The First Algernon Blackwood MEGAPACK ®. Algernon Blackwood
and voluble.
“What! You ain’t been to bed, sir! Are you ill, or has anything ‘appened? And there’s an urgent gentleman to see you, though it ain’t seven o’clock yet, and—”
“Who is it?” he stammered. “I’m all right, thanks. Fell asleep in my chair, I suppose.”
“Someone from Mr. Wilb’ram’s, and he says he ought to see you quick before you go abroad, and I told him—”
“Show him up, please, at once,” said Johnson, whose head was whirling, and his mind was still full of dreadful visions.
Mr. Wilbraham’s man came in with many apologies and explained briefly and quickly that an absurd mistake had been made and that the wrong kit bag had been sent over the night before.
“Henry somehow got hold of the one that came over from the courtroom, and Mr. Wilbraham only discovered it when he saw his own lying in his room and asked why it had not gone to you,” the man said.
“Oh!” said Johnson stupidly.
“And he must have brought you the one from the murder case instead, sir, I’m afraid,” the man continued, without the ghost of an expression on his face. “The one John Turk packed the dead body in. Mr. Wilbraham’s awful upset about it, sir, and told me to come over first thing this morning with the right one, as you were leaving by the boat.”
He pointed to a clean-looking kit bag on the floor, which he had just brought. “And I was to bring the other one back, sir,” he added casually.
For some minutes Johnson could not find his voice. At last he pointed in the direction of his bedroom. “Perhaps you would kindly unpack it for me. Just empty the things out on the floor.”
The man disappeared into the other room and was gone for five minutes. Johnson heard the shifting to and fro of the bag and the rattle of the skates and boots being unpacked.
“Thank you, sir,” the man said, returning with the bag folded over his arm. “And can I do anything more to help you, sir?”
“What is it?” asked Johnson, seeing that he still had something that he wished to say.
The man shuffled and looked mysterious. “Beg pardon, sir, but knowing your interest in the Turk case, I thought you’d maybe like to know what’s happened—”
“Yes.”
“John Turk killed himself last night with poison immediately on getting his release, and he left a note for Mr. Wilbraham saying as he’d be much obliged if they’d have him put away, same as the woman he murdered, in the old kit bag.”
“What time—did he do it?” asked Johnson.
“Ten o’clock last night, sir, the warden says.”
1 King’s Counsel.
THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM
He arrived late at night by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. the village, a single mass of shadow, was already asleep. Only in front of the little hotel was there noise and light and bustle for a moment. the horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord, their harness trailing in the dust; and the lumbering diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it the body of a great yellow-sided beetle with broken legs.
In spite of his physical weariness the schoolmaster, revelling in the first hours of his ten-guinea holiday, felt exhilarated. For the high Alpine valley was marvellously still; stars twinkled over the torn ridges of the Dent du Midi where spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests, dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. He took it all in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three passengers gave directions about their luggage and went to their rooms. Then he turned and walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall, only just able to resist stopping to examine the big mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door.
And, with a sudden disagreeable shock, he came down from the ideal to the actual. For at the inn—the only inn—there was no vacant room. Even the available sofas were occupied.…
How stupid he had been not to write! Yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in Geneva, enticed by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.
They talked endlessly, this gold-braided porter and the hard-faced old woman—her face was hard, he noticed—gesticulating all the time, and pointing all about the village with suggestions that he ill understood, for his French was limited and their patois was fearful.
“There!” he might find a room, “or there! But we are, hélas full—more full than we care about. Tomorrow, perhaps if So-and-So give up their rooms —!” And then, with much shrugging of shoulders, the hard-faced old woman stared at the gold-braided porter, and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster.
At length, however, by some process of hope he did not himself understand, and following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible, he went out into the street and walked towards a dark group of houses she had pointed out to him. He only knew that he meant to thunder at a door and ask for a room. He was too weary to think out details. the porter half made to go with him, but turned back at the last moment to speak with the old woman. the houses sketched themselves dimly in the general blackness. the air was cold. the whole valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water. He was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be very far away, and that he might even spend the night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp noise behind him and he turned to see a figure hurrying after him. It was the porter running.
And in the little hall of the inn there began again a confused three-cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides in patois between the woman and the porter—the net result of which was that, “If Monsieur did not object there was a room, after all, on the first floor—only it was in a sense ‘engaged.’ That is to say—”
But the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely into the puzzle that had somehow provided it so suddenly. the ethics of hotelkeeping had nothing to do with him. If the woman offered him quarters, it was not for him to argue with her whether the said quarters were legitimately hers to offer.
But the porter, evidently a little thrilled, accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in a mixture of French and English details omitted by the landlady and Minturn, the schoolmaster, soon shared the thrill with him, and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy.
All who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high mountain valleys where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of the attractions, will understand a certain faint element of high alarm that goes with the picture. One looks up at the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men who find their pleasure for days and nights together scaling perilous summits among the clouds, and conquering inch by inch the icy peaks that for ever shake their dark terror in the sky. the atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative contemplation of the scene; and the idea Minturn gleaned from the half-frightened porter lost nothing by his ignorance of the language. This Englishwoman, the real occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide. She had left just before daybreak two days before the porter had seen her start and…she had not returned! the route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for a skilled climber, even a solitary one. And the Englishwoman was an experienced mountaineer. Also, she was self-willed, careless of advice, bored by warnings, self-confident to a degree. Queer, moreover; for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one, for days together: a “crank,” evidently, of the first water.
This much Minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter’s talk while his luggage was brought in and the room set to rights; further, too, that the search