PART VII

THE KING'S ROAD

I

When Philip Esdaile had put into old William Dadley's hands the framing

of two of his pictures I think he had done so largely on compassionate

grounds. As you have seen, his real reason for having the old man round

to Lennox Street that afternoon a few weeks ago had had remarkably

little to do with pictures, but quite a lot to do with a bullet that a

child had been found popping in and out of his mouth. But having made

framing his pretext, I suppose he felt bound to give Dadley a job. I

became sure of this when, calling at the dusty little shop at eleven

o'clock on the following Monday morning, I saw the pictures themselves.

I knew enough about Esdaile's work to see in a moment that there was no

urgency whatever, and that probably he had not wanted the pictures

framed at all. Certainly he could be in no hurry for them. The autumn,

or for that matter the following autumn, would be quite time enough.

This being so, I wondered for a moment that he had troubled me about

them, but I did not wonder for very long. A former suspicion was renewed

in my mind. It seemed to me to confirm Glenfield's prophecy, that

Esdaile, having made as it were impulsive and unconsidered advances to

the rest of us, was about to draw in his horns again. Yet at the same

time he had the appearance of wishing to be on both sides at once--of

keeping his own counsel, but also of endeavoring to "pump" those from

whom he was now withdrawing his half-extended confidence. In a word,

without expressly asking me to spy out the land for him, he wished me

to do so, and trusted to my interest, garrulity or whatnot to report to

him anything I might discover.

Well, had I happened to call on old Dadley before that Sunday afternoon

I had spent so remarkably in his studio I dare say I should have done as

he wished. But that hole in the floor put a very different complexion on

matters. He knew about that hole, but he had no suspicion that I now

shared his knowledge. Therefore if he proposed to act independently I

did not see why I should not do the same. He would make use of me, would

he? Very well. It rather amuses us to be made use of when we guess the

intention, to allow our legs to be pulled with the knowledge that at our

pleasure the position can be reversed. I am very fond of Philip and he

of me, but there is no mush about our friendship. We take it keenly and

with relish, even to our long rivalry at the billiard-table. Undoubtedly

he knew something I didn't know, but on the other hand I thought it

likely that I too had now a minor advantage. He could hardly have known

of the presence of that ring in that hole. He had been round his house

covering up pictures, drawing blinds and removing the key from the

cellar door, and would certainly not have left that ring where it was

had he known it had been there. It had been put there since he had last

seen the hole. The event, as you will see, showed that I was right in

this, and that in one of his main objects he had broken down badly. _A

bon chat bon rat._ I laughed softly.

"Done with you, Philip," I murmured. "I'll send you the packet of

sketches, and you shall know how your precious picture-framing's going

on. But that's all you are going to get for the present."

And so I sought the little shop with the bisected Old Master in the

window, one half cleaned up like day and the other dingy as night.

Dadley was not doing anything in particular except sitting among his

molding-patterns eating an apple. The door of his workshop beyond stood

open, and when I told him my errand he led me into these back premises,

leaving the greater part of the apple on the shelf beneath his counter

but bringing small portions of it in his gray beard. The pictures were

going on very nicely, he said, but he was waiting for glass; I wouldn't

believe how difficult it was to get glass; like asking for the moon, it

was, trying to buy glass. It was as he talked about the price and

scarcity of glass that I drew my own conclusions about those two

pictures. Obviously a job given out of kindness. As obviously it

followed that I myself was being used to serve a turn.

"A fine painter, Mr. Esdaile, it's a pleasure to work for him," the old

man ran on; and I did not reply that in my experience few pleasures in

the world lasted quite so long. I was thinking of other things, the

nature of which you may guess at.

For I wanted to know, by no means for the purpose of passing the

information on to Philip, how Mr. Harry Westbury had fared since I had

last seen him, and whether his friendship with Inspector Webster

prospered. I also wanted to know the latest news of Monty Rooke. I

decided that it was better to begin with Rooke, so did not hesitate to

ask Dadley whether he had seen him.

"Oh, yes, he was in here last Thursday--no, Wednesday," the old man

replied. "Paspertoos. Six of them, or else eight; no, six; I think the

other two are Mr. Hammond's. I can't show you them because they're all

glued up in the press. And I can get the glass for small things like

that. It's the large plate that breaks my heart."

"Then Mr. Rooke is working again?" I said. "The last time I saw him he

told me that his removal had rather interrupted his work."

The lids dropped over the kind old eyes. "Yes, sir, and I understand Mr.

Rooke's had trouble as well."

This, if he meant Mrs. Cunningham, I did not propose to discuss, and he

went on.

"Well, you get over these things when you're young, but it seems hard at

the time. And troubles seem always to come together in a lump. I

sympathize with Mr. Rooke, which some doesn't. He's always been a very

pleasant gentleman to me."

"Oh? Who doesn't sympathize with Mr. Rooke?" I asked.

He hesitated for a moment. "Oh--there's a few here and there--but it

will blow over--it will blow over. I think it's blowing over now as a

matter of fact."

It was at this point that I suddenly decided on a measure of candor. He

was a likeable old soul, long past even such innocent relish of contest

as that I entertained towards Philip, a lover of peace and the least

mischievous of gentle gossips.

"Do you mean the affair of that parachute that morning?" I asked him. "I

was there, you know."

His ivy-veined old hand smoothed the edge of his mitering-machine.

"Yes. I know you were," he said. "Yes, I know you were. But I think

it'll blow over now that Mr. Westbury's taken this turn he has."

"Mr. Westbury? Yes, I remember. What turn has he taken?"

"Well, sir, as a matter of fact, that's what some of us is waiting to

hear," he replied.

II

From the point of view of my profession the story he told me was not

without interest. I give it for what it may be worth, not as an instance

of mental abnormality, but merely as it bore on our Case.

I have said that Westbury was about thirty-five, which means that he was

still under thirty when the war broke out. It is no man's business,

certainly not mine, to enter into the question whether he should or

could have joined up, nor whether he would have been of much use if he

had. His interest to me lies in the fact that he did not. For all I know

he may have been of far greater use to his country in his brown check

than in a khaki jacket, for his experience of his complicated profession

was considerable, and I understand that he became a person of some

little temporary importance when the commandeering of hotels and other

properties got fairly into swing. Therefore he did not attest under the

Derby Scheme, and his subsequent applications for exemption were

allowed.

I repeat, I wish to be perfectly fair to him. During a few London

air-raids he probably saw as much of the actuality of war as many

thousands of uniformed men who spent their year or two years "in

France." We see these things a little more clearly now. "In France" may

mean much or it may mean very little. Of our millions, I have been

informed that only about eight per cent. went "over the top," and that

this eight per cent. consisted largely of the same men over and over

again. Later the gunners' casualties approached those of the infantry,

and I believe there was a time when the losses of the Flying Corps were

twenty per cent. per week. Granted that there was no arm that did not

suffer its proportion of loss; but--we know now by whom the brunt of the

fighting was borne. Mr. Harry Westbury may claim, if he wishes, that he

did as much of it as many and many another whose allowances were

credited to them at Cox's.

But there was a strain of resentment in his nature, by no means uncommon

among his kind save that he experienced it in an uncommon degree. I

myself had heard him say of our flyers, "They're paid for it, aren't

they--they know the risks, don't they?" but it went much further than

that. According to Dadley, he showed suspicion and mistrust towards any

who had given an eye, a limb or life itself. He seemed to think that in

some obscure way these people had wronged him. And, Dadley went on, in

some cases this mistrust became positive dislike and hate.

"If the war was to begin all over again I fancy Harry'd be in it next

time," he said. "Speaking for myself, I should say it worried him. Got

it on his mind like. Maybe it's that that's stopped him going about very

much except to a few places. Sometimes you'd think he'd quarreled with

the whole world."

"From the little I've seen of him I can't say I found him a

prepossessing young man," I observed.

"Well, myself, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him," the old man

continued, with a shake of his head. "Many a man without a leg's

happier than what Harry is. He isn't even the man he was two or three

weeks ago. He thinks everybody's got their knife into him. Nor that

inquest he was on didn't do him much good neither. He's moped and

muttered about it ever since. Talks to himself, he does, up and down the

streets and play-acts dreadful things he's going to do, as you might

say. Says he won't stand this and that and the other. Any little thing

sets him off. Then there was that about that bullet. I expect Mr.

Esdaile told you about that?"

"Yes."

"Well, he goes clean off his head about that sometimes. Has the kids

downstairs--fetches 'em out of bed--and makes 'em tell him it all over

and over again. Says somebody tried to murder 'em. Oh, and a whole lot

more nonsense. What he ought to do is to get away into the country for a

bit, but when the doctor tells him that, he glares and says it's all a

conspiracy to get him out of the way so things can be hushed up."

"What things?"

"Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now--go

somewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with all

this muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away for

a bit."

"You say a doctor's attending him?"

"Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goes

round--Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is--but Harry won't do what he

tells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go to

bed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couch

pulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour together

staring out. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writes

scores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them.

They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories."

"What are the letters about?"

"All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and another

for the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's going

downhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never any

particular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a man

you've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not much

more than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on for

forty years."

I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not being

sympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"

But at that moment the most astonishingly unexpected thing happened. A

customer came into his shop. And so, as Dadley grabbed incredulously for

his spectacle case, my question went unanswered.

III

One thing at any rate now seemed fairly certain, namely, that if what

Dadley told me was true it was not likely that a man of Inspector

Webster's penetration would pay much attention to the mutterings of an

incipient megalomaniac. For, if I could guess at the signs at all, it

was megalomania. I have not made a systematic analysis of those

infinitely intricate mental states that we speak of conglomerately as

"war nerves." I am not prepared to say that one man may bitterly grudge

another something from the taking of which he himself has drawn back his

hand, nor yet (to turn the case the other way round) that there is not

on occasion just as heady and overweening an egotism on the part of the

envied man. It is useless to generalize on these matters. It is also not

quite decent. The least we can do is to mind our own business, the most

to consider the given instance on its merits. It is simply as yet

another curious by-product of our Case that I am speaking of Westbury.

Quite the most curious thing about it was that he was the only one of us

all who had, in the sense of public duty, been wholly and entirely in

the right throughout. But a little reflection showed me that it was

precisely therein that the germ of his malady lay. It was _because_ of

this consistent technical rightness that he was now in process of

arrogating to himself all the rightness in the world. No doubt he had

been technically right when he had decided that his special knowledge of

estates was of more solid use to his country than his skill at arms

would have been. He had been technically right if, in the very uncommon

circumstances, having reason to believe that a pistol had been moved

that should only have been moved by the police, he had taken steps to

ascertain that it really was a pistol Rooke had carried in his pocket.

He had been right when, finding a bullet in his own house, he had

instantly reported the matter to Inspector Webster. He had been right in

demanding a post-mortem; right when Mackwith had all-unconsciously

thwarted this; and oh, how right when, in that Chelsea back street, he

had broken furiously out on me as an accomplice in the suppression of

things that should have been brought to the light of day! Yes, it was

all this rightness that was precisely the trouble. It is not good for

any of us to be right so often as that. Personally, if I am right twice

running there is no living with me. The real cure for Westbury would

have been for him to find himself a few times in the wrong.

So, as I left Dadley's shop, I pictured him sitting there at his bedroom

window, his furious eyes fixed on Esdaile's roof, his furious heart

brooding on his rightness, and bearing the whole of the burden of our

collective offense. What a contrast between this just man and our

malefactor away in the country, Charles Valentine Smith

himself--courting, care-free, and in a danger that appeared to be

lessening with every hour that passed! Truly the Princes of this World

seem to have the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, and the Westburys

to be persecuted like the prophets before them! I could understand old

William Dadley feeling sorry for him. At the same time, I had not one

single atom of sorrow for him myself.

For we are not ruled by these municipal virtues. We say we are; it is as

much as our lives are worth to say anything else; but we know better.

Wonderful Case, to bring all this out, to present so dramatically that

single Question--the first man had to answer it and the last man will

have to answer it--without which there is no society nor state nor

government at all! Westbury had the whole weight of intellectual

approval--and nothing whatever else! Unreservedly our whole nefarious

conspiracy was to be condemned--yet something bade us stand

unflinchingly by our friends!... I was wiser than I knew when I wrote

that we all do precisely what we want to do and look for reasons

afterwards. And if it be said that Society cannot be run on these

lines, the answer is that it is our business to see that it is run. We

_have_ to serve God and Mammon though the God be the God of Injustice

and the Mammon the Mammon of Righteousness. We _must_ face both ways,

square law with force. There is _no_ escape from worshiping tradition

even when we break it, from giving revolt our acknowledgment even as we

trample it down. The world has got to go on and we to take sides.

Do you see why I laughed to see the hay our Case had made of the merits

of our respective sides?

I was ruminating thus when a bodily collision brought me with a shock

back to earth again. I had scattered somebody's armful of parcels, a

tissue-paper bag with a couple of eggs in it among them. Instantly I was

in a consternation of apology. Diving, I managed to rescue a small loaf

from rolling from the kerb and to save from a passing foot a packet of

cooked ham. Then, flushed and humbled, I heard a laugh.

"Look here--I don't so much mind your upsetting my grub, but I do mind

being cut," said a voice--Rooke's voice.

IV

What a change for the better! He had shaved, his boots shone, the soft

collar round his neck was a clean one and his gray tie was fastidiously

tied. His face had a brightness again, he was engaged in the pleasant

ordinary task of buying groceries, and Dadley had just told me that he

was framing "paspertoos" for him. Was another of the clouds of the Case

breaking up?... On the spot I decided to lunch with him, and told him

so.

"All right, but the eggs are up to you," he said.

Inside his little den in Jubilee Place the improvement was no less

marked than in his person and demeanor. There was not a spot on his

little red-and-white checked table-cloth, his crockery shone, his bed

was neatly made. He had faced the new situation and had ceased to mope.

In my waistcoat pocket was a ring he had once given to Audrey

Cunningham. Seeing his cheerfulness, I had not the slightest intention

of reopening matters by telling him anything about that ring. If Audrey

dropped rings as casually as he picked up pistols, very well; it was not

my business to mar this cheery new beginning.

"Lightly boiled, or how?" he said, my egg poised in a teaspoon over the

saucepan on the gas-ring.

"Yes--lightly boiled--anything," I replied. "Got any mustard for this

ham?"

That too he had, and he had taken care over the preparation of his jug

of coffee. He was entirely the old Monty again.

I don't know when I have enjoyed a lunch more, not even excepting the

washing-up, which he insisted on doing the moment we had finished. "If

there's one thing I loathe it's coming in to a lot of unwashed things,"

he explained. "Not a ha'porth of trouble once you get the habit."

Then he showed me the work on which he was engaged. That too had energy

and movement again. One small sketch I liked and bought on the spot--a

little thing, neither black-and-white nor color, or both if you like--a

crayon sketch of a couple of infants in the Flower Walk in Kensington

Gardens, one of them with a shining round sixpenny balloon touched with

a whiff of pink, the other with the doleful rag of one that had just

exploded--the slightest, sweetest little bit of treasure-trove of the

eye picked up in an afternoon's stroll.

"But not the copyright," he stipulated with a quick sideways glance at

me. "I might be able to reproduce."

"Right; not the copyright," I agreed. I didn't mention it to him, in

case it shouldn't come off, but I thought I might be able to help him

with reproduction-rights. We have a good many side-shows on the

_Circus_.

Then, in the middle of turning over further sketches, he broke suddenly

into a gesture of remembrance.

"By the way--I knew there was something I wanted to tell you! A funny

sort of thing happened the other day. You remember that police-sergeant

or whatever he was, who came into Esdaile's place that night?"

"He was an Inspector."

"Inspector then. Well, I've seen him. Had a talk with him. Funny sort of

talk too--I've been puzzled about it ever since. I was loafing round

Sloane Square. There's a flower-woman there, interesting type of

head--this sort----" He turned over one of the sketches and on the back

of it his pencil flowed into a few swift assured lines. ("That's rather

like her, by the way," he said in parenthesis, "regular cast-iron

gypsy.")

"Well," he went on, "her face struck me as rather an interesting

contrast with a lot of silly mimosa she had in her basket--I hate

mimosa; so I was taking peeps at her, not sketching, you understand,

when I heard somebody behind me say, 'Well, Mr. Rooke!' and I turned. I

jumped rather. It was this Inspector fellow, and he'd a funny sort of

expression on his face, not laughing exactly--sort of quizzing--I can't

describe it----

"Then he said something that I thought the most infernal neck.

"'You aren't thinking of adopting a flower-woman's baby this time, are

you, Mr. Rooke?'

"Damned impudence, wasn't it? Fancy the beggar knowing that!"

Monty was ruffling up at the recollection. I could not resist a smile.

"Chelsea knows that exploit of yours as well as it knows the Albert

Bridge, Monty," I assured him. "Go on."

"Well, then he said, 'You'll have to get out of that habit of adopting

things, Mr. Rooke. You never know where it ends.'

"'What do you mean?' I said. He _was_ smiling now, but I felt a bit

uneasy. We did stuff him up a bit that night, you know. He's a dark

horse, that fellow.

"'It doesn't do, Mr. Rooke,' he said. 'Different men take different

views of their duty, and you'll be striking one of the other sort one of

these days!'

"'I don't know what you mean,' I said. 'Oh yes you do,' says he. 'I'm

dashed if I do,' says I. 'Then you're lucky not to be dashed a good deal

worse,' says he; 'you take my advice, Mr. Rooke, and stop adopting

things, babies or what not. You might burn your fingers. You

might--ahem!--blow 'em off'....

"And he nodded and marched off.

"Now what the devil do you think's his game?"

I know of no more exciting mental pleasure than that of finding your _a

priori_ guesses taking shape and substance in the realm of actual

things. I suppose it is the triumphant cry of your deeper self telling

the other self "I told you so!" Remember how little I knew of Inspector

Webster, yet with what instinctive reserve I had hedged my impression of

him. "A dark horse?" Yes, of quite the darkest kind. I recapitulated the

degrees of his darkness. He had come round to Lennox Street that night,

probably fresh from his talk with this fellow Westbury; he had put a

whole series of questions, but of implications so guarded that in

writing that portion of the story I had to itemize and underline what I

surmised to be their real purport; and he had instituted a search of

Esdaile's premises--twelve hours later! Why twelve hours later? Why not

on the spot, there and then? Why give Philip this law, that as a matter

of fact he had made use of to drop that pistol into the river?

Could it be that he knew his House and Estate Agent better than we

did--knew his vanity, dullness, and the risks of basing a charge on his

unsupported word? No doubt he had questioned Westbury in terms far more

explicit than those he had used to us. Unless Westbury had actually put

his hand inside Rooke's pocket, probably all he could swear to was that

the pocket contained something heavy. Not until late in the same

afternoon had the bullet been found. Suppose Webster had said to

Westbury, "Not so quickly, my friend; you said nothing about a pistol at

the time; it only became a pistol when the bullet was found; we can't go

putting the cart before the horse like that; evidence is evidence; you

can't let half a day pass and then remember things to fit the Case;

_you_ may feel sure of a thing, but could you make a jury sure?" Suppose

he had said something like this? The police too are bound by the

probabilities of conviction. It is no credit to them to fail on a

charge.

And a man who can say, "Was it indeed, sir?" when informed of the

identity of a distinguished King's Counsel who has expressly announced

himself only a few hours before is emphatically not the man to think

that he can make a jacket for a large gooseberry by skinning a

small-sized flint.

V

"Now what was his game, do you think?" Monty asked again.

"He was giving you a piece of wholesome advice," I answered promptly.

"But 'You stop adopting things; you might--ahem!--blow your fingers

off.' He said it like that. I haven't put in the 'ahem.' That was his.

It looks to me as if he knew about that pistol."

"It has very much that look," I agreed blandly.

"But how? I can't understand yet how Esdaile knew, but this Police

Inspector----!"

"'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,'" I

murmured. "You never can tell, Monty."

"Oh, stop burbling. How do you suppose he did know?"

"Let me see. You told Philip it was his keys that made your pocket bulge

so, didn't you?"

"Oh--if you're just going to rot me----"

"I'm not rotting you. I've a feeling that if you'd told Inspector

Webster the same thing he'd have been happy and delighted to believe

you."

"But how does he know _any_thing about what's in my pocket?" said the

bewildered Monty....

Should I tell him? Why not? I had studiously avoided anything that might

have reminded him of Mrs. Cunningham. Pluckily as he had taken himself

in hand, I did not think that that wound was healed. But the episode of

the pistol was another matter. I felt singularly and perhaps not quite

justifiably light-hearted about that. The mists of the Case were

perceptibly thinning. What he had just told me about Inspector Webster

let still a little more sun through them. To all appearances the

Inspector had dismissed Monty with a quite characteristic admonition.

And that being so, it was perhaps his due that I should not leave Monty

altogether unarmed in the event of any contingency with Westbury.

And so I told him how his pocket had been fingered as he had descended

that ladder.

He was furious. "Damned pickpocket!" he broke out. "I should have

thought these sharks made enough out of their filthy premiums nowadays

without putting their hands right _into_ your pockets!"

"I didn't say he did that exactly."

"It's the same thing. And anyway, how did he know? What made him

think----?"

"Perhaps he saw you pick it up. Could he have done that from down

below?"

"Might. I shouldn't have thought so though. Of course, I was flurried."

"But you wouldn't have thought it in Esdaile's case either," I reminded

him.

"No, that beats me," he admitted.

"And I wouldn't be _too_ virtuous about it, Monty. In any case you'd no

business with the thing, you know."

"Oh, stuff!" he scoffed. "It's you that's being virtuous."

And, with that ring in my waistcoat pocket that I had picked up with no

more justification than he had the pistol, he might have added that I

was hypocritical too.

VI

To tell the truth, that ring was beginning to worry me a little. I don't

mean my possession of it, since I had no intention of pawning it, and

was prepared to hand it over to its rightful owner as soon as I felt

that that course would not do more harm than good. My concern was about

the severed relation of which it had been a symbol. I wondered whether I

was not perhaps a little excessively delicate on Monty's behalf. If my

eyes, wandering round his tidy room, had encountered a copy of the _Era_

or been given any other excuse for introducing Audrey Cunningham's name,

I think that after all I should have risked it. But "When in doubt cut

it out" is a safe motto, and I remained silent.

I had had, however, an idea. Mrs. Cunningham might be "fed" with men,

but it was not likely that she had broken off her engagement without

saying something to Mollie Esdaile about it. What was the harm in

writing to Mollie, not necessarily mentioning the ring, but asking for

her version of whatever had happened?

The more I thought of it the more I liked the idea. Match-making is

rather out of my line, but I am not entirely indifferent to the

happiness of my friends, and I had not forgotten poor Monty's anguished

cry of "Dawdy! Dawdy!" the last time I had visited him in Jubilee Place.

I do not call it match-making merely to inquire whether a possible

obstacle may not be removed. If it was the Case's doing, the Case's

solution ought to get matters right again. A little prematurely,

perhaps, I was growing to the belief that the question was not whether

the Case would settle itself, but how.

Before I left him, which I did very shortly afterwards, I had determined

to write to Mollie. I did so indeed that very night. I did not mention

the ring. I simply gave her a faithful picture of the two Montys, the

first one so distressing, and the second so enheartening, and asked her

what about the other side of the affair.

It was nearly a week before I received her reply, which, when it did

come, contained that invitation to spend a month at Santon that I have

already anticipated in this story. It was a curious letter in some ways.

Parts of it, even certain parts that touched Audrey Cunningham directly,

were as free and frank as I have always found Mollie to be; but other

parts were noticeably the other way. For example, she wrote:--

"The engagement is certainly 'off' as far as I can make out, and

whether there's any chance of their coming together again I really

can't say. She gave me to understand not, but it's three weeks

since she wrote, and Philip hasn't heard from Monty at all."

That seemed frank enough, but, on the very same page, was this:--

"I don't think it's absolutely impossible they'll make it up.

Perhaps I oughtn't to say this, and I'd rather not give you my

reason, but I don't think it's altogether out of the question. But

the circumstances are so peculiar. Everything's really most awfully

mixed, and I don't want to raise even my own hopes. I can't see why

you didn't ask Monty," etc., etc.

"I'd rather not give you my reason"--"the circumstances are

peculiar"--"things are most awfully mixed"--those were the dubious

parts. I was certain that she, as well as Philip, was holding something

back. The letter, in fact, seemed to confirm the opinion I had formed on

finding that ring so fantastically embedded in the studio floor, namely,

that before shaking the dust of Lennox Street from her feet Audrey

Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery, which she had since shared

with Mollie and Mollie now declined to share with me. In this, as you

will see, I was partly right and partly wrong.

In the meantime, suppression for suppression. I had not been candid

either. I had said nothing about finding the ring. Perhaps after all my

letter had got the answer it deserved.

But the invitation to visit the Esdailes at Santon tempted me extremely.

Quite apart from the Case, I hungered and thirsted for the air of my own

country. And there was the Case itself. Now that, with Glenfield's

countenance, Westbury's deterioration and the merely admonitory attitude

of Police Inspector Webster, it was becoming almost a jocund affair, its

center of gravity had shifted away from London to the country. It was in

the country that our young slayer was demonstrating murder to be the way

of happiness. It was in the country that Philip Esdaile was apparently

machinating to get the half-escaped strings back into his own

controlling fingers again. And it was from the country that Mollie was

now writing her interesting blend of candor and reserve.

And what was there left of much interest in London? It seemed to me very

little. In Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Temple the lawyers were no doubt

busily getting up their briefs for _Scepter Assurance Corporation v.

Aiglon Aviation Company_, but I could depend on Mackwith to keep me

posted on all that. In the columns of the _Circus_ I had awakened quite

a lively, if somewhat rambling, correspondence, in which the name of

Charles Valentine Smith had not definitely appeared, but for the

appearance of which, if the Case demanded it, I could arrange at a

moment's notice. All the life and interest seemed to have passed out of

these things. That is the worst of this intangible operation of

Publicity--it possesses you in spurts, with gaps of complete

listlessness. It is super-heated, and at a change of atmosphere

condenses into a few chill drops. Then, when you have brought it up to

the proper state of rarefaction again, you find that the popular

interest has shifted leagues away. Already my correspondence showed

signs of becoming as much beside the mark as had that nine-days'-wonder

that one morning had filled Lennox Street with a gaping crowd and had

set mysterious rumors circulating with the morning milk-carts.

Publicity, like lightning, never strikes in the same place twice. Nobody

now cared a rap whether an aeroplane had crashed in Chelsea on a May

morning months ago, nor how, nor why. Nobody was going to drag the bed

of the Thames for the identification-number of a useless Webley and

Scott pistol. A spent bullet, flying in at an open window, had _not_

killed an Estate Agent's child, and Inspector Webster had far too much

work on his hands to dream of applying to the Home Secretary through the

proper channels for an Exhumation Order. Cases left long enough

unanswered answer themselves. The scene changes, the circumstances

alter, the world moves on.

I too felt like moving on. Glenfield had offered me a holiday, and I had

my book to finish. As well finish it at Santon as anywhere else.

Santon--its cornfields and skies, the cliffs for ever a-racket with the

seabirds' clamor, the dappled fawn of its sands! I was there in my heart

already.

I wrote to Mollie that very night.