At the garden gate stood the oddest of all God’s agents, the old woman extremely like a witch who was to act as hostess to the party. On her thick black hair which showed not the slightest trace of grey she wore a chip straw hat Meg Merriles might have envied, and on her beaky little mouth was a crocodile grin which was intended as a smile of welcome. Harben presented the nuns to the witch as gracefully as he could without knowing the hostess’s name. She supplied it with a cackle.
“My name is Lestrange Bradley.” She turned to the group of boys.
“Shoes off children, in the hall. These are not my carpets,” she said.
“You—can’t accommodate all of us?” Sister Mary Dominic enquired with extraordinary timidity.
“Why not?” enquired Mrs. Bradley. “I’ve rented the house indefinitely, and probably shan’t use it much myself.”
As though this were sufficient answer, she led the way in, motioned Harben to conduct the Dominicans to the dining-room, and herself stayed to supervise the boys.
“Do any of you children need hot-water bottles in your beds?” she asked in threatening tones.
“No, madam,” they replied in respectful chorus. Their hostess, hooting harshly, led them upstairs.
BOOK THREE
Enchantment
His hound is mute; his steed at will
Roams pastures deep with asphodel;
His queen is to her slumber gone;
His courtiers mute lie, hewn in stone;
He hath forgot where he did hide
His sceptre in the mountain-side.
Walter de la Mare
CHAPTER NINE
Sibyl
Harben spent the night on the tub, but did not sleep. His adventure of the very early morning had caused him to provide himself with an efficient weapon in the form of a home-made sandbag, and he proposed to sit up and wait for the aggressors if they should have decided to make another attempt upon his life.
He did not altogether expect them, for he concluded that they hoped their object had been attained. It could be only a matter of time, however, before they came to the knowledge that he was still alive, unless he could find some way of concealing himself so that he could not be traced, and the chance of that was remote.
As he sat in his little cabin he thought about the mysterious affair in which he had involved himself, and then, idly at first, but later with a quickened interest, about Mrs. Lestrange Bradley, the odd, shrewd, infinitely charitable hostess of the nuns and the orphan boys.
His brain worked slowly. It must have been three o’clock in the morning before he realized who she must be. He was almost tempted to place credence in Sister Mary Dominic’s all-watchful Providence when the realization came to him, for Mrs. Bradley was famous. She must be, he decided, the psychologist and detective who was one of the consultative experts called in by Scotland Yard when they had a baffling case or an interesting prisoner. She was, in short, the very person to consult about Leda, provided she could be sworn to secrecy, at any rate for a time.
The police would want to know all sorts of things which he did not want to disclose to them. He had placed himself, it was clear, in a very invidious position, so far as the law was concerned, by his neglect to report the finding of the body and, still more, by his decision to say nothing of its strange disappearance.
He was not the kind of person who would ever have thought of claiming police protection and yet he had scarcely enjoyed that river-washed man-hunt of the morning. In fact, if he were going in fear of his life, it would be most improbable (he thought, putting what, to him, were first things first) that he would be able to settle down and get on with his book, and that would be a nuisance.
To tell Mrs. Bradley the truth, to request her for her advice, and, if it seemed reasonable, to take it, were tempting ideas. He spent the rest of the night in trying to resist them.
One thing he decided to do, although his masculinity revolted at first against it. Common sense prevailed, however, on this point, and at eight o’clock in the morning he went to The Island to ask Mrs. Bradley if she needed help in coping with her guests. Her house would be a haven if she would have him.
“Why, yes,” she said, “why not? Sister Mary Sebastian will need to rest for a time, and it is unfair to expect Sister Mary Dominic to undertake sole charge of the boys, I think. You had better go and talk to her about it. I’ve just chased her out of the sickroom. She’s in the garden.”
Harben had seen her upon his walk up the path, but she had gone to the back of the house by the time he got out there again, and was standing by Mrs. Bradley’s little landing-stage near the boathouse, looking across the green river at the woods on the opposite side.
“Pleasanter here than in Soho,” said Harben, by way of greeting.
“Indeed, yes. So green, so quiet, so kind,” she responded, lifting her eyes to his face and giving him her strangely heart-searching smile. Harben thought of the vicious attack which had been engineered against him on just this quiet water, and laughed at her, but agreed.
“Do you not really think so?” she enquired.
“No, I don’t altogether think so,” he replied. “I am in agreement with Sherlock Holmes, you know, about the country. Dark deeds can be committed more easily, and with less chance of being known, than in the streets and crowded tenements of a town.”
“But dark deeds happen in cities,” she responded. “There was murder in Soho, not so long ago.”
“Yes. Soho is dark and deep, like parts of this weedy river,” he agreed. “I live there all the winter, and ought to know. I suppose it’s the foreign element. I know we’ve had knife fights, and that sort of thing, in our neighbourhood, and one is always coming up against what one might call the elements of vice. It’s a very interesting neighbourhood for a writer.”
“And for our convent,” she said. “Indeed, I think our convents should always be in the dark places of the earth. We are called the Third Order of Preachers, and, like Our Blessed Lord, should prefer sinners to the congregation of the righteous, for, to them, we can do most good.”
“And those boys,” said Harben, a good deal more interested in sociology than in what he privately termed “religious bunk,” and influenced, in any case, far more by Sister Mary Dominic’s beauty than by her apologetics, “what sort of homes do they come from?”
“From all kinds, and not, by any means, all from the Soho district,” she responded; and proceeded to give him details and statistics.
“You mean, then, that many of those boys are potential criminals,” he suggested, when she had finished.
“I prefer to think of them as the children of light,” she responded. “There is just as much opportunity for them to be good as to be evil, and much more encouragement, I believe. It is true that we are born in sin, but goodness is stronger than evil. If I did not know that to be truth, I should not be where I am.”
“I can’t understand that,” he said. “What does make women take to the cloister?”
“I am not cloistered,” she said gently. “We derive from the friars, not the monasteries. We do not live out of the world, but tremendously, gloriously in it. We have our teachers and nurses, our social settlements, our missionaries.” She smiled at him again. “We are even regarded as heretics, you know, by some of the Catholic orders.”
“But you keep the monastic vows,” persisted Harben. “You are celibate, poor, and obedient to superiors, are you not?”
“How else could we live and do our work?”
“You should not have chosen celibacy,” he said gently. “Surely marriage and children are to be preferred, especially by women, to loneliness, barrenness, and the rather uninteresting ideology you practise?”
“It depends on the point of view,” she answered quietly. “Are you married, Mr. Harben?”
“No. I have work to do. But—does this shock you?—I take my pleasure when I can get it.”
“It does not shock me. It seems to me grievously wrong.”
“I don’t see that.”
“Have you never harmed anybody by it? That seems to me the first test.”
“I have not harmed the women. Doesn’t that let me out? They enjoyed it as much as I did.”
“I cannot discuss it,” she said, and went indoors. Later, she said to Mrs. Bradley, “You do not talk to me.”
“You are a soldier,” said Mrs. Bradley. “So am I. We are under authority, both of us.”
“You mean the authority of God?”
“I mean the authority of noblesse oblige, child, a far more powerful conception, it seems to me.”
“You are wrong,” said the young nun, studying the ugly, intellectual, lively face of her hostess, “but you are good. I know that. And I interrupted you. Please forgive me.”
“No, no!” said Mrs. Bradley, to this apology. “What do you make of Mr. Harben?”
“I think he is in some trouble. I think he has done something wrong.”
“You are a very acute psychologist.”
“No, but I like him,” said Sister Mary Dominic, troubled. “I wish he were a Catholic. I think Confession would help him.”
“It will help him,” said Mrs. Bradley, absently. “He shall confess to me.”
She did not need to look up to be able to visualize the consternation on Sister Mary Dominic’s lovely brow, but as she took out her knitting, the corners of her beaked lips slightly twitched, as though she found something humorous in the silence.
Next day she called on Harben to accompany her round the garden whilst she snipped off dead flowers. He, already fond of her astringent and lively society, was nothing loath, and for a time they snipped busily and collected the snippings with tidy and efficient care. Then she said, straightening up:
“Let’s go and sit down. I must get the crick out of my back. I suppose you never get a crick in yours?”
“Don’t I, though?” said Harben. They seated themselves in the loggia, and Mrs. Bradley drew off her gardening gloves.
“Well, who is she?” she said. “And how did you come to lose her?”
Harben, as well he might, looked completely astonished at this. Then he caught her eye and smiled gravely:
“Touché, madame,” he said. “What do you want to know? And am I being psycho-analysed?”
“Please yourself about that,” she answered. Then she waited, her black eyes no longer on him, but on the vista before her, the lawn in terraces and levels, the flower-beds burning towards autumn, the flashing river with the massed dark trees on its farther side, where the ground rose steeply from the banks and the faint ethereal blue of September skies lit the long flight of birds already in line for the south.
“You see,” said Harben, “it’s rather a queer story …”
It took him about a quarter of an hour to tell it all. He included the attack on him on the fourth of September.
“What do you think?” he added. Mrs. Bradley got up.
“I’d like to see that other house by the river. I’d like a change. I’d like to be in London again. I’ve promised to visit a hospital in Soho. I ought to get back to my house in Kensington,” she said. She led him towards the back door, and on the way they deposited the gardening tools in the shed.
“But what do you make of it?” asked Harben. It had not struck him, until he had to put it into words which would be comprehensible to a critical and disinterested third party, what an extraordinary story it was which he had to tell.
“All sorts of things,” said Mrs. Bradley. “A mysterious night visitor, a corpse, a vanishing lady, a murderous attack at dawn from unknown men—you would reject these items both separately and in toto, I presume, if you were offered them as ingredients of a plot for one of your books?”
“Yes,” He did not qualify this unconditional admission.
“Yes,” she repeated thoughtfully. “And yet they say that art is as large as life. It is, at any rate, twice as natural. And, of course, we shall find, shall we not, that they are men you know well?”
“You think I have told you an unnatural tale? In short, you don’t believe me?”
“Why should I not believe you? Have you advertised for the girl?”
“It wouldn’t be any good. Besides, whatever happens, I mustn’t put the police on her track.”
“And yet, to solve your mystery, we must get in touch with her. Will you object if I advertise for her? I promise to be discreet.”
“I’d do anything …” he hesitated.
“To solve the mystery of what happened to the old man’s body?”
“No. Just to see her again.”
“You realize that, on your own statement, she may be a murderess, don’t you?”
“He fell, you know. And she couldn’t have moved the body.”
“We have nothing but her word for the first of those statements, and your deductions for the second.”
“I see that. But I’ve met her.”
“Claudius met Messalina,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I am not making any challenging comparisons, but I do state facts.”
“I had hoped you would help me,” said Harben, “but I can’t agree that Leda killed the old man, except by way of accident, and I believe the accident happened as she described it.”
“Yes, but, speaking of facts, let us consider dispassionately, child, without prejudice, exactly those which you have given me. From out of the night a girl comes to your boat. Why does she select yours, and not somebody else’s? Why choose to come to a yachtsman at all? Surely she had neighbours along the river front? I say nothing about her having chosen a man, rather than a woman, as her confidante. Women, especially young women, are apt to confide in men. Men quite often confide in women, too. It is understandable. Each sex expects to be able to hoodwink the other, to some extent, and as very few of our doings in this life will bear (in our own opinion) the full light of day, the instinct is probably a sound one, as instincts go. But were there no other young men to whom she could have entrusted the frightening fact that she believed she had killed her husband? He was her husband, I suppose? Not that it matters, if your version is correct. Are you sure she knew nothing about you?”
“I suppose she had seen me, and thought I—thought I looked all right, if you know what I mean—”
“I know exactly what you mean, child. But did the course of events bear out this naïve assumption?”
Harben, to his disgust, discovered himself to be flushing.
“In other words, am I a beast or a fool?” he responded. “I suppose, to a psychologist, one’s bound to be one or the other!”
She grinned.
“To continue,” she went on. “You connived at what, next day, you believed must, after all, have been a crime; you have omitted to communicate with the police, although you have suffered a murderous attack which you connect, in some way, with the girl—”
“Not with the girl; with the house. With the men who, I know, have been in and out of it all summer!”
“Have it your own way, child. You now come to me to get you out of a mess.”
“That’s hardly fair—” began Harben.
“True. It is not fair at all. But you did intend to consult me, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I wanted your advice.”
“Do you still want it?”
“Yes, of course, please.”
“Join the Navy or the Port of London Air-Raid Precautions Service, and forget the whole thing.”
“I’ve written to the Admiralty already, putting myself and my boat at their disposal. There is talk of using little ships for coast work. I’d be useful at something of the sort. There’s hardly an inch of the coast I don’t know, and know pretty well.”
“There you are, then! You don’t want any advice! You’ve solved the problem for yourself.”
“But it seems like running away. I object to people dabbing at me with oars and boat-hooks when I’ve done them no harm and wouldn’t know them from Adam if I saw them. Besides, there’s the whol
e mystery of the thing. I confess to my fair share of curiosity, and this is the oddest affair I’ve ever been mixed up in, and if I don’t find out what it’s all about I’ll go haywire, sooner or later. It’s the sort of thing that nags at one, you know.”
His hostess regarded him with sympathy. Then she seemed to make up her mind.
“I’d like to have a look at that house,” she said. “What do you say to tomorrow?”
“You don’t want me to come, do you?”
“Nothing would please me better, but never mind. If I manage to contact your mermaid, that will be better still. Sister Mary Sebastian is well enough now to be left to the servants for a day, the boys and Sister Mary Dominic are going blackberrying, and you can go with them and see that the boys don’t trespass, so I think I can take a day off with a perfectly clear conscience.”
“A lot you care about a clear conscience!” said Harben, looking very much alarmed. His hostess grinned, and took him into her house. She knew quite well that nothing would keep him away from the house by the river on the morrow.
“One moment ma’am,” said Pirberry, “if I may interrupt. This is all before I came into the business, isn’t it?”
“It is,” agreed Mrs. Bradley. She might have added, had she known the expression, “so what?” She did not know it, however, and favoured her questioner with an interrogative grin.
“What I don’t understand,” said Pirberry, “is why, at this point, you suspected Mr. Harben of murdering the old gentleman in the dressing-gown.”
“Have I indicated, then, that I suspected him?”
“Well, ma’am, you seem to have provided him with every excuse not to return to that house when you went to see it, and yet you state that nothing would have kept him away.”
“That doesn’t show that I suspected him of murder. I did, however, suspect him of a certain amount of deceit.”
“You mean that the young lady, when she came to the tub as he described, was not a stranger?”
Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley) Page 7