“I don’t think it was cold at all. She left because she was bored. I just knew it. Do you suppose we ought to have put her name on the programme in bigger type? She was as big as Val and bigger than Shakespeare. It was a mistake ever to do this play out of doors. I’ll never have anything to do with a Pastoral again.”
It was impossible to keep everyone in the dark. When Dr Bliss had assured himself that there was nothing wrong with Hector except shock, hunger, and a wetting, he suggested that he be moved to a place where he might rest, and that meant that Mr Webster had to be let into part of the secret. Both guestrooms at St Agnes’ were occupied, one by the Nymphs and the other by the girls who had speaking parts in the play, for at the last minute Griselda had decided that it would be inhospitable to make the girls use makeshift dressing rooms. Mr Webster was a humane man, but something within him powerfully resisted the idea that an unsuccessful suicide should curl up in his bed, and therefore he led the way to his daughter Griselda’s pretty room, and Roscoe and Dr Bliss helped the feeble Hector to slip off his wet clothes, put on a pair of Mr Webster’s pyjamas, and crawl into the bed there. As they passed the Nymphs’ dressing room the door, was opened a crack, and a bright eye appeared for a moment, and within a few minutes the Nymphs, and the girls in the other dressing room, and all their friends, knew that Hector Mackilwraith had attempted to drown himself, and had been taken upstairs in St Agnes’, soaking wet.
Fortunately The Shed had not been used as a dressing room for the men of the cast, but only as a makeup room and a greenroom. But even so, there were a variety of personal articles in it which had to be restored to their owners, and it was not Valentine’s wish to have everyone snooping around The Shed, guessing at what happened. Therefore she sought out Solly and Cobbler, told them that she wanted to keep The Shed closed, and asked them to see that the men’s property was taken back to the men’s dressing room, which was in the basement of the house. They went to The Shed and found the way barred by Auntie Puss.
“No one may go in here at present,” said she.
“But Miss Pottinger,” said Solly, “we have special orders from Miss Rich.”
“Perhaps, then, Miss Rich will be good enough to come here and tell me so.”
“My dear lady,” said Cobbler; “it is needless to dissemble; we are privy to the dark secret of The Shed. We are going in to mop up the blood.”
“I don’t understand what you are talking about,” said Auntie Puss.
“It’s really quite all right,” said Solly; “we know what happened.”
“If that is so, you have no right to speak of it in that flippant tone.”
“And why not, if I may ask?” said Cobbler, argumentatively. “Why should we go all solemn because Mackilwraith has hashed up his attempt at suicide?”
“Hush!” said Auntie Puss, fiercely. “Don’t you dare to use that word.”
“It’s the right word, isn’t it?”
“It will provoke a scandal if it gets around. Do you want to ruin the man’s life?”
“He’s just done his best to ruin it himself.”
“That has nothing to do with it. He has been spared, doubtless for some purpose beyond our understanding. If you so much as hint at it again, Mr Cobbler, I’ll speak to the Dean about you, and you will have to find yourself another position.”
“Blackmail!” said Cobbler.
“Call it what you like,” said Auntie Puss. “This man deserves his chance, and I shall do whatever I can to see that he gets it. I do not approve of the modern custom of babbling disgraceful secrets to anybody and everybody. I do not know Mr Mackilwraith well, and what I do know about him I do not care for, but I will not be a party to his ruin. Do you understand me, Mr Cobbler?”
“I hear you, Miss Pottinger, but I shall never understand you. The world is full of people who have tried to kill themselves, or who have at least thought about it. It’s as natural as falling in love or getting one’s heart broken. I don’t see what’s so disgraceful about it. It’s the first interesting thing Mackilwraith has ever done, so far as I know.”
Valentine appeared around the corner of the house.
“Thank you so much, Miss Pottinger,” said she. “Will you let me have the key now? Mr Webster is offering some refreshment in his library. Perhaps you had better have a hot drink. You’ve been wonderful, keeping watch for so long.”
“I am glad to do whatever I can,” said Auntie Puss, who had been shivering a little in the night air. “And I advise you to remember, Mr Cobbler, that I can do more.” She rattled off toward the house, her head erect.
“My respect for Mackilwraith was never very high, and it is dropping every minute,” said Solly, as they went into The Shed. “Can you imagine a man of any gumption at all thinking that he could hang himself with a rotten old rope like that? I’ll bet it’s fifty years old. What a boob.”
“I don’t suppose he thought about it very clearly,” said Valentine.
“Oh yes he did,” said Cobbler. “He probably imagined he was wrapped up in his sorrows, but we all have keener perception than we know. The superficial Mackilwraith, the despairing lover, thought the rope would do, but the true, essential, deep-down Mackilwraith knew damn well that it wouldn’t. You don’t play safe for forty years and then cut loose. Our Hector was looking for pity, not death.”
“Why do you call him the despairing lover?” asked Valentine, who had thought that this was a secret between herself and Auntie Puss.
“Because it’s obvious that’s why he did it. He’s been mooning after the Impatient Griselda for weeks. Surely you noticed? Anyway, he told me so—or as good as admitted it—at that awful brawl of yours, Bridgetower. I had a notion that he’d do something silly, though I never thought it would be anything as silly as this.”
“Well, do keep it quiet, won’t you, Humphrey,” said Valentine. “We don’t want to make trouble for him—more trouble than he has now, that’s to say.”
“I don’t know why everybody imagines that I am going to run around town blatting everything I know. That old poll-parrot at the door said exactly the same thing to me, though much less nicely. I’m not going to blab. On the honour of a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists. But I don’t see why I can’t discuss it with you two; you know all about it anyway.”
“It would be rather hard on Griselda. People might think she had driven him to it.”
“That would merely enhance her reputation as a charmer. But really I don’t suppose she had anything to do with it.”
“What, then?” asked Solly.
“She was just a hook on which Mackilwraith hung a middle-aged man’s nerve-storm. Do you know what I think ails Mackilwraith? Male menopause. This is his last fling at romance before he goes out of business entirely as a male creature.”
“He can’t be much over forty,” said Valentine.
“Spiritually—if one may use the word of Hector—he’s been seventy for years. No, it’s the male climacteric. The last gutterings of the candle—the gurgle of the last pint of suds in the drain.”
“Well, I don’t agree,” said Solly. “I think it’s the logical outcome of his education and the sort of life he has led. He’s vulgar. I don’t mean just that he wears awful suits and probably eats awful food: I mean that he has a crass soul. He thinks that when his belly is full and his job safe, he’s got the world by the tail. He has never found out anything about himself, so how can he ever know anything about other people? The condition of a vulgarian is that he never expects anything good or bad that happens to him to be the result of his own personality; he always thinks it’s Fate, especially if it’s bad. The only people who make any sense in the world are those who know that whatever happens to them has its roots in what they are.”
“I think you are both hard on him,” said Valentine. “When I found him he was really very touching. You’re both away off the track.”