A Case in Camera
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.
VIII
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 had been 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 and again 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 in _covering up_ that 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,
saw Esdaile 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 have _heard_----
But he was right about the apparatus----
Esdaile had not heard--he had _seen_--and there was no more mystery
about it all than there is in putting your eye to a keyhole.
IX
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 gone down 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 to _think_ of
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 else _en plein
fouet_, can every neighboring scratch or fracture be assigned its
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.
PART VII
THE KING'S ROAD
I
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, he wished 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