Lindsay was so shocked that he forgot his anger. He said her name—he did not know how. Her face did not change. She looked at him as if she were too tired to speak. Then she said, in a flat, extinguished voice,
“Why did you come?”
The train which had been passing them was gone. A cold, wet, wintry light shone on her. She put her elbow on the sill and screened her face from it with her ungloved left hand. He saw that she had taken off his ring.
That hardened him. It was all very well to say, why had he come; but he had come, and he meant to get what he had come for.
“Did you think I wouldn’t come?” he said.
“I hoped you wouldn’t.” Her voice was so low that he had to guess at the words.
That hardened him still more.
“Naturally,” he said. “But you can’t break off our engagement four days before the wedding without giving me some reason for it.”
He thought she said, “I can’t.” Her lips moved. He thought they made those words. There wasn’t any sound.
He was angry by now. He wanted to hurt her, to make her speak. He said,
“I suppose you realize what will be said?”
There was another faint movement that said “No.”
“Well, people will say that one of us has made some unpleasant discovery. Your friends will believe that you have found out something about me, and I’m afraid that mine—” he stopped. After all, he could not say it. She was so pale.
Yet she spoke at once:
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Perhaps not.” Nothing really seemed to matter just then. “I just thought you’d better consider the point. But that’s not what I came down here for. I’m not here to persuade you, or talk you over, or anything of that sort. You needn’t be afraid. You’ve broken our engagement—it’s smashed. All I want is to know why you’ve done it. You’ve got to give me a reason. Do you see?”
She shut her eyes for a moment.
I can’t.
“You’ve got to. I’m not disputing your decision, but I’ve got to know why you made it.”
She sat there. She didn’t move, she didn’t speak.
“You’d better tell me. It will save trouble if you tell me at once.”
Her eyelids closed down over her eyes again. She leaned on her hand. That dumb obstinacy of hers was rousing the brute in him.
“Has anyone slandered me? I think I’ve a right to know that.”
She opened her eyes rather suddenly. They were dark and startled.
“Oh—no—no!”
That was something.
“You got engaged to me of your own free will?”
She nodded, still with that startled look in her eyes.
“Then I have offended—disappointed—or—perhaps bored you?”
She said “No on a breaking whisper, and when I she had said it, the tears began to run down her face. They changed his mood.
“Marian—for God’s sake! What is it? You look—” He could not say how she looked. He groped for words, and could not find them.
“For God’s sake!” he said; and then, “Marian—what is it? Some—trouble?”
She said, “Yes,” as if it was a relief, and leaned on her hand and wept.
“Can’t you tell me what it is?”
She shook her head.
“Not now,” she-said. “Not—yet—”
He waited until he could steady his voice.
“There’s someone—else?”
She didn’t answer that.
“Marian—is there—someone?”
She lifted her head and pushed back the hair from her wet cheek.—
“Oh yes—someone, she said. There was something wild in her voice. She hid her face again with a sob.
“There’s someone—you care for?”
Her head had dropped on her arm. She spoke in a muffled voice.
“Oh, please go! I’ve told you—there’s someone. I can’t—marry you. Won’t you go away? I can’t—there’s someone I love—that’s why I can’t marry you. Oh, please, please go!”
He leaned across and put a hand on her shoulder, turning her so that she had to look at him.
“You care for this man—really?”
She looked up at him.
“I’ve told you.”
“You might have told me before.”
There was a silence. He could not bear her piteous eyes.
“Does he care for you?” he said sharply.
She said, “Please go!”
“Are you going to marry him?” His voice sounded strangely.
She said, “No—never.” She said it quite gently and quietly. And then, “Please go, Lin.” Lindsay went.
CHAPTER V
ALL THAT CAN BE said of the days that followed is that, having dragged out their interminable hours, they did in the end pass and join themselves with other dead days. Strong emotion at its height has movement, colour, depth; but when the tide, ebbing, leaves one high and dry amidst the wreckage it has achieved, there comes the sordid business of picking up the bits and getting things straight again.
There was an announcement in the papers. “The marriage arranged … will not take place.” People wrote and condoled. And Poole spent all his spare time packing up wedding presents.
Hamilton Raeburn suggested that Lindsay should take a fortnight, or more if he wanted it, and go off abroad. He was fond of Lindsay and went out of his way to be kind. Lindsay found his kindness a little oppressive. He wanted work at this juncture, not time on his hands. A solitary honeymoon lent itself rather too easily to ribald jesting. On the other hand, if he went away and came back again, perhaps people would stop treating him in the hushed, unnatural manner which made him feel like smashing the furniture.
He told Hamilton Raeburn he would think it over, and sat down to finish the proofs of his second book. Raeburn thought it a distinct advance on Golden Apples, and though at this moment Lindsay didn’t care whether it was published or not, he thought that later on his interest would probably revive. Anyhow, Raeburn wanted to get it out early in March, and he had promised him the proofs.
It was on Thursday afternoon that the letter came. Poole brought it in and put it down on the table. There was a registered packet as well as the letter.
Lindsay opened the packet first. It was either a wedding present, which would have to be sent back, or— The ‘or’ met the case. Marian Rayne had sent him her engagement ring. It rolled out of the box and lay tipped up against the edge of his paper. Marian had a fancy for jade, and he had managed to pick up a really good bit. The green translucence, with its setting of tiny diamonds, caught the light and made it lovely.
He wondered what one did with a returned engagement ring, and he wished that she had not sent it back. After a while he locked it away in his dispatch-box and opened the letter.
It was from Mr Benbow Collingwood Horatio Smith. It began formally:
“Dear Mr Trevor—”
He read it through to the “Yours sincerely” and the signature, “Benbow Smith.” Then he read it again. Mr Smith wrote, in a beautiful clear hand:
“It has occurred to me that our conversation in the train might be resumed. If you can call at my house at nine o’clock this evening, we could discuss the matter in detail. It would be better not to ring me up on the telephone, and I should be glad if you would destroy this note as soon as you have read it.”
As he finished reading the letter for the second time, he experienced an extraordinary change of mood. He was not one of those mercurial people who is up on the heights one moment and down in the depths the next, but at this moment he experienced one of the sharpest changes of mood that he could ever remember. He could not really account for it, though he supposed the memory of having been stirred to a sense of exc
itement and adventure during that conversation in the train played its part. However that might be, there came over him a passionate impatience of his present situation, and an equally passionate desire to escape from it.
He burnt the letter and sat down to his proofs again.
At nine o’clock precisely he rang Mr Smith’s front door bell. He waited for the door to open with conflicting feelings. It was odd that Mr Smith should have written to him. An odd letter—a formal, disjointed, mysterious letter: “Dear Mr Trevor … burn this … it would be better not to telephone.” He must know of the broken engagement. He had said, “If you change your mind—” and Lindsay had said, “I wish I could.”
The door opened, and a neat elderly man-servant let him in. He took hat, coat, and scarf in a methodical, silent way. Then, with a measured ritual tread, he preceded Lindsay to the first door on the right, threw it open, and stood aside to let him pass in. Lindsay did not give his name, and the servant did not ask it. It was all rather hushed and impressive. There was therefore something incongruous in the peal of laughter which greeted him. It was coarse, side-shaking laughter of a vulgar, rollicking kind:
“Ha—ha—ha—ha! Oh, Lor! Ha—ha—I’ll bust my sides! Oh, Lor, I will! Oh mussy, mussy me!” And then more peals of laughter, in the midst of which he heard Mr Smith say in his gentle cultured tones,
“Good evening, Mr Trevor.”
Lindsay looked up the long book-lined room. It was soberly, handsomely furnished. There was some mahogany panelling above the mantelpiece and between the books. The carpet was Persian, the chairs a man’s chairs, deep, capacious, and comfortably shabby. A large table with claw feet held papers and periodicals. The lighting was in the ceiling. At the far end a grey and rose-coloured parrot on a tall perch flapped his wings and continued to laugh.
Mr Smith, after shaking hands, turned and reproved him.
“Be quiet, Ananias! That is not the way to greet a guest.”
Ananias said “Ha!” very loudly, spread his wings to their full extent, and fixed the guest with a menacing eye.
“Now, Ananias,” said his master warningly.
“Awk!” said Ananias. He ended the word with a hissing escape of breath.
Mr Smith drifted over to him and scratched him behind the ear; but the parrot retreated to the opposite of his perch, where he began to perform an aborate toilet, spreading out his “left wing and turning his back on the room.
Mr Smith walked aimlessly back again. After straying past the table, he returned to it and stood there fingering a magazine. Then,
“I am glad you have come,” he said.
He did not look at Lindsay, and his voice was quite expressionless. All at once he turned and moved to where the two largest chairs had been drawn in to the fire.
“Sit down,” he said, “and tell me why.”
Lindsay took this to be a continuation of his last remark, and answered it as such.
“Because you asked me.”
He nodded, sitting there rather upright. Without his glasses, his features had a fine Greek look, and his whole air was one of extreme distinction. He joined his fingers at the tips and gazed at a point above Lindsay’s head.
“In the train the other day,” he said, “I ventured to give you a description of yourself. If you will forgive the impertinence, I should like to add to the description a brief, a very brief, sketch of your career.”
Lindsay wondered what he was driving at.
He said, “I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much,” and then felt that he had better have held his tongue.
At the sound of his master’s voice the parrot turned half round, but as soon as Lindsay began to speak he clapped his wings, rose on his toes, and screamed loudly and unmelodiously:
“Three jolly admirals, all of a row—Collingwood, Nelson, and bold Benbow!”
Mr Smith got up languidly, went across, cuffed him, and returned without any change of countenance. As he sank into his chair, he resumed the conversation as if there had been no break in it.
“You will correct me if I am inaccurate—and there are one or two points which I find a little obscure—but the main outline is, I fancy, correct. You were at Harrow with my nephew Jack. You were, even then, an orphan with no near relatives. You were sixteen when the war broke out, and you served for rather over two years before the armistice, and for another two years after it. I am not quite clear as to why you resigned your commission. It was, I believe, a permanent and not a temporary one?”
“I wanted to take my degree. I had a very favourable opening offered to me by Hamilton Raeburn on condition that I did so. He was an old friend of my father’s.”
“Yes,” he said—“yes. Life in the Secret Service did not attract you?”
Lindsay was a little startled.
He said, “No”; and then added, “Not as a permanency.”
“In 1918,” said Mr Smith in his gentle voice, “you were taken prisoner. You escaped in company with Colonel Garratt. He reported on you afterwards as possessing ideal qualifications for the Secret Service.”
“That was only because I could speak the language, My guardian used to send me to spend all my holidays with some family abroad.”
“Colonel Garratt considered that you had other qualifications. He is a good judge. He asked for you specially, and you worked under him for two years after the armistice.”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“Your languages are rusty?”
He could not truthfully say that they were. He therefore said nothing. Mr Smith dropped suddenly into German.
“My reason for asking you to come here to-night is a serious one.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” Lindsay answered him in the same language.
Mr Smith continued:
“I would like to test your languages. You will find to-day’s Times on the table. Will you make a running translation of the first leading article?”
“Into German?”
“Yes—yes, I think so—German first.”
Lindsay brought the paper over and began. Mr Smith looked at the ceiling. When Lindsay had read about a third of a column, he stopped him.
“Now French, if you please.”
Lindsay repeated the same passage. It was really perfectly easy.
“Italian,” said the languid voice when he had reached the same place again.
“I could not pass as an Italian.”
He proceeded to prove this by rather a halting translation.
“Spanish?” said Mr Smith.
“The merest smattering.”
“Anything else?”
“I can understand and read Russian, and I can talk enough to get along. I couldn’t pass as a Russian in Russia.”
“But you could pass as a German in Germany?”
“Well, I have done so.”
“When your life depended upon it—yes. Could you pass as a Frenchman in France?”
“Not as an educated Frenchman. I can do a southern dialect that will pass in the north, and I think I could pass as a Breton in the south. It’s—it’s been a sort of hobby of mine.”
“Yes,” said Mr Smith—“a very useful hobby.” He relapsed into silence.
Lindsay wondered where all this was leading to. He had had some exciting times with Garratt. The thought of stepping out of his present circumstances into the byways of adventure had its lure. This on the surface. But beneath the surface he was aware of currents that ran strongly. That there was something desperately serious in question became momentarily plainer.
Ananias broke the silence. He began in a piercing yet cautious whisper:
“What shall we do with the drunken sailor, What shall we do with the drunken sailor, What shall we do with the drunken sailor, So early in the morning?”
Each line was a little louder than t
he last.
Mr Smith looked over his shoulder and said, “No—no, Ananias!”
Then he spoke to Lindsay.
“When I asked you if you would like to die for your country, I was serious.”
“That is not the usual way of baiting the trap, sir,” said Lindsay with a laugh.
“Danger is not always such a bad bait.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
“A little difficult to answer that comprehensively at this stage of the proceedings.”
“And why me? Any experience I have had is ten years old and out of date. I am a peaceful publisher. What’s wrong with the men who are up to date in the game?”
“Most of them are too well known,” said Mr Smith. “This”—he looked straight at Lindsay for a moment, and his eyes were not dreamy any more—“this is a very big thing.” He let the words fall slowly and heavily.
“What is it?” said Lindsay.
Mr Smith said, “Presently,” and looked at his own hands.
In a rapid whisper, Ananias recited:
“Put him in the long-boat until he’s sober,
Put him in the long-boat until he’s sober,
Put him in the long-boat until he’s sober”
“No, Ananias!”
Ananias said “Awk!” and turned his back.
“Take—” said Mr Smith in a dreamy voice—“take a hypothetical case. There are suspicious circumstances I—things small in themselves but cumulative. In the ordinary course of official routine A is detailed to make investigations and to report. He reports that he has not found out anything. Then he reports that he is on the brink of finding out something. Then he does not I report at all.”
“Why?”
“The department asks why. It gets no answer—from A. A good many months afterwards a rumour trickles in to the effect that A’s wife, who is known to have been much attached to him, has gone out to Peru and married again out there. Her husband is said to be extremely well-to-do. His hair is black, whereas A’s hair was a lightish brown—but for a well-to-do man the price of a good hair-dye is not prohibitive.”
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