“‘Good night, my friend Guibourg,’ Monsieur de Mirandol said with a piping laugh. Robin Webster laughed quietly, turning round in the moonlight a face grown suddenly sly, and more urgent than ever followed Evelyn Devenish’s protest. This time it ran— ‘Oh, please, silence!’ she whispered; and for the first time during that whispered conversation she turned an eye upwards to my window. It was then that I dipped for safety, praying that she had not seen me. I comforted myself with the thought that even if she had she would be confident that I could make nothing of de Mirandol’s allusion.
“She did not know that I had served in a great library, and that my letters were M to O inclusive. ‘O’ contains ‘Occult,’ and I had to have a working knowledge of that subject — on what shelf and in what particular volumes information was to be sought. ‘L’ami Guibourg!’ Monsieur de Mirandol had said. ‘Good night, l’ami Guibourg!’ His laugh as he spoke the name, Robin Webster’s laugh as he greeted it, linked the name with the mysterious engagement for Wednesday week. There was only one Guibourg — the infamous Abbe of the Black Mass. Wednesday week, too! That was the date. A Wednesday or a Friday. Monsieur de Mirandol had stipulated for one of those two days of the week, and those two days were the days set aside for those unholy ceremonies. I had got to the heart of Diana’s secret now, of her obsession, her indifference — yes, and of my forebodings too. In spite of herself, through the trivial phrases of her letters to me something had broken from another world — the world on the edge of which her soul stood shivering.
“I lifted my head again very carefully. I saw that Diana had joined Monsieur de Mirandol and Evelyn, and that Robin Webster had vanished amongst the trees. The three who remained talked openly now. In a few minutes they returned into the house. I heard the glass door close; I saw the yellow light disappear from the drawing-room and the floor of the terrace. The house and its garden were given over to the moonlight. Only between the dark boughs of the avenue a beam shone from the upper window of Robin Webster’s chalet.”
Joyce Whipple omitted from her story the ordinary expeditions and amusements which occupied the days and evenings of the small party at the Chateau Suvlac. She kept to the incidents relative to herself. She was sent to Coventry by Evelyn Devenish and Monsieur de Mirandol, who was never out of the house. She found more and more continually Robin Webster at her side; Mrs. Tasborough, the companion, sunned herself in her newly discovered authority. Each night some few people from the neighbourhood dined and danced, and once or twice the Abbe Fauriel played his game of whist at the Chateau Suvlac. As for Diana, she walked apart with the bandage of her dreams across her eyes. Even the service of her house became indifferent to her, the small attentions to her guests neglected, and thus quite naturally Joyce slid into the habit of preparing the cocktails, and the nightcaps before the party separated of an evening.
On the third night of Joyce’s visit two little incidents occurred which were of importance. She had danced, reluctantly, with Robin Webster, and he had guided her to the end of the terrace away from the others. Suddenly he stopped.
“I can’t go on like this,” he said in a voice of fever. “You must come down into the garden and talk to me. It’s horrible what I am going through”; and he held her off from him, and again his eyes slid over her greedily from her head to her shoes, so that she felt herself dishonoured. She wrenched her hands away and said simply, “I’ll come,” and turning at his side, went down with him into the garden.
“It was hateful,” Joyce said, “but I was afraid he would make some sort of revolting scene publicly, and that I should have to go away from Suvlac in consequence. We walked across the lawn to the hedge which separates the garden from the strip of marshland by the river, and then I turned to him.
“‘You see, I can’t hide any more,’ he began at once, his mouth trembling, and his words overtaking one another. ‘Up till now it has always been easy — amusing, too — to keep different things going — if you understand me—’ I had no difficulty at all in understanding him. The amazing feature of him was his frankness, considering what his object was — I mean myself. It never seemed to occur to him at all that I might perhaps believe in another subject under M to O inclusive — monogamy.
“‘Now I find it very difficult,’ he continued. ‘I can’t trouble about concealments — I don’t want them either — I want you — and you — and you — and all the world to see it. Joyce! I walk up and down my room half the night repeating it. Joyce! Joyce! I have thought that no one could want anyone else so — so overwhelmingly, without that other one being forced to come. I have expected to hear your step upon the gravel — to see the door open and you with your eyes full of wonder and soft light in the doorway. I knew all the time that I was a fool — that the way with women was to keep your head and only seem to lose it. But I can’t help myself. I am like the man in hell. I want my drink of water beyond anything in the world — you, Joyce, you!’ and his hands reached out to me shaking, and drew back and reached out again.
“I was in trouble too. I didn’t dare to giggle because I was in the presence of a predatory animal. My whole object was to prevent a crisis for as long as I could — until after Wednesday week, at all events. I babbled a few remarks inanely. ‘I have never had anything like this happen to me. I have never before been told that I was one of a number, even if for the moment the top one,’ and luckily at that moment Evelyn Devenish ran down the steps of the terrace and across the green towards us. It was Robin Webster’s turn to say ‘Hush! Hush!’ now. I made my escape at once and, a little more shaken than I had believed myself to be, I slipped into the drawing-room, which was empty.
“I sat there for a few moments watching the couples dancing outside, and then Diana joined me. She sat down beside me with an embarrassed smile, and began at once to talk to me rapidly.
“‘I am going to tell you something, Joyce. I haven’t told it to any of my friends yet. So you must keep it a secret for the moment. I don’t mean to have people advising and interfering in what isn’t any concern of theirs. They probably won’t know at all until it is done. I am going to marry Robin Webster.’
“I was really startled by her announcement, and no doubt my face showed it. For she continued quickly: ‘You’re astonished, but you don’t know him. He’s wonderful, really wonderful.’
“‘But — but—’ I protested a little confusedly, ‘are you sure that — I mean that you are rich and he — after all, he seems to have friends already, doesn’t he?’
“I wasn’t very tactful, but I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t stop to phrase things very decently. Diana, however, wasn’t offended at all. She took my protest with the utmost calmness.
“‘I know what you mean,’ she answered. ‘He is a good deal with Evelyn Devenish. But he loves me.’ It is impossible to give you any idea of the simple, serious fatuity with which she spoke. I felt that no evidence would shake her at all. ‘Since you came, Joyce, he has been showing you some attention too. He is just setting up so many screens to prevent anyone guessing until we want them to.’
“‘But when are you going to be married?’ I gasped.
“‘Next month,’ she answered; and then the most curious look, half pride, half fear, shone upon her face. ‘I can’t tell you everything. But we are set apart, he and I ;and a few other people. It’s the most terrific secret. I was frightened at first — perhaps I still am a little. But one’s carried away — one wouldn’t go back if one could. It’s a belief — no doubt people who didn’t understand would take us out and stone us — but there are many, many, many of us, not only here — in Paris, in Italy. And people who are right are always’ — she sought for a word— ‘punished, aren’t they? It’s the oldest thing in the world, too — it’s revolt and passion instead of renunciation, and a world scarlet and vivid instead of grey and cold.’
“Her face was transfigured. She spoke in a low voice hoarse with emotion, her features quivering, her breast rising and falling as though she ha
d run a race, and her hands picking at her frock. In that quiet room, looking across the garden to the quiet, shining river, with the gramophone in the library winding out its commonplace foxtrot, she sat, a devotee who had whirled herself into a frenzy of exaltation. And then suddenly she clapped her hands to her eyes and burst into a torrent of tears.
“‘Oh, I am afraid — I am afraid—’ she cried in a voice suddenly desolate and hopeless; and before I could utter a word she had risen and rushed from the room.
“I sat on, with a gleam of hope in my mind. De Mirandol and Evelyn Devenish — I set them aside as really sincere. That devil-worship still existed here and there in the world of drawing-rooms as vigorously as in the world of jungles and wide forests, I knew very well. And both de Mirandol, the disappointed degenerate, and Evelyn Devenish, the neurotic creature of her sex, were marked out for it. But Robin Webster was different. He was just the cunning manipulator who saw in it a weapon and an opportunity. He could marry Diana Tasborough. Yes, but he wanted a serf, not a wife. Believing in him as the High Priest of Satan, she was malleable as sculptor’s clay. The one hope I had of countering his fine plans lay in Diana’s sudden storm of tears and the words which had followed it. She was afraid. Therefore she could be rescued. But how? I was still considering that question when the door into the corridor was opened and Evelyn Devenish came in. She walked straight across the room to me with a face very white and set.
“‘I met Diana in tears just outside this room. What have you said to her?’ she demanded; and I replied:
“‘Mind your own business!’
“‘I am going to,’ she said, and nodding at me with a strange look in her eyes, she went out on to the terrace.”
At this point Joyce asked for more coffee, and not until she had drunk it and lighted a cigarette, was she willing to resume her narrative.
CHAPTER 27
THE INSPIRATION FROM THE MASK
BUT EVEN THEN Hanaud must interfere. “Let us make everything plain as the bedpost,” he said with a sweep of his hand. “I put the questions.”
“Yes?” Joyce replied, leaning towards him with a little frown of concentration upon her face.
There were difficulties in her story which she was well aware she could not answer. Why some men, for instance, of the stamp which other men detest evoke the blindest love in women. And why the adoration of idols and false gods is eternal. And why what is clean and of good repute is put aside for what is foul. She had no explanations to offer. She could only say: “Here at Suvlac these things were so, as they are so elsewhere.” But no such baffling problems were presented to her by Hanaud.
“When you come out for the first time on to the terrace at the Chateau, you see de Mirandol and Madame Devenish?”
“Yes.”
“And they give you the once-over?”
“Yes.”
“And that evening — with Robin Webster — you come over at him at once?”
Joyce blushed and answered rather shyly: “I’m afraid that I did.”
“I would not distress you,” said Hanaud apologetically. “I get the facts fixed in my mind. Now, as Mr. Ricardo would say, pray proceed.”
But Mr. Ricardo with some indignation raised a protesting voice. “Certainly, Joyce, you shall not let them distress you. He was not getting the facts fixed in his mind. He has had them there for many a day. No, he was getting the phrases fixed in his mind, and I can promise you, in revenge, that he will use them proudly on the most inappropriate occasions.”
Hanaud waved an indulgent hand. “Well, well, such phrases are commodious. Pray, Mademoiselle Whipple, proceed!”
And she took up her story again. Her problem was how to rescue Diana from that unholy gang, in spite of herself; how to disperse them and send them to hide their faces and their names in the by-ways of the earth; and how to do it without involving her in a ruin of scandal and disgrace.
“I tossed about all night, and when the morning dawned I was no nearer to a solution,” she said. “But I had reached one conviction. I must myself know all that was to take place on the Wednesday week in the house of Monsieur de Mirandol. I had certainty in myself, but none for anyone to whom I might tell the story. I must have every circumstance of the ceremony so exact that no one could doubt I spoke the truth. In a word I must be present in the house of Monsieur de Mirandol, I must be an eye-witness, and more, I must have some evidence to prove who out of the Chateau Suvlac took a part in those orgies of horror. Oh, I knew very well that my plan was dangerous — I mean dangerous for me. But I thought that if I could once secure my evidence, then perhaps from a distance, when I was safe, I could threaten to make it all public, and under that threat exact my conditions. Oh, it wasn’t very brave, I know, but I had to release Diana if I could, without doing her any harm.”
“Mademoiselle,” said Hanaud gently, “I should welcome in myself a little more of just that cowardice.”
Joyce Whipple smiled her thanks at him. “That is so prettily said that I shall make you out a long list of the most commodious American phrases I can think of,” she said, and went back to her story. “I could get the evidence, I thought. You see, we had all walked up to the Chateau Mirandol the day before, to take tea there and see the library. We went along the road past the farm buildings and up the hill and entered the grounds by the little gate in the high hedge. It was the natural way from the Chateau Suvlac, and I felt sure that it would be the one used on Wednesday week. Now, I had a great friend in Professsor Brewer, as you all know. He had served during the war in one of the Intelligence Divisions, and amongst the many stories he told me about those times was this. Just before the Irish rising, the Germans, by means of their submarines, were in touch with Irish leaders on the West Coast. It was necessary to identify those leaders, and an empty house on a lonely strip of cliff was suspected to be their meeting-place. But so many precautions were taken, and so much vigilance used at the times when these meetings took place, that no raid would have had any chance of success. Not a soul would have been found near the spot. Accordingly Professor Brewer concocted a mixture of mustard-gas and varnish which if you touched it would not trouble you for an hour or so, but after that time would develop a sore on your hand which no remedy could heal within six weeks. He was taken over to the West Coast on a trawler, and landed on a dark night on the beach at the foot of the cliff. He climbed up the cliff and smeared with his varnish the little gate which led to the front door. The authorities then had only to wait and gather in anyone going about with an obstinate sore on the palm of his hand. I remembered this story during my sleepless night, and the next morning I wrote to him at Leeds asking him to send me some of the varnish in a registered packet, and telling him why I wanted it.
“My next step was a little more difficult. In answer to Monsieur de Mirandol’s complaint that his ceremonies were trop repandu, there had been mention that the company went to them masked, and again M to O inclusive assured me that the answer was sound. I wondered whether a mask was supposed to be sufficient or whether some more complete disguise was adopted. I hoped the latter. It was reasonable to assume that a blasphemy of this kind would be celebrated late at night after the world had gone to bed. The participants would assemble secretly, and it would be as easy for me to creep down the stairs and out of the glass doors of the Chateau Suvlac and up the hill to Mirandol as it would be for anyone else. But once there the case would be altered. I might by keeping my eyes wide open and imitating the others take a place without committing an error which would attract everyone’s attention. But I should have been at Suvlac for a fortnight. Would a mask be enough to disguise me? Especially from Robin Webster, the celebrant, whose eyes made me hot and cold as they slid covetously over me from my head to my shoes. Was a domino used? I could get that and a mask, no doubt, in a big town like Bordeaux without the slightest difficulty.
“I thought of a way to make sure. My bedroom, as you all know, was above Diana’s. I had been put up there at Evelyn Devenish’
s suggestion, so that on the night of Wednesday week I might be out of the way. But there was a spiral staircase at my door which opened on to the ground-floor corridor at the side of Diana’s door. I had but to wait for an opportunity when Diana had gone out, slip into her room and discover if I could what she was going to wear. In the event of her unexpected return, escape to my own room would be simple.
“I got my opportunity two days later. Evelyn Devenish and Robin Webster drove in to Bordeaux during the morning in the small two-seater, intending to lunch and spend the day there, and in the afternoon Diana and Mrs. Tasborough went off in the large car to pay a duty visit to a family in Arcachon. The only risk, therefore, that I ran was lest Marianne should come out from her kitchen and catch me. I was as quick as I could be, therefore, in running through Diana’s clothes. But I had, of course, to refold and relay everything exactly as I found it, and I had been three-quarters of an hour at this work before I came across, at the bottom of a drawer, a boy’s black velvet suit, a short cassock of scarlet velvet, and a black domino to cover them. There was a white cardboard box.
I opened it and caught my breath. I almost cried out. For in the box lay that curiously odious mask with the purple lips, the livid face and bright red hair with which you are all familiar. It — shocked me. Yes! I hardly dared to touch it. It was so perfect, so unutterably sad and at the same time evil in its expression. It seemed somehow to be alive.” Joyce was talking almost in a whisper, with her face quite pale and her forehead puckered, as she lived again through that moment of discovery. “I had a stupid fear that if I touched it, it would spring at me, spring at my face and do me some devilish harm — perhaps even kill. I felt all at once very lonely in that sunlit, silent room, and a wasp suddenly buzzing upon a pane startled me out of my wits. I was seized by a panic. I was overwhelmed by a desire to run — anywhere from that accursed house, and leave it and everyone in it behind me for ever — whilst there was time. You know the way nervous people have of turning the head this way and that over the shoulder lest somebody should be coming up secretly behind them. Well, I suddenly saw myself in the mirror doing just that, with a face of sheer terror. The sight brought me back a little to my senses. It shamed me. And a queer notion — I was in the mood for queer notions — came into my head that if I put the mask on I should lose my fear, I should even get some inspiration which would help me.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 114