Calladine weighed her argument, and it affected him.
“No, I think you wouldn’t,” he said frankly.
Most crimes, no doubt, were brought home because the criminal had made some incomprehensibly stupid mistake; incomprehensibly stupid, that is, by the standards of normal life. Nevertheless, Calladine was inclined to believe her. He looked at her. That she should have murdered was absurd. Moreover, she was not making a parade of remorse, she was not playing the unctuous penitent; she had yielded to a temptation, had got herself into desperate straits, and was at her wits’ ends how to escape from them. She was frank about herself.
Calladine looked at the clock. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and though the music could still be heard from the ballroom in the Semiramis, the night had begun to wane upon the river.
“You must go back,” he said. “I’ll walk with you.”
They crept silently down the stairs and into the street. It was only a step to the Semiramis. They met no one until they reached the Strand. There many, like Joan Carew in masquerade, were standing about, or walking hither and thither in search of carriages and cabs. The whole street was in a bustle, what with drivers shouting and people coming away.
“You can slip in unnoticed,” said Calladine as he looked into the thronged courtyard. “I’ll telephone to you in the morning.”
“You will?” she cried eagerly, clinging for a moment to his arm.
“Yes, for certain,” he replied. “Wait in until you hear from me. I’ll think it over. I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you,” she said fervently.
He watched her scarlet cloak flitting here and there in the crowd until it vanished through the doorway. Then, for the second time, he walked back to his chambers, while the morning crept up the river from the sea.
* * * * *
This was the story which Calladine told in Mr. Ricardo’s library. Mr. Ricardo heard it out with varying emotions. He began with a thrill of expectation like a man on a dark threshold of great excitements. The setting of the story appealed to him, too, by a sort of brilliant bizarrerie which he found in it. But, as it went on, he grew puzzled and a trifle disheartened. There were flaws and chinks; he began to bubble with unspoken criticisms, then swift and clever thrusts which he dared not deliver. He looked upon the young man with disfavour, as upon one who had half opened a door upon a theatre of great promise and shown him a spectacle not up to the mark. Hanaud, on the other hand, listened imperturbably, without an expression upon his face, until the end. Then he pointed a finger at Calladine and asked him what to Ricardo’s mind was a most irrelevant question.
“You got back to your rooms, then, before five, Mr. Calladine, and it is now nine o’clock less a few minutes.”
“Yes.”
“Yet you have not changed your clothes. Explain to me that. What did you do between five and half-past eight?”
Calladine looked down at his rumpled shirt front.
“Upon my word, I never thought of it,” he cried. “I was worried out of my mind. I couldn’t decide what to do. Finally, I determined to talk to Mr. Ricardo, and after I had come to that conclusion I just waited impatiently until I could come round with decency.”
Hanaud rose from his chair. His manner was grave, but conveyed no single hint of an opinion. He turned to Ricardo.
“Let us go round to your young friend’s rooms in the Adelphi,” he said; and the three men drove thither at once.
II
CALLADINE LODGED IN a corner house and upon the first floor. His rooms, large and square and lofty, with Adams mantelpieces and a delicate tracery upon their ceilings, breathed the grace of the eighteenth century. Broad high windows, embrasured in thick walls, overlooked the river and took in all the sunshine and the air which the river had to give. And they were furnished fittingly. When the three men entered the parlour, Mr. Ricardo was astounded. He had expected the untidy litter of a man run to seed, the neglect and the dust of the recluse. But the room was as clean as the deck of a yacht; an Aubusson carpet made the floor luxurious underfoot; a few coloured prints of real value decorated the walls; and the mahogany furniture was polished so that a lady could have used it as a mirror. There was even by the newspapers upon the round table a china bowl full of fresh red roses. If Calladine had turned hermit, he was a hermit of an unusually fastidious type. Indeed, as he stood with his two companions in his dishevelled dress he seemed quite out of keeping with his rooms.
“So you live here, Mr. Calladine?” said Hanaud, taking off his hat and laying it down.
“Yes.”
“With your servants, of course?”
“They come in during the day,” said Calladine, and Hanaud looked at him curiously.
“Do you mean that you sleep here alone?”
“Yes.”
“But your valet?”
“I don’t keep a valet,” said Calladine; and again the curious look came into Hanaud’s eyes.
“Yet,” he suggested gently, “there are rooms enough in your set of chambers to house a family.”
Calladine coloured and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“I prefer at night not to be disturbed,” he said, stumbling a little over the words. “I mean, I have a liking for quiet.”
Gabriel Hanaud nodded his head with sympathy.
“Yes, yes. And it is a difficult thing to get — as difficult as my holiday,” he said ruefully, with a smile for Mr. Ricardo. “However” — he turned towards Calladine— “no doubt, now that you are at home, you would like a bath and a change of clothes. And when you are dressed, perhaps you will telephone to the Semiramis and ask Miss Carew to come round here. Meanwhile, we will read your newspapers and smoke your cigarettes.”
Hanaud shut the door upon Calladine, but he turned neither to the papers nor the cigarettes. He crossed the room to Mr. Ricardo, who, seated at the open window, was plunged deep in reflections.
“You have an idea, my friend,” cried Hanaud. “It demands to express itself. That sees itself in your face. Let me hear it, I pray.”
Mr. Ricardo started out of an absorption which was altogether assumed.
“I was thinking,” he said, with a faraway smile, “that you might disappear in the forests of Africa, and at once everyone would be very busy about your disappearance. You might leave your village in Leicestershire and live in the fogs of Glasgow, and within a week the whole village would know your postal address. But London — what a city! How different! How indifferent! Turn out of St. James’s into the Adelphi Terrace and not a soul will say to you: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’”
“But why should they,” asked Hanaud, “if your name isn’t Dr. Livingstone?”
Mr. Ricardo smiled indulgently.
“Scoffer!” he said. “You understand me very well,” and he sought to turn the tables on his companion. “And you — does this room suggest nothing to you? Have you no ideas?” But he knew very well that Hanaud had. Ever since Hanaud had crossed the threshold he had been like a man stimulated by a drug. His eyes were bright and active, his body alert.
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
He was standing now by Ricardo’s side with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the trees on the Embankment and the barges swinging down the river.
“You are thinking of the strange scene which took place in this room such a very few hours ago,” said Ricardo. “The girl in her masquerade dress making her confession with the stolen chain about her throat — —”
Hanaud looked backwards carelessly. “No, I wasn’t giving it a thought,” he said, and in a moment or two he began to walk about the room with that curiously light step which Ricardo was never able to reconcile with his cumbersome figure. With the heaviness of a bear he still padded. He went from corner to corner, opened a cupboard here, a drawer of the bureau there, and — stooped suddenly. He stood erect again with a small box of morocco leather in his hand. His body from head to foot seemed to Ricardo to
be expressing the question, “Have I found it?” He pressed a spring and the lid of the box flew open. Hanaud emptied its contents into the palm of his hand. There were two or three sticks of sealing-wax and a seal. With a shrug of the shoulders he replaced them and shut the box.
“You are looking for something,” Ricardo announced with sagacity.
“I am,” replied Hanaud; and it seemed that in a second or two he found it. Yet — yet — he found it with his hands in his pockets, if he had found it. Mr. Ricardo saw him stop in that attitude in front of the mantelshelf, and heard him utter a long, low whistle. Upon the mantelshelf some photographs were arranged, a box of cigars stood at one end, a book or two lay between some delicate ornaments of china, and a small engraving in a thin gilt frame was propped at the back against the wall. Ricardo surveyed the shelf from his seat in the window, but he could not imagine which it was of these objects that so drew and held Hanaud’s eyes.
Hanaud, however, stepped forward. He looked into a vase and turned it upside down. Then he removed the lid of a porcelain cup, and from the very look of his great shoulders Ricardo knew that he had discovered what he sought. He was holding something in his hands, turning it over, examining it. When he was satisfied he moved swiftly to the door and opened it cautiously. Both men could hear the splashing of water in a bath. Hanaud closed the door again with a nod of contentment and crossed once more to the window.
“Yes, it is all very strange and curious,” he said, “and I do not regret that you dragged me into the affair. You were quite right, my friend, this morning. It is the personality of your young Mr. Calladine which is the interesting thing. For instance, here we are in London in the early summer. The trees out, freshly green, lilac and flowers in the gardens, and I don’t know what tingle of hope and expectation in the sunlight and the air. I am middle-aged — yet there’s a riot in my blood, a recapture of youth, a belief that just round the corner, beyond the reach of my eyes, wonders wait for me. Don’t you, too, feel something like that? Well, then—” and he heaved his shoulders in astonishment.
“Can you understand a young man with money, with fastidious tastes, good-looking, hiding himself in a corner at such a time — except for some overpowering reason? No. Nor can I. There is another thing — I put a question or two to Calladine.”
“Yes,” said Ricardo.
“He has no servants here at night. He is quite alone and — here is what I find interesting — he has no valet. That seems a small thing to you?” Hanaud asked at a movement from Ricardo. “Well, it is no doubt a trifle, but it’s a significant trifle in the case of a young rich man. It is generally a sign that there is something strange, perhaps even something sinister, in his life. Mr. Calladine, some months ago, turned out of St. James’s into the Adelphi. Can you tell me why?”
“No,” replied Mr. Ricardo. “Can you?”
Hanaud stretched out a hand. In his open palm lay a small round hairy bulb about the size of a big button and of a colour between green and brown.
“Look!” he said. “What is that?”
Mr. Ricardo took the bulb wonderingly.
“It looks to me like the fruit of some kind of cactus.”
Hanaud nodded.
“It is. You will see some pots of it in the hothouses of any really good botanical gardens. Kew has them, I have no doubt. Paris certainly has. They are labelled. ‘Anhalonium Luinii.’ But amongst the Indians of Yucatan the plant has a simpler name.”
“What name?” asked Ricardo.
“Mescal.”
Mr. Ricardo repeated the name. It conveyed nothing to him whatever.
“There are a good many bulbs just like that in the cup upon the mantelshelf,” said Hanaud.
Ricardo looked quickly up.
“Why?” he asked.
“Mescal is a drug.”
Ricardo started.
“Yes, you are beginning to understand now,” Hanaud continued, “why your young friend Calladine turned out of St. James’s into the Adelphi Terrace.”
Ricardo turned the little bulb over in his fingers.
“You make a decoction of it, I suppose?” he said.
“Or you can use it as the Indians do in Yucatan,” replied Hanaud. “Mescal enters into their religious ceremonies. They sit at night in a circle about a fire built in the forest and chew it, whilst one of their number beats perpetually upon a drum.”
Hanaud looked round the room and took notes of its luxurious carpet, its delicate appointments. Outside the window there was a thunder in the streets, a clamour of voices. Boats went swiftly down the river on the ebb. Beyond the mass of the Semiramis rose the great grey-white dome of St. Paul’s. Opposite, upon the Southwark bank, the giant sky-signs, the big Highlander drinking whisky, and the rest of them waited, gaunt skeletons, for the night to limn them in fire and give them life. Below the trees in the gardens rustled and waved. In the air were the uplift and the sparkle of the young summer.
“It’s a long way from the forests of Yucatan to the Adelphi Terrace of London,” said Hanaud. “Yet here, I think, in these rooms, when the servants are all gone and the house is very quiet, there is a little corner of wild Mexico.”
A look of pity came into Mr. Ricardo’s face. He had seen more than one young man of great promise slacken his hold and let go, just for this reason. Calladine, it seemed, was another.
“It’s like bhang and kieff and the rest of the devilish things, I suppose,” he said, indignantly tossing the button upon the table.
Hanaud picked it up.
“No,” he replied. “It’s not quite like any other drug. It has a quality of its own which just now is of particular importance to you and me. Yes, my friend” — and he nodded his head very seriously— “we must watch that we do not make the big fools of ourselves in this affair.”
“There,” Mr. Ricardo agreed with an ineffable air of wisdom, “I am entirely with you.”
“Now, why?” Hanaud asked. Mr. Ricardo was at a loss for a reason, but Hanaud did not wait. “I will tell you. Mescal intoxicates, yes — but it does more — it gives to the man who eats of it colour-dreams.”
“Colour-dreams?” Mr. Ricardo repeated in a wondering voice.
“Yes, strange heated charms, in which violent things happen vividly amongst bright colours. Colour is the gift of this little prosaic brown button.” He spun the bulb in the air like a coin, and catching it again, took it over to the mantelpiece and dropped it into the porcelain cup.
“Are you sure of this?” Ricardo cried excitedly, and Hanaud raised his hand in warning. He went to the door, opened it for an inch or so, and closed it again.
“I am quite sure,” he returned. “I have for a friend a very learned chemist in the Collège de France. He is one of those enthusiasts who must experiment upon themselves. He tried this drug.”
“Yes,” Ricardo said in a quieter voice. “And what did he see?”
“He had a vision of a wonderful garden bathed in sunlight, an old garden of gorgeous flowers and emerald lawns, ponds with golden lilies and thick yew hedges — a garden where peacocks stepped indolently and groups of gay people fantastically dressed quarrelled and fought with swords. That is what he saw. And he saw it so vividly that, when the vapours of the drug passed from his brain and he waked, he seemed to be coming out of the real world into a world of shifting illusions.”
Hanaud’s strong quiet voice stopped, and for a while there was a complete silence in the room. Neither of the two men stirred so much as a finger. Mr. Ricardo once more was conscious of the thrill of strange sensations. He looked round the room. He could hardly believe that a room which had been — nay was — the home and shrine of mysteries in the dark hours could wear so bright and innocent a freshness in the sunlight of the morning. There should be something sinister which leaped to the eyes as you crossed the threshold.
“Out of the real world,” Mr. Ricardo quoted. “I begin to see.”
“Yes, you begin to see, my friend, that we must be very carefu
l not to make the big fools of ourselves. My friend of the Collège de France saw a garden. But had he been sitting alone in the window-seat where you are, listening through a summer night to the music of the masquerade at the Semiramis, might he not have seen the ballroom, the dancers, the scarlet cloak, and the rest of this story?”
“You mean,” cried Ricardo, now fairly startled, “that Calladine came to us with the fumes of mescal still working in his brain, that the false world was the real one still for him.”
“I do not know,” said Hanaud. “At present I only put questions. I ask them of you. I wish to hear how they sound. Let us reason this problem out. Calladine, let us say, takes a great deal more of the drug than my professor. It will have on him a more powerful effect while it lasts, and it will last longer. Fancy dress balls are familiar things to Calladine. The music floating from the Semiramis will revive old memories. He sits here, the pageant takes shape before him, he sees himself taking his part in it. Oh, he is happier here sitting quietly in his window-seat than if he was actually at the Semiramis. For he is there more intensely, more vividly, more really, than if he had actually descended this staircase. He lives his story through, the story of a heated brain, the scene of it changes in the way dreams have, it becomes tragic and sinister, it oppresses him with horror, and in the morning, so obsessed with it that he does not think to change his clothes, he is knocking at your door.”
Mr. Ricardo raised his eyebrows and moved.
“Ah! You see a flaw in my argument,” said Hanaud. But Mr. Ricardo was wary. Too often in other days he had been leaped upon and trounced for a careless remark.
“Let me hear the end of your argument,” he said. “There was then to your thinking no temptation of jewels, no theft, no murder — in a word, no Celymène? She was born of recollections and the music of the Semiramis.”
“No!” cried Hanaud. “Come with me, my friend. I am not so sure that there was no Celymène.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 25