Mr. Green hesitates. Mr. Green, formerly the Reverend Green, stands frozen in the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, watching Miss Scarlet advance toward the window seat. He wishes to step noiselessly from the room and vanish along a corridor, but he fears that his slightest motion will startle her into attention. Mr. Green does not dislike Miss Scarlet, but she makes him uneasy; young women in general make him uneasy. He does not know where to look when he speaks to them, and in particular he does not know where to look when he speaks to Miss Scarlet. To look away is rude; to stare into her restless, twilight-colored eyes is unthinkable; to fasten his attention on her full small mouth is to have the sensation of being about to be swallowed; to lower his eyes, even for an instant, to her distinctly separate breasts is an indecency. Mr. Green is a bachelor of thirty-eight who lives with his mother and still sleeps in his boyhood room. The same bookcase that once held Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Kidnapped, and The Three Musketeers now holds Skeat’s English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day, the thirteen volumes of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Celtic Scotland by W. F. Skene (3 volumes), the county volumes of the English Place-Name Society, all the volumes published by the Early English Text Society, including 194 volumes (up to 1933) of the Old Series and 126 volumes (discontinued in 1921) of the Extra Series, as well as philological quarterlies, dialect dictionaries, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English grammars and morphologies, and miscellaneous publications of the Camden Society, the Pipe Roll Society, the Canterbury and York Society, the Scottish Text Society, the Caxton Society, and the Rolls Series. A tendency toward the eccentric, held in check and made respectable by faith, has been released and accentuated by the loss of faith. Mr. Green has a passion for English place-names (he is the author of “A Contribution to the Study of Cheshire Place-Names of Scandinavian Origin,” published in Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire), obsolete card games (ombre, primero, noddy, ruff and honour), gem lore, Pictish history, ogham inscriptions, a theory of Wyatt’s versification according to which a strong pause is the equivalent of a stressed syllable and a line contains an irregular number of unstressed syllables, pre-Celtic Britain, and the history of armor. Mr. Green walks twenty miles a day and is subject to attacks of melancholy. He is comfortable only in the presence of children and elderly women; he fears the Colonel, likes Mrs. White, and is especially fond of Mrs. Peacock, who reminds him of a favorite aunt. In a properly regulated society, he has been known to say wryly, all girls on their twelfth birthday would be removed to Scottish castles, from which they would be released on their sixtieth birthday after forty-eight years of instruction in harmony, prosody, and needlepoint. In the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, Mr. Green is riven with distress. If she should discover him, standing in the shadows, his silence will be impossible to explain. It might even appear that he has been spying on her, as she walks in her nervous stride across the long floor of the BALLROOM, swinging her hips, swinging her hips, touching herself on the sleeve, running a hand along the side of her hair, touching herself on the hip. Mr. Green has come from the LIBRARY, bearing with him a book on Norman castles that now lies on a chair with claw-and-ball feet beside his left leg. He cannot pick up the book without fear of being heard by Miss Scarlet, who is approaching the window seat. She will sit down and see him standing in silence across the room. He must not appear to be aware of her when she sees him, but when he looks away he feels that she is turning to look at him, now, this very moment, and he looks back abruptly to make certain that he has not yet been seen. It occurs to him that he cannot possibly pretend to have been unaware of her long walk across the echoing floor. His position is worsening by the moment.
A secret. David’s love for his brother runs so deep that he feels it as an oppression in his chest. David feels there is something wrong with him: he imagines other people too intensely. He has forgiven Jacob for his lateness, which he attributes to some difficulty or sorrow in Jacob’s life, but he has no clear sense of Jacob’s trouble and is hurt at being excluded from it. David feels older than Jacob, as if he were the one who could give comfort. He can sense Marian’s anger at Jacob, her dislike of Susan, and Marian’s own trouble, which he detects in her eyes, in her self-disparaging remarks, and in an occasional tone of voice. He feels sympathy for Susan, whose uneasiness is plain to him; he is disturbed by Jacob’s coldness to her and desires to be kind to her, in part to make up for his own initial disappointment at her presence. He sees that she is pretty, possibly beautiful, though he observes this neutrally, since it is not a kind of prettiness or beauty that attracts him: there is something cool and sculptural about it, a beauty of the moon. He admires most of all the color of her hair, a light brownish red shot through with threads of blond. The thought of her hair disturbs him, for he has a shameful secret: he imagines the pubic hair of all women, even of his sister, a habit that began at the age of twelve when he saw his first nude photograph in one of his father’s photography annuals. David thinks continually about the bodies of women; although he is without sexual experience, he has a strong sense of sexual corruption. He feels that if Susan knew what he was thinking she would be shocked and would despise him; and as he studies his cards — he knows that either Mrs. White or Mrs. Peacock is the murderer — he feels a burst of gentleness toward Susan, as if she must be protected from himself.
Cards. There are twenty-one cards: six suspect cards, six weapon cards, and nine room cards. Each suspect card shows a large, colored token in the foreground and, behind it, the head and shoulders of the suspect, in two colors or three. Each weapon card pictures a weapon in a single color: yellow or blue. Although the rooms on the board are gray, and the furniture in black outline, each room card shows a pale orange room with furniture in two, three, four, or five colors (red, yellow, blue, and two distinct shades of green). Three cards — the CONSERVATORY, the HALL, and the Wrench — have been lost over the years and have been replaced by traditional playing cards labeled appropriately. Thus David’s CONSERVATORY card is a seven of clubs with the word Conservatory printed in blue ballpoint across the top; Susan’s HALL is a two of spades with the word Hall printed across the middle; and Marian’s Wrench is a five of diamonds with the word Wrench printed above the central diamond.
Nymph reclining. As Colonel Mustard silently enters the BALLROOM by the door nearest the BILLIARD ROOM, he is aware of two things: Miss Scarlet sitting at the window seat with her back to him in one of her ludicrous attitudes (head lifted, hands loosely locked over one raised knee, a show of white stocking, glossy heel dangling: Miss Scarlet exists as a series of tableaux vivants, animated from time to time by little bursts of hysteria) and Mr. Green standing in a corner intently studying his pocket watch. The Colonel’s decision follows swiftly: get rid of Green, rearrange the picture on the couch (Nymph Reclining: a study in rose and marble, disposed upon a background of red plush velvet, the whole set off by tumbled white silk underthings, glossy ink-black pubic curls, and a brilliant silver chain dangling from one languorous wrist). “I say, Green,” remarks the Colonel, “have you the…”—time, he would have said, but Mr. Green turns abruptly, cracking his elbow against the wall and gasping with pain, while from the window seat comes another gasp and a rustle of rearrangement: Nymph Upright, Tense, and Cold. Legs sharp as scissors, the long femurs shut tight like the silver sides of a nutcracker: crack crack, a scattering of broken shells. It occurs to the Colonel that there may be a certain satisfaction in disencumbering Miss Scarlet of her propriety.