Thus he reflected, whilst he paid an indifferent attention to the conversation at the dinner-table; so indifferent indeed that he actually began to carry on his formulation aloud:
“It is quite clear, therefore, or would be quite clear, if I accepted these fantastic theories, which I don’t—”
At this point Marjorie Hastings interrupted him.
“My dear man, what are you talking about?”
“Nothing, Marjorie. The idiocy with which I have long been threatened has at last declared itself.”
What was, or would have been quite clear to him, if he had accepted the heresy, amounted simply to this. There was one circumstance, one factor common to all the four occasions upon which Joan had felt the inrush of terror and had swooned away. At first nothing seemed more hopeless to Bramley than to find a link between the lounge of a hotel upon the south coast of England, and a circus at St. Etienne in France, or between a yacht in the Bay of Biscay and a motor-car breakdown in the Dauphine Alps. Yet undoubtedly such a link there must be.
He turned to Marjorie Hastings.
“Do you know St. Etienne?”
“No. Where is it?”
Bramley had drawn a blank there and tried again.
“Monsieur de Ferraud’s yacht, I believe, is little short of a palace.”
Marjorie Hastings looked at him with sympathy.
“You poor thing!” she cried. “You must hold some ice to your forehead. Try some sarsaparilla! It may be just what you want.”
“Silence, woman!” returned Bramley. He had drawn another blank, but he tried again. “Did you ever travel by the Route des Alpes?”
“Don’t be silly! Of course I did. I motored to Florence one spring with Joan and—” Marjorie Hastings came to an abrupt stop. “That’s curious,” she resumed slowly. “I hadn’t thought of it until now. Joan had just the same sort of attack and behaved just in the same strange way afterwards. She wouldn’t go on with us. She went back in the Diligence to Grenoble and joined us in Nice by train.”
This time Bramley had drawn a horse at all events. He turned to Marjorie eagerly.
“Tell me all about it, please.”
The car had broken down just beyond a tunnel half an hour or so after passing La Grave. They had sent back to the village for a cart; they turned the car round by hand to have it ready; and after that they had all strolled idly about, admiring the great bastion of the Meije across the valley and the white velvet of its enormous glacier. The cart had emerged from the tunnel. The driver had got down to fix his tow-rope to the axle of the car and without a word Joan dropped in the middle of the road as if she had been shot. “She might have broken her nose or got concussion. I tell you, it was alarming.”
“Thank you,” said Bramley. The yacht of Monsieur de Ferraud off Bordeaux, the breakdown of the motorcar in the Dauphine, the circus of St. Etienne. It had flashed upon him that these three circumstances had after all a common factor. Did the empty lounge of the hotel last night contain it also? Bramley sought out the manager immediately after dinner.
“You were close to the foot of the stairs when Miss Winterbourne fainted,” he said.
“Yes. I was arranging with Alphonse the space we should reserve for dancing.”
“Alphonse!” cried Bramwell. “The lounge-attendant. Yes, of course. He is French?”
“But of course, as I am.”
“And you were speaking in French?”
“No doubt!” The manager shrugged his shoulders. “I do not remember. But no doubt! We always do. Would you like to see Alphonse, Mr. Bramley?”
“Of all things,” Bramley replied; and after a quarter of an hour, and some goings and comings of the lounge-attendant, Bramley left the office with a smile upon his face and a package under his arm. He felt the excitement of an adventurer upon a treasure-hunt who has discovered the first important clue.
Upon his return to London, he wrote to Joan Winterbourne, asking her to play golf with him on the first Saturday at Beaconsfield. She telephoned in reply: “Delighted, if we go down by train,” and though she laughed as she spoke, it was clear that she meant what she said. Bramley had planned to put no questions to her at all, but to lure her on to talk about herself in any rambling way she chose. They were much more likely to approach the truth that way. But the pair had not been playing for more than five minutes before he had forgotten all about his plans and was concerned solely with approaches of quite a different kind. For he found to his surprise and a little to his discomfort that Joan could give him half a stroke a hole.
At the ninth hole, however, when she was six up, she missed the easiest of putts and sat down on a bank with her face between her hands and despair in her brown eyes.
“Look at that!” she cried, and she swore loudly and lustily so that an elderly lady close by left out the next two holes and removed herself to a less vicious part of the course.
“I shall never be any good at anything. It was just the same when I painted. Year after year I used to go in the summer to Normandy with a class and I never got anywhere.”
Bramley became aware once more of his attractive patient and forgot the catastrophe of his golf.
“Oho! So you used to go to Normandy?” he repeated with the utmost carelessness.
“Yes. To St.-Vire-en-Pre, a tiny village a mile from the sea. You’ll never have heard of it. I went there for three summers, until I was eighteen. Then I hated it. Shall we go on?”
“Yes. You are only five up now. So you hated it? An ugly little village, eh?”
“On the contrary, lovely. I lodged in an old farm with another girl, Mary Cole. I think she’s married now.”
Joan drove off from the tenth tee with her whole attention concentrated on the stroke. The memory of the summers at St.-Vire-en-Pre meant nothing to her, quite obviously. Bramley’s thoughts, however, ran as follows:
“I must find Mary Cole. Marjorie Hastings must help me. I want to know if Joan was on Monsieur de Ferraud’s yacht after the last summer at St.-Vire-en-Pre. If after, then we may be very near to the solution of our riddle.” With the result that his ball escaped into a patch of rough grass and dug itself in.
Bramley, however, no longer minded. He was indeed rather elated, chiefly on Joan’s account, but a little too because he was now minded to demonstrate to the “psycho-boys” that any old surgeon could play their game just as well as they did, if he only took the trouble.
Marjorie Hastings produced Mary Cole in due course. She was a brisk young woman, now married, with a couple of children, who had slipped quite out of the little set in which Joan played so conspicuous a part. Even the summers on the coast of Normandy had become unsubstantial as dreams to her. But she remembered how those visits ceased.
“We were a large party that year. So Joan and I had to find a lodging in a house which was strange to us. We found it at a farm a hundred yards or so beyond the end of the village, the farm of Narcisse Perdoux. The work of the farm was all done by the family and we were charged an extortionate price for our two rooms. We had made up our minds never to go back there in any case. Then came the last night before the party broke up. We had a dance in the studio. Joan and I went back to the farm at about one o’clock in the morning. The door was on the latch — a relief to us, for old Narcisse Perdoux, even with his Sunday manners on, was a grudging inappeasable person. What he would have been if we had waked him out of his bed to let us in we were afraid to think. We crept upstairs to our rooms, which stood end to end on the first floor, my window looking out towards the sea, Joan’s at the back looking out past the barn to the open country. We both went at once to our separate rooms, for we had our packing to do in the morning, and I at all events was more than half-asleep already. I don’t suppose that ten minutes had passed before I was in bed. I am certain that fifteen hadn’t before I was asleep. I was awakened by someone falling into my room and collapsing with a thud on the floor. I lit my candle. It was Joan. For a moment I thought that she was dead. But her hea
rt was beating and she was breathing. I got her into my bed, chafed her feet, put my salts to her nostrils, did in a word what I could and after a little while she came to. She was sick — terribly sick for a long while. The farm was stirring before she dropped off to sleep, but then she slept heavily for a long time.”
“She had no injury?” Bramley asked.
“None at all.”
“And how did she explain her rush into your bedroom at two o’clock in the morning,” interrupted Marjorie Hastings; “and her swoon?”
“Of course she didn’t explain that at all,” Bramley replied, and Mary Cole stared at him in surprise.
“How could you know that?” she asked. “But it’s true. Nothing might have happened to her at all, beyond that she had slept in my bed instead of her own. She never alluded to it. She went about her packing. The only unusual sign she made was a desperate hurry to get away from the house.”
“But why she was in a hurry she didn’t know,” said Bramley, and again Mary Cole turned to him in surprise.
“That’s just it. Joan suddenly hated the place. It made her ill.”
“But surely you questioned her?” Marjorie Hastings urged. “I should have been frightened out of my life if anyone had come tumbling about my bedroom in a lonely farmhouse in the middle of the night. My word, I should have asked a question or two and seen that I got the answers.”
Marjorie’s pretty face was truculent. Bramley was smiling at her truculence when Mary Cole explained:
“I was anxious to get away too, without wasting a moment. For the farm was all upset, and we weren’t wanted. You see Charles, Narcisse Perdoux’s oldest son, had died during the night. What in the world’s the matter?”
This question was thrown in a startled voice at Bramley, from whose face the smile had suddenly vanished.
“Nothing,” he answered gravely and hesitatingly, “except — that we are in deeper waters than ever I imagined us to be.”
All Bramley’s stipulations were working out in the most dreadful fashion. The first experience of Joan’s, terrible enough to shake the reason; Nature’s determination to thrust it beyond the reach of memory; the factor common to the original seizure and to each recurrence; and now this revelation by Mary Cole all pointed to some grim and sinister story of the darkness — an outrage upon nature, a horror upon horrors. Bramley remembered the stark look of terror which had shone in Joan’s eyes during the moment when she had clung to the balustrade in the hotel lounge and before she had clapped her hands to her face to shut the vision out. He felt a chill as though ice had slipped down his spine. And this story had to be dragged up in all its dimly seen ugliness into the full light! There was no hope for Joan in any other way. She must be made to remember. After all, he realized with a sudden humility, the “psycho-boys” had their penknives too, though they were different from his.
II
He sent for Joan Winterbourne the next day and she came to him in Harley Street. From her close-fitting hat to her beige stockings and her shiny shoes, she was just one of the pretty young women in the uniform of the day. But there was a tension, a vague anxiety in her face which had already begun to set her a little apart. It would overcloud her altogether unless it was explained to her and thereby dissolved.
“You have been all right since you beat me so disgracefully at Beaconsfield?” he asked.
“Quite. But one never knows...”
“I believe we are going to know this morning,” he reassured her; and a sudden wave of confidence and hope brought the colour into her cheeks. He put her into a chair by the side of his table.
“I want you to tell me one or two things.”
“Ask away?” said Joan.
“When did you have this attack on Monsieur de Ferraud’s yacht?”
“Three years ago.”
“I see. After your last visit to St.-Vire-en-Pre?”
“Yes, a year after.”
“And in the same month of the year?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps the same day of the month?”
“That I can’t remember.”
“Sure? Let’s see! You left St.-Vire-en-Pre,” — and here Bramley was careful to speak without a hint of emphasis or significance— “the day after Charles Perdoux died at the farm. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter.”
And it didn’t. The day of the week was of no importance. What did matter was the swift sidelong stare of Joan’s eyes when he mentioned Charles Perdoux’s name, and the curious foxiness which sharpened her face. She was suddenly disfigured. In another age he would have said that she was possessed by the devil. For the change was horrible. All her grace and youth in a second were gone. Her gaze was perfectly steady, but it was cunning. Yet cunning was too respectable a word. It was leery — as was the smile which distorted her mouth. Bramley had an inspiration that he was wrestling with some obscene spirit ages old for the possession of this girl. The spirit seemed to dare him to make her remember if he could. If he had ever doubted that he was on the right lines, he threw his doubts overboard now. Heresy or no heresy, he knew. The “psycho-boys” were one up.
“Joan,” he said gently. He bent forward and took her hand in his. “Let us get back to the yacht.”
“Yes,” she answered, her features relaxed; she flashed back to her normal self, attentive to his questions, certain of his goodwill, dispossessed of the devil.
She marshalled her memories.
“It was in the morning. I was on deck. The yacht was a schooner. We were going to race that day. The crew were busy with their preparations. Almost over my head a sailor seated on the yard was fitting a new rope through a block. I remember the end of the rope slipping down the side of the mast like a snake. I was for no reason shocked out of my wits and I fainted.”
“Thank you,” Bramley interrupted. “I needn’t bother you any more about the yacht. You saw a rope shaking down the side of the mast, and you passed out. Right! Let’s come now to the breakdown of the motor on the Route des Alpes.”
Joan leaned forward.
“Yes?”
“You were all out of the car on the road.”
“Yes.”
“Across the valley the Meije rose.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a huge mass of a mountain with pinnacles and glaciers flowing down its flank.”
“Yes.”
“But at that moment you weren’t admiring it. You weren’t looking at it at all. Just visualize that exact spot if you can!”
Joan leaned back in her chair and concentrated her thoughts, a little timidly at first lest her experience on the road should be repeated here in Bramley’s consulting-room; and afterwards, since nothing happened, with a greater freedom.
“I had the Meije upon my left,” she resumed slowly. “It’s true. I was not looking at the mountain. I was facing the tunnel through which we had come. The broken-down car was in front of me. A cart had come through the tunnel from La Grave to tow us back. The driver of the car was fixing a rope to the front axle of the car, I remember the same horrible sense of sickness and terror overwhelming me.”
“Exactly,” said Bramley. She was rather white now, but he was smiling at her cheerfully. “It’s all working out. Don’t worry!”
Joan did not answer in words, but the deep breath she drew was sign enough of her desperate need to free herself from the ghastly obsession which was darkening all her life.
“Every time I cross a road,” she said, “I ask myself, ‘Shall I go down here under the wheels?’”
“We shall answer that, Joan, before we have finished,” Bramley replied, with every sign of confidence. “Now let’s see what was happening in the circus at St. Etienne.”
“That wasn’t so inexcusable,” Joan answered. “An acrobat was performing on a trapeze and one of its ropes broke. Luckily he was sitting on the trapeze at rest. He was able to save himself, for the second rope held. But for the
moment it gave everyone a jar.”
“So all those three occurrences had one thing in common.”
Joan looked puzzled.
“I don’t see...A rope, of course, but—”
“Exactly, a rope,” Bramley returned.
“But when I was running down the stairs in the hotel,” Joan argued quickly. “I didn’t—” and she came to a stop and resumed again in a voice of surprise. “Oh, yes! There was a man in a livery holding a rope.”
“Yes. And that rope is the most important of all the ropes. The rope covered with red baize which was usually stretched out to mark off the arena reserved for dancing had been lost.”
“But I have seen heaps of ropes,” Joan protested. “They have never affected me at all.”
“Wait a bit,” Bramley returned. “The attendant in the livery was a Frenchman. He produced a rope of his own, a French rope.”
“Why should that French rope be the most important?” Joan asked.
“Because I bought it,” answered Bramley. “I have got it here.”
“Yes?” For more than a second or two Joan hesitated. She shrank back. Bramley used no persuasions. There was something he wanted her to say without any promptings from him. Joan gathered her courage; she shrugged her shoulders.
“I had better see it, hadn’t I?”
Bramley said: “Yes, if you’d like to.”
“I should like to,” answered Joan.
“Good!”
Bramley sprang up and went to his cupboard.
“It’s just a rope woven in the French way. It won’t affect you at all now. It can’t do anything. And you are prepared for it.” Whilst he spoke he brought the brown-paper parcel from the cupboard and carried it to his table and untied the string in front of Joan. The movements of his fingers had a surgeon’s neatness and precision. Every element of drama was carefully eliminated. He never even looked at Joan, although he was aware of her every gesture. He unwrapped the parcel with no more care than if it had been a box of sweets. But his heart was beating fast enough; and if he did not look at his patient it was lest his face should betray his fear. The fear, however, was now all upon his side.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 809