Witching Hill Part 18

"But my poor mother would rather lose every salt-cellar, Colonel Cheffins, than have a man shot dead on her stairs."

"I shouldn't dream of shooting him dead," replied the colonel. "I shouldn't even go as far as I went last night, if I could help it. But with that barrel glittering in your hand, Mr. Delavoye, I fancy you'd find it easier to keep up a conversation with some intrusive connoisseur."

"Is it loaded?" I asked as Uvo took the weapon gingerly from its box.

"Not at the moment, and I fear these few cartridges are all I can spare.

I only keep enough myself for an emergency. I need hardly warn you, by the way, against pistol practice in these little gardens? It would be most unsafe with a revolver of this calibre. Why, G.o.d bless my soul, you might bring down some unfortunate person in the next paris.h.!.+"

I entirely agreed, but Delavoye was not attending. He was playing with the colonel's offering as a child plays with fire, with the same intent face and meddlesome maladroitness. It was a mercy it was not loaded. I saw him wince as the hammer snapped unexpectedly; then he kept on snapping it, as though the sensation fascinated ear or finger; and just as I found myself enduring an intolerable suspense, Uvo ended it with a reckless light in his sunken eyes.

"I'm a lost man, Gilly!" said he, with a grim twinkle for my benefit. "I was afraid I should be if I once felt it in my paw. It's extraordinarily kind of you, Colonel Cheffins, and you must forgive me if I seem to have been looking your gift in the barrel. But the fact is I have always been rather chary of these pretty things, and I must thank you for the chance of overcoming the weakness."

His tone was sincere enough. So was the grave face turned upon Colonel Cheffins. But its very gravity angered and alarmed me, and I was determined to have his decision in more explicit terms.

"Then the pistol's yours, is it, Uvo?" I asked, with the most disingenuous grin that I could muster.

"Till death us do part!" he answered. And his laugh jarred every fibre in my body.

I never knew how seriously to take him; that was the worst of his elusive humour, or it may be of my own deficiency in any such quality. I confess I like a man to laugh at his own jokes, and to look as though he meant the things he does mean. Uvo Delavoye would do either--or neither--as the whim took him, and I used sometimes to think he cultivated a wilful subtlety for my special bewilderment. Thus in this instance he was quite capable of a.s.suming an alarming pose to pay me out for any undue anxiety I might betray on his behalf; therefore I had to admire the revolver in my turn, and even to acclaim it as a timely acquisition. But either Uvo was not deceived, or else I was right as to his morbid feeling about the weapon. He seemed unable to lay it down.

Sometimes he did so with apparent resolution, only to pick it up again and sit twisting the empty chambers round and round, till they ticked like the speedometer of a coasting bicycle. Once he slipped in one of the cartridges. The colonel looked at me, and I perched myself on the desk at Uvo's side. But the worst thing of all was the way his hand trembled as he promptly picked that cartridge out again.

We had said not a word, but Uvo rattled on with glib vivacity and the laugh that got upon my nerves. His new possession was his only theme. He could no more drop the subject than the thing itself. It was the revolver, the whole revolver, and nothing but the revolver for Uvo Delavoye that night. He was childishly obsessed with its unpleasant possibilities, but he treated them with a grim levity not unredeemed by wit. His bloodthirsty prattle grew into a quaint and horrible harangue eked out with quotations that stuck like burs. More than once I looked to Colonel Cheffins for a disapproval which would come with more weight from him than me; but decanter and syphon had been brought up soon after his arrival, and he only sipped his whisky with an amused air that made me wonder which of us was going daft.

"Talk about bare bodkins, otherwise hollow-ground razors!" cried Uvo, emptying his gla.s.s. "I couldn't do the trick with cold steel if I tried; but with a revolver you've only got to press the trigger and it does the rest. Then--I wonder if you even live to hear the row?--then, Gilly, it's a case of that 'big blue mark in his forehead and the back blown out of his head!'"

"That wasn't a revolver," said I, for he had taught me to wors.h.i.+p his modern G.o.d of letters; "that was the Snider that 'squibbed in the jungle.'"

Delavoye looked it up in his paper-covered copy.

"Quite right, Gilly!" said he. "But what price this from the very next piece?

"'So long as those unloaded guns We keep beside the bed, Blow off, by obvious accident, The lucky owner's head.'

"That's a bit more like it than the big blue mark, eh? And my gifted author is the boy who can handle these little dears better than anybody else in the cla.s.s; he don't only use 'em for moral suasion under arms, but he makes you smell the blood and hear the thunder!"

Colonel Cheffins seemed to have had enough at last; he rose to go with rather a perfunctory laugh, and I jumped up to see him out on the plea of something I had to say about his damaged door and window.

"For G.o.d's sake, sir, get your revolver back from him!" was what I whispered down below. "He's not himself. He hasn't been his own man for over a year. Get it back from him before he takes a turn for the worse and--and----"

"I know what you mean," said the colonel, "but I don't believe it's as bad as you think. I'll see what I can do. I might say I've smashed the other, but I mustn't say it too soon or he'll smell a rat. I must leave him to you meanwhile, Mr. Gillon, but I honestly believe it's all talk."

And so did I as the dapper little coach smiled cheerily under the hall lamp, and I shut the door on him and ran up to Uvo's room two steps at a time. But on the threshold I fell back, for an instant, as though that accursed revolver covered me; for he was seated at his desk, his back to the room, his thumb on the trigger--and the muzzle in his right ear.

I crept upon him and struck it upwards with a blow that sent the weapon flying from his grasp. It had not exploded; it was in my pocket before he could turn upon me with a startled oath.

"What are you playing at, my good fellow?" cried he.

"What are _you_?"

And my teeth chattered with the demand.

"What do you suppose? You didn't think I'd gone and loaded it, did you?

I was simply seeing--if you want to know--whether one would use one's forefinger or one's thumb. I've quite decided on the thumb."

"Uvo," I said, pouring out more whisky than I intended, "this is more than I can stick even from you, old fellow! You've gone on and on about this infernal shooter till I never want to see one in my life again. If you meant to blow out your brains this very night, you couldn't have said more than you have done. What rhyme or reason is there in such crazy talk?"

"I didn't say it was either poetry or logic," he answered, filling his pipe. "But it's a devilish fascinating idea."

"The idea of wanton suicide? You call that fascinating?"

"Not as an end. It's a poor enough end. I was thinking of the means--the cold trigger against your finger--the cold muzzle in your ear--the one frightful bang and then the Great What Next!"

"The Great What Next for you," I said, as his eyes came dancing through a cloud of birdseye, "is Cane Hill or Colney Hatch, if you don't take care."

"I prefer the Village mortuary, if you don't mind, Gilly."

"Either would be so nice for your mother and sister!"

"And I'm such a help to them as I am, aren't I? Think of the bread I win and all the dollars I'm raking in!"

"It would be murder as well as suicide," I went on. "It would finish off one of them, if not both."

He smoked in silence with a fatuous, drunken smile, though he was as sober as a man could be. That made it worse. And it was worst of all when the smile faded from the face to gather in the eyes, in a liquid look of unfathomable cynicism, new to me in Uvo Delavoye, and yet mysteriously familiar and repellent.

"Yes; they're certainly a drawback, Gillon, but I don't know that they've a right to be anything more. We don't ask to be put into this world; surely we can put ourselves out if it amuses us."

"'If it amuses us!'"

"But that's the whole point!" he cried, puffing and twinkling as before.

"How many people out themselves for no earthly reason that anybody else can see, and have their memory insulted by the usual idiotic verdict?

They're no more temporarily insane than I am. It's their curiosity that gets the better of them. They want to go at their best, with all their wits about them, as you or I might want to go to Court. If they could take a return ticket, they would; they don't really want to go for good any more than I do. They're doing something they don't really want to do, yet can't help doing, as half of us are, half our time."

"They're weak fools," I bl.u.s.tered. "They're destructive children who've never grown up, and they ought to be taken care of till they do."

He smiled through his smoke with sinister serenity.

"But we all are children, my dear Gilly, and on the best authority most of us are fools. As for the destructive faculty, it's part of human nature and three parts of modern policy; but our politicians haven't the child's excuse of wanting to know how things are made--which I see at the back of half the brains that get blown out by obvious accident."

"Good-night, Uvo," I said, just grasping him by the arm. "I know you're only pulling my leg, but I've heard about enough for one night."

"Another insulting verdict!" he laughed. "Well, so long, if you really mean it; but do you mind giving me my Webley and Scott before you go?"

"Your what?"

"My present from over the way. It's one of Webley and Scott's best efforts, you know. I had one like it, only the smaller size, when I was out in Egypt."

I thought he had forgotten about the concrete weapon, or rather that he did not know I had picked it up, but expected to find it in the corner where it had fallen when I knocked it out of his hand. My own hand closed upon it in my side pocket, as I turned to face Uvo Delavoye, who had somehow slipped between me and the door.

"So it's not your first revolver?" I temporised.