Sonata in D Minor

1

Mrs Tullivant rose from her seat and looked for her glasses everywhere but on the table where they very obviously lay.

'Here they are, my dear,' said her husband, with a thin smile that failed to hide his weariness of a good deed daily repeated.

'Thank you, Peter! Now I'm off to bed, and will leave you and Mr Morcambe to enjoy your music. I'm afraid that I'm a bit of a wet blanket where music is concerned.'

'My wife,' Mr Tullivant explained, 'has no use for composers whose names begin with B, H, M or S. That, of course, knocks out all the great masters!'

'What my husband says is quite true, Mr Morcambe. You can't imagine what a difference their names and initial letters make to my enjoyment of things and people! I just can't read the Bible, Milton or Shakespeare: and pictures by Holbein or Hogarth make me shiver. Although their styles and subjects are so different I feel a similar dislike for Millais, Morland and Murillo. And, by the way,' here she pointed an accusing knitting pin at her guest, 'your name begins with an M, you know!'

Before Morcambe had time to reply, the lady, with an ironical curtsey, had backed to the door and departed.

It may be said at this point that the mistress of Dulling Towers was known to her cottager neighbours and tenant as 'a proper caution'. Not that all she did was unacceptable but she was invariably and, sometimes it seemed, laboriously peculiar. This eccentricity she carried into all her activities, even into charitable works. Whether the latter category covered her annual distribution of two white mice apiece to the Sunday School children on Holy Innocents Day is doubtful; but, in order not to forfeit her largesse in other directions, the Vicar of East Dulling had to pretend that it did. On St. Valentine's Day she similarly presented a pair of white rabbits to every bachelor or spinster whose name appeared on the St. Stephen's Communicants' Roll; and on Michaelmas Eve a white goose was delivered from her farm to every married household among her tenantry.

Her attendance at Divine Service on Sundays and Holy Days was faithfully regular, except on festivals of saints whose names begin with B, H, M or S. The black-letter saints served this method of limitation quite as effectually and with greater frequency than the red-letter ones. Her noticeable absence from the Dulling Towers pew on the rare occasion of a Bishop of Wintonbury's visit made it necessary for the Vicar to explain to his Diocesan that the Sunday chosen for the Confirmation unfortunately coincided with the church's annual commemoration of the Venerable Bede.

In summer time she professed a strong faith in bare-footedness as a means to perfect health. Children's parties were accordingly given at the 'Towers' for which no footwear was permitted, and the Vicar sorely regretted the public exposure of corns and twisted toes entailed by his necessary attendance at the midsummer school-treat.

In her choice of clothes, hats, books, furniture and friends Mrs Tullivant was equally wayward and aggressive. Her vagaries must, in some directions, have proved expensive; but she intended them to be so. 'I value wealth,' she would say, 'only as the key to self-expression.' This key had passed to her, as only child and sole heiress, on the death of the late Sir Jeremy Andler, the proprietor of the well-known Andler's Nerve Tonic. Lady Andler had died long ago in an effort to provide her daughter with a little brother or sister; and the youth of Mrs Tullivant had been that of a pampered dictatress, whose every whim and fancy had met with paternal submission and encouragement.

'My wife'—Peter Tullivant turned his eyes from the closed door to meet those of his old friend—'probably appears to you to have perfected futility to a fine art. That unfortunately is not the case. There is a sinister method in her madness. Roger, old boy, I am an intensely unhappy man!'

Morcambe gazed at his host in sympathetic surprise at this confession, and waited for him to proceed further. To listen to a friend's complaints about his wife is forgivable, but not the prompting of them. Tullivant, moreover, quickly resumed.

'You did your best to save me from this marriage, Roger, and that is how I feel able to talk to you about it. I never really cared for Maud, much less loved her, but she amused me and I had no reason then to regard her oddities as anything but amiable and quaint. I anticipated that with the help of her large income we would live amicably together, and I enjoy the life of a leisured country gentleman. You know my tastes. I looked forward to a day or two a week with the hounds and to bridge or billiards of an evening; to motor tours on the Continent, and to some shooting here and in Scotland. That, of course, was what suggested to her her plan of campaign, or system of torture.'

'What on earth can you mean, Peter?'

'Bridge, billiards, hunting, motoring and shooting: B, H, M and S!'

'Good heavens! you don't mean to tell me...'

'I mean to tell you that in her apparently capricious and idiotic aversion to whatever begins with those four letters lies a cunning stratagem to thwart and frustrate me in everything and to make my life unbearable. I once told you my financial position as a bachelor: I had a meagre competence of some three hundred a year. Fifty of that I lost in a gramophone company, and what remains just about suffices to pay my club bills and keep me in clothes. For everything else I have to go to my wife, and she jots down in her account books every farthing I spend and determines on what I may, and on what I may not, spend it. It's nothing short of slavery, and if it weren't for one thing I'd pack up and quit.'

'What is it that keeps you?'

'My love for this dear old place and garden. Her pride in appearances prevents my wife blighting them with her ridiculous B, H, M, S taboo. She gets over it by pretending never to remember the names of trees or flowers; she realises that it is the spell of Dulling Towers that binds me to her, and is far too astute to give me my liberty by weakening that bond. On the contrary she encourages my passion for gardening because of the hold which it gives her over me.'

At this point Tullivant, in reality startled at the extent to which he had allowed himself to disclose his marital infelicity, made a show of self-possession by filling his pipe with much deliberation and apparent fixity of attention. This however did not deceive Morcambe, who at once effected the change of subject which he felt circumstances to require.

'Well, let's get on with the music! What are you going to play me?'

'There are four hundred gramophone records in that cabinet all arranged alphabetically under the composers' names. Make your choice. You'll find the contents listed on the cardboard schedule at the top of each drawer.'

Thus invited, Morcambe walked over to the cabinet and began his inspection.

'Hullo! this middle drawer is locked and there is no key. What do you keep in here?'

The pipe being by this time filled, Tullivant moved slowly over to the mantelpiece, picked a paper spill from a vase and stooped to light it at the fire. His back was therefore towards Morcambe when he made the unexpected reply: 'I wonder, Roger, whether you'd allow me to try a little experiment on you?'

2

'Experiment? What sort of experiment?'

'Oh! nothing difficult or troublesome,' Tullivant explained, rising from the fire and standing in front of it; 'only that I want you to put on the record which is in that locked drawer and play it to yourself while I go out of the room. The only other thing necessary to the experiment is that I should bolt the door on the outside after I've left you. The object of the experiment will be to ascertain your psychological reactions on an undisturbed hearing of the record which, as you will find out, is a very special and unusual one. That is why I keep it locked up.'

'But why bolt the door?'

'I'll tell you that afterwards, if you still want to know; but I think you'll soon find out. Ah! here's the key: I always keep it in my ticket pocket in order not to get it mixed up with those on my key-ring. There you are!'

Morcambe took the record and surveyed it with considerable curiosity. The colour of the disc was not the usual black but a dark chocolate brown, and it had a blank apple-green label on which was written in manuscript:

SIEDEL'S SONATA IN D MINOR
Violin: Igor Vidal
Piano: Moritz Vidal
'I'll tell you all about that record when you've played it through,' Tullivant promised as he inserted a new needle in the pick-up, 'and till then I'm off. You know how to turn the thing on? I shouldn't have the loudspeaker quite full on if I were you. Now, please don't forget to register your sensations, for I shall want to know all of them: so keep your mind on the music.'

Morcambe smiled a little wryly as his host closed the door and audibly slid the outside bolt. Really it all seemed rather ridiculous; but one mustn't blame the husband of so eccentric a wife for developing a few crazes of his own! The disc was now revolving, and with a firm but delicate touch Morcambe set the needle to its margin and, settling into his chair, awaited the music. Oh, that tune! He knew the piece well enough and associated it with D'Esterre's music at the Vallambrosa. But D'Esterre would never have murdered the violin like this! Whether the fault lay with player or instrument, the tone was indescribably horrible: it reminded Morcambe somehow of an animal moaning in pain, or was it rage? The piano, on the other hand, was being played exquisitely and, by contrast, made the violin all the more intolerable. Morcambe, indeed, rose from his chair to turn the radiophone off, but checked himself as he called to mind that this was an experiment and this his first reaction that he must remember to describe to Tullivant. As he moved towards the fire the tone of the violin grew even more shrill and strident, and fiercer in its apparent enmity to the piano. Catching a sudden glimpse of his reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece, Morcambe did not like what he saw and turned angrily round. Sonata indeed! Vendetta for violin and piano, that was what he was listening to. The violinist had now reached that pizzicato passage in the first movement, in which his brutal plucking of the strings moved Morcambe to fury. With a pounce at the grate he seized the small poker from its tripod and brandished it towards the radiophone. No: there would be no relief in smashing that inanimate machine. The music clamoured for violence to flesh and blood! In a nervous frenzy he sprang towards the door, and then as suddenly recoiled. That swine, Tullivant, in his dirty cunning had, he remembered, bolted it. But there was another way to get at him—through the french window! No, damn it! He had bolted that too. At this moment there rang out on the piano the lovely solo recapitulation of the second theme; but Morcambe shivered in anticipation of those piercing chords in which the two instruments would shortly wrestle in the tempestuous coda. If only he could get at Tullivant!

But before ever the chords sounded, there came in quick succession a thud, a scream, a choking and a moan; and then, save for the scratching of the needle on the record, silence. The sweat stood out on Morcambe's forehead and on the back of the hand in which the poker still hung limply clutched. Then with a clank it fell to the floor and he sank giddily into an armchair; nor did he hear the door unlocked before, looking up, he saw his host standing over him with a stiff brandy in his hand.

'Take this, old man; you'll soon come round. There's no delayed action about your nerves!' Here Tullivant picked up the poker. 'You'd have broken my skill if you could have got at me!'

Morcambe nodded and gulped down the brandy.

'And now perhaps you will be so good as to explain?' he suggested acidly.

'Certainly, Roger, I owe it you, and you shall have the whole story. You will remember my mentioning that I had lost money in a gramophone company. It was called Orpheophone Limited, and the idea was to begin business with the recording of a library of what our Chairman chose to call "popular classics". Siedel's Sonata was among the first half-dozen, and we thought ourselves lucky when Ballister, our manager, told us that he had booked the Vidal Brothers to play it. We little knew, nobody in fact knew, that they were not brothers at all, but distant cousins locked in a deadly feud which was to have its fatal finale in our studio. Igor waited till Moritz was playing that solo passage on the piano and then stabbed him through the back with a stiletto which he had kept in his violin case. Some of our shareholders, I remember, were sanguine enough to fancy that the tragedy might prove an advertisement for Orpheophone records!

'Of this Vidal recording only two impressions were taken before the matrix was destroyed: one for the purpose of being put in as an exhibit in the murder trial that followed. It was never brought in evidence, however, and was accidentally dropped and broken by one of the Court attendants. The other was the one which you have just heard.

'How did I come by it? Well, as a matter of fact, I found it in a parcel awaiting me at a Poste Restante in the Riviera, where I was on a motor tour with my aunt, Lady Sulcock, the following spring. With it was a note from Baluster to the effect that, if I were to play through the record by myself (on no account was I to play it in company) I might perhaps understand the nature of his crime and think kindly of him. He dared to hope so, for he had always valued my friendship. This message completely mystified me, for I saw no English newspapers during our tour and had heard nothing of the second murder. Nor did I have a gramophone on which to play the record, which I therefore packed carefully in my trunk.

'On my return to England in late summer the tragedy was soon unfolded to me in a circular from the Orpheophone Company. By that time Ballister had already gone to the gallows for the unprovoked murder of one of the studio messenger boys. At the trial he had comported himself with great dignity and contrition; there was, he told the Judge, an explanation for his act which he would reserve for the judgment seat of the Almighty, as he could not expect any human judge or jury to accept it, true though it was. His bank balance he made over to the mother of the murdered boy.

'With Ballister's death Orpheophone Limited lost its best servant and, worse than that, mischievous rumours arose of the studio being haunted. The balance sheet for the second year presented the alternatives of winding the company up or of raising more capital. It seemed an unlucky enterprise, and the Board consequently decided not to risk throwing good money after bad: so the show was closed down.

'I never got an opportunity of playing the record, as I was living in hotels or staying with friends until after my marriage. I respected Ballister's memory too well to break his condition of solitary audience. Then I forgot about the thing entirely in my first enjoyment of Dulling, and it was not until my wife flew into one of her tantrums one evening and left me alone with the radiophone in this very room that I remembered the record and brought it downstairs. I shoved it into the machine forthwith, and with what psychological effects you can now yourself judge. I could not even wait for the end of the music, but grabbed a desk knife (which, by the way, I carefully stowed away before trying my experiment on you!) and rushed out into the hall and up the stairs. Well, that was when I first discovered that my wife always sleeps with her bedroom door locked!'

There was a moment or two of uncomfortable silence before Morcambe found his voice.

'Peter!'

'Yes, Roger?'

'That's a fine roaring fire behind you. What do you say to our consigning that record to the flames?'

'What! Burn it? Certainly not. I never chuck presents away, especially not those from friends that are dead. For everything comes its day of utility. There, now! It is safely locked up again in its solitary confinement. Many thanks, old fellow, for helping me to make sure that my previous experience wasn't just a matter of personal imagination. And now, I expect, you're about ready for bed?'

Morcambe was quick to agree, both because he had disliked the experiment and the ensuing conversation and also because he had to catch the 8.20 train at Brecklethorpe next morning. He slept not too badly, and had had breakfast and was already in the car when his host appeared on the doorstep in a dressing-gown to bid him goodbye.

'I wish,' said the departing guest, 'that we'd burnt that damned record.'

'I know exactly what you have been imagining, Roger,' Tullivant replied, 'but you completely misunderstood me. To put that old mind of yours at rest I'll give you this solemn assurance; that I will never lay violent hands on Maud. Never. You may take my word on that.'

The car was already in motion and Morcambe was not sure that he caught Tullivant's concluding words correctly, but they sounded to him like 'it won't be necessary'. That, however, didn't seem to make sense.

3

Four or five weeks later Roger Morcambe was having breakfast in his small house at Nether Foxbourne when his maid, coming in with the newspaper, asked if she might make bold to ask a question.

'Why, certainly, Bertha; and I hope I may be able to answer it; but I'm not an encyclopaedia, you know.'

'That's as may be, sir; but cook keeps asking the name of that place as you stays in down Penchester way?'

'Dulling—Dulling Towers, to be exact.'

'Ah! and the name of the lady and gentleman as it belongs to?'

'Mr and Mrs Tullivant. But why do you ask?'

'Because, sir, of what's been wrote in this morning's Daily Scene. Such a scandal, cook calls it, as never she knew; and if they be the master's friends he'll sure be worried, she says.'

'Thank you, Bertha, for forewarning me. There's sure to be something about it in the Morning Digest, I expect; and I'll have a look after I've finished breakfast.'

No sooner had the door closed on Bertha than her master, yielding to the curiosity which he had felt it dignified to dissemble in her presence, tore open the paper. From its second page there stared at him these ugly headlines:

COUNTY HOSTESS ARRESTED
Alleged attempt to murder

From what followed, the reader was given to understand that the County Hostess in question was Mrs Tullivant of Dulling Towers, near Penchester, and that the intended victim of assassination was Miss Jane Cannot, her second housemaid. The lady had apparently been sitting at needlework in the drawing-room when the maid came in to clean the grate and lay the fire. The latter saw her mistress place a record on the gramophone and afterwards heard some music, but indistinctly as she was partially deaf. The next she knew was a dreadful pain in the back and her mistress bent over her, stabbing and stabbing again. At this she had fallen forward into the fireplace and fainted.

Mr Tullivant, it was next reported, was helping Mr Hopkins, the gardener, to prune and tie up the virginian creeper outside the french window. Hearing a scream they dashed together into the room, where the former tripped over the carpet and falling against the gramophone overturned it onto the parquet floor, smashing the record which it had been playing and also the glass protecting the control dials. It was the gardener, therefore, who tore his mistress away from the prostrate maid and forced her into a chair. The latter had terrible wounds on neck and shoulder, and one on the left upper arm, the consequences of which might yet prove fatal. She had been removed by motor ambulance to the Penchester Infirmary. The attack had been made with a large pair of sharply-pointed scissors from Mrs Tullivant's work-basket.

Morcambe read this account with an apprehension that increased on a second perusal. Nor was his uneasiness allayed by the Court proceedings reported at intervals over the following weeks. The evidence of Tullivant, Hopkins and Gannot herself (whose recovery was happily speedier than the doctors dared to expect) tallied in every detail and was quite unshaken in cross examination. The accused woman, however, insisted on telling a story which inevitably raised the question of her sanity. The assault, she declared, had been engineered by her husband. He had left lying on the gramophone lid a record, with instructions that she must not play it while alone because of its depressing psychological effects. He knew, therefore, that she would try playing it as soon as she had company, and he knew, too, that the first person to come in would be the deaf maid, Jane Cannot. He took up his position with Hopkins outside the french window in order to witness the success of his diabolical plan. It was the music that had compelled her to do the stabbing, and her husband had purposely fallen against the gramophone and smashed the record in order to deny her the proof of her statement. No: his purpose was not to injure the housemaid, though such injury was necessary to his plan. His object was to get herself, his wife, convicted and sent to prison so that he might have Dulling Towers all to himself.

This preposterous explanation of her act led the jury to suggest, and the judge to order, a remand of two weeks in order to enable a professional examination of her mental condition. For this purpose she was removed to the St Dymphna's Home in Penchester, whither a very large number of reports concerning her past eccentricities were posted by shocked but mercifully inclined neighbours, including the Vicar of East Dulling.

The verdict of guilty but insane, found by the jury three weeks later, met with much approval. The feelings of all in East and West Dulling were expressed by the Vicar's wife when she remarked at the Mothers' League, of which Mrs Tullivant had been patroness, that the poor thing could never have done it if only she'd been like other people. To which the assembled mothers added, 'Ah yes, indeed, poor thing!' It gave them naturally a thrill, after years of toadying to their cantankerous queen, to call her now a 'thing': poor thing!

Only for Morcambe did the lady's removal to a place of detention for the criminal insane raise unpleasant interrogations of conscience. Should he have volunteered his testimony in regard to that gramophone record? Would he not thereby have raised questions as to his own mental stability? He would, under cross-examination, have had to admit to very nearly a year's residence in Trantonhall for shell-shock; and they had told him, what indeed he knew, that his case had at one stage presented apparently mental symptoms. Then they would certainly unearth the tragedy of his uncle Edwin. Tullivant, of course, knew about all these things: and that was why, he now realised with shame and anger, Tullivant had chosen him to experiment upon that night! 'No,' he found himself muttering his conclusions out loud, 'my giving evidence would have been no manner of good to her but would have done all manner of harm to me. Moreover, from the standpoint of abstract Justice there is more perhaps to be said for locking up malignant eccentrics than unintentioned lunatics! But what a swine Peter has proved himself, he's worse than ever she can have been!'

Morcambe saw no reason to revise this opinion when in a sporting paper some weeks later he read that Mr Tullivant had obtained legal custody of his wife's estate and that frequent meets of the Haddenham Hunt were being held at Dulling Towers in response to his hospitable invitation. He might at least have waited till the next season! Morcambe decided never to visit Dulling again.

4

Nevertheless, he did, and within the year too. It was to attend Tullivant's funeral.

The last months of Tullivant's life were of almost unadulterated happiness. Not the least of his gratifications was to be addressed as 'squire', a misnomer which evidenced his growing popularity throughout the countryside. The fame of the Dulling shoots, hunt breakfasts and card parties had indeed spread far and wide, and Tullivant took good care that they should reach the ears of his compulsorily cloistered spouse. His personal visits to her invariably so aggravated her condition that the asylum authorities had soon limited them to one a month. Affecting still to humour her former fancies, and thereby to improve the conditions of her incarceration, he informed the doctors of her aversion to all things beginning with B, H, M or S and thus induced them to omit from her dietary and recreational curriculum many of the items which she liked best. This part of his revenge he found particularly sweet. He also extracted a sacrilegious enjoyment from the public prayers for his wife's recovery which the Vicar periodically offered at his hypocritical behest. With hands held over his eyes he would study through the chinks between his fingers the faces of choirboys and choirmen during such supplications. The lady had not been greatly missed, he inferred.

The only hobby in which Tullivant no longer cared to indulge was that of playing the radiophone. This had nothing to do with any defect in his sense of hearing but rather with some deterioration in that of sight. Whether he was developing colour blindness, or whether the illusion was due to some peculiarity in the room's illumination, he could never open a drawer of the record cabinet without seeming to find at its top a chocolate brown disc with an apple-green label. On each such occasion he found it necessary to steady his brain by repeating to himself the assurance that there had been only one such record and that he had most certainly smashed it to atoms. Nevertheless the hallucination persisted, and so he had to give up the radiophone.

The death of Tullivant in the fullness of his new and ill-found bliss cannot be better or more exactly told than in the words used by Mrs Hallowby at the inquest.

'My house in West Dulling is flush with the main London-Oxbridge road, along which the motor traffic is incessant. The front door opens straight onto the pavement, my garden being at the back. Last Wednesday morning I was putting up flowers in the dining-room, and my son and daughter had just gone upstairs to the music room to practise the violin and piano together, when the front door bell rang. It was about eleven o'clock and my maid had gone down to the village shop. So I answered the door myself and there found Mr Tullivant. He had walked over from the Towers by the footpath through Brereton's copse and had his black spaniel with him. He came in and I offered him a sherry after his walk but, as men often will, he preferred beer out of a pewter mug. While he was drinking we talked about our gardens, and he drew from his pocket a packet of hollyhock seed which he had promised me. After ten minutes or so he said that he must be getting back and, as I let him out of the front door, he pointed to an oncoming lorry and said, 'They ought to limit the size of these juggernauts, you know.' Then, with a wave of his hand, he walked across the road, and the dog was already on the other side. He had plenty of time to pass over and there was no need for the lorry-driver to slacken speed; but suddenly, right in the middle of the road he stopped dead with his head on one side as if listening to something. Then he turned completely round and shook his fist at the open window of my music room on the second floor. It was a mad act, for the lorry was on top of him in an instant. There was a crunching and squealing of brakes and I hurriedly put my fingers into my ears to keep out another sound that I knew must come. No; it was certainly not the driver's fault, and what suddenly possessed Mr Tullivant I cannot guess. He knew my son and daughter, but he certainly couldn't have seen them through the window for they had just that moment begun playing their piece for the village concert, and the piano is at the back of the room. I shall never hear that piece again without thinking of this tragedy; and it was a great favourite of my dead husband's too, and therefore very dear to me!'

'I sincerely sympathise with you, Mrs Hallowby,' said the coroner, 'for I am a musical man myself. Perhaps you would tell us the name of the piece?'

'Thank you, sir; most certainly. It was Siedel's Sonata in D Minor for violin and piano.'

Clarke,
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