I always have the lurking feeling that Democracy would be all right but for its numbers. I am aware that this sounds paradoxical, and that in its numbers is supposed to lie its strength, but I do not see how that can ever be a properly directed executive strength. There are too many cooks. Taken one at a time, how admirable are its impulses, how just in the main its judgments! But block-vote it——! Take away its trust in Princes and put it in Polls——! Convert its votes, not into effective action, but into arid deserts of statistics——!... Two men can make a holy friendship; among three there can be a useful understanding; but ten will ever winnow the wind with talk, and a hundred are a mere arithmetical obstruction in the way of ever getting anything done at all.
I am moved to these reflections (as no younger novelist ever dares to say) by a series of occurrences that began at that time so to harass me and to put me so completely off my private work that, like poor Monty Rooke, I might almost as well have stopped in bed till midday. These were the occurrences that I had already dimly foreseen when that photograph of the house in Lennox Street had so suddenly appeared in that morning's issue of theRoundabout. By an unforeseen fluke the peril of the coroner's inquest had been safelypassed, but I had felt in my bones that others were gathering.
Well, they gathered. I learned, no matter how, that the Scepter Insurance Company was consulting its solicitors and its solicitors were instructing counsel. The plane and parachute people, as I had expected, were investigating scraps of twisted metal and pieces of scorched fabric, and the Accidents Investigation Committees were getting to work.
Understand that none of these happenings were official happenings. If the Scepter wanted to resist, it had its ordinary remedy at civil law. The Committees had no authority whatever except to draw up reports for their own information and satisfaction. The interests of the owners and manufacturers were likewise purely private ones.
In fact, as far as I could see, the only charge that could lay Charles Valentine Smithdirectlyby the heels would be one under those half-baked Orders that so far were the best that could be done towards solving an entirely new problem with totally unascertained powers.
But there are wheels within wheels, and it is the little wheels that are the devil. We still speak of things being "official" long after that imposing word has ceased to have much significance. If only for the arithmetical reason mentioned above, Government works ever more and more through channels that are not official and votable on at all. Many a private concern has a Minister, or at any rate a Minister's adviser or an influential Member, safely tucked away in its pocket, and you may invert this if you wish in the sense of an understanding. This is why bright-eyed secretaries, fresh from a dinner-table or a conference that has let them into the very heart of some secretmatter, are not supposed to be asked what knowledge they have in their extra-secretarial capacities; and this is what the Man in the Club understands and what his brother in the Pub does not. He thumps no tub, enunciates no "first principles." A name, a glance, a shake of the head, and block-votes are put back where they belong. "I'm told Glenfield doesn't wish it" is more to him than twenty parliamentary returns; "I wonder whether So-and-So has quite the power he thinks he has," and three months later the public is surprised to see that a newspaper has changed its policy.
But let me hasten to reassure you. I am not going to invite you to follow our Case into quagmires either legal or political. I know too little about these things myself. Recent as the judgment on Appeal was, I have to stop and think for a moment before I can remember whether the Scepter people won their case or lost it, and I have only the vaguest idea what the findings of the Accidents Investigation Committees were. For most of these things I have taken Billy Mackwith's word. But he was briefed in one case, and has followed up the others with just the same pertinacity he showed when he tracked down and brought triumphantly home again those early prodigal pictures of Philip Esdaile's.
And, as I had begun to see it, Charles Valentine Smith, whether on oath in the Scepter case or at the invitation of one or other of the private inquiries, was engaged on something enormously more important than the immediate results of an aeroplane crash. He was contributing his mite to something that would live when he and all else about him had been forgotten—to the labor and knowledge and unparalleled discovery of his time.
Whitaker, in its "list of London Clubs," describes my own as "Social": that is to say, that I and my fellow-members have no common bond of occupation or interest other than that of pleasant good-fellowship. We are drawn from all professions, and this gives me an opportunity I value highly, namely, that of hearing scraps of the "shop" of other men when I am bored to death with my own. Saturday nights, when there is no morrow's issue of my paper to "put to bed," usually find me in the smoking-room behind myPall MallorEvening Standard, with a few other non-weekenders sitting rather widely apart also behind their papers, none of us so engrossed in the news that we are unaware of each other, but using the journals as protective cover. Occasionally we all drop them to converse; more frequently two or more will engage in conversation with the others interjecting sniping-shots across the room; and it is all rather interesting and quite unexciting and very much go-as-you-please.
On a Saturday evening early in June I was sitting after this fashion, half reading, half listening to Ronald Mowbray's remarks on some boxing match or other. Mowbray's talk about boxing is sometimes rather good. He was a known man of his hands long before the sport (if you can always call it that nowadays) became quite so deadly intensive both physically and financially. Moreover, his training as a sculptor has given him a good deal of knowledge of the fundamental mechanics of the human framework, and how a slight prolongation of the heel-bone can make a Deer-foot or length of humerus a lightning hitter.
"Just at present I don't think Nature's provided the world with a real heavy-weight," he was saying. "Not the real John Hopley kind, I mean. It takes more than size. You see, it doesn't matter how hard youcouldhit the other fellow if he gets his in first."
"But surely Wells is quick enough for you, isn't he?" said Jack Beresford. His newspaper was on his knee.
"Oh, yes, Wells is fast. I'm not saying that speed's everything. But it's nearly everything nowadays, even for a heavy. That's why half these giants would be simply at the mercy of a comparatively light fellow like Carpentier."
Over against the window bay aGlobewas dropped an inch. Cyril Turner's eye was seen over it. He is in the Home Office, quite high up, and is an untrammeled sort of spirit when he leaves Whitehall for the freer air of Piccadilly.
"That's true of other things besides boxing," he interjected.
Mowbray turned. "What is?"
"What you're saying about weight and speed. Labor's discovered it too."
"I don't quite know what you mean, but if I've said something wiser than I intended——" said Mowbray, claiming it if he had.
"Well, Labor has discovered it. Look at the way they strike nowadays. The New Strike's as different as chalk and cheese from the Old. Totally different methods—more scientific altogether. Masters and men used to stand up foot to foot like Smithfield Butchers and slog till neither of them could stand. Pure battering-ram principle, and the fellow who won wasn't much better off than the one who lost.But now it's all swiftness and surprise. No warning—just what you'd call a lightning punch where it's going to hurt most and then dance away again. That's why they go for the transport and postal services and all the distributing machinery instead of stopping production. It paralyzes just the same. Solar plexus business. And swiftness is the secret, as you say, not brute strength any more."
Another paper was lowered. It was Hay'sEvening News. Hay is a retired Major of Gunners, and I have bought very good cigars from him and very passable port.
"And that isn't all either," he said. "It goes far beyond strikes."
"War?" said somebody. Everybody in the Club knows Hay and his talk.
Hay nodded. "You'll see where speed comes inthen—speed and the absence of warning. The nation that can get a thousand bombing-planes into the air first will be able to do what it likes with the others."
"Oh, come, Major!" somebody laughed. "That's rather looking for trouble, isn't it?"
"No good shutting your eyes to it," Hay returned. "Turner said something about transport just now. They're talking a lot about relieving London's traffic congestion. Well, it wants relieving; but do you know how I'd relieve it? I'd dig new ways ... well underground. Big ones, to hold plenty of people. Tube Stations won't be much good the next time. And I'd start digging them now."
"Hay's had a hint from the League of Nations."
"Well, I'm a League of Nations man up to a point. Up to this point—that the next show's going to be so unutterably ghastly that a generation that leavesanything undone to prevent it ought to be wiped off the map—anything undone, you understand, whether you personally believe in it or whether you don't. We're only at the beginning of the New War, and it will be far more 'lightning' than any of Turner's New Strikes."
"Democracy'll prevent it."
"As it's doing in Russia, eh? Just as likely to make it. Democracy's got such damnably high-falutin ideals and so little sense of ordinary decency. For an inhuman thing that belongs to everybody and pleases nobody give me the Will of the People. If you read your history you'll find that hot air's usually followed by bloodshed. And they won't stick at much. Personally I prefer a King's war with guns to a democratic one with black typhus germs."
"Sunny soul, our Major, isn't he?" somebody laughed again.
"Well," said Hay, disappearing behind his paper again, "a thousand bombing-planes will do it the next time. I hope we aren't forgetting how to make 'em, and use 'em. Waiter, bring me a whisky-and-soda, please."
For a time nothing was heard in the smoking-room but the rustle of the turning papers and the clink of a coffee-cup in a saucer. Sluggishly—for the idleness that had latterly overmastered me tired me to my very marrow—I was comparing Hay's words with what Cecil Hubbard had said on the same subject. "Continuity of manufacture and the training of men"—you might call this "civil" aviation if you liked, butaccording to both men it was indistinguishable from the question of national defense. And, further, Hubbard, unless I was mistaken, had allowed young Smith some portion of vision in the matter. "It doesn't matter whether he's twenty-four or a hundred-and-four"—"The wind blew whither it list"—"While the old Burleighs had been nodding some youngster had been getting away with the job."
Well, I myself, no longer very young, could only sigh and agree that it seemed to be a young man's business. In other fields of action youth, the cutting-edge, was directed by the experienced hand and the wise head that too has been young in its day; but in this field none but youth has or has had the experience. Its time is short, it reaps its harvest in its Spring. We in the August of our lives may say, "Thus and thus should be done," but a young head shakes and we are silenced. The judgment of an infant answers us. A Samuel speaks, and our lips are closed within our beards. We administer, advise, finance, organize, but his is the mounting heart.
In the midst of my meditation I became aware that I was being spoken to by Mowbray. I told you he was a sculptor. He is no great intimate of Esdaile's, but naturally they are not unacquainted.
"I beg your pardon. What were you saying?" I said.
"This Scepter action. I see it's down on the List. You're a friend of Esdaile's. I suppose it won't affect him in any way?"
"What's the action about?" I asked.
"Here you are. 'The Aiglon Aviation Company v. The Scepter Assurance Corporation.' The Scepter people are resisting the claim on the grounds that themachine had no business to be where it was. They also allege negligence on the pilot's part, or so at least McIlwaine tells me. He's briefed. Is it true you were at Esdaile's when it happened?"
"Yes."
"Do you know the pilot?"
"No. I believe he's away with Esdaile in the country at present."
"Well, he can be getting ready to come back to town. It's down for Trinity term. I should say the whole action turns on him. Worrying sort of thing to have to go through on the top of a bad crash, but the Scepter's got to fight it. If flying ever comes to anything the position's got to be made clear."
"Ifit comes to anything?" I queried idly....
"Apart from Hay's point of view, I mean. I don't see myself that it's achieved very much yet outside war. Too risky and uncertain altogether. There isn't a flyer on the Rhine at present who'll take his leave by aeroplane; he might lose a day. And if this Atlantic flight does come off it'll be rather like Channel-swimming—done once and then not again for another forty years. Just a record. I can't see there's much more in it yet."
Here Atkinson's voice struck in. I hadn't heard him enter.
"Yes, but what about other places—Australia, for instance? It's catching on there all right from what I'm told. Say you've a station ninety miles from your front door to your back. An aeroplane'll do in an hour or two what it would take you two or three days to do in a buggy. Any number of these fellows are running their private planes now. And we're making the machines."
"And there isn't much doubt they'll be having a go at the Cape-to-Cairo route presently," somebody else remarked. (I am giving this desultory conversation very much as it happened, since I felt exceedingly desultory myself and it all contributed to the impression of Chummy Smith and the nature of his job that was slowly building itself up in my mind.)
"Well, that's a different thing again. I should say the value of that would be largely scientific, at any rate at first. Like the Shackleton and Scott expeditions."
Mowbray laughed. "Are you one of those who think those were primarily scientific?" he asked.
"What else were they?"
Whereupon we had the matter from the point of view of Ronald Mowbray, ex-amateur champion and still the soundest of referees.
"Pure sport and adventure, of course," he replied promptly. "Oh yes, I know somebody put up the money for a lot of instruments, and they took all sorts of observations and kept journals and all the rest of it. I know all that. Quite useful too in its way. But when you get right down to brass tacks those fellows did it because they jolly well wanted to and for no other reason on earth. What's better? Chuck in your science and 'contributions to the sum of human knowledge' as a make-weight if you like, but they weren't just out for that in cold blood. No, nor science books nor lecture-tours either. It was just an epic lark. After all, a fellow's got to have a go at something."
There was a general laugh. It was so very like Mowbray himself. Both in his boxing and his sculpture he was in the habit of "having a go." And that was the end of that rambling conversation as far as I wasconcerned. One of the waiters approached and bent over my shoulder.
"Lord Glenfield would like to speak to you at the telephone, sir," he said.
Besides being Ringmaster-in-Chief of theDaily Circusand of a good many other journals, Lord Glenfield is a very good friend of mine; but he had never rung me up at my Club before. He was speaking from his house in Portman Square, and he wanted to know whether I was leaving the Club immediately, and if not whether he might come round. I was a little surprised, but told him to come by all means; and he said he would be along in twenty minutes.
Now Glenfield is a very much feared man, and with reason; but I speak of him as I have always found him. Before I knew him better I had the vanity to think that he had offered me my comfortably-paid job for the sake (such as it was) of my literary name; but I was soon undeceived. It appeared he was so good as to like me. Certainly he has always shown me the greatest consideration, and I am going to ask you to notice how he added to it that night.
His car glided up to the club door in exactly the twenty minutes he had mentioned, and we sought a padded alcove at the head of the stairs. He is a big and handsome man, hardly yet gray, and had I needed a leg-up in my own Club it was certainly a distinction to be seen with him. I drew a heavy curtain for the sake of privacy, and then asked him to have coffee and a liqueur.
"I will. In fact, that's why I rang you up instead of sending for you," he said with a certain pleasant grimness. "Understand?"
"Not quite."
"Well, if you're to be had up on the carpet I prefer that it should be your own carpet."
I saw, and I hope you too see the kindliness and delicacy of his action. Apparently I was in for a wigging, which was to be, not less, but still more of a wigging that I, his subordinate, was permitted to act as his host. As he said, he could have summoned me to his office or house, dressed me down, and dismissed me again; but Glenfield knows men and how to bind them to him by accepting things at their hands. It is so easy for Glenfield to give.
"Well, can you guess?" he said, nodding to me over his liqueur.
"Perhaps I can," I answered.
"Then what about it? Are you getting tired of the job?"
"Not," I answered slowly, "of the job. But I'm tired—very tired."
He diagnosed me with a swift look.
"South of France any good to you? Or Norway? Or anywhere else? I suppose young what's-his-name—Willett—could carry on?"
"Oh, of course he's been running the whole show for weeks," I admitted. Then, "Look here, Glenfield; I'd better resign."
"Don't be an ass," he replied promptly. "If I'd meant you to resign do you suppose I should have come here to-night? I sack men in my office, not while I'm drinking their liqueurs. Now tell me what's wrong. You haven't been yourself for some time."
I frowned, hardly knowing what to reply.
"This is most awfully good of you, but I hardly think it's a case for a holiday," I said at last with some embarrassment.
"Well, tell me about it. Is it working double tides, or just post-war slump? We've all got that more or less."
I mused and shook my head. "I wish you'd let me resign," I said again.
He has an imperious eye, and I did not attempt to meet it. "Why?" he demanded....
I did not answer. Willett had loyally covered my too frequent absence and neglect, but I knew and Glenfield knew that I had let my paper down. The Circus was slipping backward. Possibly there was something in Glenfield's suggestion about post-war slump. Now, when all the world should have been working as it had never worked before, so little work seemed worth the doing. TheCircus, which after all is a vastly important instrument of democratic government, seemed to me a thing of stunts and japes and cynical mockery of the recent stupendous years; my own work, once so much to me that I had sacrificed to it the joy and ease of half a life, seemed a thing that the world could do perfectly well without. I missed my timber and gun-cotton and cordage and corrugated iron. My real books were my stores-ledgers "A" and "B," the Regulations for Engineer Services my only Muse. I feared—nay, I almost hoped—that I should write no more novels. My bolt seemed shot. It is a depressing thing to have been a younger novelist and to have wasted your life.
But I could not honestly take the way out that Glenfield suggested. Over and above the burden thatI shared with everybody else, Ihadlet my private affairs come between me and the work Glenfield paid me to do. The infernal Case had cramped itself on my shoulders and was making a slacker and a fraud of me. I wished that Glenfield had taken any way but this kindly one. There was only one answer to make to him.
"Well?" he said at last.
"Oh—let me send in my resignation," I growled. "I've let you down and will take the consequences."
"Consequences my eye," he replied bluntly. "The drop's nothing—a thousand or two—we can pick that up in no time. It's you I'm worrying about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a bit of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help."
To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull here and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power ends. I consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age that it gives to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed of. Indeed, if one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's ailment, it seems to carry within itself hope of its own cure. Few men have been so bitterly attacked as Glenfield, but in my opinion he is the natural corrective to our new disease of numbers, our malady of stultifying votes.
"Of course, I'm assuming it's a purely private affair," he went on.
"Oh, it's public enough—or looks like being—that's part of the trouble——"
"Yes?" he said invitingly....
Let me see, how many does that make—I mean when, half an hour later, I had given him as much as I then knew of the outline of this story? How many people were parties in greater or less degree to the highly important public matter that we were struggling to keep from the light of day?
There were the five men at our breakfast-party: Esdaile, Rooke, Mackwith, Hubbard and myself. And the three women: Mrs. Esdaile, Mrs. Cunningham and Joan. Westbury, and an unknown number of his associates; and Inspector Webster, also an unknown quantity. And of course there was Charles Valentine Smith himself. I am not including Hanson and old William Dadley the picture-frame maker. Call it certainly eleven. Lord Glenfield made the twelfth. We were getting on.
He took my narrative quite lightly. Indeed, parts of it seemed almost to amuse him. He asked if he might have a second liqueur, and then sat back in the padded alcove smiling at his glass.
"Well," he said at last, "it would make quite a neat prize competition, wouldn't it?" Tremendous force as he is, he can never quite shake off his interest in prize competitions.
I asked him in what way.
"I mean the position of your painter-friend. As you've told the story it strikes me that he's the key of the whole situation. And I should say that he intended to remain so."
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, you say he has his talkee-talkee with theflying-fellow, doesn't give you a single word of explanation, but simply carries him off into the country. It looks as if he thought he'd already told you too much and was pulling out again.Idon't think he intends to say anything more. You take a short holiday, go down there, and see if I'm right."
(How far he was right you already know. As I have told you in anticipation, I did go down, waited for a couple of days, then tackled Esdaile about it, and found he had taken the very line Glenfield indicated.)
"So it's really publicity you're all scared of?" he continued presently. "Well, I told you I had a bit of a pull here and there. Publicity's rather my line of country, you know."
"Yes, but hardly against the law of the land," I objected. "You can't go about suborning judges and telling the police their business—even you."
"Good gracious, man!" he cried energetically, staring incredulously at me. "Don't tell me I've been employing an editor who doesn't know any more thanthat!"
"Than what?"
"Than clumsy work ofthatsort! Suborn judges! Meddle with the police! I've been entrusting theCircusto a man who talks likethat!... Hurry up that waiter!"
"But isn't that what it comes to?"
"You haven't got toletit come to that—not within a hundred miles of it! You shock me! Tell me now what you do when you find yourself all balled up and unable to meet a Case?"
"That's precisely what I want to know."
"Then I'll tell you. You attack. You manufacture a totally different Case and then proceed to demolishit. First of all you make hay of charges that were never made, and then you carry the fight over to the other fellow. If somebody says this flying-fellow's been getting gun-work in, you simply sidestep, come back, and want to know what's wrong that he hasn't been recommended for a K.B.E.Neverdefend, my boy.Alwaysgo for your man. What is it that Boche philosopher wrote? 'Every attack is a victory.' You've got a beauty of an opening.... You say this fellow Smith really is the goods—thinker, live wire—genuine national-importance sort of fellow?" he demanded.
"So his friends seem to think."
"Then what's simpler than for you to take a column in theCircusand say so? And then take another column and damn the other side? Pack of shirkers who bolted underground while your friend went up and kept the Hun off London? The old tricks are always the best—that's why they're old. Do it on general lines, of course; keep offsub judicecases and all that. As regards his being over London, you've got to make a molehill out of that mountain, if it is a mountain. What are the Regulations exactly?"
I told him what they were, not exactly, but in all their unavoidable inexactitude. At one of them he suddenly stopped me.
"Ah, there you are. A Secretary of State has power to except him, has he?"
"Hardly after the fact, I should say."
"Oh, don't be so dashed pedantic about it! Nothing would ever get done at all if everybody talked like that! I'm not suggesting this as hisdefense; it's hisattack, so that he shan't be charged at all, don't you see? And if you know a better 'ole go to it.... Nowyou get those articles written. Write them so that they'll start correspondence. I don't quite see theDaily Circusbeing put in the cart by a Chelsea auctioneer. Then take a month's holiday.... Now tell me how the novel's going on."
This last I did over our second liqueur.
I quite realize that we can't all be Glenfields. I don't suppose it would do to have the world so over-oxygenated—for he is the oxygen as against the democratic nitrogen of our modern atmosphere. He was probably right in calling my scrupulous objections pedantic, but I confess that his power would affright me did I not trust him in the main to use it rightly. If he chose to send a note to a Secretary of State requesting that special permission for a civilian to be excepted from the Regulations should be given and slightly antedated, it was highly unlikely that he would be refused. That at any rate need no longer be a weight on my mind. As far as the Regulations were concerned Charles Valentine Smith had now probably very little to fear.
But was the contravention of the Regulations the real point of our Case after all? By keeping Smith out of Court were we not in reality making the larger issue quite dreadfully simple? Had Smith killed Maxwell any the less dead that certain strings could be conveniently pulled on his behalf? And why had Glenfield been so certain that my painter-friend, who twice had been on the point of taking the rest of us completelyinto his confidence, had now changed his mind, was "pulling out," and intended to tell us nothing at all?
On this point I was to receive still further mystification during that very week-end.
For, returning home that night, lighter of heart than I had been for many days, I found a small registered packet from Esdaile himself. The packet contained a key. His request, after Joan's house-and-servant-hunting commissions, was quite a modest one. He wanted me to go to his house, to post on to him a certain set of sketches the locality of which he minutely described, and then when I had a moment of time to go on to Dadley's, in the King's Road, and to ascertain for myself how he was getting on with the framing of a couple of pictures. He was sorry to bother me, but Rooke had behaved rather like an ass, and Mollie and the kids sent their love.
His commission was no bother to me; indeed, I found the latter part of it rather interesting. I had no desire to exchange further words with the "Chelsea Auctioneer," as Glenfield had described Westbury, but I confess that I had a curiosity about him. I had probably queered his pitch if he hoped to get Smith into Court on a technical point and then to fly off at score about bullets, pistols and pocket-patting at the foot of ladders; but I did not know what other means of making himself a nuisance he might not have. Old Dadley might be able to tell me. Dadley probably knew Inspector Webster as well.
But I could not now see Dadley till Monday, and as for the visit to Lennox Street, Sunday afternoon would do for that. Sunday morning I intended to spend in writing the first of those articles for theCircus. I went to bed, slept well, rose early, and was at my desk betimes.
Those two articles, and the numerous subsequent ones I wrote, need not detain us here. Indeed, just as you will have to take the legal aspects of our Case largely on Mackwith's word, so for the journalistic side of it I refer you to Lord Glenfield and his group of papers. But it is possible that you may remember something of the wave of opinion we set in motion, for it is not so very long ago. Deliberately I sought, and successfully obtained, correspondence—a correspondence that embraced, directly or obliquely, practically every side of the subject, from the personality of famous pilots to the constitution of the new Ministry of the Air. We have, of course, the general balance of our papers to consider, but within those limits I fairly let myself go. And if you tell me that I did all this to save Charles Valentine Smith from the hands of justice, I answer that I did it because ten short years have made the air and everything connected with it as important to us as the sea. If you tell me that I did it because I was Philip Esdaile's friend, I reply that I did it because I was just beginning to see on what a hair our destiny might hang if a new and gigantic industry, suddenly hung up in mid-career, should be left unsupported, unrecognized, unencouraged. If you charge me that I did it because of Joan and her happiness, I retort that I was by this time wholly convinced that Hay and Hubbard were right, that the next attack on one nation by another would come with appalling swiftness, would be directed at civilian nerves as much as at uniformed bodies, would be the beginning of the thousand years in which the Devil is to be unchained, and the sooner the public realized the situation the better.
So I wrote my first article, read it over, decided thatit was pretty much what was wanted, and lunched lightly at home, as is my Sunday custom. Then, at about three o'clock, I put Esdaile's letter into my pocket and set out for Lennox Street.
As I walked along the Cromwell Road I could not but be put in mind of the last occasion when I had called at Esdaile's studio—that midday when I had found all locked up, Rooke departed, and had run him to earth in his old quarters in Jubilee Place. I have spoken of Mrs. Cunningham as an enigmatic sort of person, possibly as much an enigma to herself as to others, and inspiring more of compassion and kindness than of that other feeling that is supposed to be akin to these. Now I could not help wondering about her again. What had made her so suddenly break off with Monty? Had she had a reason, or none? I suppose there are these sensitive plants whose own interior moods and feelings outweigh all the logic of outward events, so that a flurry of nerves becomes a motive, and an intuition grounds for immediate action. Monty had spoken of her as having been on the verge of hysteria on that afternoon when her Jacobean wardrobe had been carried down into Esdaile's cellar. It was within a few days of that that she had definitely announced her intention of not marrying again. I repeat, that as I left the Cromwell Road and turned down by South Kensington Station, I could not help remembering all this and wondering. I was still wondering when I turned into Lennox Street.
It was a sunny afternoon, now well on towards summer, and as I walked up the path I noticed that Esdaile's grass already needed cutting. I remember thinking how jolly it must be at Santon that afternoon. Inside, as I opened the door, I found the floor strewn with the usual clutter of leaflets and circulars, coal-merchants' post-cards, announcements of dairies and window-cleaning firms. I turned them over and found nothing of importance among them. Then I passed to the annexe and the studio.
Before he had left, Esdaile had evidently set the place more or less in order, but, judging from the veil of dust that lay over everything, he had made no arrangements for having his house visited in his absence. I suppose Mollie's two maids had found fresh jobs by this time. The shuttering-up of the French window gave the alcove a vacant and dreary sort of look, which was not improved by a slight fall of soot that had come down the chimney and lay spread out over the hearth. In the studio the dark blue blinds were drawn, pictures stood with their faces turned to the walls, and those on the easels were wholly or partially covered with hanging valances of newspapers.
The sketches I had come to fetch formed a small separate parcel which I had no difficulty in finding. Nevertheless, to make sure they were the right ones, I sat down in an old double armchair with a frayed tapestry seat and unfastened the string that bound the brown paper. They were the required ones, and I replaced the paper and tied the string again. Then I continued to sit in the chair, not consciously thinking, with the bundle of sketches on my knees.
I dare say it was the indigo twilight in which I sat that brought back to me the last time I had seen thoseblinds drawn. You will remember that I had myself helped to draw them when the shuffling of feet on the roof had warned us that the police were about to carry the two men down into the garden. I gave a slight shiver, but as much at the rather drowsy air of the place as at the recollection itself. The studio would certainly be none the worse for half an hour's ventilation and sunlight. I was in no great hurry to leave. I rose from the tapestried chair, unfastened the blind-cords from the cleats, and began to pull back the blinds. The first one I drew back showed me that the broken roof-pane had been replaced by one of a different make of glass. I pulled back the remaining blinds, and then sought the long hooked pole that was used to draw down the upper portion of the wall-window.
It was as I crossed to the corner where this pole stood that my foot caught on the corner of a loose rug, tripping me slightly. As I did not fall I took no notice of this for the moment, but found the pole, pulled down the window, and let in the needed air. Only as I was replacing the pole did I notice the small round hole in the floor that the turning up of the rug had disclosed.
Now there are times when one does not so much think as leap to an instantaneous conclusion. Be it a right one or a wrong one, it possesses you like a flash for the infinitesimal portion of time it endures. In this merest flash of time my eyes had flown aloft. A hole in the floor, and another hole in the roof!... A new roof-pane might have been put in since, but I knew accurately in which portion of the old pane that shattered star with the small round hole in the middle of it had been. In that moment of time I saw the whole picture again—the star, that gray snowslidemade by the bodies of the two men, the little wavering, creeping shadows of the broken mulberry branch. The hole in the middle of the star had been approximately over the hole in the floor that the moving of the rug had revealed.
"Then why," I cried excitedly to myself, "didn't he find the bullet? How did it come to be found in another house? If it went through the floor it ought to have been in his cellar—if he looked—if he isn't lying——"
And then, in another almost simultaneous flash, "Could there have beentwobullets? There were seven left in the pistol—the magazine carries eight—but you can get a ninth in if you place it in the chamber itself——"
All this, I say, crossed my mind in one hundredth part of the time it has taken you to read it.
And then came the drop. I was all wrong. That hole in the floor wasn't a bullet-hole at all. You can get a clean round bullet-hole in glass, but not in a floorboard. Neither does any pistol make a hole with a neat little rim of yellow metal glinting inside it.
I assure you I was already on my hands and knees by the side of that hole. It was five-eighths of an inch in diameter, perfectly round, with, as I say, that lining of what I at first took to be brass. I inserted my little finger, but the lining was firmly fixed. It did not run through the thickness of the board, but occupied perhaps an eighth of an inch about a third of the way down it. And the removal of my finger, clearing away a little grime, revealed something else. I lay down with my eye close to the hole. The ring was not of brass, but of gold.
Breathlessly I rose and looked about for an instrument. A screwdriver on the window-ledge caught my eye. Yes, a screwdriver would do. I seized it and crouched on the floor again. I worked for perhaps a minute. At the end of that time the slender circle of metal was loose in the palm of my hand.
Even without the tiny initials engraved inside it I should have known it. Tightly as it had been wedged, not one of its three little emeralds had been wrenched out. It was the engagement-ring I had seen on Mrs. Cunningham's finger on the morning of our breakfast.
Fantastic as had been the thoughts that during that fraction of time had whirled through my brain, the little gold circlet lying in my palm seemed to propound questions more fantastic still. How in the name of all that was inexplicable had Mrs. Cunningham's engagement-ring come to be there? Each momentary explanation at which I grasped seemed more lunatic than the rest. Had she simply lost it, sought for it and been unable to find it? Had it rolled of itself into that little five-eighths hole? Absurd, since even if by a miraculous chance it had rolled exactly there I had had to take a screwdriver to prise it out. Had she put it there, and for what reason? Ridiculous again, since ladies on the eve of their weddings do not use their rings for the jeweling of holes in one-inch floorboards. Yet if she had not put it there, what idiot had, and why? And what was the hole itself?
Again I was down on my hands and knees, examining the hole. Round—as perfectly round as if it hadbeen drilled with a brace and bit—but not recent. It might at one time have given passage to a gas-pipe, a wire, a cord; it might have been a knot-hole. I peered down it. Nothing but blackness. I explored it again with my finger, and learned nothing new. Just an old hole, now scraped and jagged a little by the screwdriver.
Suddenly I rose, left the studio, and strode through the annexe. Rooke might have had his scruples about prying into the nooks and corners of another man's house, but I assure you I now had none. I was bound for the cellar. If others could go down there so could I. Rooke had said that Philip had left the key in the door. "Right you are, Philip," I muttered to myself. "If Rooke won't I will. Glenfield says you're pulling out, but so am not I. I'm for Hubbard and the optophone theory now. I've an hour or two to spare, and your cellar's going to be examined as it hasn't been yet. Here goes."
But I had all the moral guilt of my intention to abuse his roof-tree with none of the advantages. The door that led to the cellar was once more locked and the key had gone.
Slowly I went back to the studio and the frayed tapestry chair. I wanted to think quietly and at length. Now I pride myself on being rather a methodical sort of thinker when I really give my mind to a thing, and I was resolved to get to the bottom of this if I could. That almost insultingly grotesque discovery of the ring had put me on my mettle. One thing seemed clear, if anything in the whole business was clear: for whatever reason, Mrs. Cunningham had not shared Monty's delicacy about peering and pottering. Of this there seemed to be several indications. Again andagain she had insisted that there was something uncanny about the place; she had had an access of hysteria and had had to be brought up from the cellar; and rather than live there she had broken off her engagement. But she had not done this last immediately. Days, if not a week or two—I did not know how long—had elapsed. I was now convinced that during that interval she had made some kind of a discovery. The ring was evidence enough of that. And she had had an advantage in her investigations that I had not: she had had access to the cellar. Then, her discovery made, apparently she had cleared out.
So much for Mrs. Cunningham. Now for the apparatus, all I knew of which was the ring in the knot-hole.
Deliberately I began to reconstruct the events of the morning of the accident from the moment when Esdaile had returned from his unexplained half hour in the cellar. I put pressure on my memory so that not a single detail should escape me. And I experienced a little thrill when, by dint of concentrated thought, I evoked Esdaile's image again at the moment when Hubbard and I had followed him into this very studio. He had been standing with bowed head, poking with his foot at fragments of broken glass and—yes—at the rug on the floor. I could see his foot again, pushing at that very mat over which I had stumbled. The mat had covered the hole then as it covered it now. Esdaile, to all appearances lost in abstraction, had—I began to feel it in my bones—been intently engaged incovering upthat hole.
Then, having covered up the hole, what had he done next? Instantly I saw another vivid picture. I saw again those gray moving shapes on the roof, sawEsdaile suddenly stride to the blind-cords, saw the movement with which he had bidden me do the same, and the little bright gold rhomboids of light in the rafters as the deep blue blinds had been shut.
And half an hour later he had sharply forbidden Rooke to touch the blind-cords and had petulantly refused him the key of the cellar.
I felt excitement growing on me. My whole body began to glow with it. I felt myself getting nearer—nearer——
Hubbard was both right and wrong——
He was wrong in his insistence on what Esdaile must haveheard——
But he was right about the apparatus——
Esdaile had not heard—he hadseen—and there was no more mystery about it all than there is in putting your eye to a keyhole.
And yet, approaching the truth as I felt myself to be, I had a deep-down feeling that at the same time I was wrong. Carefully I begun to examine the objections to my suddenly-formed theory, and instantly I was impressed by them. In the first place, take an inch board with a five-eighths hole in it, peep through, and see how much, or rather how little, of a field of vision your eye commands. Next, consider the awkwardness of peering through that hole, not in a vertical wall or door, but in horizontal planking some feet above your head. Then, most important of all, weigh the extreme unlikeliness of it that Esdaile, who had merely gonedown for a bottle of wine and had no reason whatever to dream that calamity was imminent, should have had his eye at that hole at that particular moment of time. It was preposterous. All had happened so quickly. He would have had to stand on something, probably to pile up furniture; even with a pair of household steps ready in position he would have had to mount them—nay, he would first have had tothinkof mounting them. I had no means of telling if he had previously known of that hole in his floor, but say that he had: does one, on hearing an unaccountable noise, instantly run over in one's mind every chink and cranny of one's dwelling and select one of them as an observation-post? He could have dashed upstairs again and seen for himself what was the matter in half the time.
No; in the very moment when I thought I had got it, it eluded me again. Those perfectly ordinary considerations, of time, position and common sense, seemed to dispose of my notion completely. Or almost completely. There remained the hole. My conviction that the hole, in one way or another, had something to do with it was shaken, but not destroyed. And, as I was denied access to the cellar, I rose from the chair in order to make a further examination of the studio.
And again, though the roof-plane was no longer there, I seemed to see that circular hole in the middle of its cracked star. I remembered, too, Esdaile's assumption that it was a bullet-hole and his search "high and low" for the bullet that had made it. But was it necessarily a bullet-hole at all? Bullets are not the only things that make holes. When a heavyish mass like two falling men hits something elseen plein fouet, can every neighboring scratch or fracture be assignedits proper cause? There was no getting away from the fact that the bullet had been found elsewhere. Might not some object have fallen from a pocket? Or some portion of the plane itself have dropped off? With the pane replaced it seemed useless to speculate.
Nor did my further explorations add much to my knowledge. They consisted of estimating distances and relative positions of things, in an endeavor to arrive at the physical significance of that hole in the floor. It was no longer in the studio at all that I was interested; all my thoughts were in that locked chamber below. I felt as annoyed as Monty himself had been at all this juggling with the key. But I hardly felt myself at liberty to break my friend's doors.
Nor—this too presently occurred to me—was I quite sure what I ought to do with that ring. Merely to put it back where I had found it seemed rather crass, and whether it should be returned to Rooke or to Mrs. Cunningham herself was a niceish sort of point. I ended by putting it into my waistcoat pocket.
When Philip Esdaile had put into old William Dadley's hands the framing of two of his pictures I think he had done so largely on compassionate grounds. As you have seen, his real reason for having the old man round to Lennox Street that afternoon a few weeks ago had had remarkably little to do with pictures, but quite a lot to do with a bullet that a child had been found popping in and out of his mouth. But having made framing his pretext, I suppose he felt bound to give Dadley a job. I became sure of this when, calling at the dusty little shop at eleven o'clock on the following Monday morning, I saw the pictures themselves. I knew enough about Esdaile's work to see in a moment that there was no urgency whatever, and that probably he had not wanted the pictures framed at all. Certainly he could be in no hurry for them. The autumn, or for that matter the following autumn, would be quite time enough.
This being so, I wondered for a moment that he had troubled me about them, but I did not wonder for very long. A former suspicion was renewed in my mind. It seemed to me to confirm Glenfield's prophecy, that Esdaile, having made as it were impulsive and unconsidered advances to the rest of us, was about to draw in his horns again. Yet at the same time he had the appearance of wishing to be on both sides at once—of keeping his own counsel, but also of endeavoring to "pump" those from whom he was now withdrawing his half-extended confidence. In a word, without expressly asking me to spy out the land for him, hewished me to do so, and trusted to my interest, garrulity or whatnot to report to him anything I might discover.
Well, had I happened to call on old Dadley before that Sunday afternoon I had spent so remarkably in his studio I dare say I should have done as he wished. But that hole in the floor put a very different complexion on matters. He knew about that hole, but he had no suspicion that I now shared his knowledge. Therefore if he proposed to act independently I did not see why I should not do the same. He would make use of me, would he? Very well. It rather amuses us to be made use of when we guess the intention, to allow our legs to be pulled with the knowledge that at our pleasure the position can be reversed. I am very fond of Philip and he of me, but there is no mush about our friendship. We take it keenly and with relish, even to our long rivalry at the billiard-table. Undoubtedly he knew something I didn't know, but on the other hand I thought it likely that I too had now a minor advantage. He could hardly have known of the presence of that ring in that hole. He had been round his house covering up pictures, drawing blinds and removing the key from the cellar door, and would certainly not have left that ring where it was had he known it had been there. It had been put there since he had last seen the hole. The event, as you will see, showed that I was right in this, and that in one of his main objects he had broken down badly.A bon chat bon rat.I laughed softly.
"Done with you, Philip," I murmured. "I'll send you the packet of sketches, and you shall know how your precious picture-framing's going on. But that's all you are going to get for the present."
And so I sought the little shop with the bisected Old Master in the window, one half cleaned up like day and the other dingy as night.
Dadley was not doing anything in particular except sitting among his molding-patterns eating an apple. The door of his workshop beyond stood open, and when I told him my errand he led me into these back premises, leaving the greater part of the apple on the shelf beneath his counter but bringing small portions of it in his gray beard. The pictures were going on very nicely, he said, but he was waiting for glass; I wouldn't believe how difficult it was to get glass; like asking for the moon, it was, trying to buy glass. It was as he talked about the price and scarcity of glass that I drew my own conclusions about those two pictures. Obviously a job given out of kindness. As obviously it followed that I myself was being used to serve a turn.
"A fine painter, Mr. Esdaile, it's a pleasure to work for him," the old man ran on; and I did not reply that in my experience few pleasures in the world lasted quite so long. I was thinking of other things, the nature of which you may guess at.
For I wanted to know, by no means for the purpose of passing the information on to Philip, how Mr. Harry Westbury had fared since I had last seen him, and whether his friendship with Inspector Webster prospered. I also wanted to know the latest news of Monty Rooke. I decided that it was better to begin with Rooke, so did not hesitate to ask Dadley whether he had seen him.
"Oh, yes, he was in here last Thursday—no, Wednesday," the old man replied. "Paspertoos. Six of them, or else eight; no, six; I think the othertwo are Mr. Hammond's. I can't show you them because they're all glued up in the press. And I can get the glass for small things like that. It's the large plate that breaks my heart."
"Then Mr. Rooke is working again?" I said. "The last time I saw him he told me that his removal had rather interrupted his work."
The lids dropped over the kind old eyes. "Yes, sir, and I understand Mr. Rooke's had trouble as well."
This, if he meant Mrs. Cunningham, I did not propose to discuss, and he went on.
"Well, you get over these things when you're young, but it seems hard at the time. And troubles seem always to come together in a lump. I sympathize with Mr. Rooke, which some doesn't. He's always been a very pleasant gentleman to me."
"Oh? Who doesn't sympathize with Mr. Rooke?" I asked.
He hesitated for a moment. "Oh—there's a few here and there—but it will blow over—it will blow over. I think it's blowing over now as a matter of fact."
It was at this point that I suddenly decided on a measure of candor. He was a likeable old soul, long past even such innocent relish of contest as that I entertained towards Philip, a lover of peace and the least mischievous of gentle gossips.
"Do you mean the affair of that parachute that morning?" I asked him. "I was there, you know."
His ivy-veined old hand smoothed the edge of his mitering-machine.
"Yes. I know you were," he said. "Yes, I know you were. But I think it'll blow over now that Mr. Westbury's taken this turn he has."
"Mr. Westbury? Yes, I remember. What turn has he taken?"
"Well, sir, as a matter of fact, that's what some of us is waiting to hear," he replied.
From the point of view of my profession the story he told me was not without interest. I give it for what it may be worth, not as an instance of mental abnormality, but merely as it bore on our Case.
I have said that Westbury was about thirty-five, which means that he was still under thirty when the war broke out. It is no man's business, certainly not mine, to enter into the question whether he should or could have joined up, nor whether he would have been of much use if he had. His interest to me lies in the fact that he did not. For all I know he may have been of far greater use to his country in his brown check than in a khaki jacket, for his experience of his complicated profession was considerable, and I understand that he became a person of some little temporary importance when the commandeering of hotels and other properties got fairly into swing. Therefore he did not attest under the Derby Scheme, and his subsequent applications for exemption were allowed.
I repeat, I wish to be perfectly fair to him. During a few London air-raids he probably saw as much of the actuality of war as many thousands of uniformed men who spent their year or two years "in France." We see these things a little more clearly now. "InFrance" may mean much or it may mean very little. Of our millions, I have been informed that only about eight per cent. went "over the top," and that this eight per cent. consisted largely of the same men over and over again. Later the gunners' casualties approached those of the infantry, and I believe there was a time when the losses of the Flying Corps were twenty per cent. per week. Granted that there was no arm that did not suffer its proportion of loss; but—we know now by whom the brunt of the fighting was borne. Mr. Harry Westbury may claim, if he wishes, that he did as much of it as many and many another whose allowances were credited to them at Cox's.
But there was a strain of resentment in his nature, by no means uncommon among his kind save that he experienced it in an uncommon degree. I myself had heard him say of our flyers, "They're paid for it, aren't they—they know the risks, don't they?" but it went much further than that. According to Dadley, he showed suspicion and mistrust towards any who had given an eye, a limb or life itself. He seemed to think that in some obscure way these people had wronged him. And, Dadley went on, in some cases this mistrust became positive dislike and hate.
"If the war was to begin all over again I fancy Harry'd be in it next time," he said. "Speaking for myself, I should say it worried him. Got it on his mind like. Maybe it's that that's stopped him going about very much except to a few places. Sometimes you'd think he'd quarreled with the whole world."
"From the little I've seen of him I can't say I found him a prepossessing young man," I observed.
"Well, myself, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him," the old man continued, with a shake of his head."Many a man without a leg's happier than what Harry is. He isn't even the man he was two or three weeks ago. He thinks everybody's got their knife into him. Nor that inquest he was on didn't do him much good neither. He's moped and muttered about it ever since. Talks to himself, he does, up and down the streets and play-acts dreadful things he's going to do, as you might say. Says he won't stand this and that and the other. Any little thing sets him off. Then there was that about that bullet. I expect Mr. Esdaile told you about that?"
"Yes."
"Well, he goes clean off his head about that sometimes. Has the kids downstairs—fetches 'em out of bed—and makes 'em tell him it all over and over again. Says somebody tried to murder 'em. Oh, and a whole lot more nonsense. What he ought to do is to get away into the country for a bit, but when the doctor tells him that, he glares and says it's all a conspiracy to get him out of the way so things can be hushed up."
"What things?"
"Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now—go somewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with all this muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away for a bit."
"You say a doctor's attending him?"
"Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goes round—Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is—but Harry won't do what he tells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go to bed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couch pulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour together staringout. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writes scores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them. They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories."
"What are the letters about?"
"All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and another for the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's going downhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never any particular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a man you've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not much more than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on for forty years."
I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not being sympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"
But at that moment the most astonishingly unexpected thing happened. A customer came into his shop. And so, as Dadley grabbed incredulously for his spectacle case, my question went unanswered.