A Case in Camera
of us was the personage in Joan's eyes, and we sought the trap. Joan
drove, and paved the way for our better acquaintance by telling Mr.
Smith, in these words, that I was "still young at heart." And her
pleasant young assassin called me "Sir." I suppose I am entitled to be
called "Sir" by these youngsters, but I am far from standing on my
rights in this respect. He had his Joan, and I saw no reason for rubbing
it in. People who go about murdering other people need not lay quite so
much stress on the minor conventions.
"Yes, sir, thanks--practically all right again," he said as we bowled
across that high world of flaming poppies and silky corn. "But I
say--I'm afraid you'll have rather a crow to pluck with me."
All things considered, I thought one crow a particularly modest
estimate; but "Oh?" I said inquiringly.
"Yes. I know it's your room, sir, and any old fleabag would do for me,
but it's all Joan and Mrs. Esdaile. In fact, I carried all my gear out
this morning, but they've toted everything back again."
"Oh, but he _likes_ that little room at the end!" Joan cooingly
reassured him. "He gets the morning sun, and it's beautifully cool in
the afternoons----"
"If you mean that I'm in the habit of sleeping in the afternoons I wish
to inform you that I'm not," I answered her coldly. "And if the room you
speak of is that little cupboard place just above where the hens are
fed----"
"Yes, that's the one," she answered with a darling smile. "I call it
quite large, and I've put you one or two nice books to read, and I
arranged the flowers myself. Come up, Robin!"
So Smith had the room that I, the introducer of these Esdaile people to
my loved Santon, had hitherto always had, and I was given the one with
the morning sun. You might suppose from Joan's words that the sun shone
directly in, filling it with gayety and brightness. Not a bit of it.
That morning sunlight she so extolled was a greenish and aquarium-like
half light thrown up from the steep bit of paddock that comprised the
whole of my view. And, lest I should oversleep, an enormous bronze cock,
mounting to the little sloping roof of the hen-house below, was able to
sound his clarion note practically on the drum of my ear.
II
I repeat, at a first glance he was very like the rest of the young
fellows of his day; but I admit there was something about him that grew
on you. After watching him for a while I decided that this ascendancy
was principally in his eyes. I do not wish to overwork the popular
clichés of fire and flash and smolder; Smith's eyes certainly had
something of this quality; but it was combined with an expression that,
until I can define it better, I will risk calling discontent. I don't
mean by this the discontent that is common enough among those other
flashers and smolderers, the artists and poets and suchlike. That is
usually little more than peevishness and incapacity, and, as one of the
breed myself, I rather liked Smith's attitude towards us. With perfect
sincerity he looked on us as immensely clever fellows, particularly the
late Mr. Jack London and the author of _The Crimson Specter of Hangman
Hollow_; but there he had finished with us. We were high and he could
not attain to us. Our affairs were so little his affairs that I regret
to have to say that, Malvern notwithstanding, I have heard him make use
of the expression "between you and I." That is an awful thing for a nice
girl to marry.
But the War has taught me, among other things, the overwhelming
importance of other men's jobs and the comparative insignificance of my
own. If young Smith did not express himself in the terms to which I was
accustomed, he expressed himself none the less. Don't ask me how, except
in a general way. Here again what he calls a "dreadfully gulf" is fixed,
across which I can only gaze at the New Wonder.
For Chummy, for all his Crimson Specters and his "between you and I,"
his cocktails at Hatchetts' and his stuffed-bird tympani in the Helmsea
Mess, was part of that Wonder that to-day a George takes from an
Elizabeth's hands. Four hundred years ago I suppose he would have sold a
farm and gone to sea; this, briefly, is what he did in our own day:--
Denied admission to the Flying Corps on the grounds that he was not yet
seventeen, he had made his way to London, dressed himself as a mechanic
or plumber, had forced his way into a foreign Embassy under pretext of
repairing the ambassadorial pipes or cisterns or something, and had
actually succeeded in presenting himself before the Ambassador,
demanding to be taken on in the service of a foreign country. Naturally
he had been refused and referred back to his own Government. Then had
ensued what Chummy cheerfully described as a hell of a dust-up. General
Officers had stormed and had wanted to know "what the devil he meant by
it"; the correspondence, I have been told, weighs between eleven and
twelve pounds; but in the end he had received his ticket--already
endorsed for improper conduct in offering his services to a foreign if
friendly Power. You will believe that this endorsement had stood very
little in his subsequent way. The story had run like wildfire throughout
the whole of the Service. It may have hindered his promotion, but what
on earth did promotion matter? Any number of civilian-ingrain
business-men, turning their business talents to the Services, have
obtained promotion. Few of them have attained to the distinction of such
an endorsement as that which made bright young Smith's ticket.
And--to return to what I have called that discontent of his--I for one
cannot see that a young man of daring and vision, elementally put down
into the midst of our world to-day and asked what he makes of it all,
must either write a stuffy book or paint a jazz picture or else be told
that the fire of his personality has no expression and his chosen work
no value. Very much on the contrary. I think myself that Charles
Valentine Smith was a thinker so single of purpose that it never
occurred to him that he thought at all. And why not a technique, an
artist's technique, of the wrist and eye and nerve and indomitable
heart? Is my dictation more a wonder than his zooming? Is my life so
full and his so empty? I cannot see it.
III
To look at, he had not in the very least the air of a man over whose
head a terrible menace hung. Indeed, I have rarely sat down at a table
with a less personally odious young murderer. He was lithe and of a
darkish brown complexion, a perfect anatomy of graven and incised muscle
when later I saw him bathe, and with hands the movements of which were
full of power and grace. Then there were his eyes. Of all his features
his mouth was that which communicated the least, except when he smiled.
With the rest of us I am afraid that our mouths generally communicate
the most.
I knew, at the time of this our peep forward, that Philip had had his
_éclaircissement_ with him, but had no idea of what had passed between
them. Calling at Lennox Street one midday on my way to the office I had
found the house shut up and even Rooke unexpectedly gone. Therefore I
half expected that Philip would tell me the whole story on the night of
my arrival at Santon. In fact, I gave him every opportunity to do so,
remaining behind after all but he and I had gone to bed. But he talked
about anything else, and at half-past ten rose, yawned, said he thought
he would turn in, apologized again for the change of my room, and gave
me my candle. The same thing happened the next night.
On the third night I asked him point blank.
"Eh?" he said. "Oh, that's all right--so far, at any rate. He doesn't
know anything about it."
"What!" I exclaimed. "Know nothing about it!... What do you mean--that
he was too stunned or dazed or something to remember?"
"Oh, no, I don't mean that exactly," Esdaile replied. "He remembers that
part of it all right. It was the other I didn't tell him."
"What other?"
"Why, that anybody else knows anything about the--accident."
"But didn't you mention the shooting to him, if there was any?"
"Oh, he admits that, of course."
"Then in that case he knows you know?"
"Of course he knows _I_ know. How could I ask him if I didn't know? What
he doesn't know is that you fellows know. So I told him the best thing
he could do was to come down here and get fit again, and not say
anything to Joan."
"And--he agreed not to say anything to Joan?" I exclaimed in
astonishment.
"Certainly. What good would that do? Look here: he's here getting
himself well again; I'm here painting; and you're here on a holiday. If
there's any trouble ahead we can't stop it, and so it's no good worrying
about it. Don't you think I'm right?"
"Oh ... very well," I said in bewilderment, suddenly ceasing my
questions; and I took my candle and went up to my little room over the
hen-house with somewhat mixed feelings.
Just look at a few of the ingredients of the mixture. Here was Joan,
knowing nothing about anything except that her lover had had a tumble,
had given her a few weeks of torturing anxiety, but was now blessedly up
and about again and in her pocket all day long. Then there was this
Charles Valentine Smith, also knowing nothing (for apparently a mere
trifle like shooting a man and admitting that you shot him didn't
count), and, with the Brand of Cain on his untroubled brow, offering
Joan his blood-stained hand in the most matter-of-fact way in the world.
And here was Philip, apparently accepting the whole extraordinary
situation with complete calm. I admit that I found all this serenity
just a little perplexing.
But look at the charm of the situation for me as a novelist! Few of us
have the opportunity of studying what I think I may call the amenities
of murder at first hand. I dare say that grim mutterings à la Specter
of Hangman Hollow would have bored me, writhings and agonies made me
uncomfortable; but this new view of murder I found full of pleasing
interest. And the whole of the interest lay in seeing, hearing and
asking no questions. Philip was "there painting," I on a holiday. Very
well. I was content.
And, in case you have any preconceived notions about the daily trifling
routine of murderers' lives, I can only wish you had been at Santon with
me at that time. As far as I could see, not a cloud marred the blue
heaven of these young people's days. They disappeared as soon as
breakfast was cleared away and returned when they returned. I don't for
a moment suppose that the intervening hours were spent in the
contemplation of death, judgment or the burden of undivulged crime.
Chummy enjoyed his pipe, and, as he sat at high tea, idolized by the
Esdaile boys because he flew, ate as heartily as ever in his pre-murder
days. If his crash on the Lennox Street roof was not mentioned, that
seemed to be only because everything had ended perfectly happily and
there was nothing more to be said about it. In fact, here is a bit of
conversation, taken almost at random, just to show you the way to be
entirely happy is to shoot somebody and say nothing to your best girl
about it.
Coming down to breakfast one morning I thought it my duty to administer
a sharp rebuke to Miss Merrow about the throwing of a handful of
hen-corn into my window in order (she said) to wake me.
"I had been up ten minutes, I had shaved, and was more than half
dressed," I said sternly. "I'll tell you what you are doing; you are
trying to train those hens to come _into_ my room by throwing corn in. I
have now to inform you that I intend to write this morning, and so
shall not be able to relieve you of your duties down on the shore."
"Oh, I say, sir----" young Smith began, but I thought fit to put a spoke
into his wheel also.