‘Well, about something very dear to you.’
‘About you, then?’
‘Don’t make fun of me. The objects I speak of are both solid and useful.’
‘That does rather rule you out,’ said Munt meditatively. ‘What are they useful for?’
‘Carrying bodies.’
Munt glanced across at Bettisher, who was staring into the grate.
‘And what are they made of?’
Valentine tittered, pulled a face, answered, ‘I’ve had little experience of them, but I should think chiefly of wood.’
Munt got up and looked hard at Bettisher, who raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
‘They perform at one time or another,’ said Valentine, enjoying himself enormously, ‘an essential service for us all.’
There was a pause. Then Munt asked—
‘Where do you generally come across them?’
‘Personally I always try to avoid them,’ said Valentine. ‘But one meets them every day in the street and—and here, of course.’
‘Why do you try to avoid them?’ Munt asked rather grimly.
‘Since you think about them, and dote upon them, and collect them from all the corners of the earth, it pains me to have to say it,’ said Valentine with relish, ‘but I do not care to contemplate lumps of human flesh lacking the spirit that makes flesh tolerable.’
He struck an oratorical attitude and breathed audibly through his nose. There was a prolonged silence. The dusk began to make itself felt in the room.
‘Well,’ said Munt, at last, in a hard voice, ‘you are the first person to guess my little secret, if I can give it so grandiose a name. I congratulate you.’
Valentine bowed.
‘May I ask how you discovered it? While I was detained upstairs, I suppose you—you—poked about?’ His voice had a disagreeable ring; but Valentine, unaware of this, said loftily:
‘It was unnecessary. They were in the hall, plain to be seen by anyone. My Sherlock Holmes sense (I have eight or nine) recognized them immediately.’
Munt shrugged his shoulders, then said in a less constrained tone:
‘At this stage of our acquaintance I did not really intend to enlighten you. But since you know already, tell me, as a matter of curiosity, were you horrified?’
‘Horrified?’ cried Valentine. ‘I think it a charming taste, so original, so—so human. It ravishes my aesthetic sense; it slightly offends my moral principles.’
‘I was afraid it might,’ said Munt.
‘I am a believer in Birth Control,’ Valentine prattled on. ‘Every night I burn a candle to Stopes.’
Munt looked puzzled. ‘But then, how can you object?’ he began.
Valentine went on without heeding him.
‘But of course by making a corner in the things, you do discourage the whole business. Being exhibits they have to stand idle, don’t they? you keep them empty?’
Bettisher started up in his chair, but Munt held out a pallid hand and murmured in a stifled voice:
‘Yes, that is, most of them are.’
Valentine clapped his hands in ecstasy.
‘But some are not? Oh, but that’s too ingenious of you. To think of the darlings lying there quite still, not able to lift a finger, much less scream! A sort of mannequin parade!’
‘They certainly seem more complete with an occupant,’ Munt observed.
‘But who’s to push them? They can’t go of themselves.’
‘Listen,’ said Munt slowly. ‘I’ve just come back from abroad, and I’ve brought with me a specimen that does go by itself, or nearly. It’s outside there where you saw, waiting to be unpacked.’
Valentine Ostrop had been the life and soul of many a party. No one knew better than he how to breathe new life into a flagging joke. Privately he felt that this one was played out; but he had a social conscience; he realized his responsibility towards conversation, and summoning all the galvanic enthusiasm at his command he cried out:
‘Do you mean to say that it looks after itself, it doesn’t need a helping hand, and that a fond mother can entrust her precious charge to it without a nursemaid and without a tremor?’
‘She can,’ said Munt, ‘and without an undertaker and without a sexton.’
‘Undertaker . . . ? Sexton . . . ?’ echoed Valentine. ‘What have they to do with perambulators?’
There was a pause, during which the three figures, struck in their respective attitudes, seemed to have lost relationship with each other.
‘So you didn’t know,’ said Munt at length, ‘that it was coffins I collected.’
An hour later the three men were standing in an upper room, looking down at a large oblong object that lay in the middle of a heap of shavings and seemed, to Valentine’s sick fancy, to be burying its head among them. Munt had been giving a demonstration.
‘Doesn’t it look funny now it’s still?’ he remarked. ‘Almost as though it had been killed.’ He touched it pensively with his foot and it slid towards Valentine, who edged away. You couldn’t quite tell where it was coming; it seemed to have no settled direction, and to move all ways at once, like a crab. ‘Of course the chances are really against it,’ sighed Munt. ‘But it’s very quick, and it has that funny gift of anticipation. If it got a fellow up against a wall, I don’t think he’d stand much chance. I didn’t show you here, because I value my floors, but it can bury itself in wood in three minutes and in newly turned earth, say a flower-bed, in one. It has to be this squarish shape, or it couldn’t dig. It just doubles the man up, you see, directly it catches him—backwards, so as to break the spine. The top of the head fits in just below the heels. The soles of the feet come uppermost. The spring sticks a bit.’ He bent down to adjust something. ‘Isn’t it a charming toy?’
‘Looking at it from the criminal’s standpoint, not the engineer’s,’ said Bettisher, ‘I can’t see that it would be much use in a house. Have you tried it on a stone floor?’
‘Yes, it screams in agony and blunts the blades.’
‘Exactly. Like a mole on paving-stones. And even on an ordinary carpeted floor it could cut its way in, but there would be a nice hole left in the carpet to show where it had gone.’
Munt conceded this point, also. ‘But it’s an odd thing,’ he added, ‘that in several of the rooms in this house it would really work, and baffle anyone but an expert detective. Below, of course, are the knives, but the top is inlaid with real parquet. The grave is so sensitive—you saw just now how it seemed to grope—that it can feel the ridges, and adjust itself perfectly to the pattern of the parquet. But of course I agree with you. It’s not an indoor game, really: it’s a field sport. You go on, will you, and leave me to clear up this mess. I’ll join you in a moment.’
Valentine followed Bettisher down into the library. He was very much subdued.
‘Well, that was the funniest scene,’ remarked Bettisher, chuckling.
‘Do you mean just now? I confess it gave me the creeps.’
‘Oh no, not that: when you and Dick were talking at cross-purposes.’
‘I’m afraid I made a fool of myself,’ said Valentine dejectedly. ‘I can’t quite remember what we said. I know there was something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Ask away, but I can’t promise to answer.’
Valentine pondered a moment.
‘Now I remember what it was.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘To tell you the truth, I hardly like to. It was something Dick said. I hardly noticed at the time. I expect he was just playing up to me.’
‘Well?’
‘About these coffins. Are they real?’
‘How do you mean “real”?’
‘I mean, could they be used as—’
‘My dear chap, they have been.’