The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Double doors,” he said, fumbing with the large latchkey. He entered the gritty hall with its ragged rope mat, then the chilly damp kitchen. He taught himself the meanings, bitterly, by sight. Now he knew “snug” meant tiny and “character” inconvenience and “charming” old; the ceiling was low, and though it was unnecessary for him to do so—he was not tall—he stooped, oppressed by the confining room and making his irritation into a posture. He glanced around; he said, “Sunny breakfast room.” The house was cold and held a musty stale odor that not even the draft from the open door freshened—an alien smell, not theirs.
    Munday came to attention before a still clock on a kitchen shelf which showed the wrong time on a bloodied face. He was afraid and heard his heart and felt it enlarge. He recovered, saw the rust, and feeling foolish went to the sink which was coated in grime. He turned on the faucet; it choked and spat, brown water bubbled out and patterned rivulets into the grime, and then it became colorless and Munday shut it off. What a stubborn place, he thought. He tried the lights; they worked. He opened the oven door, the furnace door, a cupboard. He peeked into a comer room and mumbled, “larder.” He sniffed and looked for more.
    Emma stood in the doorway, still holding her suitcases. A tractor went by and rattled the windows.
    “Hello, what’s this,” said Munday in his sour voice, “power points.”
    “Don’t,” said Emma. “Don’t say anything more. Please, Alfred. Or I’ll cry—”
    Munday was silent; behind him his wife began to sob. She went to the kitchen table and sat down and took a lacy handkerchief from her bag. Munday wanted to touch her hair but he kept himself away and tried to give his feeling for the house a name. He told himself that this house was what he had surrendered Africa for, it was the object of his return home. It made him uneasy—not sad like Emma (if her tears meant that), but restless, exposed like a blunderer to staring cupboards and walls. It was as if someone in all that strangeness knew him and was hunting him.
    It was not that the house was cold and unused, nor that it was so different from the agent’s description. It was not derelict, and if it had been truly empty he felt he could have possessed it; Munday—again sniffing and moving rapidly from room to room—was anxious for an opposite reason. He sensed, and he was searching for proof, that it held a presence that the apparent emptiness warned him of.
    The dampness and that dusty odor lingered as a clammy insinuation in every comer of the house, and while Emma sat at the kitchen table and cried—the door open to the drizzling courtyard completing the picture of abandonment in which she occupied the foreground: the kind of portraiture she admired but could not achieve with her own paint-box—Munday busied himself with a coal hod he found in the shed, split some dry branches for kindling and tried to drive out the dampness with fires at each end of the house. After a smoky uncertain start in the living-room fireplace (the old newspaper smoldered, too damp to flare up), the pile of dry sticks Munday eventually shredded and splintered caught and burned noisily and filled the stone opening with slender flames. He heaped on it pieces of broken coal and short halved logs from a brass-studded keg near the hearth, and he watched the fire until he could smell its heat.
    In the firebox of the kitchen stove, a low stout Ray-bum of chipped yellow enamel, he laboriously started a fire, following the instructions from a manual provided by the owner and using the fuel specified, anthracite knobs, like smooth black buns. He worked with a poker and tongs and several cubes of white crumbling firelighter. The firelighters flared and roared for minutes, then burned out, leaving red edges on the fuel which quickly cooled to blackness. It took him nearly an hour, but he had a good fire, and after he shut the