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Title: A Case in Camera

Author: Oliver Onions

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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
BY
OLIVER ONIONS

AUTHOR OF
"THE COMPLEAT BACHELOR"
"IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE"
"THE DEBIT ACCOUNT"

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1920 and 1921,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 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

I
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.

II
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.

IV
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.

V
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.

VI
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

I
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.

II
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?

IV
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.

V
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.

VI
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.

IX
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 inside
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.

X
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?

XI
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

I
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.

II
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.

IV
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.

V
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.

VI
"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.

IX
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.

X
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.

XI
"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

I
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?

II
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.

IV
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——"

V
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 something in force," I said. "I want that, whatever it is."
"Just a moment—ah, here we are!"
Willett was both right and wrong. A certain issue of Statutory Rules and
Orders had as a matter of fact been withdrawn, but an amended reprint was
now available. He handed the slender white booklet to me. It was dated
April 30th, 1919, and had therefore been in force for some days at the time
of the Lennox Street accident.
I walked to my desk and settled down to the study of it.
I don't know that I was very much the wiser for my efforts. So much
seemed to be in the air in every sense of the word. The paper was not even
an Act, but an Order, and it seemed to me that its phrases about
"contravention of these Regulations" might in practice mean almost
anything. What, for example, did "stress of weather or other unavoidable
cause" mean? What would happen in case of a kind of accident expressly
excluded from the Order—"within a circle of a radius of one mile from the
center of a licensed aerodrome"? What about the special cases permitted
"by direction of the Secretary of State on the recommendation of a
Government Department"? I don't mean that the intention of it all wasn't
plain enough. The drafters of the Regulations had done the best they could
in a new and totally unexplored field. For all practical purposes this new
science was just as old as the War, and these detailed points of law had not
arisen during the War. But they were coming up now, a whole body of
practice still to make, and any youngster who chose could loop the loop and
what little proved Law there was at one and the same time.
In fact, the only quite unmistakable paragraph I found was the one that
promised proper castigation "to any person obstructing or impeding the

authorities" and so forth—that is to say, Hubbard, Esdaile, myself and the
rest of our little gang of law-breakers.
And, before I pass on, bear with me for one moment while I ask you to
observe how all History began to loom behind our Case, ready at any
moment to drive it irresistibly forward. For that four-centuries-old
Upspringing of daring and glory and adventure that we call the Renaissance
is come suddenly and magically into our midst again to-day. There are now
to seek and to chart and to possess Indies and Orients, not of the
unembraced and bridal waters, but of the already defeated and subject Air.
Our age hears the old imperious call, and across four hundred years of time
the hands of a George receive Romance from those of an Elizabeth. It may
seem a far cry from this to the Man in the Public-house, but it crept and
lapped about our Case like a slowly-mounting flood. Idle rumors brought
with the milk to Chelsea doorsteps; a Press eager to take its lead from any
momentary whiff that ruffles the popular mind; a Government that without
that Press could not govern for a week; and the radiance of this new
sunburst over all—this is the apparatus of our Drakes and Burleighs of to-
day. And, so long as the mighty thing went forward unimpeded, what did
any individual matter?

VI
"Foreman? You may well say foreman! But he hasn't finished with me yet!
You've seen what it says in to-day's Roundabout, haven't you? Very well,
young-fellow-me-lad; you watch it! They laugh best that laugh last. It isn't
over yet!"
I was grinding my teeth behind my copy of the paper he had just mentioned.
The thick-headed fool had done it. I was not reading the paper; I was
merely using it to hide behind as I stood at the Public-house counter with
one foot on the brass rail.
"Over? It hasn't begun yet!" Westbury continued, his convex eyes glaring
from one face to another. "It's ventilation these things want—ventilation in
the public Press—and I tell you I haven't started yet! I went into this Case
out of public spirit—'Webster,' I says to our friend, 'if you want me you
know where to find me'—I'm a busy man with my own private affairs to
look after, but right's right and I'm not the man to hang back when forward's
the word—and if they think I'm as easy stopped as all that they're mistaken,
K.C. or no K.C.! The body was viewed—some of 'em didn't want to, but I
saw to that—but I contend there ought to have been a proper post-mortem.
And you may take it from me that if there had been this Case would have
gone forward."
"Do you mean to a Criminal Court, Harry?" a voice asked.
"I said gone forward; I didn't say what Court. We'll see about Courts by and
by. This Mister Smith or whatever his name is will be had up for flying to
the danger of the public, and we'll see what happens then!"
Once more I vehemently cursed him. It was half-past eight at night, with
nothing unusual doing at the office, and I had left Willett in charge so that I
might find Westbury. It was perfectly certain that after Hodgson's leading
article of that morning Westbury would not spend the evening in the
retirement of his home, but would be out for what young Willett calls "gin-
and-glory." As it happened, I had run him to earth at my very first attempt,
in the same Saloon Bar in which I had first seen him.

You may know Hodgson's leading-article style. If we on the Circus don't
imitate it it is not that we deny that it "gets across." It is allusive, rorty and
familiar, and there is frequently common sense behind it. If the Man in the
Public-house likes his news served up in that way you can't blame Hodgson
for meeting his wishes. This is what he had written, no doubt sending his
Chelsea sales up by hundreds of quires:—
"TOM, DICK AND ICARUS.

"Our correspondent Mr. Harry Westbury is some lad. You will find his
letter at the foot of the next column to this. Why, asks Harry, in these
days when you may consider yourself lucky to have a roof over your
head at all, should your head and that roof be brought into sudden and
violent contact? Not that Harry is a jumper; he isn't going to challenge
Joe Darby; but the ceiling and your occiput can establish connection
just the same if the former comes down on the latter. What he really
means is that aeroplanes, subject to sudden syncopes of the engines,
have no business over Chelsea's pleasant roofs at all.
"H.W. does not claim that he personally suffered damage from the
crash we reported last Friday. But he is a respected House and Estate
Agent residing in the district and speaks feelingly. C'est son métier, as
our gallant and Gallic Allies say. He means, we take it, that if civil
aviation is to develop, corresponding safeguards must be developed
side by side with it. Here we are with Harry all the way. Our
Olympians may have burst a number of brain-cells over the present
Regulations, but they will have to find a new wave-length. Tom, Dick
and Harry we know, but we have not yet been properly introduced to
Tom, Dick and Icarus. No, sir, not with building materials at their
present price and the plumber rolling up in his Rolls-Ford. The pilot
who came down in Chelsea last Thursday is said to have been
employed by the Aiglon Company. Nuff said. If the Aiglon or any
other Company is out for public support it knows what to do. In the
meantime we hope Mr. Westbury won't raise his house premiums. But
that is another story.

"The Man in the Public-house."

That was the whole text of it. Was it fair comment on a matter of public
interest? Well, I don't say it wasn't. Was it a timely reminder that high-
spirited lads who had lately been praised for their dare-devilry must now
pull themselves together and fall into line with the new conditions? Very
likely. Was it a legitimate attempt to arouse interest in the age's new
wonder, or merely a political stick with which covertly to beat some high
official dog or other? I didn't know.
For my mind was occupied with quite other thoughts. From round the edge
of my paper I was trying to sum up Westbury—a young man, but
unexercised; seldom drunk, as a man in decent physical condition would
have been on half that he swallowed, but already habituated and inured;
probably quite well-to-do, in that mysterious way that causes tradesmen
quietly to acquire their own houses and to drive in their own two-seaters to
places of entertainment such as that I was in; and yet in a sense a minor
man of affairs as distinct from a tradesman, a cut above the shirt-sleeves-
and-counter business, if not exactly entitled to style his occupation a
profession. He had got over the first overweening stage of the vanity of that
day's publicity; he was now a little disparaging what he wouldn't have
allowed anybody else to disparage; was treating Hodgson quite as a
familiar, in fact, which as far as I was concerned he was perfectly at liberty
to do. A dangerous beast, I thought again, and none the less dangerous now
that Billy Mackwith, as foreman of that coroner's jury, had got his back
thoroughly up.
"Yes, Mr. Mackwith, K.C. or O.B.E., or whatever you call yourself," he was
muttering again, "they laugh best that laugh last. If he'd even said to me,
'What's your opinion, sir?' I won't say but what I should have thought a bit
more of him, but him and his silk hat and gloves ... you wait a bit! There's a
few will be surprised before this Case is over!"
It seemed to me that he scarcely took the trouble to veil what he really
meant. Nor was I surprised at the way in which his hearers evidently took
his words. For, looking from his cunning yet stupid face to the six or seven
other faces about him, I could make a guess at their attitude too. Remember
those first faint rumors that had found their way with the morning's milk to
Audrey Cunningham's doorstep. Remember what whispered currency they
must have had before they had come to Audrey at all. Remember that
photograph in the Roundabout that had filled Lennox Street with a gaping

crowd that morning, a crowd that had taken a couple of days to diminish
and die away. Esdaile told me later, too, that for a week he had been
conscious of turning heads as he had walked along the streets.... Oh, I could
have made this Case of ours a thing of pistols and parachutes only, but I
wished to go a little farther than that. Not that I have any particular views
on mass-suggestion at large. My business is simply to observe its working.
And here I was, in a Saloon Bar, observing it in a very curious form.
For I think that every single member of the group to which I was listening
behind my newspaper had more than an idea of what Westbury really
meant. I think they knew perfectly well that when he spoke of flying to the
public danger he meant very, very much more. I don't think there was one
of them who had not heard the story of Inspector Webster and the bullet.
Secretive as he was, he would be garrulous among his intimates if garrulity
enhanced his self-importance. I am perfectly certain that every one of them
knew all this, knew that he had been thwarted in his legitimate demand for a
post-mortem examination, and knew in addition something else that I also
was to know by and by.
Then suddenly something happened that placed all this beyond any doubt
whatever.
Besides their own party, I was the only person at that end of the room, and I
had been there long enough to have drunk three glasses of beer instead of
the one that still stood only half empty on the counter at my elbow. As I
listened the voices suddenly dropped. There was a minute of whispering,
during which (realizing a little late that eavesdroppers must keep up
appearances) I finished my beer and ordered a second glass. Then
Westbury's voice rose again.
"Yes, 'corresponding safeguards or words to that effect,'" he said. "I gave
my copy of the paper away. Er——"
The last was a sudden clearing of his throat, evidently intended to attract
attention—my attention. I half dropped the paper and saw the convex eyes
on mine.
"If that paper belongs to the house, sir, might I have a glance at it just for
one moment?" he said.

VII
I had bought that copy of the Roundabout myself, but I knew that that was
in no sense the point. Without a word I handed it to Mr. Westbury. My
second glass of beer was placed before me, and as I half turned to get a coin
from my pocket I felt, positively felt, their eyes on me. I also felt their
removal as I took up my change and resumed my former attitude. Westbury
had taken the paper with a "Thank you, sir."
"Ah, it's open at the very page. Begin here, Tom," he said. "'If civil aviation
is to develop——'"
And he passed the paper to one of his companions.
I had not the least intention of leaving. I was perfectly well aware that
Westbury had not wanted that paper, but had wanted to see my face. He was
not likely to recognize it as that of the younger novelist whose portrait
appears publicly from time to time, since in order to maintain that
humorous status I have for a dozen years refrained from having my
photograph taken at all; but I knew enough of my man to be sure that little
had escaped him during that half hour or so when he had occupied that
position of privilege outside Esdaile's French window, and that he probably
remembered every face of that breakfast-party—Mackwith's and my own
among the rest. That was why I had no thought of leaving. He was hardly
the kind of man I should have had much to say to in the ordinary course, but
if he saw fit to challenge me, well and good. In fact, I hadn't very much
choice in the matter. I had only to picture to myself what sort of glances
would be exchanged among them were I suddenly to finish my beer and
walk out and my remaining became almost a necessity. Nay, he had already
challenged me when he had borrowed my paper. My only doubt was
whether, in view of that whispered conversation and of the dimensions
Rumor had now attained, they hadn't all challenged me.
The next moment Mr. Westbury had gone still farther. He had also chosen
the ground on which our duel, if there was to be a duel, was to take place.
The Public-house has its own punctilio. I wouldn't go the length of saying
that you can't ask a stranger for a match without offering to buy him a drink

in return, but such invitations are given on quite slight occasions. I was not
surprised, therefore, when Mr. Westbury, catching my eye, acknowledged
the loan of the paper by saying, "Will you have a drink, sir?"
So I had in a sense either to eat his salt or refuse it. I did not hesitate.
Certainly that beer was salt enough.
"Thank you," I replied.
"And what is it, sir?"
"I'll have another glass of beer."
He ordered it. Then, "I think we've met before," he said.
The silence of the others was suddenly very noticeable. It was for all the
world as if some referee had ordered, "Seconds out of the ring."
"I'm afraid I don't quite——" I began.
"Well, I won't say it got as far as an intro," he took me up, "but weren't you
at a certain house in Lennox Street when an accident occurred the other
day?"
"I was, but I wasn't aware——"
"Oh, I wasn't inside the house. But I was able to be of some little assistance
outside," he replied. "A very curious affair, sir," he added tentatively.
"Rather a sad one," I replied.
There was a pause. "Chelsea's very much interested in that accident," he
continued.
I answered that I didn't live in Chelsea.
Then suddenly he became almost amiable; but for all his amiability his eyes
were like the hard-boiled eggs on the counter, only a trifle yellower.
"Well, that's two of you gentlemen I've met now," he said. "I haven't the
pleasure of knowing your name, but the other gentleman was Mr.
Mackwith."
There was a certain correctness about this opening that I had reluctantly to
acknowledge. He may or may not have known my name—the chances were
that he had already ascertained it—but I read his thought. A few minutes

ago, possibly before he had become aware of my presence, he had spoken
pretty freely of Mackwith; he was now obviously asking himself whether I
had overheard this. In all probability I had, but in such cases the official
attitude is the best. Had Mr. Westbury been an administrator I could have
imagined him penning a minute: "This does not come within the knowledge
of this Department."
"Yes," he continued after a pause, "I had the pleasure of sitting on a
coroner's jury with Mr. Mackwith the other day."
"Really?"
"Yes, and strange as it may seem, in connection with this very accident
we're speaking of."
"That's very interesting," I said genially. "I haven't seen Mr. Mackwith since
the occurrence. What happened at the inquest on the unfortunate man?"
"The verdict was in the papers, sir. And my own views are in that paper my
friend is reading. They're twice over, as a matter of fact, once in a letter of
mine they printed and once in the editor's remarks on it."
"Ah, then you're Mr. Westbury!" I exclaimed with feigned surprise. "I was
reading both your letter and the article just now. I congratulate you. I see
you're in touch with both sides."
Mr. Westbury looked at me with mistrust. "What both sides?" he asked.
"With both the men who came down that morning," I replied. "You were at
the inquest on one of them, and you very properly call for an inquiry into
the other man's conduct."
"I do!" he said so vindictively that he might almost have been spitting the
two words into one of the sawdust-filled spittoons. "I do more than call, Mr.
——" he glared.
"Oh? But how can you do more?" I asked politely. "There are certain
prescribed forms in such cases, and if inquiry on those lines turns out to be
satisfactory I should have said there was nothing more to be done?"
"Ah! If!" said Westbury, with the greatest intensity of meaning.
There was a palm in a copper pot behind him, and above his head a picture
of a huntsman holding up a fox over the baying pack preparatory to

drinking Somebody's Whisky. My eyes wandered reflectively to these
objects for a moment; then I took a further step. It seemed to me too late to
draw back now.
"But—well, since we are discussing this I wish you could be a little
plainer," I said. "You say all Chelsea's interested in this Case, and I don't
live in Chelsea. Why is Chelsea so interested?"
He replied promptly enough. "Because, sir, of certain things that don't
appear on the surface of which I happen to have some knowledge."
"May I ask what things?"
He echoed me.
"And may I ask you something, and that is whether you happen to be aware
that the police searched certain premises the other morning?"
"Do you mean the morning of the accident?"
"I do not mean the morning of the accident. I'm speaking of last Friday
morning, at six o'clock, before anybody was about."
I considered a moment. Then, "But why not?" I replied. "Is there anything
unusual about that? Surely when an accident takes place the police are the
proper people to investigate it?"
I thought he would have jumped out of his chair with vehemence.
"Ah!" he cried. "Now you're talking! That's more like! The proper people?
So they are; you stick to that! And now I'll ask you this: If that's so, why
keep things back from them? Why this hushing up? Answer me that. Or
bring some of your friends to answer it. That's all I have to say!"
And he flung himself back in his chair and continued to mutter softly.
It was evident that his choler against Mackwith had risen again. What had
passed between the two men was no less plain. If Mackwith was right in his
estimate of this fellow, air-raid nights spent in cellars are not the best of
training for duties so unpleasant as those a coroner's inquest sometimes
involves. Billy, on the other hand, did his bit in a Field Company and is
tempered metal throughout. In any contest of wills between two such men
there was no doubt which would be the victor. It had hardly occurred to
Billy that there was a contest. Innocently and unconsciously, he had ridden

roughshod over Westbury, and, if Westbury's mutterings meant anything,
was to suffer for it.
"But," I said presently, "I'm afraid I don't understand even yet. It seems to
me you're bringing a charge against somebody of interfering in a very
serious matter. If anybody has interfered I agree with you that it's a public
scandal and ought to be exposed. But I can't believe I've understood you
properly."
He did not reply.
"And not only that," I continued, "but, if you'll forgive my saying so, you're
neither bringing a charge nor leaving it alone."
Here, for the first time, a third person put in an aside.
"Tell him about that, Harry," a voice whispered.
(And, feeling pretty sure that I could guess what "That" was, I thought,
"Now for that wearisome bullet story all over again!")
"I need hardly say," I went on, "that if you have any such charge to make
there's not a single person who was there who won't gladly help you."
("Tell him about that, Harry," the voice whispered again.)
Then it was that Mr. Westbury "went back on" that eager group of mutes
who had so scrupulously kept the ring for us. I saw their faces fall as, with a
little jerk of his head to me, he rose. Whatever the "That" was they wished
him to tell me, they apparently were not to be present at the telling. Looking
back on the scene, I don't think he had any particular motive in this except
more "gin-and-glory"; he would tell them all about it, with embellishments,
afterwards. He passed down the bar and held the swing door open for me to
precede him; then the door gave a "woff woff" as he followed me out.

VIII
I ask you to notice several untenable points about the position I had taken
up. Twice at least I had flatly lied, once when I had told him that I had not
seen Mackwith since the morning of the accident, and once when I had
given him to understand that I knew nothing of the police search of
Esdaile's premises. I say nothing of the greater lie, that we were all ready to
help him in his efforts to get to the bottom of the Case. I count that as more
the natural momentum the Case itself had now acquired than any personal
untruthfulness on my own part.
Next, I now saw that as an eavesdropper my technique had been painfully
clumsy. I had attracted attention to myself. I had accepted Westbury's
hospitality, but (believe me, out of pure forgetfulness) had omitted to return
it. Several times he had given me an opportunity, which I had not taken, of
telling him my name, though I had admitted my knowledge of his. These
may seem small things, but there are ways and ways of drinking a glass of
beer. Within certain limits, I had a distinct sense of social failure.
And if, over and above all this, I had given him and his associates credit for
too little intelligence, that I am afraid is rather a fault of mine. It may even
have something to do with my position as a younger novelist. I constantly
forget that one man is as good as another because he is as many.
So here I was, a clumsy, unmannerly fellow with a guilty conscience to
boot, face to face with a very Chesterfield of the best licensed
establishments and the whole body of law and order and public duty
overwhelmingly on his side. We stood there under the unlighted public-
house lamp, while the violet light of the May evening slowly faded from
what Hodgson had called "Chelsea's pleasant roofs."
He was fully aware that he possessed what the correspondents used to call
the initiative. This showed in his very few first words. I, it appeared, was to
be forced to open the ball.
"Now, sir, you wished to see me, I believe," he said pompously.

I was on the point of reminding him that it was he who had made the
proposal to come outside when he put up a peremptory hand.
"No, no. I know what you're going to say, and that don't go down. When I
say you wanted to see me I mean you came here to-night for that purpose.
Specially. Well, here I am."
I suppose I should have been within my rights in answering that I had
entered those swing doors for a glass of beer and had not spoken to him
until he had borrowed my newspaper; but obviously that line led nowhere.
Moreover, from his comparative calm of manner now, I realized that while
the larger advantages lay with him, at least one small tactical superiority
was mine. He was quiet for the moment, but would probably flare up again
immediately at the mention of Mackwith's name. So I kept Mackwith in
reserve.
"Well," I said in a conciliatory tone. "I have a feeling that both of us wished
to see the other, and from what you've told me with very good reason. Isn't
that so?"
"How do you mean, what I've told you?" he said suspiciously.
"I mean that you've given me the impression that there's more in this Case
than meets the eye."
He grunted. "Impression's good!"
"That there's some sort of a misunderstanding that ought to be cleared up."
"'Impression's' damned good!" he muttered again. "I like 'impression.'"
"Well, never mind the word. You reminded me a few minutes ago that we
were all there that morning, and so I take it that we're all interested. Can't
we talk it quietly over?"
I don't think I ever saw eyes capable of staring for so long without a blink.
Old Dadley had been right when he had said, "He stares you down, he
does." I awaited his pleasure.
"No, that won't wash either," he said curtly at last. "You came here for a
purpose. Specially. I won't say the place isn't free to anybody, but it would
be bad for trade if everybody stood behind a paper looking for twenty

minutes at a glass of beer. I don't think there's any need to be plainer than
that."
"Very well, have it that way if you like," I returned. "You tell me the whole
of Chelsea is interested in this Case. Well, as I was there when it happened
it's natural that I should be interested too."
"Hah!... Well, all I have to say to that is that nobody would have guessed it
at the time," he answered.
"Indeed? Why not?"
"Hah! Why not? It is a bit of a puzzle, isn't it? But suppose we put it this
way: Here's two men come tumbling on a man's roof. Bit of a bump they
make, don't they? Say a thousand people watching, eh? It isn't a thing that
happens every day exactly, you'd think? Very well. Now where were all of
you? Finishing your breakfast? 'Interested,' you say. Well, you'd expect the
master of the house to be a bit interested. But where was he? Where were
all the rest of you, except him that went up on the roof? You seem to me
more interested now than you did then. That's the first point that strikes
me."
It struck me, too, as being both stupid and acute, at the same time hardly
worth mentioning and yet unpleasantly significant. If his suggestion was
that at the time of the accident we were all whispering together in some
dark nefarious plot, it was too ridiculous to answer; but if he meant that it
was at least remarkable that not one of us except Rooke, and Hubbard for
one brief moment before his arrival, had taken the trouble to step outside to
see what had happened, I could only reluctantly agree with him. You will
remember that precisely the same observation had struck Hubbard and
myself at the time.
"Yes," he repeated, seeing my discomfiture, "that's the first point that strikes
me; where was Mr. Esdaile, for instance, that he didn't come out?"
I answered rather slowly. "I see what you mean. As a matter of fact that was
very curious. I wonder if you'll believe me when I tell you that Mr. Esdaile
knew nothing of that accident till it was all over?"
He stopped for a moment in his walk. Without noticing it we had begun to
walk. "Why not?" he demanded.

"Because he was down in the cellar at the time. He'd gone down to fetch a
bottle of wine."
He resumed his walk. "But he came up again. I saw him."
"That was some time after."
"That's right," he confirmed, as if he had been testing my truthfulness. "It
was about half an hour after. Funny way to spend half an hour with all that
going on, wasn't it?"
As I was entirely of his opinion, I made no reply.
"So," he continued, "what strikes me about it is that you're more interested
now than you were then. Now we'll pass on to another point. All the time
this is happening you're all inside except one of you, and he's on the roof.
He's the only person up there till the police came—has the field to himself
so to speak. Then he comes down the ladder in a very shaky sort of state."
"Do you wonder?" I interposed with a quickness that surprised myself.
"You were on that jury——"
"In a very shaky state," he repeated. "Nervous as a cat, as you might say.
That was the state he was in when he came down that ladder. Why?" His
manner changed suddenly to truculence. "Why? Hah! That's the question,
isn't it? Some of you'd like to make out you know nothing at all about it, but
they laugh best that laugh last, and don't you make any error about it!"
Apprehensive as I was, I forced myself also to laugh.
"And you're doing your laughing in the newspapers? Well, do you know,
Mr. Westbury, I see very little in all this. Your letter certainly raises a very
interesting subject, and I'm quite of your opinion that flying ought to be
better regulated; but I wonder if you'd resent a piece of advice from an older
man?"
"Much obliged, I'm sure." Those were the words. The tone in which they
were uttered bore no relation to them.
"But let me give it, for all that. You seem to be on the point of making
charges against somebody for something or other. Well, that's never a safe
thing to do, but if I were you I'd certainly think twice before I started with a

rather distinguished barrister. They're usually able to look after themselves
pretty well in such matters."
I said it quite deliberately. It was abundantly plain that unless I kindled his
wrath again he might go on laughs-best-ing and laughs-last-ing all night. I
didn't want to hear his vague and muttered menaces. I wanted to know
whether that bullet was in the hands of the police, and if so, what action was
to be taken. So I produced Mackwith from my sleeve.
"And another thing I'll tell you plainly," I said with something nearer real
warmth. "If I were to hear any annoying whispers about myself I shouldn't
have a moment's hesitation in taking any steps I thought proper. As I see
this business, you force your way into a private garden under cover of an
accident, pick up some cock-and-bull story or other, go spreading it about,
and then, when you're very properly put in your place by a coroner's court
——"
But I got no further. By this time we were in a quiet and dingy street where
almost every house seemed to have an "Apartments" card over the door, and
at the fury of his outbreak I expected every door to be flung open and every
blind to be drawn up.
"Hah! So that's your lay, is it, Mister Man? We've got it at last, have we?
You think you can come it heavy like your blasted barrister friend, do you?
Oh yes, you're all in it together! I knew what you came for to-night! I
forced my way into gardens, did I? And what about those that force
themselves on roofs before the police come, touching things they've no
business to be touching, eh? I pick up cock-and-bull stories, do I? And what
does some others pick up? I'm put in my place, am I? We'll see what sort of
a place some of you fine gentry's put in presently! Trying to cod me one of
you was in the cellar for half an hour! A bit too much roof and cellar for my
fancy! I was a shade over the odds for one of you anyway! He had to come
down the ladder again, hadn't he? And you hold a ladder when you see a
man coming down it, don't you? Very well, Mister Pry! You go prying
somewhere else, and drink your beer a bit quicker next time! My kids aren't
going to be shot at and no questions asked! The questions'll come presently.
They laugh best that laugh last——"
And, as a neighboring door was opened, and a blind across the street was
drawn up, and a window-sash creaked somewhere else, it came upon me in

a moment what had happened.
Philip Esdaile's hands had not been the first to pat Monty Rooke's pockets
that morning. Westbury, holding the ladder, had been before him.

PART V

SOME BYWAYS OF THE CASE

I
Strictly speaking, it is not on the Santon headland that Charles Valentine
("Chummy") Smith ought to make his first appearance in this story; but it
was there that I myself first saw him, and I want to give you my impression
of him as I received it, if at the cost of taking a slight liberty with time. So I
first set these eyes on him during a month I spent with the Esdailes
somewhat later in that year.
I may say to begin with that he would probably have passed unnoticed
among the innumerable other young men of to-day who at one time looked
just a little civilian in their new uniforms but now wear their mufti again
with a subtle but unmistakable difference. You know the young men I mean
—they still speak of distances in kilometers, can talk for hours on end about
motor-bicycles, and sprinkle their conversation with the jargon of ragtime
French they are proud to share with their own privates and sappers and
bombardiers. A year or so ago you went into a restaurant that was brown as
a beechwood with khaki; you go there to-day and the khaki is gone—yet
still hauntingly and mysteriously there, edging (as it were) the mufti with a
faint rim like a color-print a little out of register. The ghost of khaki still
clings about faces, movements, speech, the glances of eyes. Or if it isn't
khaki it is the navy-and-gold, or Charles Valentine ("Chummy") Smith's
unbelted sky-blue with the black cap-band.
He and Joan (in this little peep ahead which I am taking) were waiting for
me on the platform of Santon Station. It was a week or so before the
Company's Inter-Station Flower Competition—that annual Show that
makes the whole line with its tiny stations as gay with flowers as a row of
Thames houseboats. Geraniums and marguerites hung in boxes from the
canopies; the sills of the porters' room were a rage of bloom; and lobelia
and red bachelor's-buttons and white pebbles from the shore were set in
patriotic emblems all the way from the booking-office to the signal-box,
which alone was bare. As the train drew up I saw them standing together on
the sunny platform, with a bower of ramblers over their heads and a heaven
of larkspur behind them.

Charles Valentine Smith was for taking my two bags to the trap that waited
at the level crossing, but peremptorily Joan pushed him away and called a
porter. The presence of the trap did not mean that Chummy could not walk
yet, for with the help of a stick he got about quite well, though the cliff-path
down to the shore was still too much for him. And I may here mention,
quite incidentally, the rôle I was apparently cast for in advance. "Auntie
Joan" was supposed to take the children down to the shore every day.
Charles Valentine Smith could not yet manage the shore climb. This
necessarily meant a temporary separation. Two days later I was taking the
children down to the shore. Whether Miss Joan had urged my invitation for
that very purpose I cannot tell you.
So I was introduced to our young murderer, or he to me, I forget which of
us was the personage in Joan's eyes, and we sought the trap. Joan drove, and
paved the way for our better acquaintance by telling Mr. Smith, in these
words, that I was "still young at heart." And her pleasant young assassin
called me "Sir." I suppose I am entitled to be called "Sir" by these
youngsters, but I am far from standing on my rights in this respect. He had
his Joan, and I saw no reason for rubbing it in. People who go about
murdering other people need not lay quite so much stress on the minor
conventions.
"Yes, sir, thanks—practically all right again," he said as we bowled across
that high world of flaming poppies and silky corn. "But I say—I'm afraid
you'll have rather a crow to pluck with me."
All things considered, I thought one crow a particularly modest estimate;
but "Oh?" I said inquiringly.
"Yes. I know it's your room, sir, and any old fleabag would do for me, but
it's all Joan and Mrs. Esdaile. In fact, I carried all my gear out this morning,
but they've toted everything back again."
"Oh, but he likes that little room at the end!" Joan cooingly reassured him.
"He gets the morning sun, and it's beautifully cool in the afternoons——"
"If you mean that I'm in the habit of sleeping in the afternoons I wish to
inform you that I'm not," I answered her coldly. "And if the room you speak
of is that little cupboard place just above where the hens are fed——"

"Yes, that's the one," she answered with a darling smile. "I call it quite
large, and I've put you one or two nice books to read, and I arranged the
flowers myself. Come up, Robin!"
So Smith had the room that I, the introducer of these Esdaile people to my
loved Santon, had hitherto always had, and I was given the one with the
morning sun. You might suppose from Joan's words that the sun shone
directly in, filling it with gayety and brightness. Not a bit of it. That
morning sunlight she so extolled was a greenish and aquarium-like half
light thrown up from the steep bit of paddock that comprised the whole of
my view. And, lest I should oversleep, an enormous bronze cock, mounting
to the little sloping roof of the hen-house below, was able to sound his
clarion note practically on the drum of my ear.

II
I repeat, at a first glance he was very like the rest of the young fellows of
his day; but I admit there was something about him that grew on you. After
watching him for a while I decided that this ascendancy was principally in
his eyes. I do not wish to overwork the popular clichés of fire and flash and
smolder; Smith's eyes certainly had something of this quality; but it was
combined with an expression that, until I can define it better, I will risk
calling discontent. I don't mean by this the discontent that is common
enough among those other flashers and smolderers, the artists and poets and
suchlike. That is usually little more than peevishness and incapacity, and, as
one of the breed myself, I rather liked Smith's attitude towards us. With
perfect sincerity he looked on us as immensely clever fellows, particularly
the late Mr. Jack London and the author of The Crimson Specter of
Hangman Hollow; but there he had finished with us. We were high and he
could not attain to us. Our affairs were so little his affairs that I regret to
have to say that, Malvern notwithstanding, I have heard him make use of
the expression "between you and I." That is an awful thing for a nice girl to
marry.
But the War has taught me, among other things, the overwhelming
importance of other men's jobs and the comparative insignificance of my
own. If young Smith did not express himself in the terms to which I was
accustomed, he expressed himself none the less. Don't ask me how, except
in a general way. Here again what he calls a "dreadfully gulf" is fixed,
across which I can only gaze at the New Wonder.
For Chummy, for all his Crimson Specters and his "between you and I," his
cocktails at Hatchetts' and his stuffed-bird tympani in the Helmsea Mess,
was part of that Wonder that to-day a George takes from an Elizabeth's
hands. Four hundred years ago I suppose he would have sold a farm and
gone to sea; this, briefly, is what he did in our own day:—
Denied admission to the Flying Corps on the grounds that he was not yet
seventeen, he had made his way to London, dressed himself as a mechanic
or plumber, had forced his way into a foreign Embassy under pretext of

repairing the ambassadorial pipes or cisterns or something, and had actually
succeeded in presenting himself before the Ambassador, demanding to be
taken on in the service of a foreign country. Naturally he had been refused
and referred back to his own Government. Then had ensued what Chummy
cheerfully described as a hell of a dust-up. General Officers had stormed
and had wanted to know "what the devil he meant by it"; the
correspondence, I have been told, weighs between eleven and twelve
pounds; but in the end he had received his ticket—already endorsed for
improper conduct in offering his services to a foreign if friendly Power. You
will believe that this endorsement had stood very little in his subsequent
way. The story had run like wildfire throughout the whole of the Service. It
may have hindered his promotion, but what on earth did promotion matter?
Any number of civilian-ingrain business-men, turning their business talents
to the Services, have obtained promotion. Few of them have attained to the
distinction of such an endorsement as that which made bright young Smith's
ticket.
And—to return to what I have called that discontent of his—I for one
cannot see that a young man of daring and vision, elementally put down
into the midst of our world to-day and asked what he makes of it all, must
either write a stuffy book or paint a jazz picture or else be told that the fire
of his personality has no expression and his chosen work no value. Very
much on the contrary. I think myself that Charles Valentine Smith was a
thinker so single of purpose that it never occurred to him that he thought at
all. And why not a technique, an artist's technique, of the wrist and eye and
nerve and indomitable heart? Is my dictation more a wonder than his
zooming? Is my life so full and his so empty? I cannot see it.

III
To look at, he had not in the very least the air of a man over whose head a
terrible menace hung. Indeed, I have rarely sat down at a table with a less
personally odious young murderer. He was lithe and of a darkish brown
complexion, a perfect anatomy of graven and incised muscle when later I
saw him bathe, and with hands the movements of which were full of power
and grace. Then there were his eyes. Of all his features his mouth was that
which communicated the least, except when he smiled. With the rest of us I
am afraid that our mouths generally communicate the most.
I knew, at the time of this our peep forward, that Philip had had his
éclaircissement with him, but had no idea of what had passed between
them. Calling at Lennox Street one midday on my way to the office I had
found the house shut up and even Rooke unexpectedly gone. Therefore I
half expected that Philip would tell me the whole story on the night of my
arrival at Santon. In fact, I gave him every opportunity to do so, remaining
behind after all but he and I had gone to bed. But he talked about anything
else, and at half-past ten rose, yawned, said he thought he would turn in,
apologized again for the change of my room, and gave me my candle. The
same thing happened the next night.
On the third night I asked him point blank.
"Eh?" he said. "Oh, that's all right—so far, at any rate. He doesn't know
anything about it."
"What!" I exclaimed. "Know nothing about it!... What do you mean—that
he was too stunned or dazed or something to remember?"
"Oh, no, I don't mean that exactly," Esdaile replied. "He remembers that
part of it all right. It was the other I didn't tell him."
"What other?"
"Why, that anybody else knows anything about the—accident."
"But didn't you mention the shooting to him, if there was any?"

"Oh, he admits that, of course."
"Then in that case he knows you know?"
"Of course he knows I know. How could I ask him if I didn't know? What
he doesn't know is that you fellows know. So I told him the best thing he
could do was to come down here and get fit again, and not say anything to
Joan."
"And—he agreed not to say anything to Joan?" I exclaimed in
astonishment.
"Certainly. What good would that do? Look here: he's here getting himself
well again; I'm here painting; and you're here on a holiday. If there's any
trouble ahead we can't stop it, and so it's no good worrying about it. Don't
you think I'm right?"
"Oh ... very well," I said in bewilderment, suddenly ceasing my questions;
and I took my candle and went up to my little room over the hen-house with
somewhat mixed feelings.
Just look at a few of the ingredients of the mixture. Here was Joan, knowing
nothing about anything except that her lover had had a tumble, had given
her a few weeks of torturing anxiety, but was now blessedly up and about
again and in her pocket all day long. Then there was this Charles Valentine
Smith, also knowing nothing (for apparently a mere trifle like shooting a
man and admitting that you shot him didn't count), and, with the Brand of
Cain on his untroubled brow, offering Joan his blood-stained hand in the
most matter-of-fact way in the world. And here was Philip, apparently
accepting the whole extraordinary situation with complete calm. I admit
that I found all this serenity just a little perplexing.
But look at the charm of the situation for me as a novelist! Few of us have
the opportunity of studying what I think I may call the amenities of murder
at first hand. I dare say that grim mutterings à la Specter of Hangman
Hollow would have bored me, writhings and agonies made me
uncomfortable; but this new view of murder I found full of pleasing
interest. And the whole of the interest lay in seeing, hearing and asking no
questions. Philip was "there painting," I on a holiday. Very well. I was
content.

And, in case you have any preconceived notions about the daily trifling
routine of murderers' lives, I can only wish you had been at Santon with me
at that time. As far as I could see, not a cloud marred the blue heaven of
these young people's days. They disappeared as soon as breakfast was
cleared away and returned when they returned. I don't for a moment
suppose that the intervening hours were spent in the contemplation of death,
judgment or the burden of undivulged crime. Chummy enjoyed his pipe,
and, as he sat at high tea, idolized by the Esdaile boys because he flew, ate
as heartily as ever in his pre-murder days. If his crash on the Lennox Street
roof was not mentioned, that seemed to be only because everything had
ended perfectly happily and there was nothing more to be said about it. In
fact, here is a bit of conversation, taken almost at random, just to show you
the way to be entirely happy is to shoot somebody and say nothing to your
best girl about it.
Coming down to breakfast one morning I thought it my duty to administer a
sharp rebuke to Miss Merrow about the throwing of a handful of hen-corn
into my window in order (she said) to wake me.
"I had been up ten minutes, I had shaved, and was more than half dressed,"
I said sternly. "I'll tell you what you are doing; you are trying to train those
hens to come into my room by throwing corn in. I have now to inform you
that I intend to write this morning, and so shall not be able to relieve you of
your duties down on the shore."
"Oh, I say, sir——" young Smith began, but I thought fit to put a spoke into
his wheel also.
"Not a word!" I ordered him. "Hen-corn has been thrown into my room.
What was thrown into your room yesterday morning?"
(She had tossed up to his casement a bud of the William Allen Richardson
that grew up the cottage end. Coming round the corner from an early stroll
up the dewy paddock I had seen her do it, as well as the little token from
her lips that went with it.)
"I don't care which room I'm given, but I will not share it with poultry," I
continued firmly. "Also I object to this unfair discrimination about things
thrown in at windows. So understand that I am busy writing this morning."
"Well, we're going to Flaunton in the trap," said Joan defiantly.

"Children," I said, turning to them, "Mr. Smith and Miss Merrow are going
to Flaunton in the trap. The tuckshop at Flaunton is a much better one than
the Santon one, and there are smugglers there. They are armed to the teeth,
and they carry contraband into their echoing caves usually at about
midday."
"That," declared Joan, "I call mean! Bringing the children in!"
"It's no worse than bringing the hens in," I retorted; and our murderer
guffawed and took another egg.
I cannot say that I gained much by my protest, since, having put the idea
into their heads, I had to hire the station fly and take the children to
Flaunton myself. But it was a change from the sands, and it gave me the
opportunity for studying the blood-stained path of their dalliance against a
fresh background.

IV
But as you were. The peep-hole must be closed again. From the point of
view of the unities Charles Valentine Smith is still lying in a hospital cot,
writing daily but brief notes to Joan, forbidding her to come up, and
receiving countless boxes of tightly-packed Santon flowers. We are in
London again, during the last days of May.
One morning I had knocked off my private work rather earlier than usual (I
had, in fact, been quite unable to settle down properly to it), and, to fill in
the time before lunch, had walked up Queen's Gate, entered the Gardens by
the Memorial, and strolled slowly along in the direction of the Row. It was
a pleasant morning, and the riders were out in full force. Idly I was
admiring glossy flanks and cruppers and bits jingling and flashing in the
sun, when suddenly a horseman overtook me from behind and called me by
my name. I turned, exclaimed, and shook hands with him.
He was a junior officer in the Australian Light Horse, and several times I
had come more or less closely into contact with him during my own
uneventful period of Military Service. His name was Dudley Hanson, he
had been in Gallipoli, was still in uniform, and was awaiting his boat back
home again and demobilization. He plays no part in this story except on this
single occasion. He was riding a rather pretty little chestnut, and his hand
patted the animal's neck as he leaned over the railings and talked.
"By the way," he remarked, after a little chat about men we both knew, "that
was rotten luck for poor old Maxwell the other day. You saw it in the
papers, didn't you?"
"Who?" I said, perhaps with rather a jump.
"Bobby Maxwell. He used to spot for our lot in Gallip. Came over here
after. I thought you knew him."
"What was the rotten luck?" I asked.
"Why, he came down somewhere in London the other day—crashed—
killed on the spot."

"Dud," I said, "where are you lunching?"
"Whoa, lass.... Oh, any old joint, I guess."
"Then get off back to your stable and come straight along to my Club.
Come straight along. Don't stop to change or anything. I want to see you
particularly."
He seemed a little surprised at my urgency, but waved his hand and was off.
I continued my walk, but no longer slowly. I always walk quickly when I
am interested, excited or moved by any emotion.
I was now all three. Maxwell! Dud Hanson knew him, and had even fancied
that I might have known him myself!
Whatever luncheon engagement Hanson might have had that day I can
assure you that I should have urged him to break it.
My Club is in Piccadilly, and I waited for him in the entrance hall with
impatience. I gave his name to the porter as expressly as if otherwise he
might have been denied; I set my watch by the club clock, I fiddled with the
skeins of tape in the baskets. I had even a momentary scare lest I should not
have pronounced the name of my Club distinctly or lest by any chance he
should have misheard.
You see the reason for my eagerness. Maxwell was our unknown quantity,
the one big blank in our Case. One or another of us could contribute his
portion of knowledge about everybody else, but nobody knew anything of
Maxwell. His function was entirely unconsidered, his rights totally
disregarded. Rights? I know nothing of the law of the matter, nor whether a
dead man has rights; but if he has they should be all the more enforceable
because he is in no position to enforce them for himself. What would
Maxwell have had to say about his own shooting? What had brought about
that shooting? Was he the kind of man who, in Monty Rooke's large and
equable view of the crime of murder, ought to have been shot? Or was he
the other kind, whose death was a loss to the world? These were a few of
the questions I wanted Dud Hanson to help me to answer.
He appeared, and we made our way to the dining-room at once. I gave the
order for the whole of the lunch so that we might be interrupted as little as
possible, and then I came straight to the point.

"First of all," I said, "you say you knew Maxwell. Do you know the fellow
who came down with him—C. V. Smith?"
"Smith? Smith? Yes, I think I do, if he was Bobby's pilot out there. Smith's
a pretty common name. Slightish build, but tough as they make 'em—
dashing sort of chap with very lively dark eyes?"
At the time I could not verify this physical description. "Well, were they
friends?" I asked.
"I guess a pilot and his observer are like the little birds in their nests—it's
dangerous to fall out," Hanson replied. "What's to all this?"
"The position's this. They happened to crash on the roof of a friend of mine
and this fellow Smith's. Smith's still in hospital, and neither my friend nor I
knew Maxwell. So I want you to tell me about him—anything you know
about the pair of them."
"Right you are...."
But if it was evidence of ill-feeling between the two men I was after he
could give me none. Indeed, the probabilities were all the other way. In
other Services the bond between man and man is strict, but there is still
room for preferences and aversions. Your mess, for example, is yours, and
you are filled with a jealous pride if an outsider has anything to say about it;
but within its circle you pick and choose your friends. The ward-room
forces you into the closest physical contacts, but you can still please
yourself about the other intimacies. Even in a submarine, where the death of
one is likely to be the death of all, you may yet like one man more than
another. But two men in an aeroplane are twins in a womb. The very pulse
of one must be the pulse of both, their senses, glances, thoughts, such a
unison of coöperation as the former world never saw. For one to harm the
other is not assault, but semi-suicide. Rarely need you even "look for the
woman." Gloriana both serve, but they hardly quarrel about lesser
mistresses.
Yet is it not possible that this extraordinary attachment, this association
somewhat in excess of that of natural and aeroplaneless man, may by its
very nature have its own reactions? The closer the tie the bitterer the quarrel
when it does come. And here an artificial element is superadded. For, in
spite of Joan, who thought that Chummy simply thought of her and flew,

man does not naturally fly. If nothing else forced him into accord the mere
mechanical risks would be enough to do so. I remember Smith told me that
at one time—whether this is still the case I cannot say—an observer was not
allowed to be trained as a pilot also, lest, seeing his comrade doing
something he himself would not have done and conscious of the functioning
of a different mind, he should lose his head at a critical moment and
instinctively seize the controls. Had there been such a dissolution of unity
on that morning of the breakfast-party? Had hand hesitated, this factitious
identity suddenly failed? Of all men living Charles Valentine Smith was the
only one who could answer these questions with authority; but I wanted to
get all I could out of Hanson.
"Had Maxwell his pilot's ticket?" I musingly asked him presently.
"Couldn't say. Lots of them have flown hundreds of miles without a ticket at
all."
"Was he an Aiglon Company man, by the way?"
"Dunno. If he was he probably had his ticket. I can't see what use a
commercial Company would have for a bomb-sight specialist."
"Oh, they might. You never know."
"Well, perhaps so. I'm sorry, old son, but you know as much about poor old
Bobby as I do now."
Summarized, this was all the information I got in exchange for my lunch:—
Maxwell was four or five years older than Smith, in civil life a surveyor,
unmarried, not (so far as Hanson knew) engaged to be married, nice fellow,
reasonably abstemious, quite sound in wind and limb.
Hanson didn't think that Maxwell had spotted for any other pilot than Smith
during the time the two of them were in Gallipoli.
Maxwell didn't strike Hanson as being a sort of man to lose his head in an
emergency; had indeed rather a cool head and steady nerve.
In conclusion, Maxwell had always seemed particularly attached to
Chummy Smith.
"But what's worrying you? Going to put it in a book?" Hanson asked.

I shook my head. I had no idea at that time that I should ever be writing this
book.

V
On that day when I called at Lennox Street and received no answer to my
ringing I stepped back from the door and looked up at the house again.
Little trace of the accident now remained. The broken mulberry branch had
been neatly sawn off and the smaller branches trimmed. The blinds were
drawn, the French window clamped up, and quite obviously there was
nobody there. This, as I have said, surprised me, since, even if Esdaile had
gone away without letting me know, I had certainly expected to find Rooke.
Then, as I walked down the path again, a thought struck me. Rooke, if I
remembered rightly, ought to be getting married just about then—ought as a
matter of fact to have been married three days before. I had had no news of
this. True, he might simply have neglected to inform me, but I did not think
this likely. Was he married? Suddenly I found myself wondering and
doubting.
In the King's Road, to which I walked, a blue and white telephone sign
hanging outside a grocer's shop caught my eye. I walked into the shop. I
have a good many friends at the Chelsea Arts, and one or other of them
ought to be able to tell me something about Rooke.
I got through at the second or third name I asked for. It was Curtis. He
asked me to go on to the Club, but I told him that I couldn't spare the time,
and he next wanted to know where I was speaking from.
"Then you're hardly a stone's-throw from him," Curtis replied. "He's back in
his old rooms in Jubilee Place."
I was on the point of asking Curtis whether Rooke was married, but already
I had a divination. If he was not, to ask why he was not would only make
talk, and, if he was at home, I could ascertain for myself at little more
trouble than walking across the road. I thanked Curtis, hung up the receiver,
and turned my steps to Jubilee Place.
I say I had a divination already. At the very outset of this book I told you
that the Case affected a number of people in various and curious ways and
byways, and I was now beginning to think that the descent of that parachute

on Esdaile's roof had left not one single member of our group unaffected. I
must remind you again that at that time I actually knew far less than I have
already told you; but except by collation, rearrangement and boiling down I
could not have set down these facts at all. I had, for example, seen Esdaile's
shocked expression on discovering that the stranger who had come down on
his roof was none other than his friend Chummy Smith, but up to that time I
had not set eyes on that unruffled young criminal himself. I had guessed
what this discovery must presently mean to Joan, but was unaware of that
headstrong dash of Mollie's up to London, and her lagging return to Santon.
I had heard Hubbard's fantastic speculations as to the nature of the
mysterious apparatus Esdaile kept in his cellar, but did not know that both
Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had actually been down in the cellar. I had
enjoyed the spectacle of a rising barrister unconsciously frustrating the aims
of a coroner's jury, but had had to pump Hanson for even the meagerest
scraps of information about the subject of that inquest. And twice or thrice I
had unblushingly lied to a Chesterfield of the Saloon Bars, but without a
suspicion when I had done so that this very person, seeing another prime
actor in our Case descending a ladder, had had the curiosity to know what
made his pocket so lumpy and the deftness of hand to ascertain.
So I had begun to look with a good deal of apprehension at our Case. The
beastly thing was like an egg, that hatched out one creeping thing after
another. And, as I paused at the end of a long concrete-floored passage and
knocked at Rooke's door, I wondered if Rooke would give me news of still
another.

VI
He did. His face did so before ever he spoke. In a moment I knew that
something had happened about that wedding—certainly that it had been put
off, possibly worse. Still without speaking he showed me in.
He was lunching, or rather making a combination meal of lunch and
breakfast in one. A single glance round the room told me a good deal about
the state of mind of its occupant. I have been hard-up myself, and know
these symptoms of negligence of body, mind and surroundings. He was
fully dressed, but he wore yesterday's collar and his boots had not been
cleaned. His bed was unmade, his furniture undusted, his floor unswept. He
seemed to have got up late, to have wondered what after all there was to get
up for, and not to care much whether he stayed up or went back to bed. It
was all extraordinary unlike his former orderliness and neatness and
precision, and I made up my mind that there were several things I intended
to say to him before I left him.
"Well, how are you?" he asked perfunctorily. "Have some cocoa. I'll wash
another cup."
"No, thanks. You carry on with your breakfast. I've just been round to see
Esdaile. Is he away?"
"Went off on Tuesday," Rooke replied.
"Where, to Yorkshire?"
"Yes. Took that fellow with him—you know—the flying fellow."
"But why aren't you at the studio?"
He answered evasively. "Oh—I chucked that idea."
"But listen to me. You were to have got married, weren't you?"
"Oh—Audrey chucked that," he replied, pushing his cup away.
"Chucked it altogether, do you mean?"
"Looks like it," he grunted. "Let's talk about something else."

But, looking round the untidy room again I wondered whether it would not
be better for him to talk about precisely that. Even an active smart was
preferable to sloth and helplessness of that kind, and there is something
very lovable about Monty at his best.
"No, no," I said. "Much better get it off your chest. And look here, my
friend, you haven't shaved this morning. That sort of thing doesn't help.
Talk about something else? No, let's talk about this. Where is Mrs.
Cunningham?"
"I think Buxton this week. Haven't looked at the Era. She's on tour if you
must know."
"But why? Why are things—like this? Surely there's a reason?"
"Oh, she said she just couldn't stick it," he answered with an off-handed but
tremulous little laugh.
"Stick what?"
"Everything."
I knew what he meant by "everything." He meant, simply, this confounded
Case. Now, it appeared, it had power to break off an engagement and to
bring Rooke down to dirty table-cloths, unmade beds and marmalade out of
the grocer's pot.
"Look here, Monty," I began, touching his sleeve, "we've been friends for
quite a number of years now——"
"Oh, don't," he interrupted me petulantly. "Leave a fellow alone."
"No, I'm not going to leave you alone like this. I want you to tell me why
you left the studio, and why Mrs. Cunningham's gone off on tour, and a
number of other things."
Well, it took time, but bit by bit he yielded. In sullen, resentful sentences he
began to talk.
"What do I mean by everything?" he said. "Well, I mean everything.
Nothing's gone right. Nothing at all. Everybody's fed up to the back teeth,
Esdaile too. And all that stupid business last week just about put the tin hat
on it."

"Do you mean that photograph in the papers?"
"Yes, and those idiotic crowds, and all their senseless talk. Who wants a
streetful of fools gaping at his windows for two or three days on end like
that? Then they started pulling his leg at the Club. So he just waited till this
chap Smith was fit to be moved and then cleared out. I don't blame him."
"Yes, I can understand Esdaile's being annoyed; but that's over now, and I
don't quite see why you should leave and come back here."
"Well, Audrey wasn't going there anyway," he answered. "She'd had enough
of it. Got it into her head there was something uncanny about the place, and
so there is. Too much mystery altogether. That was Esdaile. He keeps you
on the jump the whole time."
"What do you mean by keeping you on the jump?"
"All sorts of ways. There's that cellar of his for one thing; he was never in
the same mind about that for half an hour together. We were going to take a
cupboard or something down there one day; it was his own suggestion; but
he twisted and wriggled and tried to cry off till I was about at the end of my
patience. You'd have thought he wouldn't have us down there at any price.
And then suddenly he turned round and said we could go down if we liked.
Idiotic I call it."
"Did you go down?"
"Yes. And there was nothing whatever to make all that fuss about as far as I
could see. I admit I'd wondered once or twice whether there was anything
queer, but I went into every corner and there was absolutely nothing to see."
"You're thinking of that other morning when he was down there all that
time?"
"Yes. I can't make head or tail of that yet, but I can't see it's anything to do
with the cellar. And just listen to this. After making all that fuss he came up
again and didn't even bother to take the key out of the door. It was there
when I came away. One day he nearly jumps down your throat when you
ask him for the key, and the next thing he goes and leaves it in the door! I'm
sure he did it on purpose too. It was just like saying, 'Go and live down
there if you like.' Well, I wasn't going to be messed about like that. I'm not

going nosing round other fellows' places. I'm not a policeman. So I cleared
out. Would you have stopped after that?"
Again his voice shook a little, and I could guess at the meaning behind his
words. He meant, Would I have continued in a house the offer of which had
promised so much happiness that one moment's happening had turned to
discord and misunderstanding? I cannot say that I should.

VII
In my anxiety to set him talking after his own fashion I had not yet asked
him anything about what had passed between Esdaile and Smith; but I
intended to do so. For, just as Monty himself had been the first obstacle to
Philip's letting us into the heart of his mystery straight away, so Smith, you
will remember, had since blocked the current of disclosure. Philip had had
to see Smith before taking the next step, and, as I had pre-figured the
matter, he would go to the hospital one day as soon as Smith had
sufficiently recovered, would ask for his account of the affair, and would
then take the rest of us into his confidence or not, as the case might be. In
other words, it depended on Smith's explanation whether Philip and the rest
of us continued our efforts at suppression or—did the other thing.
But now Esdaile seemed to have taken neither course. As far as I could
gather he had calmly evaded the whole situation by carrying Smith off into
the country out of our sight and hearing. I admit that, since the assassin was
taken into the bosom of Esdaile's own family, it looked as if he had
succeeded in making out some sort of a case for himself; but I also
remembered the strong bias of friendship and the practically instantaneous
resolution both he and Hubbard had taken that their Chummy was to be
stood by till the last possible moment. That is not the most judicial frame of
mind imaginable. Loftier, if chillier heights are conceivable. Esdaile alone
of us had asserted from the beginning, and had stuck unwaveringly to it,
that as a matter of plain unvarnished fact Smith had shot Maxwell. All
along his manner had proclaimed that the accident theory, which was good
enough for the women and the police, was vamped up and a lie. Was he
now going to have the face to say to us, "Well, I've seen him, and he admits
everything, but he had his reasons—unfortunately they meant putting a
bullet into a fellow, but to hang Chummy won't bring t'other chap back to
life—better let the whole thing drop"?
How beautifully simple!
But at the same time how very unfortunate that an outsider, laboring under a
sense of grievance, should have patted Monty's pocket as he came down the

ladder that morning!
Monty had risen, a little shamefacedly I thought. But for my call I fancy he
would have left his breakfast things as they were, washing up the next cup
when he wanted it. Now he began to stack them together for a general
washing-up. He went into the little lobby place that held his taps and I heard
the running of water into a basin; then he turned to his tumbled bed and
began to re-make it. He muttered something about my not minding his
carrying-on. I was far from minding it.
"But look here," I said as he moved about, "about Smith. You say Philip's
seen him. What did he say about it?"
"Who, Philip or Smith?"
"Well, both of them. Didn't Philip tell you?"
"He didn't say much. He wasn't gone much more than half an hour—
couldn't have had more than ten minutes with him—and then he came back
and said he was taking him away the next day but one."
"Then that was while you were still at the studio?"
"Yes. It was then I told him I'd had enough of it and was coming back here.
He told me not to be an ass, but I don't call that being an ass. I don't mean
there was a row, but I'd got my back up a bit, and I didn't feel like asking
him questions. I was sorry for him too in a way. You see, that morning after
his wife came up——"
"What!" I exclaimed in surprise. "Has his wife been up since she left that
morning?" (This, as I have told you, was the first I had heard of it.)
"Yes. She turned up late one night. I was out—I'd gone for a walk
Roehampton way just to think things over—that was before Audrey'd told
me she——" He stopped, as if distrusting his voice.
"Yes?" I gently urged him.
"About his wife coming up. I didn't see her till next morning. I expect she
was tired out with the journey; anyway, her face was as gray as that
Michelet paper there. And Philip was done in too. That's why I didn't want
to make any bother. I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. I don't know
what's happened to us all."

I could have told him. It was the Case that had happened.
"Mrs. Esdaile too—she was just the same——"
Naturally. The Case was the same.
"I hadn't very much talk with her. Of course, I asked her how Joan was
——"
Yes, Joan was in the Case too.
"And she told me she'd seen Dawdy the night before. Dawdy was all a
bundle of nerves, and Mrs. Esdaile put her to bed. She told me that if she
were me she'd go round there at once and tell her—tell her——"
But here he broke down suddenly and completely. He sank on the edge of
his bed and buried his face in his hands. He shook with sobs.
"Oh," he broke out uncontrollably, "it's all that beast—that beast
Cunningham——"
"Oh no," I thought; "it wasn't Cunningham; it was the Case."
"You don't know the life that brute led her," he went on. "Drunken
blackguard—women all over the place—and Dawdy, Dawdy at home! I
hope he's in hell! Killed her heart he did. Can you blame her for not
wanting to chance it again? I hardly had the heart to beg her, I was so
broken up. She admitted she'd nothing against me. She just wanted to be
right away from all men. So I pay for that beast. Somebody always has to
pay, I expect. If only I'd seen her before he did——"
Presently he was better. He got up and began to move about again. "Sorry,"
he said shortly. "But what would you do?"
"Well, I should shave for one thing," I said quietly. "And for another, I don't
think I'd make up my mind that everything was entirely hopeless. You never
know what'll happen. It may be all right presently."
"I suppose you're right," he admitted. "No good chucking your hand in like
this. Sorry. But it is a bit upsetting, you know."
Could I at that moment have added to his troubles by telling him about
Westbury, the ladder and the pistol in his pocket?
Perhaps I could have done. Anyway, I didn't.

VIII
I recognized the more readily the separate and inhuman vitality this Case of
ours was beginning to assume when I carefully considered its action upon
myself. My connection with it was slight by comparison with that of some
of the others, but I was aware of its operation. The attitudes into which it
began to constrain me were not quite natural attitudes. It exercised pressure.
What pressure?
Well, to begin with, this pressure—that I began to find it difficult to leave it
alone. Both at home and at the office of the Daily Circus it intruded
between me and the work I ought to have been getting on with. Little
fleeting pictures began to interpose themselves. Sometimes I would find
myself looking fixedly at a galley-slip or a page still damp from the
proving-press and seeing, not the thing in my hand, but Joan Merrow
running in with the children from the garden again; at home my page of
manuscript would blur and there in a doorway Philip Esdaile would stand,
his eyes dancing with a stilly excitement, the curaçao and the candle once
more in his hands. And this, in my curious trade, is a serious matter. Out of
precisely these insubstantialities I have to contrive to pay my rent and
income-tax and to provide my bread-and-butter. I will not go so far as to say
that I dreamed of the Case at night, but it began to play the dickens with my
work. Unable to settle down to it, I found the Park drawing me instead, and
even in the afternoons, which in ordinary commercial honesty were not my
time at all, I began to put in the briefest and most perfunctory appearances
at the office. I contented myself with the appearance of busyness, and
wondered how long it would be before my chief caught me out.
In this frame of mind I happened one afternoon, by the merest chance, to
run across Cecil Hubbard. I had dropped into a Technical and Scientific
Exhibition of some sort, and I had thought I had seen Hubbard's white-
topped cap and foursquare back in the downstairs rooms, but had lost them
again. It was upstairs, a quarter of an hour later, that I found him.
He was watching another man, evidently an attendant or official of the
Exhibition, who wore a double telephone-receiver about his ears and was

slowly turning the handle of an instrument that at a first glance resembled
an overgrown typewriter. Hubbard was peering into the mechanism. Then,
at the invitation of the other man, he removed his cap and clasped the
receiver about his head. The official continued to turn the handle.
"Hallo!" I said, coming up. "May one ask what it is?"
Hubbard turned. "Hallo, what are you doing here?" was his greeting. Then
to the attendant, "What do you say the thing's called?"
It was the optophone, and perhaps you may have seen, or rather heard it. It
is an instrument for enabling a totally blind man to read a page of ordinary
print. I myself had never heard of the thing, and am not sure that I give a
technically correct description of it now, but, as I understand it, the page
travels along the carriage in such a way that each letter in turn passes over a
tiny ray of light that is directed through a morsel of selenium. The letter
causes an interruption; a lower-case "l," for example, which is a straight
line, making one kind of break, but an "i," which is the "l" with the dot cut
off the top, a different one; and so with the other letters. The transmutation
is of light into sound, and the official assured us that with a very little
practice the ear learns to distinguish the minute variations in the telephonic
receiver without difficulty.
Remembering Hubbard's former (to me lunatic) conjectures that day when I
had called on him at the Admiralty, I thought it an odd chance that I should
come upon him examining such a thing as this optophone seemed to be; but
our talk did not begin with that. Leaving the instrument, we turned away
between glass showcases of fabrics and British glass and brilliant dyes and
crystals and approached a window-bay that looked out on a gray courtyard.
"Well, what are you doing here?" he said again cheerfully. "It's a long time
since you looked me up."
I told him that I went to all sorts of places in search of a little clowning for
the Circus, and added that it was precisely the same distance from his place
to mine as from mine to his. He laughed.
"I should have thought this was out of your line," he replied. "Well, what's
the news?"
It was not likely that Hubbard had forgotten incidents so remarkable as
those of that Lennox Street breakfast-party. Moreover, I could see he was

sorry he had met me at this dead hour of the afternoon; he always talked
better over lunch at Simpson's, with a Bronx or a Martini to start off with.
Failing these, there was nothing for it but a cup of tea to wash down our
chat, and as a matter of fact it was at a Slater's place in the Strand, with a
rather good little band of violin, 'cello and piano that, a quarter of an hour
later, we settled down.
"Well, Esdaile's taken your friend Chummy away," I observed when our
teapots had been brought.
"Oh, he has, has he?" said Hubbard. "Queer business that, wasn't it? Have
you made anything of it all yet?"
"I can't say I have; but then I'm rather at a disadvantage in not knowing
your friend. Tell me something about him."
"Well—what, for example?"
"As I know nothing you can't go far wrong," I replied.
Music is one of the Commander's passions, and, as I say, that Slater band
was not too bad. I think it was the "Valse Triste" that sent him off into a
reverie. The young creature who played the fiddle had bobbed hair and was
rather an attractive sort of sylph, and the Commander's blue eyes with the
dark dots in them were fixed on her intricately-moving fingers.
Then he came out of his musing with a sudden jerk. What I especially like
about Hubbard is that he usually knows what you want to know, and does
not cease to feel the working of your mind even through a longish silence.
"Extraordinary thing," were his words as he came out of that silence. "It
seems to be like the wind—blows whither it listeth. You look for it where
you'd expect it and it isn't there, and then up it pops in a place you'd never
think of looking for it."
This sounded to me rather like some of my own Publicity conclusions; but
"What does?" I prompted him.
"Oh, the fluence—the gism—the real stuff—the thing you know when you
see it but haven't got a name for," he replied off-handedly. "I suppose you
writer-fellows call it genius.... How old's Smith? Twenty-four I should say,
so it isn't a matter of accumulated experience. He couldn't be more dead
right if he was a hundred-and-four."

"Right about what?"
"Well, about his job. Aviation. What it's for, just as much as ever now the
War's over."
"Tell me—but remember I'm a journalist."
"All the better," he replied promptly. "The more you rub it in the better. The
War only ended a few months ago, but a good many people seem to be
trying to think there's never been one. That's right enough from the
economic point of view, of course—gets people back to work again—but
there is the other side, and I wish you would rub it in."
"Well, what do you want rubbed in?"
The eyes that had caught mine in Esdaile's studio rested on my face again
now. Then he pulled out a fat cigarette.
"Civil aviation's for War, of course—the next War," he said almost
contemptuously. "You're not one of those who think it's for express-letters,
are you? Or carrying a cheap-jack Bradford agent to make a dicker in wool?
That's where so many of you newspaper fellows make the mistake. You're
all so clever at disguising the truth. You don't take people into your
confidence enough."
Professionally this began to interest me. The public, its interests and its
confidence are supposed to be my business.
"Go on," I said.
"Well, you don't," Hubbard repeated. He has rather a rapid and abrupt
manner of speech that enables him better than anybody I know to carry off
the things men are usually a little shy about. "The Bradford man has his
affairs, I know, and it may sometimes be an advantage to get a letter there a
couple of hours quicker, but that's not the point. There are two points, as a
matter of fact. One's the training of your men, and the other's continuity of
manufacture. If this country forgets either of 'em it may as well chuck its
hand in. Why," he exclaimed in a phrase that arrested me in a quite
remarkable way as chiming in so exactly with my own private observations,
"look at the Elizabethans! What did they do? They wanted ships and they
wanted sailors. So they developed the North Sea fishing industry. Gave 'em
all sorts of bonuses and rebates and privileges. Not for the sake of a few

dead fish. Not on your life. It was to keep the men in training and the
shipyards running and the Spaniard out. And it's the same with civil
aviation to-day."
I won't say that I had never thought of this before. But one thinks of all
sorts of things that evaporate in the thinking, so that for practical purposes
they might just as well never have been thought. It was his energy and
certitude and single-mindedness that gave it all its force. And although I am
a journalist, that is why I think that all our print is dead and cold until it is
vivified by the heard and passionate voice. Oh, I know the stock argument
—that for one that is reached by the human voice a thousand are influenced
by the printed word. Well, so they are, until a contradictory word is printed
and both messages jam to a standstill. But you can't jam the pentecostal
flames that give the prophets utterance. I am inclined to think that if there is
one indestructible thing in the world it is the Uttered Word. Naturally I
refrain from dwelling too much on this in the office of the Daily Circus. But
it lies behind every word of our print for all that.
"Another thing," Hubbard continued. "I don't know much about the
Elizabethans, but I'm prepared to bet that a good many of 'em were
youngsters. While old Burleigh was nodding, some infant just out of his
cradle was getting away with it. At all events, there's no reason that I can
see why he shouldn't as well be twenty as ninety—every practical reason
why he should, in fact."
"Do you mean young Smith's like that?" I suddenly asked.
Perhaps it wasn't quite fair. When a man has the pluck to talk on these lines
it is rather a cold douche to bring it all down to one finite and fallible
human being. Even the pentecostal flame may flicker at times. But I noticed
that Hubbard did not say No. Indeed, he did not answer me at all. His eyes
were on the child with the fiddle again and the living, climbing fingers.
"Clever hands, aren't they?" he said. "Wish I could play the fiddle."

IX
It was a little later, when we came to speak of the optophone, that I found
him to be still firmly rooted in the conviction that Esdaile's cellar contained
the solution of at least a portion of our mystery. He was quite unshakable on
this point. I will not trouble to re-state his recapitulation of the events of the
morning of the farewell breakfast. Of subsequent events, I may say, he
knew little.
"Well, I won't pretend to understand you," I said at last. "If you seriously
think that Esdaile's got some sort of an optophone in his house——"
He waved his hand impatiently, as if to beg of me not to be an ass.
"Oh, cut that out. I'm not given to melodrama any more than you are. Of
course he hasn't; that's infantile. But what is there to prevent there being
something peculiar about the ordinary acoustics of the place—perfectly
ordinarily and naturally, but one of these freakish effects—there are such
things—an echo's the commonest example, of course—then there are these
whispering effects—vagaries of sound——" He tailed off.
"But he heard no sound," I objected, "or at any rate so little that we decided
he couldn't know what it was. He certainly didn't hear what we heard.
You've got the whole thing turned round."
"I know," he mused. "And yet he gave you the impression of a man who
knew more than all the rest of us put together. In fact, he practically
admitted he did."
"But—if you will have it it's the cellar—two people have been down since."
He turned quickly. "Who are they?"
"Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham."
"Well, and what had they to say about it?"
I had to admit that, according to Rooke, something about the place had
brought Mrs. Cunningham to the verge of hysteria, while Rooke himself
had found the place inexplicably uncanny.

"Then as far as it goes that bears me out?"
"As far as it goes. But they found nothing out of the ordinary. Esdaile even
left the key in the door, and there was nothing to prevent them from
rummaging to their hearts' content."
"Did they rummage?"
"Rooke didn't. Said he wasn't a policeman to go scratching about other
people's houses. I thought it rather decent of him."
"Well—it's possible they didn't know what to look for."
"Do you?" I parried.
"No," he confessed,—"not unless he keeps a tame ghost down there."
"In that case the Chelsea Arts Club would be right," I laughed; and we went
on to speak of other things.

X
Then one morning I had a letter from Joan Merrow, which I give you
without the alteration of a single word. If you yourself have a modern
young Anthea who may command you anything and does not hesitate to do
so I accept your sympathy in advance. The letter ran:—

"Dear Old Thing,
"Do be an angel and do one or two little things for me. I'd rather ask
you than anybody else because you're the kindest person I know. If
you're too busy of course you'll say so straight out, but what I want
first of all is for you to get me the addresses of a few nice small houses
or convenient flats."

In course of time I had recovered my breath. This, remember, was in 1919.
It was not the Crown Jewels her ladyship wanted, merely "a nice small
house"; not the sun, moon and stars, only "a convenient flat." I think my
nerves might be spared shocks of this kind at my time of life.

"Of course, I know rents have gone up," she continued, "but Chummy
thinks there ought to be plenty of quite nice little places for about £70,
but you could go up to £75 for a really nice house with a garden, rates
and taxes included, of course. There are some sweet little houses right
on the edge of the Heath at Hampstead with trees all round them and
dear little brass knockers on the doors, but I don't know if any of those
are empty, but you might ask."

I seemed to remember those sweet little houses. If I am right, your father
puts his name down for one of them on his coming of age, and, with luck in
the matter of intervening deaths, your son may end his days there. I have
never had the impiety to ask the rent of them.

"There wouldn't have to be any premium, and there must be a
telephone. Speaking of telephones, I do wish you could persuade
Philip to have that one of his moved, as where it is everybody can hear

every word you say. The house needn't be Hampstead, of course,
Wimbledon or Richmond would do if you wouldn't mind having a look
round. If you went on the top of a bus you'd be out in the fresh air and
the blow would do you good. Then there would be the question of a
maid, but we shouldn't want her for a month or two yet."

At this point a little fanning with the letter refreshed me considerably.

"And now," the joyous thing continued, "if you happen to be anywhere
near Regent Street it would be so kind if you would call at Morny's
and get me some soap, I like Chaminade best, and some tooth-powder,
any good sort. I know how busy you are, but it is so difficult to get
things here. I tried to get some Petrole Hahn the other day, but they'd
never heard of it. I'd ask Mrs. Cunningham, but I hear she's away, and
you carry colors so well in your head. That's why I wonder if you'd call
at that little bead-shop in Oxford Street, nearly opposite Frascati's, and
see if they have any amber beads, not the real amber, of course, iron-
amber I think they call it. Chummy wants me to have some because of
my hair. Not the huge ones, please, but from about the size of a pea to
as big as a marble."

"Or a 7.65 mm. bullet," I murmured to myself.

"The weather here is lovely and we're out all day long, and I do wish
you were here. But my bathing-costume is a perfect rag. I hate the
skirted ones and always wear a plain club one, either navy blue or
black; but I'm afraid it won't run to a silk one, though you might ask
the price. And now here's something that isn't for me at all. You know
Hamley's, either in Regent Street or Holborn, but they have a better
selection in Regent Street. The boys want two pairs of water-wings,
and they'd better be of different colors or they'll get them mixed up and
be always quarreling. And oh, Chummy says it's awful neck, seeing he
doesn't know you, but there are some pipes, 'Captanide' they're called,
and you get them at Loewe's in the Haymarket. There are two sizes,
and he would like the smaller size, two of them, please. You can add
them to my bill as they're my present to him and he's giving me the
beads, and he'd better have some tobacco for the pipes. His number at
Dunhills' is 06369. A pipe is better for him than cigarettes, though I

allow him six cigarettes a day and you can only get gaspers here. Any
nice kind would do as long as they're Turkish. Thanks so much. How is
the novel getting on? We're both so looking forward to reading it. Is it
a love story? I do hope it is, as I'm sure you'd do that so beautifully. Do
be a pet about the house. I'm sending you some flowers to-morrow.
"Joan."

With a light sigh I folded the letter and put it into my pocket. At any rate,
there seemed to be two people on whom our Case did not weigh too
heavily.

PART VI

THE MAN IN THE CLUB

I
I always have the lurking feeling that Democracy would be all right but for
its numbers. I am aware that this sounds paradoxical, and that in its
numbers is supposed to lie its strength, but I do not see how that can ever be
a properly directed executive strength. There are too many cooks. Taken
one at a time, how admirable are its impulses, how just in the main its
judgments! But block-vote it——! Take away its trust in Princes and put it
in Polls——! Convert its votes, not into effective action, but into arid
deserts of statistics——!... Two men can make a holy friendship; among
three there can be a useful understanding; but ten will ever winnow the
wind with talk, and a hundred are a mere arithmetical obstruction in the
way of ever getting anything done at all.
I am moved to these reflections (as no younger novelist ever dares to say)
by a series of occurrences that began at that time so to harass me and to put
me so completely off my private work that, like poor Monty Rooke, I might
almost as well have stopped in bed till midday. These were the occurrences
that I had already dimly foreseen when that photograph of the house in
Lennox Street had so suddenly appeared in that morning's issue of the
Roundabout. By an unforeseen fluke the peril of the coroner's inquest had
been safely passed, but I had felt in my bones that others were gathering.
Well, they gathered. I learned, no matter how, that the Scepter Insurance
Company was consulting its solicitors and its solicitors were instructing
counsel. The plane and parachute people, as I had expected, were
investigating scraps of twisted metal and pieces of scorched fabric, and the
Accidents Investigation Committees were getting to work.
Understand that none of these happenings were official happenings. If the
Scepter wanted to resist, it had its ordinary remedy at civil law. The
Committees had no authority whatever except to draw up reports for their
own information and satisfaction. The interests of the owners and
manufacturers were likewise purely private ones.
In fact, as far as I could see, the only charge that could lay Charles
Valentine Smith directly by the heels would be one under those half-baked

Orders that so far were the best that could be done towards solving an
entirely new problem with totally unascertained powers.
But there are wheels within wheels, and it is the little wheels that are the
devil. We still speak of things being "official" long after that imposing word
has ceased to have much significance. If only for the arithmetical reason
mentioned above, Government works ever more and more through channels
that are not official and votable on at all. Many a private concern has a
Minister, or at any rate a Minister's adviser or an influential Member, safely
tucked away in its pocket, and you may invert this if you wish in the sense
of an understanding. This is why bright-eyed secretaries, fresh from a
dinner-table or a conference that has let them into the very heart of some
secret matter, are not supposed to be asked what knowledge they have in
their extra-secretarial capacities; and this is what the Man in the Club
understands and what his brother in the Pub does not. He thumps no tub,
enunciates no "first principles." A name, a glance, a shake of the head, and
block-votes are put back where they belong. "I'm told Glenfield doesn't
wish it" is more to him than twenty parliamentary returns; "I wonder
whether So-and-So has quite the power he thinks he has," and three months
later the public is surprised to see that a newspaper has changed its policy.
But let me hasten to reassure you. I am not going to invite you to follow our
Case into quagmires either legal or political. I know too little about these
things myself. Recent as the judgment on Appeal was, I have to stop and
think for a moment before I can remember whether the Scepter people won
their case or lost it, and I have only the vaguest idea what the findings of the
Accidents Investigation Committees were. For most of these things I have
taken Billy Mackwith's word. But he was briefed in one case, and has
followed up the others with just the same pertinacity he showed when he
tracked down and brought triumphantly home again those early prodigal
pictures of Philip Esdaile's.
And, as I had begun to see it, Charles Valentine Smith, whether on oath in
the Scepter case or at the invitation of one or other of the private inquiries,
was engaged on something enormously more important than the immediate
results of an aeroplane crash. He was contributing his mite to something
that would live when he and all else about him had been forgotten—to the
labor and knowledge and unparalleled discovery of his time.

II
Whitaker, in its "list of London Clubs," describes my own as "Social": that
is to say, that I and my fellow-members have no common bond of
occupation or interest other than that of pleasant good-fellowship. We are
drawn from all professions, and this gives me an opportunity I value highly,
namely, that of hearing scraps of the "shop" of other men when I am bored
to death with my own. Saturday nights, when there is no morrow's issue of
my paper to "put to bed," usually find me in the smoking-room behind my
Pall Mall or Evening Standard, with a few other non-weekenders sitting
rather widely apart also behind their papers, none of us so engrossed in the
news that we are unaware of each other, but using the journals as protective
cover. Occasionally we all drop them to converse; more frequently two or
more will engage in conversation with the others interjecting sniping-shots
across the room; and it is all rather interesting and quite unexciting and very
much go-as-you-please.
On a Saturday evening early in June I was sitting after this fashion, half
reading, half listening to Ronald Mowbray's remarks on some boxing match
or other. Mowbray's talk about boxing is sometimes rather good. He was a
known man of his hands long before the sport (if you can always call it that
nowadays) became quite so deadly intensive both physically and
financially. Moreover, his training as a sculptor has given him a good deal
of knowledge of the fundamental mechanics of the human framework, and
how a slight prolongation of the heel-bone can make a Deer-foot or length
of humerus a lightning hitter.
"Just at present I don't think Nature's provided the world with a real heavy-
weight," he was saying. "Not the real John Hopley kind, I mean. It takes
more than size. You see, it doesn't matter how hard you could hit the other
fellow if he gets his in first."
"But surely Wells is quick enough for you, isn't he?" said Jack Beresford.
His newspaper was on his knee.
"Oh, yes, Wells is fast. I'm not saying that speed's everything. But it's nearly
everything nowadays, even for a heavy. That's why half these giants would

be simply at the mercy of a comparatively light fellow like Carpentier."
Over against the window bay a Globe was dropped an inch. Cyril Turner's
eye was seen over it. He is in the Home Office, quite high up, and is an
untrammeled sort of spirit when he leaves Whitehall for the freer air of
Piccadilly.
"That's true of other things besides boxing," he interjected.
Mowbray turned. "What is?"
"What you're saying about weight and speed. Labor's discovered it too."
"I don't quite know what you mean, but if I've said something wiser than I
intended——" said Mowbray, claiming it if he had.
"Well, Labor has discovered it. Look at the way they strike nowadays. The
New Strike's as different as chalk and cheese from the Old. Totally different
methods—more scientific altogether. Masters and men used to stand up foot
to foot like Smithfield Butchers and slog till neither of them could stand.
Pure battering-ram principle, and the fellow who won wasn't much better
off than the one who lost. But now it's all swiftness and surprise. No
warning—just what you'd call a lightning punch where it's going to hurt
most and then dance away again. That's why they go for the transport and
postal services and all the distributing machinery instead of stopping
production. It paralyzes just the same. Solar plexus business. And swiftness
is the secret, as you say, not brute strength any more."
Another paper was lowered. It was Hay's Evening News. Hay is a retired
Major of Gunners, and I have bought very good cigars from him and very
passable port.
"And that isn't all either," he said. "It goes far beyond strikes."
"War?" said somebody. Everybody in the Club knows Hay and his talk.
Hay nodded. "You'll see where speed comes in then—speed and the absence
of warning. The nation that can get a thousand bombing-planes into the air
first will be able to do what it likes with the others."
"Oh, come, Major!" somebody laughed. "That's rather looking for trouble,
isn't it?"

"No good shutting your eyes to it," Hay returned. "Turner said something
about transport just now. They're talking a lot about relieving London's
traffic congestion. Well, it wants relieving; but do you know how I'd relieve
it? I'd dig new ways ... well underground. Big ones, to hold plenty of
people. Tube Stations won't be much good the next time. And I'd start
digging them now."
"Hay's had a hint from the League of Nations."
"Well, I'm a League of Nations man up to a point. Up to this point—that the
next show's going to be so unutterably ghastly that a generation that leaves
anything undone to prevent it ought to be wiped off the map—anything
undone, you understand, whether you personally believe in it or whether
you don't. We're only at the beginning of the New War, and it will be far
more 'lightning' than any of Turner's New Strikes."
"Democracy'll prevent it."
"As it's doing in Russia, eh? Just as likely to make it. Democracy's got such
damnably high-falutin ideals and so little sense of ordinary decency. For an
inhuman thing that belongs to everybody and pleases nobody give me the
Will of the People. If you read your history you'll find that hot air's usually
followed by bloodshed. And they won't stick at much. Personally I prefer a
King's war with guns to a democratic one with black typhus germs."
"Sunny soul, our Major, isn't he?" somebody laughed again.
"Well," said Hay, disappearing behind his paper again, "a thousand
bombing-planes will do it the next time. I hope we aren't forgetting how to
make 'em, and use 'em. Waiter, bring me a whisky-and-soda, please."

III
For a time nothing was heard in the smoking-room but the rustle of the
turning papers and the clink of a coffee-cup in a saucer. Sluggishly—for the
idleness that had latterly overmastered me tired me to my very marrow—I
was comparing Hay's words with what Cecil Hubbard had said on the same
subject. "Continuity of manufacture and the training of men"—you might
call this "civil" aviation if you liked, but according to both men it was
indistinguishable from the question of national defense. And, further,
Hubbard, unless I was mistaken, had allowed young Smith some portion of
vision in the matter. "It doesn't matter whether he's twenty-four or a
hundred-and-four"—"The wind blew whither it list"—"While the old
Burleighs had been nodding some youngster had been getting away with the
job."
Well, I myself, no longer very young, could only sigh and agree that it
seemed to be a young man's business. In other fields of action youth, the
cutting-edge, was directed by the experienced hand and the wise head that
too has been young in its day; but in this field none but youth has or has had
the experience. Its time is short, it reaps its harvest in its Spring. We in the
August of our lives may say, "Thus and thus should be done," but a young
head shakes and we are silenced. The judgment of an infant answers us. A
Samuel speaks, and our lips are closed within our beards. We administer,
advise, finance, organize, but his is the mounting heart.
In the midst of my meditation I became aware that I was being spoken to by
Mowbray. I told you he was a sculptor. He is no great intimate of Esdaile's,
but naturally they are not unacquainted.
"I beg your pardon. What were you saying?" I said.
"This Scepter action. I see it's down on the List. You're a friend of Esdaile's.
I suppose it won't affect him in any way?"
"What's the action about?" I asked.
"Here you are. 'The Aiglon Aviation Company v. The Scepter Assurance
Corporation.' The Scepter people are resisting the claim on the grounds that

the machine had no business to be where it was. They also allege
negligence on the pilot's part, or so at least McIlwaine tells me. He's
briefed. Is it true you were at Esdaile's when it happened?"
"Yes."
"Do you know the pilot?"
"No. I believe he's away with Esdaile in the country at present."
"Well, he can be getting ready to come back to town. It's down for Trinity
term. I should say the whole action turns on him. Worrying sort of thing to
have to go through on the top of a bad crash, but the Scepter's got to fight it.
If flying ever comes to anything the position's got to be made clear."
"If it comes to anything?" I queried idly....
"Apart from Hay's point of view, I mean. I don't see myself that it's
achieved very much yet outside war. Too risky and uncertain altogether.
There isn't a flyer on the Rhine at present who'll take his leave by
aeroplane; he might lose a day. And if this Atlantic flight does come off it'll
be rather like Channel-swimming—done once and then not again for
another forty years. Just a record. I can't see there's much more in it yet."
Here Atkinson's voice struck in. I hadn't heard him enter.
"Yes, but what about other places—Australia, for instance? It's catching on
there all right from what I'm told. Say you've a station ninety miles from
your front door to your back. An aeroplane'll do in an hour or two what it
would take you two or three days to do in a buggy. Any number of these
fellows are running their private planes now. And we're making the
machines."

"And there isn't much doubt they'll be having a go at the Cape-to-Cairo
route presently," somebody else remarked. (I am giving this desultory
conversation very much as it happened, since I felt exceedingly desultory
myself and it all contributed to the impression of Chummy Smith and the
nature of his job that was slowly building itself up in my mind.)

"Well, that's a different thing again. I should say the value of that would be
largely scientific, at any rate at first. Like the Shackleton and Scott
expeditions."
Mowbray laughed. "Are you one of those who think those were primarily
scientific?" he asked.
"What else were they?"
Whereupon we had the matter from the point of view of Ronald Mowbray,
ex-amateur champion and still the soundest of referees.
"Pure sport and adventure, of course," he replied promptly. "Oh yes, I know
somebody put up the money for a lot of instruments, and they took all sorts
of observations and kept journals and all the rest of it. I know all that. Quite
useful too in its way. But when you get right down to brass tacks those
fellows did it because they jolly well wanted to and for no other reason on
earth. What's better? Chuck in your science and 'contributions to the sum of
human knowledge' as a make-weight if you like, but they weren't just out
for that in cold blood. No, nor science books nor lecture-tours either. It was
just an epic lark. After all, a fellow's got to have a go at something."
There was a general laugh. It was so very like Mowbray himself. Both in
his boxing and his sculpture he was in the habit of "having a go." And that
was the end of that rambling conversation as far as I was concerned. One of
the waiters approached and bent over my shoulder.
"Lord Glenfield would like to speak to you at the telephone, sir," he said.

IV
Besides being Ringmaster-in-Chief of the Daily Circus and of a good many
other journals, Lord Glenfield is a very good friend of mine; but he had
never rung me up at my Club before. He was speaking from his house in
Portman Square, and he wanted to know whether I was leaving the Club
immediately, and if not whether he might come round. I was a little
surprised, but told him to come by all means; and he said he would be along
in twenty minutes.
Now Glenfield is a very much feared man, and with reason; but I speak of
him as I have always found him. Before I knew him better I had the vanity
to think that he had offered me my comfortably-paid job for the sake (such
as it was) of my literary name; but I was soon undeceived. It appeared he
was so good as to like me. Certainly he has always shown me the greatest
consideration, and I am going to ask you to notice how he added to it that
night.
His car glided up to the club door in exactly the twenty minutes he had
mentioned, and we sought a padded alcove at the head of the stairs. He is a
big and handsome man, hardly yet gray, and had I needed a leg-up in my
own Club it was certainly a distinction to be seen with him. I drew a heavy
curtain for the sake of privacy, and then asked him to have coffee and a
liqueur.
"I will. In fact, that's why I rang you up instead of sending for you," he said
with a certain pleasant grimness. "Understand?"
"Not quite."
"Well, if you're to be had up on the carpet I prefer that it should be your
own carpet."
I saw, and I hope you too see the kindliness and delicacy of his action.
Apparently I was in for a wigging, which was to be, not less, but still more
of a wigging that I, his subordinate, was permitted to act as his host. As he
said, he could have summoned me to his office or house, dressed me down,

and dismissed me again; but Glenfield knows men and how to bind them to
him by accepting things at their hands. It is so easy for Glenfield to give.
"Well, can you guess?" he said, nodding to me over his liqueur.
"Perhaps I can," I answered.
"Then what about it? Are you getting tired of the job?"
"Not," I answered slowly, "of the job. But I'm tired—very tired."
He diagnosed me with a swift look.
"South of France any good to you? Or Norway? Or anywhere else? I
suppose young what's-his-name—Willett—could carry on?"
"Oh, of course he's been running the whole show for weeks," I admitted.
Then, "Look here, Glenfield; I'd better resign."
"Don't be an ass," he replied promptly. "If I'd meant you to resign do you
suppose I should have come here to-night? I sack men in my office, not
while I'm drinking their liqueurs. Now tell me what's wrong. You haven't
been yourself for some time."
I frowned, hardly knowing what to reply.
"This is most awfully good of you, but I hardly think it's a case for a
holiday," I said at last with some embarrassment.
"Well, tell me about it. Is it working double tides, or just post-war slump?
We've all got that more or less."
I mused and shook my head. "I wish you'd let me resign," I said again.
He has an imperious eye, and I did not attempt to meet it. "Why?" he
demanded....
I did not answer. Willett had loyally covered my too frequent absence and
neglect, but I knew and Glenfield knew that I had let my paper down. The
Circus was slipping backward. Possibly there was something in Glenfield's
suggestion about post-war slump. Now, when all the world should have
been working as it had never worked before, so little work seemed worth
the doing. The Circus, which after all is a vastly important instrument of
democratic government, seemed to me a thing of stunts and japes and
cynical mockery of the recent stupendous years; my own work, once so

much to me that I had sacrificed to it the joy and ease of half a life, seemed
a thing that the world could do perfectly well without. I missed my timber
and gun-cotton and cordage and corrugated iron. My real books were my
stores-ledgers "A" and "B," the Regulations for Engineer Services my only
Muse. I feared—nay, I almost hoped—that I should write no more novels.
My bolt seemed shot. It is a depressing thing to have been a younger
novelist and to have wasted your life.
But I could not honestly take the way out that Glenfield suggested. Over
and above the burden that I shared with everybody else, I had let my private
affairs come between me and the work Glenfield paid me to do. The
infernal Case had cramped itself on my shoulders and was making a slacker
and a fraud of me. I wished that Glenfield had taken any way but this kindly
one. There was only one answer to make to him.
"Well?" he said at last.
"Oh—let me send in my resignation," I growled. "I've let you down and
will take the consequences."
"Consequences my eye," he replied bluntly. "The drop's nothing—a
thousand or two—we can pick that up in no time. It's you I'm worrying
about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a bit
of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help."
To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull here
and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power ends. I
consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age that it gives
to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed of. Indeed, if
one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's ailment, it seems to
carry within itself hope of its own cure. Few men have been so bitterly
attacked as Glenfield, but in my opinion he is the natural corrective to our
new disease of numbers, our malady of stultifying votes.
"Of course, I'm assuming it's a purely private affair," he went on.
"Oh, it's public enough—or looks like being—that's part of the trouble
——"
"Yes?" he said invitingly....

V
Let me see, how many does that make—I mean when, half an hour later, I
had given him as much as I then knew of the outline of this story? How
many people were parties in greater or less degree to the highly important
public matter that we were struggling to keep from the light of day?
There were the five men at our breakfast-party: Esdaile, Rooke, Mackwith,
Hubbard and myself. And the three women: Mrs. Esdaile, Mrs.
Cunningham and Joan. Westbury, and an unknown number of his
associates; and Inspector Webster, also an unknown quantity. And of course
there was Charles Valentine Smith himself. I am not including Hanson and
old William Dadley the picture-frame maker. Call it certainly eleven. Lord
Glenfield made the twelfth. We were getting on.
He took my narrative quite lightly. Indeed, parts of it seemed almost to
amuse him. He asked if he might have a second liqueur, and then sat back in
the padded alcove smiling at his glass.
"Well," he said at last, "it would make quite a neat prize competition,
wouldn't it?" Tremendous force as he is, he can never quite shake off his
interest in prize competitions.
I asked him in what way.
"I mean the position of your painter-friend. As you've told the story it
strikes me that he's the key of the whole situation. And I should say that he
intended to remain so."
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, you say he has his talkee-talkee with the flying-fellow, doesn't give
you a single word of explanation, but simply carries him off into the
country. It looks as if he thought he'd already told you too much and was
pulling out again. I don't think he intends to say anything more. You take a
short holiday, go down there, and see if I'm right."
(How far he was right you already know. As I have told you in anticipation,
I did go down, waited for a couple of days, then tackled Esdaile about it,

and found he had taken the very line Glenfield indicated.)
"So it's really publicity you're all scared of?" he continued presently. "Well,
I told you I had a bit of a pull here and there. Publicity's rather my line of
country, you know."
"Yes, but hardly against the law of the land," I objected. "You can't go about
suborning judges and telling the police their business—even you."
"Good gracious, man!" he cried energetically, staring incredulously at me.
"Don't tell me I've been employing an editor who doesn't know any more
than that!"
"Than what?"
"Than clumsy work of that sort! Suborn judges! Meddle with the police!
I've been entrusting the Circus to a man who talks like that!... Hurry up that
waiter!"
"But isn't that what it comes to?"
"You haven't got to let it come to that—not within a hundred miles of it!
You shock me! Tell me now what you do when you find yourself all balled
up and unable to meet a Case?"
"That's precisely what I want to know."
"Then I'll tell you. You attack. You manufacture a totally different Case and
then proceed to demolish it. First of all you make hay of charges that were
never made, and then you carry the fight over to the other fellow. If
somebody says this flying-fellow's been getting gun-work in, you simply
sidestep, come back, and want to know what's wrong that he hasn't been
recommended for a K.B.E. Never defend, my boy. Always go for your man.
What is it that Boche philosopher wrote? 'Every attack is a victory.' You've
got a beauty of an opening.... You say this fellow Smith really is the goods
—thinker, live wire—genuine national-importance sort of fellow?" he
demanded.
"So his friends seem to think."
"Then what's simpler than for you to take a column in the Circus and say
so? And then take another column and damn the other side? Pack of
shirkers who bolted underground while your friend went up and kept the

Hun off London? The old tricks are always the best—that's why they're old.
Do it on general lines, of course; keep off sub judice cases and all that. As
regards his being over London, you've got to make a molehill out of that
mountain, if it is a mountain. What are the Regulations exactly?"
I told him what they were, not exactly, but in all their unavoidable
inexactitude. At one of them he suddenly stopped me.
"Ah, there you are. A Secretary of State has power to except him, has he?"
"Hardly after the fact, I should say."
"Oh, don't be so dashed pedantic about it! Nothing would ever get done at
all if everybody talked like that! I'm not suggesting this as his defense; it's
his attack, so that he shan't be charged at all, don't you see? And if you
know a better 'ole go to it.... Now you get those articles written. Write them
so that they'll start correspondence. I don't quite see the Daily Circus being
put in the cart by a Chelsea auctioneer. Then take a month's holiday.... Now
tell me how the novel's going on."
This last I did over our second liqueur.

VI
I quite realize that we can't all be Glenfields. I don't suppose it would do to
have the world so over-oxygenated—for he is the oxygen as against the
democratic nitrogen of our modern atmosphere. He was probably right in
calling my scrupulous objections pedantic, but I confess that his power
would affright me did I not trust him in the main to use it rightly. If he
chose to send a note to a Secretary of State requesting that special
permission for a civilian to be excepted from the Regulations should be
given and slightly antedated, it was highly unlikely that he would be
refused. That at any rate need no longer be a weight on my mind. As far as
the Regulations were concerned Charles Valentine Smith had now probably
very little to fear.
But was the contravention of the Regulations the real point of our Case after
all? By keeping Smith out of Court were we not in reality making the larger
issue quite dreadfully simple? Had Smith killed Maxwell any the less dead
that certain strings could be conveniently pulled on his behalf? And why
had Glenfield been so certain that my painter-friend, who twice had been on
the point of taking the rest of us completely into his confidence, had now
changed his mind, was "pulling out," and intended to tell us nothing at all?
On this point I was to receive still further mystification during that very
week-end.
For, returning home that night, lighter of heart than I had been for many
days, I found a small registered packet from Esdaile himself. The packet
contained a key. His request, after Joan's house-and-servant-hunting
commissions, was quite a modest one. He wanted me to go to his house, to
post on to him a certain set of sketches the locality of which he minutely
described, and then when I had a moment of time to go on to Dadley's, in
the King's Road, and to ascertain for myself how he was getting on with the
framing of a couple of pictures. He was sorry to bother me, but Rooke had
behaved rather like an ass, and Mollie and the kids sent their love.
His commission was no bother to me; indeed, I found the latter part of it
rather interesting. I had no desire to exchange further words with the

"Chelsea Auctioneer," as Glenfield had described Westbury, but I confess
that I had a curiosity about him. I had probably queered his pitch if he
hoped to get Smith into Court on a technical point and then to fly off at
score about bullets, pistols and pocket-patting at the foot of ladders; but I
did not know what other means of making himself a nuisance he might not
have. Old Dadley might be able to tell me. Dadley probably knew Inspector
Webster as well.
But I could not now see Dadley till Monday, and as for the visit to Lennox
Street, Sunday afternoon would do for that. Sunday morning I intended to
spend in writing the first of those articles for the Circus. I went to bed, slept
well, rose early, and was at my desk betimes.
Those two articles, and the numerous subsequent ones I wrote, need not
detain us here. Indeed, just as you will have to take the legal aspects of our
Case largely on Mackwith's word, so for the journalistic side of it I refer
you to Lord Glenfield and his group of papers. But it is possible that you
may remember something of the wave of opinion we set in motion, for it is
not so very long ago. Deliberately I sought, and successfully obtained,
correspondence—a correspondence that embraced, directly or obliquely,
practically every side of the subject, from the personality of famous pilots
to the constitution of the new Ministry of the Air. We have, of course, the
general balance of our papers to consider, but within those limits I fairly let
myself go. And if you tell me that I did all this to save Charles Valentine
Smith from the hands of justice, I answer that I did it because ten short
years have made the air and everything connected with it as important to us
as the sea. If you tell me that I did it because I was Philip Esdaile's friend, I
reply that I did it because I was just beginning to see on what a hair our
destiny might hang if a new and gigantic industry, suddenly hung up in
mid-career, should be left unsupported, unrecognized, unencouraged. If you
charge me that I did it because of Joan and her happiness, I retort that I was
by this time wholly convinced that Hay and Hubbard were right, that the
next attack on one nation by another would come with appalling swiftness,
would be directed at civilian nerves as much as at uniformed bodies, would
be the beginning of the thousand years in which the Devil is to be
unchained, and the sooner the public realized the situation the better.
So I wrote my first article, read it over, decided that it was pretty much what
was wanted, and lunched lightly at home, as is my Sunday custom. Then, at

about three o'clock, I put Esdaile's letter into my pocket and set out for
Lennox Street.

VII
As I walked along the Cromwell Road I could not but be put in mind of the
last occasion when I had called at Esdaile's studio—that midday when I had
found all locked up, Rooke departed, and had run him to earth in his old
quarters in Jubilee Place. I have spoken of Mrs. Cunningham as an
enigmatic sort of person, possibly as much an enigma to herself as to others,
and inspiring more of compassion and kindness than of that other feeling
that is supposed to be akin to these. Now I could not help wondering about
her again. What had made her so suddenly break off with Monty? Had she
had a reason, or none? I suppose there are these sensitive plants whose own
interior moods and feelings outweigh all the logic of outward events, so that
a flurry of nerves becomes a motive, and an intuition grounds for immediate
action. Monty had spoken of her as having been on the verge of hysteria on
that afternoon when her Jacobean wardrobe had been carried down into
Esdaile's cellar. It was within a few days of that that she had definitely
announced her intention of not marrying again. I repeat, that as I left the
Cromwell Road and turned down by South Kensington Station, I could not
help remembering all this and wondering. I was still wondering when I
turned into Lennox Street.
It was a sunny afternoon, now well on towards summer, and as I walked up
the path I noticed that Esdaile's grass already needed cutting. I remember
thinking how jolly it must be at Santon that afternoon. Inside, as I opened
the door, I found the floor strewn with the usual clutter of leaflets and
circulars, coal-merchants' post-cards, announcements of dairies and
window-cleaning firms. I turned them over and found nothing of
importance among them. Then I passed to the annexe and the studio.
Before he had left, Esdaile had evidently set the place more or less in order,
but, judging from the veil of dust that lay over everything, he had made no
arrangements for having his house visited in his absence. I suppose Mollie's
two maids had found fresh jobs by this time. The shuttering-up of the
French window gave the alcove a vacant and dreary sort of look, which was
not improved by a slight fall of soot that had come down the chimney and

lay spread out over the hearth. In the studio the dark blue blinds were
drawn, pictures stood with their faces turned to the walls, and those on the
easels were wholly or partially covered with hanging valances of
newspapers.
The sketches I had come to fetch formed a small separate parcel which I
had no difficulty in finding. Nevertheless, to make sure they were the right
ones, I sat down in an old double armchair with a frayed tapestry seat and
unfastened the string that bound the brown paper. They were the required
ones, and I replaced the paper and tied the string again. Then I continued to
sit in the chair, not consciously thinking, with the bundle of sketches on my
knees.
I dare say it was the indigo twilight in which I sat that brought back to me
the last time I had seen those blinds drawn. You will remember that I had
myself helped to draw them when the shuffling of feet on the roof had
warned us that the police were about to carry the two men down into the
garden. I gave a slight shiver, but as much at the rather drowsy air of the
place as at the recollection itself. The studio would certainly be none the
worse for half an hour's ventilation and sunlight. I was in no great hurry to
leave. I rose from the tapestried chair, unfastened the blind-cords from the
cleats, and began to pull back the blinds. The first one I drew back showed
me that the broken roof-pane had been replaced by one of a different make
of glass. I pulled back the remaining blinds, and then sought the long
hooked pole that was used to draw down the upper portion of the wall-
window.
It was as I crossed to the corner where this pole stood that my foot caught
on the corner of a loose rug, tripping me slightly. As I did not fall I took no
notice of this for the moment, but found the pole, pulled down the window,
and let in the needed air. Only as I was replacing the pole did I notice the
small round hole in the floor that the turning up of the rug had disclosed.
Now there are times when one does not so much think as leap to an
instantaneous conclusion. Be it a right one or a wrong one, it possesses you
like a flash for the infinitesimal portion of time it endures. In this merest
flash of time my eyes had flown aloft. A hole in the floor, and another hole
in the roof!... A new roof-pane might have been put in since, but I knew
accurately in which portion of the old pane that shattered star with the small

round hole in the middle of it had been. In that moment of time I saw the
whole picture again—the star, that gray snowslide made by the bodies of
the two men, the little wavering, creeping shadows of the broken mulberry
branch. The hole in the middle of the star had been approximately over the
hole in the floor that the moving of the rug had revealed.
"Then why," I cried excitedly to myself, "didn't he find the bullet? How did
it come to be found in another house? If it went through the floor it ought to
have been in his cellar—if he looked—if he isn't lying——"
And then, in another almost simultaneous flash, "Could there have been two
bullets? There were seven left in the pistol—the magazine carries eight—
but you can get a ninth in if you place it in the chamber itself——"
All this, I say, crossed my mind in one hundredth part of the time it has
taken you to read it.
And then came the drop. I was all wrong. That hole in the floor wasn't a
bullet-hole at all. You can get a clean round bullet-hole in glass, but not in a
floorboard. Neither does any pistol make a hole with a neat little rim of
yellow metal glinting inside it.
I assure you I was already on my hands and knees by the side of that hole. It
was five-eighths of an inch in diameter, perfectly round, with, as I say, that
lining of what I at first took to be brass. I inserted my little finger, but the
lining was firmly fixed. It did not run through the thickness of the board,
but occupied perhaps an eighth of an inch about a third of the way down it.
And the removal of my finger, clearing away a little grime, revealed
something else. I lay down with my eye close to the hole. The ring was not
of brass, but of gold.
Breathlessly I rose and looked about for an instrument. A screwdriver on the
window-ledge caught my eye. Yes, a screwdriver would do. I seized it and
crouched on the floor again. I worked for perhaps a minute. At the end of
that time the slender circle of metal was loose in the palm of my hand.
Even without the tiny initials engraved inside it I should have known it.
Tightly as it had been wedged, not one of its three little emeralds had been
wrenched out. It was the engagement-ring I had seen on Mrs. Cunningham's
finger on the morning of our breakfast.

VIII
Fantastic as had been the thoughts that during that fraction of time had
whirled through my brain, the little gold circlet lying in my palm seemed to
propound questions more fantastic still. How in the name of all that was
inexplicable had Mrs. Cunningham's engagement-ring come to be there?
Each momentary explanation at which I grasped seemed more lunatic than
the rest. Had she simply lost it, sought for it and been unable to find it? Had
it rolled of itself into that little five-eighths hole? Absurd, since even if by a
miraculous chance it had rolled exactly there I had had to take a screwdriver
to prise it out. Had she put it there, and for what reason? Ridiculous again,
since ladies on the eve of their weddings do not use their rings for the
jeweling of holes in one-inch floorboards. Yet if she had not put it there,
what idiot had, and why? And what was the hole itself?
Again I was down on my hands and knees, examining the hole. Round—as
perfectly round as if it had been drilled with a brace and bit—but not recent.
It might at one time have given passage to a gas-pipe, a wire, a cord; it
might have been a knot-hole. I peered down it. Nothing but blackness. I
explored it again with my finger, and learned nothing new. Just an old hole,
now scraped and jagged a little by the screwdriver.
Suddenly I rose, left the studio, and strode through the annexe. Rooke might
have had his scruples about prying into the nooks and corners of another
man's house, but I assure you I now had none. I was bound for the cellar. If
others could go down there so could I. Rooke had said that Philip had left
the key in the door. "Right you are, Philip," I muttered to myself. "If Rooke
won't I will. Glenfield says you're pulling out, but so am not I. I'm for
Hubbard and the optophone theory now. I've an hour or two to spare, and
your cellar's going to be examined as it hasn't been yet. Here goes."
But I had all the moral guilt of my intention to abuse his roof-tree with none
of the advantages. The door that led to the cellar was once more locked and
the key had gone.
Slowly I went back to the studio and the frayed tapestry chair. I wanted to
think quietly and at length. Now I pride myself on being rather a methodical

sort of thinker when I really give my mind to a thing, and I was resolved to
get to the bottom of this if I could. That almost insultingly grotesque
discovery of the ring had put me on my mettle. One thing seemed clear, if
anything in the whole business was clear: for whatever reason, Mrs.
Cunningham had not shared Monty's delicacy about peering and pottering.
Of this there seemed to be several indications. Again and again she had
insisted that there was something uncanny about the place; she had had an
access of hysteria and had had to be brought up from the cellar; and rather
than live there she had broken off her engagement. But she had not done
this last immediately. Days, if not a week or two—I did not know how long
—had elapsed. I was now convinced that during that interval she had made
some kind of a discovery. The ring was evidence enough of that. And she
had had an advantage in her investigations that I had not: she had had
access to the cellar. Then, her discovery made, apparently she had cleared
out.
So much for Mrs. Cunningham. Now for the apparatus, all I knew of which
was the ring in the knot-hole.
Deliberately I began to reconstruct the events of the morning of the accident
from the moment when Esdaile had returned from his unexplained half hour
in the cellar. I put pressure on my memory so that not a single detail should
escape me. And I experienced a little thrill when, by dint of concentrated
thought, I evoked Esdaile's image again at the moment when Hubbard and I
had followed him into this very studio. He had been standing with bowed
head, poking with his foot at fragments of broken glass and—yes—at the
rug on the floor. I could see his foot again, pushing at that very mat over
which I had stumbled. The mat had covered the hole then as it covered it
now. Esdaile, to all appearances lost in abstraction, had—I began to feel it
in my bones—been intently engaged in covering up that hole.
Then, having covered up the hole, what had he done next? Instantly I saw
another vivid picture. I saw again those gray moving shapes on the roof,
saw Esdaile suddenly stride to the blind-cords, saw the movement with
which he had bidden me do the same, and the little bright gold rhomboids
of light in the rafters as the deep blue blinds had been shut.
And half an hour later he had sharply forbidden Rooke to touch the blind-
cords and had petulantly refused him the key of the cellar.

I felt excitement growing on me. My whole body began to glow with it. I
felt myself getting nearer—nearer——
Hubbard was both right and wrong——
He was wrong in his insistence on what Esdaile must have heard——
But he was right about the apparatus——
Esdaile had not heard—he had seen—and there was no more mystery about
it all than there is in putting your eye to a keyhole.

IX
And yet, approaching the truth as I felt myself to be, I had a deep-down
feeling that at the same time I was wrong. Carefully I begun to examine the
objections to my suddenly-formed theory, and instantly I was impressed by
them. In the first place, take an inch board with a five-eighths hole in it,
peep through, and see how much, or rather how little, of a field of vision
your eye commands. Next, consider the awkwardness of peering through
that hole, not in a vertical wall or door, but in horizontal planking some feet
above your head. Then, most important of all, weigh the extreme
unlikeliness of it that Esdaile, who had merely gone down for a bottle of
wine and had no reason whatever to dream that calamity was imminent,
should have had his eye at that hole at that particular moment of time. It
was preposterous. All had happened so quickly. He would have had to stand
on something, probably to pile up furniture; even with a pair of household
steps ready in position he would have had to mount them—nay, he would
first have had to think of mounting them. I had no means of telling if he had
previously known of that hole in his floor, but say that he had: does one, on
hearing an unaccountable noise, instantly run over in one's mind every
chink and cranny of one's dwelling and select one of them as an
observation-post? He could have dashed upstairs again and seen for himself
what was the matter in half the time.
No; in the very moment when I thought I had got it, it eluded me again.
Those perfectly ordinary considerations, of time, position and common
sense, seemed to dispose of my notion completely. Or almost completely.
There remained the hole. My conviction that the hole, in one way or
another, had something to do with it was shaken, but not destroyed. And, as
I was denied access to the cellar, I rose from the chair in order to make a
further examination of the studio.
And again, though the roof-plane was no longer there, I seemed to see that
circular hole in the middle of its cracked star. I remembered, too, Esdaile's
assumption that it was a bullet-hole and his search "high and low" for the
bullet that had made it. But was it necessarily a bullet-hole at all? Bullets

are not the only things that make holes. When a heavyish mass like two
falling men hits something else en plein fouet, can every neighboring
scratch or fracture be assigned its proper cause? There was no getting away
from the fact that the bullet had been found elsewhere. Might not some
object have fallen from a pocket? Or some portion of the plane itself have
dropped off? With the pane replaced it seemed useless to speculate.
Nor did my further explorations add much to my knowledge. They
consisted of estimating distances and relative positions of things, in an
endeavor to arrive at the physical significance of that hole in the floor. It
was no longer in the studio at all that I was interested; all my thoughts were
in that locked chamber below. I felt as annoyed as Monty himself had been
at all this juggling with the key. But I hardly felt myself at liberty to break
my friend's doors.
Nor—this too presently occurred to me—was I quite sure what I ought to
do with that ring. Merely to put it back where I had found it seemed rather
crass, and whether it should be returned to Rooke or to Mrs. Cunningham
herself was a niceish sort of point. I ended by putting it into my waistcoat
pocket.

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?"

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 anything 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.

PART VIII

AT SANTON

I
"For goodness' sake, Joan, stop chattering just for a few minutes!" Philip
broke out testily. "If you don't want to sit, say so and have done with it. This
is enough to drive anybody mad!"
I had been wondering how much longer his patience would hold out. When
an artist is in difficulties with his canvas, motor-bicycle talk for an hour on
end can be extremely wearing.
Joan looked up with aggravating sweetness. "What, Philip?" she inquired.
"I say if you don't want to sit, off you go on the confounded machine and
I'll start something else."
"But, Philip darling, you know the sparking-plug's broken, and it will be
three or four days before we can get another. Do you think Wellands will
stock that make, Chummy?"
Charles Valentine Smith knocked out the new Captanide pipe and
proceeded to refill it with the Dunhill Mixture.
"Well, if they don't I think I know a fellow who has a spare. That's the worst
of the Beaver," he went on. "Now with an Indian or a Douglas ..."
And off they went again, she as well as he, both talking at once: big-ends,
plugs, magnetos: Beaver, Indian, Douglas.... In my younger youth I used to
ride a tall ungeared ordinary; except for one hellish five minutes in which I
had clung, ardently praying, to Smith's back-carrier, I know nothing about
these modern machines; and how Joan managed to keep her sideways seat
on that grid of torture over his back wheel passed my comprehension. But
ever since the arrival of the hideous thing she had hardly been off it, hair all
over the place, ankles stiffly out, skirts rippling like a ribbon on a
ventilating-fan, and cauliflowers of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind
them. I could only conclude that modern love, besides being blind, is
deficient in the tactile nerve-centers as well.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Philip had set up his easel on a sheep-
nibbled slope of the cliff-tops. Joan, in her old tweed skirt and new canary-

colored silk jumper, was stretched luxuriously on the thymy bents. The
amber beads about her neck matched the potentilla on which she lay, and I
give you your choice which was the bluest—the aimlessly fluttering
butterflies, the nodding harebells, or her demure and reprehensible eyes.
Philip had deliberately excluded the blue of the sky from his canvas. The
picture was simply of Joan herself, the crewel-work of flowers on which
she lay, and behind her, red as the habitation of dragons, the midsummer
sorrel that massed itself up the slope.
The talk continued, a fitter's romance: clutches, brakes, front-drives:
Minervas, Excelsiors, de Dions....
In my day we played croquet and read "Maud." ...
And then Philip exploded again.
"Oh, do dry up! How do you expect me to paint? Pull that book a bit closer,
Joan, so it throws the light up on your face, and hold your chin a bit higher
——"
As if she spoke to herself I heard Joan's murmur: "Why did the razorbill
razorbill?"
As softly Charles Valentine Smith murmured back: "So the sea-urchin could
sea-urchin"; and this last flippancy was too much for Philip. He put his
palette down on the turf and turned to Smith and myself.
"Look here," he said politely, "will you two fellows oblige me by pushing
off? Right away somewhere else, please, and now."
"Oh," Joan wailed, "and I shan't have anybody to talk to!"
"You can read your book."
"But it's such a stupid one—all about an old artist, over thirty, who fell in
love with his model and bought her alpaca blouses and thread stockings
——"
"You shall have a motor catalogue to-morrow. Now sheer off, you fellows."
Obediently I got on to my feet and turned to Smith.
"Come along. We'll give him till midday. Here's your stick."
And I helped him to his feet and bore him off.

II
Ordinarily I do not find it easy to talk to very young men. I have been as
young as they, but they have not been as old as I, and I know this but they
do not. Young women—that is another matter, and I will make a very
candid confession. I now envy these youngsters their youth. I envied Smith
his youth. Despite his limp, I was conscious of his tallness and lissomness
as he hobbled by my side. And I will add that it is not an unmixed joy to be
asked to do a young goddess's shopping for her because you are "quite the
kindest person she knows."
It would hardly be true to say that my acquaintance with young Smith had
made no progress at all. I had made quite a number of interesting
observations on his idyll of petrol, love and crime. But he for his part was
still at the stage of apology for his "neck" in asking Joan to ask me to buy
his pipes and tobacco for him, and by way of leveling up the obligation had
actually sent for a copy of that dandy book that I as a novelist must on no
account miss, The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow. But I was still
"Sir" to him and he hardly "Chummy" to me, and our small-talk was quite
small. It was certainly small enough as we left the thymy hollow and slowly
made for the cliff-tops.
"Tell me if I walk too quickly for you," I said. His hurt was to his right
ankle, and his stick left a trail of little round holes in the turf.
"Oh, that's all right, thanks, sir," he said cheerfully, pegging away; and he
added with a chuckle, "I say, between you and I, old Philip was rather in a
paddy, wasn't he?"
"Between you and me he was," I said. I corrected him quite deliberately.
Now that the failure of the sparking-plug had put this opportunity into my
hands I was determined at all costs to know more of him. Hence my—well
grossièreté. But he noticed nothing. Instead he broke out with a feigned
enthusiasm.
"I say, these pipes are turning out jolly well! Lovely bit of straight grain this
one! You do know how to choose a pipe, sir! Are they French or Italian

briar?"
"French."
"Jolly nice bit of root!"
"I'm very glad."
"Cool as a nut. Joan's quite right about my smoking too many cigarettes.
They're all right for the street—I hate to see a fellow smoking a pipe in the
street—and gaspers smell a bit sickly to other people sometimes, don't you
think?"
I agreed with this too.
"I suppose the Specter hasn't turned up yet?" was his next effort, as he sat
down to rest for a minute.
"Not yet."
"I do hope it isn't out of print. How soon does a book go out of print, sir—
on an average?"
Weakly I thought of "Why does the razorbill razorbill?" and, I am afraid,
found nothing to reply....
Then, as he continued to babble laboriously across the gulf that separated
us, I remembered again certain tubular parcels that arrived for him by post,
which, when stripped of their wrappings, turned out to contain the
Transactions and Proceedings of this Society or that. Seeing these left lying
about I had peeped into them, and had been brought up standing against
such intimidating fences as the following:—
"Aerofoil Sections in relation to Speed Range."
"Influence of Wave-friction on Aerodynamic Resistances."
"Notes on Lateral Stability."
My simple literary mind faints in regions such as these. His presumably did
not. This apparently was his ordinary reading, the Specter his relaxation.
"—amber beads," the words came across the void that separated soul from
soul. "Just the shade I meant—neither too yellow nor too brown—I'm afraid
it took up an awful lot of your time——"

It was here that I took my plunge.
"What," I said, looking steadily at him, "is the Influence of Wind-friction on
Aerodynamic Resistance?"
His jaw dropped, as well it might. I knew that for a moment he was
wondering whether I had taken leave of my senses.
"Eh?" he said.
I repeated the question. Of course, I no more wanted information about
Aerodynamic Resistance than I did about briar pipes and amber beads. It
was information about Charles Valentine Smith that I wanted and intended
to have.
I date my possession of him from the moment that that look of
consternation came into his face. It broke upon me that I had put him into
some position that he felt he must immediately explain. Indeed he half rose,
as if, having obtained my acquaintance under false pretenses, he must set
himself right or leave me.
"Oh, I say, sir!" he broke anxiously out. "Do you mean those Journals and
things?"
"That's what I had in my mind. Especially the blue-covered ones."
"Oh lord! You don't suppose I can make head or tail of those!"
"Not make head or tail of them? But I've seen you reading them."
He seemed positively sick to extricate himself from my too flattering
opinion of him.
"Me understand all that! I could kick myself if you think that! Why, that's
all designers' stuff—they've got brains, those chaps—shiploads of them—
why, I should never have heard of the things but for——" He checked
himself.
"But——" I began, puzzled.
He was blushing—blushing like a young girl.
"I know," he said. "I feel a most awfully ass. The fact is, sir, I just moon
over those things, lose myself in 'em, sort of. I don't know the first thing
about 'em. Of course, there are bits here and there—engines and practical

flying and all that—I know a bit about that—what I mean to say is, a fellow
doesn't want to miss anything—it's hard to explain——"
On the contrary: it was not at all hard to explain. Simply, I had caught him
day-dreaming. That vivid color still in his cheeks told me that I had
stumbled on a privacy. A young girl approaching womanhood knows these
soft oubliances, these shy yet hardy excursions of the spirit that lead
nowhither and die of their own over-sweetness. It is love of which she
dreams; and this was his equivalent. He just "mooned." It was not
understanding—he "didn't want to miss anything." His was not a
technician's, but a poet's nature. And caught unawares he blushed.
"Of course my real job would be one of these Expeditions," he mumbled.
I pursued him relentlessly. "Which Expeditions?"
"Well, between you and I, they've started work on several of them. In Africa
and India and places. You see I'm awfully keen on Air-geography. If this
dashed ankle of mine ever gives me a chance again, that is. Bobby always
said that was my line of country. He was the chap for the technical end.
Thought in surds, Bobby did. He put me on to all those Journals and things,
and—after—well, I sort-of keep it up. He was your man for that."
"By Bobby do you mean your friend Maxwell?"
"Yes. Bobby," he replied, his eyes far out over the sea.

III
He spoke the name with the most perfect readiness and simplicity; there
was neither tremor in his voice nor the faintest sign of pain in his dark and
steady eyes. He was not even self-conscious under my (I admit) prolonged
and deliberate gaze. By what mystery of self-absolution he had expunged
the sinister fact for which Esdaile vouched I could not tell. He repeated
Bobby's name.
"Yes, Bobby was your man for all that. Fearfully hot stuff. When Bobby
opened his mouth I used to dry up."
Then, still without removing my eyes from him, "I never knew Bobby," I
said. "But I know a man who did."
He turned to me swiftly. "Who was that?" he demanded.
"A man called Hanson. An Australian. He says he knew him in Gallipoli."
His brows were knitted. "Hanson? Hanson? What was his other name?"
"Dudley."
"Hanson? Hanson? Did he say he knew me?"
"He wasn't sure. He thinks he ran across you. He knew you by sight,
anyway, for he described you to me."
"Hanson? No, I give it up. Don't remember him at all. You met such crowds
of chaps, you see—sometimes it's just like a dream——"
I appreciated that; but there still remained one thing that was no dream. This
was Philip's explicit declaration, "Oh, he remembers all right—it was the
other I didn't tell him—that anybody else knew." Philip might now be
resolved to let the whole affair sink into oblivion, but Philip after all had not
shot anybody. On that morning when I had had my talk with Mackwith I
had been rather pleased with my acumen in pointing out that whether our
Case had legal consequences or not its moral consequences were
inescapable. Yet here, if I could believe my own eyes, was a man who was
escaping them in their entirety. He continued to order Journals that Bobby

had "put him on to," and could speak of his victim apparently out of some
transcendental state of mind where sorrow was an anomaly and regret
beside the mark. It all appeared to be admirable, but I found it quite
incomprehensible.
"But," I came out of my reverie presently, "you haven't yet told me what 'it'
was that Bobby knew all about."
"Do you mean those books?" he asked.
"No, I don't mean the books at all. I know a good deal about books. You can
get so soaked in them that you make a whole artificial world out of them,
quite self-contained, logical with itself at every single point, and absolutely
out of touch with anything that really matters. Do you see what I mean?"
I wasn't sure that he did, and here was I, who do not talk easily to young
men, quite anxious that he should.
"Well, let's put it another way. You say Bobby knew all about these
equations and diagrams and things. Did he know what it was all for—really
for—not just wind-resistance or whatever you call it, but something more—
why there should be aeroplanes at all, for example?"
I had said it badly, but I saw his brow clear. There was a kindling in the
eyes he turned to me.
"It's funny you should say that," he said in a rather low voice, "because
that's just what Bobby himself used to say. He used to say that anybody
who'd passed his matric. could do what he did, and he always would have it
that I was the whole show. I didn't agree with him, of course, but—is that
what you mean?"
"It is so far," I said. "What else did he say?"
"Well, he always said it was a jolly good thing I wasn't technical. And I did
see what he meant by that. I mean to say things are simple really, the big
things I mean. You take the sea——" again his eyes wandered far out over
it. "People talk an awful lot of bunk about the sea. They think bases are just
harbors and ports and coaling-stations and so on. That a base is something
fixed. Why, that's exactly what it isn't. You've got to get your coal and oil
and stores, of course, but that's only like going into a shop and coming out
again as quick as you can. It's only then that the job really begins. I'm afraid

I'm talking an awful lot, sir, but I got it down to this: that a ship's only a
ship when she's moving. She's no better than a stupid old breakwater when
she isn't. I mean to say her real base is her course. Just an imaginary line to
make a dash from and turn up where the trouble is. Focal points I believe
they call 'em. At least that's the way I worked it out for myself."
"And do you mean the air's the same, or going to be?"
The look that I have ventured to call discontent came into his eyes.
"Well, nothing's quite the same as anything else, of course. But I do think
this. There's Germany. Over there——," he nodded out to sea. "North Sea
or German Ocean we used to call that, and that was there she said her future
was. Well, it isn't, of course. She hasn't got any coast to speak of, and isn't
going to have any. But——"
And this time his eyes went aloft to the immeasurable fields of the air.
"She's got just as much of that as anybody else. Taking a perfectly sound
line about it too. And what's the good of our saying she shan't build aircraft
as long as the damn dog doesn't know? Of course she'll build aircraft. That's
where her future is now, and she can afford to hand over ships. But every
Zepp or plane you get out of her you'll have to get with a pair of pincers.
Then ... swift? Swift won't be the word.... Oh, don't I wish I could get on
one of these Expeditions!"
I made no comment on this, since I know nothing about the air. These were
merely the words of Charles Valentine Smith, who did.

IV
He knew very little about himself—hardly seemed aware that there was
anything of importance to know. It was all Maxwell—"Bobby was the
whole show." And I had a very keen sense of the honor the dead man had
done himself in denying this. "Frightfully hot stuff on maths," said Smith;
and the world is full of men who are "frightfully hot stuff on maths," in that
sense; but it is rarely that you find one of these not too absorbed in the
technique and detail of his own activities to be aware of a vision beyond. I
know this in my own business. I see men working with an appalling
intensity, a new and wild and squandering energy that has long ago passed
from me; but for their Muse I look in vain. An altar is set up, not to any god
known or unknown, but to itself. I speak diffidently, but I seldom see that
any flame from Elsewhere descends upon it. This is hard to say, since I too
rub my two sticks together with my fellows, hoping they may kindle. I
should not say it except that I was now trying to arrive at some
comprehension of Maxwell, the competent and efficient man, exposed to all
manner of temptations to narrowness and complacency and inertia, but who
could yet see in this unsuspecting youngster something he himself did not
and could never possess.
And add to this that quasi-religious bond of the air that makes of two men
twins in one womb....
I repeat, Maxwell did himself a quite radiant honor.
"What sort of a fellow was Maxwell to look at?" I asked by and by.
The answer was almost startlingly ready. This lad who had bolted from
Malvern, forced his way into an Embassy and demanded to be taken in the
service of a foreign Power, unbuckled the watch from his wrist.
"Here he is," he said.
I found myself looking at a young but curiously worn face, with a great
width of brow, eyes that seemed to hold I knew not what nameless
expression of disillusion and fatality, and a firm and sweet mouth. That face
had certainly lost nothing spiritually by its ungrudged and generous

homage. Yet he too had probably jazzed and pink-ginned and drummed
ragtime on cases of stuffed birds. Strange days! Wisdom and experience
under young brilliantined hair, and the bald and reverend dome accepting
the result on hearsay! Slang, and an undreamed-of valor; Magalhaens'
vision, and a lark at a Grafton Ball! By being "frightfully keen on Air-
geography" Smith merely meant what Columbus and Cabot and the
Navigator had meant; by wanting to "get on one of these Expeditions" he
was willing to dare for discovery's sake some monstrous Baffin's Bay of the
air. "Not to miss anything," he fumed and fretted over Maxwell's equations
and made them part of the Dream and the Desire. He was brooding over it
now as we lay there together, I with his watch in my hand.... And all this, I
ought to say, was at the time when the last of the Santon hay was barely
stacked, and John Alcock and Whitten Brown had just flown the Atlantic in
sixteen hours. It was when the headland was pale cloth-of-gold with the
ripening corn, and the R. 34 had crossed to America and returned. It was
when the ditches were yellow with hawkweed and the copses pink with
campion, and no man living could have told you what the intentions of the
Air Ministry were. Smith was lying there brooding, not on the carriage of a
few pounds' weight of letters nor on prizes of £10,000, but on the problems
of man's unchanged and warring heart. He dreamed of Imperial Defense. He
was "keen" on making India and Egypt secure. He was "dead nuts" on the
safety of Africa, "all out" for Australia's protection, and "tails up" if any
other nation jolly well interfered.
And this was his next remark:—
"I say, sir, I think Joan got that Dunhill number wrong after all—I'll swear
there's latakia on this—don't tell Joan though—this is entrez nous."
Entrez nous! Between you and I! O modest flower tossed to the welcoming
hands of the Entente!
I handed him his watch back.
Strange, strange days!

V
Why did I not say straight out to him, "Look here, my young friend, this is
all extremely interesting, but what I don't understand is why you shoot a
man and then carry his picture on your wrist. In plain English, now, why did
you shoot him—always supposing you did?"
Well, I was trying to put myself in his place—trying to picture a friendship
such as he had had with this wistful, self-effacing young fatalist whose
picture I had just handed back to him. I have told you how the more
poignant of these experiences between man and man have been denied me;
a flying-friendship I could never by any possibility have had; but I could
reach out to it in my fancy. I could imagine with what fierce jealousy I
should have guarded a treasure so rich. Not a word, not a breath from
outside would I have suffered with regard to it. It was not a question of
mere impertinence. It was rather one of the violation of a sacred place.
And it seemed to me that I now owed him no less than I would have
claimed for myself. It made no difference that he was twenty-four and I
within hand's-reach of fifty. Less than an hour had swept these conventions
aside, and thenceforward he was entitled to the full honors of friendship and
respect. He might tell me what he chose. Ply him with questions, however, I
could not.
Nay, it even seemed to me now that I should have to drop my point before
Philip also. However much I had been put on my mettle by those
discoveries I had made on that Sunday afternoon in his studio, to drag them
up again now would merely be to attack Chummy at one remove. If I could
not have it from himself I could hardly have it at all, and the Case, which
had unfolded as a conjuror's pilule unfolds into a flagrant and morbid-hued
passion-flower, looked like shutting itself up again and being as if it had
never been.
Yet the discoveries of that Sunday had been much on my mind. Especially
that gold ring that had once belonged to Audrey Cunningham had been on
my mind. That the circumstances in which I had found it were directly
connected with the rupture between her and Monty I could hardly doubt,

and several times, as a mere man, I had been on the point of confessing my
share in the incident to Mollie Esdaile.
If Mollie has a little dropped out of the picture, let me now bring her in
again as she brought herself in as Chummy Smith and I lay on the turf that
morning.
I forget for what delinquency Alan and Jimmy had spent some hours in
disgrace; I think they had been cutting one another's hair. But apparently all
was now expiated. With joyous cries they dashed over a low brow, Mollie's
head and shoulders rising behind them, and flung themselves upon us with
the jubilant announcement that they were good again and that the hens had
laid eleven eggs.
"One's a duck's——"
"Two's duck's——"
"I'll bet you——"
"I'll bet you my purple pencil——"
"I'll bet you my Bible an' all my shells——"
"Where's daddy?"
"Hasn't he finished painting Auntie Joan yet?"
Mollie was laughing and telling Chummy not to get up. She "goes to
pieces" a little in the country in the matter of dress, and wore her mallow-
flower of an old sunbonnet and her gray sandshoes. As Smith reached for
his stick and got up on to his feet she caught my eye and laughed again. She
had suffered from big-ends and magnetos too.
"Did Philip bundle you both out?" she asked.
"He bundled this man out. I was behaving myself."
"Well," quoth Smith, "we only gave him till twelve o'clock, and it's five to
now. You coming, kids?"
They were not merely coming; they were already twenty yards on the way,
with Chummy pegging after them. Had Mollie and I followed, Philip would
merely have commandeered us for the carrying home of his painting-tackle.

Instead we turned along the cliff-tops in the opposite direction, towards the
zigzag path that dropped steeply to the beach.
Since that impetuous dash of hers to London she had shown herself from
time to time—I will not say brooding (that is too strong a word), but
frequently withdrawn, pensive, rêveuse. She was as brisk and practical as
ever about the house or in the arranging of picnics and excursions, but
somehow the routine of her daily life struck me as a series of detached and
separate efforts, that for some reason or other never acquired momentum. I
admit, however, that it would be easy to make too much of this change in
her, if change there was.
"Shall we go down?" she said as we paused at the top of the path. "I haven't
seen the sands for two days. 'Man works till set of sun——'"
"Come along," I said, giving her a hand; and we began the descent.
The Santon sands were a rather wonderful sight that morning. The tide was
at its farthest out, and some mysterious wave-action had rolled out the wide
spaces, not to an even flatness, but into regular parallel striations of wet and
dry, the wet so mirror-like and shining that the sky was perfectly
reduplicated in it and the flight of the seabirds far under our feet could be
distinctly seen, the dry portions the intervening footings from one to the
next of which we stepped. Our feet left no prints on the firm surface, so that
looking behind the illusion was still the same—the dry stripes, the sudden
brilliant chasms in between, everywhere the interrupted inversions of blue
and white and dazzling sun.
"Well, I've been having my first real talk with your Chummy," I remarked
as the alternations slowly flowed under our feet.
"Oh? What about?" she asked.
"About his aims and so on—what he wants to do. Apparently he wants to
get on some sort of an Expedition. But is it likely he'll ever fly again?"
"I don't know," she said; and walked a little way before adding, "I shouldn't
think he'd want to."
"He does."
She looked straight before her, as if to rest her eyes from the passing
immensities underfoot. There was indeed a fantastic sort of consonance

between flight and the phenomenon of the shore that midday. I do not know,
however, whether this vague association prompted the huge implication of
her very next words—an implication which I now had from her for the first
time.
"You know what I mean," she said quietly.
I tried to steal a glance at her face, but saw only the folds of the sunbonnet.
"And that it isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to talk about," she added,
leaving me to take the hint.
"No," I agreed mechanically; but for all that I needed a few moments in
which to think.
Obviously I was not there to get out of Philip's wife something that Philip
himself refused me; but the immensity of her quiet assumption had pulled
me up short. I was assumed to know the whole—the whole—of "what she
meant." It was left to my good sense to see that it was not a thing to talk
about. There was to be no argument; she merely expected an equal
simplicity in return, and with a woman like Mollie to expect such a thing is
to get it. I watched a cloud of sheldrake that wheeled and broke over their
own images a few yards away to our left, and then I turned to her.
"My dear, I'm not sure that I do understand altogether, but we certainly
won't talk about it. I should, however, like to mention one little thing that I
don't think even Philip knows."
She turned quickly. "What is that?"
"Nor Smith."
"What is it?"
"Nor, I should say, you yourself."
"If only you'll tell me what it is——!"
I looked into her eyes. "Where is Mrs. Cunningham now?" I asked.

VI
Her start could hardly have been more sudden had I asked her where Alan
was a few moments after he had been seen playing at the cliff's edge.
"Audrey Cunningham? She was at Harrogate last, I think—or Scarboro—
why?"
"Why was her engagement broken off?"
She made an abrupt, impatient gesture. Evidently I had plunged her back
into an older mood.
"Oh, I don't know! I'm tired to death of—of everything! Why do you want
to remind me of it? I was just beginning to forget a little. Oh, why didn't we
leave London a week earlier! We nearly did—Philip was only waiting for
Billy to get those pictures back—we should have escaped everything then!"
I soothed her. "Yes; but about the engagement. I could make very little of
your letter. You said things were tangled and difficult and so on. What did
you mean, Mollie?"
She was silent.
"Do you mean that you won't discuss Mrs. Cunningham with me?"
Still she did not speak.
"Because you have discussed her. I had your letter. You said you'd heard
from her. That was since you last saw her. What happened in between?"
She found her voice. "Nothing that I know, except that it seems to have
been definitely off."
"By that do you mean that she returned Monty's ring?"
"She didn't say what she did with the ring."
"Well, she neither returned it nor kept it. I have it. I don't want it. Will you
take it?"
I fetched it from my pocket and held it out to her.

Her hand found my sleeve, almost as if that brilliance underfoot unsteadied
her head. Her eyes had closed and there was a little hard crumple between
her brows. I put my other hand on her shoulder.
"Let's get up the beach—this is too dazzling—it's making you dizzy," I said.
Faintly she murmured, "Yes—it does get in your eye——"

VII
On the hot loose sand above the highest seaweed I made her sit down.
Presently she had recovered a little. Her manner was now undoubtedly that
of a person on whose back a half-withdrawn burden is reimposed. But she
shouldered it.
"Where did you get it?" she asked, her eyes on the ring in my palm.
"Do you remember Philip asking me to pack up some sketches for him and
sending me his key?"
"He did say something about it. Monty had left."
"I found the ring on the Sunday afternoon I went for the sketches. It was in
a hole in the studio floor."
"In a hole.... Ah-h-h-h!"
I looked sharply at her, but continued.
"Stuck quite firmly in: in fact, I had to prise it out with a screwdriver. I
didn't know which of them it belonged to—I don't know now—so I slipped
it into my pocket. Perhaps you'd better take it."
But she made no movement to do so. She was picking up handfuls of sand
and allowing it to slip through her fingers again. She made quite a number
of little heaps, which her eyes attentively watched, but her mind was
elsewhere—perhaps on that last letter of Audrey Cunningham's, when
apparently the engagement had been neither off nor on. She made no sign
when I placed the ring in her lap. I had to speak.
"Queer, wasn't it?"
Her murmur was so low that I scarcely heard it. "Of course a thing like that
would make it definitely off."
"A thing like what?"
"Losing it like that—after all the other."

"Come, she can hardly have 'lost' it, since I had to get a screwdriver to prise
it out!"
"I don't mean 'lost' in that way—be quiet and let me think."
The fingers began to make a fifth sandhill.
I hope I have made it clear that I was confining myself quite strictly to
Monty Rooke's affair. If it was simply a misunderstanding I did not think I
was going beyond my business in discussing with Mollie whether that
misunderstanding might not be removed. But it now seemed to me that I
was once more on the verge of far more than this. That deep long-drawn
"Ah-h-h-h!" that "A thing like that would make it definitely off" were
enough to convince me of this. Evidently my words had meant more to her
than to myself who had uttered them. Therefore if Mollie claimed time to
think, so did I.
And first of all I recalled my firm persuasion of that Sunday afternoon that
Audrey Cunningham had made some sort of a discovery. It might have been
an accidental one, or she might merely not have rested until she had made
it, but a discovery she had made, and it had to do with the hole in the studio
floor. I remembered too my own pacings, eye-measurements, judgment of
angles, and my slight chagrin that Philip had frustrated my further
investigations by his removal of the key from the cellar door. And it seemed
to me that again everything seemed to come round to that cellar of Esdaile's
—the cellar on which Hubbard had instantly fastened as holding the answer
to the riddle, the cellar in which Philip had spent that unaccountable half-
hour and over which he had since so jealously watched, yet the self-same
cellar into which both Rooke and Mrs. Cunningham had since descended
and found ... nothing.
Yet instantly all my former objections rose again as vividly as ever—the
extreme physical improbability that Philip could have seen anything
through that peep-hole, the utter unlikelihood that he should have had his
eye at it at that particular moment of time, the virtual impossibility that he
should have thought of the hole at all on hearing the crash.
And yet in this hole had been tightly jammed the ring now lying in Mollie's
lap.

Suddenly Mollie surprised me by looking up and almost brightly smiling.
She smoothed out the sandhills and picked up the ring from her lap.
"Well," she said in a tone of relief, "that makes an immense difference. I'm
awfully glad you told me. Shall we be getting back?"
But this, it struck me, was rather rushing matters. I thought I had a right to
know just a little more than that. Therefore I did not rise.
"One moment," I said. "I should like to know why you said that 'a thing like
that would make it definitely off.'"
She smiled again, with a sort of affectionate raillery.
"Oh ... and you're supposed to understand women!"
This I warmly disclaimed. "In any case I only know Mrs. Cunningham very
slightly," I protested.
"And you formed no impression of her?"
"I didn't say that."
"Not even that she would be just the woman to take a—hint—of that kind?"
She was gently but quite plainly laughing at me; but, glad as I was to see
the cloud disappear from her brow, she was not going to have everything
her own way.
"Then she did make a discovery, and received a hint, as you call it, in doing
so?"
"Did she?" she parried.
"Did she?"
At that she laughed outright. She patted my sleeve almost as if I had been a
child.
"You men can't know how funny you are sometimes!" she mocked me.

VIII
It struck me even then that the moment Mrs. Cunningham's name was
introduced there was introduced also something of that sex-antagonism—
perhaps I had better modify that and say sex-difference—for which her
personal story had given her such bitter reason. Here now was Mollie,
suddenly and in the middle of our tête-à-tête, abolishing me as an individual
and saddling me with the collective qualities of men in general. And I must
remind you once more that as a matter of mere historical sequence I was
still unaware of what had passed between her and Philip on that night when
she had put Audrey Cunningham to bed, and Monty had spent half the night
in wandering through the dark Roehampton lanes.
"Well, let's take it that we're funny," I said rather shortly. "I don't quite see
the joke myself, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that if I can do
Monty a good turn I want to. Whether patching it up between him and Mrs.
Cunningham is a good turn is for you to decide. I only met her once in my
life, and hardly exchanged a dozen words with her."
"You shall presently if I can lay my hands on her."
"What do you mean? That you're going to have her down here?"
"Of course I'm going to have her down here if she can come," said Mollie in
her most matter-of-fact tones. "How slowly you think! She must come
immediately. I shall see about it this afternoon même."
"And Rooke too?"
"We'll see about that."
"And Hubbard? And Mackwith?"
"No. What have they got to do with it?"
"Merely to make the party complete. We should be just where we started
then."
"Oh, I think we can dispense with that side of it," she answered lightly. "Let
me see: was it Harrogate? It was Buxton, and then Matlock, and then either

Harrogate or Scarboro...."
I wonder whether the surmise has dawned on you that was now beginning
to dawn on me? I admit that I had none but the very slightest grounds for it,
and that even these were more exclusions than affirmations; but in the
absence of anything more positive they had to serve. Think for a moment
how we men, solemnly, ponderously and sure that we were doing the decent
thing, had decided that at all costs certain facts of our Case should be kept
from the womenfolk. To that end we had evaded, temporized, shuffled. And
now suppose—just suppose—that all our care and concealment had been
wasted, and that two of the women at any rate knew as much as Philip
Esdaile knew and far, far more than any of the rest of us? Mind you, I was
only guessing; but I began rather to fancy my guess. If there was little for it,
I could see nothing against it. Certain things, moreover, were distinctly in
its favor. Why this remarkable brightening in Mollie's manner, this change
from her dizzy little stagger over those strips of inverted sky when I had
first produced that ring to her air of lightsome raillery now? Why this quick
instinctive taking of sex-sides, this sudden practical decision to seek out
Audrey Cunningham this very day and to have her down to Santon? It was
not the ring at all; it was—could only be—the place in which the ring had
been found. Always, always we came back to that hole in the studio floor at
which Philip's eye could not possibly have been at the moment of the crash
that May morning. Somewhere between the hole and the cellar the elusive
explanation lay. I had been thwarted, Mackwith knew nothing about it, and
Hubbard could only grunt and mumble about periscopes and sound-ranging
and selenium cells; but Mollie, I was persuaded, knew.
And what I had just told her, which she had not hitherto known, was that
Audrey Cunningham shared the knowledge with her.

PART IX

WHAT PHILIP KNEW

I
The other day, accompanied by an engineer acquaintance, I was pottering
about certain new excavations in the heart of London, and came upon a
number of heaps of crushed and broken-up concrete, evidently the remains
of old foundations. Yet those foundations could not have been very old,
since I myself could remember the buildings of which they had been the
support, and these had been old-fashioned rather than old. One of them had
been a theater, another an hotel; and I stood there with my friend, looking
over the waste of rubbish and barrows and wheeling-planks and thrown-up
London clay, trying to evoke in my mind the exact plan of those vanished
streets of thirty-odd years ago.
I found it difficult. Had these streets been older streets there would have
been remembered records to help me. Prints would have jogged my
memory, maps and plans have come to my aid. The seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries would somehow have come nearer home than that
unnoteworthy period of hardly more than a generation ago. Particularly
when I tried to picture the huge new palaces of ferro-concrete that will
presently arise, that intermediate epoch seemed ephemeral and without
significance.
And so, even already, I find this record of our Case to be. There is a strange
blank, full (I know) of all manner of busyness and bustle and restless effort,
but without either the security of history nor yet the full brightness of new
discovery. The Scepter action seems somehow more remote than the
Armada, the findings of this high-sounding Committee or that farther away
than Trafalgar. All is still too near to be seen, and by the time the dust has
settled another pen than mine will have to take up the tale.
Indeed, I have more than once felt inclined to hand over the pen now, for,
when all is still to prove, a younger faith and vision than those of my day
are needed. For example, Cecil Hubbard tells me that the man who
nowadays does not know at least the elements of all this lore of wave-
lengths and directional wireless has no business to say that he belongs to his
age at all, and sadly I believe him. Yet Philip Esdaile contrives to keep

abreast, not by joining in the banging and burnt-cork of so much
contemporary painting, but by virtue of something else, often temporarily
hidden, that will still be quietly there when the whistles have ceased to
scream and the tom-toms to thud. He too maintains the continuity, sharing
with his forerunners that quality, whatever it is, which makes the old
centuries modern and the novelty of yesterday afternoon musty and stale
before the sun next rises.
Therefore, it should be understood that the rest is more theirs and less mine
than ever. In the Scepter action Charles Valentine Smith, speaking (thanks
largely to my friend Glenfield) from the witness-box and not from the dock,
with wreaths and garlands and the glamour of his Embassy adventure
almost visibly about him, made this abundantly clear. Easily, familiarly, and
with pronouns all over the shop, he dealt with matters so far above my head
that I will make no attempt to report him. If you are interested, there are The
Times Law Reports in which you can read it all. And similarly with the
whole crop of associated actions and inquiries and investigations. My own
interest in them is no more than that something has been born in my time
whose infant strugglings and gaspings I witnessed, and about which I shall
doubtless become garrulous all too soon.

II
So that conjuror's passion-flower to which I have likened this case all but
folded itself up into its original pilule again. That it did not do so was due to
a series of small happenings which I will now relate.
The first of these was my leaving Santon before Mrs. Cunningham arrived
there. Mollie, despite her energy, did not discover her friend's whereabouts
so easily as she had anticipated. It took her, to be precise, a fortnight, at the
end of which time I had to leave. But so narrowly did I miss Mrs.
Cunningham that I believe her train passed mine on the way.
But I did not leave Mollie without that sort of smiling salute that
accompanies a fencer's "en garde." If (I told her flatly) she held herself free
to accept information from me and to give nothing but pitying looks of sex-
superiority in return, I for my part should also consider myself at liberty to
do as I pleased should further information come to light. What I had in my
mind was that if she and Audrey Cunningham were going to put their heads
together in the country Rooke and I might do the same thing in town. I may
say that I was quite conscious of the feebleness of my retort, and did not for
a moment expect that Rooke would have anything fresh to tell me.
"Very well," Mollie laughed gayly from the platform. "But you can tell
Monty from me that I'll look after this end of it. Don't tell him anything
about the ring though, or you may spoil it So long, my dear—see you in
September——"
And the waving hands of the Santon party slid past my carriage window.
I gave Monty her message, though strictly without prejudice to myself as its
bearer. He was not caught up into any sudden transport of joy. Instead some
cheerful confidence of his own seemed to envelop him.
"I fancy that will be all right now," he said.
"Do you? Well, I'm very glad. It's a great improvement on the last time."
"Oh, I've had rather a bit of luck since then," he replied.

His "bit of luck" seemed to me slender enough grounds for his confidence
that all would yet be well. It appeared that he had been sent by a weekly
paper down to Hounslow to make certain sketches (he was in full harness
again), and there he had got into conversation with a ground official, an ex-
R.A.F. man. He had rather "palled up" with this man, and had seen him
several times since. Indeed, Monty was a little inclined to impart recently
acquired information with regard to the organization of "dromes" and
similar matters, and had quite a number of yarns that were "absolute facts"
to tell. His conversation also had become noticeably slangier.
"You see," he remarked casually, "I think I'm on the track of why that pal of
Philip's shot the other chap."
I found myself staring blankly at him; but, as often happens in moments of
shock, I did not at first feel the full force of what he said. I interrupted him.
"I say—I hope you haven't been talking too much about that?" (I knew his
weaknesses, and a perfectly open candor was one of the gravest of them.)
But "Lord, no!" he instantly reassured me. "Talking about it? Do you think
I'm a——" the initials he used were those of the words "blind fiddler."
"I'm glad of that," I murmured.
And then it was that the full weight of what he had said began to sink into
my mind.
"Then why did he shoot him?" I asked presently, when I was a little more
master of myself. This conversation, I ought to have said, took place on the
top of a bus going eastward down Piccadilly. I was on my way to the office,
and I had found Monty with a finished drawing which he also was taking to
Fleet Street. He looked away over the Green Park.
"Well, I'm not perfectly sure I'm right, of course," he replied, turning to me
again. "In fact, I might be miles out—right off the map. But I did see him
on the roof that morning, you know, and I've been trying to piece it all
together again, and I must say it fits in pretty well."
"What fits in, and with what?"
He dropped his voice. "Well, you see, this fellow Smith waved his hand the
way I told you—like this——" On the bus top he made that same aimless
and wavering movement of his hand that I had seen him make in Esdaile's

studio, that I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Chelsea public-
house. "I think now he wanted the pistol back again, but of course I didn't
give it him."
"What did he want it for?"
"Might have wanted to shoot himself," Monty replied.
I pondered deeply, my eyes on the passing façade of the Ritz. Certainly
Monty, as the first on the scene that morning that now seemed such ages
ago, had the right to collate his original observations with anything he
might subsequently have learned, and the resulting conclusion would
probably be a strong one. But that Chummy had possibly wished to shoot
himself was no explanation of why he had shot Maxwell. Indeed, another
explanation was far more probable. Having realized that he had in fact shot
him he might merely have wished to take the shortest way out himself, and
I drew Monty's attention to this.
"I'm coming to that," Monty answered. "You see this fellow Wetherhead is a
jolly interesting chap. You remember the July push on the Somme? Well, he
was in that—Bristol Fighter—and then he went up the line to Wipers. He
told me that one time when they were in Pop—Poperinghe that is, you
know, and we'd a lot of heavy guns there———" (but I think I may safely
omit the rather lengthy second-hand recital of Wetherhead's movements and
experiences). "Extraordinary yarns he has to tell. Did you know that a first-
class pilot can drive another one down with the wash of his propeller? He
can, Wetherhead says. He gets above him, and maneuvers for position, and
then—I forget exactly how Wetherhead put it, but he showed me with a
couple of models they have there——"
"Yes, yes, but you were going to say——"
"So I was; I know I'm rambling a bit, but it's awfully interesting, and you
must meet Wetherhead. Well, when he was with the infantry (Northwold
Fusiliers) he says quite a number of their fellows used to carry little doses
of poison about with them, just in case. He'd heard awful yarns of the way
some of these Boches used to treat their prisoners. So they had this poison
to be ready for anything, like Whitaker Wright with his cigar."
"Monty, if you don't come to the point——"

"Why, I'm there now; don't have a vertical gust, old thing. Well, just in the
same way Wetherhead says some of these pilots and their observers had an
arrangement that if one of them got it in the neck the other one was to finish
the job for him. And the other way round, of course. He and his observer—
he's going to introduce me to him—they had it all fixed up, but luckily it
never came to that. So it's not impossible that these two fellows were like
that. What do you think? It fits in with my end all right, and you've been
down there and seen Smith. What about you? I'm inclined to have a bit on it
myself."
A bit on it! ... A bit! Instantly I would have had all I possessed on it. Our bus
was standing at the Circus end of Lower Regent Street when Monty at last
came out with it, but it had reached Waterloo Place before I next became
conscious of my physical surroundings. A bit on it!... Look at Monty as I
have tried to describe him to you. An unworldly and lovable and gentle sort
of donkey he was in some ways; now that he had finished with his dummy
trees and linoleum infantry he was apparently beginning to learn a little
about other aspects of the war; and Wetherhead (whoever he was—already
Monty had so crammed him down my throat that I was resolved to put the
width of England between us rather than meet him) suddenly stood for the
whole of the Air Force to him. But behind all his sweet credulity Monty was
no fool. He was aware of his ground. He had been the first on the roof that
morning. He was in the last event capable of putting two and two together
and of scoring a bull. Do you know these flashes of the absolute and
unalterable rightness of a thing? One of them blinded Saul of Tarsus on the
road to Damascus; something of the same kind blinded me for the whole
length of Lower Regent Street. I had no longer one single shadow of doubt.
Nay, I had a certitude that even Monty didn't share. He "wasn't perfectly
sure." But I——!
For what else could it have been? What else in the whole realm of man's
created spirit? For what other reason could Esdaile, up to then wavering and
swayed by doubts, have visited the hospital where Smith lay, have been
back in his own home again within half an hour, and then have straightway
borne his exonerated friend off into the midst of his family? Why, from that
moment, had he immediately set about to get his own half-confidences to
the rest of us back into his possession again? Why, at Santon, had my own

questions been met with a silencing stare? Of all the things conceivable to
have been told, could Smith have told him anything but this?
And Smith's own demeanor on that uplifted Yorkshire headland? Was not
that too explained? I thought it was, and could only marvel—marvel—that
not as much as the smell of the fire had passed upon him. That white and
welding heat of war had not merely made his pact with Maxwell a thing to
be honored in the last emergency without a further moment's thought, but it
admitted no sigh nor compunction nor regret afterwards. Compunction?
Sigh? Regret? For what? It had had to be done, and it had been done. As
gladly would he have accompanied his friend's spirit on that last flight of
all, but, that denied him, unsorrowing he remained behind, ground-officer
henceforward to an angel. What more than this is death to those who for
four years have been crucified all the day long? What else is life, their own
life or that other-own their friend's, when it is held at this instant readiness?
The coil about it all is not for them, but for us, who peer about for bullets
and cartridge-cases and holes in the floor. Chummy's every breath would
not have been his absolution had he not laughed with Esdaile's children and,
with Joan perched on the carrier behind him, cheerfully fouled the Santon
roads with the stench of his exhaust. He had no burden to assume. He had,
on the contrary, an urgent task to carry on. And in the carrying-on of it he
knitted his uncomprehending brows over Maxwell's Transactions and
Proceedings and carried a dead man's portrait on his wrist.

III
Instead of going straight to the office that morning I waited in some ante-
room or other while Monty took in his drawing. Somebody else waiting
there, who may or may not have known me, observed that it was a fine
morning, but I am not sure that I replied. I was in no mood for exchanging
casual remarks about the weather.
For while I still marveled—and I need hardly say rejoiced—admiration and
joy must wait for the present. It might be some little time before I saw
Monty again (he had told me he was making business calls during a great
part of the day and working until late into the night), and another point had
struck me. This was his new confidence that it would presently be "all
right" between himself and Audrey Cunningham. I had had a glimpse, if not
yet the full revelation, of where Smith stood; but I did not yet clearly see
how this affected Mrs. Cunningham. Yet in Monty's mind a connection
obviously existed. He came out of the editor's den again, folding up the
brown paper that had enwrapped his drawing and putting it carefully into
his pocket.
"Brown paper's scarce," he said. "I've used this piece four times already.
And I undo all the knots in my string too. Well, which way are you going?"
We left the office and, barely a hundred yards away, turned into the Temple.
Presently he resumed our previous conversation by asking me what I
thought of his guess; and I told him. I told him also my difficulty about
what his own engagement had to do with this.
"Do with it?" he repeated as we began to pace backward and forward along
King's Bench Walk. "It's a good deal to do with it—if that about Smith's
right, of course. You see, you hardly know Dawdy. She thinks you don't like
her very much——"
"Then I hope you'll take the first opportunity——" I began hurriedly, but he
waved his hand.
"Oh, don't you worry about it. I don't suppose she means it. And whether
she does or not it seems to me this is exactly where I come in."

"Then you see more than I do," I remarked.
"Don't you? I mean her taking sudden fancies of that kind. I'm not
superstitious myself—silly I call it—but she's a mass of it. Theatrical
people are, I've heard, and anyway she is. I think that beast Cunningham
started her off. When she used to sit up at night waiting for him to come
home she used to do all sorts of stupid things—sit there counting slowly,
and if he didn't come before she counted a hundred he wouldn't come at all
—counting the taxis that passed too—watching the clock—beastly. Filthy
time she had. I hope I'm somewhere near that brute at the Resurrection."
Presently he swallowed his anger and continued.
"Well, about when Philip offered us that studio, that accident happened, and
everything was at sixes and sevens. Philip began it, stopping all that time in
the cellar and behaving like a lunatic when he did come up. What his game
was—well, you can search me. So first Philip starts playing the goat, and
then there was all that fuss about Mrs. Esdaile going away, and Philip
staying on day after day, always saying he was going and everything was
perfectly all right but never budging an inch, mind you. Well, it began to get
on Dawdy's nerves. And I began to catch it too. She said I'd something up
my sleeve as well, and of course I had, about that pistol. And then there was
that time when we took her wardrobe down into the cellar."
"Yes, tell me about that."
"Absolutely nothing to tell. That's all Dawdy's fancy too. If there'd been
anything funny he wouldn't have left the key in the door, would he?"
"He took it out afterwards."
"It was there for some days anyway. In fact, I took another box of Dawdy's
down, but I came straight up again. You're all wrong about that cellar."
"Hubbard doesn't think so."
"What does he say?"
"He doesn't actually say anything; he doesn't know; but he wouldn't be
surprised if it turned out Philip had some sort of a portable installation
down there. But don't take this from me. I know nothing about these
things."

"Wetherhead knows about them," Monty mused....
"Go on about Mrs. Cunningham."
"Well, as I tell you, it got on her nerves. She began to say she was fed up
with men and silly things like that. Didn't want to get married at all; wanted
to go and live with some girl. And then one day——"
But here he suddenly stopped, and for a reason I could easily guess.
Undoubtedly at this point she had made independent investigations, which
Monty either knew or suspected and didn't want to talk about. His hesitation
over, he continued.
"Well, so it dragged on, until one evening I met her after rehearsal, and that
was the finish. Absolutely done in she was; ten hours that day and nothing
but a bun and a glass of milk. Of course, I saw she was all tuckered up, and
I didn't want to take much notice of what she said—just gave her something
to eat and tried to calm her down. But it was no good. When I called at
Oakley Street the next morning she'd gone—gone to stop with this other
girl; and in a week the Company was off."
In spite of Mollie's injunction I ventured to ask a question.
"Did she return the ring you gave her?"
"No, and that's one of the reasons why I think it might be all right yet. But
the chief reason's this. She's got it into her head that it all started with that
crash. Superstition, but there was no arguing with her. Well, suppose I'm
right in what I told you, and Smith didn't really shoot that chap at all—
didn't shoot him in the way we thought at first, I mean. It would be just like
Dawdy to say that took the bad luck all off. She's always either up or down,
poor darling. A rotten life she's had."
I nodded, remembering Mollie's words: "She would be just the woman to
take a hint of that kind." Although Monty didn't know it, Audrey had lost
her ring, would regard the loss as an omen, and the loss had probably taken
place shortly before Monty had met her at the stage-door.
It did seem to follow, even as Monty said, that with the removal of the
whole Case out of the regions of ordinary crime, there might be an end also
of the nightmare shadows that had oppressed Audrey Cunningham's soul.

IV
This record has already taken so many turns and windings, anticipations
and doublings back upon itself, that I cannot see that one more excursion
will either make or mar it. Many pages ago I wrote that the Case was a
Case, complete, self-contained, and independent of the larger issues and
forces in which it is nevertheless paradoxically rooted and involved. And
though the Case as an entity is approaching its close, the outside influences
continue. The Scepter decision, for example, is being appealed against, and
Mackwith tells me that there is every likelihood that it will end up in the
Lords. The Press, from which I shall shortly retire, seems to be attaining
something like a real policy with regard to the matters of which I have
spoken, and, encouraged by certain signs of Ministerial yielding, has taken
still better heart. Cairo to the Cape has for the present failed, and Charles
Valentine Smith did not succeed in becoming a member of that gallant
Expedition; but other great projects are in meditation, and this very day the
announcement is made of an impending flight round the world itself, for
which Cooks and Ansons and Drakes and Dampiers of little more than half
my age will eagerly flock to enter. The gloomy forebodings of Hills, my
fellow-clubman, that attack and defense will presently become a matter of
black typhus cultures do not at present seem likely to be fulfilled, not
altogether for the reasons publicly given, but for quite other ones; but the
chances are that he is right about gas, and that one day we may have to
carry fans and box-respirators as we now carry umbrellas. What must come
must come, even as it came to our fathers before us, and we, like they, can
only do the duty of our day. The rest is out of our hands, and it is impotence
and vanity even to dream too far ahead. So to our immediate business, of
which my own present portion is the final putting to bed of our Case. With
the permission of Philip Esdaile, A.R.A., and the others, I bid you to yet
another breakfast. This time it is a wedding breakfast, and a double one.
Hardly an hour ago Joan Merrow, spinster, became Mrs. Charles Valentine
Smith, and Audrey Cunningham (née Herbert) Mrs. Montagu Rooke. Joan
was married at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, and wears her full bridal attire;
but Audrey Rooke wears the gray costume and the black satin hat (that

sticks out on each side of her head like the serifs of a capital "I") in which
she walked from the Registry Office. And there is present the same party,
with the addition of Chummy, with which this story opened.

V
Again the breakfast recess was full of charming light. About the walls the
love-making butterflies danced when carafes were moved, and only the
flowers on the table were different—for it was early in a halcyon autumn,
and the mulberry outside had already begun to turn. The faces of the
Esdailes and the Rookes were enviably brown, for Monty and Audrey had
spent three weeks at Santon and the whole party had returned together; and
Joan, who knows perfectly well that I adore her, had very simply and
sweetly come over to my side of the table and linked her hands for a
moment round my arm. Then, after a warm little pressure, she had returned
to Chummy again, who had risen. He was staying at an hotel in Gloucester
Road, must get out of his wedding garments, and would then return to take
Joan away.
"Don't change your mind and not come back," Joan called after him; and he
waved his hand from the door and was off.
"What about Joan? Isn't it time she was changing too?" Philip hinted.
Mollie gave him a sidelong look. It was understood that Philip was willing
at last to explain himself, and that look was Mollie's comment on the
situation. Mingled with its fondness were faint pity, irony, wonder at us. It
said, as plainly as need be, "That tiresome business all over again! What a
sex!"
But all she openly said was, "Come along then, Joan—you too, Audrey—
never let it be said we aren't properly submissive——"
And they too departed.
Instantly Cecil Hubbard swung round his chair to face Philip. Philip gave a
backward glance through the French windows. He seemed to derive some
reassurance from the sunlight that made vivid the garden outside.
"Well...?"
"Well...."

The words came simultaneously from the two men. As for the rest of us, we
were content for the present to let Cecil Hubbard make the running.

VI
"Well, you know what the first question is," said Hubbard.
"Let's have it," Philip replied. "Better not take anything for granted."
"Very well. About that other morning. What were you doing down below all
that time?"
"Moving furniture," Philip replied.
"Moving ... what for?"
"I'll show you that presently."
"Good.... Next, when you did come up again, what made you march straight
up to Rooke in the way you did?"
"Because he had that pistol in his pocket."
"How did you know he had a pistol in his pocket?"
"Because I saw him put it there."
"Because—you say you saw——?"
"I saw everything—practically everything that happened."
The blue eyes stared. "How ... but you say you're going to show us. What's
the next? Ah yes—After you'd fooled about with that candle and liqueur-jar
you went into the studio and we followed you. You hadn't even put the
candle out; I had to take it from you if you remember. Well, the next thing
you did was to tell us you were going to tell us all about it. But you never
did."
"Steady on, Cecil—that wasn't the next thing I did."
"What was, then?"
"I drew the studio blinds."
Hubbard nodded. "So you did. The police were getting those chaps down. I
remember."

"That wasn't my reason."
"Then what was?"
"Well, I'll show you that too presently. But let me make something else
clear first. I was all excited and upset, and really didn't know half I was
doing. I'd just seen that crash, remember, and one man shoot another, and
then another fellow altogether slide his hand out and pouch the pistol. It
was rather much to spring on a fellow without any warning at all. I'd simply
gone down to get something to drink, you know, not to——" He failed to
find words for it, and motioned to Hubbard to continue.
"Next," Hubbard went on, "you packed your wife and children off but
refused to go away yourself."
"Naturally. When you get a downright facer like that you want to see it
through."
"And when Rooke here wanted to sweep up the studio you told him not to."
"I did. And not to go into the cellar either."
"But he went into the cellar later?"
"Later—yes. The blinds were drawn then."
"Then are people only to go into the cellar when the blinds are drawn?"
"Oh no, not necessarily. A rug—or a bit of paper or a halfpenny—would do
just as well."
Here Hubbard seemed suddenly to give it up. He leaned back in his chair.
"Here, somebody else carry on for a bit," he puffed, almost as if he had
been running; and instantly I took up the catechism.
"Of course, you mean the hole in the studio floor?" I challenged.
"That's it," said Philip, smiling. "So you discovered that, did you?"
"It had been discovered long before I discovered it," I said.
This time it was Philip's turn to stare. "By whom?" he asked quickly.
"Rooke's here. Ask him to ask his wife."
"Dawdy!" Monty ejaculated, wide-eyed.

"I imagine so. At any rate you might ask her."
"Good—Lord!" said Monty, puffing as the Commander had puffed.
"And," I continued to Philip, "I don't think the blinds were drawn then. The
key was in the cellar door too."
"The devil!" Philip breathed softly. "I didn't bargain for that! It did occur to
me, of course, but I chanced it—never dreamed—I had to do something,
and it seemed safest to be perfectly open...." And then suddenly he gave an
awkward little laugh and met my eyes. "Well, evidently you know all about
it?"
"Indeed I do not."
"What, you're as warm as all that and can't guess the rest!"
I frowned, a little annoyed. It is a little annoying to be told that something is
under your nose that you don't see.
"As for that bullet-hole in the roof——" I hazarded.
"Bullet-hole in the roof? There never was a bullet-hole in the roof. The
branch did that. Westbury had the bullet all right. By the way, I saw him last
Sunday morning. Going great guns. He'll end up as our first Bolshevist
Premier. Quite the biggest crowd in the Park."
Here Monty chuckled. It was he who had first discovered the final effect of
the Case on the House and Estate Agent. He had come upon him one
Sunday morning in the space just within the Marble Arch, standing on a box
and holding forth passionately on social inequalities and equal opportunities
for all. I am afraid he had never got over the unconscious trouncing Billy
Mackwith had administered on that coroner's jury, and the collapse of his
righteous cause, ending in Inspector Webster's refusal to have him hanging
about the Police Station any longer, had completely upset his mental
balance. He declaims from his box until the opening-time of the public-
houses, and then adjourns, box and all, to the establishment near the Marble
Arch Tube Station. Here he is as well known as he formerly was in the
King's Road; but whether he has his private billiard cue there I do not know.
"Well, I give it up, Philip," I yielded at last. "I claim my single point, though
—that it was news to you that Mrs. Rooke knew."

Philip rose.
"Then come along," he said. "We must get it over before Chummy comes
back. Light the candle, somebody."
He led the way to the cellar door.

VII
"Why, you've changed it all!" was Monty Rooke's first exclamation as
Philip stood there with the candle held at arm's-length.
As for myself, I was looking round the dark, clammy place with a positive
passion of curiosity. That it had been rearranged I knew at once from
Monty's former description of it. The dust-sheeted furniture and packing-
cases had been pushed back against the walls, leaving the middle of the
floor clear, and once more the candlelight barely penetrated into the gloomy
recesses. It showed Philip's face, too, serious, but not to the complete
exclusion of a certain quiet satisfaction and triumph. And in Hubbard's
sailor eyes I fancied I already saw the dawning of comprehension.
"No I haven't—that is, I've only changed it back again as it was," Philip
replied. "I told you I'd been moving furniture that morning.... Well, do you
want to lose a bet, Cecil?"
Hubbard spoke oddly quietly. "No. I'll win one," he said.
"Ah! Then you're barred.... Take this, somebody, and you fellows wait here.
I shall be back in a minute."
He thrust into my hand the candle, which he instantly blew out, leaving us
in sudden and pitchy darkness.
I confess to a light creeping of the skin of my face. This may have been due
to the chill, clammy air, to my stimulated imagination, or to both. Nobody
spoke, and so still were the others that I had no difficulty in doing what in
fact I was already doing—putting myself months back, alone down there, as
Esdaile had been alone when he had descended for the jar of orange curaçao
that morning. I seemed to myself to be standing there waiting for a sound of
splintering glass, the muffled thud of two falling bodies, the faint murmur
of half Chelsea running out of doors. I was conscious that the candle shook
in my hand, and suddenly I wanted to relight it. I am not sure that my
fingers did not go to my pocket for a match.

But it was another light that irradiated us as we stood waiting there—a soft
bright cone that all at once spread down from the ceiling above. Up went
my startled eyes as if at some trick of thaumaturgy, some imposition on my
credulity. Down as if through a funnel streamed that circular shower of pale
brightness, outfanning from its small orifice—the hole in the floor.
The hole in the floor! It was that to which my thoughts, following that
instinctive movement of my eyes, turned like a flash. The hole in the floor!
With my body still in the cellar, I seemed in some transcendental way to be
upstairs at the same time, stooping over that hole as Audrey Cunningham
had stooped before me. We seemed to be stooping inherently together, yet at
the same time independently, so that, I was able to watch her. I saw her in
my imagination pallid and hysterical, putting forth one honeysuckle finger
half-way to the hole, and then, seized by a wild and baseless urge to put
some torturing fancy to the test, changing her mind and putting forth
another finger—the finger that bore her engagement-ring.
"If he does not come before I count a hundred he will not come at all...."
"If I thrust in that finger and anything happens I shall know what to do...."
And then her cry as the ring jammed and the finger was withdrawn without
it.
But understand that all this did not take a moment, and that I was still down
in the cellar, looking up at that hypnotizing cone of white light.
The glimpse suddenly vanished, and I heard Esdaile's voice. I had not heard
him come down.
"Stand back a bit," he said, his hand on my sleeve.
Then it was that my eyes fell on the floor.

VIII
On the floor? Rather on the roof itself, for, spread out over the floor, was a
perfect image of that glazed studio roof high above us. The divisions
between the panes were marvelously penciled there, and about one of them,
though not the one I had expected, the browning branches of the mulberry
crept and played. Something darted across and was gone—a bird.
And it was too late to bet now, for the book was closed. By merely seeing
that the roof-blinds were open, and then pushing away a rug with his foot,
Philip had confounded us all. Again I hardly heard his words: "House
simply a big pinhole camera, you see...." Once more I was seeing what he
had seen that morning so many months ago.
His mild astonishment at witnessing that phenomenon for the first time (for
it was the first time)—
His interested realization of the cause of it as he had stood there with the
bottle of liqueur in his hand——
And then the half-heard shock and the light tremor of the house and the
whole astonishing scene instantly enacted before his eyes!
But I had little time to marvel anew. He was speaking.
"... so down they came, not at this end, but over there, in reverse, you know.
And of course I'd no idea then it was Chummy; didn't learn that till the
afternoon; I simply saw him point that pistol at the other man, who
crumpled up. That was a shock, you understand, but you could have
knocked me down with a feather when I saw another shape crawl across
and pick the pistol up!... Eh? Oh, with the light above they were silhouettes
more or less; we'll send somebody up and try if you like; but I knew it was
Monty the moment I came upstairs and saw him."
"And then—-?"
"I'm afraid I can't give you any very clear account of it. Time didn't seem to
exist, if you know what I mean. But I know that all of a sudden I was
moving furniture about, to break up that beastly picture, a bit on a box top

and another bit on a sofa-end and so on. It didn't seem quite decent,
somehow, all spread out dead flat like that. But I don't wonder you fellows
were puzzled."
"But," said Mackwith presently, as we still stood looking at that moonlike
radiance spread across the floor, "why couldn't you tell us all this sooner?"
"What for?" Philip retorted. "It didn't take me long to realize that I'd told
you a dashed sight too much as it was! I had to have it out with Monty and
Chummy, of course; but the less said after that the better. Suppose it had
been a common Murder Case. I saw it, and could have hanged a man
straight away with a word. You didn't, so why fill you up with a lot of
hearsay? Don't you think I was right?"
"Hush! Listen!"
It was the tinkling of the street door bell. Chummy Smith was back already.

IX
He had a taxi waiting, and the driver was getting the boxes on as we
reached the annexe again. Philip carried in his hand the jar of orange
curaçao.
"Get the liqueur-glasses out, Monty," he said, and the words sounded
remotely familiar.
"Where are my darling babies?" Joan cried, darting out into the garden
where the Esdaile boys played beneath the mulberry. Philip and Mollie had
decided that the best and cheapest thing to do with them was to pack them
off to a preparatory school, and for a month past Joan had been impressing
on them the dignity of this promotion.
As Philip busied himself with the jar of curaçao I found myself by Audrey
Rooke's side. It was a little on my mind that she had the impression I didn't
like her. Very charming and graceful indeed she looked in her filmy black
tulle, and the hat with the little jutting-out serifs admirably suited her. The
ring that I had prised out of the hole in the floor with a screwdriver was on
her finger again, above her wedding-ring.
"May I say how sincerely glad I am this has all ended so happily?" I said in
a low voice.
She lifted the large dark eyes to mine, and I fancied I saw a grateful look in
them.
"Thank you," she said; and added, "Mollie told me what your share in it
was."
"The merest fluke," I said.
"But you were quick to understand," she replied; and we let it go at that.
"Got those glasses, Monty?" Philip called. "Fetch Joan in, Mollie—there
isn't much time——"
We pressed about the tray of glasses filled with the pale liquid gold.

"Well—extraordinary good luck, everybody——"
"Here's how——"
"Cheerioh——"
"God bless," said Chummy, with a little jerk of his glass aloft. "No, Alan,
liqueurs are not for little boys—not till after their first term——"
"The best of luck, Mrs. Rooke——"
The glasses were set down again, and we bustled into the little hall.
"Gear all aboard?"
"Right—so long, Mollie, and ever so many thanks——"
"Good-by, darling——"
"Good-by, Commander——"
"With your permission, Chummy——"
"Here, I say, let them get off—they'll miss their train——"
We flocked down the path after them, and Philip closed the taxi door.
"Paddington," he said.
Waving hands, handkerchiefs, blown kisses; and the taxi glided away. As it
did so it showed a tall figure in police uniform who had been standing
behind it.
"Good morning, Inspector," said Philip.
Inspector Webster gravely saluted.

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