“Bad marks!” Mr. Ricardo retorted, with a fine show of spirit. After all, he was in the heart of London on a morning of June. The blaze of flowers, all those high windows looking down upon the terrace, the keeper of the garden in his glass box, and just across the oblong the young lovers — these circumstances braced Mr. Ricardo. “Nonsense! I am not a schoolboy to receive bad marks, and if I were, you would not be my master.”
“There are other places than schools where bad marks are given,” said Roussencq unpleasantly.
Mr. Ricardo took him up instantly.
“Prisons?” he replied. “Yes, no doubt prisons. But then I am not a convict, and if I were, you would not be my jailer.”
Mr. Ricardo was pleased with his rejoinder. But he would have felt more at his ease, even in the safe environment of the garden, if only Hospel Roussencq would move. But he sat with the immobility of a man inured to discipline. He made not the smallest gesture. Not a muscle of his face twitched; and there was in the unwinking stillness of his eyes a look with which the older man was familiar but which he could not explain.
“So it is like that!” said Roussencq softly. “We take the high hand. Then some words must speak themselves. To make the importance, you meddle in things which do not concern you. Very, very well. But they must not be big things. For big things have danger in them. Last night when I stopped you, you were meddling in big things.”
“I am not to be frightened,” said Mr. Ricardo. But he was beginning to be a little troubled by that bright, unflinching, and somehow familiar stare.
“A wise man would be very frightened, old one,” Roussencq retorted. “Yes, even here, in this garden with all the windows looking at us. For you know where we come from, my friend and I. Yes I make no hidings with you. We come from Cayenne. Listen whilst I tell you! Then you will sit very quiet in your fine house and give no trouble to my friend and me.”
Eight years Archie Clutter had had of it; six years Hospel Roussencq. Roussencq gave Mr. Ricardo a sketch of that appalling inferno in the tropics. Sometimes they worked stark naked clearing the ground; sometimes in canvas trousers and jackets, with their numbers on their breasts, they manned the boats of the service. At night they were locked in cages, a platoon of them for each cage, and chained by the ankle to their plank beds. But here a man would slip his foot through a ring, there another would pick the lock with a nail. Lamps made out of a sardine tin, some oil and a wick would be lighted; cards would be produced, and money. For everybody had money.
“It was forbidden — yes. But every one had it concealed — where it could not be found. It is all revolting — yes.”
No warder ever dared to enter those cages when they were locked for the night. So the forbidden lamps burned and the forbidden money was won and lost; and when those eleven hours of horror and abomination were over, a convict stabbed to death, strangled, beaten to a red pulp, was no very unusual spectacle. For no one slept; and all lived on the edge of insanity, slaves of wild paroxysms, bitten by morbid delusions. And for punishments, six months, a year, two years of the dungeons on the Isle St. Joseph, half the time in twilight, half in the pitch dark, not a chair, not a rag for covering, not even a stretcher to sleep upon. A pail and a jug of water the whole furniture of the cell.
“And you think we go back there, my friend and I,” continued Roussencq in his smooth voice, “because one old man wishes to make the importance? No! We are dead people, do you see? We escaped on the mortuary table for a raft. Some friends, the Brethren of the Coast — it is their profession — picked us up at sea and landed us in Dutch Guiana, and in the end we came to Venezuela. So! But for the French we are dead. The sharks have eaten us...”
And suddenly Mr. Ricardo understood to his discomfort why the look in Roussencq’s eyes stirred his memories. Mr. Ricardo, the dilettante glutton of other people’s sensations, had been an assiduous frequenter of prize-fights. At the Albert Hall, at the National Sporting Club, at the Ring in Blackfriars Road, his seat was retained in the front row, and the bright keen concentrated look which held him now as by a spell, was exactly the look which transfigured the fighting man when he left his corner and faced his antagonist.
“I have no wish to send you back,” he replied in a voice which would quaver.
“Neither me nor my friend?” asked Roussencq.
“Neither you nor your friend.”
“Then you hold the lips together, so—” and for the first time the little man moved. He took his upper and his lower lip between his forefinger and his thumb and pressed them together. “Or they never talk again. We are here for our plans. We do not mean to live as waiters attending on old foolish gentlemen at the Semiramis Hotel. No! It is we who are going to make the importance. So you promise me now not to go on with that conversation I interrupted last night.”
“I have no wish—” Mr. Ricardo began, but Roussencq took him up at once.
“You promise me!”
Out of the tail of his eye Mr. Ricardo saw the lovers rise from the bench opposite and make their way towards the steps. A sense of desolation swept over him. He would have liked to cry out to them to stop. He felt suddenly that he was standing helplessly in a very Sahara of tiles.
“Yes, I promise you,” he said.
Hospel Roussencq leaned back. He took off his shabby billy cock hat and exposed his sleek pomaded head. He took a packet of Caporal cigarettes from his pocket, lit one and smoked.
“I am going,” said Mr. Ricardo.
He was utterly humiliated. He, the student of the macabre and horrible, had cut the poorest figure in an interview where he should have shone. If only Hanaud had been with him! Hanaud would have gobbled up that little waiter in one mouthful. Promises! He tried and failed to imagine Hanaud making promises to a fugitive from Cayenne. Yet from his own lips they had dropped as meekly as summer rain.
“I am going.”
But Roussencq held up a forefinger. That was now enough to arrest Ricardo. One had only dabbled, the other had done; and he who had done was master.
“In a minute you go. When I tell you. But I say to you now two things, so that you keep your promise very faithfully.”
Mr. Ricardo jerked up his head. After all, he was safe. There was to be no tragedy on the tiles of the Duke Street Garden.
“When I give my promise—” he began haughtily.
But Mr. Ricardo was fated not to finish his sentences that morning. For Hospel Roussencq interrupted him offensively.
“Pah, pah, pah! When you give your promise, you break it as soon as a Cabinet Minister. But now I tell you two things and then you keep it. Listen!”
Roussencq looked about him carefully. The garden was now quite empty. Even its keeper was no longer to be seen. The windows which overlooked it were out of earshot and it was raised twice a man’s height above the four surrounding streets. For such confidences as Hospel Roussencq was now to make it was the perfect trysting-place’. Yet Hospel Roussencq dropped his voice, though for the first time a smile flickered on his lips.
“That fine motor-car of yours, eh? With the crest upon the panels. You make the importance with that fine motor-car, as you make it in your talk — and just as foolishly. When you drove home from the Semiramis Hotel last night, you were brought to a stop in Coventry Street, eh?”
Mr. Ricardo started. How in the world did Roussencq know that?
Roussencq crossed an ankle over a knee, puffed at his cigarette and waited.
“Certainly. It was soon after eleven,” said Mr. Ricardo. “We got into the theatre traffic. At the top of the Haymarket a policeman held us all up for four or five minutes at the most.”
“Four or five minutes were three or four minutes more than enough,” said Hospel, his smile becoming more pronounced while his head moved slowly from side to side with a curious rhythm which haunted Mr. Ricardo. He was not so much a mouse in front of a cat, as a bird in front of a snake, spellbound to the point of paralysis.
“What a blur of lights!” con
tinued Hospel. “What a throng of carriages, all locked together! What a jostle of people hurrying on the pavement! And what a lot of men running in and out amongst the wheels, crossing the street, offering the latest editions of the night papers, selling matches! And everybody shouting! What a din!”
“It is a noisy corner at that time of night,” Mr. Ricardo agreed. His heart sank, but he could not have explained why. A great fear was upon him and once more turning his blood to water; and still that sharp venomous black head turned rhythmically from side to side, whilst the smile never left his lips nor did the glitter fade from the eyes.
“We watch your car, my friend and I, and when it stops, we ask one another: ‘Shall we?’ So easy for us in all that confusion and noise — for us who have learnt to be quick. A minute? Pouf! For us, ten seconds!”
“What do you mean?” stammered Mr. Ricardo, his cheeks as white as paper.
“We dive under the wheels, my big friend and I. He has an evening paper. I stand on his left side between him and the chauffeur, my friend — he open the door, oh, so quickly! He lean in and cry ‘All the winners!’ Perhaps the chauffeur says ‘Get out!’ Perhaps, my friend is so quick and the noise is so great, and the chauffeur so anxious in the traffic, he notices nothing at all. In any case, the door is closed again and my friend and I are once more in the crowd upon the pavement, and the fine motor-car rolls on to Grosvenor Square with Mr. Ricardo still sitting in the dark inside of it. But a Mr. Ricardo who does not get out when the fine motorcar glides up to the door. Yes, we discuss that on the pavement, my friend and I — there!” and swiftly Roussencq leant forward, as if indeed he was a serpent striking, or a steel spring which the lightest touch would change to a streak of lightning.
“There!” he said again, and the tip of his forefinger touched Mr. Ricardo over the heart. “Not a cry. Not a groan!”
Mr. Ricardo seemed at that moment to die a thousand deaths. So swift and accurate and daunting was the thrust of that forefinger that he felt it pierce into his vitals and let in the cold of both the poles.
Roussencq leaned back again upon his seat and folded his index finger down.
“That is the first thing I tell you. Now for the second. You are afraid of me. Yes, your mouth is dry, old man, and you are shaking. But I am nothing. Understand that in your bones! I am nothing at all. But my big friend with the cigar-box — eh? He is different. For me, I was born in the gutter Cayenne was bad, yes, but I could do. My friend, no! He was used to silk against his skin. For him every hour of Cayenne was a year of torture, and all those years of torture burn in him like one great fire So keep out of his way, old man! He has the brains too!” and Roussencq tapped his forehead. “Even in the prison, he was the great man, the leader. The jailers knew it, the officials consulted him. He was the chief, the master. Bend down your head to me!”
Mr. Ricardo, on the contrary, recoiled. What horrible and ghastly thing had the little Frenchman still to tell him?
“There is no one to overhear us,” he stammered. “There is nothing more I need to hear!”
But Roussencq had gauged his man. With a deliberate artistry, he had kept to the very last the supreme proof of his hero’s pre-eminence in that awful colony of lost and perverted souls; and he meant that it should be an inviolable seal upon Mr. Ricardo’s lips.
“Bend down your head, so that I may whisper to you what I only whisper to myself.”
Reluctantly Mr. Ricardo obeyed. Hospel Roussencq held him down by the lapel of his coat, and spoke so secretly in his ear that he appeared to be afraid lest the very birds should understand him and pipe his revelation as a message to the world. He had whispered very few words, before he must needs spring up and support Mr. Ricardo with his arm. For without it the old man would have fallen. With pleasant shivers he had played amongst the records of grim crimes and their penalties. Now that he met them in the gate, without his hero Hanaud at his side, his knees shook beneath him.
“Yes, you will keep your promise now,” said Hospel Roussencq. “You will not interfere with my friend’s plans. You can go.”
How Mr. Ricardo climbed down from that high garden, and how he reached his home, were mysteries to him afterwards. He came to himself in his library and sat with his head in hands, shading his eyes from that long row of folio volumes with the dates in gold upon their backs.
“I have had my lesson,” he said to himself, and repeated the phrase, as if it brought him comfort. “Yes, I have had my lesson.”
A knock sounded upon the panels of the door, and his servant Elias Tomson entered, bearing a card upon a silver salver.
“This gentleman would like to see you, sir, for a few minutes.”
Mr. Ricardo took the card and read the name of Lieut.-Colonel John Strickland. For a moment he was at a loss. Then he recollected. John Strickland was the man who had spoken of Burma, who had first called his attention to Archie Clutter. In a frantic whisper, Mr. Ricardo addressed his servant.
“I am not well. I can see no one this morning.”
He heard a colloquy in the passage immediately afterwards. ‘Would this soldier force himself into his presence, bid him as an honest man and a citizen to speak out what last night he had not spoken, harass him with questions — perhaps, even have his way?...With an enormous relief Mr. Ricardo heard the front door close and retreating steps upon the pavement. He rang for Elias Tomson.
“Tomson,” he said, “I shall never be in to Colonel Strickland.”
“Very well, sir,” Tomson replied. “I shall be meticulous upon the point.”
Not for the wide world would Mr. Ricardo interfere with any of Archie Clutter’s plans.
XV. THE CASE OF CLUTTER VERSUS CORINNE
“I FAILED. HE refused to see me. I expected it,” said Strickland.
Ariadne Ferne, Corinne and he were taking their luncheon in the garden of a wayside hotel upon the Portsmouth road. On the other side of the thoroughfare a lake shone in the sunlight like a great smooth shield of silver; and all about the lake and about the three in the garden stood a forest of pines, each of the trees a warm and friendly brown when seen from near at hand, but massed together in the distance a wall of black. Not a breath of wind stirred them this morning or broke the water of the lake with a ripple; and not a cloud floated overhead. June was at its freshest and loveliest in that quiet corner. The broad highway curved out of fairyland upon the left and disappeared again into fairyland upon the right. It would have been fitting and natural if some young mailed knight with his vizor thrown back and his lance at his side had ridden joyously into view, mounted on a great steed like a cart-horse, and had asked them if they knew of any beautiful maidens thereabouts who were held in duress by enchanters and wanted a live young man to rescue them.
The only man of that quality, however, present was seated in the garden and wondering at the recuperative powers of young women who could pass a night in agitation and fear and the next day match the morning with the freshness of their faces. There was not even a shadow under the brown eyes of Corinne.
Strickland turned to her.
“So it is now for you, isn’t it, to tell me exactly what you fear?” he suggested.
“Yes...no doubt.”
Corinne agreed, but she was at a loss how to begin. Strickland remarked a wariness creeping into her eyes and a quick, inquisitive glance directed towards him. A parallel forced itself into his thoughts against his will. Thus might a guilty prisoner look when interviewing the counsel who was to defend him at his trial — doubtful how much of his guilt he dare reveal if he was still to retain his counsel’s services.
“Shall I help you?” he asked.
“Please!”
“Well, then! The man who killed Maung H’la in the jungle, the waiter who was so interested in Battchilena’s name, is Elizabeth Clutter’s widower?”
“I suppose so...I think so...That’s just what we wanted you to find out...It must be so.”
Corinne progressed grudgingly from her conjectur
es to her definite conclusion under Strickland’s gaze; once started, she went on. In that summer garden she told the story of Archie Clutter which Mr. Ricardo had read the night before in his book of cuttings.
“So that’s it!” said Strickland, and his face grew very grave. Corinne’s narrative, cautious as it was, confirmed in so illuminating a fashion the analysis and portrait he had imagined in the moonlit glade behind Mogok. The fallen Lucifer! The rebel who had plunged in a flash a thousand miles deep into a hell of anguish and torment and privation made a thousand times more hell by contrast with that upper life of well-being and independence from which he had been hurled. Hospel Roussencq had crammed it all into his one homely phrase, “Clutter — he had been used to silk against his skin.” And now Clutter was free. He had worked himself loose from his shackles and his house of bondage. And here he was in England, famished, mauled, disfigured, half brute and wholly demon, and, to crown all, stripped of all hope here, the very money which might have restored him spent and wasted by such flimsy idols of their year as Battchilena and Corinne. That Archie Clutter would strike — was there a doubt of it? He had already struck once, in the jungle — a single, sufficient, masterful stroke. He would strike again; surely he would. But in what way? How? The mere fact that he took his time daunted Strickland. Somewhere in the darkness he was forging a new weapon.
Strickland remained silent, his eyes wandering here and there about the garden and always coming back to rest anxiously upon Ariadne Ferne’s lovely face. On such occasions a faint wave of rose would mount over her throat and cheeks, and her eyes avoided his. For when these two met that morning after their brief separation, a curious constraint arose between them and would not be exorcised. Strickland, indeed, was so possessed by it that he had again and again to bring his thoughts violently back to the peril he was there to dispel.
“If we could get a clue to Clutter’s plans!” he said with longing, and Corinne shivered and hitched about her shoulders the chinchilla coat in which she had motored out of town.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 70