THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Page 24

  ‘Oh, let the ’ole thing alone, can’t you both?’ wailed Mrs Bendigo, on the verge of tears, but David was already clattering up the stairs.

  Held in a tense silence, the two in the parlour heard the steps slow down, tread half-fearfully across the floor of the fatal room, pause, and descend again. As the boy entered the room, a strap of greyish webbing, weighted with a metal buckle, hanging from one hand, Mrs Bendigo shuddered away with a weak little cry, and even Mr Bendigo felt a cold chill creep down his spine as he surveyed the strap that had bound the ankles of one actual and one attempted suicide. A coincidence . . . and yet. . . .

  “It is the same!’ said David, in a tone faintly awestricken, ‘The strap I took out of your drawer downstairs, Dad, when my old one broke—I was rummaging about for something, and this thing fell out of a bit of brown paper. I used to use it to carry my extra school-books—then when you gave me that new satchel I give it to Daisy’

  ‘Brown-paper parcel—lord!’ Mr Bendigo stared, his eyes as round as his son’s. ‘That must be the little parcel that long feller dropped when he come in to buy something—you remember, mother, the chap that bought the ivory tusk, that awful rainy day about two months ago? I chucked the parcel into the drawer and clean forgot it, and he never came back. . . .’

  A bell rang sharply below, and Mr Bendigo started, frowning. It was long after shop hours, yet he hated to forgo a sale, and sometimes it did happen that a valuable customer happened along latish. With an irritable sigh he rose, and shuffled through the door into the shop, where a dark figure, dimly seen through the glass street door, was hammering impatiently upon the pane. Opening it, Mr Bendigo’s jaw dropped and his eyes all but bolted from his head—for it was the lean stranger who had dropped the mysterious parcel, the stranger of the ivory tusk returned as unexpectedly as he had come. The long ulstered apparition spoke as he stepped into the shop somewhat impatiently, seeing the open-mouthed amazement of the little man.

  ‘What’s the matter? For heaven’s sake don’t gape, my good man! I’ve just rediscovered you—lost your card, of course, and couldn’t remember your name—been hunting you for ages, to try and find something I think I left here. A small parcel——’

  ‘A small parcel containin’ a strap?’ faltered Mr Bendigo. The stranger threw him a sharp glance and laughed ironically.

  ‘Suppose it was beyond you not to peep inside! Yes, it did contain a strap, if you want to know; but no ordinary strap, believe me!’

  ‘I got it. Oh, I got it safe enough,’ stammered Mr Bendigo, torn beneath a wild desire to thrust both strap and stranger at once from his badly frightened house, and a still wilder curiosity tinged with horror. He hesitated, but curiosity won the day.

  ‘D’you mind telling me, sir, just what sort of a strap that is? My boy, he found it one day in the drawer, and he’s curious like.’

  The stranger laughed again, and this time his laughter seemed, to the little dealer’s excited imagination, to hold a quite definitely sinister note.

  ‘That strap, Mr Bendigo? I am a collector, but not only of old and beautiful things! Oh, no; all’s fish that comes to my net! I collect anything unusual, odd, anything with a curious history, any relic I can pick up that holds some secret association, the stranger and more terrible the better. . . .’

  Mr Bendigo became aware that David, the strap still in his hands, had ventured cautiously into the shop behind him, but he was too desperately curious to risk interrupting the stranger to bid him go, and the lean man was hurrying on.

  ‘I’ve got stored away, not only carved ivories, jade, jewels and china that would make your mouth water, Mr Bendigo, but far, far stranger things than those! I’ve the knife with which Mrs Thorpe, the baby-farmer, cut up the bodies of the children she killed; I’ve the chair in which old Peter Godden was sitting when he was shot by his daughter; I’ve a Thug’s cord that has strangled God knows how many men, a poison-ring of the Borgias, a Chinese executioner’s axe. . . .’

  His eyes glittered with an almost insane enthusiasm, and Mr Bendigo, his heart quaking, put the final question that was trembling on his lips.

  ‘Sir, for Gawd’s sake tell us . . . what is the story of the strap?’

  Snatching the strap from Dave’s nerveless hands and tucking it into his pocket, the stranger turned towards the door with a raucous laugh.

  ‘The strap? Oh, that is the strap that has been used for years at Bagshaw Gaol to shackle the ankles of those about to be hanged, so that they can’t kick, or save themselves in any way from the drop! I bought it from the retired hangman, Weekes, a month or two ago. He had it as a souvenir, but for some reason he was glad to part with it. Said it brought him bad luck or something. Curious, too . . . I heard he lost his son by suicide, a few weeks before I bought the thing. Goodnight, all!’

  He was gone into the night, and drawing a long breath of relief as he went thankfully back to the warm cosiness of the little parlour, Mr Bendigo voiced the opinion of No. 8 Yeld Passage in no uncertain tones.

  ‘Thank Gawd ’e’s gone, and that orful thing’s gone with ’im. And I’m sure I don’t care if ’e ’angs ’imself with ’is ’orrible strap. . . . I don’t, and that’s the truth!’

  December

  The American Girl’s Tale

  The Shrine At The Cross-Roads

  I was just travelling around Europe with Pop and Mamma. It was really all because of Bud. Bud and I wanted to get married, but the folks laughed and said we were too young and must wait awhile.

  His father sent Bud to Chicago, to a post there for a year, and Pop and Mom decided that a dose of Europe would do me a lot of good and make the year pass quicker. They all said if after a year we still felt the same we could get married, though even then it was taking a risk, we were such kids.

  Certainly, I suppose nineteen and twenty-one is a bit young in a way—but we knew our minds all right, though it was awfully hard to say goodbye, and I cried and got so peaked when Bud left, that Mom hurried the trip up a month to get me away. I liked Europe well enough when I got there, specially Paris, with those cute little traffic cops with their moustaches and peaked hats, and the cafés where you can sit and drink all sorts of pink and green fizzy drinks on the sidewalk, and the women with their bright, made-up eyes and their marvellous feet. I could talk to Bud sometimes on the long-distance ’phone, too, so when Mom planned to meet Mrs Allie Widdemer and her husband at Nice, and said we’d go down by car and see a bit of the country on the way, I was rather peevish at leaving. But Mom’s been to Europe several times, and she was all for me ‘seeing the French in their natural surroundings’, so we started out; but I was still cross at leaving Paris, and when, a few days afterwards, the car conked out on the road, I was mean enough to feel a little bit glad.

  I climbed out and sat on the bank. It was about twelve o’clock and a baking day, Midsummer Day in fact, and the short hot grass smelt too lovely, all sweet and spicy. I ate Page and Shaw maple fudge with cherries in it, while Pop tinkered with the car and Mom scolded him for refusing to have a chauffeur. It was a wide green rolling sort of country, rather monotonous but somehow restful, with little white clouds dotting the huge sweep of blue sky above, like the crowds of sheep that were dotting the distant hills. One could see the road we’d come by lying behind us like a piece of apple-peeling against the green, curling and curling away into the hazy distance, and there was a village of sorts tucked away in the fold of the hills a mile or two ahead. A little white village sunk deep into a green belt of woodland, asleep in the sunshine like all the world seemed to be. Mom, with her nose in the map, presently announced that this must be Arquières, and that there was sure to be a garage there where they could put the car to rights, if we could only trundle the old ’bus down to it. I said I betted there wouldn’t be a man in that one-horse place that could mend a mousetrap, let alone a car; but I was wrong, and I felt rather a fool when we lumbered like a lame duck at last into the place, our smart crimson Minerva powdered as white with
dust as a raddled old night-club lady—and there was a garage, actually, with a yellow petrol-pump beside it, about half-way down the village street!

  The place was just two rows of pink and white and cinnamon and lemon-coloured houses strung along each side of the road; shuttered little houses with creepers and vines trailing over the uneven roofs, with a few fat babies playing with equally fat cats in the clean white dust, and a few women knitting in the shadow of the doorways. But for these, and a group of brown-faced men playing cards over their wine at one of the tables outside the one inn, the ‘Fleur d’Or’, the place was deserted, as it was after one o’clock, and most people were having a ‘siesta’, as Mom called it.

  The ‘Fleur d’Or’ was washed a crude sort of pink, and the doors and shutters were bright blue—there was a sort of veranda-roof jutting out from the house over a few iron tables in the roadway, and the vines had spread themselves over it like a foam of green water. The garage was alongside, and the vines ran riot over that too, scrambled over the low roof and hung down round the entrance till the Minerva crunched in over fallen green grapes and leaves and stalks that smelt a lovely sharp smell when they were crushed beneath the wheels. You never saw such an adorable, absurd, fairybook, tumbledown sort of place! It looked like the place the Enchanted Princess lived in before the King found her; and when the old Witch herself came out, wrapped in a purple shawl, with bright black eyes and white hair, and started spinning—spinning! Can you beat it?—on a real wheel, while we ate lunch under the green leafy roof, I all but pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. We had wild strawberries and cream, chicken and salad, crusty rolls and the loveliest cheese and butter I ever ate—that Princess would have needed the Hollywood reducing diet if she’d lived there six months! I leant back and blew my cheeks out, I felt so full, and the old Witch looked over to us and laughed and said something to Mom. It appeared that the old lady’s daughter cooked the food, so the old girl was pleased we were so pleased; the inn belong to her, but her daughter and her daughter’s husband ran it and the garage too, and it was the husband who was mending our car that very moment. Mom went on talking for some time to the old lady and at last turned to Pop and laughed.

  ‘Wonders will never cease, Fred; you can apparently have your after-luncheon nap here as well, while they finish the car! It won’t be ready for another two hours, they say. Madame Leclerc says there’s a room unlet, with two beds, and we can sleep there till it gets cooler . . . what do you say?’

  ‘I say, lead me to it!’ said Pop. ‘But what about Mamie. Ask the old lady if there’s another room, and then we can all go sleep off this stunning lunch, hey?’

  But I didn’t want to go and snooze, though it was so hot. I said I’d stay around and practise my French on the old girl, or write to Bud. So Pop and Mom disappeared into the inn, and I settled down to scribble on one of the ‘letterettes’ I always carry, while the old woman went on spinning, the noise of her wheel making a soft sort of hum in the warm delicious silence, that almost made me feel sleepy in spite of myself.

  Purr, purr, purr, the wheel flew, and the fleecy tuft of wool drew out into a long shining thread, and the sunlight shone through the network of jade-green leaves on the white wool and the white head bending over it. I found myself staring at the picture she made in a sort of fascinated way, and all of a sudden she looked up and saw me—and snapped out the most astonishing question. (I don’t speak French like Mom, but I can understand all right.)

  ‘Mam’selle is young and pretty; has Mademoiselle a sweetheart?’

  I stammered out, ‘Why, yes. Why do you ask such a thing?’

  I was scarlet, and yet I didn’t feel offended . . . queer! The quaint old soul went on.

  ‘A lover . . . and you love him truly? What age has mademoiselle? Eighteen . . . nineteen? Yes?’

  ‘Nineteen,’ I said, wondering why on earth she was so interested.

  The old lady nodded sharply, taking me in swiftly from head to foot, from my flat-heeled American sandals up my nice Parisian beige crêpe frock, to my thatch of cropped light hair; then nodded again and laughed oddly, contentedly.

  ‘A maid, nineteen, and in love! Eh, grand Dieu! Listen, mademoiselle. You love to see old things, curious things—yes?’

  ‘Indeed I do!’ I spoke breathlessly, for her tone sounded most enticingly mysterious. She bent forward, one brown, gnarled hand pointing.

  ‘Mademoiselle, a little way from here, beyond the village, the road beaks into two, and at the parting of the ways is a spring, with a little old shrine beside it. They say hereabouts that if a maid who truly loves goes and drinks of the spring, and says a prayer for the repose of the soul of the saint in whose honour the shrine was built, she will bring great good luck to herself and her lover. While her parents sleep, will not mademoiselle go, as go the village girls, and drink from the shrine at the cross-roads?’

  Her strange eyes bored intently into mine. I felt awkward, odd, yet thrilled. It was absurd, of course, and yet . . . the old woman laughed with triumph and turned again to her spinning as, picking up my hat from the seat beside me, on a sudden impulse I walked out into the sunshine to hunt for the Shrine at the Cross-roads.

  It was hotter even than I had thought. The white dust rose in clouds as I plodded along, and the darting insects, playing in the shining air, made a sort of glittering veil before my eyes; but the trees along the roadside grew more plentiful as I went on, leaving the village behind, and the road sloped bit by bit downhill as it grew more wooded, and, thank goodness cooler.

  The scent of the trees was lovely, they seemed mostly pines and firs and nice aromatic-smelling mountain things, with a sparse undergrowth of bushes. It was dead quiet, the stillest day I ever remember, and walking in the soft muffling dust as I was, not even my footsteps made the least sound. I saw no tyre-marks in the road, only a few cart-tracks—just one old cart passed me, the driver asleep among his load of logs—the trees stood rigidly upright like lean, dark soldiers, not a leaf of their tufted heads stirred in the hot air. The birds seemed hidden, not even a rabbit skittered through the undergrowth, the very insects had stopped humming in the lovely enchanted stillness, like the stillness of a great, green Cathedral—it felt, do you know, just like that—and then I saw the Shrine! The road forked sharply into two, as she had said, and the right-hand bend went wandering onwards among the trees, the other downwards towards the valley—and just at the parting of the ways there was a little pool, bubbling up at the feet of a dumpy stone figure, battered, solitary. I had vaguely expected something more imposing, and felt, for the moment, disappointed, but the sight of the fresh cool water was welcome enough, and I ran forward thankfully—I hadn’t realised till I saw the water how dreadfully thirsty I was after that walk in the heat. I knelt down and drank and drank—lovely cold water it was, with a taste of fresh greenness and things of earth in it. The place must have been a natural spring that had been clumsily walled round with a low kerb of stones, now furred thick with mosses and rock-plants.

  The statue, such as it was, stood at the back of the spring under the shadows of a group of trees. A great elder-bush swept white tufts of blossom over the head of the figure, and a syringa mingled its pink blossoms down one side—masses of the two floated on the surface of the pool like fat tuffs of pink and white ice-cream, and more drifted down upon my head as I sat curled beside the kerb of the spring, staring up at the statue.

  As I said, it was disappointing. It was only about three-quarters life-size, and might have been either the figure of a man or a woman. It had a stiff, straight sort of frock on, under which showed lumps that I suppose were meant to be feet. The head ran down into the shoulders in a sort of shapeless mass that might have been hair, or a head-dress, or some sort of veil. One arm was broken off, but it seemed, from the fragment that was left, to have been stretched out holding a staff or a sceptre; the other arm and hand had gone, crumbled away like the face, and that was a mere lump of stone, the features impossible to distinguish
except that one gathered, from the vague conformation of the head, that it had been someone with a square chin and shortish nose—a man, I decided, since woman-saints always seem to have oval faces and long chins. Anyway, it couldn’t even have been anything but a clumsy village-made sort of thing, and I really didn’t see why the old girl at the inn had been so anxious for me to see it. . . . I yawned. My goodness, I was tired!

  The moss had grown up round the base of the statue till it formed the nicest possible sort of cushion. I looked at my watch. I’d only been gone half an hour, and Pop and Mom were good to sleep for another hour at least. I thought I’d have a snooze here in the lovely coolness, and wander back later, so I snuggled down without more ado against the spongy green pillow and tucking my handkerchief under my ear for fear of ‘creepies’, drifted off into dreamland on the instant.

  * * * * *

  So far, so good. Yes, I admit it looks as if I dreamt the rest but I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll go on.

  The next thing I remember is a voice, a young, happy voice, singing:

  ‘Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot

  Pretez-moi ta plume, pour ecrire un mot!

  Ma chandelle est morte, je n’ai plus de feu;

  Ouvrez-moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu!’

  I blinked, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and sat up. It must have been a good while later, for the sun was slanting through the trees at a different angle, and lay in a long shining streak across the head and shoulders of—such a funny little peasant girl!

  She sat on the farther side of the pool, gravely eyeing me from under the fringe of a heavy shock of tow-coloured hair, hair bleached almost white with sun and rain—as white as her skin was brown. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, and had on a faded blue frock, all torn and dusty, and clumsily long in the skirt, and her feet were bare—her clogs hung around her neck on a string, and a long, crooked branch lay beside her in the dust.