A Case in Camera
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
other two 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.
II
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. "In France" 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
staring out. 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.
III
One thing at any rate now seemed fairly certain, namely, that if what
Dadley told me was true it was not likely that a man of Inspector
Webster's penetration would pay much attention to the mutterings of an
incipient megalomaniac. For, if I could guess at the signs at all, it
was megalomania. I have not made a systematic analysis of those
infinitely intricate mental states that we speak of conglomerately as
"war nerves." I am not prepared to say that one man may bitterly grudge
another something from the taking of which he himself has drawn back his
hand, nor yet (to turn the case the other way round) that there is not
on occasion just as heady and overweening an egotism on the part of the
envied man. It is useless to generalize on these matters. It is also not
quite decent. The least we can do is to mind our own business, the most
to consider the given instance on its merits. It is simply as yet
another curious by-product of our Case that I am speaking of Westbury.
Quite the most curious thing about it was that he was the only one of us
all who had, in the sense of public duty, been wholly and entirely in
the right throughout. But a little reflection showed me that it was
precisely therein that the germ of his malady lay. It was _because_ of
this consistent technical rightness that he was now in process of
arrogating to himself all the rightness in the world. No doubt he had
been technically right when he had decided that his special knowledge of
estates was of more solid use to his country than his skill at arms
would have been. He had been technically right if, in the very uncommon
circumstances, having reason to believe that a pistol had been moved
that should only have been moved by the police, he had taken steps to
ascertain that it really was a pistol Rooke had carried in his pocket.
He had been right when, finding a bullet in his own house, he had
instantly reported the matter to Inspector Webster. He had been right in
demanding a post-mortem; right when Mackwith had all-unconsciously
thwarted this; and oh, how right when, in that Chelsea back street, he
had broken furiously out on me as an accomplice in the suppression of
things that should have been brought to the light of day! Yes, it was
all this rightness that was precisely the trouble. It is not good for
any of us to be right so often as that. Personally, if I am right twice