Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “You, Jim? Why, nothing of course.”

  She looked out over the Green Park, and threw up her head as though she was bathing her forehead and her throat in its cool fresh darkness; and drew from it some balm for her agitation.

  “This is one of Mummy’s parties,” she said. “There are people here whom I don’t know. People she met this spring when I wasn’t with her, at Cairo, or Tunis, or Algiers, or somewhere. So I can’t tell which of them is doing it. Can I?”

  “No, you certainly can’t,” Jim asserted stoutly.

  Cynthia swerved like a filly when a sheet of paper blows across the road in front of her, and with a frown wrinkling her pretty forehead, surveyed through the gaps between the curtains her mother’s guests. Jim looked over her shoulder, frowning still more portentously, and forgot his manners.

  “They look as commonplace a crowd as I ever saw gathered together in my life. Not one of them has got anything on you,” he said.

  “Yes, but there is one of them who isn’t commonplace at all,” returned Cynthia with conviction. “One of them is doing it.”

  Jim was half inclined to jest and sing, “Everybody’s doing it.” But tact was his strong suit on this summer night.

  “Doing what, Cynthia?” he asked gently.

  “Hush!”

  An appealing hand was thrust under his arm and pressed into his coat-sleeve. Cynthia wanted companionship, not conversation.

  “I shall have an awful night, Jim, unless we put up a barrage.”

  Cynthia was very miserable. Jim turned back his hand and got hold of Cynthia’s.

  “I know. We’ll slip out now and get away. I have got my little car at the door.”

  Cynthia, however, shook her head.

  “It wouldn’t be fair on Mummy. We must wait. They’ll all go very soon. Besides, it is important to me to find out which of them it is who’s doing it. Then I can make sure that whoever it is never comes to this house again.”

  It was an appalling threat, but Jim recognized that it was just. People had no right to do things to Cynthia which would give her an awful night, even across a drawing-room. They must be black-balled thoroughly. Then a dreadful explanation of Cynthia’s misery smote him.

  “My dear, you are not a natural medium, are you?” he asked in a voice of awe. He turned her towards him and contemplated her with pleasure. He looked her up and down from her neatly shingled fair brown hair to her shining feet. She was a slim, long-legged, slinky creature. All that he had ever heard about mediums led him to believe that as a rule they ran to breadth and flesh. He drew a breath of relief, but Cynthia looked at him very curiously.

  “No,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “It’s just this one thing. I am not odd in any other way. And this one thing isn’t my fault either. And there’s a very good real reason for it too.” She broke off to ask anxiously, “I don’t seem to you to be incoherent at all, do I, Jim?”

  Jim firmly reassured her.

  “No one could be more lucid.”

  Cynthia breathed her relief.

  “Thank you. You are a comfort, Jim. I’ll tell you something more now. This thing — somebody in that drawing-room knows about it — has been thinking about it all the evening — has been making me think about it — has come here to-night to make me think about it. And it’s a horror!”

  And she suddenly swept her arm out across the expanse of the Green Park, from Piccadilly on the north to Buckingham Palace on the south.

  “Yes, it’s a horror,” she repeated in a low voice.

  She was watching a dreadful procession go by, endlessly and always from north to south. It moved not in the darkness, but along a straight white riband of road under a hot sun, between pleasant and sunny fields, but in a choking mist of yellow dust. There was a herd of white oxen at one point of the procession, and here a troop of goats and there a flock of bleating sheep. But the bulk of it was made up of old clumsy heavy carts, drawn by old, old horses, and accompanied by old, old men, and piled up with mattresses and stores and utensils, on the top of which lurched and clung old, old women and very young children. It was the age of all, men and beasts, who were taking part in this stupendous migration which gave to it its horror. These were no pioneers. It was a flight. There was one particularly dreadful spectacle, an old man without cart or horse who carried upon his bent back like a sack a still older woman. All through the day, dipping down from the northern horizon and rising to the edge of the southern, the procession streamed slowly by. At nightfall it just stopped; at daybreak it resumed. There would come a moment, Cynthia knew well — it always did come — but after she was asleep — when the procession would begin to race, when the old men and the old horses would begin to leap and jump, grotesquely with stiff limbs, like marionettes — and that was much more horrible. For some of them would fall and be trampled under foot, and no one would mind. But that moment was not yet.

  There was a stir in the drawing-room behind her.

  “They are going,” she said.

  Both of these young people turned to the window, and Cynthia laid her hand again on Jim’s arm and detained him.

  “Wait! Wait!” she whispered eagerly. “I believe we shall find out which of them it is.”

  They watched through the gap between the curtains all the preliminary movements of a general and on the whole eagerly welcomed retreat, the guests rising as one person, the hostess with just a little less but not much less alacrity and murmurs about a delightful evening coming as if from the mouths of a succession of polite automata. They saw Mrs. Maine turn her head towards a picture on the wall. They heard her say:

  “That? Yes, it is quite lovely, isn’t it? Let us look at it.”

  Both Cynthia and Jim fixed their eyes upon the particular guest who had called Mrs. Maine’s attention to the picture and now crossed the room with her. A woman, if anything a little below the average height, of an indeterminate age somewhere between thirty-six and fifty, she had no distinctive personality. She was dark, neither ugly nor beautiful. There was even something ungraceful in her walk.

  “She is as commonplace as a sheep,” said Jim, meaning that it could not possibly be she who had so disturbed and controlled the shining young creature just in front of him.

  “Wait!” Cynthia advised. “Were you introduced to her, Jim?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose that Mummy introduced me to her. But I don’t remember anything about her. She was at the other end of the dinner table too.”

  “It can’t be her,” said Jim.

  Mrs. Maine led her visitor to the picture, a sketch of an old French chateau glowing in a blaze of sunlight. A great lawn, smooth and green as an emerald and set in a wide border of flowers, spread in front of a building at once elegant and solid; and a wide stream with a glint of silver, bathed the edge of the lawn in front. At the sides of the chateau, tall chestnut trees made an avenue and behind the chateau rose a high bare hill.

  “Many years ago, my husband and I saw that house when we were touring in France,” Mrs. Maine explained. “I fell in love with it and he bought it for me. We spent four months a year there. After my husband died, I still went back to it, but five years ago Cynthia—”

  “Your daughter?” interrupted the stranger.

  “Yes, my daughter took a distaste for it. So I sold it to a Monsieur Franchard. He made a great fortune out of the War and is very fond of it, I am told.”

  “That’s the woman, Jim,” said Cynthia with a little shake in her voice.

  But the woman in question showed no further interest in the picture. Jim had a fear lest the very intensity of Cynthia’s regard, the concentration of all her senses, should draw that strange woman’s eyes to the curtain behind which the pair of them stood concealed. But not a bit of it! The strange woman smiled, thanked her hostess for her evening, shook her hand and waddled — the word was in Jim’s thoughts — waddled out of the room. Nothing could have been more banal than her exit.

  As s
oon as she had gone Cynthia slipped back between the curtains and took her place by her mother’s side.

  “Who was it who was talking to you about the Chateau Dore, Mummy?” she asked in an interval between shaking hands with departing guests.

  “A Madame D’Estourie,” replied her mother. “She was kind to me in Algiers. She came to London a week ago and called upon me. So I asked her to dinner.”

  “Algiers!” Cynthia repeated with a start, and to herself she said: “I was right. She must never come to the house any more. I’ll speak to Mummy to-morrow.”

  The room was now empty except for her mother, herself and Jim.

  “We are going off now to dance,” she said.

  Cynthia’s mother smiled.

  “You have got your latchkey?”

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Maine turned to the young man.

  “And, Jim, don’t let her stay up too late. She’s going to dance again to-morrow. Good night, my dear.”

  At the door of the drawing-room Cynthia said:

  “Jim, I am going to run up for a cloak and you can start your old car and wait for me in the hall.”

  She ran upstairs, through her little sitting-room and into her bedroom beyond it. Whilst she was getting her cloak out of the cupboard, it seemed to her that she heard a slight movement in her sitting-room. When she reentered that room she saw that the door on to the staircase was closed; and that Madame D’Estourie was sitting in a chair, waiting for her.

  But Madame D’Estourie was no longer insignificant.

  II

  “I thought that you had gone,” Cynthia stammered.

  Madame D’Estourie smiled at so childish a notion and by her smile made Cynthia feel a child and rather a helpless child — a sensation which she very much disliked.

  “I knew of course that you were behind the curtains on the balcony,” Madame D’Estourie explained quite calmly. “I slipped into the dark room at the side of the drawing-room and watched for you. I saw you run upstairs. I followed you.”

  Cynthia was troubled and exasperated. She did something she hated herself for even whilst she was doing it. She became impudent.

  “Do you think it’s decent manners to come to Mummy’s dinner-party in order to spy and intrude on me?” she asked, haughtily lifting her pretty face above the ermine collar of her coat and stamping her foot.

  “I didn’t give my manners a thought,” Madame D’Estourie replied calmly. “I have been searching for you for years. I got this spring the first hint that it was you I was searching for. I became certain to-night. I couldn’t let you go for the sake of my good manners.”

  Cynthia did not pretend any bewilderment as to the object of Madame D’Estourie’s persistence.

  “I have never spoken about it to anyone, not even to Mummy,” she said, yielding a little in spite of herself.

  “In that you are to blame,” Madame D’Estourie returned relentlessly.

  Cynthia’s face had lost its resentment. She was on weak ground here. She had no sharp words of rejoinder.

  “I hate thinking about it at all,” she said in excuse.

  “Yet you do think about it.”

  “At times. I can’t help it;” and Cynthia shivered and clasped her cloak about her.

  “When you have talked about it, you won’t have to think about it. You will be freed from the tyranny of your memories.”

  Cynthia looked curiously, almost hopefully, at Madame D’Estourie.

  “I wonder,” she said.

  It might be possible that all these recurring nightmares, these obsessions by day were warnings that she should speak, and punishments because she did not. She tried one final evasion.

  “I’ll come and talk to you one day, Madame D’Estourie, and quite, quite soon. I have to go out to-night.”

  Madame D’Estourie shook her head, and for the first time in that interview a smile of humour softened the set of her lips.

  “It will take you five minutes to tell your story, and the young gentleman in the hall has before now no doubt waited for ten.”

  Cynthia was no match for her unwelcome visitor. Madame D’Estourie was as undistinguished as Jim had declared. But she had the tremendous power conferred by a single purpose never forgotten for an hour during ten long years. The young girl, gracious, independent, exquisite and finished from the points of her toes to the top of her head, in spite of her belief that the world belonged exclusively to the young, sat obediently down in face of her commonplace and rather dowdy companion and recited her story. Recited is the only suitable word: her recollections were so continuous and so clear.

  III

  “I was nine years old that July. On the fifteenth of the month I crossed from England with my governess, passed through Paris and out by the Eastern Railway to Neuilly-sur-Morin, which was the station for the Chateau Dore. Mummy was in London and meant to join me in August. So, you see, my governess and I were caught at the Chateau Dore. Even in Paris, on the Friday nothing definite was known and then at midday on Saturday the Eastern Railway was taken over by the Army. There we were, fifty miles from Paris. Our two motors, every horse under twenty years old, and the farm carts were commandeered the next day. No one could get to us, we could not get away and no letters or telegrams arrived — not even a newspaper. You can understand that a little girl of nine thoroughly enjoyed it. I was reading with my governess Jules Verne’s Career of a Comet, and I used to play at imagining that we had been carried away into space like the soldiers in the garrison. We were indeed just as isolated — except for the noise of the great trains which thundered by to the East at the back of the hill all day and all night.

  “Thrilling things too happened in our little village. One morning I found the old schoolmaster and Polydore Cromecq, the Mayor who kept the little estaminet, driving two great posts into the road and closing it with a heavy chain.

  “‘Now let the spies come!’ cried Polydore Cromecq. ‘Ah, les salauds! We shall be ready for them.’

  “He took a great pull at a bock of beer and explained to the little Miss as he called me that night and day there was to be a guard upon the chain and no one was to pass without papers.

  “Polydore fascinated me at that time tremendously. He was short and squat and swarthy; he had a great rumbling laugh and great hands and feet to match the laugh; and he had an enormous walrusy black moustache, which I adored. For it used to get all covered with the froth of the beer and then there would be little bubbles winking and breaking all over it, until after a time he would put a huge tongue out and lick it all off. He knew how I adored this and used to make quite a performance of it. I watched him now and clapped my hands when he had finished. Polydore burst out laughing.

  “‘Good little Miss! Sleep in your bed without fear! No one shall pass. Courage! Courage!’

  “Polydore in those days was always shouting ‘Courage!’ though why I could not imagine. We knew of course that leagues and leagues away soldiers were fighting, but it wasn’t real to any of us — yet. Our village was not even on the main road which ran east and west at the back of the hill close to the railway. It was tucked into its own little corner at a bend of the Morin and the by-road which led to it led to nowhere else.

  “For three weeks then our village slept in the sunlight, and Polydore shouted, ‘Courage! Courage! We shall get them.’ Then Polydore shouted no more, and he went about heavy and sour and if he saw me he shrugged his shoulders and said bitterly, ‘Of course, it’s only France’; as if, because I wasn’t French, I had scored some mean advantage over France. For the carts of the refugees began to rumble all day on the road on the other side of the hill, and we heard each day a little nearer the boom and reverberation of the heavy guns, and my governess set to work to install the chateau as a hospital. Then one night, the last night I slept in the Chateau Dore, I heard suddenly in the middle of a deadly stillness a quite new strange sound. It was as though a boy was running along a path and drawing, as he ran, a stick across a paling of i
ron rails. It was the first time I had ever heard a machine-gun.

  “The next morning, immediately after breakfast, I ran down to the village. The whole of the village council was assembled in the Mayor’s office, and the remaining inhabitants were standing silent and crowded together outside watching through the windows the progress of the debate. A rumour had spread that we were surrounded by Uhlans. Everybody believed it. Uhlans! There were peasants who remembered 1870. The mere name carried with it panic and despair. So overwhelming was the dread that when a party of four men in uniform came out from a little wood, at the end of the village, the women and even some of the men began to scream, ‘The Uhlans! The Uhlans!’

  “The village council broke up in a hurry and rushed into the street, Polydore wiping his forehead with a great coloured handkerchief, and cursing under his breath. The old schoolmaster was the first to recall everybody to reason.

  “‘These are French uniforms,’ he cried. ‘They are Zouaves’; and everybody began to pelt along the streets towards them, cheering at the tops of their voices in their relief. But the cheers dropped as we got nearer. For we saw that three of the Zouaves were supporting and almost carrying the fourth. He was a young lieutenant, almost a boy, and very handsome. He was as white as a sheet of paper, and there was a dreadful look of pain in his eyes, though his lips smiled at us. The blood was bubbling out of his coat at the breast. He seemed to me a young wounded god.

  “I forced my way through the crowd and said:

  “‘He must be taken to the chateau. There we will look after him.’

  “But one of the soldiers shook his head and smiled gratefully.

  “‘No, Miss. We must leave him here at the first house. If the bleeding is stopped and he can lie quiet, he may recover. Many do. Besides, we have to find our own company.’

  “The first house in the village was a small general store and sweet-shop kept by a Mademoiselle Cromecq, a withered old spinster and a sister of the Mayor.

  “‘But he will spoil my furniture,’ she cried, standing in her shop door and barring the way.