One thing at any rate now seemed fairly certain, namely, that if what Dadley told me was true it was not likely that a man of Inspector Webster's penetration would pay much attention to the mutterings of an incipient megalomaniac. For, if I could guess at the signs at all, it was megalomania. I have not made a systematic analysis of those infinitely intricate mental states that we speak of conglomerately as "war nerves."I am not prepared to say that one man may bitterly grudge another something from the taking of which he himself has drawn back his hand, nor yet (to turn the case the other way round) that there is not on occasion just as heady and overweening an egotism on the part of the envied man. It is useless to generalize on these matters. It is also not quite decent. The least we can do is to mind our own business, the most to consider the given instance on its merits. It is simply as yet another curious by-product of our Case that I am speaking of Westbury.
Quite the most curious thing about it was that he was the only one of us all who had, in the sense of public duty, been wholly and entirely in the right throughout. But a little reflection showed me that it was precisely therein that the germ of his malady lay. It wasbecauseof this consistent technical rightness that he was now in process of arrogating to himself all the rightness in the world. No doubt he had been technically right when he had decided that his special knowledge of estates was of more solid use to his country than his skill at arms would have been. He had been technically right if, in the very uncommon circumstances, having reason to believe that a pistol had been moved that should only have been moved by the police, he had taken steps to ascertain that it really was a pistol Rooke had carried in his pocket. He had been right when, finding a bullet in his own house, he had instantly reported the matter to Inspector Webster. He had been right in demanding a post-mortem; right when Mackwith had all-unconsciously thwarted this; and oh, how right when, in that Chelsea back street, he had broken furiously out on me as an accomplice in the suppression of things that should have been broughtto the light of day! Yes, it was all this rightness that was precisely the trouble. It is not good for any of us to be right so often as that. Personally, if I am right twice running there is no living with me. The real cure for Westbury would have been for him to find himself a few times in the wrong.
So, as I left Dadley's shop, I pictured him sitting there at his bedroom window, his furious eyes fixed on Esdaile's roof, his furious heart brooding on his rightness, and bearing the whole of the burden of our collective offense. What a contrast between this just man and our malefactor away in the country, Charles Valentine Smith himself—courting, care-free, and in a danger that appeared to be lessening with every hour that passed! Truly the Princes of this World seem to have the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, and the Westburys to be persecuted like the prophets before them! I could understand old William Dadley feeling sorry for him. At the same time, I had not one single atom of sorrow for him myself.
For we are not ruled by these municipal virtues. We say we are; it is as much as our lives are worth to say anything else; but we know better. Wonderful Case, to bring all this out, to present so dramatically that single Question—the first man had to answer it and the last man will have to answer it—without which there is no society nor state nor government at all! Westbury had the whole weight of intellectual approval—and nothing whatever else! Unreservedly our whole nefarious conspiracy was to be condemned—yet something bade us stand unflinchingly by our friends!... I was wiser than I knew when I wrote that we all do precisely what we want to do and look for reasons afterwards. And if it be said that Society cannotbe run on these lines, the answer is that it is our business to see that it is run. Wehaveto serve God and Mammon though the God be the God of Injustice and the Mammon the Mammon of Righteousness. Wemustface both ways, square law with force. There isnoescape from worshiping tradition even when we break it, from giving revolt our acknowledgment even as we trample it down. The world has got to go on and we to take sides.
Do you see why I laughed to see the hay our Case had made of the merits of our respective sides?
I was ruminating thus when a bodily collision brought me with a shock back to earth again. I had scattered somebody's armful of parcels, a tissue-paper bag with a couple of eggs in it among them. Instantly I was in a consternation of apology. Diving, I managed to rescue a small loaf from rolling from the kerb and to save from a passing foot a packet of cooked ham. Then, flushed and humbled, I heard a laugh.
"Look here—I don't so much mind your upsetting my grub, but I do mind being cut," said a voice—Rooke's voice.
What a change for the better! He had shaved, his boots shone, the soft collar round his neck was a clean one and his gray tie was fastidiously tied. His face had a brightness again, he was engaged in the pleasant ordinary task of buying groceries, and Dadley had just told me that he was framing "paspertoos" for him. Was another of the clouds of the Case breakingup?... On the spot I decided to lunch with him, and told him so.
"All right, but the eggs are up to you," he said.
Inside his little den in Jubilee Place the improvement was no less marked than in his person and demeanor. There was not a spot on his little red-and-white checked table-cloth, his crockery shone, his bed was neatly made. He had faced the new situation and had ceased to mope.
In my waistcoat pocket was a ring he had once given to Audrey Cunningham. Seeing his cheerfulness, I had not the slightest intention of reopening matters by telling him anything about that ring. If Audrey dropped rings as casually as he picked up pistols, very well; it was not my business to mar this cheery new beginning.
"Lightly boiled, or how?" he said, my egg poised in a teaspoon over the saucepan on the gas-ring.
"Yes—lightly boiled—anything," I replied. "Got any mustard for this ham?"
That too he had, and he had taken care over the preparation of his jug of coffee. He was entirely the old Monty again.
I don't know when I have enjoyed a lunch more, not even excepting the washing-up, which he insisted on doing the moment we had finished. "If there's one thing I loathe it's coming in to a lot of unwashed things," he explained. "Not a ha'porth of trouble once you get the habit."
Then he showed me the work on which he was engaged. That too had energy and movement again. One small sketch I liked and bought on the spot—a little thing, neither black-and-white nor color, or both if you like—a crayon sketch of a couple of infantsin the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, one of them with a shining round sixpenny balloon touched with a whiff of pink, the other with the doleful rag of one that had just exploded—the slightest, sweetest little bit of treasure-trove of the eye picked up in an afternoon's stroll.
"But not the copyright," he stipulated with a quick sideways glance at me. "I might be able to reproduce."
"Right; not the copyright," I agreed. I didn't mention it to him, in case it shouldn't come off, but I thought I might be able to help him with reproduction-rights. We have a good many side-shows on theCircus.
Then, in the middle of turning over further sketches, he broke suddenly into a gesture of remembrance.
"By the way—I knew there was something I wanted to tell you! A funny sort of thing happened the other day. You remember that police-sergeant or whatever he was, who came into Esdaile's place that night?"
"He was an Inspector."
"Inspector then. Well, I've seen him. Had a talk with him. Funny sort of talk too—I've been puzzled about it ever since. I was loafing round Sloane Square. There's a flower-woman there, interesting type of head—this sort——" He turned over one of the sketches and on the back of it his pencil flowed into a few swift assured lines. ("That's rather like her, by the way," he said in parenthesis, "regular cast-iron gypsy.")
"Well," he went on, "her face struck me as rather an interesting contrast with a lot of silly mimosa she had in her basket—I hate mimosa; so I was taking peeps at her, not sketching, you understand, when I heard somebody behind me say, 'Well, Mr. Rooke!'and I turned. I jumped rather. It was this Inspector fellow, and he'd a funny sort of expression on his face, not laughing exactly—sort of quizzing—I can't describe it——
"Then he said something that I thought the most infernal neck.
"'You aren't thinking of adopting a flower-woman's baby this time, are you, Mr. Rooke?'
"Damned impudence, wasn't it? Fancy the beggar knowing that!"
Monty was ruffling up at the recollection. I could not resist a smile.
"Chelsea knows that exploit of yours as well as it knows the Albert Bridge, Monty," I assured him. "Go on."
"Well, then he said, 'You'll have to get out of that habit of adopting things, Mr. Rooke. You never know where it ends.'
"'What do you mean?' I said. Hewassmiling now, but I felt a bit uneasy. We did stuff him up a bit that night, you know. He's a dark horse, that fellow.
"'It doesn't do, Mr. Rooke,' he said. 'Different men take different views of their duty, and you'll be striking one of the other sort one of these days!'
"'I don't know what you mean,' I said. 'Oh yes you do,' says he. 'I'm dashed if I do,' says I. 'Then you're lucky not to be dashed a good deal worse,' says he; 'you take my advice, Mr. Rooke, and stop adopting things, babies or what not. You might burn your fingers. You might—ahem!—blow 'em off'....
"And he nodded and marched off.
"Now what the devil do you think's his game?"
I know of no more exciting mental pleasure than that of finding youra prioriguesses taking shape andsubstance in the realm of actual things. I suppose it is the triumphant cry of your deeper self telling the other self "I told you so!" Remember how little I knew of Inspector Webster, yet with what instinctive reserve I had hedged my impression of him. "A dark horse?" Yes, of quite the darkest kind. I recapitulated the degrees of his darkness. He had come round to Lennox Street that night, probably fresh from his talk with this fellow Westbury; he had put a whole series of questions, but of implications so guarded that in writing that portion of the story I had to itemize and underline what I surmised to be their real purport; and he had instituted a search of Esdaile's premises—twelve hours later! Why twelve hours later? Why not on the spot, there and then? Why give Philip this law, that as a matter of fact he had made use of to drop that pistol into the river?
Could it be that he knew his House and Estate Agent better than we did—knew his vanity, dullness, and the risks of basing a charge on his unsupported word? No doubt he had questioned Westbury in terms far more explicit than those he had used to us. Unless Westbury had actually put his hand inside Rooke's pocket, probably all he could swear to was that the pocket contained something heavy. Not until late in the same afternoon had the bullet been found. Suppose Webster had said to Westbury, "Not so quickly, my friend; you said nothing about a pistol at the time; it only became a pistol when the bullet was found; we can't go putting the cart before the horse like that; evidence is evidence; you can't let half a day pass and then remember things to fit the Case;youmay feel sure of a thing, but could you make a jury sure?" Suppose he had said something like this?The police too are bound by the probabilities of conviction. It is no credit to them to fail on a charge.
And a man who can say, "Was it indeed, sir?" when informed of the identity of a distinguished King's Counsel who has expressly announced himself only a few hours before is emphatically not the man to think that he can make a jacket for a large gooseberry by skinning a small-sized flint.
"Now what was his game, do you think?" Monty asked again.
"He was giving you a piece of wholesome advice," I answered promptly.
"But 'You stop adopting things; you might—ahem!—blow your fingers off.' He said it like that. I haven't put in the 'ahem.' That was his. It looks to me as if he knew about that pistol."
"It has very much that look," I agreed blandly.
"But how? I can't understand yet how Esdaile knew, but this Police Inspector——!"
"'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,'" I murmured. "You never can tell, Monty."
"Oh, stop burbling. How do you suppose he did know?"
"Let me see. You told Philip it was his keys that made your pocket bulge so, didn't you?"
"Oh—if you're just going to rot me——"
"I'm not rotting you. I've a feeling that if you'd told Inspector Webster the same thing he'd have been happy and delighted to believe you."
"But how does he knowanything about what's in my pocket?" said the bewildered Monty....
Should I tell him? Why not? I had studiously avoided anything that might have reminded him of Mrs. Cunningham. Pluckily as he had taken himself in hand, I did not think that that wound was healed. But the episode of the pistol was another matter. I felt singularly and perhaps not quite justifiably light-hearted about that. The mists of the Case were perceptibly thinning. What he had just told me about Inspector Webster let still a little more sun through them. To all appearances the Inspector had dismissed Monty with a quite characteristic admonition. And that being so, it was perhaps his due that I should not leave Monty altogether unarmed in the event of any contingency with Westbury.
And so I told him how his pocket had been fingered as he had descended that ladder.
He was furious. "Damned pickpocket!" he broke out. "I should have thought these sharks made enough out of their filthy premiums nowadays without putting their hands rightintoyour pockets!"
"I didn't say he did that exactly."
"It's the same thing. And anyway, how did he know? What made him think——?"
"Perhaps he saw you pick it up. Could he have done that from down below?"
"Might. I shouldn't have thought so though. Of course, I was flurried."
"But you wouldn't have thought it in Esdaile's case either," I reminded him.
"No, that beats me," he admitted.
"And I wouldn't betoovirtuous about it, Monty. In any case you'd no business with the thing, you know."
"Oh, stuff!" he scoffed. "It's you that's being virtuous."
And, with that ring in my waistcoat pocket that I had picked up with no more justification than he had the pistol, he might have added that I was hypocritical too.
To tell the truth, that ring was beginning to worry me a little. I don't mean my possession of it, since I had no intention of pawning it, and was prepared to hand it over to its rightful owner as soon as I felt that that course would not do more harm than good. My concern was about the severed relation of which it had been a symbol. I wondered whether I was not perhaps a little excessively delicate on Monty's behalf. If my eyes, wandering round his tidy room, had encountered a copy of theEraor been given any other excuse for introducing Audrey Cunningham's name, I think that after all I should have risked it. But "When in doubt cut it out" is a safe motto, and I remained silent.
I had had, however, an idea. Mrs. Cunningham might be "fed" with men, but it was not likely that she had broken off her engagement without saying something to Mollie Esdaile about it. What was the harm in writing to Mollie, not necessarily mentioning the ring, but asking for her version of whatever had happened?
The more I thought of it the more I liked the idea. Match-making is rather out of my line, but I am notentirely indifferent to the happiness of my friends, and I had not forgotten poor Monty's anguished cry of "Dawdy! Dawdy!" the last time I had visited him in Jubilee Place. I do not call it match-making merely to inquire whether a possible obstacle may not be removed. If it was the Case's doing, the Case's solution ought to get matters right again. A little prematurely, perhaps, I was growing to the belief that the question was not whether the Case would settle itself, but how.
Before I left him, which I did very shortly afterwards, I had determined to write to Mollie. I did so indeed that very night. I did not mention the ring. I simply gave her a faithful picture of the two Montys, the first one so distressing, and the second so enheartening, and asked her what about the other side of the affair.
It was nearly a week before I received her reply, which, when it did come, contained that invitation to spend a month at Santon that I have already anticipated in this story. It was a curious letter in some ways. Parts of it, even certain parts that touched Audrey Cunningham directly, were as free and frank as I have always found Mollie to be; but other parts were noticeably the other way. For example, she wrote:—
"The engagement is certainly 'off' as far as I can make out, and whether there's any chance of their coming together again I really can't say. She gave me to understand not, but it's three weeks since she wrote, and Philip hasn't heard from Monty at all."
"The engagement is certainly 'off' as far as I can make out, and whether there's any chance of their coming together again I really can't say. She gave me to understand not, but it's three weeks since she wrote, and Philip hasn't heard from Monty at all."
That seemed frank enough, but, on the very same page, was this:—
"I don't think it's absolutely impossible they'll make it up. Perhaps I oughtn't to say this, and I'd rather not give you my reason, but I don't think it's altogether out of the question. But the circumstances are so peculiar. Everything's really most awfully mixed, and I don't want to raise even my own hopes. I can't see why you didn't ask Monty," etc., etc.
"I don't think it's absolutely impossible they'll make it up. Perhaps I oughtn't to say this, and I'd rather not give you my reason, but I don't think it's altogether out of the question. But the circumstances are so peculiar. Everything's really most awfully mixed, and I don't want to raise even my own hopes. I can't see why you didn't ask Monty," etc., etc.
"I'd rather not give you my reason"—"the circumstances are peculiar"—"things are most awfully mixed"—those were the dubious parts. I was certain that she, as well as Philip, was holding something back. The letter, in fact, seemed to confirm the opinion I had formed on finding that ring so fantastically embedded in the studio floor, namely, that before shaking the dust of Lennox Street from her feet Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery, which she had since shared with Mollie and Mollie now declined to share with me. In this, as you will see, I was partly right and partly wrong.
In the meantime, suppression for suppression. I had not been candid either. I had said nothing about finding the ring. Perhaps after all my letter had got the answer it deserved.
But the invitation to visit the Esdailes at Santon tempted me extremely. Quite apart from the Case, I hungered and thirsted for the air of my own country. And there was the Case itself. Now that, with Glenfield's countenance, Westbury's deterioration and the merely admonitory attitude of Police Inspector Webster, it was becoming almost a jocund affair, its center of gravity had shifted away from London to the country. It was in the country that our young slayer was demonstrating murder to be the way ofhappiness. It was in the country that Philip Esdaile was apparently machinating to get the half-escaped strings back into his own controlling fingers again. And it was from the country that Mollie was now writing her interesting blend of candor and reserve.
And what was there left of much interest in London? It seemed to me very little. In Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Temple the lawyers were no doubt busily getting up their briefs forScepter Assurance Corporation v. Aiglon Aviation Company, but I could depend on Mackwith to keep me posted on all that. In the columns of theCircusI had awakened quite a lively, if somewhat rambling, correspondence, in which the name of Charles Valentine Smith had not definitely appeared, but for the appearance of which, if the Case demanded it, I could arrange at a moment's notice. All the life and interest seemed to have passed out of these things. That is the worst of this intangible operation of Publicity—it possesses you in spurts, with gaps of complete listlessness. It is super-heated, and at a change of atmosphere condenses into a few chill drops. Then, when you have brought it up to the proper state of rarefaction again, you find that the popular interest has shifted leagues away. Already my correspondence showed signs of becoming as much beside the mark as had that nine-days'-wonder that one morning had filled Lennox Street with a gaping crowd and had set mysterious rumors circulating with the morning milk-carts. Publicity, like lightning, never strikes in the same place twice. Nobody now cared a rap whether an aeroplane had crashed in Chelsea on a May morning months ago, nor how, nor why. Nobody was going to drag the bed of the Thames for the identification-number of a useless Webley andScott pistol. A spent bullet, flying in at an open window, hadnotkilled an Estate Agent's child, and Inspector Webster had far too much work on his hands to dream of applying to the Home Secretary through the proper channels for an Exhumation Order. Cases left long enough unanswered answer themselves. The scene changes, the circumstances alter, the world moves on.
I too felt like moving on. Glenfield had offered me a holiday, and I had my book to finish. As well finish it at Santon as anywhere else. Santon—its cornfields and skies, the cliffs for ever a-racket with the seabirds' clamor, the dappled fawn of its sands! I was there in my heart already.
I wrote to Mollie that very night.
"For goodness' sake, Joan, stop chattering just for a few minutes!" Philip broke out testily. "If you don't want to sit, say so and have done with it. This is enough to drive anybody mad!"
I had been wondering how much longer his patience would hold out. When an artist is in difficulties with his canvas, motor-bicycle talk for an hour on end can be extremely wearing.
Joan looked up with aggravating sweetness. "What, Philip?" she inquired.
"I say if you don't want to sit, off you go on the confounded machine and I'll start something else."
"But, Philip darling, you know the sparking-plug's broken, and it will be three or four days before we can get another. Do you think Wellands will stock that make, Chummy?"
Charles Valentine Smith knocked out the new Captanide pipe and proceeded to refill it with the Dunhill Mixture.
"Well, if they don't I think I know a fellow who has a spare. That's the worst of the Beaver," he went on. "Now with an Indian or a Douglas ..."
And off they went again, she as well as he, both talking at once: big-ends, plugs, magnetos: Beaver, Indian, Douglas.... In my younger youth I used to ride a tall ungeared ordinary; except for one hellish five minutes in which I had clung, ardently praying, to Smith's back-carrier, I know nothing about thesemodern machines; and how Joan managed to keep her sideways seat on that grid of torture over his back wheel passed my comprehension. But ever since the arrival of the hideous thing she had hardly been off it, hair all over the place, ankles stiffly out, skirts rippling like a ribbon on a ventilating-fan, and cauliflowers of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind them. I could only conclude that modern love, besides being blind, is deficient in the tactile nerve-centers as well.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Philip had set up his easel on a sheep-nibbled slope of the cliff-tops. Joan, in her old tweed skirt and new canary-colored silk jumper, was stretched luxuriously on the thymy bents. The amber beads about her neck matched the potentilla on which she lay, and I give you your choice which was the bluest—the aimlessly fluttering butterflies, the nodding harebells, or her demure and reprehensible eyes. Philip had deliberately excluded the blue of the sky from his canvas. The picture was simply of Joan herself, the crewel-work of flowers on which she lay, and behind her, red as the habitation of dragons, the midsummer sorrel that massed itself up the slope.
The talk continued, a fitter's romance: clutches, brakes, front-drives: Minervas, Excelsiors, de Dions....
In my day we played croquet and read "Maud." ...
And then Philip exploded again.
"Oh,dodry up! How do you expect me to paint? Pull that book a bit closer, Joan, so it throws the light up on your face, and hold your chin a bit higher——"
As if she spoke to herself I heard Joan's murmur: "Why did the razorbill razorbill?"
As softly Charles Valentine Smith murmured back: "So the sea-urchin could sea-urchin"; and this last flippancy was too much for Philip. He put his palette down on the turf and turned to Smith and myself.
"Look here," he said politely, "will you two fellows oblige me by pushing off? Right away somewhere else, please, and now."
"Oh," Joan wailed, "and I shan't have anybody to talk to!"
"You can read your book."
"But it's such a stupid one—all about an old artist, over thirty, who fell in love with his model and bought her alpaca blouses and thread stockings——"
"You shall have a motor catalogue to-morrow. Now sheer off, you fellows."
Obediently I got on to my feet and turned to Smith.
"Come along. We'll give him till midday. Here's your stick."
And I helped him to his feet and bore him off.
Ordinarily I do not find it easy to talk to very young men. I have been as young as they, but they have not been as old as I, and I know this but they do not. Young women—that is another matter, and I will make a very candid confession. I now envy these youngsters their youth. I envied Smith his youth. Despite his limp, I was conscious of his tallness and lissomness as he hobbled by my side. And I will add that it is not an unmixed joy to be asked to do a young goddess's shopping for her because you are "quite the kindest person she knows."
It would hardly be true to say that my acquaintance with young Smith had made no progress at all. I had made quite a number of interesting observations on his idyll of petrol, love and crime. But he for his part was still at the stage of apology for his "neck" in asking Joan to ask me to buy his pipes and tobacco for him, and by way of leveling up the obligation had actually sent for a copy of that dandy book that I as a novelist must on no account miss,The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow. But I was still "Sir" to him and he hardly "Chummy" to me, and our small-talk was quite small. It was certainly small enough as we left the thymy hollow and slowly made for the cliff-tops.
"Tell me if I walk too quickly for you," I said. His hurt was to his right ankle, and his stick left a trail of little round holes in the turf.
"Oh, that's all right, thanks, sir," he said cheerfully, pegging away; and he added with a chuckle, "I say, between you and I, old Philip was rather in a paddy, wasn't he?"
"Between you and me he was," I said. I corrected him quite deliberately. Now that the failure of the sparking-plug had put this opportunity into my hands I was determined at all costs to know more of him. Hence my—wellgrossièreté. But he noticed nothing. Instead he broke out with a feigned enthusiasm.
"I say, these pipes are turning out jolly well! Lovely bit of straight grain this one! You do know how to choose a pipe, sir! Are they French or Italian briar?"
"French."
"Jolly nice bit of root!"
"I'm very glad."
"Cool as a nut. Joan's quite right about my smoking too many cigarettes. They're all right for the street—I hate to see a fellow smoking a pipe in the street—and gaspers smell a bit sickly to other people sometimes, don't you think?"
I agreed with this too.
"I suppose theSpecterhasn't turned up yet?" was his next effort, as he sat down to rest for a minute.
"Not yet."
"I do hope it isn't out of print. How soon does a book go out of print, sir—on an average?"
Weakly I thought of "Why does the razorbill razorbill?" and, I am afraid, found nothing to reply....
Then, as he continued to babble laboriously across the gulf that separated us, I remembered again certain tubular parcels that arrived for him by post, which, when stripped of their wrappings, turned out to contain theTransactionsandProceedingsof this Society or that. Seeing these left lying about I had peeped into them, and had been brought up standing against such intimidating fences as the following:—
"Aerofoil Sections in relation to Speed Range."
"Influence of Wave-friction on Aerodynamic Resistances."
"Notes on Lateral Stability."
My simple literary mind faints in regions such as these. His presumably did not. This apparently was his ordinary reading, theSpecterhis relaxation.
"—amber beads," the words came across the void that separated soul from soul. "Just the shade I meant—neither too yellow nor too brown—I'm afraid it took up an awful lot of your time——"
It was here that I took my plunge.
"What," I said, looking steadily at him, "is the Influence of Wind-friction on Aerodynamic Resistance?"
His jaw dropped, as well it might. I knew that for a moment he was wondering whether I had taken leave of my senses.
"Eh?" he said.
I repeated the question. Of course, I no more wanted information about Aerodynamic Resistance than I did about briar pipes and amber beads. It was information about Charles Valentine Smith that I wanted and intended to have.
I date my possession of him from the moment that that look of consternation came into his face. It broke upon me that I had put him into some position that he felt he must immediately explain. Indeed he half rose, as if, having obtained my acquaintance under false pretenses, he must set himself right or leave me.
"Oh, I say, sir!" he broke anxiously out. "Do you mean those Journals and things?"
"That's what I had in my mind. Especially the blue-covered ones."
"Oh lord! You don't suppose I can make head or tail ofthose!"
"Not make head or tail of them? But I've seen you reading them."
He seemed positively sick to extricate himself from my too flattering opinion of him.
"Meunderstand allthat! I could kick myself if you think that! Why, that's all designers' stuff—they've got brains, those chaps—shiploads of them—why, I should never have heard of the things but for——" He checked himself.
"But——" I began, puzzled.
He was blushing—blushing like a young girl.
"I know," he said. "I feel a most awfully ass. The fact is, sir, I just moon over those things, lose myself in 'em, sort of. I don't know the first thing about 'em. Of course, there are bits here and there—engines and practical flying and all that—I know a bit about that—what I mean to say is, a fellow doesn't want to miss anything—it's hard to explain——"
On the contrary: it was not at all hard to explain. Simply, I had caught him day-dreaming. That vivid color still in his cheeks told me that I had stumbled on a privacy. A young girl approaching womanhood knows these softoubliances, these shy yet hardy excursions of the spirit that lead nowhither and die of their own over-sweetness. It is love of which she dreams; and this was his equivalent. He just "mooned." It was not understanding—he "didn't want to miss anything." His was not a technician's, but a poet's nature. And caught unawares he blushed.
"Of course my real job would be one of these Expeditions," he mumbled.
I pursued him relentlessly. "Which Expeditions?"
"Well, between you and I, they've started work on several of them. In Africa and India and places. You see I'm awfully keen on Air-geography. If this dashed ankle of mine ever gives me a chance again, that is. Bobby always said that was my line of country. He was the chap for the technical end. Thought in surds, Bobby did. He put me on to all those Journals and things, and—after—well, I sort-of keep it up.Hewas your man for that."
"By Bobby do you mean your friend Maxwell?"
"Yes. Bobby," he replied, his eyes far out over the sea.
He spoke the name with the most perfect readiness and simplicity; there was neither tremor in his voice nor the faintest sign of pain in his dark and steady eyes. He was not even self-conscious under my (I admit) prolonged and deliberate gaze. By what mystery of self-absolution he had expunged the sinister fact for which Esdaile vouched I could not tell. He repeated Bobby's name.
"Yes, Bobby was your man for all that. Fearfully hot stuff. When Bobby opened his mouth I used to dry up."
Then, still without removing my eyes from him, "I never knew Bobby," I said. "But I know a man who did."
He turned to me swiftly. "Who was that?" he demanded.
"A man called Hanson. An Australian. He says he knew him in Gallipoli."
His brows were knitted. "Hanson? Hanson? What was his other name?"
"Dudley."
"Hanson? Hanson? Did he say he knew me?"
"He wasn't sure. He thinks he ran across you. He knew you by sight, anyway, for he described you to me."
"Hanson? No, I give it up. Don't remember him at all. You met such crowds of chaps, you see—sometimes it's just like a dream——"
I appreciated that; but there still remained one thing that was no dream. This was Philip's explicit declaration, "Oh, he remembers all right—it was the other I didn't tell him—that anybody else knew."Philip might now be resolved to let the whole affair sink into oblivion, but Philip after all had not shot anybody. On that morning when I had had my talk with Mackwith I had been rather pleased with my acumen in pointing out that whether our Case had legal consequences or not its moral consequences were inescapable. Yet here, if I could believe my own eyes, was a man who was escaping them in their entirety. He continued to order Journals that Bobby had "put him on to," and could speak of his victim apparently out of some transcendental state of mind where sorrow was an anomaly and regret beside the mark. It all appeared to be admirable, but I found it quite incomprehensible.
"But," I came out of my reverie presently, "you haven't yet told me what 'it' was that Bobby knew all about."
"Do you mean those books?" he asked.
"No, I don't mean the books at all. I know a good deal about books. You can get so soaked in them that you make a whole artificial world out of them, quite self-contained, logical with itself at every single point, and absolutely out of touch with anything that really matters. Do you see what I mean?"
I wasn't sure that he did, and here was I, who do not talk easily to young men, quite anxious that he should.
"Well, let's put it another way. You say Bobby knew all about these equations and diagrams and things. Did he know what it was allfor—reallyfor—not just wind-resistance or whatever you call it, but something more—why there should be aeroplanesat all, for example?"
I had said it badly, but I saw his brow clear. There was a kindling in the eyes he turned to me.
"It's funny you should say that," he said in a rather low voice, "because that's just what Bobby himself used to say. He used to say that anybody who'd passed his matric. could do what he did, and he always would have it thatIwas the whole show. I didn't agree with him, of course, but—is that what you mean?"
"It is so far," I said. "What else did he say?"
"Well, he always said it was a jolly good thing I wasn't technical. And I did see what he meant by that. I mean to say thingsaresimple really, the big things I mean. You take the sea——" again his eyes wandered far out over it. "People talk an awful lot of bunk about the sea. They think bases are just harbors and ports and coaling-stations and so on. That a base is something fixed. Why, that's exactly what it isn't. You've got to get your coal and oil and stores, of course, but that's only like going into a shop and coming out again as quick as you can. It's only then that the job really begins. I'm afraid I'm talking an awful lot, sir, but I got it down to this: that a ship's only a ship when she's moving. She's no better than a stupid old breakwater when she isn't. I mean to say her real base is her course. Just an imaginary line to make a dash from and turn up where the trouble is. Focal points I believe they call 'em. At least that's the way I worked it out for myself."
"And do you mean the air's the same, or going to be?"
The look that I have ventured to call discontent came into his eyes.
"Well, nothing's quite the same as anything else, of course. But I do think this. There's Germany.Over there——," he nodded out to sea. "North Sea or German Ocean we used to call that, and that was there she said her future was. Well, it isn't, of course. She hasn't got any coast to speak of, and isn't going to have any. But——"
And this time his eyes went aloft to the immeasurable fields of the air.
"She's got just as much ofthatas anybody else. Taking a perfectly sound line about it too. And what's the good of our saying she shan't build aircraft as long as the damn dog doesn't know? Of course she'll build aircraft. That's where her future is now, and she can afford to hand over ships. But every Zepp or plane you get out of her you'll have to get with a pair of pincers. Then ... swift? Swift won't be the word.... Oh, don't I wish I could get on one of these Expeditions!"
I made no comment on this, since I know nothing about the air. These were merely the words of Charles Valentine Smith, who did.
He knew very little about himself—hardly seemed aware that there was anything of importance to know. It was all Maxwell—"Bobby was the whole show." And I had a very keen sense of the honor the dead man had done himself in denying this. "Frightfully hot stuff on maths," said Smith; and the world is full of men who are "frightfully hot stuff on maths," in that sense; but it is rarely that you find one of these not too absorbed in the technique and detail of his own activities to be aware of a vision beyond. I know this in my own business. I see men working with an appalling intensity, a new and wild and squandering energy that has long ago passed from me; but for their Muse I look in vain. An altar is set up, not to any god known or unknown, but to itself. I speak diffidently, but I seldom see that any flame from Elsewhere descends upon it. This is hard to say, since I too rub my two sticks together with my fellows, hoping they may kindle. I should not say it except that I was now trying to arrive at some comprehension of Maxwell, the competent and efficient man, exposed to all manner of temptations to narrowness and complacency and inertia, but who could yet see in this unsuspecting youngster something he himself did not and could never possess.
And add to this that quasi-religious bond of the air that makes of two men twins in one womb....
I repeat, Maxwell did himself a quite radiant honor.
"What sort of a fellow was Maxwell to look at?" I asked by and by.
The answer was almost startlingly ready. This lad who had bolted from Malvern, forced his way into an Embassy and demanded to be taken in the service of a foreign Power, unbuckled the watch from his wrist.
"Here he is," he said.
I found myself looking at a young but curiously worn face, with a great width of brow, eyes that seemed to hold I knew not what nameless expression of disillusion and fatality, and a firm and sweet mouth. That face had certainly lost nothing spiritually by its ungrudged and generous homage. Yet he too had probably jazzed and pink-ginned and drummed ragtime on cases of stuffed birds. Strange days! Wisdom and experience under young brilliantined hair, and the bald and reverend dome accepting the result on hearsay! Slang, and an undreamed-of valor; Magalhaens' vision, and a lark at a Grafton Ball! By being "frightfully keen on Air-geography" Smith merely meant what Columbus and Cabot and the Navigator had meant; by wanting to "get on one of these Expeditions" he was willing to dare for discovery's sake some monstrous Baffin's Bay of the air. "Not to miss anything," he fumed and fretted over Maxwell's equations and made them part of the Dream and the Desire. He was brooding over it now as we lay there together, I with his watch in my hand.... And all this, I ought to say, was at the time when the last of the Santon hay was barely stacked, and John Alcock and Whitten Brown had just flown the Atlantic in sixteen hours. It was when the headland was pale cloth-of-gold with the ripening corn, and the R. 34 had crossed to America and returned. It was when the ditches were yellow with hawkweed and the copses pink with campion, and no man living could have told you what the intentions of the Air Ministry were. Smith was lying there brooding, not on the carriage of a few pounds' weight of letters nor on prizes of £10,000, but on the problems of man's unchanged and warring heart. He dreamed of Imperial Defense. He was "keen" on making India and Egypt secure. He was "dead nuts" on the safety of Africa, "all out" for Australia's protection, and "tails up" if any other nation jolly well interfered.
And this was his next remark:—
"I say, sir, I think Joan got that Dunhill number wrong after all—I'll swear there's latakia on this—don't tell Joan though—this isentrez nous."
Entrez nous!Between you and I! O modest flower tossed to the welcoming hands of the Entente!
I handed him his watch back.
Strange, strange days!
Why did I not say straight out to him, "Look here, my young friend, this is all extremely interesting, but what I don't understand is why you shoot a man and then carry his picture on your wrist. In plain English, now, why did you shoot him—always supposing you did?"
Well, I was trying to put myself in his place—trying to picture a friendship such as he had had with this wistful, self-effacing young fatalist whose picture I had just handed back to him. I have told you how the more poignant of these experiences between man and man have been denied me; a flying-friendship I could never by any possibility have had; but I could reach out to it in my fancy. I could imagine with what fierce jealousy I should have guarded a treasure so rich. Not a word, not a breath from outside would I have suffered with regard to it. It was not a question of mere impertinence. It was rather one of the violation of a sacred place.
And it seemed to me that I now owed him no less than I would have claimed for myself. It made no difference that he was twenty-four and I within hand's-reach of fifty. Less than an hour had swept these conventions aside, and thenceforward he was entitled to the full honors of friendship and respect.He might tell me what he chose. Ply him with questions, however, I could not.
Nay, it even seemed to me now that I should have to drop my point before Philip also. However much I had been put on my mettle by those discoveries I had made on that Sunday afternoon in his studio, to drag them up again now would merely be to attack Chummy at one remove. If I could not have it from himself I could hardly have it at all, and the Case, which had unfolded as a conjuror's pilule unfolds into a flagrant and morbid-hued passion-flower, looked like shutting itself up again and being as if it had never been.
Yet the discoveries of that Sunday had been much on my mind. Especially that gold ring that had once belonged to Audrey Cunningham had been on my mind. That the circumstances in which I had found it were directly connected with the rupture between her and Monty I could hardly doubt, and several times, as a mere man, I had been on the point of confessing my share in the incident to Mollie Esdaile.
If Mollie has a little dropped out of the picture, let me now bring her in again as she brought herself in as Chummy Smith and I lay on the turf that morning.
I forget for what delinquency Alan and Jimmy had spent some hours in disgrace; I think they had been cutting one another's hair. But apparently all was now expiated. With joyous cries they dashed over a low brow, Mollie's head and shoulders rising behind them, and flung themselves upon us with the jubilant announcement that they were good again and that the hens had laid eleven eggs.
"One's a duck's——"
"Two's duck's——"
"I'll bet you——"
"I'll bet you my purple pencil——"
"I'll bet you my Bible an' all my shells——"
"Where's daddy?"
"Hasn't he finished painting Auntie Joan yet?"
Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her mallow-flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith reached for his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and laughed again. She had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too.
"Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked.
"He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself."
"Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's five to now. You coming, kids?"
They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way, with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his painting-tackle. Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite direction, towards the zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach.
Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from time to time—I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but frequently withdrawn, pensive,rêveuse. She was as brisk and practical as ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions, but somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of detached and separate efforts, that for some reason or other never acquired momentum. I admit, however, that it would be easy to make too much of this change in her, if change there was.
"Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at thetop of the path. "I haven't seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun——'"
"Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent.
The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that looking behind the illusion was still the same—the dry stripes, the sudden brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue and white and dazzling sun.
"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.
"Oh? What about?" she asked.
"About his aims and so on—what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?"
"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't think he'd want to."
"He does."
She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not know, however, whether this vague association prompted the huge implication of her very next words—an implication which I now had from her for the first time.
"You know what I mean," she said quietly.
I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the sunbonnet.
"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she added, leaving me to take the hint.
"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in which to think.
Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that Philip himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had pulled me up short. I was assumed to know the whole—the whole—of "what she meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing to talk about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a thing is to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and broke over their own images a few yards away to our left, and then I turned to her.
"My dear, I'm not sure that I do understand altogether, but we certainly won't talk about it. I should, however, like to mention one little thing that I don't think even Philip knows."
She turned quickly. "What is that?"
"Nor Smith."
"What is it?"
"Nor, I should say, you yourself."
"If only you'll tell me what it is——!"
I looked into her eyes. "Where is Mrs. Cunningham now?" I asked.
Her start could hardly have been more sudden had I asked her where Alan was a few moments after he had been seen playing at the cliff's edge.
"Audrey Cunningham? She was at Harrogate last, I think—or Scarboro—why?"
"Why was her engagement broken off?"
She made an abrupt, impatient gesture. Evidently I had plunged her back into an older mood.
"Oh, I don't know! I'm tired to death of—of everything! Why do you want to remind me of it? I was just beginning to forget a little. Oh, why didn't we leave London a week earlier! We nearly did—Philip was only waiting for Billy to get those pictures back—we should have escaped everything then!"
I soothed her. "Yes; but about the engagement. I could make very little of your letter. You said things were tangled and difficult and so on. What did you mean, Mollie?"
She was silent.
"Do you mean that you won't discuss Mrs. Cunningham with me?"
Still she did not speak.
"Because you have discussed her. I had your letter. You said you'd heard from her. That was since you last saw her. What happened in between?"
She found her voice. "Nothing that I know, except that it seems to have been definitely off."
"By that do you mean that she returned Monty's ring?"
"She didn't say what she did with the ring."
"Well, she neither returned it nor kept it. I have it. I don't want it. Will you take it?"
I fetched it from my pocket and held it out to her.
Her hand found my sleeve, almost as if that brilliance underfoot unsteadied her head. Her eyes had closed and there was a little hard crumple between her brows. I put my other hand on her shoulder.
"Let's get up the beach—this is too dazzling—it's making you dizzy," I said.
Faintly she murmured, "Yes—it does get in your eye——"
On the hot loose sand above the highest seaweed I made her sit down. Presently she had recovered a little. Her manner was now undoubtedly that of a person on whose back a half-withdrawn burden is reimposed. But she shouldered it.
"Where did you get it?" she asked, her eyes on the ring in my palm.
"Do you remember Philip asking me to pack up some sketches for him and sending me his key?"
"He did say something about it. Monty had left."
"I found the ring on the Sunday afternoon I went for the sketches. It was in a hole in the studio floor."
"In a hole.... Ah-h-h-h!"
I looked sharply at her, but continued.
"Stuck quite firmly in: in fact, I had to prise it out with a screwdriver. I didn't know which of them it belonged to—I don't know now—so I slipped it into my pocket. Perhaps you'd better take it."
But she made no movement to do so. She waspicking up handfuls of sand and allowing it to slip through her fingers again. She made quite a number of little heaps, which her eyes attentively watched, but her mind was elsewhere—perhaps on that last letter of Audrey Cunningham's, when apparently the engagement had been neither off nor on. She made no sign when I placed the ring in her lap. I had to speak.
"Queer, wasn't it?"
Her murmur was so low that I scarcely heard it. "Of course a thing like thatwouldmake it definitely off."
"A thing like what?"
"Losing it like that—after all the other."
"Come, she can hardly have 'lost' it, since I had to get a screwdriver to prise it out!"
"I don't mean 'lost' in that way—be quiet and let me think."
The fingers began to make a fifth sandhill.
I hope I have made it clear that I was confining myself quite strictly to Monty Rooke's affair. If it was simply a misunderstanding I did not think I was going beyond my business in discussing with Mollie whether that misunderstanding might not be removed. But it now seemed to me that I was once more on the verge of far more than this. That deep long-drawn "Ah-h-h-h!" that "A thing like thatwouldmake it definitely off" were enough to convince me of this. Evidently my words had meant more to her than to myself who had uttered them. Therefore if Mollie claimed time to think, so did I.
And first of all I recalled my firm persuasion of that Sunday afternoon that Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery. It might have been an accidental one, or she might merely not have resteduntil she had made it, but a discovery she had made, and it had to do with the hole in the studio floor. I remembered too my own pacings, eye-measurements, judgment of angles, and my slight chagrin that Philip had frustrated my further investigations by his removal of the key from the cellar door. And it seemed to me that again everything seemed to come round to that cellar of Esdaile's—the cellar on which Hubbard had instantly fastened as holding the answer to the riddle, the cellar in which Philip had spent that unaccountable half-hour and over which he had since so jealously watched, yet the self-same cellar into which both Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had since descended and found ... nothing.
Yet instantly all my former objections rose again as vividly as ever—the extreme physical improbability that Philip could have seen anything through that peep-hole, the utter unlikelihood that he should have had his eye at it at that particular moment of time, the virtual impossibility that he should have thought of the hole at all on hearing the crash.
And yet in this hole had been tightly jammed the ring now lying in Mollie's lap.
Suddenly Mollie surprised me by looking up and almost brightly smiling. She smoothed out the sandhills and picked up the ring from her lap.
"Well," she said in a tone of relief, "that makes an immense difference. I'm awfully glad you told me. Shall we be getting back?"
But this, it struck me, was rather rushing matters. I thought I had a right to know just a little more than that. Therefore I did not rise.
"One moment," I said. "I should like to know why you said that 'a thing like that would make it definitely off.'"
She smiled again, with a sort of affectionate raillery.
"Oh ... and you're supposed to understand women!"
This I warmly disclaimed. "In any case I only know Mrs. Cunningham very slightly," I protested.
"And you formed no impression of her?"
"I didn't say that."
"Not even that she would be just the woman to take a—hint—of that kind?"
She was gently but quite plainly laughing at me; but, glad as I was to see the cloud disappear from her brow, she was not going to have everything her own way.
"Then she did make a discovery, and received a hint, as you call it, in doing so?"
"Did she?" she parried.
"Didshe?"
At that she laughed outright. She patted my sleeve almost as if I had been a child.
"You mencan'tknow how funny you are sometimes!" she mocked me.