The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “It won’t take a minute.”

  “Honestly I can’t wait! I’ve got to go down to Chiswick of all unearthly places! My poor old darling of a fräulein’s been taken ill and she’s got no one to look after her. I must just see she’s got everything she wants. It’s horribly rude, but you will forgive me, won’t you? She rang up at half-past twelve, and I’ve only just got back.”

  Touching my hand with the tips of her fingers, she flashed down the steps before I could stop her. The bearded Orthodox Church retainer was waiting at the kerb, and I heard her call out “Twenty-seven, Teignmouth Road, Chiswick,” as he slammed the door and clambered into his seat. I caught my last glimpse of her rounding the corner into Sloane Street, the same black and white study that I had admired when I first visited Gladys—white dress, black hat; white skin, dark hair, and soft unfathomable brown eyes; a splash of red at the throat, a flush of colour in her cheeks. Then I hailed a taxi on my own account and drove back to Adelphi Terrace.

  The Seraph was still in the library, sitting as I had left him more than four hours before. An empty coffee cup at his elbow marked the only visible difference. He was writing quicker than I think I have ever seen a man write, and allowed me to enter the room and drop into an armchair by the window without raising his eyes or appearing to notice my presence. I had been there a full five minutes before he condescended—still without looking up from his writing—to address me.

  “You couldn’t stop her, then?”

  “No.”

  “But you saw her?”

  “Just for a moment.”

  “‘Just for a moment.’ Those were the words I had used.”

  He stopped writing, drew a line under the last words, blotted the page and threw it face-downwards on the pile of manuscript. Then for the first time our eyes met, and I saw it was only by biting his lips and gripping the arms of the chair that he could keep control over himself.

  “You’d like some tea,” he said, in the manner of a man recalling his mind from a distance. “Can you reach the bell?”

  “Is this the end of the chapter?” I asked as he tidied the pile of manuscript and bored it with a paper fastener.

  “It’s the end of everything.”

  “How far does it carry you?”

  “To your parting from Sylvia.”

  “Present time, in fact?”

  “Forty minutes ago.”

  I checked him by my watch. “And what now?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, looked through me, I might say, and sat staring at the window without answering.

  The next two hours were the most uncomfortable I have ever spent. If in old age my guardian angel offers me the chance of living my whole life over again, I shall refuse the offer if I am compelled to endure once again that silent July afternoon. The Seraph sat from four till six without speech or movement. As the sun’s rays lengthened, they fell on his face and lit it with cold, merciless limelight. He had started pale and grew gradually grey; the eyes seemed to darken and increase in size as the face became momentarily more pinched and drawn. I could see the lips whitening and drying, the forehead dewing with tiny beads of perspiration.

  I made a brave show of noticing nothing. Tea was brought in; I poured him out a cup, drank three myself, and ostentatiously sampled two varieties of sandwich and one of cake. I cut my cigar noisily, damned with audible good humour when the matches refused to strike, picked up a review and threw it down again, and wandered round the room in search of a book, humming to myself the while.

  At six I could stand it no longer.

  “I’m going to play the piano, Seraph,” I said.

  “For pity’s sake don’t!” he begged me, with a shudder; but I had my way.

  When the City of Pekin went down in ’95 as she tried to round the Horn, one of my fellow-passengers was a gigantic, iron-nerved man from one of the Western States. I suppose we all of us found it trying work to sit calm while the boats were lowered away: no one knew how long we could keep our heads above water and we all had a shrewd suspicion that the boat accommodation was insufficient. We should have been more miserable than we were if it had not occurred to the Westerner to distract our minds. In spite of a thirty-degree list he sat down to the piano and I helped hold him in position while we thundered out the old songs that every one knows without consciously learning—“Clementine,” “The Tarpaulin Jacket,” “In Cellar Cool.” We were taking a call for “The Tavern in the Town” when word reached us that there was room in the last boat.

  I set myself to distract the Seraph’s mind, and gave him a tireless succession of waltzes and ragtimes till eight o’clock. Then the bell of the telephone rang, and I was told Philip Roden wished to speak to me.

  “It’s about Sylvia,” he began. “She hasn’t come back yet, and we don’t know where she is. The man says you had a word with her as she started out: did she say where she was going?”

  I told him of the message from Chiswick, and repeated the address I had heard her give the chauffeur.

  “I don’t know what the matter was,” I added. “Sylvia may have found the woman worse than she expected. Hadn’t you better inquire who took the message and see if he or she can throw any light on the mystery?”

  I was half dressed for dinner when Philip rang me up again, this time with well-marked anxiety in his voice.

  “I say, there’s something very fishy about this,” he began. “I’ve just rung up the Chiswick address and the Fräulein answered in person. She wasn’t ill, she hadn’t been ill, and she certainly hadn’t sent any message to Sylvia.”

  “Well, but who—?” I started.

  “Lord knows!” he answered. “It might be any one. The address is a boarding house with a common telephone: any one in the house could have used it. You said twelve-thirty, didn’t you? The Fräulein was out in Richmond Park at twelve-thirty.”

  “What about Sylvia?” I asked.

  “That’s the devil of it: Sylvia hadn’t been near the place. When was it exactly that you saw her? Three-five, three-ten? And she turned into Sloane Street? North or South? Well, North’s the Knightsbridge end. And that’s all you can say?”

  I mentioned the invitation she had given me, and asked if I could be of any assistance in helping to trace her. Philip told me he was going at once to Chiswick to investigate the mystery of the telephone, and promised to advise me if there was anything fresh to report. Then he rang off, and I gave a résumé of our conversation to the Seraph. He had just come out of the bath and was sitting wrapped in a towel on the edge of the bed. I remember noticing at the time how thin he had gone the last few weeks: he had always been slightly built, but the outline of his collarbones and ribs was sharply discernible under the skin.

  “I think it would be rather friendly if I went round after dinner to see if there’s any news of her,” I concluded.

  “There won’t be,” he answered.

  “Well, that of course we can’t say.”

  “I can. They won’t have found her, they don’t know where she is.”

  “Philip may hear something in Chiswick; it looks like a silly practical joke.”

  “But you know it isn’t.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I answered, as I returned to my room and the final stages of my toilet. I soon came back, however, to tie my tie in front of his glass and propound a random question. “I suppose you don’t know where she is?”

  “How should I?”

  “You sometimes do.”

  “So do other people.”

  “You sometimes know where she is when other people don’t—and when you’ve no better grounds for knowing than other people.”

  He was still sitting on the bed in déshabille, his hands clasped round his bare knees and his head bowed down and resting on his hands. For a moment he looked up into my face, then dropped his head again with
out speaking.

  “You remember what happened at Brandon Court?” I persisted.

  “Guess-work,” he answered.

  “Nonsense!”

  “Well, what other explanation do you offer?”

  “I don’t know; you’ve got some extra sensitiveness where Sylvia’s concerned. Call it the Sixth Sense, if you like.”

  “There is no Sixth Sense. I thought Nigel disposed of that fallacy at Brandon.”

  “Not to my satisfaction—or yours.”

  The Seraph jumped up and began to dress.

  “Well, anyway I don’t know where she is now,” he observed.

  “Meaning that you did once?”

  “You say I did.”

  “You know you did.”

  “There’s not much sign of it now.”

  “May be in abeyance. It may come back.”

  I watched him spend an unduly long time selecting and rejecting dress-socks.

  “It won’t come back as long as the connection’s broken at her end,” I heard him murmur.

  CHAPTER X

  The Zeal That Outruns Discretion

  “Selina! The time has arrived to impart

  The covert design of my passionate heart.

  No vulgar solicitudes torture my breast,

  No common ambition deprives me of rest.…

  My soul is absorbed in a scheme as sublime

  As ever was carved on the tablets of time.

  Tomorrow, at latest, through London shall ring

  The echo and crash of a notable thing.

  I start from my fetters, I scorn to be dumb,

  Selina! the Hour and the Woman are come…

  Hither to the rescue, ladies!

  Let not fear your spirits vex.

  On the plan by me that made is

  Hangs the future of your sex…

  Shall she then be left to mourn her

  Isolation and her shame?

  Come in troops round Hyde Park Corner,

  Every true Belgravian dame.”

  —Sir George Otto Trevelyan

  “The Modern Ecclesiazusæ.”

  I ought to have known better than to go round to Cadogan Square next morning. Bereaved families, like swarming bees, are best left alone; and I knew beforehand that I could render no assistance. At the same time, I felt it would be unfriendly to treat Sylvia’s disappearance as part of the trivial round and common task, especially after my overnight conversation with Philip. And if I could bring back any news to the Seraph, I knew I should be more than compensated for my journey.

  Save for its master and mistress, I found the house deserted. Philip had organised himself into one search party, Robin into another: Nigel Rawnsley appeared to be successfully usurping authority at Scotland Yard, and from Sloane Street and Chiswick respectively Gartside and Culling paced slowly to a central place of meeting. Every shopkeeper, loafer, postman, and hawker along the route was subjected to searching inquisition: the car, its passenger, and black-bearded driver were described and re-described. My two detective friends from Henley, as I afterwards found out, passed a cheerful day at headquarters, drinking down unsweetened reprimands and striving to explain the difficulties of protecting a young woman who refused to be shadowed.

  I admired the way Arthur Roden took punishment. When armchair critics scoff at a generation of opportunist politicians, I think of him—and of Rawnsley, who suffered first and longest. Their public pronouncements never wavered; the Suffrage must be opposed and defeated on its own merits or demerits, and no attacks on property, no menaces to person could shake them from what they regarded as a national duty. Even if I chose to think old Rawnsley’s mechanical, cold-blooded inhumanity extended to the members of his own family, it would be impossible to charge Jefferson with indifference to his only child, or Roden with want of affection towards his only daughter. I know of no girl who exacted as much admiring devotion from the members of her own family as Sylvia: or one who repaid the exaction so generously.

  Their wives were even more uncompromising than the Ministers. I have no doubt the New Militants thought to strike at the fathers through the mothers, and the reasoning seemed tolerably sound. I admit I expected at first to find Mrs. Rawnsley and Mrs. Jefferson calling for quarter before their husbands, and if the New Militants miscalculated, I miscalculated with them. I had not expected their policy of abduction to arouse much active sympathy, but the bitter, uncompromising resentment it evoked far surpassed my anticipations. Had the perpetrators been discovered, I believe they would have been lynched in the street; and without going to such lengths, I feel confident that the mothers themselves would have sacrificed their own children rather than yield a single inch to women who had so outraged every maternal instinct. Had their own feelings inclined to surrender, Rawnsley, Jefferson, and Roden would have surrendered only over their wives’ bodies.

  “We shall go on exactly as before,” Arthur told me when I asked his plans. “The enemy has varied its usual form of communication; this is what I have received.”

  He threw me a typed sheet of paper.

  “We shall be glad to know within the next ten days (expiring Saturday) when the Government will guarantee the introduction of a bill to give women the parliamentary vote on the same terms as it is enjoyed by men.”

  “How are you answering this?” I asked.

  “My campaign in the Midlands is all arranged,” was the reply, “and will go forward in due course.”

  “And Sylvia?”

  “Anything that can be done will be done. I am offering two thousand pounds reward.…”

  “Are you making the whole thing public?”

  “It’s more than half public already. We tried to keep it secret, as you know. To avoid giving them a free advertisement. However, they’ve advertised themselves by broad hints in the New Militant; the gutter-press has taken it up until half England knows and the other half suspects. Rawnsley’s seeing the Times, and you’ll have the whole story in tomorrow’s papers. I shall confirm it at Birmingham next week.” He paused, and drummed with his fingers on the library table. “I can’t answer for the men, but there’s not a mother in the length and breadth of the land who won’t be on our side when the story comes out.”

  The ultimate collapse of the whole New Militant campaign has proved his sagacity as a prophet.

  “You’ve got no traces yet of Mavis Rawnsley and the Jefferson boy?” I asked.

  “So far the police are completely baffled. They’re clever, these women, very clever.”

  “No clue?”

  “Nothing you could take into court. We’re not even sure where to look for the perpetrators.”

  “You’ve no suspicions?” I ventured to ask.

  “Oh, suspicions, certainly.” He looked at me shrewdly and with a spice of disfavour. “Candidly, I suspect your friend Miss Davenant.”

  “Why her in particular?” I asked carelessly.

  “By a process of exclusion. The old constitutional agitators, the Blacks and the Campions and that lot, are out of the question; they’ve publicly denounced the slightest breach of the law. I acquit the Old Militants, too—the Gregorys and Haseldines and Ganons. They’re too stupid, for one thing; they go on burning houses and breaking windows in their old fatuous way. And for another thing they haven’t the nerve.…”

  “There are a good many Hunger-Strikers among them,” I interposed, probably with the dishonest intention of spreading his suspicions over the widest possible area.

  “Less than before,” he answered. “And their arch-Hunger-Striker, the Haseldine woman, carried meat lozenges with her the last time she visited Holloway. No, they’re cowards. If you want brain and courage you must look to a little group of women who detached themselves from the Old Militant party. Mrs. Millington was one and Miss Davenant was another.”
/>   “The eminently moderate staff of the ultra-constitutional New Militant,” I said as I prepared to leave.

  “If you’ve any influence with either of those women and want to save them a long stretch of penal servitude, now’s your time to warn them.”

  “Good Heavens! you don’t suppose I’m admitted to their counsels!”

  “You could advise them as a friend.”

  “When you tell me there’s not enough suspicion to carry into court? I fear they wouldn’t listen.”

  “They might prefer to stop play before their luck turns,” he answered as he accompanied me to the door. “Their quiescent state is the most significant, most suspicious, most damning thing about them. If a house-breaker opened a religious bookshop, you might think he had reformed. Or you might think he was preparing an extra large coup. Or you might think he sold sermons by day and cracked cribs by night.”

  “What cynics you public men are!” I exclaimed as I ran down the steps and turned in the direction of Chester Square.

  I have said that “Providence” is not one of my star rôles, and I had every reason to know that my eloquence was unavailing when set to the task of converting Joyce from her militant campaign. However, I have seen stones worn away by constant dripping.… And in any case I had not been near the house for nearly two days.

  “I’m afraid you can’t see Joyce,” Elsie told me as we shook hands. “She wouldn’t go to bed when the doctor told her, and now she’s really rather bad.”

  I was more upset by the news than I care to say, but Elsie hastened to assure me.

  “It’s nothing much so far,” she said. “But she’s got a temperature and can’t sleep, and worries a good deal.”

  “Can’t we get her away?” I exclaimed impatiently.

  Elsie shook her head.

  “I’ve tried, but she simply won’t leave town.”

  “But what’s to keep her?”

  “There’s the paper every week.”

  It always annoys me to find any one thinking the world will come to an end unless run on his or her own favourite lines.

  “If she died, some one else would have to edit it,” I pointed out. “Who’s doing it now?”