The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “A common drunk and disorderly!” Culling shouted as the Seraph came towards us with his right arm in a sling. He had that morning shut his thumb in the front door of his flat, and while we dragged the depths of Waterloo for his body, he had been sitting with his doctor, sick and faint, having the wound dressed. His face was whiter than usual, and his manner restless.

  “I’ve kept my promise,” he remarked to me.

  “I was giving up hope.”

  “I had to come,” he answered in vague perplexity, and relapsed into one of his longest silences.

  We wandered for an hour through the grand old-world gardens, reverently worshipping their many-coloured spring splendour. Flaming masses of azaleas blazed forth from a background of white and mauve rhododendrons; white, grey, and purple lilac squandered their wealth in riotous display, while the Golden Rain flashed in the evening sun, and a scented breeze spread the grass walks with a yellow carpet. We drew a last luxurious deep breath, and turned to watch the nymphæas closing their eyes for the night.

  Beyond the water garden, in an orchard deep with fallen apple-blossom, Rawnsley and Gartside were stretched in wicker chairs watching an old spaniel race across the grass in sheer exhilaration of spirit.

  “Come and study the Sixth Sense,” Gartside called out as we approached.

  “There isn’t such a thing, but there’s no harm in your studying it,” said Rawnsley, in a tone that indicated it mattered little what any of us did to improve or debase our minds.

  “Martel!” The dog bounded up at Gartside’s call, and he showed us two glazed, sightless eyes. “Good dog!” He patted the animal’s neck, and Martel raced away to the far end of the orchard. “That dog’s as blind as my boot, but he steers himself as though he’d eyes all over his head. By Jove! I thought he’d brained himself that time!”

  Martel had raced at top speed to the foot of a gnarled apple tree. At two yards’ distance he swerved as though a whip had struck him, and passed into safety. The same thing happened half a dozen times in as many minutes.

  “He knows it’s there,” said Gartside. “He’s got a sense of distance. If that isn’t a sixth sense, what is it?”

  “Intensified smell-sense,” Rawnsley pronounced. “If you were blind, you’d find your smelling and hearing intensified.”

  “Not enough,” said Gartside.

  “It’s all you’ll get. A sense is the perceptiveness of an organ. You’ve eyes, ears, a nose, a palate, and a number of sensitive surfaces. If you want a sixth sense, you must have a sixth perceive organ. You haven’t. Therefore you must be content with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.”

  Gartside was not satisfied with the narrow category.

  “I know a man who can always tell when there’s a cat in the room.”

  “Before or after seeing it?” Rawnsley inquired politely.

  “Oh, before. Genuine case. I tested him by locking a cat in the sideboard once when he was coming to dine with me. He complained the moment he got into the room.”

  “Acute smell-sense,” Rawnsley decided.

  “You hear of people who can foretell a change in the weather,” Gartside went on.

  “Usually wrong,” said Rawnsley. “When they’re right, and it isn’t coincidence, you can trace it to the influence of a changed atmosphere on a sensitive part of their body. An old wound, for instance. Acute touch sense.”

  I happened to catch sight of the Seraph lying on his face piling the fallen apple-blossoms into little heaps.

  “What about a sense of futurity?” I asked.

  “Did you ever meet the man could spot a Derby winner?” asked Culling, infected by Rawnsley’s scepticism.

  “Futurity in respect of yourself,” I defined. “What’s called ‘premonition.’”

  Rawnsley demolished me with patient weightiness.

  “You come down to breakfast with a headache.…”

  “Owin’ to the unwisdom of mixin’ your drinks,” Culling interposed.

  “…Everything’s black. In the course of the day you hear a friend’s dead. ‘Ah!’ you say, ‘I knew something was going to happen.’ What about all those other mornings.…”

  “Terribly plentiful!” said Culling.

  “…When everything’s black and nothing happens? It’s pure coincidence.”

  I defined my meaning yet more narrowly.

  “I have in mind the premonition of something quite definite.”

  “For instance?”

  I told him of a phenomenon that has frequently come under my observation in the East—the power possessed by many natives of foretelling the exact hour of their death. Quite recently I came across a case in the Troad where I fell in with a young Greek who had been wasting for months with some permanent, indefinable fever. One morning I found him sitting dressed in his library, the temperature was normal and the pulse regular; he seemed in perfect health. I congratulated him on his recovery, and was informed that he would die punctually at eight that evening.

  In the course of the day his will was drawn up and signed, the relatives took their farewells, and a priest administered supreme unction. I called again at seven o’clock. He seemed still in perfect health and full possession of his faculties, but repeated his assertion that he would pass away at eight. I told him not to be morbid. At ten minutes to eight he warned me that his time was at hand; after another three minutes he undressed and lay motionless on his bed. At two minutes past eight the heart had ceased to beat.

  “Auto-hypnosis,” said Rawnsley when I had done. “A long debilitating illness in which the mind became more and more abnormal and subject to fancies. An idea—from a dream, perhaps—that death will take place at a certain hour. The mind becomes obsessed by that idea until the body is literally done to death. It’s no more premonition than if I say I’m going to dine tonight between eight and nine. I’ve an idea I shall, I shall do my best to make that idea fruitful, and nothing but an unforeseen eventuality will prevent my premonition coming true. Stick to the five senses and three dimensions, Merivale. And now come and dress, or I may not get my dinner after all.”

  “I think Rawnsley’s disposed of premonitions,” said the Seraph from the grass. Possibly I was the only one who detected a note of irony in his voice.

  We had been given adjoining rooms, and in the course of dressing I had a visit from him with the request that I should tie his tie.

  “Choose the other hand next time,” I advised him, when I had done my bad best. “Authors and pianists, you know—it’s your livelihood.”

  “It’ll be well enough by the time I’ve anything to write.”

  “Is your Miserable Child causing trouble?”

  Never at that time having been myself guilty of a line of prose or verse, I could only judge of composition by the light of pure reason. To write an entirely imaginative work would be—as the poet said of love—“the devil.” An autobiographical novel, I thought, would be like keeping a diary and chopping it into chapters of approximately equal length.

  “Have you ever kept a diary a week in advance?” the Seraph asked when I put this view before him.

  “Why not wait a week?” I suggested, again in the light of pure reason.

  “You’d lose the psychology of expectation—uncertainty.”

  “I suppose you would,” I assented hazily.

  “I want to dispose of my premonition on the Rawnsley lines.”

  “What form does it take?”

  His lips parted, and closed again quickly.

  “I’ll let you know in a week’s time,” he answered.

  Sylvia had not returned when we assembled in the drawing-room, and after waiting long enough to chill the soup and burn the entrée, it was decided to start without her. Nothing of that dinner survives in my memory, from which I infer that cooking and conversation were unrelievedly mediocre.
With the appearance of the cigars I moved away from Lady Roden’s empty chair to the place vacated by Gladys between Philip and the Seraph.

  “Thumb hurting you?” I asked.

  He looked so white that I thought he must be in pain.

  “I’m all right, thanks,” he answered. Immediately to belie his words the sudden opening of the door made him jump almost out of his chair. I saw the footman who was handing round the coffee bend down and whisper something to Arthur.

  “Sylvia’s turned up at last,” we were told.

  “Did the car break down?” I asked; but Arthur could only say that she had returned twenty minutes before and was changing her dress.

  “Has she brought Mavis?” asked Rawnsley.

  “The man only said.…”

  Arthur left the sentence unfinished and turned his head to find Sylvia framed in the open doorway. She had changed into a white silk dress, and was wearing a string of pearls round her slender throat. Posed with one hand to the necklace and the other still holding the handle of the door, she made a picture I shall not easily forget. A study in black and white it was, with the dark hair and eyes thrown into relief by her pale face and light dress.… I must have stared unceremoniously, but my stare was distracted by a numbing grip on my forearm. I found the Seraph making his fingers almost meet through bone and muscle; he had half risen and was gazing at her with parted lips and shining eyes. Then we all rose to our feet as she came into the room.

  “The car went all right,” she explained, slipping into an empty chair by her father’s side. “Please sit down, all of you, or I shall be sorry I came. I’m only here for a minute. Mavis hasn’t come, Mr. Rawnsley. Your mother didn’t know why she was staying on in town; she ought to have been down last night or first thing this morning. She hadn’t wired or anything, so I waited till the six-forty got in, and as she wasn’t on that, I came back alone. No, no dinner, thanks. Mrs. Rawnsley gave me some sandwiches.”

  “I hope there’s nothing wrong,” I said in the tone that tries to be sympathetic and only succeeds in arousing general misgiving.

  Sylvia turned her eyes in my direction, catching sight of the Seraph as she did so.

  “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, jumping up and walking round to him with that wonderful flashing smile that I once in poetical mood likened to a white rose bursting into flower. “I didn’t see you when I came in. Oh, poor child, what have you done to your hand?”

  I watched their faces as the Seraph explained; strong emotion on the one, polite conventional sympathy on the other.

  “Move up one place, Phil,” she commanded when the explanation was ended. “I want to talk to our invalid.”

  Sylvia’s presence kept us lingering long over our cigars, and when at last we reached the drawing-room, it was to find that Gladys had already been packed off to bed with mustard plasters and black currant tea. Life abruptly ceased to have any interest for Philip. I stood about till my host and hostess were established at the bridge table with Culling and Gartside, and then accepted the Seraph’s invitation for a stroll on the terrace.

  He executed one of the most masterly silences of my experience. Time and again we paced that terrace till the others had retired to bed and a single light in the library shone like a Polyphemus eye out of the face of the darkened house. I pressed for no confidences, knowing that at the fitting season he would feel the need of a confidant and unburden himself to me. That was the most feminine of the Seraph’s many feminine characteristics.

  It was a wonderfully still, moonlight evening. You would have said he and I were the two last men in the world, and Brandon Court the only house in England—till you rounded the corner of the terrace and found two detectives from Scotland Yard screened by the angle of the house. Since the beginning of the militant outrages, no cabinet minister had been allowed to stir without a bodyguard; through the mists of thirty years I recalled the dynamiter days of my boyhood. In one form or other the militants, like the poor, were always with us.

  It was after one when the Seraph stalked moodily through the open library window on his way to bed. Had he been less pre-occupied, he would have seen something that interested me, though I suppose it would have enlightened neither of us.

  On a table by the door stood a photograph of Sylvia. I noticed the frame first, then the face, and finally the dress. She had arrayed herself as a Savoyard peasant with short skirt, bare arms and hair braided in two long plaits. It was not a good likeness, because no portrait could do justice to a face that owed its fascination to the fact of never being seen in repose; but it was good enough for me to judge the effect of such a face on a man of impressionable temperament.…

  I had an admirable night’s rest, as I always do. I awoke once or twice, it is true, but dropped off again immediately—almost before I had time to appreciate that the Seraph was pacing to and fro in the adjoining room.

  CHAPTER IV

  The First Round

  “BRASSBOUND: You are not my guest: you are my prisoner.

  SIR HOWARD: Prisoner?

  BRASSBOUND: I warned you. You should have taken my warning.

  SIR HOWARD: … Am I to understand, then, that you are a brigand? Is this a matter of ransom?

  BRASSBOUND: … All the wealth of England shall not ransom you.

  SIR HOWARD: Then what do you expect to gain by this?

  BRASSBOUND: Justice.…”

  —Bernard Shaw

  “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.”

  But for Pat Culling the library was deserted when I entered it the following morning. I found him with a lighted cigarette jauntily placed behind one ear, at work on an illustrated biography of the Seraph. Loose sheets still wet from his quick, prolific pen lay scattered over chairs, tables and floor, and ranged from “The Budding of the Wing” to “The Chariot of Fire.” Fra Angelico, as an irreverent pavement artist, was Culling’s artistic parent for the time being.

  “Merivale! on my soul!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of me. “Returning from church, washed of all his sins and thinkin’ what fun it’ll be to start again. We want more paper for this.”

  As a matter of fact I had not been to church, but Philip had kindly arranged for my coffee to be brought me in bed, and I saw no reason for refusing the offer. It was not as if I had work to neglect, and for some years I have found that other people tend to be somewhat irritating in the early morning. When I breakfast alone, I am not in the least fretful, but I believe it to be physiologically true that the facial muscles grow stiff during sleep, and this makes it difficult for many people to be smiling and conversational for the first few hours after waking. So at least I was informed by a medical student who had spent much time studying the subject in his own person.

  “Seraph up yet?” I asked.

  “Is ut up?” Culling exclaimed in scorn, and I learnt for the first time that the Seraph habitually lived on berries and cold water, slept in a draught, and mortified his flesh with a hair shirt. He had, further, seen the sun rise, wetted his wings in an icy river and escorted Sylvia to the early service.

  “I’m glad one of us was there,” I said.

  “Be glad it wasn’t you,” answered Culling darkly. “Seraph’s in disgrace over something.”

  The reason, as I heard some time later, was his unwillingness to enter Sylvia’s place of worship. The Seraph has devoted considerable time and money to the study of comparative religion, he will analyse any known faith, and when he has traced its constituent parts back to their magical origin, he feels he has done something really worth doing. Sylvia—like most dévôtes—could not believe in the existence of a conscientious free-thinker. Why two attractive young people should have bothered their heads over such matters, passes my comprehension. I have always found the man who demolishes a religion only one degree less tiresome than the man who discovers religion for the first time. Most men seem fated to do on
e or the other—and to tell me all about it.

  “Where’s she hiding herself now?” I asked.

  “Only gone to bring the rest of the family home.”

  Almost before the words were out of his mouth, the door burst open and admitted Robin and Michael. The Roden boys were all marked with a strong family likeness, thin, lithe, and active, with black hair and brown eyes. Robin had outgrown the age of eccentricity in dress, but Michael persevered with a succession of elaborate colour-schemes. He was dressed that morning in brown shoes, brown socks, a brown suit and brown Homburg hat; even his shirt had a faint brown line, and his handkerchief a brown border. Of a Sphinx-like family, he was the most enigmatic; his leading characteristics were a surprisingly fluent use of the epithet “bloody,” and a condition of permanent insolvency. The first reminded me of the great far-off day when I tested the efficacy of that word in presence of my parents; the second was the basis of our too short friendship. Finding a ten-pound note in my pocket, I tossed Michael whether I should give it to him or keep it myself. I forget who won; he certainly had the note.

  A leave-out day from Winchester accounted for Michael’s presence. Robin had slipped away from Oxford for the nominal purpose of a few days’ rest before his Schools, and with the underlying intention of perfecting certain intricate arrangements for celebrating his last Commemoration.

  “You’ll come, won’t you?” he asked as soon as we had been introduced. “House, Bullingdon and Masonic.…”

  “Who’s paying?” asked Michael.

  “Guv’nor, I hope.”

  “Je ne pense pas,” murmured Michael, as he wandered round the library in search of a chair that would fit in with his colour-scheme.