“You’ll excuse me, sir, and I hope Mr. Ransome will, if I say that Parliamentary gentlemen, valuable of course though they are, don’t cut quite as much ice as they used to do. I hope, therefore, you will pardon my ignorance. I am afraid that people have come to look upon the House of Commons as a sort of sick-room — a sick-room in the incurables — where everybody’s more and more concerned with the hours of his meals and the doctors’ visits and what new nurses are appointed than with the world going by outside the windows. So one gets apt to pay less attention to it than one ought to. I am sorry.”
With that catastrophic apology, Soames really retired. Strickland allowed a second or two to elapse, and then said deliberately:
“And Soames, let me tell you, is an unusually well-informed man.”
Ransome turned back into the room. He had somehow during the last few minutes acquired a real dignity.
“I don’t think that we need prolong this interview,” he said quite quietly, as he took up his hat and stick. “Good morning.”
He walked to the door and, standing there with his back to the room, made an observation in the same subdued voice which, to Strickland’s thinking, gave him in the end all the honours of the encounter.
“I was asking for that, of course,” he said. “I have been certainly talking to you foolishly and unguardedly. But I have been deeply troubled, deeply disappointed.”
He went out of the room so quietly that he might not have been a Parliamentary Secretary at all.
Strickland pushed his hair back from his forehead.
“I wasn’t behaving nicely,” he declared regretfully. “No, I wasn’t.”
He took a bath, shaved and dressed. He walked to Browden House. As yet there was no news of Ariadne. There might be, however, something to be learnt in South Audley Street. But the blinds were drawn down behind Corinne’s windows, and when Strickland knocked at the door it was opened by the cook. Miss Corinne, he was told, had gone away for some time, and the house was to be shut up. Her maid had already departed on a holiday; she herself, the cook, was leaving that afternoon, and a caretaker was coming in. Strickland walked slowly back to Stratton Street, at a complete loss. There was nothing which he could do, nothing which he had a right to do. He could only wait, whilst the storm cloud of fear massed and darkened above his head.
But upon his hall table a telegram was lying. He tore open the envelope, fumbled with shaking fingers at the folded form, got it spread out at last, and was carried away on so smooth a wave of relief that the whole world seemed on this summer day delectably to have regained its youth. The telegram was from Ariadne.
“Don’t worry. Expect a letter in a week. All well,” it ran; and more than the words themselves, the name of the place from which it had been sent delighted him.
Ariadne had sent off her telegram from Boulogne at a quarter to twelve. She had crossed to France by the ten o’clock boat, and nowhere else could she be as safe. Strickland stretched himself out in his arm-chair and slept without a movement until dinner-time was long since past and he must make shift with a supper at his club. For a week, then, he walked unharassed, but at the end of the week the expected letter came and — however, let us see what had happened.
XXI. GETTING TOGETHER
STRICKLAND HAD BEEN lust as wrong as he could possibly be in the matter of Battchilena’s latch-key. Corinne had picked it up from the carpet whilst Ariadne was still in the room and had dropped it into a vase upon her mantelshelf, and there it remained. She had dropped a poor little broken heart at the same time into the same porcelain sarcophagus, and there that remained too.
Corinne was utterly miserable. The dainty playthings who bubble up iridescent and lovely on the froth of a season’s fashions fall easy victims to adventurers of the type of Leon Battchilena. Such men can be fatal to them. For so long as the money lasts, they have an effervescent gaiety always at their command, they have no work to occupy their time, no perplexities to make them thoughtful and dull. A telephone call, and they are at your house. They are clever enough to persuade the Corinnes that they could be great artists if only they chose; and mean, while they have the halo and the prestige without the drudgery.
Battchilena could flatter Corinne by playing to her upon her piano, without a note of music, half of an opera by Strauss, and with an equal sensibility slip into the jingles of the day which she really appreciated and liked He had passion and jealousy at his beck and call. They were his stock-in-trade. He could make a furious scene and round it off with a reconciliation. If tears were wanted, you could have them from him too. And he was sincere. He was too good a masquerader not to deceive himself. He played upon his own heart-strings as well as upon his mistress’s. He was bright if she was cheerful, sympathetic if she was sad, tragic and suicidal if she glanced at another man. All, just as long as the money lasted. When that was spent, so was passion, and it was time to go.
Such men do not run to courage. Butterflies have wings, not weapons; and at the first chill of fear, at the first thought that he might be held to account for the squandering of Elizabeth Clutter’s fortune, he was on the boat train to the Continent. If he left a small heart very troubled and afraid behind him, why, that was Corinne’s affair, not his. There was a new little heroine of the films at Berlin whose acquaintance he had yet to make. A young prima donna was turning heads crazy in Milan. Battchilena was belated already. He must hurry; and he did.
Meanwhile, Corinne went home alone and cried herself to sleep. “I shan’t suffer so very much,” she said to herself each day, but she did suffer, and it would have been easier for her if, when her work was over, she had joined some gay party as she had been wont to do. But she was not only love-lorn; she was afraid. Fear was always with her, a snake which now and again tightened its coils about her heart and made her gasp for breath. She dared not any longer let herself at night into a dark and silent house. She must come home betimes to find the windows alight and her servants waiting up for her.
On one night, then, she drove back to South Audley Street at half-past twelve, ate her supper, and was in bed shortly after one o’clock in the morning. She had been sleeping only by fits and starts of late, and she had spent a long, arduous morning rehearsing a new lance. It happened, therefore, that on this night she fell asleep immediately after she had turned off the lamp by the side of her bed.
She awoke with the impression clear in her mind that she had slept for a very long time. But this impression will come from a heavy slumber as often as from a long one; and it was certainly the very dead of the morning. There was not a sound in the streets, and when she raised her eyelids and found herself lying upon her side with her face towards the windows, she saw that there was not yet any glimmer of dawn. She was still floating on that smooth border-sea between sleep and consciousness, and without moving she closed her eyes again. She would have drifted back at once into oblivion but for a curious sense of discomfort. Even then, in her vague twilight mood, she took a few seconds before she could define it. But when she did she was at once startlingly awake, tingling with every nerve alert to the very tips of her toes. For when she had closed her eyes after assuring herself that it was still dark, she saw beneath each eyelid a dazzling globe of light. She was familiar with that simple phenomenon, of course. But, equally of course, she was familiar with its cause. One saw just such balls of fire for a little while in front of one’s eyes when one had looked at the lamp before turning it out — and at no other times.
Now Corinne was convinced that she had slept for a long time. There had, in any case, elapsed too prolonged an interval between this moment of consciousness and the moment when she had last turned out her lamp for its image to remain still impressed upon the retinae of her eyes. Then someone had but now flashed a light upon her face. Then someone was in the room.
Corinne’s blood ran cold as ice. For in the same instant when she became assured that there was an intruder in the room, she knew to an inch where the intruder was. She did not
have to move a muscle or to lift an eyelid to acquire the knowledge. Nor did her ears tell her. She heard not a sound, not even an intake of breath. But there was a drag and pressure of the bedclothes across her feet as though they had been tucked in under the mattress very tightly. That could not be the case, for Corinne these days must be lapped in ease, and the ghost of a crumpled rose-leaf would have driven rest from her pillow. She could never have fallen asleep with her legs so pinioned. The intruder was seated on the edge of the bed, at the foot of it, and his mere immobility and silence terrified her almost as much as his presence in the room at all.
She pictured him — for she never sought to console herself with a doubt as to who the intruder was — as a huge giant with a terrible, wasted face, trained to the patience of stone and the swift violence of fire, and he sat on the edge of her bed, his ultimate goal reached after his years of slavery and wandering, waiting — waiting patiently, as he could afford now to wait, with some sinister and devilish humour, until she awoke of her own accord or until he awakened her.
Therefore, of her own accord she must not awake — until some plan of escape shaped itself in her mind, some unexpected help came from some unimagined quarter, or some glint of daybreak slipped into the room and brought noise again into the silent streets. Corinne, though she looked like a flower which a spot of rain would spoil, had a peasant’s health and, when put to it, a sturdy spirit. She managed not to move her feet; she managed to modulate her breathing to the easy steadiness of sleep; she managed to keep her body in its attitude of relaxation and to keep unscreamed the scream which ached at the back of her throat. But she could not keep her eyelids closed. She lay in the darkness, with her eyes open towards the windows, her bosom rising and falling evenly, though one small, slim hand was clenched beneath her pillow so tight that the nails bit into her palm, and the sweat was a cold dew upon her forehead and her limbs.
There was a telephone upon the table beside her bed close to the lamp, behind her shoulder. But to reach it she must turn over, stretch out an arm, seize it swiftly — madness! Not a word would be called before it was dashed from her grasp. There was a bell. Its handle dangled from a cord a little above her head. It rang in her maid’s room upstairs. That was her best chance. If she could bring herself to wake naturally, to yawn, to stretch up her arms — but it was putting her life upon the swiftness of a movement; and all the while he — Clutter — was sitting over her, watching her, like a wild beast hunting.
Meanwhile Corinne’s eyes got used to the darkness. A summer night, except in a thunderstorm, is never black; and although the blinds were down, the curtains were not drawn and the windows stood open. Every now and again the blinds fluttered and lifted with some passing breath of air.
Gradually, that part of the room within the range of her vision swam vaguely into sight — the oblong shape of the recessed windows, the whiteness of the ceiling, the black sheen of a mirror, a pile of delicate clothes thrown over the back of a chair — all were made discernible to her, not so much by a faint light as by a less dark darkness. Corinne, however, made one error in spite of her magnificent control. She forgot that if she, within these few minutes had learnt to see a little, how very much more must she be visible to the patient watcher on the edge of the bed. She could distinguish a mirror; it hung between its uprights like a gleaming slab of stone. Well, what then of the gleam of her own open eyes?
There was a sudden swoop above her like the body of some great bird descending upon its prey; and a pair of eyes glittering with a greenish lambent fire stared into her own. Corinne’s heart turned over inside her breast. The avenger was here, then; the moment of retribution so often imagined during these last weeks had come, but in a fashion a thousand times more terrifying than she had ever imagined. Her arm shot up in a frantic clutch towards the bell, but never reached it. The intruder struck with the swiftness of a serpent. One great hand closed about her wrist, a band of metal about a stalk of straw. Her lips made a horrible bubbling sound, and she shuddered down in her bed: but that bubbling sound was not allowed to swell into a cry. For the palm of the intruder’s right hand had covered her mouth, In an extremity of fear, she bit at it like a wounded dog, but she might as usefully have bitten at a piece of iron. The flat of his hand pressed down her lips and kept them sealed, his thumb upon one side and his last two fingers upon the other, held her small face as in a vice, and to add to the final horror, his first and second fingers, crooked, took her nostrils between them and closed. Corinne flung herself from side to side but she could not loosen by a hair’s breadth that relentless grip. It was inconceivable to her that she could suffer torture so poignant and still live. She could not breathe. Her heart thundered against her breast as though it must burst its way out or crack, the blood sang in her ears, her eyes started from their sockets. The darkness whirled about her flecked with blots of fire. Corinne was drowning in her little house in the middle of Mayfair, and with her one free hand she thrashed the bed-clothes in her agony.
“So!”
Clutter let her go and she slipped down in the bed, drawing in the air into her lungs with labouring breaths, whilst her body shook from bead to foot like a patient in the rigor of a fever.
“It is all very well for Elizabeth Clutter, no doubt,” he said in a low voice with a curious rasp to it, “but when one’s own turn comes, it is not so pleasant. You will lie very still, Corinne, with your hands stretched at your sides outside the bed-clothes.”
“Yes,” she answered in a whisper.
She obeyed him meekly, and suddenly she began to cry. The tears ran down her cheeks, and the sobs came bursting uncontrollably until her throat ached with them.
“Good!” said Archie Clutter, meaning that he would have no more trouble with her that night. He had chosen his own brute’s way to strip from her all resistance in one or two swift seconds of violence. She lay now a thing of wax for his will to mould as he would. She breathed fear instead of air. Fear slipped in currents of ice through all her veins. She was chained by it to her bed. It gagged her lips.
Clutter reached out his hand and turned on the lamp by the side of the bed. Outside, in South Audley Street, Strickland saw that light shine out and walked on appeased of his anxieties.
For the first time Corinne saw with her own eyes her enemy; and though Battchilena and Strickland had both prepared her by their descriptions, the aspect of the man himself exceeded them by so much that she, who had thought to have plumbed every deep of terror, discovered that there were depths till then unknown. The contrast of his dress lent to him a quality which was bizarre and sinister. For he wore the ordinary dress which a man of fashion puts on in the evening, a high, white collar with its bent flaps, a white tie in a big bow, a white silk scarf about his neck, a black overcoat with silk lapels. But above this conventional garb were the big, naked face of a yellowish pallor, under a thick crop of dark hair; the haggard cheeks, scarred and seamed, the out-thrust full lower lip, the half-open mouth, the green bright eyes of which the fire was for the moment veiled; and visible through all the deformity of thickened features, starved flesh and the stigmas branded by hatred and passion and cruelty, the traces of an ertswhile beauty. Corinne shuddered as she looked. She felt that she was in the presence of some elemental spirit of evil, which had been even before existence was.
Archie Clutter did not trouble to tie up the handle of the bell above her reach, nor to set the telephone receiver down upon the floor. The clasp of his iron fingers about her delicate face, had plucked the last least remnant of courage and hardihood out of her.
“To-night you give me my money, Corinne,” he said in the queer, creaking voice which just seemed an inevitable part of him.
Corinne whimpered like a child under punishment. She had no money to give.
“The money you hold in trust for me, Corinne.”
She dared not plead that the hour was late, that in the morning banks would be open, jewellery could be sold. She was under a compulsion now to speak
the truth — even if the truth meant the confession of a crime.
“You give me my money, Corinne, and I forgive you that letter.”
Corinne could not assemble her thoughts.
“Letter?” she repeated, her forehead wrinkled in her perplexity, and she saw his eyes widen and the animal leap up in them. “I don’t know,” she said with a sob.
“The letter asking for money to help me to escape. One morning it lay on the hall table. Then it was destroyed — by you, Corinne. That fine inheritance must not be lost. So, lest another letter come, three nights afterwards Maung H’la shifts the glasses by the bed.”
It was a very different story to that which Corinne had told in the garden of the inn upon the Portsmouth road. But she did not contradict this version. She uttered a little moan.
“Maung H’la! Maung H’la.”
“Yes, he told me.”
“Yet you killed him.”
“After he had told me. Of course I did.” Archie Clutter’s voice rasped the words casually, as though nothing in the world could be more obvious and natural. “I am not the Lord Mayor. I didn’t want any trumpeter to warn you that I was coming. Besides, Maung H’la couldn’t live after I was free.”
After all, certain things are done, and certain things are not. There’s a code. No, certainly Maung H’la could not go on living, after Archie Clutter was free.
“So I want my money, Corinne.”
Corinne flung her head from side to side. Almost she gave her throat to him with a prayer— “Let it be quick!”
“Well?” he insisted.
And in a whisper broken by a whimper came the answer at last:
“It is spent.”
“What?”
The exclamation was uttered in a low and startled cry. Corinne nodded her head, She had no more words at her command. And Clutter’s head dropped so that she could not see his face.
“All of it?” he asked.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 78