Prelude to a Certain Midnight Read online

  The Murderer was always thankful that he was not selfish like other men, and rejoiced in his social-mindedness. He could not meet a beggar in the street without giving away a coin or two and saying a few sympathetic words. He was a member of two or three societies devoted to the abolition of corporal punishment, and what not. He would have been among the first to protest against the use of pigs and goats in the atom-bomb test at Bikini. There were occasions when he saw himself as a great militant humanitarian. He was something of a Socialist. He knew that Good must be pitiless. In fantasy, he was the man who, with his own hand, cut to pieces the Justice of the Peace who ordered the birching of a small boy; and, although it was not expedient to say so, he saw Herr Hitler’s point. The pure man must be strong. Purity and strength are correlated. He must be like pure iron – malleable, yet the strongest thing in the world. Out of his malleability must be forged… for the sake of example a Knife… a Knife to cut the throat of Evil.

  And then he was in a quiet town. Once again he was the Liberator – pure and passionate yet cold, a Leader, a god. Under the cover of the Law-Protected roofs – here, there, everywhere, waiting for his word – his legions waited. He gave the Word. From Ealing to Barking, from Enfield to Harrow, the mob arose. The screams of the evil-doers rose high above the thunder of applause. This was the Night of the Long Knife… and in due course he sat in judgement. Lisping, shrugging, gesticulating, shuffling, the Ringleaders of the Adversaries were brought before him. Should he kill them? Yes, but not immediately. They and theirs must be stamped out, stamped out utterly for ever. “Question them!” and then he was looking down, while stretched upon a rack someone gibbered and told everything out of a bleeding mouth.

  And later, there was peace in the world, his peace, and the world cried: “Hail, Peacemaker!”

  His peace, the Peace of the Murderer, had necessarily to be preceded by violence. His world would give birth to a new baby; but first of all, there would be plenty of birth pangs. His peace would be something like the exhaustion of the mother of the first-born; a little death, the blood washed away. And in ten thousand places new grass would be growing. Loving mankind as he did, he had persuaded himself that people needed to be thinned out – above all, that the world needed the guidance of a leader of steel-clad knights, a man with a pale, set face, riding that white horse.

  Here was his Ideal Man – the Leader. Sometimes he felt that, circumstances being favourable, he could have achieved such leadership. Then he saw himself walking along an interminable avenue of waving hands towards a great wreath-hung platform, while a hundred thousand voices thundered: “Hail, Peacemaker! Hail, Liberator!” His face was even paler and more firmly set than usual as he climbed the steps. One lock of hair (the only good thing that ever dared to rebel against him) fell across his forehead. He let it stay where it fell, and raised a hand for silence. With one flick of the wrist he stilled that storm of approbation. Then he spoke, standing in a floodlight; the vast hall threw back thunderous echoes. Then his terrible, urgent voice dashed the echoes back where they belonged and silenced them. He was a tempest, a raging torrent. Two hundred thousand eyes were fixed in adoration upon his face. His wild, incandescent eyes were holding hypnotically the gaze of a multitude a hundred thousand strong. And how he talked! With what fire, with what passion! Whenever he paused for breath, the pent-up breath of the listening multitude let itself out in such cheering as had never been heard before in the whole history of the world. He raised a hand again. Then he continued. His arguments clamped down hard, inescapable… like the thumbs of a strangler. His phrases were incisive; they bit deep… like Spanish knives. And the end of the speech was the beginning of a new world…

  Still, always, when the day-dream had spent itself, he knew that he was not a leader of men; he remembered that he was shy of men. He knew that he would never shout his will into the face of mankind; because he shrank away from mankind and feared a defiant reply. A bus conductor, a taxi-driver, a shop walker, or a beggar in the street could abash him with a nonchalant rejoinder. He dreaded the rough, rude answer. For this reason, as he was well aware, he was invariably kind and gentle with people; full of understanding. He had almost persuaded himself that there was a good deal of the saint in him. All the same, he knew that if he could have had his way some insolent man or woman would have gone crashing down with splintered teeth more often than he could remember.

  No, he could not actually lead men. But he could, he was convinced, have been a power behind a leader… if he could have cultivated a certain courage of the subtle Machiavellian sort. But all his courage, Machiavellian or animal, was a dream dreamed in a furnished room in front of a gas fire. Black armour? He would not have the strength to walk in armour, black or white, to the end of the street. As for the high-stepping white horse, he would be afraid to lay his hand on the pommel of its saddle. If he could have brought himself to sit astride the humblest old hack of a horse, he would have patted its neck with an uncertain hand and said: “There, there, poor old fellow,” like Mr Winkle. He did not even have a pale set face except when he saw himself in a glass in the privacy of his bed-sitting-room.

  Yet he felt that he could have been a Leader, a Liberator; given luck.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty

  He was constantly thinking of everything, and of nothing. There was such a woolly hood of preoccupation over the eyes and ears of this man that occasionally he seemed to be blind and deaf – the absent-minded uncle with his “Ha! Where was I?” and “Uh? What was that again?” Once, visiting a newly-married friend who had set up house on the fifth floor of a block of flats, he fell into a typical state of abstraction…

  He saw himself as married to his friend’s wife and installed in this apartment. His wife found him somehow unsatisfactory: she took a lover. He knew that she had her lover, but said nothing. He was the quiet man, the Watcher by Night – he could wait. Oh, he knew all about the agonized embraces, the desperate meetings and anguished partings! He knew. But he could wait. He was the Schemer, the Patient One. At last the moment was his. There came a fragrant night in late spring. The sitting-room window faced westward. Clouds like Spanish knives had shaved red slices out of the grey-blue sky. Nana was in the bathroom. “Ah, dear, dear!” he murmured, “look at the grey of the pavement below! Look.” (There was little time to lose.) “Look at the people like ants below – down there, just look!”

  And then a quick stoop – hands to the ankles, heave up, thrust out hard; and back to the easy chair, flipping over the pages of an album as the cistern went Ha-hoosh and the lady came back with an air of abstraction…

  Calm, brother, calm, in anticipation of the buzz and twitter from below! “Where’s Tom?” The Murderer is bewildered: “Here, surely?”

  Then the scream; the stampede in the passage, and the thumb squeezing the life out of the battery of the electric bell.

  “He fell, sir – fell down, smack at my feet!”

  “Now take it easy. He fell at your feet. Then what? You looked where? Upwards? You did. And you saw what? What did you say? You ‘sort of saw the gentleman take a jump’? Think again, my friend. The gentleman was looking out of the window while I was in the room. Come, now – ‘take a jump’, you say. Let’s get this clear. Are you telling us the gentleman jumped out of the window?”

  “Yes, sir: that’s how it looked to me.”

  “I can scarcely credit this, my friend… No, no, Nana – please don’t look! One thing only – one very little thing – how long were you in the bathroom?”

  “A few minutes; not more than four or five: probably less than five minutes.”

  “Pray be calm, my dear – relax and be calm, my dear!”

  He, the deceived husband, was wet with anguish. Nana was looking at him: she knew! He gave her a look out of the left-hand corners of his eyes, indicating that he knew she knew. Then her eyes changed: she worshipped him…

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said his host.r />
  The Murderer stared. “Hah?” Then he laughed, and the company laughed with him – that dreamer, that man of dreams. Nana was rubbing her cheek against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Oh-oh, please, please excuse me,” the Murderer said. “I seem to go into a trance these days. Do please forgive me…”

  A roar of laughter, a replenishment of glasses, a slapping of shoulders, an offering of sandwiches. But the Murderer wanted to go home and dream some dreams… He was still blinking in his dazed way.

  “What a dreamy fellow you are!” said his host.

  Soon he excused himself, saying that he had some work to do, and walked slowly homewards. He resented a spatter of rain that forced him to run for a bus. How can a man dream dreams while he is running? Still, it would never do to get his suit wet.

  His grey suit was the only presentable one he possessed.

  When he had gone the others talked about him. The newly-married wife said: “I suppose he’s all right, but I’m not sure that I like him.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. I don’t know what it is, but somehow there’s just something… I don’t know what… something creepy about him.”

  “Creepy? What, him? Oh come, come, darling! He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I didn’t say he would. I only said that he gave me the creeps – why, goodness knows. It’s just a feeling.”

  “You know what it is? It’s that dreamy look of his,” said a girl named Muriel, “like a zombie.”

  “And what’s a zombie?”

  “Isn’t it a sort of walking corpse?”

  “Well, I see what you mean,” said the host, “I must admit that he does, as it were, look as if he was walking in his sleep. But he’s all right. I’ve known him for ages. Gentle sort of creature, terribly fond of children.”

  “Is he married?” asked Muriel.

  The host laughed; this question amused him. “Married? Good Lord no! I couldn’t imagine him marrying anybody, could you?”

  “Why not? Is he impotent?”

  “How the devil should I know?”

  “Is he queer?”

  “No, I should say definitely not queer. I don’t think he’s got much interest in sex at all. At least, I don’t associate him with anything of the kind. The peculiar thing about him is that women find him attractive. What they-see in him I can’t imagine. But I know quite a few girls who have more or less fallen for him. I wonder why?”

  Muriel said: “Oh, I don’t know. He isn’t so bad really. I think he’s rather interesting.”

  “In what way interesting?” asked Nana.

  “I don’t know. Just one of those things. Sort of interesting.”

  The host said: “I know what it is. It’s the same as with those professional polygamists. They’re irresistible to women because they’d so obviously make good, faithful, docile husbands. You couldn’t imagine him, for instance, rushing from pub to pub or brothel to brothel night after night, could you? No; security, nice quiet devotion, the pay envelope intact every Friday night, that’s what you’d expect from our old pal. House-trained, obedient, born to be henpecked. That’s what most women like, especially widows with a little money of their own.”

  Nana said: “You know too much about women. If you’re not careful, I shall henpeck you.”

  “Then I shall lock you up in a dark room and feed you on bread and water, and break your spirit that way.”

  The girl Muriel asked: “What does he do?”

  The host looked blank and then said: “Well, as a matter of fact, I think he writes.”

  “Well, everybody writes nowadays. What does he write?”

  “He’s very cagy about it. But once I caught him reading the Weekly Sweetheart. You know, that tuppenny rag that has stories about mill-girls and baronets and all that sort of thing. It’s my theory that he writes that kind of stuff, but I couldn’t say for certain. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because he doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  Muriel nodded and said: “Well, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to admit that I wrote tripe like that, would you?”

  The wife said: “I don’t see why not. What’s the matter with it? There’s nothing shameful in it, is there? I’d just as soon write stories about mill-girls and baronets as go about in corduroy trousers writing highbrow poetry. It’s an honest living, and – ”

  Her husband whooped with laughter and shouted: “Ah-ha! Here speaks the married woman! Honest living! Ah-ha! Ah-ha – the pay envelope, the pay envelope! There you are, you see – the irresistible fascination of the pay envelope, eh?”

  “Darling, don’t be such a bloody idiot,” said his wife.

  “I wasn’t saying there was anything wrong in writing that sort of stuff,” said Muriel, “but if a man happens to be shy and sensitive… you know what I mean.”

  The husband said: “Oh sure, sure, we know what you mean all right, we know what you mean, Muriel, my dear. You and your Weekly Sweetheart.”

  “I wonder – ” said Muriel, and then stopped.

  “You see, darling, she wonders. She wonders,” said the husband, affectionately patting the hindquarters of his wife. “There’s the secret of that fatal fascination. He gets them wondering, my poppet, he gets them wondering. He gives them food for thought.”

  “All he gives me is the creeps,” she said, toying with the lobe of his ear.

  “Oh, forget him, my poppet!”

  “With pleasure, my own!”

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-One

  While this conversation was in progress, the Murderer was back in his bed-sitting-room. He had switched on the light, drawn the curtains, taken off and carefully hung up his only decent grey suit, and put on a tired-looking old blue woollen dressing-gown. He had work to do. The idea of work was distasteful to him: he just wanted to dream. But a man must eat, keep a roof over his head, and dress respectably. He had a craving for new suits. Once in a while he saw himself as Beau Brummell swaggering in impeccable coats, immaculate linen, and cravats that took an hour to tie – the haughty, the intolerably insolent, the fastidious buck whose wit was more to be feared than… say, a Spanish knife – an elegant Blade.

  He caught himself on the shadowy verge of another daydream and dragged himself to his little table. He had to work. The Ubiquity Press paid him a guinea a thousand words. There were men who made fat livings out of Ubiquity at that rate, but they could work like demons: words seemed to pour out of them like sugar from a torn paper-bag. The Murderer was something of an artist: he laid out his second-hand sentences with the meticulosity of a rag-picker sorting rubbish; by hand, with a fine-pointed pen. At present he was working on a new serial for The Knuckleduster, a boys’ paper that specialized in tales of violence. He had invented a character named ‘Ironskin Obst’ who had discovered a serum that gave his skin the impregnability of fine steel without impairing its flexibility. Fire a gun at Obst and the bullet flattened itself against his forehead; throw him off a cliff, and instead of smashing himself on the rocks below Obst smashed the rocks. Hit him, and you beat your hand to pulp. The only way to get at Ironskin was with a blowlamp – and an extra-special blowlamp at that. The Villain had such a blowlamp.

  The pity of it was that words came so slowly. He had to exert himself to make five pounds a week, and he detested exertion; he wanted to dream.

  He sat down sighing, dipped a long, sharp, shiny nib in the ink-pot and began to write:

  IRONSKIN OBST!

  by

  DASHWOOD STEEL

  He liked this nom-de-plume even better than the one with which he signed his stories in Young Detective Weekly – ‘Dirk Pike’. Readers of The Thunderbolt knew him as ‘Lance Stockmar’. Sometimes he contributed to The Smasher under the pseudonym ‘Carver Riddle’. When he wrote for the Weekly Sweetheart he took pleasure in signing himself ‘Rayon Knickerbocker’. But ‘Dashwood Steel’ was the name he l
iked best of all – the name he would have chosen for himself if he had had any say in the matter.

  Ironskin Obst laughed as the red-hot iron seared his eyeballs, he wrote. Then he nibbled his penholder. If only such things could be! But no, no dreams just now! Work…

  Nothing could hurt him. Knives broke and bullets rebounded from the serum-strengthened body of Ironskin Obst. Even fire was powerless to hurt him.

  But oh, oh, oh if only such things could be! Oh for impregnability, and the attributes of Samson Herk, who could poke his finger through the side of a submarine! Such physical strength, combined with the powers of Svenska Agali, the Schoolboy Hypnotist…

  But the sneering oblong mouth of the gas fire asks for shillings.

  To work!

  Genius is ninety per cent perspiration… which smells. The world is grim and hard, and stinks. What can a sensitive man do?

  He wrote.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-Two