They worked quickly; so on Tuesday...
Meanwhile, normality. That was the main thing. He must do nothing to alarm Millie or excite her curiosity.
It did not occur to him that there would be a grim irony in getting Millie to help him dust the shop that evening. But he dismissed the idea. They’d never do it thoroughly in the time.
He washed in the kitchen and went back into the hall. A step on the stairs above him brought a scream to his throat which he only just succeeded in stifling.
It was Millie. She had come in the back way without him hearing her, heaven knew how long before.
“I’ve borrowed a curtain from Mother for your bedroom door, Henry,” she said mildly. “You won’t be troubled by the draft up there any more. It’s such a good thick one. I’ve just been fixing it up.”
Henry Brownrigg made a noise which might have meant anything. His nerves had gone to pieces.
Her next remark was reassuring, however; so reassuring that he almost laughed aloud.
“Oh, Henry,” she said, “you only gave me four of those pills today, dear.
You won’t forget the other one, will you?”
“Cold ham from the cooked meat shop, cold tinned peas, potato salad and Worcester sauce. What a cook I’ve married, my dear Millie.”
Henry Brownrigg derived a vicious pleasure from the clumsy sarcasm, and when Millie’s pale face became wooden he was gratified.
As he sat at the small table and looked at her he was aware of a curious phenomenon. The woman stood out from the rest of the room’s contents as though she alone was in relief. He saw every line of her features, every fold of her dark cotton foulard dress, as though they were drawn with a thick black pencil.
Millie was silent. Even her usual flow of banality had dried up, and he was glad of it.
He found himself regarding her dispassionately, as though she had been a stranger. He did not hate her, he decided. On the contrary, he was prepared to believe that she was quite an estimable, practicable person in her own limited fashion. But she was in the way.
This plump, fatuous creature, not even different in her very obtuseness from many of the other matrons in the town, had committed the crowning impudence of getting in the way of Henry Brownrigg. She, this ridiculous, lowly woman, actually stood between Henry Brownrigg and the inmost desires of his heart.
It was an insight into the state of the chemist’s mind that at that moment nothing impressed him so forcibly as her remarkable audacity.
Monday, he thought. Monday, and possibly Tuesday, and then...
Millie cleared away.
Mr. Brownrigg drank his first glass of whisky and soda with a relish he did not often experience. For him the pleasure of his Saturday night libations lay in the odd sensation he experienced when really drunk.
When Henry Brownrigg was a sack of limp, uninviting humanity to his wife and the rest of the world, to himself he was a quiet, all-powerful ghost, seated, comfortable and protected, in the shell of his body, able to see and comprehend everything, but too mighty and too important to direct any of the drivelling little matters which made up his immediate world.
On these occasions Henry Brownrigg tasted godhead.
The evening began like all the others, and by the time there was but an inch of amber elixir in the square bottle, Millie and the dust in the shop and Doctor Crupiner had become in his mind as ants and ant burdens, while he towered above them, a colossus in mind and power.
When the final inch had dwindled to a yellow stain in the bottom of the white glass bottle Mr. Brownrigg sat very still. In a few minutes now he would attain the peak of that ascendancy over his fellow-mortals when the body, so important to them, was for him literally nothing; not even a dull encumbrance, not even a nerveless covering but a nothingless, an unimportant, unnoticed element.
When Millie came in at last a pin could have been thrust deep into Mr. Brownrigg’s flesh and he would not have noticed it.
It was when he was in bed, his useless body clad in clean pajamas, that he noticed that Millie was not behaving quite as usual. She had folded his clothes neatly on the chair at the end of the bed when he saw her peering at something intently.
He followed her eyes and saw for the first time the new curtain. It certainly was a fine affair, a great, thick, heavy plush thing that looked as though it would stop any draft there ever had been.
He remembered clearly losing his temper with Millie in front of young Perry one day, and, searching in his mind for a suitable excuse, had invented this draft beneath his bedroom door. And there wasn’t one, his ghost remembered; that was the beauty of it. The door fitted tightly in the jamb. But it gave Millie something to worry about.
Millie went out of the room without extinguishing the lights. He tried to call out to her and only then realized the disadvantages of being a disembodied spirit. He could not speak, of course.
He was lying puzzled at this obvious flaw in his omnipotence when he heard her go downstairs instead of crossing into her room. He was suddenly furious and would have risen, had it been possible. But in the midst of his anger he remembered something amusing and lay still, inwardly convulsed with secret laughter.
Soon Millie would be dead. Dead — dead — dead!
Millie would be stupid no longer. Millie would appal him by her awful mindlessness no more. Millie would be dead.
She came up again and stepped softly into the room.
The alcohol was beginning to take its full effect now and he could not move his head. Soon oblivion would come and he would leave his body and rush off into the exciting darkness.
He saw only Millie’s head and shoulders when she came into his line of vision. He was annoyed. She still had those thick black lines round her, and there was an absorbed expression upon her face which he remembered seeing before when she was engrossed in some particularly difficult household task.
She switched out the light and then went over to the far window. He was interested now, and saw her pull up the blinds.
Then to his astonishment he heard the crackle of paper; not an ordinary crackle, but something familiar, something he had heard hundreds of times before.
He placed it suddenly. Sticky paper. His own reel of sticky paper from the shop.
He was so cross with her for touching it that for some moments he did not wonder what she was doing with it, and it was not until he saw her silhouetted against the second row of panes that he guessed. She was sticking up the window cracks.
His ghost laughed again. The draft! Silly, stupid Millie trying to stop the draft.
She pulled down the blinds and turned on the light again. Her face was mild and expressionless as ever, her blue eyes vacant and foolish.
He saw her go to the dressingtable, still moving briskly, as she always did when working about the house.
Once again the phenomenon he had noticed at the evening meal became startlingly apparent. He saw her hand and its contents, positively glowing because of its black outline, thrown up in high relief against the white table-cover.
Millie was putting two pieces of paper there: one white with a deckle edge, one blue and familiar.
Henry Brownrigg’s ghost yammered in its prison. His body ceased to be negligible: it became a coffin, a sealed, leaden coffin suffocating him in its senseless shell. He fought to free himself, to stir that mighty weight, to move.
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?”