A Case in Camera
thought these sharks made enough out of their filthy premiums nowadays
without putting their hands right _into_ your pockets!"
"I didn't say he did that exactly."
"It's the same thing. And anyway, how did he know? What made him
think----?"
"Perhaps he saw you pick it up. Could he have done that from down
below?"
"Might. I shouldn't have thought so though. Of course, I was flurried."
"But you wouldn't have thought it in Esdaile's case either," I reminded
him.
"No, that beats me," he admitted.
"And I wouldn't be _too_ virtuous about it, Monty. In any case you'd no
business with the thing, you know."
"Oh, stuff!" he scoffed. "It's you that's being virtuous."
And, with that ring in my waistcoat pocket that I had picked up with no
more justification than he had the pistol, he might have added that I
was hypocritical too.
VI
To tell the truth, that ring was beginning to worry me a little. I don't
mean my possession of it, since I had no intention of pawning it, and
was prepared to hand it over to its rightful owner as soon as I felt
that that course would not do more harm than good. My concern was about
the severed relation of which it had been a symbol. I wondered whether I
was not perhaps a little excessively delicate on Monty's behalf. If my
eyes, wandering round his tidy room, had encountered a copy of the _Era_
or been given any other excuse for introducing Audrey Cunningham's name,
I think that after all I should have risked it. But "When in doubt cut
it out" is a safe motto, and I remained silent.
I had had, however, an idea. Mrs. Cunningham might be "fed" with men,
but it was not likely that she had broken off her engagement without
saying something to Mollie Esdaile about it. What was the harm in
writing to Mollie, not necessarily mentioning the ring, but asking for
her version of whatever had happened?
The more I thought of it the more I liked the idea. Match-making is
rather out of my line, but I am not entirely indifferent to the
happiness of my friends, and I had not forgotten poor Monty's anguished
cry of "Dawdy! Dawdy!" the last time I had visited him in Jubilee Place.
I do not call it match-making merely to inquire whether a possible
obstacle may not be removed. If it was the Case's doing, the Case's
solution ought to get matters right again. A little prematurely,
perhaps, I was growing to the belief that the question was not whether
the Case would settle itself, but how.
Before I left him, which I did very shortly afterwards, I had determined
to write to Mollie. I did so indeed that very night. I did not mention
the ring. I simply gave her a faithful picture of the two Montys, the
first one so distressing, and the second so enheartening, and asked her
what about the other side of the affair.
It was nearly a week before I received her reply, which, when it did
come, contained that invitation to spend a month at Santon that I have
already anticipated in this story. It was a curious letter in some ways.
Parts of it, even certain parts that touched Audrey Cunningham directly,
were as free and frank as I have always found Mollie to be; but other
parts were noticeably the other way. For example, she wrote:--
"The engagement is certainly 'off' as far as I can make out, and
whether there's any chance of their coming together again I really
can't say. She gave me to understand not, but it's three weeks
since she wrote, and Philip hasn't heard from Monty at all."
That seemed frank enough, but, on the very same page, was this:--
"I don't think it's absolutely impossible they'll make it up.
Perhaps I oughtn't to say this, and I'd rather not give you my
reason, but I don't think it's altogether out of the question. But
the circumstances are so peculiar. Everything's really most awfully
mixed, and I don't want to raise even my own hopes. I can't see why
you didn't ask Monty," etc., etc.
"I'd rather not give you my reason"--"the circumstances are
peculiar"--"things are most awfully mixed"--those were the dubious
parts. I was certain that she, as well as Philip, was holding something
back. The letter, in fact, seemed to confirm the opinion I had formed on
finding that ring so fantastically embedded in the studio floor, namely,
that before shaking the dust of Lennox Street from her feet Audrey
Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery, which she had since shared
with Mollie and Mollie now declined to share with me. In this, as you
will see, I was partly right and partly wrong.
In the meantime, suppression for suppression. I had not been candid
either. I had said nothing about finding the ring. Perhaps after all my
letter had got the answer it deserved.
But the invitation to visit the Esdailes at Santon tempted me extremely.
Quite apart from the Case, I hungered and thirsted for the air of my own
country. And there was the Case itself. Now that, with Glenfield's
countenance, Westbury's deterioration and the merely admonitory attitude
of Police Inspector Webster, it was becoming almost a jocund affair, its
center of gravity had shifted away from London to the country. It was in
the country that our young slayer was demonstrating murder to be the way
of happiness. It was in the country that Philip Esdaile was apparently
machinating to get the half-escaped strings back into his own
controlling fingers again. And it was from the country that Mollie was
now writing her interesting blend of candor and reserve.
And what was there left of much interest in London? It seemed to me very
little. In Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Temple the lawyers were no doubt
busily getting up their briefs for _Scepter Assurance Corporation v.
Aiglon Aviation Company_, but I could depend on Mackwith to keep me
posted on all that. In the columns of the _Circus_ I had awakened quite
a lively, if somewhat rambling, correspondence, in which the name of
Charles Valentine Smith had not definitely appeared, but for the
appearance of which, if the Case demanded it, I could arrange at a
moment's notice. All the life and interest seemed to have passed out of
these things. That is the worst of this intangible operation of
Publicity--it possesses you in spurts, with gaps of complete
listlessness. It is super-heated, and at a change of atmosphere
condenses into a few chill drops. Then, when you have brought it up to
the proper state of rarefaction again, you find that the popular
interest has shifted leagues away. Already my correspondence showed
signs of becoming as much beside the mark as had that nine-days'-wonder
that one morning had filled Lennox Street with a gaping crowd and had
set mysterious rumors circulating with the morning milk-carts.
Publicity, like lightning, never strikes in the same place twice. Nobody
now cared a rap whether an aeroplane had crashed in Chelsea on a May
morning months ago, nor how, nor why. Nobody was going to drag the bed
of the Thames for the identification-number of a useless Webley and
Scott pistol. A spent bullet, flying in at an open window, had _not_
killed an Estate Agent's child, and Inspector Webster had far too much
work on his hands to dream of applying to the Home Secretary through the
proper channels for an Exhumation Order. Cases left long enough
unanswered answer themselves. The scene changes, the circumstances
alter, the world moves on.
I too felt like moving on. Glenfield had offered me a holiday, and I had
my book to finish. As well finish it at Santon as anywhere else.
Santon--its cornfields and skies, the cliffs for ever a-racket with the
seabirds' clamor, the dappled fawn of its sands! I was there in my heart
already.
I wrote to Mollie that very night.
PART VIII
AT SANTON
I
"For goodness' sake, Joan, stop chattering just for a few minutes!"
Philip broke out testily. "If you don't want to sit, say so and have
done with it. This is enough to drive anybody mad!"
I had been wondering how much longer his patience would hold out. When
an artist is in difficulties with his canvas, motor-bicycle talk for an
hour on end can be extremely wearing.
Joan looked up with aggravating sweetness. "What, Philip?" she inquired.
"I say if you don't want to sit, off you go on the confounded machine
and I'll start something else."
"But, Philip darling, you know the sparking-plug's broken, and it will
be three or four days before we can get another. Do you think Wellands
will stock that make, Chummy?"
Charles Valentine Smith knocked out the new Captanide pipe and proceeded
to refill it with the Dunhill Mixture.
"Well, if they don't I think I know a fellow who has a spare. That's the
worst of the Beaver," he went on. "Now with an Indian or a Douglas ..."
And off they went again, she as well as he, both talking at once:
big-ends, plugs, magnetos: Beaver, Indian, Douglas.... In my younger
youth I used to ride a tall ungeared ordinary; except for one hellish
five minutes in which I had clung, ardently praying, to Smith's
back-carrier, I know nothing about these modern machines; and how Joan
managed to keep her sideways seat on that grid of torture over his back
wheel passed my comprehension. But ever since the arrival of the hideous
thing she had hardly been off it, hair all over the place, ankles
stiffly out, skirts rippling like a ribbon on a ventilating-fan, and
cauliflowers of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind them. I could
only conclude that modern love, besides being blind, is deficient in the
tactile nerve-centers as well.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Philip had set up his easel on a
sheep-nibbled slope of the cliff-tops. Joan, in her old tweed skirt and
new canary-colored silk jumper, was stretched luxuriously on the thymy
bents. The amber beads about her neck matched the potentilla on which
she lay, and I give you your choice which was the bluest--the aimlessly
fluttering butterflies, the nodding harebells, or her demure and
reprehensible eyes. Philip had deliberately excluded the blue of the sky
from his canvas. The picture was simply of Joan herself, the crewel-work
of flowers on which she lay, and behind her, red as the habitation of
dragons, the midsummer sorrel that massed itself up the slope.
The talk continued, a fitter's romance: clutches, brakes, front-drives:
Minervas, Excelsiors, de Dions....
In my day we played croquet and read "Maud." ...
And then Philip exploded again.
"Oh, _do_ dry up! How do you expect me to paint? Pull that book a bit
closer, Joan, so it throws the light up on your face, and hold your chin
a bit higher----"
As if she spoke to herself I heard Joan's murmur: "Why did the razorbill
razorbill?"
As softly Charles Valentine Smith murmured back: "So the sea-urchin
could sea-urchin"; and this last flippancy was too much for Philip. He
put his palette down on the turf and turned to Smith and myself.
"Look here," he said politely, "will you two fellows oblige me by
pushing off? Right away somewhere else, please, and now."
"Oh," Joan wailed, "and I shan't have anybody to talk to!"
"You can read your book."
"But it's such a stupid one--all about an old artist, over thirty, who
fell in love with his model and bought her alpaca blouses and thread
stockings----"
"You shall have a motor catalogue to-morrow. Now sheer off, you
fellows."
Obediently I got on to my feet and turned to Smith.
"Come along. We'll give him till midday. Here's your stick."
And I helped him to his feet and bore him off.
II
Ordinarily I do not find it easy to talk to very young men. I have been