A Case in Camera

by Oliver Onions · English · Gutenberg #43063 · 467,149 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Case in Camera

Author: Oliver Onions

Release date: June 29, 2013 [eBook #43063]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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A CASE IN CAMERA

* * * * *

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

* * * * *

A CASE IN CAMERA

OLIVER ONIONS

Author of
"The Compleat Bachelor"
"In Accordance with the Evidence"
"The Debit Account"

New York
The Macmillan Company
1921

TO
OLE LUK OIE

"Our Life is like a curious Play
Where each doth strive to hide himself.
One Mask doth to another say
'Let us be open as the Day'
The better to conceal himself."

PART I

WHAT HAPPENED IN LENNOX STREET

A Case in Camera

The tale I am setting out to tell has to do with the killing, on a May
morning of the year 1919, of one young man by another who claimed, and
still claims, to have been his friend. The circumstances were
singular--perhaps even unique; the consequences affected a number of
people in various interesting ways and byways; and since the manner of
telling the story has been left entirely to me, I will begin with the
breakfast-party that Philip Esdaile gave that morning at his studio in
Lennox Street, Chelsea.

Philip had at least two good reasons for being in high feather that
morning. The first of these was that barely a week ago, with a
magnificent new quill pen, he had signed the Roll, had shaken august
hands, and was now Philip Esdaile, A.R.A., probably the most gifted
among the younger generation of painters of the pictorial phenomena of
Light.

I and his second reason for contentment happened to arrive almost
simultaneously at the wrought-iron gate that opened on to his little
front garden. We all knew that for many months past our barrister
friend, Billy Mackwith, had been tracking down and buying in again on
Philip's behalf a number of Philip's earlier pictures--prodigal
pictures, parted with for mere bread-and-butter during the years of
struggle, and now very well worth Philip's re-purchase if he could get
them into his possession again. (I may perhaps say at once that I don't
think Philip owed his Associateship to his pictures of that period. It
is far more likely that the artist thus honored was Lieutenant Esdaile,
R.N.V.R., sometime one of the Official Painters to the Admiralty.)

A carrier's van stood drawn up opposite the gate, and I saw Mackwith's
slim, silk-hatted and morning-coated figure jump down from the seat next
to the driver. Evidently Philip had seen the arrival of the van too, for
he ran down the short flagged path to meet us.

"You don't mean to say you've brought them all?" he cried eagerly.

"The whole lot. Fourteen," Mackwith replied. "Glad I just caught you
before you left."

Esdaile and his family were leaving town that morning for some months on
the Yorkshire Coast, and it was this departure that was the occasion of
the farewell breakfast.

The three of us carried the recovered canvases through the small annexe,
where the breakfast-table was already laid, and into the large studio
beyond. There we stood admiring them as they leaned, framed and
unframed, against easels and along the walls. No doubt you remember
Esdaile's paintings of that period--the gay white and gray of his
tumultuous skies, the splash and glitter of his pools and fountains,
the crumbling wallflowered masonry of his twentieth-century
_fêtes-champêtre_. There is nothing psychical or philosophic about them.
He simply has that far rarer possession, an eye in his head to see
straight with.

"Well, which of 'em are you going to have for yourself, just by way of
thank-you, Billy?" the painter asked. "Any you like; I owe you the best
of them and more.... And of course here comes Hubbard. Always does blow
in just as things are being given away, if it's only a pink gin. How are
you, Cecil?"

The new-comer wore aiguillettes and the cuff-rings of a Commander, R.N.
He was a comparatively new friend of mine, but for two years off and on
had been a shipmate of Esdaile's, and I liked the look of his honest red
face and four-square and blocklike figure. We turned to the pictures
again. I think their beauties were largely thrown away on Hubbard.
Somebody ought to have told him that their buying-in meant a good
thousand pounds in Esdaile's pocket. Then he would have looked at them
in quite a different manner.

In the middle of the inspection Joan Merrow's white frock and
buttercupped hat appeared in the doorway, and we were bidden to come in
to breakfast. Monty Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had just arrived, which
made our party complete.

The little recess in which we breakfasted was filled with the sunlight
reflected from the garden outside. Everything in it--the napkins and
fruit and chafing-dishes on the table, the spring flowers in the bowls,
the few chosen objects on the buff-washed walls, the showery festoon of
the chandelier overhead--had the soft irradiation of a face seen under a
parasol. Little shimmers of light, like love-making butterflies, danced
here and there whenever glasses or carafes were moved, and the
stretches of shining floor almost looked as if trout might have lurked
beneath them.

And where the tall French windows stood wide open the light seemed to be
focused as if by a burning-glass on the two little Esdaile boys who
played beneath the mulberry that rose above the studio roof.

I don't suppose the whole of Chelsea could have shown a merrier
breakfast-party than we made that May morning. For, in addition to our
host's new Associateship and those fourteen wandering pictures safely
back home again, we had a further occasion for light-heartedness that I
haven't mentioned yet. This was the wedding, to take place that day
week, of Mrs. Cunningham and Monty Rooke. Philip was generously lending
them his house and studio for the summer. Monty we had all known for
years, but Mrs. Cunningham I for one set eyes on for the first time that
morning. Later I got a much more definite impression of her. For the
present I noticed only her slender and beautiful black-chiffon-covered
arms, the large restless dark eyes that seemed to disengage themselves
from under the edge of her black satin turban hat, and her manicured
fingers that reminded you of honeysuckle. The Esdailes had received her
"on the ground floor," so to speak, and it obviously pleased Monty that
Philip had called her Audrey straight away.

So we talked of the approaching wedding, and the Associateship, and the
painting-cottage in Yorkshire, and so back to the pictures again. On
this subject Commander Hubbard unhesitatingly took the lead.

"Well, it's certainly Art for mine my second time on earth," he
good-humoredly railed, the aiguillettes swinging gently on his breast.
"Fancy going out of town this weather! Taking away all that gear behind
the bulkhead there,"--he jerked his head to where Philip's painting
paraphernalia lay ready packed in the hall--"a few yards of raw canvas
bent on battens--and bringing it back again worth twenty pounds an
inch!"

Hubbard had a Whitehall job that summer, and loathed it. Esdaile
laughed.

"Can't see why they didn't make me a full Academician while they were
about it," he said.

"_And_ he's grumbling!" Hubbard retorted. "Perfectly revolting fellow.
That's too much lunching with Admirals. Listen, Mrs. Esdaile, and I'll
tell you the kind of thing we mere senior officers had to put up with. A
hoist breaks out from the flagship, and every glass in the Squadron is
glued to it. You'd think at least we were to proceed to sea immediately.
Nothing of the sort! It's the Admiral presenting his compliments to this
wretched wavy-ringed fellow your husband, and would he give him the
pleasure--would Lieutenant Esdaile, R.N.V.R., condescend--stoop--to take
luncheon with him! The Admiral, if you please! And that's what it is to
be an Official Painter!"

Esdaile laughed again. He was trying to remove in one unbroken piece the
paring of an apple for Joan Merrow.

"Give him a smile now and then and he'll eat out of your hand, Mollie,"
he said. "Now, Joan, the last little bit--this is where a steady hand
comes in--there!" He held up in triumph the wiggle of apple paring.
"Throw it over your left shoulder and see what initial it makes on the
floor. Here's my guess on this bit of paper under my napkin--'C for
Ch' ... Ah, clumsy infant!" The strip had fallen in two pieces. "There
goes your luck. Allee done gone finish. I'll have the apple myself;
you'd better go and write the rest of those labels."

The Esdailes had to all intents and purposes adopted Joan Merrow now
that she was alone in the world. On the day when Philip, half scared by
the risks he was taking, had informed his private pupils that their
tuition took up too much of his painting-time, he had not included Joan.
She had continued to prime his canvases and to make use of his models at
long range from odd corners of the studio; and then, during his absence
on Service, she had come to live in the house, had taught and mended for
the children, and had been companion and friend to Mollie. By an
affectionate fiction, her former fees were supposed to cover the cost of
her board, and a proper arrangement was to be come to one of these days.
She was twenty, had only lately ceased to have the stripling figure that
is all youth and no sex, and was already acquiring that mystery of
physical shape and of mind and emotion that causes men's heads to turn
behind and their lips to murmur, "Ah--in another year or so----"

There was still the faint echo of chattering schoolrooms in the repartee
that came from her pretty lips. Pertly and with little tosses of her
head she enumerated the duties she had discharged that morning.

"The labels are all distinctly written, with the name at the top, then a
space, and 'Santon, Yorks' quite at the bottom so you can tear it off
and use the label again for somewhere else. Both the taxis are ordered
for one-thirty, and Mr. Rooke won't have to send on letters because
they're all being re-addressed at the Post Office. The doors and windows
are all fastened, and I've shown Mrs. Cunningham where everything is
for after the wedding. And I didn't want the apple, and you've no
business to write things about me on your horrid bits of paper!"

And we all laughed as she suddenly twitched Philip's napkin away and
tucked the horrid bit of paper safely away into her bosom.

III

I have told the foregoing in some detail because I want you to see the
careless and happy party into which that morning's bolt dropped a
quarter of an hour later. I want you to see the contrast between our
homely light-heartedness and the complex tangle of all that followed. I
will now tell you what the bolt was.

Breakfast was over, and we men had gone into the studio again. Mrs.
Cunningham was helping Mollie to clear away, and Joan Merrow had joined
the children in the garden, and with them was looking up at an
aeroplane, the soft organ-like note of which had suddenly ceased. We
were having Hubbard's views on Art again.

"But that submarine sketch of yours is the pick of all you've done to my
mind, Esdaile," he was saying. "Old Horne at the periscope, eh? You
caught him to a hair; a snapshot couldn't have been better! And we
bagged that beggar ten minutes later, Norwegian flag and all," he added
with professional satisfaction.

Philip Esdaile gave a quick exclamation.

"By Jove, that just reminds me! The orange curaçao, of course! The very
thing after all that fruit--corrects the acidity, as the doctors say.
We'll have some."

The Commander gave him a sharp look. On the face of it there was no very
evident reason why the torpedoing of a German ship flying the Norwegian
flag should remind Esdaile of orange curaçao, but no doubt there was a
story behind that we others knew nothing of. If ships have to be put
down there is no sense in sending bottles of delectable liqueur to the
bottom of the sea also.

"What!" cried Commander Hubbard, R.N. "You don't mean to say that _you_
had the infernal neck to take your whack----"

A mere wretched wavy-ringed fellow to loot bottle for bottle with his
betters like that!

But Esdaile, with a wink, demanded the key of the cellar from Monty
Rooke, told him to get the liqueur glasses out, and was off.

It was at that moment that the crash came that seemed to bring the whole
of Chelsea running out of doors.

The shrill cry of "The aeroplane! The aeroplane!" was hardly out of the
children's mouths before it was upon us--I don't mean the aeroplane, but
the other thing. Judging from the harsh but muffled roar, the first
installment of the crash, so to speak, which was the plane itself, must
have been a quarter of a mile away; but between that and the second one
there was hardly time to take breath. Simultaneously, as it seemed,
there came a rushing of air, a loud cracking, and a nauseating thud on
the studio roof; and Joan Merrow ran in with the children, one under
either arm and her head down. The street outside was a sudden clatter
of running feet and short spasmodic cries.

"Good God, right on our heads!" the Commander muttered, his eyes aloft.

The next moment he was at the studio door looking for Esdaile.

Had he found him I should not be writing this story. Not finding him, he
assumed command.

"All right. All over now, little fellows. There won't be any more. Mrs.
Esdaile, you ladies will stay just where you are, please. Get on to the
telephone, Mackwith. You other fellows come with me."

He thought it better that somebody should investigate before the women
began to move about too freely.

One order at any rate was superfluous--that to telephone to the police.
Aeroplanes do not crash in Chelsea in the middle of the morning
unobserved. Already the windows on the other side of the street were
packed with faces, and every face was turned in the same direction.

This was towards the torn fabric of a parachute that had lodged partly
on the studio roof, partly in the branches of the mulberry in the
garden.

Hubbard ran out through the French windows and looked up. Tapes trailed
and rippled and fluttered in the merry morning breeze, and the gray silk
ballooned and rose and fell. But the sound of running feet warned
Hubbard not to pause. He strode quickly down the flagged path, shot the
catch of the wrought-iron gate in the faces of the too curious, and
then hurried into the house again. He addressed Rooke, who stood by the
group of shocked women.

"Here, you seem to know this house pretty well. How do we get up there?"
he asked.

"Bathroom window, I should think," Rooke replied. "This way."

The bathroom lay at the end of a short passage on the floor above. The
three of us dashed upstairs. Rooke tried the bathroom door, but found it
locked. "Damn!" he muttered, and then I reminded him that possibly he
had the key of it in his pocket.

It was oddly irritating to watch him try first one key and then another.
We wanted to tell him to make haste, as if he could have made any
greater haste than he was doing. Then luckily he hit on the right one.
The door opened, we sprang across the cork-covered floor, and Rooke
began to tug at the window-catch. The window was one of these
late-Victorian windows with a colored border and white incised stars,
and already the tragic huddle a dozen yards away could be seen,
violently crimson through the red squares and morbidly blue through the
blue ones.

Then, as the sash flew up, all was sunshine again, and the wrecked
parachute and the two men enwrapped in its folds could be seen only too
clearly.

Monty Rooke had a new silver-gray suit on that morning, but already he
had thrown one leg over the sill.

"I'm not so heavy as you fellows," he muttered. "I'm not so sure about
this gutter--give me a hand while I try it. Then I can shin up that
spout over there."

Hubbard took the small, nervous hand in his own beefy fist and let him
down three or four feet. "All right," said Rooke, after a moment's
trial; and, spread-eagled out on the annexe roof, he began to make his
way towards the higher roof of the studio beyond.

"Tapes oughtn't to have fouled like that," I heard the Commander say
under his breath as we watched. "Parachuting's safe enough if you're any
height at all. This breeze, I suppose, and risking the double load.
Wonder they didn't go slap through."

It was, indeed, merely by inches that the two men had missed the
roof-glass. Apparently the parachute, the roof-frame and the mulberry
had shared the shock among them. Not that another fifteen feet would
have made much difference to the poor devils, I couldn't help thinking.

The street was now a densely-packed mass of faces, all watching Rooke's
progress. Even the whispering had ceased. Then cries of "Make way
there!" were suddenly heard. Fifty yards away a ladder, preceded by a
plump young man in a horsey check coat, was being passed over people's
heads. Every hand that could touch the ladder did so, as if out of some
odd pride of assistance. What anonymous mind had foreseen the need of it
none could have told. Down below Mackwith opened the gate; an Inspector,
followed by a couple of constables and the last relay that bore the
ladder, entered; and Mackwith closed the gate again. The ladder was set
up by the splintered mulberry, and the Inspector and one of the
constables joined Rooke on the roof.

Five minutes later Rooke was down again. Hubbard and I had also
descended. We met him as he came in at the French window.

"Well?" we both demanded at once.

He was agitated, as indeed he had some reason for being. He had had an
unpleasant task. Before replying he advanced to the breakfast-table and
poured himself out some water into the nearest glass. The glass knocked
unsteadily as he set it down again. Then he glanced down at his clothes,
made a movement as if to brush the grime from them, but gave a jerk to
his tie instead.

Nevertheless his news was not all bad. In one particular it was rather
astonishingly good. One of the two men, it appeared, was by no means
fatally hurt--was, indeed, quite likely to pull through.

"Do you know who they are?" Hubbard asked.

Again Monty seemed preoccupied with his clothes. Then we had his
tidings, jerkily and bit by bit.

The plane itself had come down somewhere by the Embankment, and was said
to have caught fire. Parts of the parachute seemed to be singed too.
Both men were civilian flyers; at least neither was in uniform. The
other poor fellow was killed. The ambulance had been sent for, and for
the present there was little more to be done. The police were seeing to
the rest. This was the sum of what Monty told us.

Then we heard the voice of Mackwith, who had come up behind us.

"That's so," he confirmed. "I've just been having a word with the
Inspector about that. He doesn't think anybody here will have to attend
any inquiry or anything; the police evidence ought to be enough. So I
was thinking, Mrs. Esdaile," he turned to Mollie, whose face was still
pale and drawn and who bit the corner of her lip incessantly, "that the
best thing for you to do is to stick to your program just as if this
hadn't happened. You'll do no good staying here. You didn't see
it,"--here Joan Merrow, from the little sofa, raised her head but
dropped it again without speaking--"well, I mean that even Joan didn't
see anything that five hundred other people didn't see just as well.
Rooke may just possibly be wanted, but anyway he'll be here. And as for
Philip----"

He broke off abruptly. Of a sudden we all stared at one another. We had
forgotten all about Philip. Where was he?

If you remember, he had gone down into the cellar to fetch a bottle of
wine. And in performing this simple errand he had been away for close on
half an hour.

Mollie Esdaile, all on edge again, turned swiftly to Monty Rooke.

"Where is he? He did go down there, didn't he? You did give him the
cellar key, didn't you? And nobody heard him go out of the house?"

Well, that was a matter that was very easily ascertained. Already
Hubbard had taken a stride towards the door that led to the cellar.

But he did not reach the door. A footstep was heard behind it and the
turning of a key, and Esdaile entered. In one hand he carried a stone
jar of Dutch curaçao. In the other, arrestively out of place in the
spring sunshine, its flame a dingy orange and its little spiral of
greasy smoke fouling the air, he held a lighted candle in a flat tin
stick.

For a moment we all gazed stupidly at that jar and candle; but the next
moment our eyes were fastened on Philip's face.

Now ordinarily Esdaile's face, clean-shaven since 1914, is quite a
pleasant one to look at, lightly browned, and with the savor of the sea
still lingering about it. Nor was it noticeably pale now. Indeed, you
might have said that some inner excitation made it not pale at all. But
there was no disguising the strained tenseness of it. At the same time
he was obviously attempting such a disguise. His features were set in a
would-be-easy smile, but the smile stopped at his eyes. These blinked,
though possibly at the sudden brightness after the obscurity below. And
he spoke without pause or preliminary, as if rehearsing something he had
had time to get letter-perfect but not to make entirely and naturally
his own.

"Did you think I was never coming up?" The mechanical smile was turned
on us all in turn. "I suppose I have been rather a long time. Just
wool-gathering. I apologize to everybody. Where are the
liqueur-glasses?"

There was a dead silence. Was it possible that he had heard nothing,
knew nothing of what had occurred?

Monty Rooke was the first to speak.

"Do you mean to say you didn't hear it?" he blurted out.

Then, as Philip seemed to concentrate that artificial smile suddenly on
him alone, he seemed sorry he had drawn attention to himself.

"And where on earth have _you_ been?" Philip demanded slowly. "What's
the matter with your clothes? Been emptying the dustbins? Here, let me
give you a clean-up, man----"

He got rid of the jar of liqueur, not by putting it down on a table, but
by the simple if unusual expedient of letting it drop through his
fingers, where it made a heavy thump, rolled over on its side, and came
to rest. He stepped forward.

But Rooke, for some reason or other, stepped much more quickly back. He
muttered something about his clothes not mattering--it was only a few
grains of dust, but damp--better let it dry before touching it----

It was at this point that I caught Cecil Hubbard's eye.

Hubbard's is a bright blue eye, with angular lids like little
set-squares and a tiny dark dot in the middle of the blue. That eye may
not know very much about pictures, but it knows a good deal about men
and their faces. Esdaile was taking risks if he hoped to play any tricks
with that eye on him.

Then, having caught mine for that moment, the eye was attentively fixed
on our host again.

You see how preposterous it was already. Esdaile apparently could notice
a trifle like the dust on Rooke's clothes, but he seemed to be both
blind and deaf to everything else--the soft surging murmurs of the crowd
outside, the voice of the Inspector in the garden, the shadows of
strangers across the French windows. He just dropped heavy stone jars to
the floor, talked about wool-gathering, and had not even thought of
extinguishing the candle that was melting and guttering in his hand.

Wool-gathering--Philip Esdaile, the least woolly-minded of men!

Already I was certain that he was deliberately acting, and acting far
from well at that.

It was little Alan, the elder of the two boys, who broke the spell that
seemed to have benumbed us all. He ran forward, his blue-and-white check
smock against his father's knees and his little face upturned.

"A naeroplane, daddy!" he cried eagerly. "Some men fell out of a
naeroplane close to Jimmy and me, didn't they, Auntie Joan? In a
parachute, bigger'n this room!" The little arms were outstretched to
their widest reach. "Do come quick and look, daddy!"

And he seized his father's hand.

Again I caught Hubbard's eye. Esdaile was at it again, this time with a
badly-exaggerated gesture of astonishment. He might have made just such
a gesture if Alan had told him that the Grandmother in the bed was
really a Wolf--good enough for children but not for anybody else.
Hubbard at any rate thought that this had lasted long enough.

"Do you mean to say that you didn't feel the whole house shake half an
hour ago?" he demanded.

Esdaile turned, but with a curious reluctance that I didn't understand.

"I did fancy I heard a noise of some sort," he admitted. "What about
it?"

Hubbard gave it to him plain and unvarnished, for all the world as if he
had been in the Admiral's office with a sentry with a bayonet at the
door.

"A plane crashed, and two men came down on your roof in a parachute.
One's living, the other's killed. Those are the police in your garden
now. That's all--except that you seem to live in a pretty
solidly-constructed house."

This time Esdaile made no demonstration. He stood listening for a
moment longer, as if he thought Hubbard might add something; then,
without a word, he released himself from Alan's hand and strode, not to
the garden where the voices were, but towards the studio door.

The studio (into which Hubbard and I immediately followed him) was a
large oblong apartment, with a portion of one of its longer sides and
almost the whole of the roof glazed. More or less light could be
admitted by means of a system of dark blue blinds and cords running to
cleats on the walls. It was to the roof-glass that my eyes turned first
of all. One corner of it was darkened, as if melted snow had slipped
down its slope, but the irregular triangle thus made was not so dark but
that the shapes of the two heads could be seen, a little darker still.
Nearer up to the ridge one thick pane was badly starred, and in the
middle of the star was a small hole. This I judged to have been made by
the broken branch that still brushed and played about it. A couple of
pictures had fallen from the walls and lay face downward among their
sprinklings of broken glass on the floor. One or two others were
disarranged. Otherwise the apartment seemed to be undamaged.

Esdaile's behavior was now odder than ever. With those two men lying on
the roof just over his head and the police moving about the garden
outside, apparently he found nothing more urgent to do than to move
displaced rugs about and to push at the bits of broken glass with his
foot. And he did this with the candle, now a stalagmite of tallow, still
licking and flickering in his hand.

He made no remark when Hubbard took the candle almost roughly from him,
blew it out, and set it down on the table where the artist's tubes and
brushes usually stood.

"We'll be rid of that first of all," he said. "Unless it's a mascot.
Scaring 'em to death with that in your hand like a sleepwalker in
traveling-tweeds! Now what about it, Esdaile?"

There was sudden attention in Philip's attitude, though he still looked
down at the floor and pushed at a rug with his toe.

"What about what?" he asked.

"About this last half-hour."

"You mean where have I been? I went down into the cellar. I went to get
that liqueur."

"That doesn't take half an hour--and it certainly didn't take this
particular half-hour."

To this Esdaile made no reply.

"Come," said Hubbard again after a pause. "You admitted just now that
you thought you heard something."

The words came slowly. "Did I? Yes, I remember. But it was all muffled.
Honestly, I couldn't tell from the sound that it was--that it was all
this."

"Was that when you were down there, or as you were going down, or when?"

"I'd just got down, I think."

"But didn't you wonder what was the matter? What kept you all that time?
And what's the matter with you now that you have come up?"

"The matter?" Esdaile began once more to parry; and then suddenly his
manner changed. For the first time he looked up from the floor, and the
mask, whatever it was, almost dropped. "Look here, you fellows," he said
almost appealingly, "you might see I'm a bit worried. I've been trying
to hide it, but perhaps it wasn't much of an effort. Not so dashed easy
to hide. But if you're suggesting that I've been somewhere else besides
in the cellar I can only tell you I haven't. Couldn't for one thing;
Rooke's got every key of this house. I had to get the cellar one from
him. By the way, what's he doing now?"

"Looking out your next train. But what I want to know is----"

He broke off suddenly as sounds were heard over our heads. About the
snowslip on the roof other shadowy shapes could be seen. Feet shuffled
and moved, and the broken branch was dragged away. They were preparing
to get the two men down.

And until they should have finished our conversation ceased.

But in the meantime Esdaile did yet another trivial incongruous thing.
Moving towards one set of blind-cords he motioned to me to take another
set. With short sticking tugs we drew the blinds across a foot at a
time, and soon only narrow gold lozenges of sunlight showed among the
rafters. All below was a dark blue twilight, as if for an obsequy within
instead of for one on the roof.

Then, when from the cessation of sound all appeared to be over, Hubbard
made a fresh appeal. He took the painters arm.

"Now let's have this out," he said. "No good letting a thing get way on
when a few plain words will stop it. A perfectly ordinary thing's
happened. Simple parachute accident. No mystery about it whatever. The
mystery only begins when _you_ come in carrying your damned candles and
dropping jars and coming in here to tidy up instead of going outside to
see what's happened. That's where the answer begins to be a lemon, my
son. Listen to me. Whether you heard that crash or whether you didn't,
at any rate you know all about it _now_. Then why can't you be just
decently upset like the rest of us and have done with it?"

"Decently upset?" The words seemed to strike him. "Have I been behaving
any other way?"

"You were behaving damnably indecently when you came up out of the orlop
there--and that was _before_ you were told a word of all this,
remember."

At last Esdaile saw the point. His behavior _had_ been extraordinary for
whole minutes before the situation had been explained to him. One would
have thought that during those minutes he had been deliberately trying
to find out how much we knew about something or other before committing
himself. When next he spoke it was almost apologetically.

"I see," he said quietly at last. "Yes, you're perfectly right. That was
certainly the proper way to take it--just be decently upset. I see now.
I must have looked a perfect zany.... Now look here: I want to tell you
both all about it, but the trouble is that I can't just at this moment.
At present it's somebody else's affair, not mine at all. Must get that
cleared up first. I'm not perfectly sure of my ground either; you'll see
by and by. But as regards the accident--well, that's the whole point at
present. I mean anybody would say it _was_ an accident, wouldn't they?
It _looked_ like one, I mean? It would never occur to anybody who saw it
that----"

But here he broke off abruptly as his wife appeared in the doorway.

VII

Perhaps at this point I had better tell you who "I" am who write this,
and also how our little circle came to choose me for the task.

As a minor actor in these events you may set me down as a working
journalist. Among other things I am one of the sub-editors of the _Daily
Circus_. But that is not the whole of my life. I am also a novelist of
sorts. And one of my reasons for sticking to journalism when I could
manage at a pinch to do without it is that in this way I escape the doom
of having to produce two novels a year whether I have anything to write
about or not.

But that was not their idea in asking me to put into shape the mosaic of
differently-colored pieces that constitutes this Case. I believe their
idea was that my two capacities might supplement one another--that I
might hold fast (so to speak) to the bed-rock facts with my journalistic
hand while the other was left free for the less tangible elements. I
don't know that I altogether agree with this distinction. I happen to
have some experience of how much fiction people swallow when they take
up their morning papers, and also of how much mere hurdy-gurdy-grinding
they accept as "human nature" when it comes to them in the form of a
novel. But that is their look-out. I told them that with their help I
would do my best.

I had to have their help. Obviously I could not always be at the side of
this person or that, Rooke or Esdaile or Hubbard, throughout every
winding of a complicated chain of events. But I have known Esdaile for
twenty years, Rooke for a dozen, and most of the others long enough to
have a fairly reliable impression of them, and their accounts are quite
trustworthy. If I have any doubt about this I say so.

I cannot deny that we took a good deal of responsibility when we
conspired to hush up the facts of this Case. We have no more right to
come between the agents of the Law and their duty than any other set of
private persons. And, though many of the beaten tracks are lost in these
changing days, and new precedents are making whichever way you turn, I
for one don't like making new precedents, especially moral ones. I like
tradition to have my homage even when I am resolved to break it. But we
are dealing with a _fait accompli_. The Case _is_ a Case. It became so
in spite of laws and customs and institutions. First one person acted as
according to the laws of his individual being he had to act, and another
did the same, and then another and so on, until the phenomenon was
complete.

So, as my chief business in life is precisely those human accidentals
that make us all different beings destined to different acts, perhaps
they have chosen their historian more or less rightly after all.

One caveat (as Mackwith would say) I must enter, however. This is with
regard to my own Services in the War that is now over. Most of these
services, though as a matter of fact performed in belt and khaki, might
just as well have been discharged in a dressing-gown, so unadventurous
for the most part were they. Thanks to a "joy-ride," I did just see War,
but for the rest I went where I was told to go and did what I was told
to do. It is therefore just possible that from the point of view of
those who lived in the hell I only briefly visited, one or two of my
values may be a little "out." The North Sea cannot be quite the same to
me that it was to Esdaile and Hubbard, the air means just what it meant
to Maxwell and Chummy Smith. For this I am afraid there is no help. But
there is always the chance that if I have minimized, they might have
stressed a little unduly. For while our Case has nothing to do with War,
War is always antecedent to it, as for a generation to come it will be
antecedent to everything.

So, on this understanding, we may get on with the tale.

VIII

A slightly embarrassing little scene next took place in that
breakfast-room in Lennox Street, Chelsea. Rooke had put down the Time
Table, and Mollie Esdaile's face wore an expression of exasperation.

It appeared that Philip wanted to pack his family off according to
program but wished to remain behind himself. For this he gave no
reason--or rather he gave several reasons, all of the thinnest
description.

"But how tiresome!" broke from Mollie. "Why on earth do you want to
upset everything like this?"

Philip muttered something about the newly-arrived pictures needing a
thorough overhauling.

"And the children all ready, all but their hats!" Mollie exclaimed.

"Better hurry them up.... At least seven of them are to frame too."

"Then there's Monty and Audrey, what about them? When you offer people a
house----"

But at this one of Mrs. Cunningham's slender hands was imploringly
raised. Her small mouth was parted in appeal.

"Oh, please! Don't think of that! I should be miserable if I thought
that was going to make any difference!"

"But of _course_ it makes a difference!" Mollie declared. "All your
things will be coming here, all your things for the wedding, and anyway
you won't want Philip hanging about the place. Better never have offered
the house at all!"

"Oh--for a day or two--I shan't be in the way," said Philip uneasily.

But it was awkward for all that. If Esdaile had offered his house to one
of his more prosperous friends he would not have hesitated to say
frankly that he was sorry, but something unforeseen had happened, and
the hospitality must be considered "off." But this was different. It was
known that these two were the reverse of well-off. Monty as a matter of
fact had already given up his rooms in Jubilee Place, and I had gathered
at breakfast that Mrs. Cunningham only intended to occupy her
bed-sitting-room in Oakley Street for a very few days longer. There was
her story, too, which I shall come to presently. Philip's decision
certainly upset a number of minor arrangements.

"Oh, it's too ridiculous!" Mollie declared again with vexation. "If it
means that the wedding's to be put off I don't feel like going away at
all."

But Philip only continued to mumble soothingly that it would be quite
all right, and it wasn't for long, and nobody had said anything about
putting off the wedding. The situation looked rather like a deadlock,
and Mackwith already had his silk hat in his hand and the Commander's
white-topped cap was tucked under his upper arm. Whether Philip went or
stayed was a private family matter after all.

But as we were on the point of taking our leave yet another significant
little trifle was added to all the rest. And again Monty Rooke provided
the occasion.

Monty, I ought to say, is one of these fellows who, whenever any odd job
is to do, especially a domestic one, instinctively seems to take it upon
himself. I dare say his living in rooms and studios hardly big enough to
turn around in has made him methodical in his habits. It was Monty, for
example, who had looked out the train in the Time Table; it was Monty
who had picked up the jar of curaçao when Esdaile had let it fall to the
floor; and it was Monty who, just as the rest of us were leaving,
wandered off towards the studio, presently returned again, sought the
kitchen, and reappeared with a sweeping-brush.

"What are you going to do with that?" Philip asked, seeing him making
for the studio again.

"I thought I'd just sweep up that broken glass," Monty replied.

"Better leave it," Philip answered.

Monty carried the brush back to the kitchen again, and presently
wandered off to the studio once more. Esdaile must have had eyes in the
back of his head, for I, who was facing the studio, had not seen Monty
preparing to draw back the roof-blinds again.

"I wouldn't bother about that just at present," Esdaile called rather
loudly. "Just see if there's a train about tea-time, do you mind?"

Monty, once more returning, took up the Time Table again. Philip walked
with us to the door. Then another little exclamation broke from him.
Monty had put down the Time Table and had asked him for the cellar key.

"What on earth do you want the cellar key for?" Philip demanded.

"To put this jar of stuff back," Monty replied. "It won't be wanted
now."

Hereupon Philip broke out with a petulance that struck me as entirely
disproportionate, if indeed there had been any occasion for petulance at
all.

"Oh, we can do that any time. We've got all the rest of the day to
ourselves, haven't we? Sit down and smoke a cigarette or something;
you've done about enough for one morning----"

It was then that we left.

PART II

WHAT HAPPENED OUTSIDE

It may have already struck you that while Esdaile, a responsible
householder directly interested in any unusual occurrence on his
premises, had not once been into his garden to see what the trouble was,
I myself, a journalist with quite a good "news story" in the wind, had
shown little more eagerness. Well, I will explain that. In the first
place, we have our own reporters, who do that kind of thing far better
than I can. Next, however interesting things outside might have been, I
had found them quite interesting enough inside. But my real reason was
this:--

Rooke had said that both these aviators were civilians. Well, as regards
civilian flying, we on the _Circus_ had something that for want of a
better name I will call a policy. To speak quite frankly, this policy
was a supine one enough, and merely consisted in waiting for a definite
lead.

As you know, no such thing as a definite lead existed. Except for war
purposes, the future use of flying was at that time the blankest of
blanks. It is true we talked a good deal about it, but that was merely
our highly specialized way of saying nothing and filling space at the
same time. Nobody admitted this lack more readily than those who had
drawn up the provisional Regulations. These were merely experimental,
any accident might change them at any moment, and, in one word, all our
experience was still to be earned.

For this reason, I was just as much interested in opinion about the
facts as I was in the facts themselves, and already I was looking
forward to an exchange of views with Hubbard and Mackwith.

But time had flown. Both Hubbard and Mackwith had appointments for which
they were already late, the one at the Admiralty, the other in the
Temple. I therefore parted from them at Sloane Square Station, and,
being in no great hurry myself, turned back along King's Road. What I
was in search of was a representative public-house. We have all heard of
"the man in the street." You often get even closer to the heart of
things when you listen to the man in the pub.

I think it was the sight of a plumpish young man in a horsey brown coat
that settled my choice of pub. For a moment I couldn't remember where I
had seen that or a similar coat before; then it flashed upon me. A man
in just such a coat had preceded that ladder that had been passed over
the heads of the crowd in Lennox Street, and he or somebody very like
him had managed to get inside Esdaile's gate and to secure a privileged
position within a few feet of the mulberry tree in which the parachute
had lodged.

I followed this coat through two glittering swing-doors a little way
round the corner from the King's Road, and found myself in a
closely-packed Saloon Bar full of tobacco-smoke and noise.

I will venture to say that the man I followed was never shut out of a
tube-lift in his life, however crowded it was. He jostled through the
throng about the counter as if it had been so much water. I learned
presently that he had had no sort of interest or proprietorship whatever
in that ladder that had been passed along Lennox Street. Seeing a ladder
approaching he had merely pushed himself forward, had placed himself at
the head of it, and, with energetic elbowings and loud cries of "Make
way there!" had made it to all intents and purposes his own, squeezing
himself in at Esdaile's gate with such nice judgment that the very next
man had been shut out. He called this "managing it a treat," and I
further gathered that neat things like this usually did happen when
Harry Westbury was anywhere about.

The aeroplane accident had at any rate given the licensed trade a fillip
that morning. When I asked for a glass of beer I was curtly told, "Only
port, sherry and liqueur-brandy--three shillings." Yet many a three
shillings was cheerfully paid. Nothing so stimulates conviviality as an
undercurrent of tragedy. Apparently half Chelsea had given up all
thought of further work before lunch, and in my Saloon Bar there were
already signs that more than a few would make a day of it.

And so bit by bit I managed to edge myself nearer to Mr. Harry Westbury.

I dare say you know the kind of man. If the house had a billiard-room
upstairs no doubt he had his private cue in it, as well as his private
shaving-pot at the barber's round the corner. For all his freshness and
plumpness, there was nothing of the jovial about him. Either he had no
humor, or he did not intend that humor should stand in his way through
the world. His convex blue eyes were hard and bullying, and his rosebud
of a mouth never blossomed into a smile. Probably his wife had a thin
time of it. But she would have as good a fur coat as any of her
neighbors.

He was holding forth as I drew near on what he called this "Tom, Dick
and Harry sort of flying."

"And here you have the proof of it," he was saying, his fingers pronged
into four empty glasses and his hard eyes looking defiantly round. "Look
at the damage to property alone! What price these air-raids?
Three--million--pounds in the City in one night! That's my information
as an estate-agent. Three--million--pounds! And now everybody's going to
start. What I want to know is, is it peace or war we're living in?
That's what I want to know!"

He also wanted to know whether it was the same again--the three-shilling
brandy. He was "not to a shilling or two" that morning. It was only
right that as a spectator from the reserved enclosure he should "put his
hand down."

"I wasn't thinking of property; I was thinking of those two poor lads,"
a gray old man said from his seat near the automatic music-box. I
happened to know him by sight as old William Dadley, the picture-frame
maker--"Daddy" of the fledgling artists of the King's Road.

But Westbury would have no weak sentiment of this kind. There was a
blood-and-iron ring in his voice as he set the brandy down.

"Poor lads be blowed!" he said. "They know the risks, don't they?
They're paid for it, I suppose? What I want to know is who's going to
put his hand in his pocket if they start coming down on top of those
houses we're building in Wimbledon or where I live in Lennox Place
there? Let 'em break their necks if they want, but not on my roof! The
world isn't going to stop for a broken neck or two. I _don't_ think!"

"Well, tell us all about it, Harry," somebody said; and Mr. Westbury,
taking the middle of a small circle, did so.

I am not going to trouble you with all he said, but only with as much as
I saw fit to make a mental note of. At this stage of our Case he was
simply a vain and interfering busybody, who had had a rather better view
of things than anybody else. But first of all I noted the obstinacy with
which he dwelt on the fact that Monty Rooke had been first on the roof,
several minutes before the arrival of the police. There was, of course,
nothing in this, excepting always Westbury's dull insistence on it.

Next, he described in detail the bringing-down of the two men. There was
nothing remarkable here either, except that the living one had "kept on
moving his hand all the time like this"--illustrated by an aimless
fluttering of the right hand, now a few inches this way, now a few
inches that.

But I had an involuntary start when Mr. Westbury pompously announced
that he "had offered himself to Inspector Webster as a witness in case
he should be wanted." It was, of course, just what such a fellow would
do, if only out of vain officiousness, and I don't quite know why I
didn't like the sound of it. I had gone into that Saloon Bar to glean,
if possible, what people at large thought of flying over London, what
their temper would be if there were very much of this, and similar
things; but instead I had apparently hit on some sort of a human
bramble, who hooked himself on everywhere with a tenacity out of all
proportion to the value of any fruit he was likely to bear, and who
would scratch unpleasantly when you tried to dislodge him. There was
nothing to be uneasy about, but the whole of the events of that morning
were so far inexplicable, and to that extent intimidating.

"Yes, me and Inspector Webster will probably be having a talk about
things this evening," Mr. Westbury continued with hearty relish. "We're
neighbors in Lennox Place, the very street behind Lennox Street--you can
see right across from my bedroom window. So I had my choice of two good
views in a manner of speaking.... Five-and-twenty to two. Not worth
while going home for lunch now. May as well be hung for a sheep as a
lamb. I wonder if they've got a snack of anything here?"

If they had I have not the least doubt he got it.

III

Musingly I mounted an eastward-bound bus and sought my office. The more
I thought things over the less able I became to shake off the sense of
accumulating trifles, of gathering events. And it was as I passed
through Pimlico that yet another incident, temporarily forgotten, came
back into my mind. This was the curious way in which Esdaile had
snapped--it had been a snap--when Rooke had wanted to sweep up the
broken picture-glass, to draw the studio blinds back again, and to
return the bottle of curaçao to its place in the cellar. "You've done
enough for one morning," Esdaile had said. What had Monty done that was
"enough"?

Now I have known Monty Rooke, as I told you, for a dozen years, and in
that time I have learned not to be surprised at anything he does
provided it is sufficiently out of the way, unprofitable to himself, and
unlike anything an ordinary person would have done. I will give you an
instance of what I mean.

A year or two before there had arrived one night at his studio a bundle
of washing, fresh from the laundry. This bundle, on being opened, had
proved to contain a fully-developed infant girl of a fortnight old, no
doubt the pledge of some unknown laundrymaid's betrayed trust. As a joke
you will see the possibilities of this, particularly in the merry
Chelsea Arts Club; but don't imagine that Monty was a butt. What he did
was enough to dispel that idea. He had immediately wanted to adopt the
foundling, and would certainly have done so but for the strong
dissuasion of his friends; whereupon he had made a drawing instead, a
drawing quite singular for its wistfulness and emotion and depth, of the
infant just as it had arrived, with the newly-ironed shirts and socks
for its cot, deriving none knew whence, cast for none knew what part in
Life, save for Monty friendless, the close of one obscure drama but the
beginning of another.

That was Monty, our little friend of the warm, unprofitable impulses,
the shy and easily daunted manner, but also of the quiet persistence of
purpose that kept him afloat in his seas of petty difficulties and
enabled him once in a while to produce a drawing or a painting that you
returned to again and again, a bit of philosophy that cut clean down to
the quick of things, or--an indiscretion that it would hardly have
occurred to one in a million to commit.

What was there between him and Esdaile now?

The moment I reached the office I rang up the _Record_, our evening
sheet. But their reporters were still out, and nobody could yet tell me
anything about the accident I didn't already know. Willett, my young
colleague on the _Circus_, did not propose to give the story exceptional
treatment.

"If the thing caught fire in the air we'll let it alone," he said.
"Fire's too much of a bugbear. We want the joy-riding idiot and the
lunatic who stunts over towns. I'm for letting it alone, but we'll wait
and see what the others do."

He was quite right. On its merits as Publicity it looked as if we should
hear little more of the Case. I settled down to my work.

I had not actually expected that Hubbard would ring me up, but I was not
greatly surprised when, at about four o'clock, he did so. He wanted to
know whether I could go round to the Admiralty at once. That we must
have a talk at the earliest possible moment was a foregone conclusion. I
therefore replied that I would be on my way in ten minutes, and, hastily
swallowing the cup of tea that had been placed on my desk and telling
Willett to carry on, I took up my hat and stick, sought the lift,
threaded my way through the _Record's_ carts and bicycles and boarded a
passing motor-bus in Fleet Street.

I had no very clear notion of the nature of the job that kept Hubbard in
town that spring, and that had caused him to envy Esdaile his luck in
being able to get away into the country. Indeed, I can tell you very
little about the organization of that mysterious Service that moves,
familiar yet isolated, in our midst. I understood that originally he had
been a torpedo man, but had later been drafted into the Inventions
branch. It is quite possible that the scope of his work had been
expressly left rather ill-defined. So many amazing extemporizations had
to be hurriedly made and applied.

Still, these war-improvisations have to be overhauled afterwards, so
that it may be seen which disappear with the emergency, and which are to
be permanently incorporated in the strategy of the future; and I knew
that one at any rate of Hubbard's tasks was to explain to a certain
Parliamentary Committee a number of technical and basic facts that have
a way of not varying very much however the political situation may
change.

I found him alone in his room on the third floor. The screen just within
the door was so disposed that, in the spot to which your eyes naturally
turned on entering, the officer you had come to see was not. They are
old in cunning in the Senior Service, and I had never seen Hubbard at
work before. His voice came to me from quite a different part of the
room, and I had the feeling that if I had been a stranger there would
have been a moment in which I should have been pretty thoroughly looked
up and down.

"Come in and take a pew," he said. "Hope I haven't fetched you away from
anything important. But I couldn't stop to talk this morning. I only got
rid of my By-election Blighters half an hour ago. Well----"

And, as I sat down in the chair at the end of his desk, he plunged
straight into the matter by asking me how long I had known Esdaile.

Now how long you have known a man, in the sense of how well you know
him, is not always simply a matter of time. I have told you how humdrum
my own War services were. They had not included those incredible moments
of intensified action that may more truly reveal a man to you than years
of desultory familiarity. It was plainly something of this kind that
Hubbard had in his mind now. He frowned as he trifled with a
paper-weight.

"No, it's absolutely unaccountable," he broke out suddenly, putting the
paper-weight down with a slap. "He's not that kind of man. It simply
doesn't fit in."

"His behavior this morning, you mean?"

"Yes. It was another man altogether. Why, before I knew Esdaile well I
remember I bet him a supper that he'd drop his palette on the
quarter-deck when the first shell came over. Well, it came, and half the
bridge was wrecked, and he never turned a hair. Just carried on with
that sketch of Hopkins at the range-finder. Absolutely undefeated
sportsman. So why should he behave as he did this morning?"

Hereupon--though not as throwing very much light on the question after
all--I told Hubbard of my own surmise with regard to Rooke. He looked
rather quickly up.

"What, little Queerfellow? He's--er--all right, isn't he? What about
him? Tell me about him."

This too I told him as well as I was able. And I may say that I noted
with pleasure, as perhaps the real beginning of a valued friendship,
that there did not seem to be any question in Hubbard's mind as to what
kind of man I was myself. He was quite content to accept my summing-up
of Monty.

"So it's between 'em, you think, whatever it is?"

"Or else I give it up," I replied.

"I wonder if you're right," he mused.... "But then," he added suddenly,
"what about all that time he spent in the cellar?"

From that point our conversation took for a time a curious little turn.

For Hubbard, while seeming to have no explanation that as a sensible man
he must not reject as fantastic, seemed nevertheless to be reluctant to
let something go. He seemed to hint and to dismiss and then to hint
again, to come to the brink of saying something and then to leave it
unsaid after all. And again I had the feeling that though he had known
Philip Esdaile for only two years as against my twenty, in some things
he might be the familiar and I the outsider.

Then again he seemed to decide to take a risk. He spoke to the
paper-weight in his palm.

"You don't happen to know anything about these new sound-appliances, do
you?" he asked.

"No. Which are they?"

"Oh, there are a lot of 'em," he answered again, half evasively.
"There's sound-ranging, of course. Then there's the hydrophone. And as a
matter of fact the best brains in the world to-day are trying to cut-out
sound--aeroplane propellers and so on.... What I mean is Esdaile's not
hearing anything. I suppose it's just possible that he didn't. All a
matter of where the sound-wave hits. You remember the broken windows in
the Strand when Fritz used to come over and drop his eggs? First a
broken one, then two or three whole ones, then broken ones again, all
along the street? Well, this might have been one of those dumb
intervals. Otherwise he _must_ have heard. And I should have thought
he'd have felt the vibration too."

"He's admitted he thought he heard something."

"Pooh, there was no mistaking it. If he didn't recognize it we can take
it he didn't hear it. If we believe him, of course."

"Don't you believe him?"

"Yes," Hubbard answered without a moment's hesitation.

"Then----?"

"Oh, I suppose it means I'm on the wrong track," Hubbard replied.

Naturally any track of that nature was totally unexplored by me; but I
was far from dismissing it on that account. Here again my ignorance of
modern War came in to humble me. For what is the good of saying things
are fantastic and far-fetched--sound-ranging and the selenium cell and
what not--when for a number of years the food we have eaten and the
clothes we have worn and the roofs over our heads have depended on just
such fantasies? Not for nothing were those clusters of listening cones
at Hyde Park Corner and on Parliament Hill, not for nothing those
wireless masts over our heads at that very moment. Their operation might
be unfamiliar to me, but these things were the daily business of
Commander Hubbard, R.N. He turned as naturally to them as I myself turn
to those equally mysterious things, a man's motives and the operative
emotions of his heart.

"For all that," said Hubbard abruptly, "I should like to have a good
look at that cellar of his."

I was silent. I didn't know whether his wish to see the cellar included
sound-experiments on the roof also.

"More than that," he continued slowly, "--by the way, did Mrs. Esdaile
and the children get away?"

That I did not know.

"Well, what about going round this evening to see?"

"The chances are that they did if I know Philip."

"I don't mean that. I mean what about going round to see that cellar,"
Hubbard replied.

I didn't say so, but I had a sudden wonder, quite new and born all at
once of I don't know what, whether Esdaile might want us to see his
cellar.

However, we went, and at a little after eight o'clock rang the bell we
had rung under such very different circumstances at breakfast-time that
morning. The parachute still waved in the mulberry, and a few policemen
were unobtrusively hanging about the street. Two of these did not move
very far from the gate. I supposed that in view of pending inquiries it
was important that the parachute should not be touched.

We waited so long for an answer after ringing the bell that I had almost
concluded there was nobody at home. We were, in fact, on the point of
turning away when Esdaile himself opened the door.

Poor devil! I learned presently that he had had callers enough that
afternoon to make him wish to disconnect his bell altogether--interested
parties of all sorts, a dozen of them at least. He had as a matter of
fact removed his telephone receiver from the hook. He said its ringing
had nearly driven him mad.

But even all this did not explain his weariness as he stood holding the
door open in the still bright light of the perfect evening. My first
glance at him made me wonder whether something even more untoward than
that morning's sudden drama had happened. Before, his manner, baffling
as it had been, had at least had a sort of hectic brilliancy, an
artificial excitement that had buoyed him up and kept him going. Now it
was as unlike that as possible. He was spiritless and played out. He no
longer seemed to wish to keep everything and everybody at arm's-length.
Indeed, we had his reason almost before he had closed the door behind
us.

"Of course, you've heard who it is?" he said to Hubbard in a dull voice.

"No. Who?"

"Chummy Smith."

Only the fanlight over the door let in the last of the day, but it did
not need light to reveal how the name Esdaile had spoken affected
Hubbard. To me this name conveyed nothing for the moment. I heard
Hubbard's indraught of breath.

"You don't say so! Good God! Which? The dead one?"

"No. The other. I happened to ring up the hospital to ask how he was
going on and learned that way. That was before I took that infernal
receiver off. Come in. I'm all alone."

"Your people got away, then?"

"Yes," said Esdaile. And I fancied I heard him grunt, "Thank God!"

"Who's the other chap?" Hubbard asked as we walked along the passage.

"Fellow called Maxwell. Never heard of him. Did you?"

"No."

"Well, come in. It's the devil, isn't it?"

I suppose it _is_ the devil when one of your particular friends comes
down like this on your roof; but it struck me even then that it would
have been still more devilish if he had been killed in doing so. Yet not
only had their friend Chummy not been killed, but, according to Rooke's
account earlier in the day, he was in a fair way for recovery. Hence I
didn't quite see the reason for Esdaile's utter dejection. I should have
understood it better had their friend been, not Smith, but the dead man
Maxwell.

You see, I had totally forgotten one pretty little incident of that
morning's breakfast. Perhaps you have forgotten it too. Remember, then,
that Philip had pared an apple for Joan Merrow, had told her to see what
initial the paring made on the floor, and had shaped his own guess with
his lips--"C for Ch"--as he had hidden his bit of paper under his
napkin.

Philip pushed up chairs for us and pottered about in search of whisky
and glasses. Then, having set out a tray, he dropped heavily into a
chair. For a time none of us spoke, and then I asked if Rooke was out.

"Yes. He's taken Audrey Cunningham home," Philip replied with marked
brevity, and the silence fell on us again.

If Hubbard had really come for the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar I
could see that all thought of this had now passed from his mind. The
first thing to do was to cheer Esdaile up. After all, Chummy was alive
and doing well. The news when Esdaile had rung up the hospital that
afternoon had been reassuring. It might be some little time before he
was out and about again, but certainly the occasion did not seem one
for gloom. I therefore kept silence while Hubbard pointed all this out.

And as Esdaile's spirits seemed to revive a little and things began to
seem not quite so hopeless after all, I began to rummage in my memory
for recollection of this Chummy Smith of theirs. I remembered now that I
had at any rate heard his name. And I confess that I am a little
curious, not to say jealous, about some of these intensive War
friendships. It interests me to note which of them survive the quieter
and more persistent pressure on the lower levels, and which fail to do
so. Not every one of them succeeds. It is one thing to wait in a Mess
for the overdue chum, trying not to look too often at the full glass of
gin-and-bitters that by this time he ought to have come in and claimed,
and quite another to meet that chum a year or two later and, as you ask
him what he will have, to know that you are making the swift mental
note, "Ah, _that's_ him in mufti!"

But this rubicon had been safely crossed in the case of Chummy Smith. I
began to piece together odd things I had heard. Philip, meeting him in
Coventry Street six months before, had stopped, spoken, and had
presently brought him home to a scratch supper. A fortnight later Chummy
had dropped in again unannounced. Thereafter he had continued to come at
fairly frequent intervals. He and myself had never happened to call at
the same moment, that was all.

"Who do you say he's flying for now?" Hubbard asked presently.

"The Aiglon Company. He's a goodish bunch of shares in it, I believe.
Knows his job, too. Ever see him zoom?"

He described Smith's performance of this terrifying maneuver, with the
fire of the Lewis gun reserved till the last twenty yards, then the
fiery bridge-clearing rafale, and the upshooting like a rocket as he
cleared the rail by a yard.

"Yes, he's a dashed good youngster," Hubbard agreed. "Thank the Lord
he's all right."

But Esdaile only leaned his head wearily on one hand and sat gazing
moodily at his whisky-and-soda.

Then it was that the probable reason for all this depression flashed
upon me. Then it was, in that moment, that I remembered that
apple-paring, Joan's adorable little schoolgirl's outbreak, and her
tucking away of that piece of paper into her breast. Philip Esdaile was
thirty-nine, young Smith twenty-four; that is a difference of fifteen
years; but a young man of twenty-four could be quite devoted to
Methuselah himself if there was a young woman anywhere about. Those
frequent calls after that meeting in Coventry Street simply meant that
Philip's leg had been pulled. Chummy Smith was no doubt very fond of
Philip, but he was even fonder of Philip's wife's help and companion.

And Joan had seen the crash.

No wonder Philip thanked God that she didn't know who it was she had
seen come down.

I know now the exact point up to which I was right, and also where I
ceased to be right. Mollie Esdaile made a clean breast of the whole
guileful conspiracy of their courtship afterwards. Here it is, for your
edification and warning.

Mollie had several times been down to visit Philip in his billet at the
Helmsea Station. There it was that she had first seen Chummy. At first
she had not been able to single out Chummy from the rest of the
uniformed mob that led such a mysterious existence down there--a world
of womenless men, who paraded at all hours of the day and night,
suddenly vanished by the half week together, turned up smiling again,
danced with one another to the grinding of gramophones, played cards and
snooker, howled round pianos and swapped yarns, Kirchners and pink gins.
To Mollie their uniforms were of two kinds only, khaki and dark blue. In
course of time she had come to pick out Chummy as wearing both--khaki,
but with the rings and shoulder-badges of the other Service. The lad
made Philip ask him to tea, and the next time, in Philip's absence,
Chummy had asked her to tea.

And so to the sky-blue uniforms and the monochrome of mufti again, by
which time Chummy and Mollie were firm friends.

I believe she threw the youngsters together from the moment Philip first
brought Chummy home to Lennox Street. She says she didn't, and refers me
to Joan. I wouldn't hang a dog on what Miss Joan says on such a matter.

For who can believe in the candor of a young woman of just twenty who,
the very first time a young man is brought to the house, straightway
enters into a clandestine arrangement to meet him at tea the next day,
and presently can hold out her hand with a conventional "Good-by, Mr.
Smith," as if the last thing that entered her head was that she would
ever set eyes on him again? It takes the nerve of the modern young woman
to do that. The case of Mr. Smith, observe, is entirely different. Mr.
Smith, suddenly meeting the lovely young thing, may not be sure whether
his feet are treading a polished studio floor or whether they have
little Mercury wings on them that waft him through the empyrean; but
there is this to be said for Mr. Smith--that when he is in love he
doesn't behave as if he wasn't. He fidgets even if she goes out of the
room for a minute. He doesn't know that she herself couldn't tell him
why she has gone out of the room. He thinks she had something to go for,
and never dreams that she is just sitting on the edge of her bed,
knowing perfectly well that he will be leaving in half an hour, asking
herself what made her so suddenly get up and leave him, and yet not even
writing him a note.

The notes came later, at about the time she put a lock on her
letter-case. They were numbered "1," "2" and "3" to indicate the
sequence in which they should be read (a billet scribbled at seven
o'clock in the evening must on no account be read before one that is
dashed off at tea-time), and they were constantly on the wing.

Nor did these protégés of Mollie's choose tea-shops that Philip was
known to frequent, nor cinemas the kindly gloom of which might by any
chance have concealed him. Philip never noticed that his monthly
telephone accounts rose perceptibly higher. True, he did ask one evening
why the children had been put to bed while it was still broad day, but
he was not told that he might find the reason walking hand-in-hand under
the trees in Richmond Park.

It is no good asking whether Joan and Chummy were engaged. What is a
young woman's engagement nowadays? No doubt Joan's father had in his day
ceremoniously "waited upon" her maternal grandfather-elect and had "had
the honor" and so on, but Miss Joan always reminded me of the private
with the field-marshal's baton--she seemed to have come into the world
with a will of her own, a latch-key and her marriage-lines all
potentially complete. I remember she called an engagement an
"understanding." If by that word she meant what the Psalmist meant, she
certainly made haste with all her heart to get it.

Of course, Philip had sooner or later discovered what was going on under
his abused roof, and now knew all there was to be known about it. And it
must have occurred to him also that, with letters numbered "1," "2" and
"3" flying backwards and forwards all the time, any interruption of more
than a day or two would set Joan, away in Santon, Yorks, anxiously
wondering what was the matter.

You are now to see how far I was right in this.

VII

The lights he had switched on were a couple of standard lamps only, that
worked from plugs in the wall. Both had mignonette-colored shades, and
while one shade stood a-tilt near the syphon and glasses, the other
threw a soft light on Philip's little escritoire. As he sat the light
crossed his breast only, leaving his face in a half-transparent
obscurity. A few yards away the entrance to the studio made a dead black
oblong, so completely without trace of the evening light that must still
be lingering in the world outside that I judged that the dark-blue
roof-blinds were still drawn.

I suppose it was these roof-blinds, and Philip's apparent disinclination
to have them touched, that brought my surmises with regard to Monty
Rooke into my mind again. And somehow, back again under the roof where
the tragedy had happened, these surmises seemed to have grown a little
more threatening. Why this alteration of values should take place in me
I didn't know, but there it undeniably was, hovering (so to speak) in
the spaces above the unlighted chandelier, approaching as it were to the
very edge of the penumbra that crossed our host's breast, and
accumulated as in some dark power-house beyond the threshold of the
black studio doorway. And as this feeling grew on me lesser feelings
seemed by comparison to grow less still. My hastily-seized-on
explanation with regard to Joan seemed all at once insufficient. A shock
of some kind she would naturally receive; that was unavoidable in any
event; but what would be simpler than to write to her immediately, to
tell her what had been discovered since her departure, to promise to
send her daily bulletins, and to warn her that for the present, in the
absence of letters, these must suffice?

I didn't know to what extent I was supposed to be privy to the
Chummy-Smith-Joan-Merrow love affair, but in the circumstances I did not
let that trouble me. I just said what I thought. "She'll have to be told
some time or other," I finished by saying.

But for some reason or other he waved my words aside.

"Wouldn't do at all." His voice came from within the shade of the
mignonette-colored lamp. "Must think of something better than that."

"But she'll be expecting letters. And she won't get them. My way's much
the kindest. What's the objection?"

"Oh, heaps of objection," he answered evasively. "I don't know half of
'em myself yet."

On this I instantly fastened.

"Ah! Then you haven't seen the fellow yet you spoke of?"

I knew I had him. I could feel his mental wriggle.

"What fellow?"

"You said this morning it wasn't your affair, but somebody else's. The
fellow I mean is the somebody else."

He spoke slowly.

"Do you mean Rooke?"

"You didn't mention any name. I mean Rooke if it was Rooke."

This time we had to wait a long time for an answer, but at any rate it
cleared the air when it did come.

"It was Rooke. I don't remember very clearly exactly what I did say, but
I meant Rooke," he admitted.

"You say he's taken Mrs. Cunningham home. He's coming back, I suppose?"

With remarkable grimness Philip replied, "You bet he is."

"You mean you told him to?"

"Yes, and I told him to be pretty quick unless he wanted to drive me
crazy. I said I'd give him time for dinner at the Parrakeet, though. I
was waiting for him when you came in."

"Then--well, to put it plainly, do you want us to clear off?"

"No--at any rate wait a bit," he answered irresolutely. "I don't suppose
he'll be long now."

I don't know how much longer we should have continued to spar like this
had not Hubbard suddenly put a question. He had evidently been thinking
it over for some time, and he took care, with a preliminary "I say" and
a pause, that he had Esdaile's attention before putting it.

"I say," he said quietly, "about when you came up from below this
morning. Why did you want to brush Rooke's clothes?"

And that settled it. Esdaile began with one more "Did I?" but Hubbard
did not let him finish.

"Yes, you did," he cut him short. "It was the very first thing you did.
And he jumped back when you tried to touch him. Why?"

There was no further attempt at prevarication. Without even taking the
trouble to rise, Esdaile pushed back the lamp, opened the upper drawer
of the escritoire as he sat, and from the corner of it drew out and
placed on the table a 7.65 mm. Webley and Scott automatic pistol.

VIII

Honestly, I don't know whether I was surprised or not. On the whole I
hardly think I was. If he had produced another candlestick or jar of
liqueur I think I should have felt like getting up and walking out; but
here at last was something on the fuller scale. Thank heaven, we had
done with broken glass and sweeping-brushes and dark blue linen blinds.
We might now hope to get a little farther.

For a pistol is a pistol at all times and all the world over. No other
weapon has quite so exclusively sinister a meaning. Among the honorable
swords and rifles of war it is a low and sneaking thing, and in
peace-time an Apache's tool, something for the common garrotter to
shoot through his pocket with. Its proper place was the Criminal Museum
at Scotland Yard, not in a decent artist's studio.

So Philip put the revolting thing on his desk, and for a moment we sat
looking at its roughened grip, black as crape, and the glossy blackness
of the rest of it. Then without a word Hubbard took it up, glanced at
the safety-catch and slid back the breach. A cartridge lay ready in the
chamber. Then he withdrew the magazine. Six nickel steel bullets showed
through the perforations of the clip. The capacity of the W. & S. 7.65
is eight shots. One shot had therefore been fired.

Hubbard replaced the pistol on the desk.

"And where did _that_ come from?" he asked with pursed lips.

Philip shrugged his shoulders. Somehow the answer was "Rooke" as plainly
as if he had spoken the name.

"And where did he get it?"

"Up there." Philip's eyes made the slightest of turns up towards the
ceiling.

"From one of those two fellows?"

"I suppose so."

"How do you mean, you 'suppose' so? Don't you know?"

"I'm not perfectly sure yet. You see, just at that moment Audrey
Cunningham came in, and it isn't the kind of thing you discuss with
women there. I thought she'd gone, or I should have waited a bit."

"Well, don't you think it's time you told us a little more now?"

This is the narrative that followed, with that beastly object still
lying there in the silky light of the mignonette-shaded lamp.

At first Monty had tried to get out of it by saying it was the keys.
Esdaile's is not a modern house; its keys are not of the Yale kind, of
which you can carry a dozen in one pocket; each of them is anything from
three to five inches long, and they weigh very few to the pound. In
handing over the house to Monty, Philip had given him eight or ten of
these; and so at first (Esdaile said) Rooke had wanted to say it was the
keys.

"I don't mean the keys," Philip had replied. "I mean the pocket on the
other side that you're nursing as if it had eggs in it. Why have you
been standing sideways and behind people all this time? And why did you
jump when I wanted to give you a dust-down this morning?"

Esdaile's face became animated as at last he warmed up to it all. He
spoke almost vehemently.

"You see," he said, "I wasn't going to have any more damned nonsense. I
had quite enough of that--hours of it--all this that I'm telling you
took place just after tea. So I was as short as you please. Pity I spoke
quite so soon, but I really thought Audrey'd gone. And the idiot hadn't
even put the safety-catch on," he added with disgust.

There was no need to urge him now. He was as resolved to tell his story
as before he had been reticent. The only unfortunate thing was that
until Monty should return he had so little to tell.

"So when he saw the key story wouldn't do he fetched out this pretty
little article," he continued, rapping with his knuckle on the
writing-desk. "Just like a kid caught stealing apples he was. I asked
him where he got it, and he said on the roof. Then he told me all about
you fellows going up into the bathroom, and how he'd been the one to
crawl along the gutter because he doesn't weigh as much as either of
you."

"But which of 'em gave it to him--Chummy or the other man?" Hubbard
asked.

"Well, I'm not so sure that either of them really 'gave' it to him,"
Esdaile replied. "He began to be a bit of a mule when I pressed him
about that. And of course I asked Monty all this before I knew it was
Chummy at all, and Monty doesn't know that yet, though I don't think he
ever met Chummy. No, as far as I can make out, the pistol was lying on
the roof, just out of Chummy's reach, and he kept pointing to it--moving
his hand like this."

The gesture Esdaile made was the very gesture I had seen Mr. Harry
Westbury make in the Saloon Bar earlier in the day.

"So he just picked it up and put it into his pocket?"

"Just that. Simple, isn't it?"

"And it's been fired?"

"As you see."

"Innocent young man. What did he do during the War?"

"Camouflage," Esdaile replied. "In Kensington Gardens there. Imitation
haystacks and dummy O.P. trees and gunpit-screens and painting tanks and
so on. Making anything look like what it isn't. Just what he would do."

"Does he know this thing's been fired?"

"That I can't tell you. Audrey came in then."

And that was the answer to all our further questions--Audrey had then
come in. Esdaile had as a matter of fact now told us all that had taken
place between himself and Monty Rooke. For further information we must
wait until Monty's return.

You may imagine, however, that I had now quite a lot of food for
thought. In the first place, Rooke had taken it upon himself to conceal
a highly material fact from the police. Whether Esdaile yet shared this
responsibility was at present debatable. Audrey Cunningham's
interruption half-way through Monty's story rather obscured the moral
aspect of this last. One does not set weighty machinery going for
trifles, and for all we knew Monty, when he arrived, might have a
complete explanation. In the meantime Esdaile was probably wise to hold
his hand.

A pistol, however, had undoubtedly been fired, and, as a further
examination of the barrel showed, probably recently. And, if you
remember, there was that small round hole in the starred roof-glass of
the studio that I had at first assumed to have been caused by the broken
mulberry branch. A pistol-bullet might have made just such a hole.

Next I remembered how Esdaile had been occupied when Hubbard and I had
followed him into the studio shortly after his return from the cellar.
He had been so engrossed in poking about the broken glass and mats on
the studio floor that he had seemed to notice little else. Had he been
looking for the bullet that had made that hole in the roof? And why had
he had the roof-blinds drawn, and broken out on Monty when he had wanted
to put them back again? This last, I admit, set me all at sea again. The
drawing of the blinds would certainly hide the bullet-hole in the pane
from anybody _in_side the house, supposing he wished to hide it; but
what about the police who had been on the roof itself at that very
moment? The drawing of the blinds inside would hide nothing from them.
Why seek to conceal from the rest of us something that if they cared to
investigate they could hardly fail to see?

One more thing. If that pistol had been fired on the premises, somewhere
there must be, not only a bullet, but a spent case also. I mentioned
this, and Esdaile gave a slight start of recollection.

"Of course!" he exclaimed. "Glad you mentioned that. I found the case in
the garden. Here it is. I'd honestly forgotten all about it."

And, as he fetched it out of his waistcoat pocket and put it down by the
side of the pistol, I as honestly believed he had.

"But there's no sign of the bullet?" I asked.

"I've looked high and low for it," Esdaile replied. "Low, I should say,
because naturally I don't want to go hunting about the roof in the
daylight. Too many eyes about. There's no trace of it."

"But it wouldn't be on the roof if it made that hole in the glass. It
would be in the studio. Or possibly," I ventured, "in the cellar."

But, as Esdaile was about to reply, a bell trilled in the kitchen, and,
with a "That's Rooke, I expect," Esdaile put the pistol and the empty
case back into the drawer, motioned us to remain where we were, and went
out.

Philip had described Rooke quite well when he had said that he had the
air of a naughty boy caught robbing an orchard. He had a hang-dog yet
defiant look as he entered, shepherded in by Philip as if we had been a
tribunal empaneled for his condemnation. But there was relief in his
face too--the relief of one who has got the worst over and hardly fears
the rest. And, as he threw his hat on the table and looked round in
search of a chair, he unconsciously emphasized his air of boyish guilt
by sitting down on a low stool that stood between the empty fireplace
and the escritoire.

Esdaile began immediately, as if Rooke had merely been out of the room
for a few moments.

"Well, to continue our chat, Monty," he said. "I've told these fellows
as much as you've told me. Shall we have the rest of it now?"

From the look on Monty's face I began to think that we might have some
difficulty in getting very much more out of him, for the simple reason
that, in picking up and concealing an incriminating pistol, he evidently
didn't see that he had done anything at all out of the way. He seemed to
think that was a natural thing to have done. I gathered also that there
was something further on his mind, something that had already begun to
dawn on my own and has doubtless occurred to you also. But we will come
to that presently.

So Monty merely repeated what we already knew, and then looked from one
to another of us as if to ask, "_Now_ were we satisfied?"

"Oh, we want to know a good deal more than that," Esdaile continued.
"First of all, did he speak? The man who pointed to the pistol, I mean."

"No. He'd taken too bad a toss for that," Monty replied. "He just
pointed, the way I showed you, and I thought perhaps he didn't want the
thing lying about, so I--well, I obliged him, so to speak."

"But it's been fired."

"I don't know anything about that. I didn't fire it, if that's what you
mean."

"It's been fired recently. Did you notice if it was warm?"

"No, I didn't," said Monty, ruffling up, "and it's all very well you
fellows talking, sitting down here with glasses of whisky in front of
you, but I'll bet if you'd been in my place you'd have done exactly the
same."

Here I struck in. I asked him what made him so sure of that. He turned
his earnest brown eyes to me.

"I mean you just would. If you'd seen him, I mean--seen his face. It was
the look in his eyes; I couldn't get it out of my mind for hours; I can
see it now. I tell you you missed a pretty rotten job by not having to
go up there, and here you go asking me if pistols were warm and who
fired them and all about it as if I'd been having a fortnight's holiday
up there."

I saw Monty's point. I suppose I have arrived at that stage of life when
I too trust my eyes more and more as time goes on. Men may have all
sorts of reasons for saying one thing and meaning another, but he is a
remarkable man who can control his looks with the same facility. I have
seen many eyes telling the truth while the lips beneath them have told
the practiced lie. So if Monty had taken his impulse from Chummy
Smith's anguished eyes in that moment, I for one did not feel inclined
to blame him.

"You've heard who it was, haven't you?" I said.

"No. Who?"

Philip told him. His eyes opened very wide.

"Not the fellow I've heard you talk about?"

Esdaile nodded gloomily.

"And you mean _he_ fired the pistol?"

There was an embarrassed silence. Nobody so far had ventured to express
his thought quite so nakedly. We had an obscure feeling of resentment,
as if Monty had been a little lacking in tact. He sat up on his stool
and pursed his lips into the shape of a whistle.

"I--say! _That_ makes it the dickens, doesn't it? Well, I know what his
eyes looked like, I can promise you that! Poor devil! Thank goodness you
were all too busy watching Philip when he came up from down below to
notice me much. Nobody noticed me except Audrey, and she----"

Philip sliced his words off like a guillotine.

"You haven't told her anything about this, have you?"

Monty stared at him. "No," he replied, "as a matter of fact I haven't;
but what if I had? I don't quite see----"

"Then you see you jolly well don't," Philip curtly ordered him. "Four's
quite enough. You understand?"

"Four's quite enough." Do you see what was already working in his mind,
and what a sudden jump forward our Case took when his lips uttered that
concluding word?

For he did not say "enough" for what. The What was only just dimly
beginning to appear. Perhaps I shall save time if I put what I mean into
the form of a single question:--

Why had Esdaile, who knew perfectly well that that pistol ought to be in
the custody of the police, not himself immediately handed it over?

Why indeed did he not do so now?

That is what I am getting at. He had not only _not_ handed the pistol
over, but he had drawn blinds and grubbed about floors and had sought
high and low, though so far in vain, for a stray bullet. Nay, he might
lecture Monty on the picking up of random pistols, but what else had he
himself done when he had found that little empty brass case in the
garden and had slipped it into his waistcoat pocket? He had pretended to
hold back until Monty should have told him everything. Well, Monty had
now told him everything.

There was a telephone in the hall. Ten seconds would suffice.

Yet Esdaile did nothing.

I was conscious of a curious quickening of excitement. The whole
atmosphere of our little gathering had already changed. Monty, sitting
on his stool, seemed somehow less of a culprit, Esdaile something much
more nearly in collusion with him. And above all it distinctly began to
appear--dare I say "providential"?--that Monty had picked up that
pistol.

Why?

Was it because Chummy Smith, instead of being a stranger who must be
left to take the consequences of his own acts, was Hubbard's and
Esdaile's friend?

It is not for me to draw the hair-line that divides the heart's wish
from the conviction of the rightness of the act that follows it. We are
all prone to do what we want to do and to look for reasons afterwards.
That was for Esdaile and Hubbard to consider. I am merely stating the
Case. Personally you will always find me the broadest-minded and most
tolerant of men until these lofty qualities begin to react on my own
private affairs; after that I become a pattern of the narrow and the
hidebound. Whether in their place I should have done as Hubbard and
Esdaile did I have fortunately not to answer. What that was you will see
in a moment.

For it was now clear that we were looking, without very much dismay,
into the perilous face of Conspiracy. A pistol had been fired, and
humanly speaking could only have been fired by one man. If the pistol,
therefore, ought to have been handed over to the police, _a fortiori_
ought the man who had fired it.

But that appeared to be precisely the sticking-point. It was here that I
saw both Hubbard and Esdaile preparing to dig in. In a word, until they
(private individuals, mark you) knew more about it, Chummy Smith was not
to be given up.

Monty's attitude at about this stage began to be rather amusing.
Suddenly he left the stool of repentance and began to walk about. He
even swelled a little. It was he, after all, who had in a sense saved
the situation, and when the cartridge-case was produced (for Hubbard and
Esdaile had their heads together over the pistol-barrel again in search
of further minute indications) he became almost cock of the walk.
Incidentally he had one of those flashes of insight I told you he
sometimes had, or at any rate it was a flash with which I myself am not
without a certain amount of sympathy.

"Well, there isn't half enough murder in the world if you ask _me_," he
said. "Only they're the wrong people. If you could get somebody really
trustworthy to pick out the right ones no end of good would be done."

"Oh, shut up!" said Philip rudely; and happily the dangerous theory was
not pressed.

But Monty had used the awkward word "murder."

And if Monty was amusing, the state of mind of the other two was now
fascinatingly interesting. For you see their predicament. To put it
quite plainly, they were trying to screw up their courage. Esdaile in
particular was almost visibly hardening his heart. That was the
fascinating part--to see exactly how much and how little homage they
would pay to the decencies before they thought themselves free to go
ahead.

The stages of the comedy were rapid. The first of them came when Esdaile
wondered whether he oughtn't to go to the telephone, not to communicate
with the police, but to ask for the latest news of Chummy's progress.

"Seems funny to think of Chummy being laid out six months after the
War's all over," he said. "Remember the Jazz Band in the Mess, Cecil?"

"Red Pepper Two-Step on the Birds, eh?" said Hubbard.

(I am aware that this needs elucidation. The Helmsea Mess Jazz Band had
been a noteworthy improvisation, and the Birds had been Chummy Smith's
special department. They were stuffed Birds, set in cases round the
walls, and the glass fronts of the cases had formed Smith's tympani.
With drumming fingertips and softly-pounding wrists I learned that he
had got great variety out of his instruments.)

"And the cock-fight between the razorbills?" Esdaile continued.

I could also make a guess at the kind of rag that had been.

"And the night old Pike's motor-bike broke down?"

And though this reminiscence passed over my head, it was plain that they
were getting on. Very soon I might expect to be told outright that
Chummy Smith was Chummy Smith and a pal, and they would be damned if
they would see him in the cart till things were much clearer than they
were. So I simply leaned back and amused myself with mental pictures.
They were jumbled pictures, but I knew I was sharing them with the other
two. I seemed to see their East Coast Base, with planes homing in the
evening and the M.L.'s suddenly appearing out of the mists and dropping
anchor in the tideway. I seemed to see the rubber-coated and
white-mufflered figures striding up the jetty to that Mess they spoke of
and loudly demanding drinks and food and hot baths. I imagined the
mechanics filling up the tanks and the Duty Officer swearing at the snow
and slush as he stamped up and down the 'drome. And, faint and
ineffectual as my pictures were, they still had a little of the magic of
that life in which gayety and tragedy came so close and the chances of
life and death were so intertwined.

I also guessed what a purist in the matter of picking up pistols might
find himself up against if he pushed his purism inconveniently far.

Esdaile took the plunge even more quickly than I expected. I saw the
little effort with which he pulled himself together.

"Well, it's no good beating about the bush," he said. "We all know how
things are. The question is what's to be done."

I don't think he realized, as he pulled out his pipe, that that was now
hardly the question at all. Already the question was, not what was to be
done, but exactly how it was to be done.

XII

For, if he had realized, he could hardly have overlooked the immensely
important point he did overlook. It was left to me to draw his attention
to this point.

For when one man kills another, it necessarily follows that one man has
been, killed _by_ another. And it further follows that, if you decide to
shield the killer because he is your friend, you are inevitably forced
into an unfriendly attitude towards the victim. What about the victim
and his rights in the matter?

You may believe it or not, but until this moment I don't think this
aspect of the affair had occurred either to Hubbard or Esdaile. All had
been Chummy. More than this: so exclusively had Chummy occupied their
thoughts that they had forgotten the ordinary physical fact that a
bullet fired into a man's body makes a hole--the same ugly kind of hole
whether the person who makes it is your friend or not. Loyalty to
friendship in the teeth of the Law is not always the simple thing it
sounds. Among the various facts that faced us was one inescapable one,
namely, that a man called Maxwell was at that moment lying in a mortuary
awaiting a post-mortem examination.

Esdaile was frowning and clawing his jaw. The realization was sinking in
now all right.

"What had you thought of doing with the pistol anyway?" I asked.

"To tell you the truth I hadn't thought," he admitted. "I should say the
bottom of the river's the best place for it. But as you say, you can't
drop that poor devil's bullet-hole into the river. Does nobody know
anything about him?"

Nobody did. Maxwell might have been Chummy's best friend or worst enemy,
a good fellow, a rotter, any one kind of all the kinds of men there are.

"Chummy was in Gallipoli. Anybody ever hear of a Maxwell with him
there?"

Nobody had.

Then Esdaile took another line. For a moment it seemed quite a hopeful
one.

"Well, look at it this way." He tried to evade the inevitable. "It's all
very well for Monty to talk out of his hat about there not being murders
enough, but what earthly right have we to assume that this was a murder
at all? None, I say. Far more likely to have been an accident. Accidents
do happen. Chummy wasn't the kind of man to deliberately do another
fellow in. It must have been an accident."

But at this moment I remembered Philip's own words that morning in the
studio: "Anybody would say it was an accident, wouldn't they? It looked
like an accident, I mean? It wouldn't occur to anybody who saw it that
it wasn't?" Those were rather remarkable words. They had meant, if they
had meant anything at all, that even then Philip had had his reasons
for supposing it had _not_ been an accident. Now that a thunderclap had
revealed that one of the men who had come down on the roof was Chummy,
he apparently wanted it to be an accident again.

And by the way, how, at that particular moment, had Philip come to be in
possession of an opinion on the matter at all? This was the point I have
mentioned as being on Rooke's mind also. So far, in telling his story,
Esdaile had taken as his starting-point the moment when he had got
possession of the pistol from Monty; but what about the antecedent
mystery? How in the first place had he discovered that Monty had the
pistol? Why had he walked practically straight to Monty the moment he
had ascended from the cellar? The whole series of incidents, from first
to last, had passed while he had been still down in the cellar; how then
could he know anything whatever about them?

Then I remembered that only a series of diversions had turned Hubbard
away from his express purpose in coming to Lennox Street that
evening--the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar. First had come the
shock of learning that one of the men was Chummy Smith; then Joan
Merrow's implication in the affair had sidetracked us; and then had come
the pistol and Monty. These things were all very well, but they brought
us no nearer to the solution of the first puzzle of all. Why had Esdaile
behaved as he had behaved when he had rejoined us with a jar of curaçao
in one hand and a lighted candle in the other?

But for all this we had to wait. My speculations were suddenly cut
short. There was another ring at the door, and Esdaile rose. But before
going to see who it was this time he took the precaution of once more
putting Monty's pistol away in the escritoire drawer.

It was well for our Case, as a Case, that he did so. We heard voices in
the passage, Esdaile's own tenor and a deeper voice. Then I heard him
say, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in."

The next moment he stood holding the door open for a Police Inspector to
pass.

PART III

WHAT THE WOMEN DID

For a great number of years past, innumerable reviewers have been so
kind as to class me as "one of the younger novelists," and with the
passing of time I have acquired a certain affection for the status. But
I have to confess myself unlike my brethren in this--I don't know all
about women. Indeed, twenty Philip Esdailes poking about twenty cellars
are clearer to me than some of the mental processes of such a person as
(say) Miss Joan Merrow. For instance, she once told me that she would be
terrified to go up in a machine. She told me this (as I subsequently
learned) within a very few hours of a side-slip at a few hundred feet
that had fairly "put the wind up" Chummy Smith, her companion in this
(by Philip) strictly forbidden adventure. Some chance remark of her own
revealed all this to me weeks later, and our eyes met, mine sternly
accusing, hers of limpid periwinkle blue. Then she had the effrontery to
take me aside, to put her arm inside mine, and to whisper that she knew
she could "trust" me!

"Trust," indeed!

So, as far as Miss Merrow is my informant for the part of our Case I am
now coming to, you are warned what to expect.

Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him
I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a
vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four
hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there
is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches
of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very
poultry of its farmyards. The only tiny thing about it is its church,
and this stands in the middle of a daisied field, not by any means one
of the largest, but that can hardly be less than a hundred acres. There
is a shop-post-office, a short street mostly laithes as big as
airship hangars, an opaque horse-pond, and a single telegraph wire the
posts of which can be seen for miles diminishing away over the Wolds.
The few trees are mostly thorn, all blown one way by the wind and as
stiff and compact as wire mattresses.

And Joan herself fitted into all this Caldecott spaciousness as if she
had been bred and born there. Half a mile away across the young corn you
saw her white sweater at the cliff's edge, and it seemed part of the
whiteness of the screaming seabirds, of the whiteness of the awful
glimpses of chalk where the turf suddenly ended in air, of the crawling
whiteness of the waves far below. And on the shore--but any young girl
is a Nausicaa on any shore. Esdaile has drawn and painted her a score of
times--young neck, fair thick yellow hair, the none-too-small white feet
with the sand disappearing from them as she waded into the anemonied
pools. Sometimes it was no more than a cryptic pencil-line, that, as
you looked at it, suddenly became her uplifted arm and flank, or the
balance of back and hips as she moved across the unsteady white stones.
Sometimes the jotting was more abbreviated still, just a dab or two of
color that placed her against fawn-colored sand or ribbon-grassed water.
But always it was Joan romping as it were her last between the little
Alan and Jimmy she mothered and those other dream-stuff children that
did not call her mother yet.

I feel fairly certain that it was not in the very least on Philip
Esdaile's account that she had given instructions at the Chelsea
post-office for the readdressing of letters. Neither was it, as she had
falsely said, "to save Mr. Rooke the trouble." Both Philip's stupid
letters and Monty's convenience were very minor matters. The really
important thing was her own letters. Some little delay her change of
address was bound to entail; but if, after "1," "2," and "3" there must
be a short pause, "4," "5" and the rest would arrive all in one blissful
bag. And, pending her receipt of them, there was no reason why she
should cease to write letters.

So, accompanied by the letter-case with the new lock on it, down to the
shore she took the children on the first two mornings (which is
something of a journey, by the way), and back in the afternoon she came
to high tea at half-past four. On the first day she did not even trouble
to walk on to the little post-office-shop. But on the second day she
did, returning empty-handed to boiled fowl and white sauce, tall piles
of Santon bread and Santon butter and Santon jam, pints of hot tea from
the luster pot under the haystack cosy, and the children's clamor:--

"I saw a jellyfish as big as a cart-wheel!"

"'N Jimmy found seven starfishes!"

"I found _eight_ starfishes!"

"'N I waded out till the water came right up to here!"

"'N I saw a polar bear----"

"Oh, Jimmy, what a story! You've just made that up this minute!"

This last in bell-voiced reproof from Joan. At twenty she still
corrected and disputed with them as a rather larger equal.

III

They had arrived at Santon at half-past eight on a Thursday night,
and after tea on the Saturday Joan walked up to the little
coastguard-station on the hill. Aeroplanes were not unknown on that wide
uplifted promontory, and it would not in the least surprise her if
presently, say in another week or so, Chummy, finding himself within a
mere fifty miles, were to drop in unannounced. He had in fact said so,
in the last letter but four. He had not been able to see her off at the
station because he had had a new machine to take up with a fellow she
didn't know. On Friday he was chasing off to the Midlands, where he
might have to stay the night, and he did not expect to be back in London
till Saturday afternoon. So he would not be within fifty miles, and even
if a plane did happen to pass over it could not possibly be his.

As a matter of fact a plane did happen to pass over, and she pretended
that it was his. She stood watching, eyes shaded with her hand, lips
smiling and parted, and the young throat long as the flower-trumpet at
the pit of which lies the nectar. Though she had been in a plane (and
"trusted" me not to tell), I don't think that in her heart she regarded
aeroplanes as apparatus at all. They were not things of wood and steel
and oil and petrol that carried a load as a motor-car might have carried
a load. All was the particular skill and daring and unaided cleverness
of that Chummy of hers. I suppose he simply thought of her and flew....
But her little pretense ended in a light sigh when the plane did not
circle, but with unfeeling purposefulness followed the telegraph wire
over the Wolds and was lost to her sight. The young chauffeur of the
air, whoever he was, knew nothing of the kiss that went after him. She
returned to the cottage and the letter-case and began "7."

She knew nothing of the letter that Mollie Esdaile had already received
from Philip, fortunately during her absence with the children. Nor did
she know that Mollie, still in her absence, had run immediately to the
shop-post-office and had telegraphed "_Wire fullest particulars
immediately most anxious_." Chummy (Philip had written) had had a slight
accident, nothing serious, but enough to keep him in bed for a few days.
It would be better (his letter had continued) if this could be kept from
Joan until she, Mollie, heard further from him. If Mollie could also
glance through the newspapers before Joan got hold of them, that also
Philip recommended. For the rest, he had said nothing whatever about
when he himself might be expected at Santon, and Mollie further wondered
whether it was to create a reassuring impression that he had passed on
to tell her how he was having old Dadley round about some
picture-framing, and ended with similar trivial matters. That letter had
come on the Friday afternoon. Saturday had brought neither letter nor
reply to her telegram. She was glad that there was a Sunday delivery at
Santon, which usually awaited them on their return from Church.

(I may say now, by the way, that Philip's caution about the newspapers
was needless. The paper that found its way to Santon about midday was a
London paper, but a Northern edition. Minor accidents in Chelsea are
seen in perspective from the North, and no account of that Chelsea
accident ever did appear.)

Only Joan and the children went to Church on that Sunday morning. Mollie
made some excuse about helping the village girl to prepare the midday
meal. Perhaps she preferred not to read letters and have her own face
read by Joan at the same time.

In the summer, when the door of that diminutive Church usually stands
wide open all through the service, you can see from the back pews the
postman pass on his way to Newsome's, the farthest farm. So there in
Church Joan sat, watching the bees that droned in and out of the open
door, the butterflies that hovered, the cattle that tried to crop inside
the little wire fence. The whiteness of the daisies was faintly shed up
among the old rafters, and the curate's singsong rose and fell
peacefully. The postman passed with the Newsome letters, and repassed
with his empty bag. Then the sluggish old harmonium droned forth the
last hymn, they knelt for the Benediction, and Joan and her charges were
the first to hurry forth out into the sunshine again.

And this time there was a letter for her.

But her brows were already contracted even before she opened it. She
stood, in the white frock and buttercupped hat, against the musk and
geraniums of the sunny window, already wondering what the quite strange
handwriting of the envelope meant, already half afraid to ascertain.

"Is this all----?" she began.

Then with a nervous jerk she tore open the envelope, and a cry broke
from her. The blue eyes were wide frightened rounds.

For if the handwriting on the envelope was strange, that of the shaky
penciled scrawl inside was not quite familiar either. Yet it was
Chummy's. He had had a bit of a spill, he said, but nothing to hurt.
Rather shaken, but nothing broken. She was not to come up, as he would
be out and up again before she could get there.

And that was all. There was no address at the head of the letter, and he
did not say who had addressed the envelope for him, nor why.

"Oh, Mollie, he's hurt!" broke agitatedly from Joan.

Mollie was writing a letter at the little round table where the
workbasket stood. Quietly she rose and passed her arm about the girl.

"Yes, darling, but he's quite all right," she calmed her.

"Have you heard from Philip, then? What is it? What does he say?" the
words came with a rush.

Mollie had not heard from Philip that morning. That was why she was
writing her letter. But she said she had heard from him. She meant the
letter she had received on Friday afternoon.

"And somebody's had to write the address for him!" Joan's voice became
more unsteady still. "Oh, that means he's badly hurt! I must go at
once!"

"Nonsense, dear. Anyway, there are no trains on Sunday. May I see what
he says, or----?"

Joan thrust the weak scribble into her hand. She read it, passed it
back, and then began to unpin Joan's hat.

"Well, that's nothing to be alarmed about," she said. "He says just the
same as Philip. And he tells you you're not to go up. We shall hear all
about it to-morrow."

But she did not tell Joan that it was precisely because there was so
maddeningly little in the letter she had received from Philip on Friday
that, despairing of getting anything plain out of a mere man, the letter
she was now writing was to Audrey Cunningham.

I hope you haven't got the impression that I didn't like Mrs.
Cunningham. Indeed, if half I presently learned about her was true, it
would have been a hard heart that had not shown a very real and
compassionate consideration for her. Young as she was, she had had a
wretched story. As far as I know it it was this:--

The late George Cunningham, having contracted the dangerous habit of
going to bed every night comparatively sober and waking up in the
morning very drunk, had one day arrived at the point when something had
had to be done about it. I assume that he had tried the usual specifics
to no purpose, since he had presently found himself with only two
alternatives left. The first of these was to have done with specifics,
to go boldly forward, and to trust to the strength of his constitution
to land him high, and still dry, among the seasoned octogenarians. The
other was to marry, and to trust that the pure love of an innocent young
girl might work its traditional miracle.

Unfortunately, instead of choosing he had tried both courses at once. An
unjailed criminal of a father had either suggested the match himself or
had failed to throw Cunningham out of the window when it had been
suggested. So at seventeen-and-a-half Audrey Herbert had become the wife
of a man-about-town of forty-two, with a roomy house in St. John's Wood,
a considerable private fortune, and a hole in every one of his pockets.

It had not taken Mrs. Cunningham long to discover that a man who goes to
bed sober and wakes up drunk, frequently does so in other beds than his
own. But her father, to whom she ran, advised her to continue to
exercise her influence for good. He seems to have thought that as long
as Cunningham did not actually strike her the rest must be accepted as
part of marriage-as-it-is. He had passed out of the world in that belief
a couple of years after his daughter's immolation.

Cunningham never struck her. Nor, while it lasted, did he starve her of
money. Twice, when housekeeping debts had pressed, he gave her blank
checks which the bank duly honored. The third time (one of his
mistresses appears to have been the occasion) he gave her a considerably
wider permission.... No, he had never struck her. Instead he had merely
dragged through the mud of alcoholism and unfaithfulness the hope and
belief in men he had found her with, and after five years of it had
died--not a day too soon, as she had discovered on going into his
affairs. When his debts of honor, dishonor and at law had been paid,
about a hundred pounds had remained. With this, her clothes, a few
pieces of furniture bought in from the sale and her experience of
married life, she had become her own mistress again at twenty-three.
Most of the hundred pounds had gone in fees at a School of Dramatic
Art. She was now twenty-seven and on the eve of her second marriage.

I am telling you all this because of the part that Mrs. Cunningham
presently came to play in our Case. I think her unhappy history partly
explained certain things. I would not go so far as to say that with the
exception of Monty Rooke she disliked and distrusted all men, but I
think that the sense of sex-hostility was latent and instinctive in her.
This never took the form of gloom. Quite the other way. Lest it should
be thought for a moment that she mourned for the cur with whom she had
been kenneled, she was rather histrionically bright. She fell naturally
into beautiful attitudes and gestures, which beauty her art enhanced. I
think I mentioned the care she bestowed on her manicuring; in the whole
of her person and dress she was the same, as if to wipe out some
soilure. She was undoubtedly much in love with Monty--who at any rate
was a teetotaller. And, except as I have qualified, I think she liked
the rest of us well enough. But the history was always behind, and, in
my experience, if you like with however natural a reservation, there is
something of the same reserve in the liking you inspire.

So in this sense I was prepared to like Mrs. Cunningham, and without any
qualification whatever was sorry she had had so ghastly a time and
hopeful that her marriage with Monty would expunge the memory of it.

And so we come to the episode of the wardrobe that Audrey Cunningham had
bought in from the St. John's Wood sale.

This wardrobe, with a number of dress-baskets and other articles, formed
part of the furniture of the bed-sitting-room in Oakley Street that she
was now on the point of leaving, and it had been Philip Esdaile himself
who had suggested, some time ago, that there was plenty of room for
these belongings in his cellar. Nothing had since been said about it;
Philip says that the matter had entirely slipped from his memory; and
Mrs. Cunningham, having no reason to suppose that he had changed his
mind, had as a matter of fact had the wardrobe put on a light cart and
brought round to Lennox Street the day after the aeroplane accident,
that is to say on the Friday afternoon. Philip himself, coming along the
street at that moment, had found the cart at the gate and Monty and Mrs.
Cunningham considering the best way of getting the wardrobe in.

"Ah, so you've got it round; good," he said. "I don't quite know where
you're going to put it, but we'll find somewhere. Let me give you a
hand."

"I thought you said it was to go into the cellar?" said Mrs. Cunningham.

"Eh?" said Philip. "Did I? I believe I did. Well, let's get it in first.
We can settle that afterwards. Has Dadley come?"

So the wardrobe was got into the hall, where it was left for the present
among Philip's corded and labeled painting-gear.

"Has Dadley come?" Philip asked again.

"Yes. He's been waiting for you for ten minutes in the studio," Monty
replied.

"Bon. I don't suppose I shall be more than ten minutes, but don't wait
for tea. I've had a cup as a matter of fact."

"Can't say I think much of old Daddy as a framer----" Monty was
beginning; but Esdaile was already at the studio door, which he closed
carefully behind him.

You may remember the name of old William Dadley. It was he who, when Mr.
Harry Westbury had held forth in the Saloon Bar about the danger to
property from the air, had ventured to suggest that lives too had their
value. His shop was the little one in the King's Road with the alleged
Old Master in the window, one half of it black with ancient grime, the
other pitilessly restored; and, as Monty had said, artists who were in
any hurry to see their pictures back again seldom took their framing to
old Daddy. Unless they went farther afield, they were more likely to
patronize the up-to-date establishment across the road, kept by the two
pushing young men in the Sinn Fein hats and black satin bows and little
side-whiskers and hair bobbed like girls'.

And now for the discussion on picture-framing that took place between
Philip Esdaile and William Dadley, behind the closed studio door.

"Was he drunk?" Esdaile asked. He was walking about, head down,
frowning.

The old man stroked his grizzled beard.

"Well, I won't say he hadn't had a few. I saw him have two or three
liqueur brandies. And he's a crossish sort of man when he's at home,
especially when it's wearing off a bit, but he isn't easily bowled over,
isn't Harry. Well, as I was telling you. He gets home about tea-time
that day, and the first thing he sees is one of the children playing
with something or other in his mouth. He was popping it in and out. You
know what children are, Mr. Esdaile--everything goes straight into their
mouths. So Westbury asked the child how much oftener he wants telling
about putting things into his mouth, and takes it away from him. And
what do you think it was, Mr. Esdaile? It was a bullet!"

"A bullet?" said Esdaile with a show of astonishment.

"A bullet. And it had been fired, because it was all out of shape. Well,
you don't find bullets everywhere, like leaves off the trees, do you?"

"Where on earth did the child get it?" Esdaile asked.

"Ah, that's what Harry wants to know!" The gray old head was wagged a
few times. "Shouts for his missis, and there's a bit of a scene. The
child says he found the bullet in the bedroom. How did it get there?
Harry wants to know. It seems the window was wide open to air the room a
bit. Then Harry asks what the child was doing in the bedroom, and what
time he went up, and what time he came down again, and I don't know what
else. Then he has a bit of a sleep and a cup of tea and a wash and goes
off out again. I believe he went straight to Inspector Webster with the
bullet, but he won't say either Yes or No. He's very mysterious about
it. A man told me, though, that he'll be an important witness when the
Case comes on."

"What Case?" Esdaile asked.

"Well, Westbury he looks at it like this, Mr. Esdaile: If that bullet
came in at his window it might have hit somebody, he says, and he's
great on the window being just opposite this house of yours. And he's
worked it out, from the time it was when his wife cleaned the bedroom
and where the children were and all that, that the bullet must have come
in at the same time that accident was."

"But what's a flying accident got to do with a bullet?"

"Ah, that I can't tell you; but he's very mysterious. And I know he's
written a letter to the papers about dangerous flying, because I heard
him reciting bits of it. He says he'll make a Case of it or his name
isn't Harry Westbury."

"What paper has he written to?"

"I can't remember the name just for the moment, but it's one of the
papers. And I heard him reciting one bit about three million pounds'
damage. I don't suppose he's written to the papers about the bullet;
that's the tit-bit, that is, and he's keeping that to himself, except
for Inspector Webster. Westbury's a difficult sort of man once he gets
started on a thing. Stares you down like. You say you don't know him by
sight? It was him brought that ladder into your garden--he was there
when Mr. Rooke went up on the roof----"

And that (to pass on) was the gist of the discussion on the framing of
Esdaile's _fêtes-champêtre_.

VII

A few minutes' reflection would have shown Esdaile that there was no
immediate reason why he should have hesitated to have that wardrobe
carried down into his cellar. He himself admits this. But it is easy to
think of these things afterwards, and he was caught off his guard. He
did allow reluctance to appear.

"Why not move this desk and let it stand here?" he said, pointing to the
writing-table with the mignonette-shaded lamp on it. "It's not a
bad-looking piece at all. Pity to hide it. What is it--Jacobean?"

It was either genuine Jacobean or else a passable copy, but, placed
where Philip proposed to place it it would have been a little in the way
of anybody passing to the French window. Mrs. Cunningham pointed this
out.

"Do you think so? Let's measure it," Esdaile replied.

Measurement of the piece confirmed Mrs. Cunningham's view, and Philip
next suggested that it should go into the large studio.

"Why not have it where you can get at it and use it?" he said. "I
thought women complained they could never get hanging-space enough. Or
what about upstairs in Mollie's room?"

But Audrey Cunningham's frocks, which she made quite wonderfully
herself out of almost nothing at all, were few, and Mollie had left her
plenty of room for them. Besides, there were the dress-baskets. These
would hardly add to the beauty either of the annexe or the studio. For
the baskets at any rate the most convenient place was certainly the
cellar. And it was at this point that Philip, recognizing that further
objection would look rather like obstinacy, yielded.

He confesses that he felt awkward about the whole situation. Either he
had lent his house or he had not. If the former, Monty and his fiancée
should have had the complete freedom of it; if the latter, or if for any
reason he regretted his generosity, the position was even more obscure.
To say that until the marriage he had lent it to Monty only and not to
Mrs. Cunningham was mere quibbling; he had made the offer in entire good
faith, and had not made a lawyer's matter of it, with clauses and
reservations about this, that and the other.

Yet here he not only was, but here very much master of the house whether
he wished it or not. Audrey Cunningham would of course be very nice
about it, but he could see very plainly how it must strike her. He did
not even pretend to be working. He was merely hanging on, for a reason
unexplained and unexplainable to her. Monty knew his reason, of course;
but the reason she supposed to be the truth (for she had been told that
one of the men who had crashed was their friend and Joan Merrow's more
than friend) by no means accounted for everything. It did not account
for a quarter of his eccentricities; it did not even account for his
latest inadvertence, of proposing any place in the house except the
cellar for the bestowal of that nuisance of a wardrobe. What an ass he
had been about that! The cellar could be made _perfectly safe_ at an
instant's warning; as a matter of fact it was _perfectly safe_ at that
moment. There was no reason whatever why Audrey Cunningham should not go
down there.

But things would get worse as time went on. Presently Audrey would be
living here, as Monty's wife, and it would be difficult for Philip to
delay his departure after that. A honeymoon is a honeymoon even when it
is spent in a borrowed studio, and newly-married couples don't commonly
take in fussy and fretful lodgers. Within a week or so he or they would
most certainly have to clear out.

Philip could have stated what had actually happened in one short
sentence. He had offered them one house, but was now called upon to hand
over to them the possession of quite a different one.

But this was impossible to explain without dragging in the thing of all
things that he wished to keep from Audrey, from Mollie, and above all
from Joan--that beastly episode of the pistol, with all it involved.

And here at any rate he was quite firm. Chance what might, that must be
kept the men's affair only. As far as the women were concerned at
present the accident was a pure accident. Well, an accident it must
remain.

But what about that Police Inspector who had appeared so suddenly in our
midst the night before, and for all Philip knew might be round again at
any moment? Audrey Cunningham had been told nothing about that. She
might have many opinions about Philip's delayed departure, but about a
series of domiciliary visits by the police she could have one only,
namely, that the loan of a studio wasn't worth it. In suppressing this
piece of information Philip was actually doing his best to keep her in
Lennox Street. To have informed her would have been much the same thing
as asking her to leave.

And what exactly had passed when Philip's tenor voice, interrupting the
Inspector's deep one, had said, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in"?

VIII

Of the four of us sitting there I alone had instantly realized what must
have happened. Our Nosey Parker of a Westbury had been at work already.
I remembered the dull insistence of the man and how he had said in my
hearing that he and Inspector Webster "would be having a bit of a talk
that evening." I recalled also the stupid but dangerous cunning with
which he had repeated over and over again that Rooke had been the first
on the scene of the accident. Well, he hadn't lost very much time. The
Inspector had stood there in the doorway, and neither Esdaile, Hubbard
nor Rooke had had the least idea why.

Now there are a good many of the commonly-accepted views on physiognomy
that I for one don't share. One of these is about rather narrowly-set
eyes. Webster, who was a very big red-and-black man, had these eyes
under a sort of bison-front of close-curling hair, but I did not
associate them with meanness and slyness at all. On the contrary, they
had rather a kindly glint, and they reminded me of the infinitesimal
slight cast that at certain moments makes some women irresistible. No, I
did not set Inspector Webster down as a bad sort. At the same time there
was no nonsense about him, and I should have thought twice before
trying any tricks with him.

I was more thankful than I can tell you that Philip also, in spite of
the emotional gamut he had run that day, still had resilience enough to
sum the Inspector up very much as I did. There was no bland "Well,
Inspector, and to what are we indebted for the pleasure of this visit?"
nor anything of that kind. Perhaps that dangerous pistol, X-raying
itself so plainly in our minds through the top of the escritoire, had
forbidden any such attitude. I now know, as a matter of fact, the
life-line on to which he had immediately and instinctively laid hold.
Inspector Webster, whatever he had come for, was to be treated exactly
as the women were to be treated, and the accident-theory was to hold the
field.

So this is what had happened:--

The Inspector, after a few conventional remarks about being sorry to
trouble us gentlemen for the second time that day and so on, had come
down like a hammer straight upon our weakest point. This was the part
that Monty Rooke had played in that morning's events. First of all he
wanted (with our permission) to put a few words to Mr. Rooke. I think he
used the word "permission" in good faith, and not as any kind of a
veiled threat.

I saw Monty moisten his lips. He has since explained the swiftness with
which he also was able to come into line and to play up so really nobly
as he did. Philip, if you remember, had forbidden him pretty gruffly to
say one word about all this to Audrey Cunningham; it is no light matter
to dictate to another man what he shall say and what he shall not say to
his fiancée; and this it was that saved the situation. If Monty was to
be ordered to keep his mouth shut before his fiancée he was jolly well
not going to be pumped by an outsider, Police Inspector or no Police
Inspector. On such hairs do our actions hang sometimes.

"Fire away," he had said.

"Well, sir, to begin with, would you be so kind as to tell me in your
own words exactly what you saw on the roof this morning?"

"Certainly," Monty had replied.

And he had launched out.

From the point of view of the things he omitted I can only describe his
performance as brilliant. Camouflage was certainly Monty's war-job. Not
one single word was there about bullet-holes, cartridge-cases or
pistols. Had there been a polar bear or a pterodactyl on the roof it
might have been worth mentioning, but a pistol--no.

My only fear was lest he should be so pleased with his own performance
as to undo it again out of sheer satisfaction presently.

"Thank you very much indeed, sir," said the Inspector. "I asked you for
your own words and you've given them. Now I wonder if I might be allowed
to ask you one or two questions?"

"Fire away," said Monty again.

But here the Inspector himself had seemed to be in some slight
difficulty. Apparently for some reason he wasn't very anxious to speak
of pistols either. Polar bears or pterodactyls, yes; but not pistols. I
have since thought that, as a man of some penetration, he also might
have had his private opinion about Mr. Harry Westbury, and thought it
best to act on anything Westbury said with caution.

Nevertheless, the series of questions that had followed had all been in
the very close neighborhood of pistols, so to speak. I itemize what
struck me as being their real, if unuttered trend.

"About this man that's dead, Mr. Rooke. You saw his face, of course?"

(_Item: Had Maxwell been shot through the head?_)

Yes, Monty had seen his face, but so, he ventured to remind the
Inspector, had he himself.

"Well, say I had other things to attend to and didn't particularly
notice. You'd say he was--pretty bad?"

(_Item: So bad that there might have been a little hole on one side of
his head and a big one on the other without your noticing it?_)

"Rotten," said Monty with an unaffected shiver.

"Bleeding much?"

(_Item: Or anything else scattered about?_)

"No."

"Clothes singed?"

(_Item: If not through the head, perhaps through the body?_)

"Yes. Badly. Bits of the parachute too."

"From where you were on the roof lots of people could see you?"

(_Item: If you'd done anything you'd no business to do, for instance?_)

"Any number of people I should say," Monty had replied rather faintly.
"But I don't see what you're getting at. You were up there too. What is
it all about?"

And here Philip had seen fit to intervene, rather quickly.

"Yes, that's what I'm wondering, Inspector. Is it a proper question to
ask? And is it proper to ask you if you'd like a glass of whisky, by the
way?"

The narrow eyes had twinkled. "Not supposed to, sir----"

"Right. Say when----"

And so our healths had been drunk.

"You see," Philip had resumed presently, "I understood from Mr. Mackwith
this morning--you knew that was Mr. Mackwith, K.C., you were talking to,
didn't you--the tall man in morning-coat and spats?"

"Was he indeed, sir?"

"Yes, that was Mr. Mackwith, and I understood from him that you had said
you had all the evidence you wanted?"

The Inspector had been sitting with his cap on his knees and the glass
of whisky inside it like a flowerpot in a vase. He had ruminated.

"Well," he had said suddenly, "the fact is that that was this morning,
gentlemen. Since then a certain piece of information's been laid in
connection with this affair. I'm not at liberty to say what this
information is, nor whether we shall act on it or not, but the Law's for
the protection of us all, gentlemen, and I take it all of us wants to do
our best to maintain it. Even if it meant the inconvenience," he added
deliberately, "of a warrant for the search of these premises."

Here the sorely-tried Philip had given a wild laugh.

"Search these premises! Search 'em now if you like. But in God's name
what for?"

"Accidents aren't always what they seem, sir," Inspector Webster had
replied.

And now (to come out of this winding of the story into the open again)
here was Audrey Cunningham with dress-baskets and a wardrobe for which
the most suitable place was certainly the cellar.

"All right," Esdaile said suddenly. "Let's do it now. Monty and I can
manage it if you'll hold a candle for us."

And he lighted and put into Audrey's hand the same candle he had himself
used when he had gone down into the cellar to fetch the orange curaçao.

He was still kicking himself that he had made such a fuss. Now at last
he saw that, although only a trifle stood between revelation and perfect
concealment, this trifle was as firm as the rocks of which the mountains
are built. A short flight of steepish stone steps, with a rather awkward
right-angled bend half-way down, descended ten feet or so, and there was
no cellar door. You stepped from the bottom step, which was a little
worn and concave, and there you were, with nothing more to do but to put
the wardrobe and the dress-baskets inside and to come out again.

The wardrobe was at the turn of the stairs. Mrs. Cunningham stood just
above it, holding the candle for the two men to see.

"Gently--don't knock it," muttered Philip, "and mind the edge of the
steps--they're pretty old----"

The wardrobe cleared the bend, and Audrey Cunningham followed it into
the cellar.

It was only natural that she should look with some curiosity at the
place in which Philip Esdaile had spent that unaccounted-for half hour
on the morning of the day before. I did the same thing myself at a
later stage. But all that she saw was the most ordinary of cellars.
Hubbard himself, who seemed to have cellar-on-the-brain, would have
found nothing remarkable in it. This is all that was to be seen:--

A roomy, gloomy, clammy place, with old plastered walls, and neither
door nor window of any kind nor other means of entry than that they had
just used. Its air hit skin and nostrils like that of a grave. The light
of the single candle seemed lost in its obscurity. When Audrey held the
candle up above her head a couple of heavy beams could be seen,
necessary for the support of the largish area of the studio floor; when
she held it to one side it showed in a corner a couple of gas-meters
with the usual pipes, and underneath them the improvised rack in which
Esdaile kept his modest stock of wine. When she held it to the other
side its light hardly reached the farther wall, but wavered over the dim
objects that half-filled the floor-space. These were merely the
furniture for which Esdaile had no present use, and consisted of a large
couch covered with a dingy dust-sheet, a few oddments of chairs, a
number of packing-cases, and in fact the usual miscellaneous collection
of household lumber that one day seems hardly worth keeping and the next
looks just too good to throw away. Nearest to hand on the wine-rack
stood the bottle of curaçao, just where Esdaile himself had replaced it.
And that was all.

"Well, where will you have it, Audrey?" said Philip. "What about over by
the sofa there?"

Mrs. Cunningham was once more holding the candle over her head. Any
young woman's face by candlelight always seems singularly attractive to
me, especially if she is a dark-eyed woman, and she was a slight and
graceful thing to have endured so much. Had Joan been holding that
candle up she would have given you the impression of a statue, but Mrs.
Cunningham was just the opposite--all warm and fleeting and impermanent
charm, a creature depending on the varying accidents of color, even when
that color was only the sooty black of her home-made dress, the
candlelight on her face and the tiny reflections in her large and
lustrous eyes.

Suddenly she gave a shiver and a nervous laugh.

"I don't think I should like to be shut in here alone," she said.

"Why not?" Philip asked.

But the "why not" hardly needed saying, with that same candlestick in
her hand and, as she once more moved it, that same jar of curaçao
seeming to advance a little out of the shadows. These things brought the
shock and dread of that other morning all too plainly before her again.
It was within these chill sweating walls that Philip Esdaile had done
the "wool gathering" he had spoken of. What wool? She saw none. Then
why, up to that very moment almost, had he shuffled so? Why had he
seemed so anxious that the wardrobe should be placed anywhere rather
than in the place where they now stood? Here she was. She could not
imagine any kind of cellar, however earthy and tomblike, that so changed
its nature or properties that at one moment it must be jealously guarded
and the next thrown open for her to look as much as she pleased. She was
free to look. Monty also was wandering about in the farther corner
there, as greedy for knowledge as she. The only check on her freedom was
that she felt that Philip at the same time was covertly watching her.

Then all at once something seemed to give way in her. She put the candle
down on one end of the sheeted sofa and turned to Philip. Her hands were
clasped at her breast, the honeysuckle fingers interworking.

"Oh, please tell me!" she begged. "What is it makes this place so queer?
There's something--I can feel it--like eyes on me--I've a being-watched
sort of feeling, as if something was wrong----"

Philip took up the candle. "Then let's go upstairs," he said promptly.

But something almost like hysteria seemed to take her. Her voice rose.

"No, I want to know! I don't feel I can come to this house unless I
know! I don't want to come here if it's going to be like this! You don't
want to tell me--I know you could if you wanted! Oh, I wish Mollie was
here!"

"Come upstairs," Philip repeated gently. "Bring her up, Monty."

But she went on with even less and less control.

"Oh, I think it's cruel! You're all cruel! You never think of us! Joan's
to go on being told nothing, and Mollie's kept in the dark--oh, I know
she is--and I'm made to feel that I'm not wanted here.... I want to go
back to Oakley Street, Monty. I can't stop here. I won't. Everything's
been wrong ever since that accident. It's horrible. I'm going away. I
dare say they'll let me keep my room on; if they won't I must find
somewhere else. Please take me away."

Upstairs, she became a little calmer, but she still wanted to be taken
away. Monty was soothing her where she sat on the little Empire sofa,
and Philip's face was distressed as he walked up and down. Then, though
there was little heart in his attempt, he tried gently to laugh her out
of it.

"But of course you'll go back to Oakley Street," he said. "You're there
for three days yet, aren't you? It will be all right by that time. It's
just a little bit of a complication we're in. It won't be long now. Then
you'll get married and come along here, of course. Pull yourself
together, my dear. It's all right. There, you're feeling better now,
aren't you?"

He felt a perfect brute, he says, but he didn't see what else he could
do. Even if he had had the right, he doesn't see that it would have
helped to tell her that, after tying herself up with a drunkard, she was
now going to make a second experiment with a man who had no more sense
than to go and get himself mixed up in an affair that might bring the
police round at any moment. He had no such right. Just as before he had
been unable to explain to Hubbard and myself until he had spoken to
Monty, so now he couldn't take any further step till he had seen Chummy
Smith. It might be hard on Joan and Mrs. Cunningham, not to mention his
wife, but what other course could he take? When you set about to burke
inquiry into a capital Case the fewer people you take into your
confidence the better. Besides, who knew yet that it was a capital Case?
Suppose twenty words from Chummy should somehow explain it all? Suppose
some ridiculous mistake had been made? Suppose our elaborate pretenses
to ourselves were in reality no pretenses at all, and that the thing
really was what it seemed--just an aeroplane accident with nothing more
to be said about it?

Yes, in spite of all the evidence, he would have been glad at the moment
to have believed that.

"Look here, Audrey," he said at last, "I feel absolutely rotten about
all this. I know I'm in the way and I oughtn't to be here at all. When I
turned over this place to you I hadn't the faintest idea of stopping on
like this. I'd go straight into rooms now if I could, but that wouldn't
do. Don't ask me why, there's a dear. For one thing I've got to see
Smith. They tell me he can be seen in a few days now. Then I'll just
stop for the wedding and clear right out afterwards. Whats the matter
with that?"

The matter with that appeared in Audrey Cunningham's next words, which
she spoke slowly and with her eyes on the floor.

"It isn't just you. It's Monty as well. He could tell me if he wanted,
but he doesn't want. I don't think I want to get married," she said.

The letter she wrote crossed Mollie Esdaile's Sunday morning one. It was
written on Saturday, and missed the Santon Sunday morning delivery by a
post, arriving there on Monday.

"Please don't think me ungrateful," Mollie read, "but all sorts of
things seem to be happening, and I'm so afraid of hurting you after all
your kindness. Perhaps I'd better come to the point straight away and
explain afterwards. I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox
Street for Monty and myself after all."

Mollie was standing in the porch of the cottage as she read this. It was
immediately after breakfast. The postman could be seen in the middle
distance, climbing the stile on his way to Newsome's. Joan was
upstairs, getting the children ready for the shore.

Mollie thrust the letter into her breast. If Joan knew that the postman
had been she would come flying downstairs, and in any case Mollie did
not wish to be seen reading a letter. This from Audrey Cunningham was
all there was for her. For Joan there was nothing at all.

Quietly she slipped into the cottage, picked up a floppy print
sunbonnet, and slipped noiselessly out again. The back of the cottage
had no windows. Like a malefactor she skirted the palings of the little
front garden and gained the security of the back. But even this was not
far enough. The path up the field led to the Coast-guard Station, and,
with one furtive glance behind her, she took it. She would finish
Audrey's letter there.

Mollie Esdaile is still a young woman, but she looked every minute of
her age that morning. She had not slept. The room adjoining hers was
Joan's, and the wall between them might just as well not have existed,
so little a barrier had it been to the restless mental ticking of the
girl on the other side of it. A soft and tortured toss, then the
creaking of the bed, then the sounds of Joan moving about her room; the
striking of a match, a long silence, and then the creaking of the bed
again--all night it had gone on. Mollie had not gone to her; what had
there been to do or say? A hundred times she had promised, as if it had
lain in her power, that there should be a letter in the morning. None
had come. She felt a coward. She simply could not face Joan.

There was a merry morning wind, that ruffled the fleeces on the sheep's
backs and set the halliards of the Coast-guard's mast cracking and
rattling. Mollie tied the strings of the print sunbonnet under her plump
chin and walked with her head a little averted in order to see round the
print blinker. Beyond the waving grass-heads the sea appeared, a wide
silver glitter. You cannot see the shore from that hill. The sands and
the mile-long rollers lie far below that cliff's edge over which the men
are let down by ropes to gather the eggs from the awful ledges.

Then, in the little sunken way that runs down to the Rocket-house, she
sat down and took out the letter again.

"I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty
and myself after all. Our engagement is not definitely broken off,
but I can't stand things as they are, and am back in Oakley Street
again. They say I can stay on, but I may have to pay a little more.
Monty is still at the studio."

"I _knew_ it!" broke from Mollie with soft conviction. "I knew that if
Philip stayed that wedding would be put off! I told him so----"

Frowning, she turned to the letter again.

"I'm trying to think it all over quite calmly," the letter went on.
"Perhaps it isn't Monty after all. Perhaps it is just that men
worry me. I don't know really whether I'm a man's sort of woman.
Their ways seem so queer and roundabout to me. Lots of them don't
seem fair. I don't want to marry and make a mess of it a second
time, and I don't think Monty sees this as I do. Of course, I don't
want him to tell me every little thing he does and everywhere he
goes or anything of that kind, but I hate being kept in the dark
as I know I am being. It all seemed to start with that horrible
accident. Nothing's been the same since. Of course, they've told me
about Mr. Smith and poor darling Joan, but if it was only that I
could understand it. I know there's something else. I'm afraid I'd
rather a breakdown yesterday, when all three of us were in your
cellar putting that wardrobe of mine away. There's something
uncanny about that place. Monty thinks so too, but says he doesn't
know what it is any more than I do. But there is something he does
know and won't tell. And now it's all over Chelsea that something
not quite right has happened. Mrs. Cook hinted at it this morning
when she brought my milk up, and she said the milkman had told her.
I really think that if the milkman knows I might be told. The fact
is that just at present I don't feel much like men and marriage.
You'll understand this, because I've told you heaps of things I
should never dream of telling Monty----"

Mollie's gaze wandered to the twinkling silver sea. She remembered some
of those things that would never be told to Monty. It was perhaps not
altogether fair to Monty that he should have to restore the whole of the
credit of his sex that the late George Cunningham had so let down, but
she knew how Audrey felt about it. Men _were_ trials sometimes. "Queer
and roundabout?" Mollie not seldom called them infants outright. Such
little things pleased them, such even less things caused them to dig
their hoofs into the ground and refuse to budge. Whatever Philip's
tremendous reason for remaining in Chelsea might be, Mollie brushed it
aside as a trifle compared with Audrey's marriage. For a moment she
almost forgot Joan's distress. Philip, with his curaçao and
candle-sticks, postpone Audrey's wedding? It was nonsense--not to be
thought of. Mollie wouldn't hear of it. All this mystification should be
put a stop to if she had to do it herself. Audrey, to be sure, was a
highly-strung creature; lying there among the warm grasses and with the
wind ruffling the silver sea, Mollie could afford not to take too
seriously Audrey's broken sentences about uncanny cellars and whispered
hints that ran all over Chelsea; but it seemed to her that there were
two birds to be killed with one stone. If she were to go up to town she
would be able to ascertain for herself what this Audrey-Monty trouble
was all about, and also why newspapers were to be kept from Joan and how
it was that Joan had first heard of Chummy's crash from Chummy himself.

She looked at her wrist-watch and scrambled to her feet. She could not
go without letting Joan know she was going, and Joan would already have
started with the children for the shore. There was a train at midday.
She would have plenty of time to intercept Joan, to tell her she was
going to leave her for a couple of days, to return to the cottage,
change and pack her bag.

And she did not think it necessary to warn Philip of her intention
either.

"But, darling--oh, don't go on like this! Can't you see that if I go I
can clear up everything in half an hour? It's _much_ the best!"

Joan's manner was stony and impregnable. She stared straight before
her.

"I don't mind being left quite, quite alone," was her reply.

"But I shall be back again on Wednesday, foolish child, and I'll wire
you everything immediately if it costs me the whole of my quarter's
pocket-money. Anything's better than this!"

"Just as you like," came the expressionless response.

Not finding her on the shore, Mollie had climbed the precipitous zigzag
path to the cliff-top again and had sat down to rest, fairly blown. Then
she had seen her a quarter of a mile away, sitting motionless on a
rounded sky-line over which a hawthorn hedge straggled. The children
were stolidly watching her, and she as stolidly was watching nothing.
The boughs under which she sat were a custard of white bloom, and white
was the sun-flecked sweater in the shadow of them, and white as snow the
battlemented clouds overhead. Her eyes were dry and quite consciously
enduring, and Mollie was alternately comforting and scolding her.

"I shall catch the midday train, and I shall be back on Wednesday," she
repeated firmly. "If the mountain won't come to Mahomet or whatever it
is, very well. And _do_ try to be a little cheerful, darling. I heard
you last night. That does no good."

"I know you haven't had a letter this morning, either," came the dull
voice.

"I haven't from Philip, but I have from Audrey. She sends her love. Of
course, she knows about Chummy, and it's quite all right."

"But you won't show me the letter," Joan replied, steadfast in her
misery. "I know you won't. Nobody shows me anything. I saw him fall--I
was the only one who did--but nobody tells me anything."

"You shall hear every word the moment I get there."

"I saw him fall," Joan repeated obstinately. "You were all indoors, but
I was in the garden. But of course I didn't know who it was----"

"Don't, darling--just to please me," Mollie begged, distracted.

"He fell like a stone, crash into the tree. You can't realize that. You
haven't been up. I have. I know what it's like."

"But you've had a letter from him!" Mollie protested. "Really you talk
as if he was killed!"

"I don't know where the letter came from, and I can't write to him,
except to the Aiglon Company, which I've done, and there's no reply, and
somebody else had to address the envelope for him. I ought to go, not
you. I saw him fall."

To Mollie's touch on her shoulder she was quite unresponsive. Mollie
could have shaken her. It might have been the best thing to do.

"Do run away, you boys!" she said crossly instead. "Go and pick some of
those blue flowers; Auntie Joan's a little tired. Now, Joan, I'll tell
you what I'll do if you're good, but not unless. He's in a hospital or a
nursing-home, I expect, and I shall go straight to him; and then if he's
fit to move, as I expect he is by this time, I shall bring him straight
down here. Will that do?"

"I know he's not fit to move. I saw him fall. I saw him falling all last
night."

"Now you're naughty and just trying to make the worst of it. That's
simply willful. It's like Alan when he wants smacking; when you're as
old as I am you'll look on the bright side and be thankful it's no
worse. Now do try. I'm going to bring him down here, and we'll keep him
for a month. A whole month--it will be lovely! Why, you've only seen
him in London and Richmond Park!"

"I've been to Chalfont Woods with him four times."

Mollie seized gratefully on the diversion.

"Joan! How _could_ you! You never told me that!" she scolded. "And you
never told me you'd been flying with him either! Philip would be furious
if he knew! And now I'll tell him, and about Chalfont too, and all those
other times as well, if you don't try to be reasonable. A month in this
lovely place with him, and nobody to interfere--why, you'll be glad he
had a little bit of an accident!... Now get up and we'll all go back.
You'll have to get dinner ready, and I shall want a few sandwiches.
Alan! Jimmy! We're not going to the shore. You can play on the see-saw
instead. Run ahead, boys--and you come along, darling----"

And Joan of the cinemas and cliffs, of the secluded tea-shops and the
noble Santon shore, rose, still as naughty and obstinate as ever, but
obediently. Already Mollie, bustling the children on ahead, was shaping
in her mind the dressing-down she intended to give Philip that very
night.

XII

There was no help for it, Philip has since told me. He simply had to
tell her everything. She was, in fact, in possession of the whole story
long before any of the rest of us.

But even she had to wait yet a little longer. When, at half-past nine
that Monday night her taxi drew up at the wrought-iron gate in Lennox
Street, Philip was out and the place was in darkness. She had no key.

"Go on to Oakley Street," she ordered the driver.

Audrey Cunningham was at home. Mollie found her, alone, in her
first-floor bed-sitting-room, already on the point of going to bed.

"First of all give me a cup of cocoa or something," was Mollie's
greeting. "I've been half the day in the train with only a few
sandwiches, and I shall drop if I don't have something."

Mrs. Cunningham lighted the little gas-ring and fetched water from an
adjoining room. Then, opening a little cupboard, she mixed cocoa-paste
in a cup, got out bread and margarine and a plate of macaroons, and set
them on a little chintz-covered stool before Mollie.

"I've an egg if you'd like one," she said.

"No, thanks. I got your letter this morning. Have you got the one I
wrote yesterday?"

"No; but I don't think the last post's been yet."

"Well, it doesn't matter now. I've come to see for myself. Philip
doesn't know I'm here yet, but he will presently. Now first of all,
what's all this about you and Monty? What's happening?"

Her tone was that of a woman who intended to stand no further nonsense
of any kind. She was dog-tired, already angry on Joan's account, and the
resigned and hopeless air of the slender creature before her completed
her resolve to get to the bottom of things.

But nothing appeared to be happening about Audrey and Monty. Mrs.
Cunningham was still of the same mind, or no mind, that had prompted her
letter.

"Where is he now?" Mollie demanded.

Audrey did not know.

"Is he with Philip?"

She did not know that either.

"And aren't you going to Lennox Street?"

"I don't think I can."

Mollie's eyes went round the room. I myself have never been in Mrs.
Cunningham's bed-sitter, but I have been in many others and can picture
its frugality--the gas-ring, the little cupboard with the bread and jar
of marmalade in it, the chintz-covered grocer's box on which Mollie's
cup of cocoa stood, probably a slightly fresher wallpaper-pattern where
the Jacobean wardrobe had stood. Lennox Street was positive luxury by
comparison, yet here was Audrey preferring this. Then there was Audrey
herself, heavy-eyed, drained of energy, probably thinking of George
Cunningham and wondering whether any experience was worth repeating.
With Joan for breakfast and Audrey for supper, poor Mollie had had about
enough of it for one day.

"About this marriage," she said abruptly. "Of course, it's not going to
be put off. _I_ shall see to that. I shall have a talk with Monty too
when I've finished with Philip. You're simply run down and want a
tonic."

"Oh, it isn't that," Audrey replied, sinking into an old wicker chair.
"I've thought it all over. I don't think they tell young girls enough
before they get married. They ought to tell them lots more. They ought
to tell them quite plainly, 'You'll have to be prepared for this and
that and the other. You'll have to expect to sit up half the night in
the dining-room with dinner on the table wondering where he is. You'll
have to learn that he hasn't really been run over or anything of that
kind and that it's only their way. You must expect telegrams and
telephone calls and excuses, and you mustn't be surprised if he brings
somebody else with him when he does come. They're like that. And when
they come home in a beastly state----'"

Here Mollie peremptorily interrupted her.

"Leave that brute in his grave," she commanded. "We're talking about
Monty, not him. And I'll see Monty. Now what's all this rigmarole about
milkmen and cellars and all the rest of it? Tell me as I undress you.
I'm going to put you to bed."

But little that was fresh was to be learned here either. Audrey thanked
her again and again for the offer of the house, but she thought she
would rather be here with her gas-ring and cocoa and chintz-covered
sugar-box. Mrs. Cook thought she could arrange it--it would only be half
a crown more.

"Well, I'll see Mrs. Cook too while I'm about it; may as well do the
thing thoroughly. Let me unlace your boots--why, your feet are cold, and
on a night like this! Never mind your hair; you can do it in bed. And
drink the rest of this cocoa. Really I do think I live in a helpless
sort of world--there isn't enough of me to go round--there ought to be
half a dozen of me. Now into bed with you, and you'd better stay there
till I come round in the morning. I'm not going back till Wednesday."

She packed up the cocoa-cups and turned off the gas-ring, opened the
window and wound up the little Swiss clock. As she moved about the room
folding Audrey's clothes and setting things to rights her own letter of
Sunday morning was brought up, but she placed it on the mantelpiece by
the side of the clock, forbidding Audrey to read it till the morning.
Letters didn't matter now that she was here in her own capable,
practical person. Letters took too long. She was going to have things
done much more quickly or know the reason why.

XIII

Philip himself opened the door to her. She gave her cheek to be kissed
and then walked straight in.

"Is Monty here?" were her first words.

"No. I think he's gone out for a walk."

"A walk, at this time of night!"

Philip shrugged his shoulders. "What brings you here, Mollie?" he said.

She was busy untying her veil. "What do you suppose? Everything, of
course."

"Have you had dinner or supper?"

"I had a cup of cocoa at Audrey Cunningham's, and don't want anything
else. Now why didn't you answer my telegram, and why didn't you write
again as you promised?" She threw the hat and veil on the table and her
gloves after them and stood before Philip.

"How are the children?" he asked.

"Perfectly well."

"And Joan?"

Her only answer to this last was a long look. Then she walked to the
little Empire sofa and sat down. He might stand if he wished.

"Well?" she said at last. This was after a full minute, during which
time he had stood by the table idly fingering her veil. Then suddenly
his fingers pushed the veil aside, and he crossed to the sofa and sat
down by her.

"What is it you want to know, darling?" he asked.

"Everything--every little thing from beginning to end," she replied.

"You've seen that I don't want to tell you?"

"Yes, I've seen that."

"And that I probably have my reasons?"

"Oh--reasons!"

"Reasons that are stronger than ever at this moment?"

"Will they go on getting much stronger? If so I can only warn you that a
breaking-point will come."

"Yes. I'm very near it."

"And so am I, Philip."

There was no mistaking her tone. It did not mean that if he continued to
shut her out like this she would do anything violent--live apart from
him, become merely his housekeeper, or anything of that kind. It meant
enormously more than that. Where confidence and trust are, there are few
divergences that do not presently right themselves, few differences that
cannot be resolved; but where these are absent nothing is right. Every
word is possible peril, every silence a hanging sword. In all my
acquaintance I know of no happier marriage than the Esdailes'. You never
go into their house and feel that the air is still charged with some
scene that your arrival has interrupted, you never leave wondering what
weapons will be picked up again the moment your back is turned. Philip
is not without his tempers nor Mollie without her own purposes, but it
stops at that. The rest is brave decencies, with I know not what
tenderer stuff behind. This it was that seemed for the moment to be in
peril.

But suddenly she put her hand on his. She did not speak; the hand spoke
for her. The next moment his other hand had fallen on hers again, so
that both enclosed it. Then their eyes too met.

"It would be an awful thing to risk, Phil," she said quietly.

His eyes begged her. "Won't you let me carry it a little longer alone?"

"I don't believe you can. And if you can," she added, "I don't see what
we got married for."

"But it will be rotten for you too."

"When have I shrunk from that?" she asked.

"Never," he replied in a low voice.

And so Mollie Esdaile too took her portion of the burden.

"Well, where shall we begin?" he asked, with a sigh that it must be so.

"You know best. But tell me first why you didn't write."

"I hadn't seen young Smith. I haven't yet as a matter of fact. But----,"
he drew her head to his breast, and there were some moments during which
he whispered into her ear.

For all his care and guarding it was not possible that she should not at
least tremble. But she did not start within his arms. The tremor passed,
and her dry lips repeated--

"Shot him!"

"For some reason or other. I don't think either of us can quite tell
Joan that, can we?"

"Shot him! Chummy!"

"There's no doubt about it. It was Monty who picked up the pistol.
Neither you nor I can very well tell Audrey that, can we?"

"Monty found the pistol!"

"And I picked up the cartridge-shell myself. The police were round here
at six o'clock on Friday morning looking for them."

"The police! Here!"

In spite of all, Philip could not restrain a little laugh. "Oh, they
didn't find anything. They don't when they've given you warning the
night before. By that time both pistol and case had been at the bottom
of silver-flowing Tamesis for six hours. I dropped 'em in myself from
the middle of Albert Bridge. Do you begin to see what you're in for, my
poor darling?"

It was doubtful whether she yet did. She could still only repeat,
"Chummy shot him! Does that mean----?" Her horrified stare finished the
question.

"Oh, I don't think so," he answered quickly, "at any rate not yet.
Naturally both Hubbard and I have got to stand by Chummy for the
present."

"Then somebody saw Monty pick up the pistol?"

"For the police to know anything about it, you mean? Well, as a matter
of fact that's the purest bad luck. There happens to be a fellow called
Westbury, confound him, and that beastly bullet seems to have fetched up
somewhere in his house; he lives just across the way there. That's all
the police have to go on now that the other things are safely in the
river mud."

Slowly it was sinking into her mind. Her eyes closed for a moment as she
felt the first faint strain of the weight of it. This came with the
thought of Joan.

"But--but----" she said faintly, "--that poor child----?"

"Joan? I suppose she is wondering what's happened?"

"Wondering what's happened.... You may as well know, Philip--it's a
mere trifle at this stage--that they're most awfully thick--far more
than you've been told. You know what boys and girls are nowadays. And
now comes this horrible silence, except for that one little note from
him----"

"Has she had a note from him?" Philip asked quickly. "From the
hospital?"

"There was no address on it. I suppose it was from the hospital?" she in
her turn asked in quick alarm.

"Yes, it wasn't from a prison. When did she get this note?"

"Yesterday morning."

"Did she show it to you?"

"Yes. It simply said he'd had this spill, but was all right, and she
wasn't to be alarmed."

"He didn't mention incidentally that he'd shot a man?"

"Of course not. I don't believe he had."

Philip passed this last point.

"Well, as he's written once I suppose he'll go on writing. He's heaps
better as a matter of fact. So it won't be too hard on her. Anyway,
she'll have to grin and bear it."

"I did hold out hopes that I might be able to take him back with me,"
Mollie ventured.

"You won't be able to do that," said Philip with decision. "Quite apart
from his being fit to travel, we've only gone a certain way in all this,
you know. He'll still have matters to explain. And till he does, I'm
afraid Audrey Cunningham will have to make the best of things too, like
Joan. It wouldn't do her any good to know that Monty was liable to
arrest at any moment."

"But is he?" said Mollie, startled.

"Of course he is. So am I. So are you. So would she be."

"But why?"

In spite of his explanation, I don't think she understood. I don't think
she understands to this day. I don't think that at the bottom of her
anti-social heart any woman does. A delayed wedding or a post without a
lover's letter is a far greater thing than a capital charge in which all
who conspire are principals.

Then, in spite of her fatigue, her skeptical common sense came to her
aid. Philip might involve himself in a web of unelucidated stuff of
which one-tenth perhaps was fact of sorts and the rest pure speculation;
but she knew Chummy. The thought of Chummy as a murderer was absurd
beyond words. Whatever the explanation might be it certainly was not
that. And, yawning as she rose, she told Philip so.

"And that's that," she concluded. "Now do let's go to bed. Of course, if
you think Chummy's a murderer I quite see why you didn't write and why
you don't want to tell Audrey and all the rest of it, but you'll find
it's all a mistake. There's something you don't know, or else there's
been an accident of some kind. If you seriously want me to believe that
Chummy Smith.... What's the matter, darling?"

The last words were a quick, startled cry. She did not know what it was
that lurked at the bottom of the eyes that were looking so deeply and
somberly into her own, but she feared already. His head was slowly
shaking from side to side.

"Philip! What do you mean?" she cried in agitation.

Still the head shook. It was impossible for her mind not to fly back to
that moment, now nearly five days ago, when he had stood blinking in
the doorway with a candle in one hand and a jar of liqueur in the other.

"Tell me quickly what you mean, Philip!" she cried again.

"I saw it."

She fell back. "You----?"

"It wasn't an accident, and there isn't anything I don't know."

"You----?"

The slow sideways shake changed to one single nod. The next moment his
arms were about her and he was leading her to the sofa again. He sighed.
There was no help for it now. If she would have it she must have it all.

"It's the only thing I haven't told you. We may as well get it over," he
said.

Nor did he whisper this time. He spoke in his usual voice, using the
plainest English he could.

But what it was that Philip Esdaile told his wife you must guess for a
little while longer. She was the first living soul to know. And it was a
very different thing from that which she had left Santon to hear.

For it was this overwhelmingly extraordinary yet stupendously ordinary
thing that sent her round to Audrey Cunningham the next morning, but
without comfort for her, with no plans for settling the wedding out of
hand.

It was this same thing that took her back to Santon on the Wednesday,
without Chummy, without help for Joan.

It was this same thing that puzzled Monty Rooke's brain as he took his
midnight walk that night down Roehampton Lane, driven from Audrey
Cunningham's company and sick of the sight of Philip and all his works.

And it was this and nothing else that Cecil Hubbard so much wanted to
know when he knitted his honest brows over hydrophones, sound-ranging,
or whatever other mysterious apparatus it was that Philip Esdaile might
have hidden away in his cellar.

PART IV

THE MAN IN THE PUBLIC-HOUSE

As an eager and passionate student of the Life of my day there are,
within limits, few places that I don't visit and few people I don't on
occasion talk to. I say "within limits," since I admit that there may be
grades at one end of the scale at which I draw the line, while at the
other end there may conceivably be those who draw the line at me. But
within these extremes, if not always familiarly, yet on the whole
without constraint, I sup at coffee-stalls or dine in quite good company
more or less indifferently.

I have found that the best strategic jumping-off-points for the
satisfying of this curiosity about the preponderating average of Life
are two. One--the Public-house--I have already mentioned. There only a
glass screen may divide you from the hawker who has left his barrow for
a few minutes in somebody else's charge, or from the gibused and
silk-mufflered figure who finds a glass of sherry a convenient way of
getting small change for his taxi. The other point of vantage is the
Club, where that same taxi is paid off, but where liveried chauffeurs
may stand for hours by the waiting cars.

I shall come to the Man in the Club by and by. For the present I wish to
return to the Man in the Public-house.

I won't say that I always love him, but I always recognize that I have
him very seriously to deal with. I am not thinking of him now either as
a reader of my journalism or as a potential buyer of my novels, but as a
larger phenomenon. I am thinking of him--loosely I admit--very much as
some political cartoonist might think of a generalized and consolidated
figure that turns a deaf ear to the Bolshevist and his sinister
whisperings on the one side, while the other ear is no less stopped to
the honeyed blandishments of the statesman who so frequently and
extraordinarily seeks to cajole him with flatteries that are both
out-of-touch and out-of-date.

He is Conservative, if Conservatism means that he cynically holds his
hand till he has seen what the next dodge is likely to be; and he is
Liberal in the sense of believing that if everybody looks after himself
then there will not be anybody who is not looked after. You have
overdone it, my good friends and representatives in Parliament. He no
longer believes a word you say. You offer him good and necessary things,
and he glances sideways at you, and his lips shape the words
"By-election." You try to keep him from rash and dangerous courses, and
he wants to know what _you_ are getting out of it. You ration him, but
he knows where to get sugar and butter while you make the best of
saccharine tablets and West African margarine; you de-control, and he
knows better than you do why hens cease to lay and rabbits to breed. It
is we of the cheaper Press who really have him in hand, and he cocks his
ears back at us occasionally. He did so when the _Daily Circus_ gave him
pictures of bathing girls instead of war news; he is doing so to-day
when--oh, lots of things--are pushed on and off the proscenium like
Monty Rooke's camouflage canvas trees and linoleum sentries. He sniffs
at all these things, says nothing, and calls for another glass of his
country's seven-times-accursed beer.

Yet he follows, if not his leader, his neighbor. This he sometimes does
to the most astonishing conclusions, just as he looks up at the sky-line
because he sees somebody else doing so, or is prepared to swear that he
hears a maroon because the man next to him says "Listen!" The vaguer the
rumor the greater is the scope for his self-and-collective suggestion.
He sees Russians, he knows that dead Field-Marshals are still alive. He
can tell you from private information that such-and-such a battalion has
been cut up or such-and-such a battle-fleet sent to the bottom of the
sea. And not one of these larger things is half so large to him as the
smaller thing that looms huge because it is in his own immediate
neighborhood. We on the _Circus_ provide pictures to give him at least
the photographic semblance of body for his belief. But what when the
very flesh and blood of the drama passes along his street every day?
What when he has spoken with the chief actor himself, knows who he
married, the number of his children and their names? What when he knows
the house he lives in, who lived there before, why he left so suddenly,
and the very words he is said to have said on leaving?

Do you see what I am coming to--those first faint whisperings of
something wrong--or if not positively wrong so much the better for
public-house debate on the point--with Philip Esdaile's house in Lennox
Street?

The first that Esdaile knew of all this was from the younger of Mollie's
two maids. Monty and Audrey had arranged to dispense with the services
of these two domestics, but Philip, still lingering on, had wanted the
younger one at least back. She had promised to come, but had not done
so, and Philip had sought her out. Thereupon she had said that she would
rather not come.

"Why?" Philip had asked; but she had given no satisfactory reason.

He had then turned to the second maid, but with no better result.

After all, it didn't matter. It was very little trouble for himself and
Monty to make their own breakfasts. They could take their other meals at
the Chelsea Arts Club, and there would be no difficulty in getting a
woman one or two days a week to clean.

Then, to his extreme astonishment, on the very day after Mollie's
departure for Santon, he left Monty to a sandwich-and-coffee luncheon in
the studio and came out of his house to find Lennox Street almost as
full of people as it had been on the morning when the parachute had
descended on the studio roof.

"What's the matter? Anything happened?" he asked the nearest loiterer at
his gate; but he did not learn what had really happened till he reached
the Club.

Certainly the joke, if it was a joke, appeared to be "on him."
Simultaneously two grinning fellow-members thrust into his hand that
morning's issue of the _Roundabout_. The _Roundabout_, I should say, is
the _Circus's_ (much inferior) rival.

It contained a photograph of Esdaile's house, with the spot where the
parachute had descended marked with a cross.

It was, of course, a thousand pities. No man likes the house he lives in
held up to the idle public gaze. Had the annoying thing been submitted
to my own paper I could have stopped it. Had it been a big thing I might
even have stopped its appearance in the _Roundabout_, for, while we cut
one another's throats in detail, we have our understandings in larger
matters. Hurriedly I scanned the rest of the paper to see whether any
letterpress went with the picture. None did. There was simply the
photograph, with a couple of quite innocent descriptive lines
underneath.

"Seems to me rather a stumer," I said to Willett. "Is Hodgson losing his
grip a bit?"

"Haven't noticed it," Willett replied. "Sound man Hodgson. Doesn't often
do things without a reason. I think we might go a bit slower on
actresses and mannequins. This is the crash we were talking about the
other morning, isn't it?"

"Yes. A wash-out I should have said."

"Perhaps he's playing the local-interest card. He's doing that just now.
I don't see why we shouldn't do more of it."

"I think we'll wait for a better story than that anyway," I replied.
"Well, let's get to work----"

But all that afternoon the thing worried me. It was a trifle, perhaps,
but it was a trifle on the wrong side. More, unlike some other trifles,
I already saw how dangerously capable of further development it was. I
have told you what the attitude of the Press was to this question of
civil flying. It was one of simply awaiting events. But all the time
events were fermenting, so to speak. High over our heads Olympian minds
were shaping and re-shaping policies and plans, and Argus eyes were
tirelessly watching for indications of the receptivity of the popular
mind. Had Hodgson heard something that we had not? As you sometimes see
an insignificant person's affairs, of no interest in themselves,
solemnly weighed by the Lords of Appeal because of some novel and
far-reaching point they raise, was something in the nature of a Test
Case now being sought? Had we on the _Circus_ been wrong in assuming
that the idea was simply to catch and make an example of the careless
joy-rider and the idiot who stunted over towns? Was some more important
point to be raised, and had Hodgson had wind of it?

I was inclined to think not, and for the reason I have just given. Make
a thing big enough, and we hang fairly well together; but take the whips
off, so to speak, and we go as we please. If it had been as important as
all that we should have heard of it. Willett, who is a youngster of
parts, was in all probability right. Hodgson was merely catering for the
local interest.

But still I was uneasy, and my uneasiness had nothing to do with the
annoyance the publication of the photograph of the house in Lennox
Street must cause Esdaile. I was thinking of far graver possible
consequences. Even the lightest measure of Publicity is not a thing
to be trifled with. Here I know what I am talking about. The merry
fellows of the Chelsea Arts Club might pull Esdaile's leg about his
haunted house, and want to know whether the White Lady dropped any
hairpins as she passed, or if the horrible shrouded figure with the
crimson-dripping hands would make a good film; but we journalists have
to take these things a good deal more seriously than that. Publicity,
sometimes of the most incredibly silly kind, is our meat and drink and
hourly breath. All day and every day our brains are on the stretch in
our endeavors to secure it. We bring our heaviest guns to bear on the
elusive thing, are sure we can't possibly miss it this time, let fly,
and lo! we have missed after all. Like a pithball on a fountain, it is
still dancing there untouched, and any penny peashooter may bring it
down when all our trained intelligence has failed.

And what would be the effects on our Case if it came down?

Well, you can see that for yourself. In obscurity lay our hope that the
thing might remain what on the face of it it appeared to be. Switch the
arc-lamps of the great papers on to it, with the whole power-house of
dynamic government behind them, and all was over. Not an aspect of the
Case would go unprobed to the very bottom, and the hungry newspapers
would find themselves, not with a mere aeroplane crash that could be
dismissed in a couple of lines, but with a really fine fat, first-class
Murder Case that would keep them merrily going for weeks.

And I can assure you that we all wanted very badly indeed just such a
Case. We wanted it for more reasons than one. We wanted it, as we always
do, in the ordinary way of our business, but much more we wanted it to
take people's minds off other matters. We wanted it for the same reason
that made us resolutely print those pictures of girls bathing during the
blackest days of the War. We wanted it because the Man in the
Public-house was restless and showed a disposition to pry into affairs
in which his interference is only wanted when a General Election draws
near. Bathing girls were very well in their way; a really high-class
line in Divorce Cases would have outstripped them easily, if I may be
permitted the unintentional expression; but the man who could have given
us on the _Circus_ the first Assassination in the Air could have named
his own price for it.

III

The flat in which I live with the old housekeeper who looks after me is
not in Chelsea at all, but a quarter of an hour's walk away, just round
the corner from Queen's Gate. It is exceedingly comfortable (as indeed
it should be considering the rent I am made to pay for it), I have my
own furniture, and on the whole I don't ask for a much better place to
work in. For, quite apart from my paper, I do work, and I don't want to
give you the impression that the whole of my leisure time is given over
to the investigation of what happens to my Chelsea friends.

I was, as a matter of fact, particularly busy just about that time. Day
after day I was getting up at half-past six in the morning, breakfasting
at my table as I worked, and continuing without interruption till it was
time for luncheon and the office. Since you are probably not in the
white-elephant line of business, I won't tell you which of my novels I
was at work on. I will only say that I at any rate was interested in it,
and, severe as was the strain of writing from seven o'clock in the
morning till midday, I sometimes hated to break off. Mrs. Jardine had
orders not to admit anybody whomsoever between those hours, and obeyed
them to the letter.

You may judge then of my surprise when there walked into my study at
nine o'clock in the morning, and not over Mrs. Jardine's dead body,
Billy Mackwith.

"Don't scold the old lady," he began without preface. "I suppose she
hadn't any barbed wire except that on her chin--it is rather like one of
the gooseberries we used to make on the old wiring-course. I had to see
you."

"Had breakfast? Have a cup of coffee?" I asked him.

"Nothing, thanks. Well, I think I saved friend Philip a certain amount
of trouble yesterday," he said, putting down his hat, stick and gloves.
I don't think Mackwith buys a glossy new silk topper every time he goes
out, but I do honestly believe he buys a new pair of lemon-colored
gloves.

"Oh? How was that?"

"At the inquest on that fellow," he replied. "And by the way, I saw the
_Roundabout_ too. I suppose it has its humorous side, but it's very
annoying too. I should go for 'em for libel. A house can be libeled, you
know. Anyway, it's a good job he's out of town."

I was on the point of saying, "A good job he's what?" when I checked
myself. If you remember, I had last seen William Mackwith, K.C., when I
had left him at Sloane Square Station an hour or two after that
confounded aeroplane accident. He and Hubbard had gone off to keep their
respective appointments, while I myself had followed our check-coated
friend Westbury into a public-house. Whether either Esdaile or Hubbard
had seen him since I didn't know. I now gathered that Billy at any rate
hadn't seen Esdaile.

"Yes?" I said. "What trouble have you been saving him?"

"Well, I told you--I saved him the bother of stopping for the inquest."

I had of course known that there must be an inquest, but I suppose I had
been busy and had forgotten it again. This began to be interesting.

"Tell me about the inquest," I said.

He took a cigarette from his case and offered me one. Then he continued
between puffs.

"Well, as a matter of fact there wasn't very much trouble. One man
seemed inclined to be cantankerous, but we brought it in Misadventure
all right. We----"

I imagine that at this point he caught sight of the expression on my
face, for he stopped suddenly.

"Esdaile did go out of town, didn't he?" he asked.

"I'll tell you about Esdaile in a moment. Go on about the inquest."

He seemed puzzled, but went on.

"Of course, that was my idea in speaking to that Inspector that morning.
It would have been a pity to upset the Esdailes' plans. So I explained
this to the Inspector and gave him my card--said I hadn't seen very
much, but as much as anybody else--result, I was made foreman of the
jury."

Here I had a little flash of illumination as regards Inspector Webster
too. Esdaile, if you remember, had said to him, "Yes, that was Mr.
Mackwith, the King's Counsel; didn't you know?" and Webster had
answered, "Was he indeed, sir?" My respect for the Inspector's powers
of giving nothing away went up several hundreds per cent. Apparently it
was the Inspector who had seen to it that Billy had been put on the
jury.

"Well, you were made foreman. You said one man gave trouble. Who, and
why?"

"Oh, some fellow or other--Westcott or Westmacott I think his name
was--I forget. Insisted on viewing the body. Wanted his money's worth I
suppose. He was sorry he did though."

This was more and more interesting. I asked what sort of a man this
Westmacott was.

"The sort of fellow who would be down in the cellar before his wife and
children when there was an air-raid on, I should say," Billy replied.
"Awful nuisance of a man. But he got his all right. He'll probably be
taking solid food again this day week."

"Then you did see the body?"

"Had to, if only to keep this fellow quiet. He stuck out right to the
finish too, but we got our dozen without him. Prima facie case, of
course. Death by burning, and what wasn't that was general smash-up."

"Was a doctor called?"

"The divisional surgeon was there, but he quite agreed, and I saw to the
rest in my capacity as foreman. There was only one man who wasn't
satisfied, and he was busy----" Billy twinkled wickedly.

You may imagine how I was beginning to relish all this. The Chelsea Arts
with its rags about haunted houses and White Ladies who dropped hairpins
was well enough in its way, but its humor could not compare for a moment
with the spectacle of a rising King's Counsel who practically forced
himself on to a jury-panel, got himself made foreman, and then burked
inquiry by shutting up the only juryman who had as much as a suspicion
of the dangerous truth--and all this in the whitest innocence and purest
good faith! I could have laughed aloud. Had he been a willing instrument
in the affair he could not have done his work more efficiently and
completely.

"Is the poor fellow buried yet?" I asked in a suppressed voice.

"Yesterday," said Billy.

"And he can't be dug up again?"

Mackwith gave me a sharp look. "What do you mean?" he asked quickly.

"Dug. Past participle of the verb to dig. I mean is he buried once for
all?"

"Short of an Exhumation Order from the Home Secretary he is. I don't
understand you."

"And that's rather difficult to get, isn't it?" I continued.

"I should say the North Pole was comparatively easy," Billy replied.

At this point my laughter really became too much for me. I remember
hoping that it didn't seem too rude, but I couldn't help it. Billy let
me finish, and then asked quietly, even gravely, "Now if you're feeling
better, will you please explain?"

I suppose my laughter had been just a little hysterical. As I have
already told you, I myself stand only on the verge of this Case; but not
so my friends, and Esdaile in particular. I remembered--and deep under
that rather remarkable laughter it moved me more than a little to do
so--the extraordinary range and sweep of emotions that had shaken
Esdaile in the course of a single day. I remembered the bright strained
tension of those first minutes after he had come up out of the cellar,
the shock of that telephone message from the hospital that had told him
what had happened to a friend. I remembered that black depression when
Hubbard and I had found him waiting alone in his house for Monty. I
remembered his ache on Joan Merrow's account, our later talk with Monty,
his nascent and grim resolve that in the teeth of all the world the
accident theory should be maintained, his dismay when he had realized
what a post-mortem examination might disclose. I ran over again his
whole day, from that merry breakfast-party to the appearance of
Inspector Webster in our midst at ten o'clock at night.... Well, one
peril was now safely past. In the absence of the Exhumation Order of
which Mackwith spoke, there remained no tittle of material evidence save
a battered bit of nickel-steel in Westbury's possession or in that of
the police. If only for Esdaile's sake, I felt as if a weight had been
lifted from me.

And, on the top of all, Billy Mackwith's innocent complicity must have
moved me to that inane outburst.

"Well, for one thing, Esdaile isn't out of town at all," I said, wiping
my eyes.

"Well, I thought he was. That isn't the joke, is it?"

"Not altogether. You see----"

"Do you mean that stupid _Roundabout_ thing?"

"No.... I beg your pardon, Billy. It came over me all of a sudden. Now I
think I can tell you----"

And so another was added to our nicely-lengthening list of Principals in
the Case.

While I spoke Billy had risen, and was pretending to examine the prints
on my walls. I continued to talk; talking was, in fact, my morning's
work that day. I finished, and there was a long silence. I thought my
barrister-friend would never have done looking at those prints.

Then suddenly he crossed over to my table and stood leaning lightly on
his fingertips.

"Why wasn't I told this sooner?" he asked, his eyes brightly on mine.

For a moment I thought he meant that our neglect to inform him had
landed him into this equivocal position with regard to the coroner's
jury, and was beginning to explain that, being everybody's business, it
had also apparently been nobody's. But he cut me short.

"Oh, I don't mean that. Leave the inquest out of it for the present.
What I mean is that I could have saved our friend a good deal of mental
pain if I'd known--and you too," he added, "from the way you laughed
just now."

"How?" I asked.

"In this way," he replied, sitting down on the edge of my table and
giving his striped cashmere trousers a little hitch. "Say that a shot
has been fired.... Philip, I take it, has been worrying about the
consequences to this fellow Smith, and incidentally to Miss Merrow. Now
if I'd been there to ask Rooke a few material questions I think I could
have assured him that it's a thousand to one there won't be any
consequences."

"Why not?"

"The state of the body," he replied promptly. "Rooke saw it, you say, or
at any rate quite enough of it; I saw it too; and, shot or no shot, it
wouldn't have taken me two minutes to get out of Rooke that there was no
earthly possibility of proving that a shot caused death."

"You mean there were so many other good reasons?"

"Well, I'm not a doctor, but I should say at least a dozen. No wonder
that fellow Westbury--ah, that's his name, not Westcott--had to make a
bolt for it. Unless somebody can be produced who actually saw the shot
fired there won't be the ghost of a Case, and I'm inclined to think that
even then it would reduce itself to shooting with intent to kill or
wound--which is a felony, of course, but not quite the same thing as
murder. No, I think you can take it from me that there won't be any
consequences."

I pondered this for a moment. Then I saw the flaw in it. Every man to
his trade. Here was the advocate speaking, his whole acute mind trained
to one single end--the getting of his man off. But I myself work in a
different material and saw the Case from my own angle.

"One moment," I interposed. "When you say consequences you mean legal
consequences? In other words he'd slip through your fingers simply
because nobody actually saw him do it?"

"He wouldn't even be charged. That was practically a certainty before
the inquest. It's overwhelming now the other fellow's buried."

"But legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences there are
in the world."

"Oh, I'm not speaking of moral consequences. They're quite another
matter," quoth Billy.

"Not as regards Esdaile's having a rotten time over this," I differed.
"Let's look at it from another point of view for a moment. Neither you
nor I know Smith. But Hubbard and Esdaile do, and there's this
friendship between them. And mark you, friendship too isn't always the
same thing it was before the War. There were lots of men we called
friends then very much as a matter of habit; I mean it didn't often
occur to you to ask what kind of a man your friend would be when it came
to the pinch. We've all made new friends, and there are some of the old
ones whose names we never want to hear again. You see what I mean? I
mean the bond must be pretty strong for two men like Esdaile and Hubbard
to take instantly to the thought of shielding Smith like ducks taking to
water. I watched them--it was really exciting--you could read both their
faces like books. Very well. Up to this point we're both talking the
same language. When we say consequences we mean legal consequences.

"But here's where the difference comes in. I don't know what Hubbard's
views are, as I haven't seen him since that night; but I do know what
Esdaile's are. He's shielding Smith--but only till he hears what he's
got to say for himself. He doesn't want to condemn him unheard. I admit
that in the meantime he's taken certain rather risky steps, and my own
opinion is that he won't find it very easy if he wants to retrace them
again; the river'd have to be dredged for a pistol, for example, and
Lord only knows what sort of a reason he'd give for even having
interfered at all. But my point is that he's done nothing final yet.
Smith's got to satisfy him, and if he can't--well, it can't be quite the
same between them again after that, can it?"

"You mean their friendship's broken?"

"Well, that's not quite the way I should put it. It might break, or
possibly it might not. What I mean is that a friendship with a man who's
killed other men in battle isn't the same thing as one with a man who
murders another in peace-time. It may be as good for all I know, as I
haven't done either, but obviously it isn't the same."

"No, I suppose not," Mackwith agreed. "And as for retracing his steps, I
agree with you that the best thing he can do is to keep his mouth shut.
I certainly intend to about that inquest. Life's too short to go moving
for Exhumation Orders."

"Well, next there's Joan Merrow. Exactly the same thing applies to her.
Is she going to marry a soldier or an assassin? Is Esdaile going to let
her? He's her guardian for all practical purposes, and he's got that
question to answer."

The barrister laughed. "I don't think he need worry about that. Miss
Merrow strikes me as a young woman who won't stand any nonsense from
guardians. Well," he took up his hat and stick, "I must be getting
along. I didn't expect all this when I came in, but it seems to me the
Case is over now. Barring these moral consequences of yours, it
practically ended when I gave in our verdict yesterday."

"I hope you're right," I replied. "I thought so myself a few days ago,
though, and that evening a Police Inspector marched in."

He stopped at the door and spoke over his shoulder.

"Oh? You seem doubtful. Any reason?"

"None," I replied. "Only what women call a sort of feeling about it."

Mackwith laughed.

"We'll see about that when it comes," he said. "So long----"

The surface indications were of course of the very slightest. So far
they consisted merely of the photograph in the _Roundabout_, my
speculations whether Hodgson had anything up his sleeve, and similar
trifles. But others were pending. The danger of the coroner's inquest
might be safely past, but at least half a dozen other rocks loomed
immediately ahead. The Aiglon Company, for example, would want to know
what had gone wrong with their machine, and the manufacturers would be
even more interested. The same with the parachute people. The Aero Club
and the Royal Aeronautical Society both have their Accidents
Investigation Committees, and it was quite likely that claims against
various Insurance Offices had already been lodged. You cannot thrust a
finger into the close web of modern life without stirring up all manner
of complexities. I suppose it was these that I had already begun to
fear.

Perhaps most immediate of all was the question of unauthorized flying.
What had that machine been doing over London at all? Military machines
come and go under orders, but not commercial planes piloted by civilian
aeronauts. Setting such things as Murder and Manslaughter entirely on
one side, was it not probable that Smith would be called to book on
this account? From our point of view it was obviously most undesirable
that he should be brought into Court on any charge at all; but what if
we couldn't prevent it? What if, in the inhuman collision of powerful
business interests behind, the lawyers were to get to work--an Insurance
Company resist a claim, say, or the Aiglon people proceed against the
manufacturers on a point of warranty? You may think I was seeing lions
in the path, but it is never safe to reckon on meeting nothing more
formidable than a sheep. And I have nothing against lawyers as a class.
I don't think Billy Mackwith would pick my pocket of a single sixpence.
But I do believe they are like the road-mender with the stone. He hit it
with his hammer ten times without breaking it, and was then asked
whether he did not think he would have a better chance of splitting it
if he turned it splitting-edge uppermost. "How do you know I want to
split it?" he replied. I suspect even Billy of not wanting to split it
sometimes.

"Willett!" I called as I entered my office after lunch that day. "Just
get me out the latest thing about Air Navigation, will you?"

"Is the new one out yet?" Willett replied, walking to the big
glass-fronted cupboard where we keep the current papers of this kind;
the others are on the library shelves downstairs. "I think they were
withdrawn. I seem to remember sending to the Stationery Office and being
told there'd been a muddle of some sort."

"There must be somethi

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