was cluttered with eastern curios. There were prayer-wheels and fly-whisks, curtains and cushions, elephants carved in ebony, ashtrays and pen-trays of Benares ware, a Malay kris he used as a paper-knife, a soapstone Buddha he used as a paperweight. It was not very suitable furniture for a headmaster’s room in a poor boys’ school in Doomington, but it put people in their place. It put him in his place, too. He was a traveler, an empire-builder.
He did not feel so sure of himself when he went out into the playground. He would have preferred to stay in his sanctum, but he had a feeling that the small boys took to talking and laughing about him when they got together. He would stand for a long time, quite still, behind the windows of one of the classrooms, and then, all of a sudden, he was a few inches behind you. For a person with such large feet, he moved very quickly and quietly over the gravel.
The schoolday came to an end at half-past four. It was bad enough when the boys collected in the play-intervals between lessons, but when the last lesson was over, there was absolutely no excuse for them to be hanging about, whispering, and pointing with their thumbs over their shoulders. On the day in Mr. Dofferty’s history with which this tale is concerned, there was an unusually large troop of boys assembled near the wood-work room, at the bottom end of the playground. Mr. Dofferty happened to be at the top end of the playground. He observed that only one of the boys was talking, a small, pale boy named Albert Hewitt. The rest were listening. At least, they were listening in the intervals of laughing. The narrative with which Albert Hewitt was regaling them seemed to entertain them mightily, though Albert himself seemed not at all amused. On the contrary, his spotty little face seemed paler than usual; his eyes seemed to stand quite a way out of his head.
Mr. Dofferty did not like Albert Hewitt; he thought him a soapy, sneaky sort of boy. He had had occasion more than once to take him into his sanctum and use the cane on him. What was the boy doing, holding forth at this time of day, when well-behaved boys should be making tracks for home, with their heads filled with the night’s homework? What and who was there to talk about that was so frightfully funny?
Of course; Mr. Dofferty could swear to it... “Lampy,” and once again, “Lampy.” It was a long way from the bottom end to the top end of the playground, but Mr. Dofferty had extraordinarily acute hearing. “Lampy” again, and a roar of laughter. The boy was talking about his headmaster; he was making jokes about his headmaster. Mr. Dofferty’s lips set thin and hard.
Mr. Dofferty made a sort of sideways movement on a segment of a wide circle towards the group of boys. He looked a bit like a huntsman keeping to windward of his quarry. The maneuver was successful. He had come up to within a few yards of them, always in the rear of Albert Hewitt, before the boys became aware of him. Then, suddenly, the boys caught sight of him: all but Albert Hewitt. One moment later they had scuttled away, like a warren-full of rabbits shocked into a hedge by a footstep. A hand came down heavily on Albert Hewitt’s shoulder.
“You were talking about me, I think,” said Mr. Dofferty. His voice was gentle.