Four Days' Wonder

by A. A. Milne

  Lastly, the orphaned Jenny. She was five.

  III

  Since Edward had done so little for Jane, and George had not, in Caroline’s view, been a conspicuous success with the modern girl, Jenny was brought up by Queen Victoria. She throve, under these auspices, in a world of her own.

  She was the daughter of that dashing young Hussar whom she had never seen. She was glad and proud that he had been a Hussar. As she pointed out to God in one of her early prayers, he might have been in the Manchester Regiment.

  Every night they talked together in bed.

  ‘Well, Jenny, what shall we do to-night?’

  Perhaps she had been reading Robinson Crusoe, by Mr. Daniel Defoe.

  ‘Darling, I thought we might be wrecked together on a desert island.’

  ‘Without the Aunts?’

  ‘Just whatever you think, Hussar darling?’

  ‘I don’t like Aunt Jane,’ said the Hussar dashingly.

  Jenny called God’s attention to the fact that it was the Hussar who was saying this.

  ‘I do like Aunt Caroline, but I don’t think she would be good on a desert island,’ said the Hussar.

  (‘We both like her,’ explained Jenny, ‘but we do not think she would be good on a desert island. You do see, don’t you?’)

  ‘So it’s just you and me, Jenny. Now the ship’s breaking up, and I’m swimming to shore with you on my back. Go!’

  When she was nine, she met Julian.

  ‘Well, Jenny, what shall we do to-night?’

  ‘Darling, I thought we might be the Dauntless Three, if you wouldn’t mind very much. Do you mind very much, Hussar darling? You could be Horatius, and I could stand on your right hand.’

  ‘But how about my left hand, Jenny?’

  ‘I thought you might think of somebody, darling.’

  ‘What about Julian?’ said the Hussar, after racking his brain.

  ‘Darling, what a lovely idea! You do think of lovely ideas.’

  And then, a year later, Aunt Jane met the Comte de la Tour. At least, he said she did.

  ‘Hussar darling?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny?’

  ‘Did you know about Aunt Jane running away with the French Count?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny.’

  ‘Why do you have to run?’

  ‘He wants to get back to France quickly so as to say “Vive la France!” and it’s a long way to go.’

  ‘I thought that was it . . . Hussar darling?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny?’

  ‘Why mustn’t I talk about her any more?’

  ‘Because they’re carrying secret dispatches to the exiled King, and nobody must know.’

  ‘I thought that was it. But I shan’t tell Julian.’

  ‘Oh, no, you mustn’t.’

  ‘Well, I don’t tell him anything now. I think he’s a silly little boy.’

  ‘I think he is too,’ said the extremely intelligent Hussar.

  So Aunt Jane left Auburn Lodge . . . and the Jane Latour who afterwards played the harp, and did other odd and exciting things, never saw Jenny again. But Jenny, as we know, saw Jane Latour.

  IV

  When Aunt Caroline died, Jenny was eighteen. The first thing that she did was to have her hair shingled. There was a great deal of it, parti-coloured like a straw-stack after rain, and as soon as it was safely off, she wondered if she had been unkind to her aunt’s memory to proclaim her independence so quickly. Then she remembered that some tribes always shaved their heads as a sign of mourning, and if she had been one of those tribes she would have had to have had her hair shingled. This made her feel better. By the time she had called on Mr. Watterson (who was now nearly eighty) and Mr. Watterson had said nothing about her hair, because, being eighty, he hadn’t noticed the difference, she felt quite comfortable again.

  Mr. Watterson suggested that they should let Auburn Lodge (furnished) for a year, and that she should make her home with him and his dear wife for that time, while, as he put it, she looked round. Mr. Watterson lived in a house in St. John’s Wood, with a garden, and, as he said this, he had a sudden thought of Jenny in the hammock between the two pear-trees, reading a magazine with a gay cover, while a thrush sang over her head, and beneath her on the grass lay a hat with cherry ribbons; which was how he remembered somebody in some other world; and two tears came into his two old eyes, and he knew that now nothing could ever happen, and in a little while he would be dead. Then he forgot all this just as suddenly, and remembered that there were six dozen of the port left and Victoria Falls Preferred were going up.

  ‘You are kind,’ said Jenny.

  ‘You realize, my dear, that I am now your guardian?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Jenny, and thought: ‘Another guardian!’ when all she really wanted was her dear Hussar.

  She wondered what would be said about her hair, because Mrs. Watterson would be sure to notice it. Well, thank goodness, it couldn’t go back.

  ‘So I think that that’s what we will do, my dear.’

  Jenny agreed, as she always did when a guardian spoke to her.

  So Auburn Lodge was let for a year (furnished) to Mr. and Mrs. George Parracot, who also wanted to look round. Mr. and Mrs. Parracot had lived for ten years at The Chestnuts, Chislehurst. They were great theatre-goers, and had missed the last five minutes of the Third Act of every play worth seeing since 1922.They had also missed in this way some five hundred renderings of the National Anthem. So when old Paul Parracot died suddenly (but not too suddenly, considering that they were only second cousins) they decided to take a house in London for a year, and see how they liked it. For whatever could be said about Chislehurst, it was not so central as the Brompton Road.

  But Jane Latour knew nothing of all this. She did not even know that her sister Caroline was dead. Caroline was not News. No subeditor dropped a headline for her; in her name no vowels were wrung at Broadcasting House; and on that remote island in the South Seas at which the ex-President’s yacht had just landed them, Jane Latour neither wept nor hung her harp upon the trees.

  However, even ex-Presidents tire, and pleasure-cruises come to an end. Jane Latour was in London again, and, in the language of her profession, resting. She also, in a sense, was looking round. Taking stock.

  In a year she would be forty—forty—forty. And now and at once and all the time she wanted money—money—money.

  Forty . . . money . . .

  Then, as she was lying one morning in the red-and-black bath in the red-and-black bathroom in the little red-and-black house in Stapleton Mews, comparing, as so often now, her overdraft, which was at the National Provincial Bank, with her assets, which, at the moment, were mostly under water, she remembered suddenly her sister Caroline. Caroline and she were joint-owners of Auburn Lodge; indeed, she still had the key to which joint-ownership entitled her. It was true that Caroline paid over to her yearly a half-share of the estimated rent, but why should not Caroline buy her out altogether? The house must be worth—what? Six—eight—ten thousand? Five thousand pounds for Jane Latour! She stretched out an arm and added another handful of bath-salts to the water. She could afford it.

  So it was that Aunt Jane came again to Auburn Lodge. As she clicked up the little alley-way in her absurdly high heels, she fumbled in her bag for the latch-key, so long unused. To let herself into her own house was an assertion of her rights; it was to be a gesture, a reminder to Caroline that half of all this was hers; yes, even down to half of the silver photograph-frames on the grand piano. She would stand for no nonsense from Caroline.

  She fidgeted the key into the lock, smiling a little scornfully as she thought of poor Caroline. And the child Jenny. Jenny must be nearly eighteen. What sort of a mid-Victorian miss had Caroline made of her?

  But she did not smile scornfully as she thought of Jenny. Jenny was eighteen.

 
; Chapter Three

  Old Felsbridgian

  I

  There was a noise of a door opening below; there was a noise of footsteps on the stairs; and suddenly the awful realization swept over Jenny that she had no business to be here at all!

  How could she have been so silly!

  The answer was that to-day, for the first time since she had left Auburn Lodge, she had found herself in her dear Brompton Road. Old inhabitants of the North-West do their shopping in Oxford Street. Not exclusively in Oxford Street, for they may stop short at Wigmore Street, or venture as far south as Bond Street, Regent Street or Hanover Square; but they have a marked Oxford Street manner, which will never carry them across the Park. For six months Jenny had been striving to acquire this manner, and striving in vain. She had the stamp of Brompton Road upon her.

  Brompton Road was particularly sweet to her, because it was the only London street in which she and her dear Hussar had been allowed to go about together. In Brompton Road, Aunt Caroline had felt, a young girl was Safe. However noisomely Danger might lurk in the side streets, waiting to pounce upon the divergent, along the straight way of Brompton Road walked only the Loyal and the Respectable. Jenny tripped up and down it untouched; but amid the perils of Beauchamp Place there marched by the side of Jenny her Aunt Caroline, or her Aunt Caroline’s maid.

  In St. John’s Wood it was different. Mr. Watterson had the usual views about the modern young girl, but the fact that Abduction was Illegal made him indisposed to think that it could happen to a ward of Watterson, Watterson and Hinchoe’s. There was no need for Jenny to have a latch-key, but (he assured Mrs. Watterson) she could safely run about London alone in the daytime. Indeed, in this way she could take some of the housekeeping off Mrs. Watterson’s shoulders.

  So at eighteen Jenny had been given the freedom of London. Moreover, unknown to Mr. Watterson, she had a latch-key in her bag. Admittedly it was not the latch-key to the house in Acacia Road, and therefore did not greatly enlarge her freedom; but a latch-key, brought casually to the surface when feeling for coppers in an omnibus, could only have one meaning, and her possession of it gave Jenny, if not the conductor, an authentic thrill. In fact, it was one of those in use at Auburn Lodge, which Jenny had been allowed to borrow on a certain notable occasion. She had gone to a dance without Aunt Caroline but not the less chaperoned, and the chaperones (there were several of them) had delivered her at the door of Auburn Lodge at an hour almost Edwardian. ‘We’ll just see you safely in,’ had said the Colonel with a hearty laugh, and they had all gathered (a little humorously) round the front door, while Jenny felt proudly for her latch-key. The fact that it had slipped down behind the lining of her bag, and was not discovered until eight months later, had spoilt the joke at the time, but had left in Jenny’s possession a key which should now have been with the Parracots.

  She had this key, then, in her bag, and she had there ten pounds of her quarterly allowance, and it was a fine warm day in June, and all Brompton Road was calling to her as never before.

  She went. She spent. She tripped backwards and forwards, and round and about—oh, the darling Brompton Road, how glad she was to get back to it again! Her dear Hussar was with her just as he used to be, and she was telling him all about Michael Alloway, the barrister by profession, who had found the body of a well-dressed woman in his drawing-room, and they were thinking how exciting this would be, and not really looking where they were going . . . and, before they knew where they were, they had come to the little alley-way together and, chattering as they had always done, turned up it. And there was the latchkey in her hand, and the key had fitted so easily, and now she was in the well-known house, and going dreamily up the stairs as she had gone a hundred, a thousand times before . . . ‘Aunt Caroline! I’m back!’

  II

  The footsteps, the voices, were nearer. They were just outside the door. Only one thing to do. Hide!

  In a flash Jenny was into the window-seat which went round the three sides of the big window over the lawn. She was curled up behind the curtains. As a child she had hidden here from Aunt Caroline or Aunt Jane and then popped her head out and said ‘Bo!’—a joke in which, somehow, no grown-up had ever seemed able to join. But now it was not a joke; it was desperate. One simply couldn’t let perfect strangers know how idiotic one had been.

  ‘My God!’ said Mr. George Parracot.

  Jenny was neither surprised nor shocked. From a hundred detective stories she knew that this was how men greeted the body of an unknown woman in the drawing-room.

  ‘What is it?’ called a voice from Aunt Caroline’s bedroom.

  ‘I say, quick!’ shouted Mr. Parracot. And then commandingly: ‘No—don’t. Stay where you are!’ Mr. Parracot had remembered that he was a Man and an Old Felsbridgian. One must keep The Women out of this sort of thing.

  It was too late. Mrs. Parracot was in the doorway.

  ‘George!’ she cried.

  There was just that something in her voice which made it clear that, from now onwards, whatever might happen, it was his body, not hers. Mr. Parracot, wearing the Club tie, recognized the note and accepted all responsibility.

  ‘It’s quite all right, old girl. You’d better go to your bedroom. Leave it all to me.’

  ‘Is she—dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest. I say, old girl, you’d better——’

  Mrs. Parracot came a little closer and said: ‘Why, it’s Jane Latour!’

  ‘Good lord, not the Jane Latour?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure it is.’ She looked up at him. ‘George?’

  It was not quite an accusation, not quite a question; and it said all about Jane Latour that was not going to be said in the obituary notices.

  ‘I’ve never spoken to her in my life,’ said George indignantly. ‘I’ve never——Well, we’ve seen her act once or twice. But that’s all. How on earth did she get here?’

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Laura Parracot, suddenly feeling an immense envy for one who had had such an exciting life, an immense pity for one who now would have it no more. ‘Did she—kill herself?’

  George looked about him in a puzzled way. ‘Well, but——How?’

  ‘Veronal or whatever——Oh!’ She had come still closer.

  ‘She couldn’t have hit her head, because there’s nothing——’

  ‘George!’

  ‘It’s quite all right, old girl. You go to your bedroom, and I’ll ring up the police.’

  ‘But, George, don’t you understand, she was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all right, old girl. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘But he may be in the house still!’

  ‘Nonsense, old girl, he’s far enough off by this time.’

  ‘But he must have known the house was empty, or he wouldn’t have been here with—her. And if we hadn’t come in on our way to Mary’s——Oh, I wish we’d gone straight through instead of——But I had to get some thinner things, and you wanted your Brilliantine, but don’t you see he might be in the house now, looking for—for whatever it is they came here for.’

  ‘Now now, old girl,’ said Mr. Parracot quickly, ‘this won’t do.’ He had an uneasy feeling that Laura was getting hysterical, and that the best way to stop it was to slap her face smartly with the open hand, an action so definitely un-Felsbridgian that he could not possibly bring himself to it. He fingered his tie anxiously, and said: ‘If you go into your bedroom and lock the door, and if I’m here all the time, it must be all right, mustn’t it, old girl?’

  ‘All right, George,’ said the old girl bravely.

  She went out. Jenny was left alone with Mr. Parracot. For a little while there was silence. Then a voice began to speak.

  ‘Hallo! I want the nearest police-station, please . . . Auburn Lodge. Brompton Road . . . Thank you . .
. Oh, hallo! I’m speaking from Auburn Lodge, just off the Brompton Road. Er—there’s a—there’s a—a body here . . . A body . . . Yes . . . A well-dressed woman . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . George Parracot . . . Yes. But we’ve been away, and the house has been empty . . . Quite sure . . . Right . . . Right . . . Good-bye.’

  Then there was silence again. Jenny looked round the corner of the curtain. Mr. Parracot was in an arm-chair, waiting. Jenny breathed a prayer to God or her Hussar, she wasn’t sure which, to think of something. For if she were found now, not even the handsomest young detective could save her.

  She had done everything wrong! Why, the first thing they told you was not to move anything until the police came, and she had moved the one thing which she ought to have left: the door-stop! Worse still, she had cleaned it with her handkerchief! Worst of all (‘Oh, Hussar darling, isn’t it awful’) she had left her handkerchief in a chair for every one to see! And it had ‘Jenny’ on it!

  And then hiding!

  Even that wasn’t all. She was Aunt Jane’s only relation, and so by law she would get all Aunt Jane’s money, and the police would say that that was why she had done it!

  JENNY WINDELL IN THE DOCK: DRAMATIC EVIDENCE

  Jenny realized that there was only one thing to do. She must escape and fly the country. But how? And, more important, when?

  When? Before the police came. There was just one moment when it could be done. There were no servants in the house, and Mrs. Parracot was safely locked up. So Mr. Parracot would have to go downstairs to let the police in. Then would be the moment.

  How? That was easy. Through the window. The ground was higher at the back of the house than at the front, and there was a flower-bed not more than eight feet below her. Then out by the garden-door into the other little alley-way, and out through the far end into Merrion Place . . .

  Suppose Mrs. Parracot answered the door? She couldn’t . . .

  Suppose the Police came in with a skeleton-key? They wouldn’t . . .