A Case in Camera
I looked into her eyes. "Where is Mrs. Cunningham now?" I asked.
VI
Her start could hardly have been more sudden had I asked her where Alan
was a few moments after he had been seen playing at the cliff's edge.
"Audrey Cunningham? She was at Harrogate last, I think--or
Scarboro--why?"
"Why was her engagement broken off?"
She made an abrupt, impatient gesture. Evidently I had plunged her back
into an older mood.
"Oh, I don't know! I'm tired to death of--of everything! Why do you want
to remind me of it? I was just beginning to forget a little. Oh, why
didn't we leave London a week earlier! We nearly did--Philip was only
waiting for Billy to get those pictures back--we should have escaped
everything then!"
I soothed her. "Yes; but about the engagement. I could make very little
of your letter. You said things were tangled and difficult and so on.
What did you mean, Mollie?"
She was silent.
"Do you mean that you won't discuss Mrs. Cunningham with me?"
Still she did not speak.
"Because you have discussed her. I had your letter. You said you'd heard
from her. That was since you last saw her. What happened in between?"
She found her voice. "Nothing that I know, except that it seems to have
been definitely off."
"By that do you mean that she returned Monty's ring?"
"She didn't say what she did with the ring."
"Well, she neither returned it nor kept it. I have it. I don't want it.
Will you take it?"
I fetched it from my pocket and held it out to her.
Her hand found my sleeve, almost as if that brilliance underfoot
unsteadied her head. Her eyes had closed and there was a little hard
crumple between her brows. I put my other hand on her shoulder.
"Let's get up the beach--this is too dazzling--it's making you dizzy," I
said.
Faintly she murmured, "Yes--it does get in your eye----"
VII
On the hot loose sand above the highest seaweed I made her sit down.
Presently she had recovered a little. Her manner was now undoubtedly
that of a person on whose back a half-withdrawn burden is reimposed. But
she shouldered it.
"Where did you get it?" she asked, her eyes on the ring in my palm.
"Do you remember Philip asking me to pack up some sketches for him and
sending me his key?"
"He did say something about it. Monty had left."
"I found the ring on the Sunday afternoon I went for the sketches. It
was in a hole in the studio floor."
"In a hole.... Ah-h-h-h!"
I looked sharply at her, but continued.
"Stuck quite firmly in: in fact, I had to prise it out with a
screwdriver. I didn't know which of them it belonged to--I don't know
now--so I slipped it into my pocket. Perhaps you'd better take it."
But she made no movement to do so. She was picking up handfuls of sand
and allowing it to slip through her fingers again. She made quite a
number of little heaps, which her eyes attentively watched, but her mind
was elsewhere--perhaps on that last letter of Audrey Cunningham's, when
apparently the engagement had been neither off nor on. She made no sign
when I placed the ring in her lap. I had to speak.
"Queer, wasn't it?"
Her murmur was so low that I scarcely heard it. "Of course a thing like
that _would_ make it definitely off."
"A thing like what?"
"Losing it like that--after all the other."
"Come, she can hardly have 'lost' it, since I had to get a screwdriver
to prise it out!"
"I don't mean 'lost' in that way--be quiet and let me think."
The fingers began to make a fifth sandhill.
I hope I have made it clear that I was confining myself quite strictly
to Monty Rooke's affair. If it was simply a misunderstanding I did not
think I was going beyond my business in discussing with Mollie whether
that misunderstanding might not be removed. But it now seemed to me that
I was once more on the verge of far more than this. That deep long-drawn
"Ah-h-h-h!" that "A thing like that _would_ make it definitely off" were
enough to convince me of this. Evidently my words had meant more to her
than to myself who had uttered them. Therefore if Mollie claimed time to
think, so did I.
And first of all I recalled my firm persuasion of that Sunday afternoon
that Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery. It might have
been an accidental one, or she might merely not have rested until she
had made it, but a discovery she had made, and it had to do with the
hole in the studio floor. I remembered too my own pacings,
eye-measurements, judgment of angles, and my slight chagrin that Philip
had frustrated my further investigations by his removal of the key from
the cellar door. And it seemed to me that again everything seemed to
come round to that cellar of Esdaile's--the cellar on which Hubbard had
instantly fastened as holding the answer to the riddle, the cellar in
which Philip had spent that unaccountable half-hour and over which he
had since so jealously watched, yet the self-same cellar into which both
Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had since descended and found ... nothing.
Yet instantly all my former objections rose again as vividly as
ever--the extreme physical improbability that Philip could have seen
anything through that peep-hole, the utter unlikelihood that he should
have had his eye at it at that particular moment of time, the virtual
impossibility that he should have thought of the hole at all on hearing
the crash.
And yet in this hole had been tightly jammed the ring now lying in
Mollie's lap.
Suddenly Mollie surprised me by looking up and almost brightly smiling.
She smoothed out the sandhills and picked up the ring from her lap.
"Well," she said in a tone of relief, "that makes an immense difference.
I'm awfully glad you told me. Shall we be getting back?"
But this, it struck me, was rather rushing matters. I thought I had a
right to know just a little more than that. Therefore I did not rise.
"One moment," I said. "I should like to know why you said that 'a thing
like that would make it definitely off.'"
She smiled again, with a sort of affectionate raillery.
"Oh ... and you're supposed to understand women!"
This I warmly disclaimed. "In any case I only know Mrs. Cunningham very
slightly," I protested.
"And you formed no impression of her?"
"I didn't say that."
"Not even that she would be just the woman to take a--hint--of that
kind?"
She was gently but quite plainly laughing at me; but, glad as I was to
see the cloud disappear from her brow, she was not going to have
everything her own way.
"Then she did make a discovery, and received a hint, as you call it, in
doing so?"
"Did she?" she parried.
"_Did_ she?"
At that she laughed outright. She patted my sleeve almost as if I had
been a child.
"You men _can't_ know how funny you are sometimes!" she mocked me.
VIII
It struck me even then that the moment Mrs. Cunningham's name
was introduced there was introduced also something of that
sex-antagonism--perhaps I had better modify that and say
sex-difference--for which her personal story had given her such bitter
reason. Here now was Mollie, suddenly and in the middle of our
_tête-à-tête_, abolishing me as an individual and saddling me with the
collective qualities of men in general. And I must remind you once more
that as a matter of mere historical sequence I was still unaware of what
had passed between her and Philip on that night when she had put Audrey
Cunningham to bed, and Monty had spent half the night in wandering
through the dark Roehampton lanes.
"Well, let's take it that we're funny," I said rather shortly. "I don't
quite see the joke myself, but that's neither here nor there. The point
is that if I can do Monty a good turn I want to. Whether patching it up
between him and Mrs. Cunningham is a good turn is for you to decide. I
only met her once in my life, and hardly exchanged a dozen words with
her."
"You shall presently if I can lay my hands on her."
"What do you mean? That you're going to have her down here?"
"Of course I'm going to have her down here if she can come," said Mollie
in her most matter-of-fact tones. "How slowly you think! She must come
immediately. I shall see about it this afternoon _même_."
"And Rooke too?"
"We'll see about that."
"And Hubbard? And Mackwith?"
"No. What have they got to do with it?"
"Merely to make the party complete. We should be just where we started
then."
"Oh, I think we can dispense with that side of it," she answered
lightly. "Let me see: was it Harrogate? It was Buxton, and then Matlock,
and then either Harrogate or Scarboro...."
I wonder whether the surmise has dawned on you that was now beginning to
dawn on me? I admit that I had none but the very slightest grounds for
it, and that even these were more exclusions than affirmations; but in
the absence of anything more positive they had to serve. Think for a
moment how we men, solemnly, ponderously and sure that we were doing the
decent thing, had decided that at all costs certain facts of our Case
should be kept from the womenfolk. To that end we had evaded,
temporized, shuffled. And now suppose--just suppose--that all our care
and concealment had been wasted, and that two of the women at any rate
knew as much as Philip Esdaile knew and far, far more than any of the
rest of us? Mind you, I was only guessing; but I began rather to fancy
my guess. If there was little for it, I could see nothing against it.
Certain things, moreover, were distinctly in its favor. Why this
remarkable brightening in Mollie's manner, this change from her dizzy
little stagger over those strips of inverted sky when I had first
produced that ring to her air of lightsome raillery now? Why this quick
instinctive taking of sex-sides, this sudden practical decision to seek
out Audrey Cunningham this very day and to have her down to Santon? It
was not the ring at all; it was--could only be--the place in which the
ring had been found. Always, always we came back to that hole in the
studio floor at which Philip's eye could not possibly have been at the
moment of the crash that May morning. Somewhere between the hole and the
cellar the elusive explanation lay. I had been thwarted, Mackwith knew
nothing about it, and Hubbard could only grunt and mumble about
periscopes and sound-ranging and selenium cells; but Mollie, I was
persuaded, knew.
And what I had just told her, which she had not hitherto known, was that
Audrey Cunningham shared the knowledge with her.
PART IX
WHAT PHILIP KNEW
I
The other day, accompanied by an engineer acquaintance, I was pottering
about certain new excavations in the heart of London, and came upon a
number of heaps of crushed and broken-up concrete, evidently the remains
of old foundations. Yet those foundations could not have been very old,
since I myself could remember the buildings of which they had been the
support, and these had been old-fashioned rather than old. One of them
had been a theater, another an hotel; and I stood there with my friend,
looking over the waste of rubbish and barrows and wheeling-planks and
thrown-up London clay, trying to evoke in my mind the exact plan of
those vanished streets of thirty-odd years ago.
I found it difficult. Had these streets been older streets there would
have been remembered records to help me. Prints would have jogged my
memory, maps and plans have come to my aid. The seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries would somehow have come nearer home than that
unnoteworthy period of hardly more than a generation ago. Particularly
when I tried to picture the huge new palaces of ferro-concrete that will