“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 careful 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.”
With a smile upon his face, Hanaud led the way across the room. He had the dramatic instinct, and rejoiced in it. He was going to produce a surprise for his companion and, savouring the moment in advance, he managed his effects. He walked towards the mantelpiece and stopped a few paces away from it.
“Look!”
Mr. Ricardo looked and saw a broad Adams mantelpiece. He turned a bewildered face to his friend.
“You see nothing?” Hanaud asked.
“Nothing!”
“Look again! I am not sure — but is it not that Celymène is posing before you?”
Mr. Ricardo looked again. There was nothing to fix his eyes. He saw a book or two, a cup, a vase or two, and nothing else really expect a very pretty and apparently valuable piece of — and suddenly Mr. Ricardo understood. Straight in front of him, in the very centre of the mantelpiece, a figure in painted china was leaning against a china stile. It was the figure of a perfectly impossible courtier, feminine and exquisite as could be, and apparelled also even to the scarlet heels exactly as Calladine had described Joan Carew.
Hanaud chuckled with satisfaction when he saw the expression upon Mr. Ricardo’s face.
“Ah, you understand,” he said. “Do you dream, my friend? At times — yes, like the rest of us. Then recollect your dreams? Things, people, which you have seen perhaps that day, perhaps months ago, pop in and out of them without making themselves prayed for. You cannot understand why. Yet sometimes they cut their strange capers there, logically,
too, through subtle associations which the dreamer, once awake, does not apprehend. Thus, our friend here sits in the window, intoxicated by his drug, the music plays in the Semiramis, the curtain goes up in the heated theatre of his brain. He sees himself step upon the stage, and who else meets him but the china figure from his mantelpiece?”
Mr. Ricardo for a moment was all enthusiasm. Then his doubt returned to him.
“What you say, my dear Hanaud, is very ingenious. The figure upon the mantelpiece is also extremely convincing. And I should be absolutely convinced but for one thing.”
“Yes?” said Hanaud, watching his friend closely.
“I am — I may say it, I think, a man of the world. And I ask myself” — Mr. Ricardo never could ask himself anything without assuming a manner of extreme pomposity— “I ask myself, whether a young man who has given up his social ties, who has become a hermit, and still more who has become the slave of a drug, would retain that scrupulous carefulness of his body which is indicated by dressing for dinner when alone?”
Hanaud struck the table with the palm of his hand and sat down in a chair.
“Yes. That is the weak point in my theory. You have hit it. I knew it was there — that weak point, and I wondered whether you would seize it. Yes, the consumers of drugs are careless, untidy — even unclean as a rule. But not always. We must be careful. We must wait.”
“For what?” asked Ricardo, beaming with pride.
“For the answer to a telephone message,” replied Hanaud, with a nod towards the door.
Both men waited impatiently until Calladine came into the room. He wore now a suit of blue serge, he had a clearer eye, his skin a healthier look; he was altogether a more reputable person. But he was plainly very ill at ease. He offered his visitors cigarettes, he proposed refreshments, he avoided entirely and awkwardly the object of their visit. Hanaud smiled. His theory was working out. Sobered by his bath, Calladine had realised the foolishness of which he had been guilty.
“You telephone, to the Semiramis, of course?” said Hanaud cheerfully.
Calladine grew red.
“Yes,” he stammered.
“Yet I did not hear that volume of ‘Hallos’ which precedes telephonic connection in your country of leisure,” Hanaud continued.
“I telephoned from my bedroom. You would not hear anything in this room.”
“Yes, yes; the walls of these old houses are solid.” Hanaud was playing with his victim. “And when may we expect Miss Carew?”
“I can’t say,” replied Calladine. “It’s very strange. She is not in the hotel. I am afraid that she has gone away, fled.”
Mr. Ricardo and Hanaud exchanged a look. They were both satisfied now. There was no word of truth in Calladine’s story.
“Then there is no reason for us to wait,” said Hanaud. “I shall have my holiday after all.” And while he was yet speaking the voice of a newsboy calling out the first edition of an evening paper became distantly audible. Hanaud broke off his farewell. For a moment he listened, with his head bent. Then the voice was heard again, confused, indistinct; Hanaud picked up his hat and cane and, without another word to Calladine, raced down the stairs. Mr. Ricardo followed him, but when he reached the pavement, Hanaud was half down the little street. At the corner, however, he stopped, and Ricardo joined him, coughing and out of breath.
“What’s the matter?” he gasped.
“Listen,” said Hanaud.
At the bottom of Duke Street, by Charing Cross Station, the newsboy was shouting his wares. Both men listened, and now the words came to them mispronounced but decipherable.
“Mysterious crime at the Semiramis Hotel.”
Ricardo stared at his companion.
“You were wrong then!” he cried. “Calladine’s story was true.”
For once in a way Hanaud was quite disconcerted.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “We will buy a paper.”
But before he could move a step a taxi-cab turned into the Adelphi from the Strand, and wheeling in front of their faces, stopped at Calladine’s door. From the cab a girl descended.
“Let us go back,” said Hanaud.
III
Mr. Ricardo could no longer complain. It was half-past eight when Calladine had first disturbed the formalities of his house in Grosvenor Square. It was barely ten now, and during that short time he had been flung from surprise to surprise, he had looked underground on a morning of fresh summer, and had been thrilled by the contrast between the queer, sinister life below and within and the open call to joy of the green world above. He had passed from incredulity to belief, from belief to incredulity, and when at last incredulity was firmly established, and the story to which he had listened proved the emanation of a drugged and heated brain, lo! the facts buffeted him in the face, and the story was shown to be true.
“I am alive once more,” Mr. Ricardo thought as he turned back with Hanaud, and in his excitement he cried his thought aloud.
“Are you?” said Hanaud. “And what is life without a newspaper? If you will buy one from that remarkably raucous boy at the bottom of the street I will keep an eye upon Calladine’s house till you come back.”
Mr. Ricardo sped down to Charing Cross and brought back a copy of the fourth edition of the Star. He handed it to Hanaud, who stared at it doubtfully, folded as it was.
“Shall we see what it says?” Ricardo asked impatiently.
“By no means,” Hanaud answered, waking from his reverie and tucking briskly away the paper into the tail pocket of his coat. “We will hear what Miss Joan Carew has to say, with our minds undisturbed by any discoveries. I was wondering about something totally different.”
“Yes?” Mr. Ricardo encouraged him. “What was it?”
“I was wondering, since it is only ten o’clock, at what hour the first editions of the evening papers appear.”
“It is a question,” Mr. Ricardo replied sententiously, “which the greatest minds have failed to answer.”
And they walked along the street to the house. The front door stood open during the day like the front door of any other house which is let off in sets of rooms. Hanaud and Ricardo went up the staircase and rang the bell of Calladine’s door. A middle-aged woman opened it.
“Mr. Calladine is in?” said Hanaud.
“I will ask,” replied the woman. “What name shall I say?”
“It does not matter. I will go straight in,” said Hanaud quietly. “I was here with my friend but a minute ago.”
He went straight forward and into Calladine’s parlour. Mr. Ricardo looked over his shoulder as he opened the door and saw a girl turn to them suddenly a white face of terror, and flinch as though already she felt the hand of a constable upon her shoulder. Calladine, on the other hand, uttered a cry of relief.
“These are my friends,” he exclaimed to the girl, “the friends of whom I spoke to you”; and to Hanaud he said: “This is Miss Carew.”
Hanaud bowed.
“You shall tell me your story, mademoiselle,” he said very gently, and a little colour returned to the girl’s cheeks, a little courage revived in her.
“But you have heard it,” she answered.
“Not from you,” said Hanaud.
So for a second time in that room she told the history of that night. Only this time the sunlight was warm upon the world, the comfortable sounds of life’s routine were borne through the windows, and the girl herself wore the inconspicuous blue serge of a thousand other girls afoot that morning. These trifles of circumstance took the edge of sheer horror off her narrative, so that, to tell the truth, Mr. Ricardo was a trifle disappointed. He wanted a crescendo motive in his music, whereas it had begun at its fortissimo. Hanaud, however, was the perfect listener. He listened without stirring and with most compassionate eyes, so that Joan Carew spoke only to him, and to him, each moment that passed, with greater confidence. The life and sparkle of her had gone altogether. There was nothing in her manner now to suggest the waywardness,
the gay irresponsibility, the radiance, which had attracted Calladine the night before. She was just a very young and very pretty girl, telling in a low and remorseful voice of the tragic dilemma to which she had brought herself. Of Celymène all that remained was something exquisite and fragile in her beauty, in the slimness of her figure, in her daintiness of hand and foot — something almost of the hot-house. But the story she told was, detail for detail, the same which Calladine had already related.
“Thank you,” said Hanaud when she had done. “Now I must ask you two questions.”
“I will answer them.”
Mr. Ricardo sat up. He began to think of a third question which he might put himself, something uncommonly subtle and searching, which Hanaud would never have thought of. But Hanaud put his questions, and Ricardo almost jumped out of his chair.
“You will forgive me. Miss Carew. But have you ever stolen before?”
Joan Carew turned upon Hanaud with spirit. Then a change swept over her face.
“You have a right to ask,” she answered. “Never.” She looked into his eyes as she answered. Hanaud did not move. He sat with a hand upon each knee and led to his second question.
“Early this morning, when you left this room, you told Mr. Calladine that you would wait at the Semiramis until he telephoned to you?”
“Yes.”
“Yet when he telephoned, you had gone out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I will tell you,” said Joan Carew. “I could not bear to keep the little diamond chain in my room.”
For a moment even Hanaud was surprised. He had lost sight of that complication. Now he leaned forward anxiously; indeed, with a greater anxiety than he had yet shown in all this affair.
“I was terrified,” continued Joan Carew. “I kept thinking: ‘They must have found out by now. They will search everywhere.’ I didn’t reason. I lay in bed expecting to hear every moment a loud knocking on the door. Besides — the chain itself being there in my bedroom — her chain — the dead woman’s chain — no, I couldn’t endure it. I felt as if I had stolen it. Then my maid brought in my tea.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 804