The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “Isn’t it telling you we are?” protested Culling. “It started on the day you returned from your godless wanderings and prowled through London like a lion seeking whom you might devour. ‘Portrait of a Gentleman—well known in Society—seeking whom he may devour,’” he murmured to himself, stretching forth a hand for fresh foolscap. “And it’s been going on ever since. And nobody’s had the courage to speak to him about it. There you have the thing in a nutshell.”

  I turned despairingly to Gartside, and in time was successful in extracting and piecing together an explanation of his dark references to the Seraph. “Once upon a time,” he began.

  “When pigs were swine,” Culling interrupted, “and monkeys chewed tobacco.”

  “Shut up, Paddy! Once upon a time a girl named Elsie Davenant married a man called Arnold Wylton. Perhaps she knows why she did it, but I’m hanged if anybody else did. She was a nice enough girl by all accounts, and Wylton—well, I expect you’ve heard some queer stories about him, they’re all true. After they’d been married—how long was it, Paddy?”

  “Oh, a few years—by the calendar,” said Culling, eagerly taking up the parable. “It’s long enough she must have found ’em! Wylton used to work in little spells of domesticity in the intervals of being horse-whipped out of other people’s houses, and disappearing abroad while sundry little storms blew over. Morgan and Travers took in a new partner and started a special ‘Wylton Department’ for settling his actions out of court.…”

  “This is all fairly ancient history,” I interposed.

  “It’s the extenuating circumstance,” said Gartside.

  Culling warmed oratorically to his work.

  “In the fulness of time,” he went on in the manner of the Ancient Mariner, “Mrs. Wylton woke up and said, ‘This is a one-sided business.’ Toby, ye’re a bachelor. Let me tell you that married life is a mauvais quart d’heure made up of exquisite week-ends. While Wylton dallied unobtrusively in Buda Pesth, giving himself out to be the Hungarian correspondent of the Baptist Family Herald, Mrs. Wylton spent her exquisite week-end at Deauville.”

  He paused delicately.

  “Girls will be girls,” sighed Gartside.

  “A gay cavalry major, with that way they have in the army, made a flying descent on Deauville. He’d been seen about with her in London quite enough to cause comment. Good-natured friends asked Wylton why he was vegetating in Pesth when he might be in Deauville; he came, he saw, he stayed in the self same hotel as his wife.…”

  “Which curiously enough had been already chosen by the gay cavalry major.”

  Culling shook his head over the innate depravity of human nature.

  “You see the finish?” he inquired rhetorically. “They say the senior partner in Morgan and Travers had a seizure when Wylton had finished the last batch of cases in his own department, and strolled into the private office to instruct proceedings for a petition.”

  “Six days ago, decree nisi was granted,” said Gartside.

  “Scene in Court: President expressing sympathy with Petitioner,” murmured Culling, with quick pencil already at work on the blotting-pad.

  I lit a cigar to clear my head.

  “Where does the Seraph come in?” I persisted like a man with an idée fixe.

  “In the sequel,” said Gartside. “There is a right way of doing everything, also a wrong. When one is divorced, one hides one’s diminished head.…”

  “I always do,” said Culling.

  “One grows a beard and goes to live in Kensington. Mrs. Wylton is making the mistake of trying to brazen things out. ‘You may cut me,’ she says, ‘but ye canna brek me manly sperrit.’ Consequently in every place where she can be certain of attracting a crowd, Mrs. Wylton is to be found in the front row of the stalls, very pretty, very quiet and so unobtrusively dressed that you’re almost tempted to damn her as respectable.”

  He lit a cigarette and I took occasion to remind him that we had not yet come in sight of the Seraph.

  Culling took up the parable.

  “Is she alone?” he asked in a husky whisper. “Sir, she is not! Who took her to dinner last night at Dieudonné’s, the night before at the Savoy, the night before that at the Carlton? Who has been seen with her at the Duke of York’s, the Haymarket, the St. James’?”

  “Who rides with her every summer morning in the Park?” cut in Gartside. “It is our Seraph. Our foolish Seraph, and we lay at your door the blame for his demoralisation. Seriously, Toby, somebody ought to speak the word in season. He’s getting talked about, and that sort of flying in the face of public opinion doesn’t do one damn’s worth of good. The woman’s got to have her gruel and take her time over it. She’ll only put people’s backs up by going on as she’s doing at present. Mind you, I’m sorry for her,” he went on more gently. “In her place I’d have done precisely the same thing, and I’d have done it years ago. But I should have had the sense to recognise I’d got to face the consequences.”

  I wondered for a short two seconds if it would be of the slightest avail to proclaim my belief in Elsie Wylton’s innocence. A glance at Culling and Gartside convinced me of the futility.

  “Where’s the Seraph now?” I asked.

  “With her. Any money you like. She lives with her sister in Chester Square; you’ll find him there.”

  I sent a boy off to telephone to Adelphi Terrace. Until his return with the announcement that the Seraph was still away from home, Gartside suggested the lines on which I was to admonish the young offender.

  “The gay cavalry major’s prudently shipped himself back to India,” he said, “and he was a pretty shadowy figure to most people as it was. What the Seraph has to understand is that he’ll get all the discredit of being an ‘and other’ if he ties himself to her strings in this way. I only give you what everybody’s saying.”

  I promised to ponder his advice, and after being reminded that Gladys and I were due at his musical party the following week, and reminding him that he was expected to lunch on my house-boat at Henley, we went our several ways.

  Wandering circuitously round the smoking-rooms and library on my way to the hall, I had ample corroboration of what—in Gartside’s words—everybody was saying. The Wylton divorce was the one topic of conversation. For the most part, I found Gartside’s own tolerance to the woman representative of the general feeling in the club: his strictures on the folly of the Seraph’s conduct had a good many echoes, though two men had the detachment to praise his disinterested behaviour. Of the rest, those who did not condemn opined that he was too young to know any better.

  The one discordant note was struck when I met Nigel Rawnsley in the hall. Elsie Wylton was shot hellwards in one sentence and the Seraph in another, but the burden of his discourse was reserved for the sacramental nature of wedlock and the damnable heresy of divorce. I was subjected to a lucid exposition of the Anglican doctrine of marriage, initiated into the mysteries of the first three (or three hundred) General Councils of the Church, presented with thumbnail biographies of Arius and S. Athanasius, and impressed with the necessity of unfrocking all priests who celebrated the marriage of divorced persons. It was all very stimulating, and I found that half my most prosaic friends were living in something that Rawnsley damningly described as “a state of sin.”

  It was tea-time before I arrived at Chester Square. I suppose I had never taken Gartside very seriously: the moment I saw Elsie and the Seraph, my lot was unconditionally thrown in with the publicans and sinners. She greeted me with the smile of a woman who has no care in the world: then as she turned to ring the bell for tea, I caught the expression of one who is passing through Purgatory on her way to Hell. The Seraph’s eyes were telegraphing a whole code-book. I walked to the window so that she could not see my face, nor I hers.

  “I thought you wouldn’t mind my dropping in,” I said as carelessly as I could. “It was tea-time for o
ne thing, and for another I wanted to tell you that you’ve done about the pluckiest thing a woman can do. Good luck to you! If there’s anything I can do.…”

  Then we shook hands again, and I found her death-like placidity a good deal harder to bear than if she had broken down or gone into hysterics. I do not believe the Davenant women know how to cry: Nature left the lachrymal sac out of their composition. Yet on reflection I can see now that she was suffering less than in the days six weeks before when the anticipation of the divorce lowered menacingly over her head and haunted every waking moment. It is curious to see how suspense cards down a woman’s spirit while the shock of a catastrophe seems actually to brace her and call forth every reserve of strength. From this time till the day of my departure from England, Elsie was indomitable.

  “It’s hard work at present,” she said with a gentle, tired smile, “but I’m going through with it.”

  That was what her father used to say when I climbed with him in Trans-Caucasia. He would say it as we crawled and fought and bit our way up a slippery face of rock, sheer as the side of a house. And he was five and twenty years my senior.

  “What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

  “We were trying to make up our minds when you came in,” said the Seraph.

  “Dinner somewhere, I suppose, and a theatre? What’s on, Seraph? I’m all alone tonight, and I want you and Elsie to dine with me.”

  Elsie was sitting with closed eyes, bathing her forehead with scent.

  “Make it something that starts late,” she said wearily. “I don’t feel I can stand many hours.”

  After a brief study of the theatrical advertisements in the Morning Post the Seraph went off to make arrangements over the telephone. I took hold of Elsie’s disengaged hand and tried in a clumsy, masculine fashion to pump courage into her tired spirit.

  “You must stick it out to the end of the Season,” I told her. “It’s only a few more weeks, and then you can rest as long as you like. Don’t let people think they can drive you into hiding. If you do that, you’ll lose pride in yourself, and when you lose pride in yourself, why should any one believe in you?”

  “How many people believe in me now?”

  “Not many. That’s why I admire your pluck. But there’s Joyce for one.”

  “Yes, Joyce,” she assented slowly.

  “And the Seraph for another.”

  “Yes, the Seraph.”

  “And me for a third.”

  I felt her trying to draw her hand away.

  “I wonder if you do, or whether it’s just because I’m a bit—hard hit.”

  I let go the hand as she rose to blow out the spirit lamp. Standing erect—blue-eyed, pale faced and golden haired—she was wonderfully like Joyce, I thought, with her slim, black-draped figure and slender white neck, but a Joyce who had drunk deep of tribulation.

  “It’s a pity you weren’t ever at a boys’ school,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “If you had been, you’d know there are some boys who simply can’t keep themselves and their clothes clean, and others who can’t get dirty or untidy if they try. In time the grubby ones usually get cleaner, but the boy who starts with a clean instinct never deteriorates into a grub. The distinction holds good for both sexes. And it applies to conduct as much as clothes. The Davenants can’t help keeping clean. I’ve known three in one generation and one in another.”

  I said it because I meant it. I should have said it just the same if Elsie had had no sister Joyce.

  The Seraph came back with Dick Davenant, and I tried to get him to join us, but he was already engaged for dinner. Shortly afterwards I found it was time to get home and change my clothes. In the hall I found Joyce and pressed her into our party. It was a short, hurried meeting, as she was saying good-bye to two colleagues or fellow-conspirators when I appeared. I caught their names and looked at them with some interest. One was the formidable Mrs. Millington, a weather-beaten, stoutish woman of fifty with iron-grey hair cut short to the neck, and double-lensed pince-nez. The other was an anæmic girl of twenty—a Miss Draper—with fanatical eyes that watched Joyce’s every movement, and a little dry cough that told me her days of agitation were numbered. When next we met she wiped her lips after coughing.… Mrs. Millington I never saw again.

  That night was my first effort in the vindication of Elsie Wylton. I believe we dined at the Berkeley and went on to Daly’s. The place is immaterial; wherever we went we found—or so it seemed to our over-sensitive, suspicious nerves—a slight hush, a movement of turning bodies and craning necks, a whispered name. Elsie went through it like a Royal Duchess opening a bazaar; laughing and talking with the Seraph, turning to throw a word to Joyce or myself; untroubled, indifferent—best of all, perfectly restrained. The hard-bought actress-training of immemorial centuries should give woman some superiority over man.…

  We certainly supped at the Carlton in a prominent position by the door. I fancy no one missed seeing us. The Seraph knew everybody, of course, and I had picked up a certain number of acquaintances in two months. We bowed to every familiar form, and the familiar forms bowed back to us. When they passed near our table we hypnotised them into talking, and they brought their women-folk with them.…

  When supper was ended we moved outside for coffee and cigars, so that none who had entered the supper room before us should leave without running the gauntlet. We had our share of black looks and noses in air, directed I suppose against Joyce as much as against her sister; and many a mild husband must have submitted to a curtain lecture that night on the text that no man will believe political or moral evil of any woman with a pretty face. The older I get the truer I find that text; I cannot remember the day when I was without the instinct underlying such a belief.

  At a quarter-past twelve Elsie began to flag, and we started our preparations for returning home. As I waited for my bill—and swore a private oath that Gartside should translate his sympathy into acts, and join our moral-leper colony before the week was out—an unexpected party emerged from the restaurant and passed us on their way to collect cloaks. Gladys and Philip, Sylvia and Robin, driven home from Ranelagh by the impossibility of securing a table for dinner, had eaten sketchily at Cadogan Square, hurried to the Palace, and turned in to the Carlton to make up for lost food.

  The Seraph of course saw them first, rose up and bowed. I followed, and both of us were rewarded by a gracious acknowledgment from Sylvia. Then she caught sight of Joyce and Elsie, and her mouth straightened itself and lost its smile. The change was slight, but I had been expecting it. Another moment, and the straight lines broke to a slight curve. Every one bowed to every one—Robin with his irrepressible, instinctive good-humour, Philip more sedately, as befitted a public man, the eldest son of the Attorney-General, and an avowed opponent of the Militant Suffrage Movement. Then Sylvia passed on to get her cloak, I arranged with Philip to take Gladys home, we bowed again and parted.

  The whole encounter had taken less than two minutes. It was more than enough to make Elsie say she must decline my invitation to Henley.

  “A public place is one thing, and a houseboat’s another,” she said. “You wouldn’t invite two people to stay with you if you knew the mere presence of one was distasteful to the other.”

  “You’ve got to go the whole road,” I said. “If the Rodens know me, they’ve got to know my friends.”

  “We mustn’t be in too much of a hurry,” she answered. “I’m right, aren’t I, Joyce? There’s no scandal about Joyce, but she’s given up visiting with the Rodens. It was beginning to get rather uncomfortable.”

  The matter was compromised by the Seraph inviting Elsie to come to Henley in an independent party of two. They would then secure as much publicity as could be desired without causing any kind of embarrassment to a private gathering.

  I saw nothing of Sylvia until Gartside’s Soirée Musicale three night
s later. The Seraph dined with us, and when Philip snatched Gladys from under my wing almost before the car had turned into Carlton House Terrace, I retired with him into an inviting balcony and watched the female side of human nature at work.

  Sylvia stood twelve feet from us, looking radiant. Instinctive wisdom had led her to dress—as ever—in white, and to wear no jewellery but pearls. Her black hair seemed silkier and more luxuriant than ever; her dark eyes flashed with a certain proud vitality and assurance. Nigel Rawnsley was talking to her, talking well, and paying her the compliment of talking up to her level. I watched her give thrust for thrust, parry for parry; all exquisite sword play.… His enemies called Nigel a prig, even his friends complained he was overbearing; I liked him, as I contrive to like most men, and only wish he could meet more people of his own mental calibre. He had met one in Sylvia; there was no button to his foil when he fenced with her.

  “Thus far and no farther,” I murmured.

  The Seraph looked up, but I had only been thinking aloud. I was wondering why she painted that sign over her door when Nigel approached. A career of brilliant achievement and more brilliant promise, her own chosen faith and ritual, ambition enough and to spare—Nigel entered the lists well armed, and she was the only one who could humanise him. I wondered what gulf of temperamental antipathy parted them and placed him without the pale.…

  They talked till Culling interposed his claim for attention, preferring the request with triplicated brogue. From time to time Gartside strayed away from his other guests and shivered a lance in deferential tourney. As I watched his fine figure, and looked from him to the irrepressible Culling, and from Culling to Rawnsley’s clear-cut, intellectual face, I asked myself for the thousandth time what indescribable affinity could be equally lacking in three men otherwise so dissimilar.

  With light-hearted carelessness she guarded the sword’s length of territory that divided them. It was adroit, nimble fencing, but I wondered how much it amused her. Not many women can resist the age-long fascination of playing off one admirer against another; but I should have written Sylvia down among the exceptions. She did not want admiration.… Then I remembered Oxford and read into her conduct the first calculated stages in the Seraph’s castigation. If this were her object, it failed; the Seraph was ignorant of the very nature of jealousy. In the light of their subsequent meeting, I doubt if this were even her motive.