The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie [29]
“Isn’t sin your husband’s province? His official business, so to speak.”
“The forgiveness of sins,” she corrected me. “He can give absolution. I can’t. But I,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop with the utmost cheerfulness, “can get sin arranged and classified for him. And if one knows about it one can help to prevent its harming other people. One can’t help the people themselves. I can’t, I mean. Only God can call to repentance, you know—or perhaps you don’t know. A lot of people don’t nowadays.”
“I can’t compete with your expert knowledge,” I said, “but I would like to prevent people being—harmed.”
She shot me a quick glance.
“It’s like that, is it? You’d better come in and we’ll be comfortable.”
The vicarage sitting room was big and shabby. It was much shaded by a gargantuan Victorian shrubbery that no one seemed to have had the energy to curb. But the dimness was not gloomy for some peculiar reason. It was, on the contrary, restful. All the large shabby chairs bore the impress of resting bodies in them over the years. A fat clock on the chimneypiece ticked with a heavy comfortable regularity. Here there would always be time to talk, to say what you wanted to say, to relax from the cares brought about by the bright day outside.
Here, I felt, round-eyed girls who had tearfully discovered themselves to be prospective mothers, had confided their troubles to Mrs. Dane Calthrop and received sound, if not always orthodox, advice; here angry relatives had unburdened themselves of their resentment over their in-laws; here mothers had explained that their Bob was not a bad boy; just high-spirited, and that to send him away to an approved school was absurd. Husbands and wives had disclosed marital difficulties.
And here was I, Mark Easterbrook, scholar, author, man of the world, confronting a grey-haired weather-beaten woman with fine eyes, prepared to lay my troubles in her lap. Why? I didn’t know. I only had that odd surety that she was the right person.
“We’ve just had tea with Thyrza Grey,” I began.
Explaining things to Mrs. Dane Calthrop was never difficult. She leaped to meet you.
“Oh I see. It’s upset you? These three are a bit much to take, I agree. I’ve wondered myself… So much boasting. As a rule, in my experience, the really wicked don’t boast. They can keep quiet about their wickedness. It’s if your sins aren’t really bad that you want so much to talk about them. Sin’s such a wretched, mean, ignoble little thing. It’s terribly necessary to make it seem grand and important. Village witches are usually silly ill-natured old women who like frightening people and getting something for nothing that way. Terribly easy to do, of course. When Mrs. Brown’s hens die all you have to do is nod your head and say darkly: ‘Ah, her Billy teased my Pussy last Tuesday week.’ Bella Webb might, be only a witch of that kind. But she might, she just might, be something more… Something that’s lasted on from a very early age and which crops up now and then in country places. It’s frightening when it does, because there’s real malevolence—not just a desire to impress. Sybil Stamfordis is one of the silliest women I’ve ever met—but she really is a medium—whatever a medium may be. Thyrza—I don’t know… What did she say to you? It was something that she said that’s upset you, I suppose?”
“You have great experience, Mrs. Dane Calthrop. Would you say, from all you know and have heard, that a human being could be destroyed from a distance, without visible connection, by another human being?”
Mrs. Dane Calthrop’s eyes opened a little wider.
“When you say destroyed, you mean, I take it, killed? A plain physical fact?”
“Yes.”
“I should say it was nonsense,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop robustly.
“Ah!” I said, relieved.
“But of course I might be wrong,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “My father said that airships were nonsense, and my great-grandfather probably said that railway trains were nonsense. They were both quite right. At that time they both were impossible. But they’re not impossible