And then – at half-past three in the morning – someone knocked at my door. Lambert came into my bedroom, and said: ‘Oh, Master Rodney – Master Rodney – will you come down? Sir Arnold – I mean your uncle – is taken very bad!’
I put on dressing-gown and slippers, and followed him. As I went downstairs, I was aware of a sense of doom.
I wished my uncle dead, yes. I wished him dead, God forgive me, for his worth in money, considering the terms of his will. But I beg you to believe me – do, please, believe me – when I tell you that I loved the old gentleman very dearly, and had no intention of murdering him, as I did, that night.
PART TWO
YOU may imagine that, as I went downstairs – steadily, slowly, contemplatively – my thoughts were with my uncle. As a matter of fact, they were not. The date was 30 April, but the weather struck cold in the old house. I thought, first, that it might have been a good thing to put on my overcoat, over my dressing-gown; then it occurred to me how right Mavis was when she insisted that a woman had to have a fur coat. This being the case, therefore, I had bought her a fur coat.
Now there are fur coats and fur coats. Mavis had told me how a certain class of woman could not distinguish between musquash and mink, or between mink and sable. Such women were earmarked for oblivion. But Mavis had ‘modelled’ for furs, and knew what was what. She had a great deal of this kind of knowledge. Mavis knew, and wanted to be one with, the kind of woman that recognises – let us say – blue fox, blond mink, and Siberian sable. She could explain the difference between the pelts of certain rodents – for example, mole and chinchilla. The difference, generally, ran into many hundreds of pounds. Mavis made a social difference of it.
… Chinchilla and sables, perhaps, might come later. Meanwhile, she could wear nothing cheaper than mink. And wearing mink, how could she ride in a bus? Women wearing mink do not ride in buses – it is antisocial to do so – the proletariat stares. And what is a mink coat without a corsage of orchids, preferably purple? … But what girl, who respects herself, wears a suit by a lesser craftsman than Vallombroso under a mink coat? Respecting herself in a Vallombroso suit, how could she feel comfortable with something inferior to Ambergh underwear next to her skin, a Bobini hair-cut, and shoes by Dupuy? … The hat was another item. Nobody who was anybody wore a hat that was not made by Berzelius. And one became a Somebody by mixing with Somebodies. This was Mavis’s philosophy, and I could not disagree with it.
‘I always found,’ she had told me, ‘that when I had supper for eighteen pence at the Café Mauve, I never had more than eighteen pence to pay for my supper. But when I started to have supper for three-and-sixpence at the Café Impérial, I managed to find three-and-sixpence …’
This operates, in a way; the only drawback is that somebody must pay….
It was of this that I was thinking when I went downstairs. My uncle was lying on his back, with his knees drawn up. His face was blue with pain, but still he fought. He said, gloatingly: ‘You would have been dead three-quarters of an hour ago, I bet! It looks as if you might come into your inheritance yet, you worm.’
‘What is the matter, Uncle?’ I asked.
He said: ‘I don’t know. My belly is hard as a pumpkin, and hurts like hell…. First I go hot, and then I go cold, and when I move my head … I seem to fade away, wash away on a kind of foggy wave. It pains, Rodney, it pains!’
Then Lambert came in with a hot-water bottle. (I write down these details to convince you that almost to the last I wished my poor uncle nothing but well.)
‘This sounds like appendicitis,’ I said. ‘Take that bottle away, and make a pack of crushed ice in a towel.’
Even in his agony, my Uncle Arnold sneered: ‘Male nurse!’ You see, my eyes were weak, so that in the war I was only in the Medical Corps. He had been a rough-riding cavalryman, and had been shot in the thigh at Rorke’s Drift – carried the Mannlicher bullet that disabled him on his watch chain.
‘Call Dr Gilpin,’ I said to Lambert.
He hesitated, and said: ‘I wanted to, sir, but Sir Arnold said not to.’
Remember – all I had to do was temporise, humour my uncle in his obstinacy for three or four hours, and he would surely have been dead that day. But I said: ‘Uncle, you have an appendicitis, very likely burst; and that “fading away” in waves is a hæmorrhage. Lambert, call Dr Gilpin this instant!’
‘No damned quacks!’ my uncle groaned. ‘It’s nothing but a belly-ache. I can’t imagine why Lambert called you down, you Woman! … Lambert, don’t call Dr Gilpin, call Mr Coote – if I die where I lie, I cut this milksop off with a shilling.’
That was the nature of the man; do you know, I honoured him for it! But I rose to the occasion, and said: ‘You may cut me off, or you may cut me on, as you please; I am getting the doctor.’ And so I did.
The old gentleman was delirious when Dr Gilpin arrived. The diagnosis was as I had foreseen – a burst appendix, with a serious internal hæmorrhage.
I went with my uncle and the doctor to the Cottage Hospital. The surgeon there said: ‘We’ll pull the old boy through, I dare say. But I’ll want somebody to stand by for a transfusion of whole blood…. How about you?’
I said: ‘My blood group is universal O.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘I found that out during the war,’ I said. ‘I was in the R.A.M.C.’
‘You’ll do,’ said the surgeon.
At this point I murdered my uncle, Sir Arnold Arnold, for the sake of my love for Mavis. For, you see, an allergy may be transmitted in a transfusion of blood. I spoke the truth when I said that my blood group was Type O, which is universally transfusible. But some devil got hold of my tongue, so that when I intended to say, I am violently allergic to oysters, and Sir Arnold lives on them; therefore, if he receives my blood in transfusion now – his heart being weak, and his blood pressure high – he will almost certainly die in a fit of asthmatic coughing, or of convulsive colitis, when he celebrates the opening of the next oyster season with three dozen Colchesters next September … I was silent.
Premeditation here! When I let them siphon the blood from my arm into the bottle for transfusion, I knew that I was poisoning my uncle as surely as if I had been putting arsenic in his tea.
But I never spoke.
He was conscious by noon, and then he said: ‘Rodney, my boy, I’m an old man, and a little testy at times. Don’t mind every word I say. Blood is thicker than water, old fellow; and you must have good blood in you. You behaved like a man and a gentleman, by God! … Bring your Mavis to see me. I dare say she’s a nice gel, really. Meantime, send Coote to me. I’m going to give you a thousand pounds for a wedding present.’
‘Oh, no, Uncle!’ I said, almost crying.
‘Don’t interrupt. I haven’t the strength to argue. Get Coote. I’ll leave the Cottage Hospital five thousand, I will…. Go away now. No, wait a second. Rod——’
‘Uncle?’
‘Your allowance, henceforward, is a thousand a year. You’re a good boy. Now go home.’
Mavis was waiting for me when I got home. She said: ‘Good Lord, Rod! You look like death warmed up. Your eyes are all red. Have you been crying, or something? And where were you all last night?’
‘My uncle was very ill, so I got no sleep,’ I said.
I was sick to s hear her remark: ‘If only the old fellow would pop off! We’d have fun then, wouldn’t we?’
‘Very likely,’ I said heavily.