No; in the very moment when I thought I had got it, it eluded me again.Those perfectly ordinary considerations, of time, position and commonsense, seemed to dispose of my notion completely. Or almost completely.There remained the hole. My conviction that the hole, in one way oranother, had something to do with it was shaken, but not destroyed. And,as I was denied access to the cellar, I rose from the chair in order tomake a further examination of the studio.
And again, though the roof-plane was no longer there, I seemed to seethat circular hole in the middle of its cracked star. I remembered, too,Esdaile's assumption that it was a bullet-hole and his search "high andlow" for the bullet that had made it. But was it necessarily abullet-hole at all? Bullets are not the only things that make holes.When a heavyish mass like two falling men hits something else _en pleinfouet_, can every neighboring scratch or fracture be assigned itsproper cause? There was no getting away from the fact that the bullethad been found elsewhere. Might not some object have fallen from apocket? Or some portion of the plane itself have dropped off? With thepane replaced it seemed useless to speculate.
Nor did my further explorations add much to my knowledge. They consistedof estimating distances and relative positions of things, in an endeavorto arrive at the physical significance of that hole in the floor. It wasno longer in the studio at all that I was interested; all my thoughtswere in that locked chamber below. I felt as annoyed as Monty himselfhad been at all this juggling with the key. But I hardly felt myself atliberty to break my friend's doors.
Nor--this too presently occurred to me--was I quite sure what I ought todo with that ring. Merely to put it back where I had found it seemedrather crass, and whether it should be returned to Rooke or to Mrs.Cunningham herself was a niceish sort of point. I ended by putting itinto my waistcoat pocket.
PART VII
THE KING'S ROAD
I
When Philip Esdaile had put into old William Dadley's hands the framingof two of his pictures I think he had done so largely on compassionategrounds. As you have seen, his real reason for having the old man roundto Lennox Street that afternoon a few weeks ago had had remarkablylittle to do with pictures, but quite a lot to do with a bullet that achild had been found popping in and out of his mouth. But having madeframing his pretext, I suppose he felt bound to give Dadley a job. Ibecame sure of this when, calling at the dusty little shop at eleveno'clock on the following Monday morning, I saw the pictures themselves.I knew enough about Esdaile's work to see in a moment that there was nourgency whatever, and that probably he had not wanted the picturesframed at all. Certainly he could be in no hurry for them. The autumn,or for that matter the following autumn, would be quite time enough.
This being so, I wondered for a moment that he had troubled me aboutthem, but I did not wonder for very long. A former suspicion was renewedin my mind. It seemed to me to confirm Glenfield's prophecy, thatEsdaile, having made as it were impulsive and unconsidered advances tothe rest of us, was about to draw in his horns again. Yet at the sametime he had the appearance of wishing to be on both sides at once--ofkeeping his own counsel, but also of endeavoring to "pump" those fromwhom he was now withdrawing his half-extended confidence. In a word,without expressly asking me to spy out the land for him, he wished meto do so, and trusted to my interest, garrulity or whatnot to report tohim anything I might discover.
Well, had I happened to call on old Dadley before that Sunday afternoonI had spent so remarkably in his studio I dare say I should have done ashe wished. But that hole in the floor put a very different complexion onmatters. He knew about that hole, but he had no suspicion that I nowshared his knowledge. Therefore if he proposed to act independently Idid not see why I should not do the same. He would make use of me, wouldhe? Very well. It rather amuses us to be made use of when we guess theintention, to allow our legs to be pulled with the knowledge that at ourpleasure the position can be reversed. I am very fond of Philip and heof me, but there is no mush about our friendship. We take it keenly andwith relish, even to our long rivalry at the billiard-table. Undoubtedlyhe knew something I didn't know, but on the other hand I thought itlikely that I too had now a minor advantage. He could hardly have knownof the presence of that ring in that hole. He had been round his housecovering up pictures, drawing blinds and removing the key from thecellar door, and would certainly not have left that ring where it washad he known it had been there. It had been put there since he had lastseen the hole. The event, as you will see, showed that I was right inthis, and that in one of his main objects he had broken down badly. _Abon chat bon rat._ I laughed softly.
"Done with you, Philip," I murmured. "I'll send you the packet ofsketches, and you shall know how your precious picture-framing's goingon. But that's all you are going to get for the present."
And so I sought the little shop with the bisected Old Master in thewindow, one half cleaned up like day and the other dingy as night.
Dadley was not doing anything in particular except sitting among hismolding-patterns eating an apple. The door of his workshop beyond stoodopen, and when I told him my errand he led me into these back premises,leaving the greater part of the apple on the shelf beneath his counterbut bringing small portions of it in his gray beard. The pictures weregoing on very nicely, he said, but he was waiting for glass; I wouldn'tbelieve how difficult it was to get glass; like asking for the moon, itwas, trying to buy glass. It was as he talked about the price andscarcity of glass that I drew my own conclusions about those twopictures. Obviously a job given out of kindness. As obviously itfollowed that I myself was being used to serve a turn.
"A fine painter, Mr. Esdaile, it's a pleasure to work for him," the oldman ran on; and I did not reply that in my experience few pleasures inthe world lasted quite so long. I was thinking of other things, thenature of which you may guess at.
For I wanted to know, by no means for the purpose of passing theinformation on to Philip, how Mr. Harry Westbury had fared since I hadlast seen him, and whether his friendship with Inspector Websterprospered. I also wanted to know the latest news of Monty Rooke. Idecided that it was better to begin with Rooke, so did not hesitate toask Dadley whether he had seen him.
"Oh, yes, he was in here last Thursday--no, Wednesday," the old manreplied. "Paspertoos. Six of them, or else eight; no, six; I think theother two are Mr. Hammond's. I can't show you them because they're allglued up in the press. And I can get the glass for small things likethat. It's the large plate that breaks my heart."
"Then Mr. Rooke is working again?" I said. "The last time I saw him hetold me that his removal had rather interrupted his work."
The lids dropped over the kind old eyes. "Yes, sir, and I understand Mr.Rooke's had trouble as well."
This, if he meant Mrs. Cunningham, I did not propose to discuss, and hewent on.
"Well, you get over these things when you're young, but it seems hard atthe time. And troubles seem always to come together in a lump. Isympathize with Mr. Rooke, which some doesn't. He's always been a verypleasant gentleman to me."
"Oh? Who doesn't sympathize with Mr. Rooke?" I asked.
He hesitated for a moment. "Oh--there's a few here and there--but itwill blow over--it will blow over. I think it's blowing over now as amatter of fact."
It was at this point that I suddenly decided on a measure of candor. Hewas a likeable old soul, long past even such innocent relish of contestas that I entertained towards Philip, a lover of peace and the leastmischievous of gentle gossips.
"Do you mean the affair of that parachute that morning?" I asked him. "Iwas there, you know."
His ivy-veined old hand smoothed the edge of his mitering-machine.
"Yes. I know you were," he said. "Yes, I know you were. But I thinkit'll blow over now that Mr. Westbury's taken this turn he has."
"Mr. Westbury? Yes, I remember. What turn has he taken?"
"Well, sir, as a matter of fact, that's what some of us
is waiting tohear," he replied.
II
From the point of view of my profession the story he told me was notwithout interest. I give it for what it may be worth, not as an instanceof mental abnormality, but merely as it bore on our Case.
I have said that Westbury was about thirty-five, which means that he wasstill under thirty when the war broke out. It is no man's business,certainly not mine, to enter into the question whether he should orcould have joined up, nor whether he would have been of much use if hehad. His interest to me lies in the fact that he did not. For all I knowhe may have been of far greater use to his country in his brown checkthan in a khaki jacket, for his experience of his complicated professionwas considerable, and I understand that he became a person of somelittle temporary importance when the commandeering of hotels and otherproperties got fairly into swing. Therefore he did not attest under theDerby Scheme, and his subsequent applications for exemption wereallowed.
I repeat, I wish to be perfectly fair to him. During a few Londonair-raids he probably saw as much of the actuality of war as manythousands of uniformed men who spent their year or two years "inFrance." We see these things a little more clearly now. "In France" maymean much or it may mean very little. Of our millions, I have beeninformed that only about eight per cent. went "over the top," and thatthis eight per cent. consisted largely of the same men over and overagain. Later the gunners' casualties approached those of the infantry,and I believe there was a time when the losses of the Flying Corps weretwenty per cent. per week. Granted that there was no arm that did notsuffer its proportion of loss; but--we know now by whom the brunt of thefighting was borne. Mr. Harry Westbury may claim, if he wishes, that hedid as much of it as many and many another whose allowances werecredited to them at Cox's.
But there was a strain of resentment in his nature, by no means uncommonamong his kind save that he experienced it in an uncommon degree. Imyself had heard him say of our flyers, "They're paid for it, aren'tthey--they know the risks, don't they?" but it went much further thanthat. According to Dadley, he showed suspicion and mistrust towards anywho had given an eye, a limb or life itself. He seemed to think that insome obscure way these people had wronged him. And, Dadley went on, insome cases this mistrust became positive dislike and hate.
"If the war was to begin all over again I fancy Harry'd be in it nexttime," he said. "Speaking for myself, I should say it worried him. Gotit on his mind like. Maybe it's that that's stopped him going about verymuch except to a few places. Sometimes you'd think he'd quarreled withthe whole world."
"From the little I've seen of him I can't say I found him aprepossessing young man," I observed.
"Well, myself, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him," the old mancontinued, with a shake of his head. "Many a man without a leg'shappier than what Harry is. He isn't even the man he was two or threeweeks ago. He thinks everybody's got their knife into him. Nor thatinquest he was on didn't do him much good neither. He's moped andmuttered about it ever since. Talks to himself, he does, up and down thestreets and play-acts dreadful things he's going to do, as you mightsay. Says he won't stand this and that and the other. Any little thingsets him off. Then there was that about that bullet. I expect Mr.Esdaile told you about that?"
"Yes."
"Well, he goes clean off his head about that sometimes. Has the kidsdownstairs--fetches 'em out of bed--and makes 'em tell him it all overand over again. Says somebody tried to murder 'em. Oh, and a whole lotmore nonsense. What he ought to do is to get away into the country for abit, but when the doctor tells him that, he glares and says it's all aconspiracy to get him out of the way so things can be hushed up."
"What things?"
"Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now--gosomewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with allthis muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away fora bit."
"You say a doctor's attending him?"
"Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goesround--Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is--but Harry won't do what hetells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go tobed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couchpulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour togetherstaring out. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writesscores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them.They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories."
"What are the letters about?"
"All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and anotherfor the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's goingdownhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never anyparticular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a manyou've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not muchmore than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on forforty years."
I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not beingsympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"
But at that moment the most astonishingly unexpected thing happened. Acustomer came into his shop. And so, as Dadley grabbed incredulously forhis spectacle case, my question went unanswered.
III
One thing at any rate now seemed fairly certain, namely, that if whatDadley told me was true it was not likely that a man of InspectorWebster's penetration would pay much attention to the mutterings of anincipient megalomaniac. For, if I could guess at the signs at all, itwas megalomania. I have not made a systematic analysis of thoseinfinitely intricate mental states that we speak of conglomerately as"war nerves." I am not prepared to say that one man may bitterly grudgeanother something from the taking of which he himself has drawn back hishand, nor yet (to turn the case the other way round) that there is noton occasion just as heady and overweening an egotism on the part of theenvied man. It is useless to generalize on these matters. It is also notquite decent. The least we can do is to mind our own business, the mostto consider the given instance on its merits. It is simply as yetanother curious by-product of our Case that I am speaking of Westbury.
Quite the most curious thing about it was that he was the only one of usall who had, in the sense of public duty, been wholly and entirely inthe right throughout. But a little reflection showed me that it wasprecisely therein that the germ of his malady lay. It was _because_ ofthis consistent technical rightness that he was now in process ofarrogating to himself all the rightness in the world. No doubt he hadbeen technically right when he had decided that his special knowledge ofestates was of more solid use to his country than his skill at armswould have been. He had been technically right if, in the very uncommoncircumstances, having reason to believe that a pistol had been movedthat should only have been moved by the police, he had taken steps toascertain that it really was a pistol Rooke had carried in his pocket.He had been right when, finding a bullet in his own house, he hadinstantly reported the matter to Inspector Webster. He had been right indemanding a post-mortem; right when Mackwith had all-unconsciouslythwarted this; and oh, how right when, in that Chelsea back street, hehad broken furiously out on me as an accomplice in the suppression ofthings that should have been brought to the light of day! Yes, it wasall this rightness that was precisely the trouble. It is not good forany of us to be right so often as that. Personally, if I am right twicerunning there is no living with me. The real cure for Westbury wouldhave been for him to find himself a few times in the wrong.
So, as I left Dadley's shop, I pictured him sitting there at his bedroomwindow, his furious eyes fixed on Esdaile's roof, his furious heartbrooding on his rightness, and bearing the whole of the burden of ourcollective offense. What a contrast between this just man and ourmalefactor away in the country, Charles Valentine Smithhimself--courting, care-free, and in a danger that appeared to belessening with every hour that passed! Truly the Princes of this Worldseem to have the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory,
and the Westburysto be persecuted like the prophets before them! I could understand oldWilliam Dadley feeling sorry for him. At the same time, I had not onesingle atom of sorrow for him myself.
For we are not ruled by these municipal virtues. We say we are; it is asmuch as our lives are worth to say anything else; but we know better.Wonderful Case, to bring all this out, to present so dramatically thatsingle Question--the first man had to answer it and the last man willhave to answer it--without which there is no society nor state norgovernment at all! Westbury had the whole weight of intellectualapproval--and nothing whatever else! Unreservedly our whole nefariousconspiracy was to be condemned--yet something bade us standunflinchingly by our friends!... I was wiser than I knew when I wrotethat we all do precisely what we want to do and look for reasonsafterwards. And if it be said that Society cannot be run on theselines, the answer is that it is our business to see that it is run. We_have_ to serve God and Mammon though the God be the God of Injusticeand the Mammon the Mammon of Righteousness. We _must_ face both ways,square law with force. There is _no_ escape from worshiping traditioneven when we break it, from giving revolt our acknowledgment even as wetrample it down. The world has got to go on and we to take sides.
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