The Big Bow Mystery | Page 3

told her anything of his journey, beyond the town; but
she knew Devonport had a Dockyard because Jessie Dymond--Tom's
sweetheart--once mentioned that her aunt lived near there, and it lay on
the surface that Tom had gone to help the dockers, who were imitating
their London brethren. Mrs. Drabdump did not need to be told things to
be aware of them. She went back to prepare Mr. Constant's superfine
tea, vaguely wondering why people were so discontented nowadays.
But when she brought up the tea and the toast and the eggs to Mr.
Constant's sitting-room (which adjoined his bedroom, though without
communicating with it), Mr. Constant was not sitting in it. She lit the
gas, and laid the cloth; then she returned to the landing and beat at the
bedroom door with an imperative palm. Silence alone answered her.
She called him by name and told him the hour, but hers was the only
voice she heard, and it sounded strangely to her in the shadows of the
staircase. Then, muttering, "Poor gentleman, he had the toothache last
night; and p'r'aps he's only just got a wink o' sleep. Pity to disturb him
for the sake of them grizzling conductors. I'll let him sleep his usual
time," she bore the tea-pot downstairs with a mournful, almost poetic,
consciousness that soft-boiled eggs (like love) must grow cold.
Half-past seven came--and she knocked again. But Constant slept on.
His letters, always a strange assortment, arrived at eight, and a telegram
came soon after. Mrs. Drabdump rattled his door, shouted, and at last

put the wire under it. Her heart was beating fast enough now, though
there seemed to be a cold, clammy snake curling round it. She went
downstairs again and turned the handle of Mortlake's room, and went in
without knowing why. The coverlet of the bed showed that the
occupant had only lain down in his clothes, as if fearing to miss the
early train. She had not for a moment expected to find him in the room;
yet somehow the consciousness that she was alone in the house with
the sleeping Constant seemed to flash for the first time upon her, and
the clammy snake tightened its folds round her heart.
She opened the street door, and her eye wandered nervously up and
down. It was half-past eight. The little street stretched cold and still in
the grey mist, blinking bleary eyes at either end, where the street lamps
smouldered on. No one was visible for the moment, though smoke was
rising from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house
of the detective across the way the blinds were still down and the
shutters up. Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her.
The bleak air set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned
to the kitchen to make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a
deep sleep. But the canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know
whether she dropped it or threw it down, but there was nothing in the
hand that battered again a moment later at the bedroom door. No sound
within answered the clamour without. She rained blow upon blow in a
sort of spasm of frenzy, scarce remembering that her object was merely
to wake her lodger, and almost staving in the lower panels with her
kicks. Then she turned the handle and tried to open the door, but it was
locked. The resistance recalled her to herself--she had a moment of
shocked decency at the thought that she had been about to enter
Constant's bedroom. Then the terror came over her afresh. She felt that
she was alone in the house with a corpse. She sank to the floor,
cowering; with difficulty stifling a desire to scream. Then she rose with
a jerk and raced down the stairs without looking behind her, and threw
open the door and ran out into the street, only pulling up with her hand
violently agitating Grodman's door-knocker. In a moment the first-floor
window was raised--the little house was of the same pattern as her
own--and Grodman's full fleshy face loomed through the fog in sleepy
irritation from under a nightcap. Despite its scowl the ex-detective's

face dawned upon her like the sun upon an occupant of the haunted
chamber.
"What in the devil's the matter?" he growled. Grodman was not an early
bird, now that he had no worms to catch. He could afford to despise
proverbs now, for the house in which he lived was his, and he lived in
it because several other houses in the street were also his, and it is well
for the landlord to be about his own estate in Bow, where poachers
often shoot the moon. Perhaps the