Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 68, July 1949

Dirge by Hector Bolitho[2]

Most detective and crime stories employ the garden-varieties of murder methods: the bromidic bullet, bludgeon, and blunt instrument; the stereotyped stabbing; the hackneyed hands — by pushing or strangling; the mechanical device — by running over, squashing, decapitating, or untidily tearing limb from limb; and so on. Occasionally, however, an author hits upon an unusual method, and we cannot help but be startled. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her brilliant Introduction to GREAT STORIES OF DETECTION, MYSTERY AND HORROR: FIRST SERIES (known in America as THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME), listed “a brief selection of handy short cuts to the grave,” all of them unusual — or, at least, unusual when first used. By this time most of you are more or less familiar with “poisoned tooth-stoppings; licking poisoned stamps; shaving-brushes inoculated with dread diseases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison-gas; a cat with poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses;” and to get away from poisons, which lend themselves so easily to gimmickry, “knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle; electrocution by telephone; biting by plague-rats and typhoid-carrying lice; boiling lead in the ears (much more effective than cursed hebanon in a vial); air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic ‘Prince Rupert’s drop’; frightening to death; hanging head-downwards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns concealed in cameras [to say nothing of lethal weapons concealed in canes, umbrellas, and crutches!]; a thermometer which explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and so forth.”

This catalogue of unusual short cuts to the coffin could be extended indefinitely. You will no doubt remember Anthony Wynne’s classic use of anaphylactic shock in “The Cyprian Bees”; Ronald A. Knox’s murder by starvation in “Solved by Inspection”; Dorothy L. Sayers’s own “new idea for a murder” — transfusion of the wrong type of blood — in “Blood Sacrifice”; Melville Davisson Post’s combustion power of the sun in “The Doomdorf Mystery” (although, believe it or not, this method was first used by M. McDonnell Bodkin in a Paul Beck short story, “Murder by Proxy,” as early as 1898!); E. C. Bentley’s loaded golf club in “The Sweet Shot”; Agatha Christie’s electrified chess piece in the big four; Marc Connelly’s diabolical shortening of a walking stick in “Coroner’s Inquest”; and so on, almost ad infinitum.

And, yes, we mustn’t forget: there is an extraordinary method of murder in Donn Byrne’s virtually unknown “The Brown Box”; whoever opened the ancient case — faded, mildewed, embossed, scrolled with crescent-shaped Arabic script, and locked with automatic Damascan bolts and tumblers — whoever threw back heavy lid, died suddenly, spontaneously. No poison, no explosive, no actual weapon of any kind — indeed, the cause of death is unique in murder fiction. No, we won t tell you: this is one murderous memorandum worth your looking up in the original text.

But if we kept on listing all the unusual means we could fish out of our memory or find among our notes, it is unlikely that we would come upon a duplication of the mortal method invented by Hector Bolitho in his story, “Dirge.” “There are things,” as Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote, “beyond the power even of a coroner to imagine or of a coroner’s jury to believe” — in London, New York, or the Congo. And Hector Bolitho learned some of these things during his extensive travels throughout the world.

A lethargic swell ruled oncoming lines across the ocean, a swell so peaceful that the surface rose and fell as gently as the breast of a sleeping child. The water finally broke into waves which moved indolently towards the Congo coast. They made the finest possible white rim of foam when they broke upon the sand. The visible circle of sea was tremendous, for there were no clouds in the sky and no mists upon the water. Far out, helpless as a twig, a small, dirty boat rose and fell in obedience to the movement of the tide. A half-caste woman sat in the stern of the boat, staring out into the hot space. She could see nothing but the sea and sky, laced together on the distant edge with what seemed to be a silver ribbon. For an hour she peered, her hand over her eyes, her black hair falling down over her back, her dingy black cotton blouse stained with the white of dried salt water. Then she looked into the boat itself. In the bows, asleep, perhaps unconscious, was the figure of Reek Dryden. She watched his ugly, purple face with the passivity of habit: she had been married to him too long to reveal any sensation of hatred upon her face. He might have stirred at any moment. Then it would all have begun again: the raving and the screaming. She could not have borne a refreshed attack of his drunken insolence. She took a rope out of the locker and tied him to the seats, his arms to one and his feet to the other. She returned to the stern and squatted there, her elbows upon her knees, her chin in her hands. She was far enough away from him now. For still another hour her sad cold eyes looked out toward the limit of sight. As far as she could see, there might be no world left, no people; only this brilliantly lighted space between the lofty blue sky and the sea.

The boat drifted and once it came to the edge of a great floating island of flotsam and jetsam. So tightly packed was the floating rubbish that it looked solid and safe. Rita Dryden looked down into the water. They were drifting into the chaos of filth; old fish baskets, torn canvas, twigs and ends of rope retained their identity in the vast floating mass. Something of character and movement stared at her out of the jetsam. She saw two immense eyes, crafty, patient eyes, looking at her. A gray-white mass stirred and a long, terrible arm moved gracefully in the water. Then another arm moved out from the shadow of the stinking mass. She could see a beak, and more and more arms.

She picked up the oars and rowed away from the octopus. The boat rose and fell on the clear water. When she knew that they could not drift near the tangle again, she sat on the bottom of the boat and went to sleep.

Rita Dryden had been found by a missionary on the fringe of a jungle in the Congo Basin; thus vaguely did she know whence she came. When she was older, all that the missionary could tell her was that he had walked from the sunshine into the cool arches of the jungle to pick some orchids. He had found her naked and forsaken, sleeping in the undergrowth. He had carried her to the mission station and there she had been dressed in a pink cotton dress and brought up as a Methodist.

In those days Reek Dryden owned a stinking cargo boat, which threaded its dishonest way through the waterways of the Congo, up slow-running tributaries where he worked; always at war with missionaries and traders. He represented a degree of moral outlaw to which none of them dared aspire. Rita Dryden had all the veneer of the mission school: a string of beads about her neck and her head full of Sankey and Moody hymns. She sang “Shall we gather at the river?” in a pure contralto voice. She achieved a superficial sense of physical modesty and a parrot-like ability to quote the proverbs which the starched missionary lady had taught her. Her contacts with human beings had thus far been peaceful. It was true that she had stolen and lied, when the discipline of the mission school obliged her to: otherwise she would have lost all freedom. In all the sixteen years she was at school, neither the missionaries nor Rita herself suspected that the dark powers of a fiend were within her. Yet the powers were there, despite the hymns and the proverbs: powers which she had inherited from her mother, who had gone off into the jungle with a white man, wooed and bewildered by his softly spoken promises. That was back in the old days, when her black uncles still walked silently through the forest, with smoked human legs slung over their backs, for marching food.

On her sixteenth birthday Rita Dryden was allowed to walk alone beyond the mission gates. Her first delight was to go to the river bank to see the sights.

She had loveliness of a kind and she walked impudently. Reek Dry-den was the first man to observe her beauty, when he happened to look out of the porthole. He twirled his mustaches with a seducer’s vanity. Lurching up on to the deck, he spoke to the girl and enticed her on board the Vanity Belle. From that moment the teaching of the missionaries counted for nothing with her: she went back to the mission station, collected her blouses and beads, her whistle and her ribbons and, leaving her New Testament on the dressing table, she returned to the river bank. She accepted the invitation to go to Reek Dryden’s little boat, and in the darkness of the night the Vanity Belle moved down stream among the interminable channels, towards the sea.

Nobody in the world liked Reek Dryden. He had begun his life in Cape Town as a fisherman, professedly honest in the beginning. But there had been a stolen net and a quarrel out in the secret spaces of the night. A boat had drifted back, one man short, and before a surge of suspicion and his fear of the law, Reek Dryden had disappeared up the coast. In ten years he owned his own schooner: the story of his cruelty was left in every port or bay or river towards which his boat set its bows. There were hints of slave trading and proofs of gun-running against him. Once when he had had trouble with a black boy he had taken on board, he had hoisted one of the victim’s black, bleeding hands to the top of the mast as a warning to others in the village. The people were dependent upon him for wages and supplies, and they were afraid.

Rita Dryden cooked for Dryden and she worked for him. For two years she suffered the physical penalties of her marriage. In these things she was docile and obedient. But when his drunk hands touched her, she tightened every muscle in her body, until her hatred seemed to frighten his hands away from her. She had sat back for five years in dumb patience, watching the decay of his senses. Once she had seen a witch doctor “go mad,” screaming with a voice that seemed to split the air. She had been thrilled. She had been no more than a child then, but, with ecstasy upon her face, she had watched the demented charlatan hitting his hands against the rock. When she watched Reek Dryden move about in the little cabin, she unconsciously waited for the time when he too would dash himself against a wall or beam and destroy himself. Yet she did not want him to die. The hatred which was strong in her was too bitter and subtle to wish for finality or death. She just wanted to see Dryden drop to the final, witless depth of life, and stay there.

It was the lapping and murmuring of the sea that he hated; he could hear it licking the ship when he sat at the table, moving greasy cards about in an unintelligible game which he had learned in his fishing days. The sickly, yellow lamp swung like a pendulum over his head. His shadow moved over the surface of the table and Rita Dryden sat somewhere in the background and watched him. Sometimes he would turn and listen to the slow murmur of the sea outside, and the faint slapping of the water against the hull. Once he turned to her with a gentle, resigned note in his voice. “That bloody sea, it will get me yet,” he had said. Then he would remember a day when he had been a boy. He had been playing on the beach in Cape Town with his mother, when he had run to her with a sea shell, holding it against his ear, entranced by the sound he had discovered. She had dashed the shell out of his hand saying, “No, not yet! It drove your father daft. You’ll never be a sailor. Not you too.”

At night he’d lie on his bunk with the blankets piled up behind him against the wall of the cabin. The bed was seldom made and seldom renewed. Reek Dryden would turn in his dreams, always with the dirge of the sea in his ears. When he went on shore and roamed among low, inland drinking hovels, where the sea could not be heard, he was a different man. But he was a daft loon on the filthy boat, with its ripped, flapping sails; so mad and cruel that there came a time when the crew mutinied against him.

He had been saved knowledge of all that happened, for somebody had hit him as he sat over the table under the swinging yellow lamp. He had not awakened until he was alone with Rita, marooned in the little boat. Even now, lying in the bow of the dinghy, rising and falling, his fuddled brain was still leaning over the table, holding the cards between his thumb and first finger. They had put Rita with him because she had always been a liar, telling Dryden this or that tale about them, mentioning them by name, to induce him to give her a drink of the sickly, warm port which he kept locked underneath his bunk. They had put her with him in the boat and then they had sailed off in the rotting schooner, with the incongruous name of Vanity Belle painted in blistering letters upon its bow.

Reek Dryden moved a little and then he tried to sit up. The rope held him to the seats of the dinghy, but he could lift his head up far enough to look to the right and left. There was a cliff, still indistinct in the distance.

They had drifted far in their long sleep. Dryden kicked his trussed feet against the bottom of the boat. He was calm now. Rita did not speak to him. He cursed her quietly, and she answered by taking the oars and moving to the centre seat, under which his feet were tied. She did not undo the ropes which held him. He went to sleep again, with the moaning of the sea against the bottom of the boat, monotonous as ever, droning in his ears. Yet he pressed his head closer to the wood to hear the sound more distinctly; the moan that he had known ever since he was a little boy, coming up from the immense depth. “Oh, God, stop that noise,” he whimpered, without any curse, like a sad child, pleading.

Once Rita rested on her oars and looked at him again. She hated him so much that she scowled at the expanses of bare flesh, which she could see between his torn clothes. She became excited at the pleasure of having him thus, completely dependent upon her strength and care. When she had heard him whimper, “Oh, God, stop that noise, oh, stop that noise,” she had smiled. She thought of the floating island and of the gray-white arms and the Octopus eyes and hoped that some vision of such things hung behind Dryden’s horror of the sea. He had been held to it because his sort of life was not a life for the shore. Men like him hung from wayside trees, if they did not go to sea. Or they were stabbed in their beds by the black men of her own race. With all the missionary teaching, her breed had an instinctive sense of justice, at times.

They moved in towards the shore and the gray-green mass of land became distinct; there was a place where the cliff sloped down to sand and trees.

When Rita eventually dragged Reek Dryden from the boat onto the sand, when he was released and was gentle and pitiful in his delirious weakness, she laughed. Then, because he was not looking, she laughed openly, to convince herself of her freedom to do so as she pleased.

While he was lying back against the sand, Rita bent down and picked up two shells. She tossed them into the air, and then held them against her ears so that she could hear their strange ocean voice. She smiled again and put them into the canvas bag which had been thrown to them in the boat; the canvas bag in which the biltong, the biscuits, and the bottle of water were carried.

The hut in the hills was seventy miles from the sea. When Reek Dryden was a little better, he could walk out, stand against the wall and look down into a quiet valley. He could hear the birds and the noises of animals, but there was no sea, no sound of the waves or of their moaning. He had escaped. Rita Dryden watched him sullenly and she sniggered at his pleasure. He was kind to her and he talked. His old cursing, spitting phrases ended; he helped her to mend the door and to wash the dishes.

She gave little in return for his efforts to help her; she answered him in slick, hard monosyllables, and she pushed his dish of food before him with ungracious roughness. He did not seem to notice these rebuffs. All that he knew was that the Vanity Belle had sailed away without him. The poison seemed to be drained out of his mind now. The sound of the sea, incessant as the torture of dripping water, had mesmerized him into his old villainies. Now, standing upon the crest of a hill or walking down to the water hole, with a gourd in his hands, he could hear the lap of the tide no more. The “green and yellow melancholy” was no longer his master.

Reek Dryden and his wife slept on opposite sides of the hut. Her straw bed wars near to the door. She watched him with dark resentment, seeing the lines of anger and cruelty pass from his face as if they had been smoothed out of clay by a sculptor’s hand. But she never shared his happiness nor did she cease to answer him with her sharp, unsympathetic voice, whenever he tried to cajole her or ask her to share the peace of his escape. There came a night when he made his last, pathetic effort to break past her silent resentment. He had walked out of the hut after their evening meal of fruit and fish. The hut was upon a wooded hill; outside were the sounds of the jungle, going to sleep. Leaning against the trunk of a tree, Reek spread his arms and smiled. He heard and knew the sounds of the darkness: the cry of the water fowl in the valley below, the discontented voices of birds, disturbed in their nests by the ominous crackling of twigs or the deeper sounds of animals.

“Come and listen, Rita,” he had called. “Don’t let us be bad friends. It is all over now. Come and listen here with me.”

She had held her hands hard down upon the table, where she was standing, and she had grown more and more sullen as she listened to him. She hated him more now. She would not go out to him.

When the two chipped enamel plates were put back in the box, she threw herself down in the straw, and, turning to the wall, breathed slowly as if she were asleep.

It was almost midnight before the slow-moving, weak man came in. In his eyes there was some odd light; like the keen light in the eyes of a boy. It was a gentle knowledge that shone there. The dream, the black dream, with its persistent, accompanying dirge, was over. He went to bed and lay there for a long time, watching the rectangle of moonlight that came in through the rudely-cut window, enlarging itself upon the opposite wall. It moved as the angle of the rays changed, and his own face was framed in the patch of light. He was asleep then.

When she was certain that he was unconscious, Rita Dryden got up from her bed and walked over to him. She worked quietly for twenty minutes, tying his hands carefully to the side of the bed, his feet to the lower legs. As she drew the rope taut, she watched his face, white in the moonlight, to see if he stirred. She waited until there was a faint flicker of consciousness in his eyelids. She knew the rope was tight enough then.

Me was crucified on his bed, with his arms outstretched. She could see his chest rising and falling, within his blue shirt. She went back to her bed. From beneath the straw she took the canvas bag she had brought with her from the Vanity Belle. The two shells were still there. She took them out and held them to her ears. The sea moaned again. She shut her eyes and saw the cabin of the Vanity Belle, the swinging lamp and Reek Dryden listening, with strained ears, to the dirge of the sea. “It will get me yet,” he had said.

She lifted his head very gently and slipped a broad strip of cloth beneath it. She held the shells to her cars again. The sound of the sea was almost sweet to her now. She would go back to it; she’d find a boat to take her back to the rivers of the Congo Basin, without Reek Dryden. She put the shells against his ears. She warmed them against her breast first, in case the cold touch of them should wake him. Then, gently, she drew the strip around his head and tied it, with the shells pressed against his ears. His face moved. He was almost awake. Anyway, he could not move his body. She felt the rope that tied his hands. It was tight. Then she placed her hands against the shells on his ears and pressed them a little, as if she wished to hear the dirge again through her own hands. She knew it was sounding in his ears even then. She moved to the foot of the bed and felt the rope holding his feet. She tightened it a little. Then she took a longer strip of cloth and tied it too about his head. At the end she drew it so tight that he moved and awakened. But she held it with the brown muscles thumping in her wrists, and she tied it.

“Oh, God, stop it! Stop it! The sea, oh! God Almighty, it has come back!” he screamed.

But he could not move. She closed the door of the hut and walked down the hill. The power in her feet was tremendous. She walked; it seemed that she walked across the world before she climbed the faraway range of hills over which she found the sea. But she never turned. When three days had passed, she came to the crest of a hill. From there she looked down to the peaceful ocean coming in from the distance, blue, shimmering with sunlight. A battalion of birds rose from the sand dunes and flew, screeching over the water. She smiled and ran down the last slope, towards the waves and the white foam.