For some seconds, he supposed, he gazed at the staring eyes, at the hair lightly swaying, as if stirred by a sluggish breeze. Then the cloud passed, and he could again see nothing but the shimmering surface of the pool.
He shaded his eyes, lurched to and fro, trying to escape from the angle of light. He grabbed the loose beam of the bench, intending to bridge the rocks of the waterfall to get a new angle, but he stumbled, cutting his hand on a splinter of the beam, which splashed into the pool and was carried away.
He related that he shouted at himself as if he were someone else. “Pull yourself together, man! You were dazzled by the moonlight, and you’ve had an hallucination. You were thinking of Rita, and beginning to fear she had met with an accident, and you visualized your fear. How could she be sort of standing up under the water like that?”
He half-believed it. The other half sent him scurrying from the pool down the track to the village. “Check up at the cottage anyway,” he muttered. “Better not mention the hallucination — make people laugh. It’s partly that damned syllabus. Anxiety complex!”
Fortunate that Ruth Watlington’s cottage was so near! At the end of the track through the wood, he did not vault the stile; he took it slowly, regaining his breath, coming to terms with his panic. A hundred yards of scrub, then the cottage, built at right angles to the lane that wound its way to the village. Slowly across the scrub.
Already he could discern the wicket gate of the cottage garden. And there — a dozen feet away — were the yellow sleeves, the pale green dress, grey-white in the moonlight. He bounded forward. As he snatched her in his arms his nostrils were filled with the scent he had never perceived on any other woman — the scent of gardenia.
“Oh, my darling — thank God — had a ghastly hallucination! Thought I saw you standing up drowned — in Drunkard’s Leap.” Her head was resting on his shoulder. The scent of gardenia spurred him — he could have vaulted innumerable stiles. “Speak, Rita, darling!”
“But I’m not Rita!” cried Ruth Watlington. “What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?”
He swung her round so that she faced the moon.
“It must be this dress,” she said. “Rita wore it once and didn’t like it, so I took it off her hands.”
He gaped at her, his senses in a vacuum in which his one clear impression was the scent of gardenia, almost as sharp as when, but a moment ago, her head had lain on his shoulder.
“I thought the hallucination, or whatever it is, was about me, and you seemed hysterical, or I wouldn’t have—”
“Then perhaps it wasn’t hallucination!” he gasped. “Where is Rita?”
“By now she’s at Lynmouth, where she is spending the night with her cousin, Fred Calder, and his wife. They’ve got a bungalow there. Mr. Calder rang up before Rita came in. She had just time to catch the eight-fifty bus. She asked me to phone you, which I did. Effie Cumber — one of the kitchen-maids, in case you don’t know — took the message. I told her you’d be in your classroom. But, I’m afraid I forgot till about nine.”
“I left a little before nine. Then Rita never went near Drunkard’s Leap!” He laughed at his own fear, though it wasn’t a wholesome laugh. “Yet — it was horrible! I can’t believe it wasn’t real.”
“Well, come in first and tell me all about it. I’ve got a bottle of brandy for emergencies. I think you have been overworking on that syllabus... Oh, you’ve cut your hand — it’s bleeding. I’ll try and bind it up for you, though I’m very bad at anything to do with blood.”
“It’s nothing. Must have cut it when I fell down.”
He followed her into the sitting-room of the cottage, stopping in the hall to hang up his mackintosh.
As is known, he stayed there for about an hour, leaving before eleven, slightly fuddled with brandy. Ruth’s purpose was to delay investigation. No police system, however scientific, could be expected to solve the riddle of why she should want to create the delay. The pool was obviously useless as a permanent hiding place. Once she had made her getaway, as she had, it would not have mattered to her if the police had found the body a few minutes later.
Nor did anybody attribute any special importance to Herbert Cud-den’s assertion that, in mistaking Ruth for Rita, he was misled not only by Rita’s dress, but also by Rita’s particular perfume. Yet Ruth Watlington was convicted — thanks to Detective Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends — for no other reason than that she had put on the dead girl’s dress and worn her perfume.
After a stiff brandy, Herbert gave Ruth details of the now supposed hallucination.
“But the pool is forty feet deep!” objected Ruth. “If there had been a body under the surface it would have been at the bottom, and you couldn’t have seen it without a strong searchlight.”
“I know. But one does not think of things like that at the time.”
He told her about it all over again, and then, his fear banished, they talked about Rita in general, an absorbing topic to both. This conversation has been grossly misunderstood by the commentators, who said that it revealed Ruth as an hysteric, titillating her own terror by talking about the woman she had just murdered. Her showing him her scrapbook of babies’ photographs was stigmatized as the height of hypocrisy — alternatively as indicating a depth of morbid cruelty which would almost justify a plea of insanity.
Whereas the truth is that if Ruth had been a hypocrite she would never have committed the murder. “The schoolmarm who beat Scotland Yard” would have had short shrift if the police had been able to grasp that, though she was capable of murder, she was not capable of insincerity, cruelty, or greed.
At the time of the murder, Ruth was thirty-seven; would have been physically mistakable for thirty if she had not affected a certain dowdiness of dress. She was trim and springy, athletic without a touch of thickness. A truth about herself that she did not know was that the right touch here and there would have converted her into a more than ordinarily attractive woman. When she was sixteen, a boy of her own age had kissed her at a party, to her own satisfaction. Three days later she overheard the boy laughing about it to another boy. There was a loutish reference to her own over-estimation of her charms.
The incident distressed her sufficiently for her to confide in her young stepmother, for whom, in defiance of tradition, she entertained a warm affection. It did not occur to her that Corinne Watlington, who was only seven years older, might be sexually jealous.
“Men are rather beastly, you know,” explained Corinne Watlington. “They lure you on with flattery and then laugh at you. It’s as well to be on guard, or you may find yourself humiliated where you least expect it.”
Ruth did not want to be humiliated, so she went on guard — so effectively that the young men of her generation dubbed her a prude and a codfish, and left her out — which made her manner more brusque than ever.
Following Corinne’s advice, Ruth concentrated on a career. She won a scholarship to Oxford, generously resigning the bursary, as her mother had left her some two hundred pounds a year. She represented the University in lacrosse, tennis, and fencing. She took honors in history and literature, doing so well that she was invited to read for a Fellowship, but declined, as she wished to teach the young. She was appointed to Mardean, which was then considered the leading school for girls.
When she was twenty-seven she found herself thinking too intensively about one of the classical masters. In her emotion there was no echo of the boys at the parties. Indeed, she hardly thought directly of the man himself. She thought of herself in a house, just large enough, with a very green lawn on which very young children — hers — were playing. Somewhere in the background, giving substance and security to the dream, was the classical master.