Murder Abroad

by E. R. Punshon

  “There now,” said Bobby gently. “Why aren’t you more careful? Hurt yourself?” he asked sympathetically.

  That was too much for Volny, and, with what can only be described as a scream of rage, he pulled a small revolver from his pocket. And that was too much for Bobby, who, with a sudden leap, the leap a man makes when he feels his life may hang upon his speed, sprang forward, caught Volny, as he was struggling to his feet, a heavy blow between the eyes that sent him sprawling again, snatched the revolver away and hurled it into the crevasse.

  “Nasty things. I’ve always hated them,” Bobby remarked. He turned to Volny: “Evens now,” he said.

  Volny, a little dazed, for the blow had been a severe one, was slowly regaining his feet. He said:

  “You hit me when I wasn’t looking, when I was down.”

  “I know I did. Your own fault,” Bobby answered. “Revolvers are outside the rules of the game so I went outside, too.”

  “Give it me back,” Volny said.

  “I never liked the things,” Bobby explained again. “I chucked it away. You can look for it if you want to.”

  “Spy,” said Volny once more but with less spirit this time. “You can tell your friends so, the Williamses.”

  “Not my friends,” Bobby interposed. “I know nothing about them.”

  Volny waved this aside, as unworthy the trouble of a contradiction.

  “Tell her from me,” he said, “tell her to be a little careful. Tell her to take a walk and look at the well of the Pépin Mill. Where one has gone, another can follow; yes, and you, too. Spies deserve what they get. Give me back my revolver. I won’t shoot you.”

  You jolly well won’t get the chance,” Bobby answered amiably. “Look here, Volny, don’t be a fool. Tell me what you mean. About the Pépin Mill and the well there. Look here. Why not be friends? I may be able to help you.”

  “If you hadn’t stolen my pistol, if I didn’t know you might shoot me and hide my body where no one would ever find it, then I would knock your head off,” said Volny and turned and strode away, ignoring utterly Bobby’s exhortation to wait a moment and not make such an utter ass of himself.

  CHAPTER VII

  BLIND MAN PHILOSOPHY

  Bobby had a good deal to think about as he went slowly down the hill in the track of the slowly-receding form of young Volny, past oak and fir, by birch and chestnut, down to the cultivated valley levels. That he had been right in his guess that Taylour’s care to keep closed the door of his hut, indicated the presence of something or some one he wished to keep concealed, was now sufficiently evident. Only what reason could Volny have for wishing to hide his presence from Bobby, and why the mingled fear and suspicion he had displayed—somewhat forcibly? The one thing that seemed certain was that in some way there was some kind of connection between this solitary priest of whom the artist, Shields, had expressed his doubts, and young Volny. Yet what could that connection be?

  It was a question to which Bobby could find no answer as he continued slowly and thoughtfully on his way. By the time he reached the village it was after four and he thought longingly of tea. In the hope that the café he had visited before might be able to provide some, he turned in and asked. He was assured with some pride that tea was always ready and presently a cup was placed before him, a battered coffee-pot in which tea was apparently kept perpetually brewing was produced, his cup was filled, a triumphant eye watching all the time for the signs of that appreciation so confidently expected. A loud ‘Voila’ of mingled relief and triumph announced the end of the operation, and the operator retired, taking the battered coffee-pot with him and leaving Bobby facing with resignation a cup full of a lukewarm liquid in which even long brewing had failed to produce anything more than a faint and unpleasant discolouration.

  Bobby sighed and sipped. The ‘patron’ came up to receive congratulations. Bobby launched into a description of the way tea is made in England. The patron was interested but puzzled. He asserted that his English visitors were always pleased. One could tell that from the way they laughed to each other with glee while they were being served. True, there had been sadly few English visitors this summer, but he had kept tea ready for them all the time. Whether, said the patron proudly, one asked at his establishment for tea, for coffee, or for wine, it was always ready, it required but to be poured out. Truly, tea was not a beverage he himself greatly appreciated, but each to his taste. For himself, frankly, he preferred a glass of the good wine of the district. Bobby agreed that he himself preferred a glass of wine to the concoction now before him and so he and the patron parted on good terms and Bobby went on to his hotel.

  On the way he had to pass the little shop kept by Lucille Simone’s aunt. He turned in, ostensibly to buy more postcards. Lucille did not appear. He was served by the old lady who in spite of all his efforts to make himself agreeable, preserved an attitude of cold suspicion. He asked her again if she had any postcards showing the Pépin Mill and received once more a brief and emphatic negative.

  “A picturesque old place,” Bobby explained. “I should like to do it—make a sketch, I mean.”

  The old lady regarded him with renewed and even more intense suspicion.

  “To-morrow, is it?” she asked. “It is to-morrow afternoon you make your sketch? Then Lucille does not go.”

  “Go where?” Bobby asked and when the old lady made no answer, he added: “I don’t know when I shall be having a try. I haven’t asked for permission yet. But why not to-morrow afternoon?”

  Madame Simone looked more unfriendly still and still made no answer beyond an indistinct muttering. Bobby told himself it would be better not to press the old dame at the moment. Anxious as he was to get on friendly terms with her, he felt it would be better to proceed cautiously. He paid for his cards accordingly and departed with a cheerful promise to return presently to make some more purchases, a promise received with little apparent gratitude.

  “Lots of puzzling things in this village,” he told himself as he sought his room. “Why doesn’t old Madame Simone like me and what’s up to-morrow afternoon and where is Lucille not to go and why?”

  Bobby was quite ready for his dinner when the time came. Over the service Charles Camion presided with the same air of proud efficiency. He made Bobby think of a general performing a sergeant’s task of drilling recruits. So far Bobby had not tried to do more than exchange a casual word with him. Not, Bobby had made up his mind, until he knew more of the village background would he take any active steps, but to-night he noticed that young Camion was showing in him a more direct interest. He even asked Bobby if he had had a profitable day and found suitable subjects for his sketch book, and Bobby said he had hardly put pencil to paper all day.

  “Even the one sketch I began I hardly did more than start,” he said. “But it was very pleasant up there on the hill-side. Beautiful air, lovely scenery. Everything quiet and peaceful and open—nothing dark or hidden or secret up there.”

  Camion looked at Bobby doubtfully as if by no means sure what to make of this, but he said nothing and went away. Dinner over, Bobby decided to pay another visit to the neighbouring café. He had discovered by now that there were small social and political distinctions between the café and the hotel, the hotel being slightly superior in status while about the café there was a faint, very faint, communistic flavour. To-night Eudes was there, holding forth in earnest whisperings and mutterings to an attentive group at one table. Volny was there, too, his bruised face conspicuous; before him a bottle he was rapidly emptying. He greeted Bobby with a furious glare to which Bobby responded with a friendly wave. He was glad to see that this time his appearance seemed to excite less interest than it had done before. He hoped that meant he was coming to be accepted as a normal visitor interested only in his sketching, and presently, to a neighbour with whom he had managed to get into casual conversation, he made a remark about the young man near who had managed to bruise himself so severely. For indeed one of Volny’s eyes was nearly clo
sed and his nose was badly swollen.

  “You mean the young Volny?” answered the other, smiling. “Yes, it seems he stepped on the teeth of a rake and the handle leaped up and hit him between the eyes. That happens.”

  “Yes, I know,” agreed Bobby. “Nasty when it does.”

  “Carelessness unheard of,” said his new friend severely. “No rake, no fork, should ever be left lying on the ground for others to tread on. It is unforgivable.”

  “So it is,” agreed Bobby. “Gave Monsieur Volny a nasty knock. Too bad altogether. He is a great friend of young Camion’s at the hotel where I’m staying, isn’t he?”

  The other stared at him.

  “You think so?” he asked with evident caution and still more evident surprise.

  “Well, two young men, neighbours, living in the same village, natural, is it not?”

  “There is also,” said the other gravely—perhaps he would not have said it had he not been drinking a little freely of the local ‘cru’ Bobby had been very pressing with, “there is also Mademoiselle Lucille Simone.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Bobby, “ah, the young ladies, always there, aren’t they? Then it wasn’t Volny and Camion I saw chatting together this evening in such an interested way?”

  This was strictly true. He had not seen it, nor anything of the kind. He had only said it by way of making conversation. But the remark seemed greatly to disturb his new friend, even a little to alarm him. He put down untasted the glass of wine he was just raising to his lips.

  “Oh, la, la,” he muttered, “that bruise, too. The handle of a rake could make it but scarcely like that. And what’ll happen now?” he added still more uneasily, twisting round in his chair as he did so to stare at Volny.

  Volny stared back with an evidently mounting rage. Bobby guessed suddenly that Volny thought he had been talking about their adventure of the afternoon and boasting of being the author of that damaged eye and swollen nose. Volny got to his feet. He was pale with rage and the look he threw towards Bobby was murderous. Bobby almost thought he was going to be attacked then and there, but instead Volny walked straight out of the café, leaving his bottle of wine unfinished. This last detail evidently surprised every one very much. Bobby heard some one say:

  “Look then, he has not drunk all his wine.”

  To himself, Bobby thought:

  ‘Well, I’ve made an enemy all right. No tact, they would tell me at the Yard. Volny will never believe I wasn’t boasting about what I did to him.’

  Bobby’s neighbour muttered a word of excuse and went to join in the talk at another table. Bobby thought that was mischief enough for one night and, in a somewhat worried and dispirited mood, returned to the hotel and bed, for which his long day in the fresh, clean, keen air on the hills had made him more than ready. He had a feeling that his remark, so carelessly made, had started something of which it was difficult to see the outcome. Probably it would soon be all over the village that he had seen Volny and Camion quarrelling bitterly, that they had fought, and that Volny had evidently got the worst of it since he showed a bruise but Camion none. In fact, the story of the stepping on the rake and the blow received from the upspringing handle had not been very well invented. A blow can easily be received in that way, but hardly one producing quite the sort of bruise Volny showed. Bobby felt uneasily that the version now probably spreading through the village would be more widely believed and might lead to developments.

  Interesting, too, to know that the young men were rivals for Lucille’s favour. Was that, Bobby wondered, with the approval of their respective families? He reflected sleepily as he prepared for bed that Charles Camion almost certainly dominated his mild-looking parents. But Volny’s father apparently exercised at any rate a certain amount of parental control since he seemed to have laid a firm veto on his son’s desire to take up boxing professionally, and would the richest farmer of the district, as the senior Volny was said to be, approve of a marriage with the niece of a small shop-keeper, a girl who probably had little or no money of her own?

  ‘Another complication,’ Bobby thought yawning, and remembered, too, that though it was harvest time, and urgent work necessarily waiting for every pair of hands, Volny had spent that day up on the hills, visiting the Abbé Taylour.

  “Perhaps the elder Volny would not be pleased by that, either,” Bobby murmured as he drifted away into sound slumber; “doesn’t look as though the young man were awfully keen on farm work.”

  He was up early the next morning. A few inquiries he had made from a sympathetic chambermaid about the poor old blind beggar he had noticed in the neighbourhood, had brought him the information that the old man was quite methodical in his rounds. He made a point of visiting his ‘clients’, as he called them, at regular intervals, and he expected to be suitably received. It was still remembered how when one good housewife told him she had nothing for him that day, he must wait till next time, he had asked sternly what she supposed would be the result if everyone made that excuse? To-day, for example, said the chambermaid, he would probably be on the Nosière road. She knew that because her uncle lived that way and would be expecting Père Trouché.

  Along the Nosière road Bobby accordingly took his way, making an early start. By eight, he was already a mile or more beyond the village, keeping as he walked a sharp look out. All the same he would have passed Père Trouché unknowingly, but for a chuckle he heard coming from the road-side, from the shelter of a clump of trees and bushes. Bobby stopped and made his way Père Trouché, stretched out at full length on the warm turf as he basked in the morning sunshine.

  “He, the little Englishman once more,” he greeted Bobby. “Yet not so little either.”

  “How did you know who it was?” Bobby asked.

  The blind beggar chuckled again.

  “I have ears, have I not?” he asked. “When one sees nothing, one hears all.”

  He relapsed into silence. Bobby sat down beside him and produced his cigarettes. He lighted one himself and offered one to the blind beggar who accepted it with dignity. After they had both been smoking for a little, Bobby remarked:

  “You heard me going by?”

  “But naturally,” Père Trouché answered. “Why not? Ah, the poor deaf ones, unhappy that they are. To lose the hearing, it is to lose everything. It must be insupportable, to be shut out from all the sounds that make up the world. Consider, monsieur, from here, where we sit, could you see who came along the road?”

  “No, you couldn’t,” agreed Bobby, for in fact the trees behind cut off entirely all view of the road.

  “But one can hear,” Père Trouché said. “I heard a step. Ah, the steps, all a man’s mood, all his character, all his past, one had almost said, all his future, too, it is there in his steps. I, who speak, I know, have I not been listening to them all my life?”

  “You mean you knew me by my step?” Bobby asked.

  “Naturally. I know the steps of all or else I know it is a stranger. Your step, it is one to remember. It is distinctive. Your shoes also. They are excellent quality, of the best leather, new, for they have not been mended. Is it so?”

  “Why, yes,” agreed Bobby.

  “It means then,” Père Trouché went on, “that you understand that the feet must be taken care of. You are then of a profession that requires you should spend much time upon your feet? Not a soldier, you say, and yet a man of action, of movement. That gives furiously to think. Certainly not the step of an artist.”

  “What is the step of an artist like?” asked Bobby, a little disconcerted by the old man’s remarks that seemed to be getting near a truth he did not wish revealed.

  The Père Trouché shrugged his shoulders.

  “It is difficult to describe,” he said. “A step of wonderment, perhaps, of one who marvels at all around. The step of monsieur, it is the step of one who searches. For what does monsieur search? Is it the same thing that he sought on the hill-side yesterday?”

  “You know about that
, too?”

  “Monsieur,” replied the blind man with dignity, “the good God and I, we know all that happens in the village of Citry-sur-l’eau.”

  “Do you though?” said Bobby thoughtfully. “That must be useful sometimes.”

  “Very useful,” agreed the other. Then he gave again his harsh, unmirthful chuckle. “For example,” he said, “I know the name of the rake that sprang up when it was trodden on and hit young Henri Volny in the eye.”

  “Really?” Bobby said. “Well, then, in that case, and since you know people by their step, you know who it was went by you so close the other night near the Pépin Mill when you told me you were blind but not that you could hear so well?”

  For a little the Père Trouché seemed a trifle disconcerted and it was a moment or two before he replied. Then he said slowly:

  “The question of an examining magistrate. Perhaps monsieur, too, is of the police?”

  Bobby ignored this. He said:

  “You do not answer my question.”

  “Ah, monsieur, a blind beggar, what does it matter what he knows or thinks he knows?”

  “It might matter a good deal,” Bobby said.

  He took out his wallet and began to finger some of the bank notes it held. Purposely he made them rustle between his fingers. The blind man chuckled once more and Bobby had the impression that for some reason he felt now less disturbed, less uneasy.

  “Money,” he said. “Money. All men’s price. What would it not mean to me? For example: leisure? Freedom from work? From worry?” He stretched himself lazily. “Ah, well,” he said, “but then I never work. As for worry, why should I when I possess nothing? Worry only comes with possessions. The good sunshine and the air? Alas! They are not for sale and when they are there I have them, I, who sit within no four walls, toiling for no master. Freedom? Who has money has a master. Respect? Bah, the respect of fools for folly. Health? Why, when one has money one visits the doctor and then one has neither money nor health. Power?” He chuckled again. “I have it,” he said. “Half the neighbourhood trembles for fear I may tell what I know. Safety? Only the poor are safe, only on the ground are you sure you won’t fall from the ladder. What does money mean except work, worry, responsibility, more work, all that I have fled from all my life as the devil flies from holy water. Monsieur, money is man’s supreme stupidity.”