A Case in Camera
not know very much about pictures, but it knows a good deal about men
and their faces. Esdaile was taking risks if he hoped to play any tricks
with that eye on him.
Then, having caught mine for that moment, the eye was attentively fixed
on our host again.
You see how preposterous it was already. Esdaile apparently could notice
a trifle like the dust on Rooke's clothes, but he seemed to be both
blind and deaf to everything else--the soft surging murmurs of the crowd
outside, the voice of the Inspector in the garden, the shadows of
strangers across the French windows. He just dropped heavy stone jars to
the floor, talked about wool-gathering, and had not even thought of
extinguishing the candle that was melting and guttering in his hand.
Wool-gathering--Philip Esdaile, the least woolly-minded of men!
Already I was certain that he was deliberately acting, and acting far
from well at that.
It was little Alan, the elder of the two boys, who broke the spell that
seemed to have benumbed us all. He ran forward, his blue-and-white check
smock against his father's knees and his little face upturned.
"A naeroplane, daddy!" he cried eagerly. "Some men fell out of a
naeroplane close to Jimmy and me, didn't they, Auntie Joan? In a
parachute, bigger'n this room!" The little arms were outstretched to
their widest reach. "Do come quick and look, daddy!"
And he seized his father's hand.
Again I caught Hubbard's eye. Esdaile was at it again, this time with a
badly-exaggerated gesture of astonishment. He might have made just such
a gesture if Alan had told him that the Grandmother in the bed was
really a Wolf--good enough for children but not for anybody else.
Hubbard at any rate thought that this had lasted long enough.
"Do you mean to say that you didn't feel the whole house shake half an
hour ago?" he demanded.
Esdaile turned, but with a curious reluctance that I didn't understand.
"I did fancy I heard a noise of some sort," he admitted. "What about
it?"
Hubbard gave it to him plain and unvarnished, for all the world as if he
had been in the Admiral's office with a sentry with a bayonet at the
door.
"A plane crashed, and two men came down on your roof in a parachute.
One's living, the other's killed. Those are the police in your garden
now. That's all--except that you seem to live in a pretty
solidly-constructed house."
This time Esdaile made no demonstration. He stood listening for a
moment longer, as if he thought Hubbard might add something; then,
without a word, he released himself from Alan's hand and strode, not to
the garden where the voices were, but towards the studio door.
VI
The studio (into which Hubbard and I immediately followed him) was a
large oblong apartment, with a portion of one of its longer sides and
almost the whole of the roof glazed. More or less light could be
admitted by means of a system of dark blue blinds and cords running to
cleats on the walls. It was to the roof-glass that my eyes turned first
of all. One corner of it was darkened, as if melted snow had slipped
down its slope, but the irregular triangle thus made was not so dark but
that the shapes of the two heads could be seen, a little darker still.
Nearer up to the ridge one thick pane was badly starred, and in the
middle of the star was a small hole. This I judged to have been made by
the broken branch that still brushed and played about it. A couple of
pictures had fallen from the walls and lay face downward among their
sprinklings of broken glass on the floor. One or two others were
disarranged. Otherwise the apartment seemed to be undamaged.
Esdaile's behavior was now odder than ever. With those two men lying on
the roof just over his head and the police moving about the garden
outside, apparently he found nothing more urgent to do than to move
displaced rugs about and to push at the bits of broken glass with his
foot. And he did this with the candle, now a stalagmite of tallow, still
licking and flickering in his hand.
He made no remark when Hubbard took the candle almost roughly from him,
blew it out, and set it down on the table where the artist's tubes and
brushes usually stood.
"We'll be rid of that first of all," he said. "Unless it's a mascot.
Scaring 'em to death with that in your hand like a sleepwalker in
traveling-tweeds! Now what about it, Esdaile?"
There was sudden attention in Philip's attitude, though he still looked
down at the floor and pushed at a rug with his toe.
"What about what?" he asked.
"About this last half-hour."
"You mean where have I been? I went down into the cellar. I went to get
that liqueur."
"That doesn't take half an hour--and it certainly didn't take this
particular half-hour."
To this Esdaile made no reply.
"Come," said Hubbard again after a pause. "You admitted just now that
you thought you heard something."
The words came slowly. "Did I? Yes, I remember. But it was all muffled.
Honestly, I couldn't tell from the sound that it was--that it was all
this."
"Was that when you were down there, or as you were going down, or when?"
"I'd just got down, I think."
"But didn't you wonder what was the matter? What kept you all that time?
And what's the matter with you now that you have come up?"
"The matter?" Esdaile began once more to parry; and then suddenly his
manner changed. For the first time he looked up from the floor, and the
mask, whatever it was, almost dropped. "Look here, you fellows," he said
almost appealingly, "you might see I'm a bit worried. I've been trying
to hide it, but perhaps it wasn't much of an effort. Not so dashed easy
to hide. But if you're suggesting that I've been somewhere else besides
in the cellar I can only tell you I haven't. Couldn't for one thing;
Rooke's got every key of this house. I had to get the cellar one from
him. By the way, what's he doing now?"
"Looking out your next train. But what I want to know is----"
He broke off suddenly as sounds were heard over our heads. About the
snowslip on the roof other shadowy shapes could be seen. Feet shuffled
and moved, and the broken branch was dragged away. They were preparing
to get the two men down.
And until they should have finished our conversation ceased.
But in the meantime Esdaile did yet another trivial incongruous thing.
Moving towards one set of blind-cords he motioned to me to take another
set. With short sticking tugs we drew the blinds across a foot at a
time, and soon only narrow gold lozenges of sunlight showed among the
rafters. All below was a dark blue twilight, as if for an obsequy within
instead of for one on the roof.
Then, when from the cessation of sound all appeared to be over, Hubbard
made a fresh appeal. He took the painters arm.
"Now let's have this out," he said. "No good letting a thing get way on
when a few plain words will stop it. A perfectly ordinary thing's
happened. Simple parachute accident. No mystery about it whatever. The
mystery only begins when _you_ come in carrying your damned candles and
dropping jars and coming in here to tidy up instead of going outside to
see what's happened. That's where the answer begins to be a lemon, my
son. Listen to me. Whether you heard that crash or whether you didn't,
at any rate you know all about it _now_. Then why can't you be just
decently upset like the rest of us and have done with it?"
"Decently upset?" The words seemed to strike him. "Have I been behaving
any other way?"
"You were behaving damnably indecently when you came up out of the orlop
there--and that was _before_ you were told a word of all this,
remember."
At last Esdaile saw the point. His behavior _had_ been extraordinary for
whole minutes before the situation had been explained to him. One would
have thought that during those minutes he had been deliberately trying
to find out how much we knew about something or other before committing
himself. When next he spoke it was almost apologetically.
"I see," he said quietly at last. "Yes, you're perfectly right. That was
certainly the proper way to take it--just be decently upset. I see now.
I must have looked a perfect zany.... Now look here: I want to tell you
both all about it, but the trouble is that I can't just at this moment.
At present it's somebody else's affair, not mine at all. Must get that
cleared up first. I'm not perfectly sure of my ground either; you'll see
by and by. But as regards the accident--well, that's the whole point at
present. I mean anybody would say it _was_ an accident, wouldn't they?
It _looked_ like one, I mean? It would never occur to anybody who saw it
that----"
But here he broke off abruptly as his wife appeared in the doorway.
VII
Perhaps at this point I had better tell you who "I" am who write this,
and also how our little circle came to choose me for the task.
As a minor actor in these events you may set me down as a working
journalist. Among other things I am one of the sub-editors of the _Daily
Circus_. But that is not the whole of my life. I am also a novelist of
sorts. And one of my reasons for sticking to journalism when I could
manage at a pinch to do without it is that in this way I escape the doom
of having to produce two novels a year whether I have anything to write
about or not.
But that was not their idea in asking me to put into shape the mosaic of
differently-colored pieces that constitutes this Case. I believe their
idea was that my two capacities might supplement one another--that I
might hold fast (so to speak) to the bed-rock facts with my journalistic
hand while the other was left free for the less tangible elements. I
don't know that I altogether agree with this distinction. I happen to
have some experience of how much fiction people swallow when they take
up their morning papers, and also of how much mere hurdy-gurdy-grinding
they accept as "human nature" when it comes to them in the form of a
novel. But that is their look-out. I told them that with their help I
would do my best.
I had to have their help. Obviously I could not always be at the side of
this person or that, Rooke or Esdaile or Hubbard, throughout every
winding of a complicated chain of events. But I have known Esdaile for
twenty years, Rooke for a dozen, and most of the others long enough to
have a fairly reliable impression of them, and their accounts are quite
trustworthy. If I have any doubt about this I say so.
I cannot deny that we took a good deal of responsibility when we
conspired to hush up the facts of this Case. We have no more right to
come between the agents of the Law and their duty than any other set of
private persons. And, though many of the beaten tracks are lost in these
changing days, and new precedents are making whichever way you turn, I
for one don't like making new precedents, especially moral ones. I like
tradition to have my homage even when I am resolved to break it. But we
are dealing with a _fait accompli_. The Case _is_ a Case. It became so
in spite of laws and customs and institutions. First one person acted as
according to the laws of his individual being he had to act, and another
did the same, and then another and so on, until the phenomenon was
complete.
So, as my chief business in life is precisely those human accidentals
that make us all different beings destined to different acts, perhaps
they have chosen their historian more or less rightly after all.
One caveat (as Mackwith would say) I must enter, however. This is with
regard to my own Services in the War that is now over. Most of these
services, though as a matter of fact performed in belt and khaki, might
just as well have been discharged in a dressing-gown, so unadventurous