Trial and Error

by Anthony Berkeley

  “Oh, how sporting of you! Very well, that’s a bargain. We’ve promised, remember. Now, you ask me first.”

  “No, no,” cackled Mr Todhunter inanely. “Ladies first. You ask me.”

  “Very well.” The lady closed her lustrous eyes, placed the tips of her encarmined fingers together and considered. “Now, what shall it be? My first real friend. . . what shall I ask him?”

  Suddenly caution, which Mr Todhunter had thought safely submerged, popped up an unexpected head and addressed him in blunt terms. “You adjectival fool, don’t you see she’s been playing a game with you? She’s going to ask for a diamond necklace or something—and you, poor noodle, have undertaken to give it her. Didn’t everyone tell you what she was?”

  Horribly alarmed, Mr Todhunter clutched at the arms of his chair and wondered desperately how he could save the situation.

  The lady opened her eyes and smiled at him. “I’ve decided.”

  Mr Todhunter gulped. “Yes?” he asked shakily.

  “I ask you to dedicate your next book to me in these words, ‘To my friend, Jean Norwood.’ ”

  “Oh!” Mr Todhunter clutched at his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Relief, not the agony which went before, had bespangled it with moisture. “Yes, certainly. Very glad indeed . . . great honour . . .” Mr Todhunter had once published, at his own expense, a critical study of the work of an unknown eighteenth-century diarist, whom he had acclaimed as the equal of Evelyn and Pepys. The book had sold forty-seven copies and the diarist was still unknown. There was no intention in Mr Todhunter’s mind of ever publishing another, but he saw no need to tell Miss Norwood that.

  “Now you!” Miss Norwood laughed delightedly. “Whatever it is, I’ll grant it, you know. That’s rather brave, I think—for a woman. But I always flatter myself I can judge character. Now, what is it to be?”

  A sudden idea jumped into Mr Todhunter’s mind. Without stopping to think, he said:

  “Send Farroway back to his wife in Yorkshire.”

  Miss Norwood stared at him, her eyes widening till Mr Todhunter could hardly believe that any eyes could be so enormous. Then she laughed, simply and naturally.

  “But my dear man, that’s just what I’ve been trying to do for the last six months. I can’t tell you how much I wish he’d do it. But he simply won’t go.”

  “He’ll do anything you tell him,” said Mr Todhunter mulishly. “And you promised. Send him.”

  “I’ll send him,” laughed Miss Norwood lightly. “I promise you that. But I can’t promise that he’ll go.”

  “You can make him if you try. I ask you to make sure he goes.”

  Miss Norwood’s fine eyebrows lifted for a second, then dropped. She smiled—a smile different from all the others that Mr Todhunter had seen. It was, as a matter of fact, a provocative, pleased, quietly triumphant, faintly deriding smile, but Mr Todhunter recognised none of that.

  “Mr Todhunter,” said Miss Norwood softly, “just why are you so anxious that Nicholas should retire back to the north? Tell me, between friends.”

  “Oh, come,” protested Mr Todhunter. “Don’t tell me you can’t see that for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I can,” murmured Miss Norwood, and her smile became a little intensified.

  “Then you’ll make him go?” asked Mr Todhunter earnestly.

  “He shall go. I promise you,” replied Miss Norwood with an earnestness matching Mr Todhunter’s own.

  “Thank you,” said Mr Todhunter simply.

  He beamed in happy relief upon his hostess. Mr Todhunter had quite decided now that Miss Norwood was a thoroughly maligned woman. It was the penalty, he supposed, of greatness. Jealousy, no doubt, and all that sort of thing. Anyone who really knew her could see at once what a sweet nature she had.

  “But I think,” remarked the maligned woman with an attractively wicked little laugh, “that you rather threw your opportunity away, Mr. Todhunter, didn’t you? And it’s not the sort of opportunity that occurs twice. I was quite in your hands, you know—well, I mean, I might have been.”

  “But that would hardly have been fair,” replied Mr Todhunter roguishly.

  Miss Norwood tilted her charming head. “Isn’t all fair in war and—other things?”

  Mr Todhunter cackled happily and felt the very devil of a fellow. For the first time in six weeks he had completely forgotten his aneurism.

  Mr Todhunter always had thought the best of people.

  3

  It was past three o’clock when Mr Todhunter got up to leave, and he did so then with reluctance.

  “It has been delightful, Miss Norwood,” he said, shaking his hostess’s hand. “I can’t recall when I enjoyed a luncheon more.”

  “Oh, come,” smiled the lady. “To my friends I’m Jean. ‘Miss Norwood’ sounds just too grim for words.”

  “And my name is Lawrence,” crowed Mr Todhunter, apparently unaware that his hand was being held.

  They parted with assurances of a further meeting in the very near future.

  It was only as he was going down the stairs that Mr Todhunter recalled the delusion of which his hostess had been the victim. Something had been said about Miss Norwood visiting him next, in Richmond. She would expect a palace, and she would find—well, not a hovel but a semidetached Victorian house of quite revolting aspect. It was not fair to let her remain under the impression that he was a rich man. Not that it would make any difference to so generous a nature, of course, but . . . well, one simply did not deceive one’s friends.

  Mr Todhunter turned and sought the electric lift again.

  It is a matter for question whether Miss Norwood’s life might have been saved had Mr Todhunter been not quite so punctilious. Had he written his information, for instance, or even telephoned it, Miss Norwood would just have dropped him quietly, Nicholas Farroway would probably have returned in any case to the north, for, having come to the end of his cash, he was of little practical use and therefore interest to anyone in London, and Mr Todhunter would duly have died at the appointed time of his aneurism. But all this simple arrangement was shattered by Mr Todhunter’s regard for the requirements of friendship.

  For the door of Miss Norwood’s flat stood just a little ajar when Mr Todhunter reached it. In point of fact the lock was defective and should have been put right that morning, and the locksmith, in failing to keep his promise to do so, had driven a screw into Miss Norwood’s coffin as surely as if he had wielded the screwdriver with his own hands. Mr Todhunter was therefore able to hear only too clearly certain observations which Miss Norwood, in a voice very different from that in which she had addressed him, was calling through the open door of her bedroom to the maid, Marie, in the sitting room.

  “Marie, for God’s sake get me a glass of brandy, and quick. This off-stage acting’s more exhausting than the real thing.”

  “Yes, madam.” The maid’s voice came pertly. “I thought you’d taken on a bit of a job this time, madam.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, nothing, madam. I beg your pardon.”

  “Get me that brandy.”

  “Very good, madam.”

  Mr Todhunter’s hand, already raised to the bell push, dropped back to his side. He had not meant to listen, but there it was. He hesitated whether to ring or not.

  Miss Norwood’s voice came again.

  “Oh, and Marie!”

  “Yes, madam?”

  “I’m not at home to Mr Farroway any longer, thank God! At least, not in Richmond. I suppose I’ll have to be here for a bit, but . . .”

  “Then we shan’t be giving this place up after all, madam?”

  “I think not, Marie. I think not.” Even to Mr Todhunter’s inexperienced ears Miss Norwood’s voice sounded almost indecently complacent.

  “I thought you were getting him nice and interested, madam. And I should think he’s the sort that’d stump up the rent and not even ask for a latchkey, isn’t he?”

  “Damn you, Mari
e, who do you think you’re talking to?” Miss Norwood’s voice was suddenly shrill with rage. “Don’t you know your place yet? I’ll have to teach you a lesson one of these days, my girl. I pay you to wait on me, not to try to gossip about my private affairs.”

  “I beg your pardon, madam, I’m sure.” Marie’s voice held the perfunctory tone of one used to making a stereotyped apology.

  Mr Todhunter turned away. He was a man of little experience but he was nobody’s fool. At the present moment, too, he was in a temper so vile that it was touch and go whether his aneurism could stand the strain.

  4

  What upset Mr Todhunter as much as anything was the vulgarity of the little scene he had just overheard. Mr Todhunter was a bit of a snob. His snobbery, however, was not of the negative kind which consists merely of refusing to know persons of a lower social stratum than one’s own. He believed that class, as well as the nobility, has its obligations; and one of the attributes of a “lady” was an inability to confide in her maids. Mr Todhunter had mistaken Miss Norwood for a lady, and it upset him to find out how far he had been deceived. So curiously constituted was Mr Todhunter that this really upset him more than the revelation that Miss Norwood considered him enslaved already by her charms and was confidently expecting to shift onto him from Farroway the responsibility for the rent of her palatial flat.

  Meditating wickedly upon these matters in the safe anchorage of his library once more, Mr Todhunter found it simple enough to decide to have no more to do with Miss Norwood, with Farroway or with any of the participants in this sordid tragi-comedy; but there were some matters upon which he still found himself puzzled. Why, for instance, did Miss Norwood require anyone to pay her rents for her? As an actress-manager, with long run after long run to her credit and never a failure, was she not making quite enough money to pay her own rents? And was her behaviour not quite at variance with every canon of the legitimate stage? It was indeed more like the traditional behaviour of the musical-comedy chorus girl than the great and dignified figures of the drama proper.

  From this point it was only a step to wonder if it were possible that he could be on the wrong lines altogether, so that by the time his tea arrived (at fifteen minutes past four to the second) Mr Todhunter was actually wondering whether he had really heard what he had heard and if so whether he had not read all kinds of horrible meanings into what might have been a perfectly innocent conversation. It was all very bewildering.

  At this point, and while actually pouring out his second cup of tea, Mr Todhunter remembered Joseph Pleydell, the dramatic critic of the London Review, who was reputed not only to be the best judge of a play and a performance of acting in London, but to know more about stage folks than any man living. So great was Mr Todhunter’s relief that he actually jumped up with his cup of tea only half poured, rang up Pleydell that instant on the telephone and for the first time in his life proffered an invitation for dinner that same evening without at least twenty minutes anxious consultation with Mrs Greenhill first upon ways and means. It was perhaps fortunate that Mr Pleydell, having to attend a first night as usual (a possibility which Mr Todhunter had quite overlooked), was unable to come. Upon Mr Todhunter’s urgent pleading, however, it was discovered that Pleydell lived in Putney, only half a mile away from Mr Todhunter’s house, and would therefore come along for a half-hour’s chat after his play.

  Mr Todhunter had made a lucky choice. At the interview which followed at around midnight that evening he learned all he wanted to know.

  Jean Norwood, explained Mr Pleydell in reply to his host’s questioning, was a curious and interesting type. She combined an inordinate avarice and greed in money matters with an almost morbid craving for public admiration. She had some small artistic feeling, but what she lacked here she more than made up in flair; for Jean Norwood was to the theatre what a certain type of popular novelist is to literature.

  “Mediocrity passionately called to mediocrity, it’s been defined,” observed Mr Pleydell drily, “and it certainly pays. Jean Norwood is the mediocre mind in excelsis. She can feel precisely what the suburbs want in a play, and she can act in it precisely as they want her to. You know it’s her boast that she’s never had a failure.”

  “Then she must be a very wealthy woman?” suggested Mr Todhunter.

  “No.”

  “But she must have made a great deal of money?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “She’s extravagant, then?”

  “On the contrary, I told you, she’s exceedingly mean. She’ll never pay herself for anything that she can get some man to buy for her; and she’s quite unscrupulous as to how she’ll induce him to do so.”

  “Dear, dear,” lamented Mr Todhunter. “But I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Pleydell took a small sip of whiskey and soda and stroked his neat little pointed beard.

  “That is precisely where the interest lies. Without it Jean Norwood would be a commonplace character; as it is, she is possibly unique, certainly on the English stage. The key to her complexity is her passion for the public’s applause. To ensure that she stints her private expenditure to a remarkable degree—and, frankly, is willing to be the kept woman of any man who is both wealthy and discreet, for of course her public must not know anything about that. I really believe she’s persuaded herself that she is sacrificing herself in this way to the public.”

  “But how? I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”

  “Why, she uses very little of the money she makes in her theatre for private living; only the smallest sum necessary to keep up a certain position and dress her part. Out of her profits she first sets aside a sum to finance her next production, for she always puts on her own plays and up to a point she’s a very sound businesswoman. The rest goes back onto the stage. That is to say, she throws away nearly all the money she makes—and there’s a very great deal of it—in keeping her plays on long after they’ve ceased to earn money. To do that she’ll sacrifice anything. I’m sure she’d live on bread and water if necessary.”

  “But why?” asked Mr Todhunter, bewildered.

  “Because she can’t bear to have anything approaching—well, not a failure because she never has that, but even anything that can’t be called a stupendous success. Haven’t you noticed that the Jean Norwood runs are becoming longer and longer? All records broken time and time again, and each record has to be broken all over again next time. It’s fantastic. And as I say, she’ll stick at absolutely nothing to break these records. Of course the press love it, and the public cheer the roof off each time a record’s broken. It’s become quite a game at the Sovereign. That’s what she lives for: the public’s cheers.”

  “How very odd,” commented Mr Todhunter.

  “Very odd. I shouldn’t think there’s ever been another instance of an actress in a really big position behaving off the stage like a professional courtesan, but that’s what she does—and is. Though I give her the credit for having genuinely persuaded herself that her position is the same as that of the old temple prostitute and that she is serving the God of Art as devoutly as you like. But of course a woman like that could persuade herself of anything.”

  “Then what is your private opinion of her as a person?” asked Mr Todhunter with interest.

  “A poisonous bitch,” replied Mr Pleydell succinctly. “And a disgrace to a great profession,” he added more temperately.

  “Dear me. Is she,” ventured Mr Todhunter, for he was about to use a word which has fallen into considerable disrepair, “is she a lady?”

  “Neither by instinct nor birth, Her father was, I believe, a small tradesman in Balham; her mother had been in service. Both admirable people and still alive. But they never see their daughter nowadays; unless, of course, they like to pay for a ticket to the pit, Jean disowned ’em long ago, bless her. I believe she’s invented a colonel in the guards, killed at Mons, and a poor but proud descendant of one of the earlier English reigning families (I’m not sure it isn’t a Plantagenet) t
o take their places. Ah well, that’s how things are.”

  “Has she,” asked Mr Todhunter, “a single redeeming quality?”

  “Well, no one’s bad all through, you know, but I should think Jean comes as near it as anyone.”

  “Would you say,” pursued Mr Todhunter, “that she does a great deal of harm to a great many people?”

  “Undoubtedly I would. She does. But on the other hand she does a great deal of good. I mean, she provides a great many worthy people with considerable and wholesome pleasure.”

  “But anyone could do that.”

  “Oh no. A Jean Norwood is just as rare as an Ethel M. Dell—and, in her way, just as great a genius.”

  “Still,” demanded Mr Todhunter, lured on by a morbid fascination, “would you say that on balance it would be a great deal better if she were dead?”

  “Oh, a great deal,” concurred Mr Pleydell without hesitation.

  Mr Todhunter sipped his barley water.

  5

  “Well, I’m not going to kill the woman,” decided Mr Todhunter as he reached out a bony arm towards the bedside lamp and snapped off the switch. “All that nonsense came to an end weeks ago, I’m exceedingly glad to say.” And, having quite made up his mind on that point, Mr Todhunter fell tranquilly asleep.

  PART II

  Transpontine

  THE MURDER IN

  THE OLD BARN

  CHAPTER VII

  It amused Mr Todhunter very much to reflect upon the way in which he had been vamped. His eyes were open now, and he saw just how it had been done. He also saw, not without shame, how easily and thoroughly he had fallen into the trap, with all the blithe confidence of a rabbit walking into a snare. The net had been spread in his sight, and he had positively rushed to occupy a position fairly and squarely in the middle of it. If he had not happened, just by the merest chance pricking of a punctilious conscience, to turn back into the lift. . .