A Case in Camera
presently arise, that intermediate epoch seemed ephemeral and without
significance.
And so, even already, I find this record of our Case to be. There is a
strange blank, full (I know) of all manner of busyness and bustle and
restless effort, but without either the security of history nor yet the
full brightness of new discovery. The _Scepter_ action seems somehow
more remote than the Armada, the findings of this high-sounding
Committee or that farther away than Trafalgar. All is still too near to
be seen, and by the time the dust has settled another pen than mine will
have to take up the tale.
Indeed, I have more than once felt inclined to hand over the pen now,
for, when all is still to prove, a younger faith and vision than those
of my day are needed. For example, Cecil Hubbard tells me that the man
who nowadays does not know at least the elements of all this lore of
wave-lengths and directional wireless has no business to say that he
belongs to his age at all, and sadly I believe him. Yet Philip Esdaile
contrives to keep abreast, not by joining in the banging and burnt-cork
of so much contemporary painting, but by virtue of something else, often
temporarily hidden, that will still be quietly there when the whistles
have ceased to scream and the tom-toms to thud. He too maintains the
continuity, sharing with his forerunners that quality, whatever it is,
which makes the old centuries modern and the novelty of yesterday
afternoon musty and stale before the sun next rises.
Therefore, it should be understood that the rest is more theirs and less
mine than ever. In the _Scepter_ action Charles Valentine Smith,
speaking (thanks largely to my friend Glenfield) from the witness-box
and not from the dock, with wreaths and garlands and the glamour of his
Embassy adventure almost visibly about him, made this abundantly clear.
Easily, familiarly, and with pronouns all over the shop, he dealt with
matters so far above my head that I will make no attempt to report him.
If you are interested, there are _The Times_ Law Reports in which you
can read it all. And similarly with the whole crop of associated actions
and inquiries and investigations. My own interest in them is no more
than that something has been born in my time whose infant strugglings
and gaspings I witnessed, and about which I shall doubtless become
garrulous all too soon.
II
So that conjuror's passion-flower to which I have likened this case all
but folded itself up into its original pilule again. That it did not do
so was due to a series of small happenings which I will now relate.
The first of these was my leaving Santon before Mrs. Cunningham arrived
there. Mollie, despite her energy, did not discover her friend's
whereabouts so easily as she had anticipated. It took her, to be
precise, a fortnight, at the end of which time I had to leave. But so
narrowly did I miss Mrs. Cunningham that I believe her train passed mine
on the way.
But I did not leave Mollie without that sort of smiling salute that
accompanies a fencer's "en garde." If (I told her flatly) she held
herself free to accept information from me and to give nothing but
pitying looks of sex-superiority in return, I for my part should also
consider myself at liberty to do as I pleased should further information
come to light. What I had in my mind was that if she and Audrey
Cunningham were going to put their heads together in the country Rooke
and I might do the same thing in town. I may say that I was quite
conscious of the feebleness of my retort, and did not for a moment
expect that Rooke would have anything fresh to tell me.
"Very well," Mollie laughed gayly from the platform. "But you can tell
Monty from me that I'll look after this end of it. Don't tell him
anything about the ring though, or you may spoil it So long, my
dear--see you in September----"
And the waving hands of the Santon party slid past my carriage window.
I gave Monty her message, though strictly without prejudice to myself as
its bearer. He was not caught up into any sudden transport of joy.
Instead some cheerful confidence of his own seemed to envelop him.
"I fancy that will be all right now," he said.
"Do you? Well, I'm very glad. It's a great improvement on the last
time."
"Oh, I've had rather a bit of luck since then," he replied.
His "bit of luck" seemed to me slender enough grounds for his confidence
that all would yet be well. It appeared that he had been sent by a
weekly paper down to Hounslow to make certain sketches (he was in full
harness again), and there he had got into conversation with a ground
official, an ex-R.A.F. man. He had rather "palled up" with this man, and
had seen him several times since. Indeed, Monty was a little inclined to
impart recently acquired information with regard to the organization of
"dromes" and similar matters, and had quite a number of yarns that were
"absolute facts" to tell. His conversation also had become noticeably
slangier.
"You see," he remarked casually, "I think I'm on the track of why that
pal of Philip's shot the other chap."
I found myself staring blankly at him; but, as often happens in moments
of shock, I did not at first feel the full force of what he said. I
interrupted him.
"I say--I hope you haven't been talking too much about that?" (I knew
his weaknesses, and a perfectly open candor was one of the gravest of
them.)
But "Lord, no!" he instantly reassured me. "Talking about it? Do you
think I'm a----" the initials he used were those of the words "blind
fiddler."
"I'm glad of that," I murmured.
And then it was that the full weight of what he had said began to sink
into my mind.
"Then why did he shoot him?" I asked presently, when I was a little more
master of myself. This conversation, I ought to have said, took place on
the top of a bus going eastward down Piccadilly. I was on my way to the
office, and I had found Monty with a finished drawing which he also was
taking to Fleet Street. He looked away over the Green Park.
"Well, I'm not perfectly sure I'm right, of course," he replied, turning
to me again. "In fact, I might be miles out--right off the map. But I
_did_ see him on the roof that morning, you know, and I've been trying
to piece it all together again, and I must say it fits in pretty well."
"What fits in, and with what?"
He dropped his voice. "Well, you see, this fellow Smith waved his hand
the way I told you--like this----" On the bus top he made that same
aimless and wavering movement of his hand that I had seen him make in
Esdaile's studio, that I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Chelsea
public-house. "I think now he wanted the pistol back again, but of
course I didn't give it him."
"What did he want it for?"
"Might have wanted to shoot himself," Monty replied.
I pondered deeply, my eyes on the passing façade of the Ritz. Certainly
Monty, as the first on the scene that morning that now seemed such ages
ago, had the right to collate his original observations with anything he
might subsequently have learned, and the resulting conclusion would
probably be a strong one. But that Chummy had possibly wished to shoot
himself was no explanation of why he had shot Maxwell. Indeed, another
explanation was far more probable. Having realized that he had in fact
shot him he might merely have wished to take the shortest way out
himself, and I drew Monty's attention to this.
"I'm coming to that," Monty answered. "You see this fellow Wetherhead is
a jolly interesting chap. You remember the July push on the Somme? Well,
he was in that--Bristol Fighter--and then he went up the line to Wipers.
He told me that one time when they were in Pop--Poperinghe that is, you
know, and we'd a lot of heavy guns there----" (but I think I may safely
omit the rather lengthy second-hand recital of Wetherhead's movements
and experiences). "Extraordinary yarns he has to tell. Did you know that
a first-class pilot can drive another one down with the wash of his
propeller? He can, Wetherhead says. He gets above him, and maneuvers for
position, and then--I forget exactly how Wetherhead put it, but he
showed me with a couple of models they have there----"
"Yes, yes, but you were going to say----"
"So I was; I know I'm rambling a bit, but it's awfully interesting, and
you must meet Wetherhead. Well, when he was with the infantry (Northwold
Fusiliers) he says quite a number of their fellows used to carry little
doses of poison about with them, just in case. He'd heard awful yarns of
the way some of these Boches used to treat their prisoners. So they had
this poison to be ready for anything, like Whitaker Wright with his
cigar."
"Monty, if you don't come to the point----"
"Why, I'm there now; don't have a vertical gust, old thing. Well, just
in the same way Wetherhead says some of these pilots and their observers
had an arrangement that if one of them got it in the neck the other one
was to finish the job for him. And the other way round, of course. He
and his observer--he's going to introduce me to him--they had it all
fixed up, but luckily it never came to that. So it's not impossible that
these two fellows were like that. What do you think? It fits in with my
end all right, and you've been down there and seen Smith. What about
you? I'm inclined to have a bit on it myself."
_A bit on it!_ ... A bit! Instantly I would have had all I possessed on
it. Our bus was standing at the Circus end of Lower Regent Street when
Monty at last came out with it, but it had reached Waterloo Place before
I next became conscious of my physical surroundings. A bit on it!...
Look at Monty as I have tried to describe him to you. An unworldly and
lovable and gentle sort of donkey he was in some ways; now that he had
finished with his dummy trees and linoleum infantry he was apparently
beginning to learn a little about other aspects of the war; and
Wetherhead (whoever he was--already Monty had so crammed him down my
throat that I was resolved to put the width of England between us rather
than meet him) suddenly stood for the whole of the Air Force to him. But
behind all his sweet credulity Monty was no fool. He was aware of his
ground. He _had_ been the first on the roof that morning. He _was_ in
the last event capable of putting two and two together and of scoring a
bull. Do you know these flashes of the absolute and unalterable
rightness of a thing? One of them blinded Saul of Tarsus on the road to
Damascus; something of the same kind blinded me for the whole length of
Lower Regent Street. I had no longer one single shadow of doubt. Nay, I
had a certitude that even Monty didn't share. _He_ "wasn't perfectly
sure." But _I_----!
For what else could it have been? What else in the whole realm of man's
created spirit? For what other reason could Esdaile, up to then wavering
and swayed by doubts, have visited the hospital where Smith lay, have
been back in his own home again within half an hour, and then have
straightway borne his exonerated friend off into the midst of his
family? Why, from that moment, had he immediately set about to get his
own half-confidences to the rest of us back into his possession again?
Why, at Santon, had my own questions been met with a silencing stare? Of
all the things conceivable to have been told, could Smith have told him
anything but this?
And Smith's own demeanor on that uplifted Yorkshire headland? Was
not that too explained? I thought it was, and could only
marvel--marvel--that not as much as the smell of the fire had passed
upon him. That white and welding heat of war had not merely made his
pact with Maxwell a thing to be honored in the last emergency without a
further moment's thought, but it admitted no sigh nor compunction nor