Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Thank Heaven you did forget,’ said I. ‘What is to be done with you, you vile creature? I am utterly staggered.’

At this Lady Fairfax broke into sudden laughter. ‘That is altogether understandable,’ said she. ‘My dear Dr Watson, you have been scandalously put upon. How am I to explain? Perhaps I may show you this.’

She handed me a tattered volume on whose cover I made out the legend, ‘Plays of Terror and the Macabre’. I turned over its pages with a dawning comprehension which became complete when I reached, set out in cold print, the very words I had just heard Sir Harry pronounce. ‘You are acting’, was the best I could find to say.

‘Correct, my dear fellow,’ smiled the dreadful inquisitor of a minute before, cracking his whip against a battered escritoire — I saw now that the room was half full of such items of discarded furniture. ‘I think I told you how my poor wife misses the theatre, and this sort of tomfoolery was the best we could devise by way of a substitute.’

‘Last night,’ I said feebly — ‘last night I heard Lady Fairfax protesting in a strain I could have sworn held nothing simulated.’

‘Quite true,’ said the lady pleasantly; ‘last night I was tired after my travels, too tired for this sport.’

‘I will interrupt you no longer,’ I declared, and brushing aside the apologies of both, took myself out of that room as fast as I could. Doubtless I had made a fool of myself, but I was saved from the self-regarding shame that that thought usually brings by commiseration towards Lady Fairfax. Nobody could have failed to see that her object that night had been, not entertainment, but distraction from thought of what the next day might hold in store.

It was a day that began auspiciously enough, with a blue sky faintly veiled in mist, so often the prelude to a blazing noon. By eleven o’clock the shooting-party was on its way towards the wood. Besides myself, it included the Fairfax brothers and half a dozen neighbours, but not Captain Bradshaw, whom I had just heard explaining to a bewhiskered farmer that the recurrence of a bowel complaint, the effect of a germ picked up in India, forbade him to attend. Happening to catch my eye as he said this, he had hastily looked away, and with reason; I have never met a worse liar. The only servant present was a ruddy-cheeked youth carrying a rattle to put up the birds.

The sun was hot and high as we moved into the shadows of the wood, where there were many small noises. Almost at once Miles Fairfax stumbled at some irregularity of the ground, and but for my out-thrust arm might have fallen.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

He hobbled a pace or two. ‘My damned ankle. I seem to have twisted it.’

‘Best let me have a look.’

This natural suggestion seemed to fill him with wrath. ‘I haven’t broken my leg, curse it!’ he cried. ‘I don’t need surgery! I’ll be all right directly and will catch you up. Go on, all of you. Go on!’

It seemed we had no choice but to do as we were told. Presently the rattle sounded, flocks of pigeons took to the air and the guns blazed merrily away. I held my fire, maintaining a keen look-out and staying as close to Sir Harry as I could without forming one target with him. The party trod steadily on, deeper into the wood. I caught various movements among foliage, but none were of human agency. I had begun to fear, not what might happen, but that nothing would, when we reached a clearing some seventy yards across. At once there came the smart crack of a rifle-shot and Sir Harry cried out and fell. I was thunderstruck, but after a glance at the baronet’s prostrate form I shouted to the party that they should lie flat and keep their heads down. They obeyed with alacrity. Another shot sounded, but the bullet went wild. I faced in the direction from which it had come and walked slowly forward.

‘Aim here,’ I called, indicating my chest. ‘Here.’

A third report followed; I heard the round buzzing through the air ten feet above my head. The fourth and fifth attempts were no better. When I had gone some twenty yards there was a receding flurry in the bushes. I followed at a run, but still had seen nothing when two shots rang out almost together and a howl of pain followed. Within a minute I had found what I sought — Bradshaw and Carlos each covering with a rifle the prostrate form of Black Ralph.

‘Well done, lads,’ said I, grasping each by the arm, then turned my attention to the would-be assassin. My first good look at the scoundrel showed him to be of simous and ape-like appearance, and there was something animal in the way he whimpered over his injury. This was nothing much; a bullet had creased his knee-cap, temporarily incapacitating him but not, which would have been the case had it struck nearer, crippling him for life. All in all he was infernally lucky.

‘Whose shot was it?’ I asked.

‘I’m not certain,’ said Bradshaw.

‘I am certain,’ said the Spaniard with a gallant bow. ‘It was yours, Captain. Most brilliant, with a moving target at that range. And now you may leave it to me to deliver to the authorities this piece of filth.’

Sir Harry’s wound was lighter — a gash in the upper arm which had not bled excessively. When I reached him, he was being tenderly comforted by his brother Miles, whose whole nature seemed transformed, and who gave me such a look, compounded of remorse for past conduct and a firm resolve for the future, as I shall never forget. On our return to Darkwater Hall, the wife’s joy at her husband’s safe homecoming affected us all, notably Bradshaw. I received so much praise for my supposed courage in exposing myself to Black Ralph’s fire that I was forced at last to explain that it was undeserved.

‘The rifle is the key,’ said I, the recovered weapon in my hand. ‘Like all its fellows, it’s inaccurate. So when it was stolen I knew the culprit was someone ignorant of firearms. Then, when your tea-cup flew to pieces yesterday, Lady Fairfax, I knew more. To get a bullet out of this thingumbob between you and me at something like eighty yards the firer must be either a brilliant shot with many hours of practice behind him — impossible — or a very bad shot with the luck of the devil, one who had the luck of the devil again an hour ago; that staggered me, I must say. So you see, while Black Ralph was aiming at my chest I was safe. If he had just let fly at random he might conceivably have hit me.’

Bradshaw seemed dissatisfied. ‘But even the most inaccurate weapon in the world is dangerous at short range,’ he observed.

‘Indeed it is. That was why I kept my distance till there were no more shots in the locker. But of course I knew who was the villain of the piece within minutes of arriving in the house, despite all the questions I asked.’

‘By deduction?’ asked Miles Fairfax with a friendly smile.

‘Certainly not. I knew Black Ralph was a criminal, one glimpse of him was enough to show me he was a dangerous one, and everybody else I saw was simply incapable of such a monstrous deed as the one he tried to perpetrate today. It was obvious. And I thank God for that fact. In a case of the least difficulty I should have been the sorriest of substitutes for Sherlock Holmes.’

Accompanied by Bradshaw, who told me he felt he had vegetated too long, I caught the evening train for London, where we supped pleasantly at the Savoy.

If I were recording here one of Holmes’s adventures I should lay down my pen at this point, but since I mean to ensure that nobody shall see this account until fifty years after my death, I will take leave to say a little more.

I have been less than frank with the reader. By this I do not merely mean to confess that, in this narrative as in others, I have done what Holmes himself once accused me of doing and concealed ‘links in the chain’ — the scheme I devised with Bradshaw and Carlos for apprehending Black Ralph is the most glaring example — in order to make a better story, though I hope the finale thus produced is not ‘meretricious’. Nor do I mean to discuss the view, put forward by a Viennese colleague to whom I recently recounted the outline of this story, that Sir Harry Fairfax’s amateur theatricals might have been something other than what I had taken them to be, and in some abstruse way — which I could not wholly follow — connected with his failure to produce an heir. But it is all too certain that he was still childless when, some ten years after the Black Ralph affair, he met his death in a riding accident, leaving his brother to inherit with sorrow the baronetcy and estates he had once so ardently coveted.