They climbed out of the miniature ravine in which the Chinese Garden was set. Presently the ruins were before them. ‘Hold on’, said Patricia. ‘There’s the Hermit.’
The Hermit, in a coarse grey gown and with a little book in his hands, was pacing meditatively up and down before a long line of Norman arches on the near side of the ruins – no doubt the cellarium. At each end of his walk he paused for some moments in a devotional attitude. The effect was curiously like that of sentry-go.
‘He does look rather trade-fallen, doesn’t he?’ said Timmy; for the Hermit, though correct in his behaviour, was decidedly more pursy and alcoholic than an anchorite may respectably be. ‘Let’s go and talk to him.’
‘Well,’ said Patricia, ‘it is what Jasper calls out of bounds.’
‘Oh, rot.’ That there is such a thing as discreet observance of the behests of an employer was not a notion which would lodge readily in Timmy’s mind. ‘You needn’t’, he lucklessly added, ‘be scared.’
Patricia, once more darkly reflecting on the Eliots in their character as Barbary apes, tilted her chin and strode forward. When they were a little more than halfway the Hermit caught sight of them. He knelt in prayer.
‘What absolute–’ Timmy’s exclamation was cut short by the unexpected sight of his father. Mr Eliot – or rather Mr Eliot’s head – had appeared with infinite caution from behind a fragment of masonry at the Hermit’s rear; he made a rapid survey of the ground before him, bolted sharply for another place of concealment farther on, and was immediately lost in the advancing shades of evening.
Timmy and Patricia, who had been unwittingly useful in focusing the Hermit’s attention, looked at each other rather blankly. ‘What an extraordinary thing,’ said Timmy. ‘Though daddy does amuse himself at times with playing boy scouts. As I gather Chown thinks, he is a child at heart. What is this ruins business anyway?’
‘The cellarium? Belinda and I have always supposed it to be a laboratory in a quiet way. Trying out explosive formulas they’ve bribed or stolen from other people – that sort of thing.’
‘I say, you do take your proximity to this scandalous racket coolly.’
‘I keep away and get on with my own stuff. It’s you who are all for proximity at the moment.’
‘Quite true. And come on.’ Timmy grabbed Patricia’s arm and advanced farther. The Hermit abandoned prayer and began to thump himself with an ugly-looking flint and to bang his head on the ground. Timmy paused doubtfully. ‘Patricia, don’t you think he’s really and sincerely mortifying himself and all that? It would rather be gatecrashing if he were.’
‘I’m quite sure he’s not. It’s just Jasper’s little joke. You needn’t be scared.’
They went on. When they were within fifteen yards the Hermit abrupted his penitential proceedings and turned towards them. ‘Bundle off!’ he shouted.
They stopped.
‘D’you hear?’ bawled the Hermit. ‘Bundle off, you young bastards, if you don’t want a kick on the ruddy rump.’ He advanced brandishing his chunk of flint menacingly.
‘What an awful man,’ said Timmy. He looked, Patricia thought, not much less belligerent than the Hermit himself. It seemed likely that once more the cloistral calm of Shoon Abbey would be most shockingly disturbed.
But at this moment there came a diversion. Jasper Shoon himself emerged from the cellarium. ‘My dear young friends’, he said advancing and taking each firmly by an arm, ‘the evening air here is not altogether wholesome.’ He led them back to the house. On the terrace they paused and from this discreet distance surveyed the interesting ruins anew; in the half-light they were beginnnig to look convincingly venerable.
‘I cannot tell you’, said Shoon, ‘what the past means to me.’ He paused meditatively. ‘You know, nothing would please me better than the present becoming the past rather more quickly than it commonly does.’
Appleby, wandering the Abbey in quest of Shoon’s Zoffanys, was halted by the melodiously upraised voice of Peter Holme. ‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ Holme was saying. ‘Really better not. It’s the sort of thing that sounds all right in the book, or pleases an audience well enough in good stout melodrama. But in real life, no. Much more embarrassment than satisfaction, I’m sure. Or at least wait until you get back to Rust. Surely a horse-whipping should be a strictly domestic affair.’
There was an inarticulate murmur in reply; Appleby turned into the tribune and found that the person being thus oddly exhorted by Holme was Sir Rupert Eliot. And Rupert was indeed brandishing a whip in a most ferocious manner.
‘Appleby’ – Holme was lounging gracefully on a sofa – ‘do add your entreaties to mine. Eliot here has been handed the black spot again – how much I have always wanted to play in Treasure Island! – and seems determined to beat up his cousin as a result. I am doing my utmost’ – Holme stretched himself lazily – ‘my very utmost to prevent it. For one thing, our nerves are all too frayed. I just don’t want to hear Archie Eliot yelp. Another time, conceivably yes; before dinner and after that dreary Collection, no. Intervene, I beg.’
‘The black spot?’ Appleby turned to Rupert. ‘Another warning?’
‘Another piece of damned foolery.’ With the point of his whip Rupert pointed at a fragment of crumpled newspaper on a table. ‘Shied at me as I was walking down the corridor. I tell you, a good hiding is what the little swine wants. I admit that the proper place of execution would be a public lavatory. But Shoon’s beastly Abbey comes to much the same thing.’
Holme smoothed out the missile; it proved to be a fragment torn from a Sunday paper and was about six inches square. ‘After that young bomb’, he said, ‘it seems distinctly an anticlimax. Even supposing it is Sir Archibald, do you really think you must reply with a whip? What about a drawing-pin on his chair at dinner? Or a particularly tempting sweet filled with ink?’
Rupert snorted. ‘Give it to Appleby,’ he said. ‘Let him use his blasted snooping eyes.’
Without resentment Appleby used his eyes. The fragment had been torn roughly from a page of advertisements. ‘Bargains at a Regent Street shop,’ he said; ‘there seems nothing particularly insulting – nor yet sinister – in that.’ He turned over. ‘Sailings for New Zealand. Hardly significant either… I see.’ He passed the paper back to Holme. ‘The joker was simply after a figure. The Begonia sails on the ninth of December. And found the figure nine, therefore, a lightly sketched spider. Reticent indeed.’ He smiled cheerfully at Rupert. ‘As I murmured before, Annihilation at Nine. Or The Clock Strikes – with emphasis on the final word.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Sir Rupert, have you made a will? You have just under three hours to live.’
Holme was staring at Appleby in mild astonishment. Rupert’s indignation was such that it took him a moment to command the power of speech. ‘If you showed the least sign of making yourself useful’, he said, ‘we might for a day or two tolerate you about. But your sense of humour quite fails to please.’ He snorted again. ‘Do you really think I’m scared?’
‘I think you’re moving that way.’
‘Pah! I tell you I’ve sampled most of the more dangerous sorts of humanity, and Archie’s kind isn’t among them.’
‘Your confidence that your persecutor is Sir Archibald is really uncommonly interesting – chiefly because it is almost completely without a rational basis. Has it occurred to you, I wonder, that it is closely related to your cousin Richard’s conviction some time ago that he was the victim of a sort of kink in the universe? He clung to that notion because he was a bit scared. And now here are you clinging to the notion that it is Archie who is after you.’ Appleby was speaking forcibly and brusquely. ‘While all the time a much likelier person is Shoon.’
Peter Holme whistled: the sound mingled with the clatter of Rupert’s whip as it fell to the floor. He stooped to retrieve it; straightened up again with a face drained of colour. ‘What the devil do you mean?’
‘A murder has been arranged.’ Appleby made the statement le
ss soberly than formerly to Chown. ‘That is my refrain for the rest of this evening. And I assure you that I am really beginning to see that the victim may very well be yourself.’
Rupert’s confidence was plainly wavering. ‘You’ve taken leave of your senses,’ he said shortly.
‘And as a likely murderer I would pick first on our present host. You know the sort of life he led before he came out on top of his racket and set up as a professional eighteenth-century racket? You know that he as good as professes a set philosophy of destruction? A dangerous man, Sir Rupert – so beware!’
Peter Holme, still sprawled on his sofa, was plainly undecided as to whether Appleby’s flamboyance or its effect on Rupert was the oddest part of all this. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘if the plot doesn’t thicken.’
‘Are you talking plots here too?’ Belinda had come into the room. She looked curiously from Rupert to Appleby. ‘John, I think daddy really has taken leave of his senses at last. Guess what he’s been doing.’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I have quite enough guessing on hand – and so has Sir Rupert. Out with it.’
‘He’s been discussing the plot of one of his books with Jasper.’
‘He’s been what?’ Rupert, staring gloomily into the fire, had swung sharply round.
‘Arguing about just what happened in Grand Tarantula. They’ve even made a bet on it. Nothing so odd has ever happened before. I’ve never known daddy do other than shy off discussion of any of the old books. And it’s stranger because I believe he has decided not at all to like Jasper. He even disparages his pigs.’
‘Dear me. I can’t really imagine your father disparaging anything. He’s much too amiable.’ Appleby shook a bewildered head.
Belinda laughed. ‘But yes. He tells me he’s taken a secret prowl round the Tamworths, and that they won’t do. They lack finish. Like Peter in drawing-room comedy.’
Holme sighed softly. ‘It’s too much. Mystery. Dark speeches. And now people being rude again.’ He lounged to his feet. ‘To hard words I am resigned. But I do think it time the mystery was cleared up. It’s becoming as lowering as a record run of Eliot-cum-Moule.’
‘You won’t have long to wait.’ Appleby too had got to his feet and was looking at the clock. ‘The point of maximum obfuscation has been reached.’ He turned from Holme to Rupert. ‘The sands are running out.’ His glance travelled on to Belinda. ‘And the crisis, Belinda, has been announced by you.’
PART FOUR
A Death in the Desert
1
Evening, like a gallant enfolding his lady in some fine-spun shawl of Kashmir or Ispahan, dropped its shadows over England. At Rust in the apartments of Mrs Timothy Eliot, where time stood so strangely still, the sun retreated from its diurnal vain assault and Mrs Jenkins, lighting the lamps and bringing out the tatting, prepared for her mistress the restrained entertainment of a Victorian night. The shutters were up in Snug and Warter; in Low Swaffham it was time to open the Five Mows of Barley; around the church at Wing the Martyrs slipped from their torments with a yawn and a stretch, the Fathers laid down their pens and idled, heaven and hell blended and faded, Judgement was suspended until the dawn. Mrs Birdwire’s Zulus, building the little camp-fire which was allowed them as a Sunday treat, mingled their strange exclaiming music with the growls of the unslumbering La Hacienda dogs; Horace Benton, overtaken by the skirts of darkness on the London road, leant back in his hired limousine and gave himself to the building up of vengeful and sadistic fantasies about Dr Bussenschutt. On these and on the temperance institute at Pigg, on Caedmon’s Cowshed at Little Limber and on the blanket-factory at King’s Cleve, the deepening twilight fell. One further heave eastwards and rural England would be in bed, drawing about itself an eiderdown of stars.
Dusk was over the Shoon Abbey. The sun, for a last moment touching the tip of the west tower like a pennant on an admiral’s staff, had expanded its last weak beams on air. About the broken buttresses and bogus tombs the shadows were darkening. The glimmer of the ornamental waters which wound in the exactest taste about the estate was fading on the sight. A browner horror possessed the groves, the grots, and the Gardens of Idea. At no hour was Jasper Shoons fantasy more impressive. For the Abbey – in this unlike the lady in Gilbert’s song – looked its most venerable in the dusk with the light behind it.
Within, this glide of England towards the cone of night was apprehended in a glance at a watch or in the sound, caught amid a hum of talk, of the chiming hour. Seven o’clock was treading hard upon the heels of six; nine o’clock must come. And at nine o’clock there might be another hoax as ingeniously alarming as the affair of the middle black; there might be this or there might be some less harmless variation of the Spider’s theme. According to Appleby a murder had been arranged – nothing less. And Gerald Winter, contemplating the party which was now drifting about the Abbey as it had drifted about Rust, reflected on this expectation with both a troubled and a puzzled mind. In the beginning the affair of the Spider had seemed to him a joke, and as the affair developed he had been reluctant to shed the conviction that basically it remained just that. The episode of the middle black had been a joke of an effective if brutal kind; the susequent threats against Rupert Eliot had all the appearance of being the same sort of thing. Try as he might he could see nothing but a malicious japing, desultory in its methods and random in its choice of victim, in what had occurred. To this, murder seemed the unlikeliest of sequels. And yet here was Appleby preparing for murder with an unnerving mixture of confidence and professional indifference – rather like a busy obstetrician looking forward to a normal delivery.
All unconsciously, Winter frowned with something of Kermode’s ferocity at Miss Cavey… Not with indifference. In Appleby’s attitude within the last hour or so there could be detected what was definitely satisfaction. That he really believed that murder was to be attempted Winter was convinced; that he was not altogether confident of his ability to prevent the attempt Winter shrewdly suspected; nevertheless he had the air of one who waits for the spin of a coin on the satisfactory basis of heads I win and tails you lose. Winter, who had formed the opinion that Appleby was by no means an irresponsible person, was bewildered and in some suspense.
Everywhere the hum of talk. Presently there was to be another boring inspection of the resources of the Abbey, and after this there was to be a supper before the Rust contingent departed. But at the moment there was conversation. The remaining Friends of the Venerable Bede, who had not mixed too well at first with the forces of the Spider, were now being affable and indeed discreetly instructive. A large man, who turned out to be a microchemist, had delighted Mrs Moule by taking her away and showing her an experiment on so small a scale as to be totally invisible; one of his colleagues, who dealt – in Shoon’s phrase – in much more extensive effects, was entertaining Hugo Toplady with a discussion of some topic the cataclysmic nature of which might be guessed at from the violent gestures with which it was illustrated. Everyone seemed tolerably at ease except Rupert Eliot; his eyes were straying frequently to the clock, and once Winter was startled to see Appleby shake his head at him in a particularly portentous and foreboding way: Appleby, who denied the significance of mere malice in whatever mystery was going forward, seemed to be engaged in the quiet practice of it himself.
Talk. It had been going on for days. He had contributed more than his fair share himself. But now it seemed to Winter like a meaningless music issuing from a wireless-set – listened to only because at any moment it may be faded out for some curt announcement of crisis or catastrophe. It was with vague irritation that he observed Appleby himself as having joined the chatterers. In a remote corner of the tribune he had been for some time in sustained colloquy with Bussenschutt. These two had now been joined by Mr Eliot, and the conversation was clearly as brisk as it affected to be idle.
‘It was remarked by Aristotle’, said Dr Bussenschutt, ‘that nothing more certainly promotes clear thinking than to have hold of the r
ight end of the stick from the start. In considering an action or series of actions let us always begin by asking: “To what does this conduce?”’ Bussenschutt beamed on Appleby and Mr Eliot alike. ‘A commonplace reflection, but I am moved to it by considering that it must be the grand principle of each of your professions.’
Mr Eliot, although disposed to some absence of mind, nodded his head in agreement. It was evident that he approved of the conversation of Bussenschutt, finding it as fluent as Winter’s but with less unacademic levity. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when one knows the goal to which things are moving one is at once much surer of one’s ground.’ He stared absently once more at one of Shoon’s magnificent log fires.
Appleby nodded. ‘To know the agent and his mechanism while remaining in the dark as to his motive can be disconcerting. But on the other hand to have hold only of that part of the stick which is labelled motive can be very disconcerting too. In either case action is difficult.’
‘In your responses to my observation’, said Bussenschutt – and it was disturbing, Appleby reflected, to note how swifly intelligent the cold blue eye which brooded above his ponderous manner of utterance – ‘I am conscious of undercurrents of hidden meaning. A cryptic element which it is a temptation to probe.’
Mr Eliot laughed a shade nervously. ‘If our talk is cryptic let us break off – as indeed we must presently do to inspect the Shoon Press. You speak of my profession. In my sort of story nothing is more tedious than prolonged dark talk. It is a matter of good manners, I suppose. For one’s characters to converse together – even to fence together – in a mysteriously understanding way while the reader must stand excluded in a corner is really rather boorish.’ He sighed. ‘I sometimes fail to detect such little discourtesies until my proofs come to me paged up. It used to be difficult to persuade Wedge of the necessity of alteration. Not that Wedge is not a capital fellow and most liberal in matters of expense. But once a book is put in production there is a time-table. He sets great store on the time-table and I have no doubt he is right.’ Mr Eliot, sunk in the recesses of an enormous chair, seemed disposed to vague communicativeness. ‘I would not disoblige Wedge in any way. That is why I mean to fulfil my present contract. Three more novels and the Spider – in what I believe is Timmy’s favourite phrase – will be led into the wings.’
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