Читать книгу The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes - Arnold Bennett - Страница 14

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Carpentaria dogged him with all the precautions of silence as he turned to the right down the Central Way. The great thoroughfare of the City of Pleasure was, of course, absolutely deserted. Its fountains were stilled; its pretty cable-cars had disappeared; its flags had been hauled down. The meagre trees rustled chilly in the night-wind. Its vast and floriated white architecture seemed under the sombre sky to be the architecture of a dream. The one sign of human things was the illuminated face of the clock over the Exposition Palace, which showed twenty-five minutes past twelve. Of the two thousand souls employed in the City, more than half had gone to their homes in the other city, London, and several hundreds slept in the dormitories that had been built for them at the southern extremity of the Central Way. The remaining hundred or so were dispersed in various parts of the City, either watching or asleep. Some had the right to sleep at their posts. But the men of the highly-organized fire service would be awake and alert.

Yet there happened to be no living creature on the Way, except its two chiefs. Ilam crossed the Way, and turned off it through an avenue that lay between the lecture hall and the menagerie. Carpentaria followed at a safe distance, hiding in the thick shadows as he went. From the interior of the menagerie came the subdued growls and groans of the wild beasts therein, suffering from insomnia, and longing for the jungle. Among the treasures of the menagerie was a society of twenty-seven lions, who went through a performance twice a day under their trainer, Brant, the king of lion-tamers, as he was called on the City of Pleasure programmes, and as he, in fact, was. There were also a celebrated sanguinary tiger, that had killed three men in New York, and various other delicate attractions. The nocturnal noises of these fearsome animals were sufficiently appalling. And when Ilam stopped before a little door in the south façade of the menagerie building, a cold perspiration froze the forehead and the spirit of Carpentaria. Was the man going to yield his mysterious black-enveloped burden to the lions and the tigers, the jackals and the hyenas, of that inestimable collection of African and Asiatic fauna?

But Ilam struggled onwards. And next they passed the electricity works, which was in full activity, for the manufacture of light went on night and day in the City of Pleasure. Ilam slunk along the front of the workshops, increasing his pace. Fortunately for him, the windows were seven feet from the ground, so that he could not be observed from within. The whirr of the wheels revolving incessantly in front of gigantic magnets filled the air, and from the high windows shone a steely-blue radiance, chequered by the flying shadows of machinery.

Ilam turned again, and entered the Amusements Park, and, threading his way among chutes, switchbacks, slides, and ponds, he crossed it from end to end.

“Where is he going?” Carpentaria muttered.

And then, suddenly, it occurred to Carpentaria where Ilam was going.

Behind the Amusements Park, and abutting on the confines of the City territory, was a large waste piece of ground which had been used for excavations and for refuse. In the tremendous operation of levelling the site of the City, digging foundations, and gardening in the landscape manner, much earth had been needed in one spot, and much earth had had to be removed in another. The waste piece of ground was the clearing-house of this business. In certain parts it was humped like a camel’s back, and in others it was hollowed into pits. Immense quantities of soil lay loose, and there were, besides, barrows and spades in abundance.

Arrived in the midst of this sterile wilderness, Ilam unceremoniously dropped his burden near a miniature mountain, which raised itself by the side of a miniature pit. He then found a spade, and, having tested the looseness of the soil, took up the black mystery and slipped it carefully into the pit. Then he climbed with the spade on to the summit of the hillock, and began to push the soil from the hillock into the pit. It proved to be the simplest thing in the world. In five minutes the burden of Ilam lay under several feet of soil.

Carpentaria, favoured by the nature of the spot, had crept closer.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!” he heard Ilam reciting. Amazing phenomenon! But nothing can be more amazing than the behaviour of an utterly respectable man when he is committing a crime!

The affair finished, Ilam departed, passing within a few feet of Carpentaria, who stretched himself flat on the ground to avoid detection.

And when Ilam had vanished out of sight, Carpentaria jumped up feverishly, seized the spade, leapt into the pit and began to dig—to dig with a fury of haste. Fate helped him, for the black mass was uncovered in less time than had been taken to cover it. He dragged it slowly out of the pit, and slowly, almost reluctantly, unwrapped it. He had been sure at the first touch that it was the body of a man, and he was not mistaken. In the gloomy night he could see the white patches made by the face and the hands. The body was not yet stiff. He hesitated, and then struck a match. He hoped the wind would blow it out, but the wind spared it; it flared bravely, and lighted the face of the corpse, and the corpse was that of the mysterious drunken man.

A thousand unanswerable questions fought together for solution in Carpentaria’s brain.

He knew himself to be in the presence of a crime, of a murder. His legal duty, therefore, was to fetch justice in the shape of a policeman. But he reflected that no battalion of policemen and judges could undo the crime, bring the dead to life, make innocent the guilty. He reflected also upon the clumsiness of State justice, and the inconveniences attaching to it, and upon the immeasurable harm its advent might do to the opening season of the City of Pleasure. Moreover, he had a horror of capital punishment, and he was a bold and original man, though an artist. He settled rapidly in his mind that he himself would probe the matter to its root, and that the justice involved should be the private justice of Carpentaria, not the public justice of the realm.

And a few minutes later he had discovered a long, flat barrow, and was wheeling away the burden that had bent the back of Josephus Ilam. He brought it circuitously and gently by way of the Sports Fields round again to the Central Way, and so to the neighbourhood of his own house. The night had now grown darker than ever, and a few drops of rain began to fall.

Suddenly, as he was approaching the two bungalows, he stopped and listened. He thought he heard footsteps; but no sound met his ear, and he raised the handles of the barrow again. By this time he was midway between the bungalows and about to turn to the side-entrance of his own. Once more he stopped; he distinctly did hear footsteps crushing the gravel.

“What is that? Anyone there?” cried a voice.

And it was Ilam’s voice, full of fear. Carpentaria crept away to the shelter of his own wall, leaving the barrow that had become a bier in the midst of the path. Vaguely and dimly he saw the form of Ilam coming down the avenue, saw it stop uncertainly before the barrow, saw it bend down, and then he heard a shriek—a shriek of terror—loud, violent, and echoing, and Ilam fled away. Carpentaria heard him mount the steps of his house and fumble with the door, and then he heard the bang of the door.

With all possible speed he rushed to the barrow, wheeled it into his garden, and thence to an outhouse, of which he carefully fastened the padlock.

He stood some time hesitant in the avenue, wondering whether any further singular phenomenon would proceed from the Ilam house that night. His curiosity was rewarded. A most strange procession emerged presently from the bungalow. First came old Mrs. Ilam, dressed in a crimson dressing-gown, a white nightcap on her head, and carrying a lamp with an elaborate drawing-room shade. Carpentaria could see that the lamp shook in her trembling hand. Her hands always trembled, but her head never. She came down the steps with the deliberation of extreme old age, peering in front of her, and she was followed, timorously, by her son. The lamp threw a large circle of yellow light on the ground, and at intervals Mrs. Ilam held it up high so that it illuminated the faces of mother and son. They came into the middle of the avenue. It was now seriously raining.

“I knew it wouldn’t be there,” Ilam whispered, in an awed tone. “It isn’t the sort of thing that stays. But I saw it—I saw the cloth and I saw a bit of its face.”

Mrs. Ilam looked about her.

“Nonsense, Jos,” she upbraided him, fixing her eyes on him in a sort of reproof. “It’s your imagination.”

“It isn’t,” said Josephus. “I saw it; and what’s more, it was on a bier. That’s the worst—it was on a bier. Mother, he will haunt me all my life!”

“Don’t talk so loud, child,” put in Mrs. Ilam. “You’d better go to bed.”

“What’s the good of going to bed?” he inquired. “What! I took him and I buried him as safe as houses. I left him there, and I came straight back here, except that I was stopped by a watchman at the stables, who told me the horses seemed to be all frightened. And I had a talk to the fellow; and I find it on a bier here, right in my path. And now it’s gone again.”

“Come in,” said Mrs. Ilam.

“And why were the horses frightened? That shows——”

“Come in,” Mrs. Ilam repeated. “I’ll get you some hot milk, and you must try to sleep.”

“Sleep!” he murmured. “Mother, you mustn’t leave me.”

And the procession re-entered the house, and the door was closed, but a light burned upstairs through the remainder of the night.

Carpentaria himself had little sleep; he scarcely tried to sleep. He arose at seven o’clock, and dressed and went out on to the balcony. The rain had ceased, and the Sunday morning was exquisitely calm and sunny. The whole scene was so bright and clear that the events of six hours ago appeared fantastic and impossible. Yet Carpentaria knew only too well that the unidentified corpse lay in the outhouse. He meant first to examine the corpse himself, and then to confide in a certain official of the city whom he knew that he could trust. What he should do after that he could not imagine. Decidely some process of burial would be speedily imperative.

All the blinds of the Ilam bungalow were drawn. He guessed that at least the upper ones would remain so, and he was somewhat taken aback when Mrs. Ilam herself appeared at a window and opened it. He was still more taken aback to see Mrs. Ilam a moment later open the door, and with much stateliness cross the avenue to his own dwelling. He knew that she was friendly with Juliette, and that Juliette liked her. He, too, had admired her, but only because she was so old and so masterful, such a surprising relic. That she should be accessory to a crime did not seem strange to him. He esteemed her to be a woman capable of anything. He would have to warn Juliette.

At eight o’clock a servant brought up the French breakfast with which, under Juliette’s influence, he compromised with hunger till lunch-time; and with the breakfast came, as usual, the cat Beppo. The breakfast consisted of a two-handled bowl of milk and a fresh roll and a pat of butter. Beppo seemed determined to share the breakfast without delay. Carpentaria, as was his frequent practice, took the roll off its plate and poured on the plate as much milk as it would hold. And Beppo, to whom milk was the answer to the riddle of the universe, leapt on to the table and began to lap in his gluttonous masculine way. He had taken exactly four laps when he ceased to lap. He looked up at his master, and there was a disturbed and pained expression in his amber eyes. This expression changed in an instant to one of positive fright. He was evidently breathing with difficulty, and he was rather at sea, for he groped about on the table and put both his forepaws into the bowl, splashing the milk in all directions. He then gave a fearful shriek; his pupils dilated horribly in spite of the strong sunshine, and he went into convulsions. His breath came quick and short. Finally, he fell off the table.

He was dead.

Less than three minutes previously he had been a cat full of power, of romance, and of the joy of life, with comfortable views on most things.