The Passionate Friends
"Suppose," said I, "it was for the plot of a play." He nodded gravely.
My case as I stated it struck me as an unattractive one.
"Application for a Writ of Habeas Corpus," he considered with eyes that
tried to remain severely impartial, "by a Wife's Lover, who wants to
find out where she is.... It's unusual. You will be requiring the
husband to produce her Corpus.... I don't think--speaking in the same
general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be
likely to succeed.... No."
Then I overcame a profound repugnance and went to a firm of private
detectives. It had occurred to me that if I could have Justin,
Tarvrille, Guy or Philip traced I might get a clue to Mary's
hiding-place. I remember a queer little office, a blusterous,
frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an
eyeglass and a strained tenor voice, who told me twice that he was a
gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than
to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready
and eager to blackmail either side in any scandal into which spite or
weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. He alluded vaguely to his
staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his
remarkable underground knowledge of social life--"the illicit side."
What could he do for me? There was nothing, I said, illicit about me.
His interest waned a little. I told him that I was interested in
certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that I wanted
to have a report of the movements of Justin and his brothers-in-law for
the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "You want them
watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards
me and betraying a slight squint. "Exactly," said I. "I want to know
what sort of things they are looking at just at present."
"Have you any inkling----?"
"None."
"If our agents have to travel----"
I expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left
him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. How far mightn't this
undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his
investigations? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith
and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable
feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a
weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the
abduction of Mary justified any such course.
As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards
ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down
outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and
overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door
for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"
He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of
the breath, "mention my sister?"
I spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at
the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want
to see her," I expostulated. "I _must_ see her. What you are doing is
not playing the game. I've _got_ to see her."
"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of
rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up exasperation of three
weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the
hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the
face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me
after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the
jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I
hit with all my being. It was an amazing flare up of animal passion;
from the moment that I perceived he was striking at me to the moment
when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified
and spacious hall-way of Blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and
we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. The arms of the
commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from
his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and
an intervening member bawling out "Sir! Sir!" converged to remind us
that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal days....
We seemed for a time to be confronted before an audience that hesitated
to interfere. "How dare you name my sister to me?" he shouted at me, and
brought to my mind the amazing folly of which he was capable. I
perceived Mary's name flung to the four winds of heaven.
"You idiot, Philip!" I cried. "I don't _know_ your sister. I've not seen
her--scarcely seen her for years. I ask you--I ask you for a match-box
or something and you hit me."
"If you dare to speak to her----!"
"You fool!" I cried, going nearer to him and trying to make him
understand. But he winced and recoiled defensively. "I'm sorry," I said
to the commissionaire who was intervening. "Lord Maxton has made a
mistake."
"Is he a member?" said someone in the background, and somebody else
suggested calling a policeman. I perceived that only a prompt retreat
would save the whole story of our quarrel from the newspapers. So far as
I could see nobody knew me there except Philip. I had to take the risks
of his behavior; manifestly I couldn't control it. I made no further
attempt to explain anything to anybody. Everyone was a little too
perplexed for prompt action, and so the advantage in that matter lay
with me. I walked through the door, and with what I imagined to be an
appearance of the utmost serenity down the steps. I noted an ascending
member glance at me with an expression of exceptional interest, but it
was only after I had traversed the length of Pall Mall that I realized
that my lip and the corner of my nostril were both bleeding profusely. I
called a cab when I discovered my handkerchief scarlet, and retreated to
my flat and cold ablutions. Then I sat down to write a letter to
Tarvrille, with a clamorous "Urgent, Please forward if away" above the
address, and tell him at least to suppress Philip. But within the club
that blockhead, thinking of nothing but the appearances of our fight and
his own credit, was varying his assertion that he had thrashed me, with
denunciations of me as a "blackguard," and giving half a dozen men a
highly colored, improvised, and altogether improbable account of my
relentless pursuit and persecution of Lady Mary Justin, and how she had
left London to avoid me. They listened, no doubt, with extreme avidity.
The matrimonial relations of the Justins had long been a matter for
speculative minds.
And while Philip was doing this, Guy, away in Mayo still, was writing a
tender, trusting, and all too explicit letter to a well-known and
extremely impatient lady in London to account for his continued absence
from her house. "So that is it!" said the lady, reading, and was at
least in the enviable position of one who had confirmatory facts to
impart....
And so quite suddenly the masks were off our situation and we were open
to an impertinent world. For some days I did not realize what had
happened, and lived in hope that Philip had been willing and able to
cover his lapse. I went about with my preoccupation still, as I
imagined, concealed, and with an increasing number of typed letters from
my private enquiry agent in my pocket containing inaccurate and
worthless information about the movements of Justin, which appeared to
have been culled for the most part from a communicative young policeman
stationed at the corner nearest to the Justins' house, or expanded from
_Who's Who_ and other kindred works of reference. The second letter, I
remember, gave some particulars about the financial position of the
younger men, and added that Justin's credit with the west-end tradesmen
was "limitless," points upon which I had no sort of curiosity
whatever....
I suppose a couple of hundred people in London knew before I did that
Lady Mary Justin had been carried off to Ireland and practically
imprisoned there by her husband because I was her lover. The thing
reached me at last through little Fred Riddling, who came to my rooms in
the morning while I was sitting over my breakfast. "Stratton!" said he,
"what is all this story of your shaking Justin by the collar, and
threatening to kill him if he didn't give up his wife to you? And why do
you want to fight a duel with Maxton? What's it all about? Fire-eater
you must be! I stood up for you as well as I could, but I heard you
abused for a solid hour last night, and there was a chap there simply
squirting out facts and dates and names. Got it all.... What have you
been up to?"
He stood on my hearthrug with an air of having called for an explanation
to which he was entitled, and he very nearly got one. But I just had
some scraps of reserve left, and they saved me. "Tell me first," I said,
delaying myself with the lighting of a cigarette, "the particulars ...
as you heard them."
Riddling embarked upon a descriptive sketch, and I got a minute or so to
think.
"Go on," I said with a note of irony, when he paused. "Go on. Tell me
some more. Where did you say they have taken her; let us have it right."
By the time his little store had run out I knew exactly what to do with
him. "Riddling," said I, and stood up beside him suddenly and dropped my
hand with a little added weight upon his shoulder, "Riddling, do you
know the only right and proper thing to do when you hear scandal about a
friend?"
"Come straight to him," said Riddling virtuously, "as I have done."
"No. Say you don't believe it. Ask the scandal-monger how he knows and
insist on his telling you--insist. And if he won't--be very, very rude
to him. Insist up to the quarrelling point. Now who were those people?"
"Well--that's a bit stiff.... One chap I didn't know at all."
"You should have pulled him up and insisted upon knowing who he was, and
what right he had to lie about me. For it's lying, Riddling. Listen! It
isn't true that I'm besieging Lady Mary Justin. So far from besieging
her I didn't even know where she was until you told me. Justin is a
neighbor of my father's and a friend of mine. I had tea with him and his
wife not a month ago. I had tea with them together. I knew they were
going away, but it was a matter of such slight importance to me, such
slight importance"--I impressed this on his collarbone--"that I was left
with the idea that they were going to the south of France. I believe
they are in the south of France. And there you are. I'm sorry to spoil
sport, but that's the bleak unromantic truth of the matter."
"You mean to say that there is nothing in it all?"
"Nothing."
He was atrociously disappointed. "But everybody," he said, "everybody
has got something."
"Somebody will get a slander case if this goes on. I don't care what
they've got."
"Good Lord!" he said, and stared at the rug. "You'll take your oath----"
He glanced up and met my eye. "Oh, of course it's all right what you
say." He was profoundly perplexed. He reflected. "But then, I say
Stratton, why did you go for Maxton at Blake's? _That_ I had from an
eye-witness. You can't deny a scrap like that--in broad daylight. Why
did you do that?"
"Oh _that's_ it," said I. "I begin to have glimmerings. There's a little
matter between myself and Maxton...." I found it a little difficult to
improvise a plausible story.
"But he said it was his sister," persisted Riddling. "He said so
afterwards, in the club."
"Maxton," said I, losing my temper, "is a fool and a knave and a liar.
His sister indeed! Lady Mary! If he can't leave his sister out of this
business I'll break every bone of his body." ... I perceived my temper
was undoing me. I invented rapidly but thinly. "As a matter of fact,