“I was never quite so mad as that,” said Strickland.
“Well, I was!” Ransome shouted.
He realised that he had used an abominable and foolish phrase. The mere sound of it had been rather shocking. But he was out of his own control. The more unfortunate the phrases he used, the more he persisted in them; the more indefensible, the more he would defend them — yes, and pile others still more extravagant upon them.
“All this fine idea of hers,” he exclaimed loftily, “of making some money in a musical comedy first and then stepping aside for me — a fairy tale! It’s not my idea, I can tell you.”
“No; you belong, Ransome, to the days of Mr. Disraeli,” said Strickland. He was very glad to transfer that galling reproach at last to someone else, and unregenerate enough to feel an acute satisfaction that the newly-found relic was the young man in front of him.
“Very good days, too,” Julian Ransome retorted. “I meant my wife to be mistress of my house.”
“Got a house?” Strickland interposed softly.
“Oh, I shall have a house — don’t you trouble your head about that, Colonel Strickland — at all events until the invitations go out from it and your name isn’t among them.”
Ransome nodded his head with a satisfied grin. He had got well home there. One for his nob. A vulgarism was excusable in thought after so deft a blow.
“I am quite willing to gamble on my future, do you see? Of course you have got to have a future first to gamble on, haven’t you? But I have, see! And it’s a perfectly sound proposition.” And thereupon he uttered the most illuminating sentence. The whole man was compact in it. “I want my wife to owe everything in the world she has, and values, to me.”
The idea of a mate — no! The idea of a debtor — yes. His wife must sit in admiration, twiddling her thumbs. Strickland’s memories went back to the morning when Ariadne in her sitting-room overlooking the park had cried out: “Ransome’s my man!” because he understood her so well and treated her so wisely. Well, women went wrong in their estimates of men, just as completely as men did in the case of women, and the more high-spirited they were the more joyously confident, the more tremendous the mistakes of which they were the victims. Strickland had been willing on that morning to wave a cheerful farewell to that good barque, The Gallant Adventure, when she slipped out past the headlands into the open sea, and to wish it from the depths of his heart favouring breezes throughout its voyage. But he knew now that it was doomed to shipwreck, and upon a reef hardly beyond the horizon’s edge.
“Ariadne couldn’t owe everything to you,” he commented. “Besides, aren’t we going a little wide of the point of real importance? Which is, after all: what has become of her?”
Julian Ransome had the grace to feel and show a little confusion. In probing the wounds of his vanity he had forgotten the disappearance of Ariadne. Strickland, indeed, had not yet had a glimpse of the torturing splinter at the core of that wound. But he had no interest in it at all. He was tired and dispirited, and he merely longed for the young politician to take himself and his pretensions out of the room.
“Ariadne set out last night on that treasure hunt. You have heard of it, of course?” he said.
Ransome started.
“Oh, yes! I had heard of it. It took place last night. I had forgotten the date. It wasn’t after all the kind of diversion in which I was likely—”
“No, no, of course not,” Strickland interrupted hastily. “But Ariadne was certainly at the starting-point, which was Portman Square, at midnight.”
“She was!”
“Yes.”
Julian Ransome pondered over that fact.
“But she wouldn’t want a small portmanteau and a dressing-case to go on that sort of expedition,” he argued.
“She certainly wouldn’t,” Strickland agreed. “We must assume that she used the treasure hunt as an excuse to slip away unnoticed.”
“But why?” Ransome cried, extending his arms in a fine gesture of appeal. “In the name of goodness, why?”
A quite novel explanation began to glimmer in Strickland’s mind He had been shading his eyes with the palm of a hand. He put the hand down and contemplated Julian Ransome with a searching glance.
“Have you been exasperating Ariadne with your theories?” he asked. “It’s no use jumping about! You would do better to recognise the truth. You could be quite insupportable, you know. I can hardly think of an excess to which a woman or a man, too, might not be driven.”
Julian Ransome laughed with a lofty amusement.
“You are being humorous about me again, I see.”
Strickland shook his head.
“These are subjects too solemn for laughter.”
Julian paid no heed to the remark. He asked instead the question which Strickland dreaded, For his answer would be certain to prolong the interview by yet another outburst of indignation.
“Was Ariadne alone when you saw her?”
Strickland became a coward and sought escape in equivocations.
“I didn’t see her. I wasn’t present in Portman Square. I only heard that she was there.”
“Did you hear that she was alone?”
“No, I didn’t hear that.”
“Did you hear that someone was with her?”
“I understood that someone was with her.”
“Who?”
Strickland had got no good by his evasions. He had merely aroused suspicions and sharpened anger, and the objectionable name had to be disclosed after all.
“Corinne was with her,” said Strickland, and Ransome exploded like a rocket.
“Corinne!” he roared.
“Yes, Corinne,” said Strickland meekly.
“So that’s it! No wonder you hesitated to tell me! Corinne!”
The name was like a hot wire to an open wound. Julian Ransome flinched from it, yet must grasp it in the end, hurt himself with it and find a luxury of pain in so hurting himself.
“Corinne! To be sure! Corinne! It would be so. Ariadne scampers off with Corinne, openly before all London, and leaves no address. Corinne of the Cabarets Corinne spinning in the air on the shoulders of her dancing partner! Corinne with her brains in her heels! God bless my soul!”
He dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief and turned suddenly upon Strickland, nodding his head savagely.
“You’re in the plot of course, Strickland! You and Ariadne and Corinne, you have been putting your heads together over some fine scheme. Oh, I have heard about you. Whilst I was giving my time and my labours to my country. And now they have gone off together, my fiancée and Corinne of the Night Clubs — with you to follow in due season. I do so hope you’ll have good weather. Is it Deauville or Aix? Both are charming, I am told, at this time of the year. I regret that my duties keep me in a less amusing place.”
Ransome’s words were tumbling out of his mouth, jostling and running into one another in a frantic haste to get themselves spoken. There was, indeed, an angle from which his anger might be justified. Strickland began to recognise it. Throughout this affair of Corinne and Archie Clutter, Ransome had been kept in the dark, deliberately by both Strickland and Ariadne. For his own sake, no doubt, not to compromise his position and that career of which Strickland this morning was hearing a little too much. But Ransome could not be expected to divine this. It was quite gently then that Strickland answered:
“I am not going to repeat that I would give anything to know where Ariadne is at this moment.”
Ransome, however, was off upon another tangent.
“Just at this moment,” he said, “to go off with Corinne Was there ever such — such levity — such giddiness? At this moment, on this night of all nights?”
Strickland looked quickly at his wrathful visitor. There was some deeper reason for that wounded pride, some torturing aggravation not yet revealed to him. He asked:
“What happened, then, last night?”
“You don’t know?” cried Ransome, and
looked about him with a gasp, as if he requested someone to tell him, if someone could, what the world was coming to.
“No, I don’t.”
“Read, then!”
Ransome twisted The Times round and pushed it across the table under Strickland’s eyes.
“That column!”
He beat with his knuckles upon a paragraph towards the bottom of the page.
“There! Read there!”
Strickland read. Mr. Julian Ransome, M.P. for the Sittingham Division of Bucks, had been appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. Strickland’s face grew grave. It was indeed an unfortunate conjunction that this announcement should appear exactly on the morrow of Ariadne’s sudden departure. It could not but arouse some comment, even had Ariadne gone oft alone.
“She never knew of this,” said Strickland. “You may be certain of that. Ariadne never knew.”
But the comment, instead of assuaging young Ransome’s fury, only kindled it to a more roaring flame. Strickland had not yet probed to the splinter in the wound, the ultimate cause of all these outcries.
“No, she didn’t know,” Ransome cried, his voice rising almost to a scream of passion. “But she could have known. She would have known if she had given a thought to me. The news was there for her. Yes, when she came back to change her dress. My chance had come, eh? I had stepped out of the ranks, eh? I had power, I had my share in the best thing there is — the business of governing men—”
Strickland interrupted him sharply:
“Let us leave that alone for the moment. Let me hear exactly how Ariadne might have known.”
The pallor of his face was increased. He looked at Ransome with steady, anxious eyes. His voice quietly commanded, and to its authority Ransome yielded as, when Strickland chose to use it, so many had done before.
“I’ll give you the information precisely,” Ransome answered with a sullen acquiescence. “My appointment was communicated to me by the Prime Minister personally in his room in the House of Commons, at five o’clock in the afternoon. There was a debate in progress of some importance to me in my new position. But I did not at once return to the Chamber. No. I went straight off to the library and wrote a note to Ariadne, giving her the news, and I sent it off there and then by hand.” He spoke as if he had done some rather fine and condescending thing in thus employing the first minutes after his elevation to office. “I expected an answer of course. But it didn’t come.”
“Ariadne was no doubt not at home,” Strickland objected.
“That may have been,” Julian Ransome conceded handsomely. “But I had a feeling that on an occasion of so much importance to me, she ought to have been at home. I am not saying that I blamed her so much as the condition of things which made it possible that she shouldn’t be at home at such a moment.”
“Something of the East about that, isn’t there?”
“Well, there’s a good deal to be said for the Eastern point of view where women are concerned,” Julian retorted, and he resumed his narrative. “When no answer was returned, I said to myself: ‘She’ll be coming down to Westminster herself. That’s it! She’ll want to go up into the Ladies’ Gallery and see me sitting on the Treasury Bench — making myself at home there — for life — yes, for life. That’s what she’ll want to do.’ I couldn’t give my attention to the debate at all, though my Department was concerned. I watched the door instead, for one of the attendants to enter, for a card to be passed down to me from the back benches which I had left now for good. But no card came. I was vexed. It was dinner-time now. Ariadne must have got my note. It was,” — he cast about for the word he exactly wanted and found it— “it was neglectful.”
So might a Satrap have spoken. Strickland almost looked for a bow-string in Ransome’s hand. In the East they knew how to punish such delinquencies and neglects. However, Julian Ransome had not completed the tale of his injuries. The crown of them was to come.
“The House rose soon after eleven. I took a taxi at once and drove to Browden House. Ariadne by that time had changed and gone off again in her car. And she had apparently left no message for me. I saw Ariadne’s maid. I assured her that she must be mistaken. She insisted that she was not. I was certain that a note had been left for me. The maid took me upstairs to Ariadne’s sitting-room and switched on the light. Even from the doorway I could see the note waiting for me on the blotting-pad. ‘I thought so’ I said. After all, I was not quite such an inconsiderable person as the maid thought. ‘There it is. There’s the message for me’; and I walked over to the table. ‘That letter’s not for you, sir,’ the maid said. ‘It’s one which was sent to her ladyship this afternoon.’ It was indeed. It was my own letter announcing my appointment and — what do you think? — it was unopened.”
“Unopened?” cried Strickland.
He sprang up with a cry.
“Yes,” said Julian. “You begin to realise how I have been treated, eh? My letter, if you please, with the great news — just tossed down on the blotting-pad — not worth glancing at. I might have been Mr. Anybody.”
“You, for instance,” his eyes said, and almost his contemptuous lips. The splinter in the depths of the wound was visible enough now. His letter dispatched in the afternoon was still unread at midnight. Ariadne could come home and dress for dinner. Yes, she had time enough for that She could return and change again and order her car and have her luggage packed. But she could not spare a moment in which to open the letter, which he had actually interrupted the important business of listening to a debate, in order to write.
“Could anything be more insulting?” Julian Ransome cried.
The affronted gentleman drew some consolation at last from the aspect of his confidant. John Strickland was staring at him aghast. But Strickland’s dismay had nothing whatever to do with Ransome’s complaints and wounded pride. They were all swept out of his thoughts like so much sea spume driven down the wind.
“Your letter was in your handwriting?” he asked.
“Of course it was.”
Strickland nodded. Ariadne would never have left that letter unopened through any indifference or neglect. She was capable of any wild and erratic thing so long as it was not an ill-mannered thing; and this omission fell definitely into that last category. Ariadne was incapable of it. Good manners were of the very substance of her, not a veneer. She would never wound unless she wounded deliberately; and the last man she would treat with carelessness would be Julian Ransome. The more difficult the relationship of those two became, the more scrupulous she would be to consider him. Since, then, she had left this letter unopened and unanswered, she must have been in the very press of action, caught by some irresistible demand upon her time and her activity — a demand at all events which would be reckoned irresistible by her, a demand upon her generosity, her friendship. Strickland was staring straight at Julian Ransome, but he was seeing that letter on Ariadne’s writing-table, claiming its lecture and its answer. He saw Ariadne moving swiftly in the stress of a crisis, the room darkening, the letter glimmering white. In his fancy it grew incandescent as the darkness gathered...
“Don’t you see,” he asked quietly, “that there must be another reason? Don’t you understand that Corinne must have invented some desperate call for help — ?”
But Ransome broke in upon him roughly.
“That won’t do at all for me, Colonel Strickland! Corinne this and Corinne that, Corinne here and Corinne there Corinne might be the League of Nations and Mussolini rolled into one. Damn Corinne, I say. My letter unopened — that’s what I am thinking about. If it wasn’t opened, because Corinne comes first in importance — well, that only increases the offence. I told you once before that all this Bohemianism of the cabarets had got to end, didn’t I? Well, it’s going to end now, so far as I am concerned. By God, it is Corinne Just fancy!”
He dragged The Times across the table towards him and read again the wonderful passage. He was amongst the shining ones on the Treasury Bench. Why
, any morning he might wake up to find himself caricatured by Poy or Matz or Strube or one of the other shrewd epitomists of the current politics. Hospel Roussencq had the right phrase for him. He was making the importance, and John Strickland had had as much of it as his stomach could stand. He rang the bell and when his servant appeared, he said:
“Come right into the room, Soames.”
“Very good, sir.”
Soames closed the door behind him and stepped forward, whilst Julian Ransome, stayed in the full flight of his eloquence, looked on with annoyance.
“Soames, how long have you been with me?”
“Counting the war, sir, twelve years; and I am sure that I have tried to give satisfaction,” answered Soames.
“And I am satisfied,” said Strickland. “I shall be still more satisfied if you can remember the name of one Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade during those twelve years.”
Soames’s face went perfectly blank. A cardboard mask could not have been more expressionless. He remained mute.
“Take your time, Soames.”
Soames swallowed. He prided himself upon his efficiency. He did not deny that it was the part of efficiency to provide his employer with necessary information. He had a sense of failure and humiliation which was extremely galling.
“I am sorry, sir,” he said apologetically.
“Not one, Soames?”
“Not one, sir.”
Strickland did not look at Julian Ransome, but he was aware that he moved away to the window. Strickland pursued the subject, and in anything but a nice spirit.
“Have you read this morning’s paper, Soames?”
“Oh yes, sir. I make a point of keeping up with the news of the day.”
“And you can’t mention a single one?”
“No, sir. I am sorry.”
“Very well, Soames. That’s all.”
But it was not all for Soames. He had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He hesitated at the door, a very dissatisfied servant; and he came back into the room and made matters ten times worse than they had been before.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 77