The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “You’ve not ordered yourself any lunch.”

  “Oh, hang lunch!”

  “But you haven’t ordered any for me, either.”

  My poor story—for what it was worth—started with the plovers’ eggs, and finished neck-to-neck with the cheese. I told him how I had gone down to the docks twenty years before to see young Handgrove off to India, and how at the last moment he had cajoled me into accompanying him.… Arthur came with me in spirit from India to the diamond mines of South Africa where I made my money, took part with me in the Jameson Raid, and kept me company during those silent, discreet months when we all lay perdus wondering what course the Government was going to pursue towards the Raiders. Then I sketched my share in the war, and made him laugh by saying I had been three times mentioned in despatches. My experience of blackwater fever was sandwiched in between the settlement of South Africa, and my departure to the scene of the Russo-Japanese war: last of all came the years of vegetation, during which I had idled round the Moorish fringe of the Desert or sauntered from one Mediterranean port to another.

  “What brings you home now?” he asked.

  “Home? Oh, to England. I’ve a young friend stationed out at Malta, and when I was out there three weeks ago I found his wife down with a touch of fever. He wanted her brought to London, couldn’t come himself, so suggested I should take charge. J’y suis.…”

  I hesitated.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know, Arthur. I’ve no plans. If you have any suggestions to make.…”

  “Come and spend Whitsun with me in Hampshire.”

  “Done.”

  “You’re not married?”

  “‘Sir,’” I said in words Sir James Murray believes Dr. Johnson ought to have used, “‘in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.’”

  “And never will be, I suppose.”

  “I’ve no plans. You, of course.…”

  I paused delicately, in part because I was sure he wanted to tell me all about himself, in part because I could not for the life of me remember what had come of the domestic side of his career during my absence abroad. He was married, and the father of a certain number of children before I left England; I had no idea how far the ramifications went.

  It appeared that his wife—who was still living—had presented him with Philip, now aged twenty-six, his father’s private secretary and member for some Scotch borough; Sylvia, aged twenty-four, and unmarried; Robin, aged twenty-one, and in his last year at Oxford; and Michael, an enfant terrible of sixteen still at Winchester. I fancy there were no more; these were certainly all I ever met, either in Cadogan Square or Brandon Court.

  In his public life I suppose Arthur Roden would be called a successful man. I remember him during the barren first few years of practice, but soon after my departure from England reports used to reach me showing the increasing volume of his work, until he became one of the busiest juniors on the Common Law side, reading briefs at four in the morning, and sending a clerk out to buy his new clothes. After taking silk at an early age, he had entered the House and been made Attorney-General in 1912.

  “I was appointed the same day your brother was raised to the Bench,” he told me.

  “I should think he makes a pretty bad Judge,” I suggested.

  “Resolute,” said Arthur. “We want firmness.”

  I knew what that meant. According to unsympathetic papers, Mr. Justice Merivale had conducted a Bloody Assize among the Militants of the Suffrage Army. When Roden prosecuted in person, there was short shrift indeed.

  “We’ve killed militancy between us,” he boasted.

  “And I understand you’re burnt together in effigy.”

  His face grew suddenly stern.

  “They haven’t stopped at that. There’ve been two attempts to fire Brandon Court, and one wing of your brother’s house was burnt down a few weeks ago. I expect you found him rather shaken.”

  “I haven’t seen him yet.”

  Arthur looked surprised.

  “Oh, you ought to,” he said. “I’m afraid he won’t be able to last out the rest of the term without a change. It’s got on his nerves. Got on his wife’s nerves, too. Your niece is the only one who doesn’t seem to care; but then I think girls have very little imagination. It’s the same with Sylvia. By the way, I suppose you know you’ve got a niece?”

  We paid our bills, and walked upstairs to the Smoking Room.

  “What’ll be their next move?” I asked.

  “I don’t think there will be a next move,” he answered slowly. “What can they do?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I’m only an onlooker, but d’you believe this Cat and Mouse Act is going to stop them? My knowledge is mere newspaper knowledge, but to be beaten by a device like that—it isn’t in keeping with the character of the women who’ve organised the Militant Campaign so far.”

  “What can they do?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They don’t either. One or two of the most determined law breakers are in reality spies; they’ve kept us posted in the successive steps of the campaign up to the present. Now they report that there’s no plan for the future. They know it would be futile to start assassination; if they go on burning and breaking, a proportion of them get caught and punished. Hunger striking’s been killed by the Cat and Mouse Act. Well, militancy’s dead, Toby. If you come down to the House tonight, you’ll be present at the funeral.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s the division on the Suffrage amendment to the Electoral Reform Bill. Hullo! here’s Philip. Let me introduce my eldest son.”

  I made friends with Philip as we crossed the Park and entered the House. He was curiously like the Arthur I had known twenty years before—tall, dark-haired, clean-featured, with an exuberant zest for life tempered to an almost imperceptible degree by the reserve of the responsible public man. The physical and mental vigour of father and son left me silently admiring; as they hurried along at a swinging five miles an hour, I took stock of their powerful, untiring frames, quick movements, and crisp, machine-made speech. They were hard, business-like, unimaginative, with the qualities of those defects and the defects of those qualities; trained, taught, and equipped to play the midwife to any of the bureaucratic social reforms that have been brought into the English political world the last few years, but helpless and impotently perplexed in face of an idea outside their normal ken. They were highly efficient average English politicians. Either or both would reform you the Poor Law, nationalise a railway, or disestablish a Church; but send Philip to India, set Arthur to carry out Cromer’s work in Egypt, and you would see English dominion driven from two continents as speedily as North drove it from America. It was one of the paradoxes of English politics that Arthur should have been entrusted with the problem of Suffrage militancy, a paradox of the same order as that whereby Strafford grappled with the problem of a parliamentary system.

  “You’ll stay a few minutes,” Philip urged as I abandoned him to Empire and wandered off to pay my belated respects to my brother.

  I glanced round me and shook my head. I would not grow old all at once, and yet—Gladstone was Prime Minister when I left England: his statue now dominated the public lobby. And Salisbury, Harcourt, Chamberlain, Parnell, Labby—their voices were sunk in the great silence. In my day Committee Room Number Fifteen used to be an object of historic interest.…

  “They say the lion and the lizard keep

  The Halls where Jamshyd gloried, and drank deep:

  And Bahram, the great hunter, the wild ass

  Stamps o’er his head, and he lies fast asleep.”

  I quoted the lines to Philip apologetically, reminding him that the Omar Khayyam vogue had not come in when I left England. “I shall see you at Brandon Court,” I added.

 
“What are you going to do till then?” he asked.

  “Heaven knows! I never make arrangements. Things just happen to me. I always contrive to be in the thick of whatever’s going on. I don’t know how long I shall stay in England, or where I shall go to afterwards. But whether it’s a railway strike or a coronation, I shall be there. I don’t like it, I’m a peaceful man by nature, but I can’t help it. I always get dragged into these things.”

  Philip scratched his chin thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know that we’ve got any great sensations at the present time,” he said.

  “Something will turn up,” I answered in the words of one greater than myself, as I waved my hand in farewell and started back in the direction of the Club.

  I knew my brother would not leave Court till at least four o’clock, so I had to dispose of an hour before it was time to call round in Pont Street. The Club had emptied since luncheon, and I drew blank in one place after another until fate directed my steps to the Card Room. There were two men playing bézique, one of them poor Tom Wilding whom I had left lame and returned to find half paralysed and three parts blind. The other—who played with a wonderful patience, calling the names of the cards—I recognised as my young friend Lambert Aintree who had parted from me in Morocco five years before. I reminded them both of my identity, and we sat gossiping till an attendant arrived to wheel poor Wilding away for his afternoon drive.

  Leaving the card-table, Aintree joined me on the window-seat and subjected my face, clothes and general appearance to a rapid scrutiny. It was the practised, comprehensive glance of an old physician in making diagnosis, and I waited for him to pronounce on my case. Five years ago in Morocco he had exhibited a disconcerting and almost uncanny skill in reading character and observing little forgotten points that every one else missed. The results of his observation were usually shrouded in the densest veils of uncommunicativeness: I sometimes wonder if I have ever met a more silent man. When you could get him to talk, he was usually worth hearing: for the most part, however, talking like every other form of activity seemed too much of an exertion. I understand him now better than I did, but I am not so foolish as to pretend that I understand him completely. I am a man of three dimensions: Aintree, I am convinced, was endowed with the privilege of a fourth.

  “Well?” I said invitingly, as he brought his examination to an end and looked out of the window.

  His answer was to throw me over a cigarette and light one himself.

  “Take an interest in me,” I said plaintively. “Say you thought I was dead.…”

  “Everyone’s said that.”

  “True,” I admitted.

  “And they’ve all asked you when you landed, and how long you were staying, and what brought you to England.”

  “It would be rather friendly if you did the same.”

  “You couldn’t tell me—any more than you could tell them.”

  “But I could. It was Sunday morning.”

  “About then. I knew that. You’ve been here long enough to get English clothes, and,” he gave me another rapid look, “to have them made for you. How long you’re here for—you don’t know.”

  “Not to a day,” I conceded. “Well, why did I come?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Pardon me.” I told him of my visit to Malta and the charitable guardianship of my friend’s convalescent wife.

  “But that wasn’t the real reason.”

  “It was the only reason.”

  “The only one you thought of at the time.”

  I was amazed at the certainty of his tone.

  “My dear fellow,” I said. “I am a more or less rational creature, a reason comes along and compels me to do a thing. If I were a woman, no doubt I should do a thing and find reasons for it afterwards.”

  “Don’t you ever do a thing on impulse, instinctively? And analyse your motives afterwards to see what prompted you?”

  “Oh, possibly. But not on this occasion.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What are you driving at?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out in time.”

  “I should like to know now.”

  Aintree inhaled the smoke of his cigarette and answered with eyes half-closed.

  “Most men of your age wake up one morning to find they’ve turned forty. They feel it would be good to renew their youth, they play with the idea of getting married.”

  “Is this to my address?” I asked.

  “D’you feel it applies to your case?”

  “I can solemnly assure you that such an idea never crossed my mind.”

  “Not consciously.”

  “Nor unconsciously.”

  “What do you know of the unconscious ideas in your own mind?”

  “Hang it,” I said, “what do you know of the unconscious ideas in my—or any one else’s mind?”

  “I’m interested in them,” he answered quietly. “Tell me if you ever feel my prophecy coming true.”

  “You shall be best man,” I promised him. “Married! One doesn’t marry at my age.”

  It was a glorious spring afternoon, and I suggested that he should accompany me part of my way to Pont Street.

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself since you stayed with me five years ago,” I said as we stepped into Pall Mall.

  He seemed to shiver and retreat into his shell as soon as the conversation became focussed on himself.

  “I’ve done nothing,” he answered briefly, and relapsed into one of his wonted spells of silence.

  In the blazing afternoon sunlight I returned him the compliment of a careful scrutiny. He had come to Morocco five years before as a boy of one-and-twenty just down from Oxford. A girl to whom he had been engaged had died of consumption a few months before, and he was straying into the Desert, broken, unnerved, and hopeless, to forget her. I must have seemed sympathetic, or he would not have unburdened himself of the whole pitiful little tragedy. At twenty-one you feel these things more keenly perhaps than in after life; there were moments when I feared he was going to follow her.…

  Five years may have healed the wound, but they left him listless, dispirited, and sore. He was more richly endowed with nerves than any man or woman I know, and all the energy of his being seemed requisitioned to keep them under control. Less through love of mystery than for fear of self-betrayal his face wore the expressionless mask of a sphynx. He was fair, thin, and pale, with large frightened eyes, sapphire blue in colour, and troubled with the vague, tired restlessness that you see in overwrought, sensitive women. The nose and mouth were delicate and almost ineffeminate, with lips tightly closed as though he feared to reveal emotion in opening them. You see women and children with mouths set in that thin, hard line when they know a wickering lip or catch in the breath will give the lie to their brave front. And there were nerves, nerves, nerves everywhere, never so much present as when the voice was lazily drawling, the hands steady, and the eyes dreamily half-closed. I wonder if anything ever escaped those watchful, restless eyes; his entire soul seemed stored up and shining out of them; and I wonder what was the process of deduction in his curious, quick, feminine brain. Before I left England I tried to evolve a formula that would fit him; “a woman’s senses and intuition in a man’s body” was the best I could devise, and I am prepared at once to admit the inadequacy of the label. For one thing his intuition transcended that of any woman I have ever known.

  As he would not talk about himself, I started to wile away the time by telling him of my meeting with the Rodens, and their invitation to Hampshire.

  “I was asked too,” he told me. “I shan’t go.”

  “But why not?”

  “Unsociability, I suppose. I don’t go out much.”

  “It’s a bachelor’s party, I understand.”

  “That’s the best thing I�
��ve heard about it. Did they say who’d be there? If you’re not careful you’ll have politics to eat, politics to drink, and politics to smoke.”

  “Come and create a diversion,” I suggested.

  “I’ll think about it. Is Phil going to be there? Oh, then it won’t be a bachelor party. I could name one young woman who will be there for certain, only I mustn’t make mischief. Did you find Roden much changed?”

  I tried to sort out my impressions of Arthur.

  “Harder than he used to be. I shouldn’t care to be a militant prosecuted by him.”

  Aintree raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “I don’t think they mind him; they can look after themselves.”

  “I’ve never met one.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Who is she?”

  “Joyce Davenant, the queen bee of the swarm. Dine with me tonight at the Ritz; seven o’clock, I’m afraid, but we are going to a first night.”

  “Is she a daughter of old Jasper Davenant? I used to shoot with him.”

  “The younger daughter. Do you know her sister, Mrs. Wylton? She’s coming too. You’d better meet her,” he went on with a touch of acidity in his tone, “you’ll hear her name so much during the next few months that it will be something to say you’ve seen her in the flesh.”

  I only remembered Elsie Wylton as a young girl with her hair down her back. Of her husband, Arnold Wylton, I suppose every one has heard; he enjoys the reputation of being a man who literally cannot be flogged past a petticoat. How such a girl came to marry such a man no rational person has ever been able to explain; and it never sweetens the amenities of debate to talk vaguely of marriages being made in heaven. I met Wylton twice, and on both occasions he was living in retirement abroad. I have no wish to meet him a third time.

  “How did she ever come to marry a fellow like that?” I asked.

  Aintree shrugged his shoulders.

  “Her father was dead, or he’d have stopped it. Nobody else felt it their business to interfere, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if they had. You know what the Davenants are like—or perhaps you don’t. Nothing shakes them when they’ve made up their minds to do a thing.”