“Made from an infant’s thighbone,” he explained. “Seventeenth century. Probably by Chinese tribesmen but I’m not sure. Fascinating, don’t you think?”
He went on to show me the large box of prepared soil in which he had planted his tobacco seeds. “When they reach a good height I’ll transplant them in my back garden,” he explained.
It was a pleasant evening we spent, drinking, talking, and slowly reducing a bottle of passable sherry he had brought back from the army and kept from Maude. I left him standing on his doorstep, a rather forlorn figure, and only after turning the corner did I hear his door slam as he went inside to await Maude’s return.
Shortly afterwards I had to cross the Channel for an indefinite stay and I didn’t know when or if I’d see Walter again, so I journeyed to Teddington to make my farewell. It was Saturday, Walter’s pub night. He didn’t show up at his usual time, but I waited patiently, sipping warm beer and chatting with the Ace of Spades’ affable landlord.
Walter arrived quite late. His face was drawn. Instead of his customary pint of beer he ordered Scotch. When he gulped it down I noticed his hands were trembling.
“She wouldn’t let me be,” he muttered. “I returned her insults at first. After a while I gave up but she wouldn’t. She followed me to the basement and kept shouting.” He passed a hand over his face. “I went into the garden but she was there, too. She wouldn’t let me be.”
When he heard that I was leaving England, his lips began to tremble. The value he plainly attributed to our friendship moved me.
“Soon as I get the chance I’ll come by again,” I assured him.
“You might not. Listen,” he stood up and squared his shoulders. “I’d like you to have one of my pipes. Kind of a souvenir. Come home with me now and—”
I protested — less, I’m afraid, from a reluctance to diminish his collection by a single item than from a strong disinclination to meet Maude. I kept the reason to myself but Walter, suddenly defiant, said, “The hell with Maude. Anyway, she may have gone out.” He held up a hand. “I insist. We’ll have a goodbye drink at my place.”
We rode the bus. He talked cheerfully all the way but I knew he was praying Maude wouldn’t be at home. So was I.
Our prayers were answered. She had left a card propped on the mantelpiece which Walter read aloud. “You are not fit to live with. I despise and hate you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Walter laughed. I hadn’t really seen him laugh before but now he threw back his head and laughed. “Hope to God she means it,” he gasped. Then he laughed some more and was still laughing on his way to the cellar for the last of the sherry. Then he was silent. A loud cry like that of a scalded animal arose suddenly from somewhere downstairs. It ended in a torrent of curses. I ran down the stairs to him.
“Look... oh, my God, look, will you?” His voice broke. “See what that... that — see what she’s done.”
A ghastly display of spite confronted me. The closet lock had been forced, the velvet drape torn out, the pipes scattered. Several were chipped. The stem of the Dutch clay was snapped, three bowls crushed by a frenzied heel. It must have taken Walter half a lifetime to gather this proud store and now he knelt amid its ruin, almost sobbing with anger and disbelief.
I took his arm and helped him to his feet. “I know how you must feel. I’m really sorry, Walter.”
His eyes blazed. “If she comes back, if she ever comes back, I’ll...”
“Better relax,” I interrupted. “I want to leave you in a better mood than this.”
But there was fury in his eyes when I left and he clutched the wreckage of the thigh-bone pipe with a trembling, white-knuckled hand. On the way out I told myself that if Maude had any sense she wouldn’t show up here in a hurry. But I had barely turned the corner, my step slowed by an autumn fog, before a woman brushed past me, headed in the opposite direction. I caught only a fleeting glimpse of her face but hadn’t I seen it before, clumsily framed on Walter’s wall? I couldn’t be certain.
It was a year before I saw Walter again. I knew that it would be the last time, for I was on my way home to America. He looked like a new man, buoyantly content and living alone.
“She is in Liverpool with her sister,” he told me when I thought it politely proper to ask. “She’ll never worry me again, thank God.”
“You mean she isn’t coming back?”
“She never has and I don’t think she ever will.” He got up and strutted about his living room. “Bit of a change in the old place, what?”
He had certainly improved it. Bright new carpets, laden pipe racks, fresh coats of paint had worked wonders. The aspidistra and Maude’s huge portrait had vanished. In the basement he showed me the flue he had built for curing his tobacco. The postwar curtailment of tobacco purchases from America had forced many Englishmen to experiment in home cultivation. Walter was well advanced. His tobacco leaves were healthy-looking specimens, stacked in tightly bound bunches. Out in the garden, more grew within a carefully roped-off plot.
Later we sat and smoked. He was eager to hear my opinion of his product. “Got quite a tang,” I told him. “But it’s pretty good.”
It was, too, although it lacked the smooth coolness of a professionally prepared leaf and there was a pungency, a harsh biting quality, which took some getting used to. But soon I was smoking pipeful after pipeful with great relish. My evident delight in the product pleased him.
It was much later, after Walter’s drinks and perhaps an excess of smoking made us both drowse, that his words fretted in my mind. She never did come back. Hadn’t I seen her stalking through the fog that night? Still, she might have thought better of it, knowing how Walter must have felt following her insane slaughter of his pipes. She could have paused at the door, turned and gone away again. She must have, if it was really Maude whom I had seen. And if Walter was telling the truth, of course.
Next morning we said goodbye for the last time. At the door Walter said, “Hold on a minute. I’ve got something for you.”
While he was away, the postman had pushed a letter through the mail slot. I retrieved it and handed it to Walter when he returned, carrying a beautiful meerschaum which he pressed upon me. Then I left him, the pipe cool in my pocket and a crazy little puzzle worrying my brain. For the letter had been addressed to Maude Mayhew and my eye had caught the postmark too. It was Liverpool.
Walter was arrested six months later.
As I said, the trial wasn’t reported in our papers but the landlord of the Ace of Spades kept me informed and sent me local press clippings. A neighbor had grown suspicious during Maude’s long absence and, disbelieving Walter’s explanation that she had gone to her sister’s, traced the woman’s address and wrote. Maude, replied her sister, certainly was not in Liverpool but at home in Teddington with her husband. Occasionally they corresponded although, it was added, Maude’s letters had been uncommonly brief lately. Maude’s excuse for this, her sister went on, was a frequent fatigue which kept her letters short and, no doubt, accounted for the shakiness which had crept into her handwriitng.
The neighbor went to the police.
Walter admitted writing the letters to Liverpool in a simulation of Maude’s handwriting and it seemed obvious to the police that his only reason for so doing was to maintain the fiction of Maude’s continued existence — in other words, to conceal her departure. Why? And where was Maude?