A Case in Camera
"Chummy shot him! Does that mean----?" Her horrified stare finished the
question.
"Oh, I don't think so," he answered quickly, "at any rate not yet.
Naturally both Hubbard and I have got to stand by Chummy for the
present."
"Then somebody saw Monty pick up the pistol?"
"For the police to know anything about it, you mean? Well, as a matter
of fact that's the purest bad luck. There happens to be a fellow called
Westbury, confound him, and that beastly bullet seems to have fetched up
somewhere in his house; he lives just across the way there. That's all
the police have to go on now that the other things are safely in the
river mud."
Slowly it was sinking into her mind. Her eyes closed for a moment as she
felt the first faint strain of the weight of it. This came with the
thought of Joan.
"But--but----" she said faintly, "--that poor child----?"
"Joan? I suppose she is wondering what's happened?"
"Wondering what's happened.... You may as well know, Philip--it's a
mere trifle at this stage--that they're most awfully thick--far more
than you've been told. You know what boys and girls are nowadays. And
now comes this horrible silence, except for that one little note from
him----"
"Has she had a note from him?" Philip asked quickly. "From the
hospital?"
"There was no address on it. I suppose it was from the hospital?" she in
her turn asked in quick alarm.
"Yes, it wasn't from a prison. When did she get this note?"
"Yesterday morning."
"Did she show it to you?"
"Yes. It simply said he'd had this spill, but was all right, and she
wasn't to be alarmed."
"He didn't mention incidentally that he'd shot a man?"
"Of course not. I don't believe he had."
Philip passed this last point.
"Well, as he's written once I suppose he'll go on writing. He's heaps
better as a matter of fact. So it won't be too hard on her. Anyway,
she'll have to grin and bear it."
"I did hold out hopes that I might be able to take him back with me,"
Mollie ventured.
"You won't be able to do that," said Philip with decision. "Quite apart
from his being fit to travel, we've only gone a certain way in all this,
you know. He'll still have matters to explain. And till he does, I'm
afraid Audrey Cunningham will have to make the best of things too, like
Joan. It wouldn't do her any good to know that Monty was liable to
arrest at any moment."
"But is he?" said Mollie, startled.
"Of course he is. So am I. So are you. So would she be."
"But why?"
In spite of his explanation, I don't think she understood. I don't think
she understands to this day. I don't think that at the bottom of her
anti-social heart any woman does. A delayed wedding or a post without a
lover's letter is a far greater thing than a capital charge in which all
who conspire are principals.
Then, in spite of her fatigue, her skeptical common sense came to her
aid. Philip might involve himself in a web of unelucidated stuff of
which one-tenth perhaps was fact of sorts and the rest pure speculation;
but she knew Chummy. The thought of Chummy as a murderer was absurd
beyond words. Whatever the explanation might be it certainly was not
that. And, yawning as she rose, she told Philip so.
"And that's that," she concluded. "Now do let's go to bed. Of course, if
you think Chummy's a murderer I quite see why you didn't write and why
you don't want to tell Audrey and all the rest of it, but you'll find
it's all a mistake. There's something you don't know, or else there's
been an accident of some kind. If you seriously want me to believe that
Chummy Smith.... What's the matter, darling?"
The last words were a quick, startled cry. She did not know what it was
that lurked at the bottom of the eyes that were looking so deeply and
somberly into her own, but she feared already. His head was slowly
shaking from side to side.
"Philip! What do you mean?" she cried in agitation.
Still the head shook. It was impossible for her mind not to fly back to
that moment, now nearly five days ago, when he had stood blinking in
the doorway with a candle in one hand and a jar of liqueur in the other.
"Tell me quickly what you mean, Philip!" she cried again.
"I saw it."
She fell back. "You----?"
"It wasn't an accident, and there isn't anything I don't know."
"You----?"
The slow sideways shake changed to one single nod. The next moment his
arms were about her and he was leading her to the sofa again. He sighed.
There was no help for it now. If she would have it she must have it all.
"It's the only thing I haven't told you. We may as well get it over," he
said.
Nor did he whisper this time. He spoke in his usual voice, using the
plainest English he could.
But what it was that Philip Esdaile told his wife you must guess for a
little while longer. She was the first living soul to know. And it was a
very different thing from that which she had left Santon to hear.
For it was this overwhelmingly extraordinary yet stupendously ordinary
thing that sent her round to Audrey Cunningham the next morning, but
without comfort for her, with no plans for settling the wedding out of
hand.
It was this same thing that took her back to Santon on the Wednesday,
without Chummy, without help for Joan.
It was this same thing that puzzled Monty Rooke's brain as he took his
midnight walk that night down Roehampton Lane, driven from Audrey
Cunningham's company and sick of the sight of Philip and all his works.
And it was this and nothing else that Cecil Hubbard so much wanted to
know when he knitted his honest brows over hydrophones, sound-ranging,
or whatever other mysterious apparatus it was that Philip Esdaile might
have hidden away in his cellar.
PART IV
THE MAN IN THE PUBLIC-HOUSE
I
As an eager and passionate student of the Life of my day there are,
within limits, few places that I don't visit and few people I don't on
occasion talk to. I say "within limits," since I admit that there may be
grades at one end of the scale at which I draw the line, while at the
other end there may conceivably be those who draw the line at me. But
within these extremes, if not always familiarly, yet on the whole
without constraint, I sup at coffee-stalls or dine in quite good company
more or less indifferently.
I have found that the best strategic jumping-off-points for the
satisfying of this curiosity about the preponderating average of Life
are two. One--the Public-house--I have already mentioned. There only a
glass screen may divide you from the hawker who has left his barrow for
a few minutes in somebody else's charge, or from the gibused and
silk-mufflered figure who finds a glass of sherry a convenient way of
getting small change for his taxi. The other point of vantage is the
Club, where that same taxi is paid off, but where liveried chauffeurs
may stand for hours by the waiting cars.
I shall come to the Man in the Club by and by. For the present I wish to
return to the Man in the Public-house.
I won't say that I always love him, but I always recognize that I have
him very seriously to deal with. I am not thinking of him now either as
a reader of my journalism or as a potential buyer of my novels, but as a
larger phenomenon. I am thinking of him--loosely I admit--very much as
some political cartoonist might think of a generalized and consolidated
figure that turns a deaf ear to the Bolshevist and his sinister
whisperings on the one side, while the other ear is no less stopped to
the honeyed blandishments of the statesman who so frequently and
extraordinarily seeks to cajole him with flatteries that are both
out-of-touch and out-of-date.
He is Conservative, if Conservatism means that he cynically holds his
hand till he has seen what the next dodge is likely to be; and he is
Liberal in the sense of believing that if everybody looks after himself
then there will not be anybody who is not looked after. You have
overdone it, my good friends and representatives in Parliament. He no
longer believes a word you say. You offer him good and necessary things,
and he glances sideways at you, and his lips shape the words
"By-election." You try to keep him from rash and dangerous courses, and
he wants to know what _you_ are getting out of it. You ration him, but
he knows where to get sugar and butter while you make the best of
saccharine tablets and West African margarine; you de-control, and he
knows better than you do why hens cease to lay and rabbits to breed. It
is we of the cheaper Press who really have him in hand, and he cocks his
ears back at us occasionally. He did so when the _Daily Circus_ gave him
pictures of bathing girls instead of war news; he is doing so to-day
when--oh, lots of things--are pushed on and off the proscenium like
Monty Rooke's camouflage canvas trees and linoleum sentries. He sniffs
at all these things, says nothing, and calls for another glass of his
country's seven-times-accursed beer.
Yet he follows, if not his leader, his neighbor. This he sometimes does
to the most astonishing conclusions, just as he looks up at the sky-line
because he sees somebody else doing so, or is prepared to swear that he
hears a maroon because the man next to him says "Listen!" The vaguer the
rumor the greater is the scope for his self-and-collective suggestion.
He sees Russians, he knows that dead Field-Marshals are still alive. He
can tell you from private information that such-and-such a battalion has
been cut up or such-and-such a battle-fleet sent to the bottom of the
sea. And not one of these larger things is half so large to him as the
smaller thing that looms huge because it is in his own immediate
neighborhood. We on the _Circus_ provide pictures to give him at least
the photographic semblance of body for his belief. But what when the
very flesh and blood of the drama passes along his street every day?
What when he has spoken with the chief actor himself, knows who he
married, the number of his children and their names? What when he knows
the house he lives in, who lived there before, why he left so suddenly,
and the very words he is said to have said on leaving?
Do you see what I am coming to--those first faint whisperings of
something wrong--or if not positively wrong so much the better for
public-house debate on the point--with Philip Esdaile's house in Lennox
Street?
II
The first that Esdaile knew of all this was from the younger of Mollie's
two maids. Monty and Audrey had arranged to dispense with the services
of these two domestics, but Philip, still lingering on, had wanted the
younger one at least back. She had promised to come, but had not done
so, and Philip had sought her out. Thereupon she had said that she would
rather not come.
"Why?" Philip had asked; but she had given no satisfactory reason.
He had then turned to the second maid, but with no better result.
After all, it didn't matter. It was very little trouble for himself and
Monty to make their own breakfasts. They could take their other meals at
the Chelsea Arts Club, and there would be no difficulty in getting a
woman one or two days a week to clean.
Then, to his extreme astonishment, on the very day after Mollie's
departure for Santon, he left Monty to a sandwich-and-coffee luncheon in
the studio and came out of his house to find Lennox Street almost as
full of people as it had been on the morning when the parachute had
descended on the studio roof.
"What's the matter? Anything happened?" he asked the nearest loiterer at
his gate; but he did not learn what had really happened till he reached
the Club.
Certainly the joke, if it was a joke, appeared to be "on him."