THE LOONY

By FRED URQUHART

ivps MAYFIELD would never have considered the job if she hadn't been trying to escape from the clutches of the Dole. That was the villain with the black moustache who cried " Curses! " and assailed not her virtue but her pride. It was not that she minded drawing money from the Unemployment Exchange ; after over thirty years of hard work she felt that it was no more than her due. But it was the public way in which she had to apply for relief to which she objected. She came in contact with such frightful people—especially among the officials.

" Simply terrible folk," she said to Mrs. Spowart, the cook. " Really, I never thought there were such folk till I first went to the Dole."

" It takes a' kinds to make a world," said Mrs. Spowart. " And shairly they couldnie ha'e been ony mair funny than puir Miss Rhona."

" Well, that's right," agreed Miss Mayfield, for Miss Rhona was indeed much queerer than anybody she had seen at the Unemployment Exchange. When Mr Rattray, the lawyer, had engaged her as companion for Miss Rhona, he had said: " Er—of course, you must understand, Miss—er —Mayfield, that you will need to be rather more than a companion. Miss Rhona is—er—mentally deficient."

" And that's putting it mildly," said Miss Mayfield to the cook. " Mentally deficient! Gee whiz, she's fair loony! "

Miss Rhona was thirty-four, according to her birth-certi- ficate, but she hadn't developed physically since she was seven or eight. And she hadn't developed mentally since she was a baby. If she had developed mentally at all.

All day Miss Rhona sat behind the lace curtains at the drawing-room window and gazed out at the street. Her hands lay listlessly in her lap. Passers-by who happened to look up always took a second glance at the big pumpkin- shaped head and the flat yellowish face. And children of the neighbourhood often came and stood on the pavement, putting out their tongues and calling: " Yah, funny face, whae's got a face like a suet-pudden?" until either Miss Mayfield or Mrs. Spowart drove them away.

All day Miss Rhona sat in her rocking-chair and rocked. That was the only movement she ever made. Rock, rock, rock—backward and forward the chair would go until it began to get on Miss Mayfield's nerves.

Although Miss Mayfield always called her the Loony when speaking of her to Mrs. Spowart or other friends, Miss Rhona showed no vestiges of that drooling imbecility which characterises so many half-wits. There were no mouthings or epileptic fits, no weird, unearthly yells, no twitchings of her misshapen body. Instead there was a calmness more terrifying in a way than any half-murderous attack would have been. Miss Mayfield often said: " If she'd throw something. at me or yell or roll on the floor, I'd know where I was. But she's so quiet, sitting there all day, doing nothing, not even twiddling her thumbs. just rocking and rocking. She fair gives me the creeps. She never looks at rne, but no matter where I am I can't help feeling that she's there. You know, I'm beginning to get feared of her."

At first Miss Mayfield did not find her work exacting. It was much more pleasant to wait upon the imbecile woman than to stand behind a counter and serve people as stupid but of whom there was scarcely any pleasing. And it cer- tainly was much better than to have to fawn before the carping rudeness of the officials at the Unemployment Ex- change.

But as time went on it began to tell on her nerves. She fed Miss Rhona and washed her and did everything for her in the same way as she would have done things for a baby. And never once by look or by anything else did the imbecile show that she was aware of Miss Mayfield's presence. She stared straight in front of her, her black eyes dull as dead snails in her impassive yellow face as she rocked steadily backward and forward. " If she would just smile at me or look at me," Miss Mayfield wailed to Mrs. Spowart. " Gee whiz, you'd think she could surely do that. Even a baby would do something. It would look at you and laugh and hold out its arms, the little lamb, and gurgle and let you tickle it and kiss it. You'd get something in return for all you did for it. But that big fat lump . . ."

" Ay, it would take a gey brave yin to think about pettin' Miss Rhona," said Mrs. Spowart. " Puir thing, too."

" Puir thing nothing," said Miss Mayfield. " I could murder her sometimes, she makes me that angry. Surely to goodness she could do something for herself. It's not as if she were helpless."

For although she was misshapen Miss Rhona could walk perfectly well, and she had the full command of her limbs. She could have fed herself all right, but Miss Mayfield said it was sheer stubbornness that made her not do it. " If she'd been born like you and me, Mrs. Spowart," she said, " she'd have had to do things for herself. No wonder she's so helpless. She's been pampered. If you ask me, it's not that she can't do things, it's pure thrawnness. She's like all the rest of them who've been born with silver spoons in their mouths, she won't do a thing for herself if she can get other folk to do it for her."

Mrs. Spowart did not agree with this. She was a perfect specimen of the old family retainer, and she had been with Miss Rhona's father and mother when the imbecile was born. But Miss Mayfield had none of the cook's loyalty to the aristocratic tradition. She had had to fend for herself since childhood, she'd had to fight for a job and fight to keep the job, fight with the customers and fight with the boss, and now at the age of forty-seven she was still fighting to earn enough to keep her alive. Some- times she wondered whether there was any use of fighting any further. Sometimes she thought she would be better dead. She had nothing to look forward to but the pension when she was sixty-five, and a lonely poverty-stricken old age, probably in the poor-house or some such institution. It seemed so senseless to slave and slave to keep herself alive with that future ahead of her.

Gradually she began to hate Miss Rhona. The loony became a symbol—a symbol of the small wealthy class who kept people like Miss Mayfield down. They sat impas- sively, doing nothing to help themselves, yet they got all the attention, all the luxuries.

" I could murder her," she said to the cook. " Sittin' there like a bloomin' heathen idol with her fat smug face, lettin' me do all the dirty work for her, and never as much as a thank you. Takin' it all for granted. I wish some- thin' would happen to her."

" What guid would that dae ye? " asked Mrs. Spowart. " Ye wouldnie' ha'e a job then."

But Miss Mayfield thought that anything would be better than living like a slave. She would far rather go back to the drudgery of a shop, even though the wages would be smaller, than stay and wait on this creature who didn't deserve to be alive. If only something would happen to Miss Rhona!

Miss Rhona could not speak, nor could she write. But she had a way of making herself understood by just gazing fixedly at whatever she wanted. She didn't even put herself to the trouble of pointing, although she was perfectly able to do so. This infuriated Miss Mayfield. " She's lazy, that's what she is," she complained to Mrs. Spowart one night after Miss Rhona was safely in bed after a very exacting evening. " Thinks she's Lord God Almighty. Gee whiz, she couldn't be any more trouble if she was. I wonder what she'd do if we didn't take any notice of her? "

That was an idea. Miss Mayfield couldn't help thinking about it. And she thought that she would try it and see. So the next day when she was giving the loony her dinner she set a plate of soup in front of her and nodded significantly at it instead of spooning it into Miss Rhona's mouth as she usually did. She sat down to her own soup and ate it. Every now and then she glanced at the loony to see how she was getting on. But the loony sat and stared straight in front of her. Miss Mayfield finished her soup, and, knowing that Mrs. Spowart was safely out of the way, she leaned forward and poked Miss Rhona. She nodded at the soup, indicating that the loony was to take her spoon and feed herself. For a few minutes they looked at each other, Miss Mayfield's sharp green eyes glaring at the loony's sombre black ones. Then sud- denly the loony acted. She lifted the plate and held it to her mouth, and then she poured the whole plateful down the front of her dress.

Miss Mayfield was furious. " I'll kill you one of these days," she hissed as she undressed the misshapen figure, and put a clean dress on it. " I'll make you sorry you ever were born."

The idiot stared back at her without a flicker of under- standing.

After that Miss Mayfield did everything she could to try to humiliate the loony and get her to retaliate in some way, in order to have a good excuse for striking her. But all her efforts were in vain. The loony stared uncomprehendingly at her, as silent and as ugly as a gargoyle. And day after day, hating her, Miss Mayfield wondered more and more what would happen if anything happened to Miss Rhona.

It would be so easy for something to happen. She might fall down the stairs and break her neck, or she might cut herself, or . . . well, there were lots of ways in which she might suddenly cease living.

Miss Mayfield was terrified suddenly at the trend in which she found her thoughts moving.

She tried to dismiss them from her mind, surprised that a respectable woman like herself could have such thoughts. She wasn't the kind of person who did those kind of things. What would she gain, anyway? Nothing but the loss of a job and subsequent unemployment, as Mrs. Spowart had pointed out. Ach, don't be daft, she said to herself, you know you would never have the nerve, anyway.

Nevertheless, it was pleasant to think about it, to feel that she might be one of these women whose photographs _ adorned the pages of the more sensational newspapers. And almost unconsciously she found her mind dwelling more and more upon the possibility of Miss Rhona coming to a sudden end by her hand. Of course, she would never have the courage to carry her plans into action, but it was nice to see what she could think up in the way of a perfect murder.

She tried to imagine what anybody who really intended to murder the loony would do. They would need to have a motive, of course. They would need to be after the loony's money or something. They would have to have a better motive than mere hatred. Although God knows that was strong enough at times, so strong that it took all her time to keep her hands away from Miss Rhona's thick neck.

What would the murderer do? Which method would he apply? Strangling and poison and a knife—all these were hopeless. Nobody who wanted to throw the police off the scent would consider these. Suffocation? Well, that would be easy enough. All they needed to do was to get the lootle into bed and then hold the bedclothes over her.

No, on second thoughts, that idea wasn't so good. A far better way would be gas. Miss Rhona could be enticed into the kitchen when Mrs. Spowart was out, the gas turned on, and the door locked with the loony inside.

Miss Mayfield sighed at her lack of imagination. She would not make a good murderer. Everything she thought of was so obvious that the police would spot it at once.

Nevertheless, her imagination kept dwelling on various possibilities. And it was fed by her growing hatred. Things got to such a pitch between the loony and herself that often she thought of leaving. But the remembrance of the slights her pride had received at the Unemployment Exchange stopped her. Certainly her pride boggled at the menial tasks she was forced to perform for the loony, but there was this advantage: she could get her own back on the loony in a number of petty ways, such as pinching and slapping and tormenting, all with the knowledge that the poor dumb creature couldn't tell. Sometimes Miss Mayfield was sur- prised to find what a cruel streak was appearing in her nature. What between thinking of new methods of tortur- ing Miss Rhona and dwelling on the various ways in which she could be murdered, Miss Mayfield had become a com- pletely different character.

Then one day as she was taking the loony downstairs she had an idea. It's true that she had thought of it before, but it had never quite struck- her like this. It was so simple. And it was so clever and unsuspicious in its simplicity. Everybody would naturally think that the loony had stumbled.

All that day Miss Mayfield watched the loony, watched her like the proverbial spider. She gloated over what she had thought of doing. Rolling the idea round her mind, relishing it as her palate would have relished a delicacy. Towards evening it became too good to keep. She must share it with somebody.

And who better could she share it with than the intended victim? As she put the loony to bed she told her. She put her face close to the dull yellow mask, her own features twisting with pent-up hatred. " Hah! " she hissed. " I'll soon put an end to you, my bonnie wee hen. We'll see what good your money will do you tomorrow when you get the push that'll send you sliding straight down into hell. Ha, just you wait! Better enjoy your bed tonight, for this'll be the last time."

The loony stared back with her impenetrable stare, un- comprehending and vacant. Miss Mayfield was furious ; she would have liked the loony to have understood and to have savoured to the full the horror of what was coming to her.

The next morning Miss Mayfield dressed Miss Rhona carefully, dressed her as though she were dressing the poor body for a wedding. Then she took her by the arm and led her along the landing. There was no fear in Miss May- field's heart. She was only a little surprised at her own callousness. She led Miss Rhona to the top of the stairs. She knew there was nobody in the house but Mrs. Spowart, and she was busy in the kitchen, but she looked around, just in case . . .

The next minute her throat was seized in an irony grip. For a moment she looked into the loony's eyes. Then her body went hurtling down the stair.

The loony stood at the top, leaning on the bannisters. She looked over at the still heap at the foot, regarding it with curiosity. And as she watched Mrs. Spowart rush excitedly into the hall, there was a momentary gleam of intelligence in her eyes. Then it faded and they resumed their normal dull vacancy.