The numbness that had taken hold of Jimmy’s body began to invade his mind, which grew dull and sleepy under the effort of compelling his tired hands to retain their hold. His back curved outwards, his head sank upon his breast; the changes of which his cramped position admitted were too slight to afford his body relief. So that he could not at once look round when he heard close above his head the sound of an opening door and the sharp rattle of falling mortar. He recognized the figure as it passed him—Rollo’s.

Jimmy restrained his impulse to call out. Why had Rollo come back? Why was he swaggering over the roofs of Verdew Castle at daybreak looking as though he owned it? It was not his yet. Rollo turned, and in the same leisurely fashion walked back towards Jimmy’s corner. His face was set and pale, but there was triumph in his eyes, and cruelty, and the marks of many passions which his everyday exterior had concealed. Then his eyebrows went up, his chin quivered, and his underlip shot out and seemed to stretch across his face. ‘Just five minutes more, five minutes more; I’ll give him another five minutes,’ he kept muttering to himself. He leaned back against the wall, Jimmy could have touched the laces of his shoes, which were untied and dirty. ‘Poor old Jimmy, poor old James!’ Rollo suddenly chanted, in a voice that was very distinct, but quite unlike his own. To Jimmy’s confused mind he seemed to be speaking of two different people, neither of whom was connected with himself. ‘Never mind, Jimmy,’ Rollo added in the conciliatory tone of one who, overcome by his better nature, at last gives up teasing. ‘Anyhow, it’s ten to one against.’ He stumbled down the gully and round the bend.

Jimmy never knew how he summoned strength to climb over the parapet. He found himself sprawling in the gully, panting and faint. But he had caught sight of a gaping hole like a buttery hatch amid the tangle of soot-doors, and he began to crawl towards it. He was trying to bring his stiff knee up to his good one when from close by his left ear he heard a terrible scream. It went shooting up, and seemed to make a glittering arc of sound in the half-lit sky. He also thought he heard the words, ‘Oh, God, Randolph, it’s me!’ but of this he was never certain. But through all the windings of Rollo’s bolt-hole, until it discharged itself at the base of a ruined newel-staircase among the outbuildings, he still heard the agonized gasping, spasmodic, yet with a horrible rhythm of its own, that followed Rollo’s scream. He locked the cracked, paintless door with the key that Rollo had left, and found himself among the lanes.

Late in the evening of the same day a policeman asked to see Mrs. Verdew, who was sitting in a bedroom in the King’s Head inn at Fremby, a market town ten miles from Verdew Castle. She had been sitting there all day, getting up from time to time to glance at a slip of paper pinned to one of the pillows. It was dated, ‘7.30 a.m., July 10th,’ and said, ‘Back in a couple of hours. Have to see a man about a car. Sorry—Rollo.’ She wouldn’t believe the constable when he said that her husband had met with an accident some time early that morning, probably about five o’clock. ‘But look! But look!’ she cried. ‘See for yourself! It is his own handwriting! He says he went away at half-past seven. Why are all Englishmen so difficult to convince?’

‘We have a statement from Mr. Randolph Verdew,’ said the policeman gently. ‘He said that he . . . he . . . he met Mr. Rollo at the castle in the early hours of the morning.’

‘But how can you be so stupid!’ cried Mrs. Verdew. ‘It wasn’t Rollo—it was Mr. Rintoul who . . .’

‘What name is that?’ asked the policeman, taking out his notebook.

THE WHITE WAND

THE WHITE WAND

C.F. told me this story and I shall re-tell it, as nearly as I can, in his own words. He would certainly have wished to be anonymous, and I shall respect his wish.

‘Last summer,’ he said, ‘after an absence of many years, I revisited Venice. I used to stay there for long stretches at a time before the war, and had many friends in the Anglo-American colony. My reasons for going to Venice were partly curiosity, to see if the old spell still held, and partly in order to write—I’ve always been able to write in Venice. The apartment I used to take had been let, and I had found a new one, though of course I hadn’t seen it. Nor had I notified my friends of my arrival; I’ll tell you why Arthur, presently.

‘But I didn’t expect to be altogether alone, nor did I want to be. I had one stand-by. My gondolier, Antonio, who had served me all the times I was in Venice, was at the station to meet me. Italians are very good at welcoming one. He greeted me rapturously; he could hardly stand still: excitement wriggled from the top of his greying head to the soles of his feet. It was as if a fund of affection had been accumulating in him during the war years and now he was pouring it all out.

‘Alone of my Venetian friends I had kept in touch with him during the War. Somehow or other, by way of Portugal, or the Vatican, or the Red Cross, we had managed to communicate, and the very difficulty entailed by those manœuvres seemed to have made our friendship more precious. Though I had never succeeded in hating him as an enemy, the reaction was just as strong as if I had, and I think the same was true of him. He was much more articulate about his feelings than I was. All the way from the station to my flat, which was somewhere behind the Zattere—I’ll try to tell you where later, it’s so hard to describe where anything is in Venice—I kept screwing my head round on the cushion and looking up at him, while he leaned over his oar, his words tripping over each other he talked so fast.

‘I got more feeling from that conversation that hostilities had come to an end than I did from V.E. day or V.J. day, or indeed from anything before or since. The cold war with Russia had not yet got under way, and talking to Antonio I felt that human solidarity was once more a fact.

‘So enveloping was his personality and so infectious his goodwill that I was hardly aware of the strangeness of my new abode, he was like a strong dose of familiarity that transformed the unknown into the known. I only noticed that it was up a great many steps.

‘There was only one subject I didn’t discuss with him, and that was my friends in Venice. Partly because I thought that he wouldn’t know about them (though he was by nature a know-all), partly, and illogically, because I thought he might tell me something I didn’t want to hear, but chiefly because—well, you know how I have felt about people since the war. The whole thing was such a ghastly disappointment to me that even my closest friends were somehow involved in it—even you, Arthur. I saw even the people I liked best as somehow at each other’s throats. My personal relationships were a tender area, as the doctors say. I had dreaded my meeting with Antonio, in case it turned sour on me, like food on an acid stomach. I had jumped that hurdle, but I thought the others could be taken later. It’s one thing talking to a servant who more or less has to agree with you (at least, Italian servants feel they must), and another to broach highly controversial topics with people whose minds and feelings have to be approached as warily as if they were a Foreign Power. And I was in no mood for circumspection. If I couldn’t see eye to eye with someone, I didn’t want to see him; I couldn’t bear to be disagreed with, and I wasn’t over eager to be agreed with, either. So I didn’t ask Antonio for news of my friends, and he didn’t for the moment volunteer any.

‘I might have noticed that he and Giuseppina, the maid of all work who “went” with my new flat, were not hitting it off; but if I did notice, it didn’t register. In the confusion of arriving I forgot to introduce them to each other formally. This was a breach of etiquette, but I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had. There is never any love lost between gondoliers and indoor servants, and I think they were jealous of each other from the start. Giuseppina had not been warned that I should have this attendant, and Antonio did not trouble to disguise from her the fact that he regarded me as his possession. She looked about fifty; he was ten years older. She never let him out of her sight if she could help it, and she didn’t want him to unpack for me. At about seven o’clock, before going out, as was his custom, to celebrate with his friends, he asked me if there was anything I wanted—tobacco, cigarettes, cognac? I said I should like some cognac and he brought it back with him when he returned to wait on me at dinner. Afterwards, when he was standing in the dimly-lit sala, saying goodnight, which took him a long time for he had by no means rubbed off the patina of absence, Giuseppina circled round him like a cat round a retriever, and when he had gone she shot the big bolt—the catenaccio—across the door with a sigh of satisfaction.