Complete works of a e w.., p.63
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 63
VII. FIRST-HAND NEWS OF CORINNE
WITH THE COMING of June, that year, London broke into flowers and warmth. Its old palaces mellowed a little more in the golden sunlight, and something of its old gaiety hesitatingly returned to it. The striped awnings once more decorated the balconies and from the lighted windows of a thousand houses, music and a babel of young voices kept the nights awake. Where once the waltz had swooned now was heard the moan of the saxophone and the fox-trot’s lilt. Public dinners resumed their tyranny and again the voice of the toast-master was heard in the land.
Strickland dropped into his old place with an ease which rather surprised him. If youth, a little more flambuoyant perhaps, a little more avid of enjoyment than it used to be, was inclined to shoulder him out of the way without much ceremony as one of the generation which had made such a dung-heap of the world, he, for his part, had enough sympathy and enough sense of humour to step aside. If the youngsters could do better, good luck to them!
Meanwhile he went where the world went. To Epsom, for instance, on that day of blinding sunshine when Captain Cuttle won the Derby. There, for the first time, he saw Corinne the famous dancer, amidst a group of people in a private stand by the winning-post.
“Which is she?” he asked with a start when her presence there was announced to him. In the resumption of old and placid interests, the events of Mogok had faded in his recollections; his fears had grown remote and a little ridiculous. But he was curious enough to wish quite positively to see her.
“The girl in the yellow frock,” said his informant.
Strickland looked but was none the wiser. For since she wore a small, tightly-fitting hat which covered her ears and hid her eyes, a pair of orange-coloured cheeks, and a scarlet gash for a mouth, he was totally unable to distinguish her from any other of the thousands of young women who gladdened the racecourse with their company.
There, too, a little later on, he stumbled upon Lady Ariadne, who, Bohemian that she was, had preferred to picnic with her lover amongst the other gipsies on the hill.
“Strickland,” she cried at the top of her voice. She was sitting on the grass, munching a sandwich out of a paper bag, looking delightfully cool and very much at home. Julian Ransome, on the other hand, laughed a little affectedly as Strickland approached. He seemed to be saying: “For once this is an amusing experience.”
“Strickland, I have written to you,” cried Ariadne, “and of course you’ll come.”
Strickland shook his head at her warily.
“I’ll see what it is I am to come to, before I promise to come,” he replied.
Ariadne made a grimace at him first and kissed her hand to him afterwards.
“How hot you look in those ridiculous clothes,” she said, and Strickland, who had been inclined to think that he was looking his best in a new silk hat and a new slim cut-away black coat with a rose in the buttonhole, walked away reduced to his proper proportions.
Ariadne’s idea of a letter was a line of half a dozen words scribbled with a pencil across the corner of a holograph invitation to a public dinner. The letter was signed by Lord Culalla, a young and wealthy Australian who had been lately raised to the peerage and was making a stir in the new world of London. It bade him to a banquet at the Semiramis Hotel given on behalf of the Choral Benevolent Society.
“I have arranged your seat. A.F.” This was the extent of Ariadne’s letter.
Strickland found it upon his table when he returned from Epsom. He sat down and dutifully wrote out a cheque and an acceptance of the invitation. Whilst he was closing the envelope he became aware that a second letter had arrived for him by that afternoon’s post. And the sight of it gave him a queer little shock. For the stamp was Burmese and the postmark Mogok.
It seemed to him a little odd that the letter should have reached him on the very day when he had just seen Corinne, and so immediately after seeing her. He hesitated a little before he opened it.
“After all, it’s his affair now,” he said to himself, and it was modesty which prompted this reflection. If there were peril for Ariadne in this affair of Maung H’la and Corinne, it was Julian Ransome’s business to stand between her and it, not his. The very same day when Ariadne had told him of her engagement, he had made his plan; to stand aside and wish all well for the young couple upon their gallant adventure. He meant to keep within the limits of that plan, close within them — ah, if he could! But Julian Ransome had not a suspicion of any danger portending. If he was to be forewarned, then Strickland himself must know.
He tore open the envelope, and turned to the signature. As he expected, the writer was Captain Thorne, and he had some startling news to give.
First of all he repeated his apology for ever having seemed to doubt Strickland’s story. A man answering exactly to the Colonel’s description had been seen upon the jungle road fifteen miles or so from Mogok, about the very time when the Colonel was buying his ruby. The stranger stopped the public motor and rode to Thabeikyin, whence he travelled, no doubt as a deck-passenger, on the very boat which carried Strickland down to Mandalay. For he had not been seen since. Then the letter went on:
“Maung H’la’s body was found in the jungle two days after you left, and not half a mile from the spot where you waited in your tree. Mr. Brain, of the Forest Department, found it and the tiger at the same time, and was fortunate enough to kill the tiger. As for Maung H’la, it is supposed that the tiger killed him. At all events, nothing could be proved to the contrary. Brain, however, thinks—”
And then came, for Strickland, who remembered well the caution of Captain Thorne, a most illuminating alteration. After he had written “Brain, however, thinks—” Thorne had broken off and scratched the words out, yet left them legible. So the careful Officer of Police said what he meant to say and committed himself to no statement at all. Strickland could not but smile at so ingenious a way of conveying to him that Maung H’la died by another agency than a tiger’s claws. The letter continued, indeed, even more explicitly:
“His neck was broken. And of course a gentle pat of the tiger’s paw would have broken it, just as easily as — say, the sort of club your stranger was carrying. I hold no views upon the matter. Maung H’la was certainly mauled by the tiger. So no case could lie. But the greatest sportsman who ever shot big game in Burma did write that there could not be a greater fallacy than the old superstition that a tiger never ate anything not killed by himself.” This last sentence was underlined.
There the letter ended, and there was the truth uttered in Thorne’s very own special and particular way. Maung H’la had been caught up and murdered in the jungle on the very night when Strickland was sitting out on his machan, in the tree, and not half a mile from where he watched; had been murdered silently and suddenly, and by that grim Satan with the club in his hand, perhaps — nay, almost certainly, only a few minutes before he had stood out in the glade with the moonlight glistening upon his eye-. Strickland sat with the letter in his hands, and all his forebodings crowding back into his mind. The tremendous event! That is what he had called it — aye, even before it had happened. And here was the loom of it once more in the sky like the glare of a fire on land to a sailor in the dark of the seas. Here it was threatening Corinne the dancer, whose gay plumage had helped to brighten Epsom that afternoon, and through her friendship, reaching out towards the sacred person of Ariadne Ferne — involving her, perhaps, in a dreadful scandal which even she could not carry off.
There was a knock upon the door, and Strickland’s servant announced that Mr. Julian Ransome would like to see him. Strickland jumped up with alacrity. Here was the very man to whom this mystery must be confided.
“Show him in,” he cried, and Julian Ransome was ushered into the room.
He was a tall, dark young man with a pair of keen grey eyes, a little stiff in the back, perhaps, a little pompous in manner, too. But these characteristics, no doubt, were the outward and visible signs of a political career in the making.
“Back from Epsom already?” said Strickland genially. “You have left the moke and the coster’s cart at the door, I suppose. Shall I send down someone to look after it?”
“We only hired it for the day,” answered Ransome, falling in not very easily with Strickland’s humour. “I have come to see you about that dinner at the Semiramis Hotel on behalf of the Choral Benevolent Society.” He raised a forefinger in the air as if he were addressing a public meeting. “Ariadne is very anxious that you should go. A great friend of hers, Culalla, is taking the chair. She wants to make the dinner a success.”
“I’m going,” Strickland answered. He pointed grimly to the envelope stamped and addressed upon his table. “The Banqueting Room of the Semiramis Hotel is the modern synonym for Hounslow Heath.”
Julian Ransome was at once lost in reflection. He stroked his smoothly-shaven face, his eyes were aloof.
“What’s the matter?” Strickland inquired, and he was forced to repeat his question, before Ransome, with a laugh of deprecation, shook himself out of his abstraction.
“I was wondering whether I could use that phrase on a platform,” he said. “In my dreadful calling one goes scouting for epigrams, like a seagull after a meal.”
“It’s not a very good one,” said Strickland.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Ransome returned. “With epigrams, as with human beings, the good are not always the most useful.”
“No doubt,” said Strickland, and now he, too, had fallen into an abstraction, with his letter spread out before his eyes.
This was the moment to relate his story, and hand over his trust to its proper guardian. He was sure of it. Therefore he had absently said just now, “No doubt!” Yet doubt had been growing upon him none the less ever since Ransome had entered the room. He imagined himself telling his story. How vaporous and fantastical it would sound It was an account of his moods rather than a statement of facts. And would his moods make any appeal to Julian Ransome? Ariadne’s own explanation of how her engagement came about in the studio at Chelsea, showed him as a composed, practical, matter-of-fact young man, not at all inclined to take shares in a fancy; and he left just that impression of himself independently on John Strickland’s mind.
“Won’t he treat the whole story as mere moonshine?” he asked himself; and he admitted ruefully that moonshine did in any case enter largely into it.
The facts were few enough — the quest and murder of Maung H’la by the alarming stranger and some vague connection of him through Maung H’la with Ariadne’s friend Corinne.
“Even if he listens seriously,” Strickland’s speculations ran on, “wouldn’t Ransome be just the man to take the fatal step of trying to exercise authority over Ariadne to make her break off her friendship with the dancer?”
Perhaps, after all, he had so much authority
In his perplexities Strickland asked a question directly.
“Do you know Corinne?”
There was just a perceptible pause before Ransome answered.
“Of course I do.”
“Is she French?”
“No, English. Corinne is a name.”
The answers were short. Corinne was clearly a subject which Mr. Ransome did not wish to improve. Strickland, however, pursued it.
“What’s your opinion of her?”
The pause was now even more perceptible.
“She is a friend of Ariadne’s,” he replied at last.
Strickland nodded his head.
“And then?”
Ransome took a step nearer to the table, and plunging his hands into his pockets, faced his questioner.
“And then — once more — Corinne is a friend of Ariadne’s,” he said in a firm and even voice.
Strickland laughed cordially. He could have wished for no other reply from the future guardian of the Trust. He would transfer the charge of it now and here. He picked up his letter to begin his story, when Ransome must needs spoil altogether the effect which he had produced and check the words on Strickland’s lips.
“All that has got to end, of course,” he continued. “I have let it go on. But it won’t do.”
Well, Strickland reflected, Ariadne had herself foreseen that changes must come. During the first years she was to make the pace, afterwards Ransome was to go ahead. Only, if he sought to take the lead too soon he might spoil a fine race altogether.
“It will end in the natural order of things, no doubt,” said Strickland.
“Sooner than that,” Julian Ransome answered.
“Have you ever known Ariadne deliberately to drop a friend?” Strickland asked.
“Everything must have a beginning,” Ransome retorted easily as he walked away to the hearth-rug.
Strickland thoughtfully folded up his letter and put it away in a drawer. He might be right and he might be wrong. But it seemed now to him that Ransome would use the story of Maung H’la’s end and its menace to Corinne prematurely, rashly, and set up Ariadne still more publicly as Corinne’s champion and associate.
“You can form your own opinion of Corinne, Colonel Strickland,” said Ransome from the hearth-rug. “For you are going to meet her yourself.”
Strickland swung round in his chair and stared at his visitor.
“It’s the first I have heard of it,” he exclaimed. Ransome smiled.
“I should have thought you knew Ariadne well enough to realise that the first anybody hears of anything is after she has decided that it shall happen. When this bore of a dinner is over, we are all to go on to the ‘Noughts and Crosses.’”
“Good God, what’s that?” cried Strickland. “A public-house in the King’s Road?”
Julian Ransome looked at him with pity. During the last three months, however, Strickland had been getting used to that look upon the faces of the younger generation.
“No,” Ransome explained very seriously and patiently. “The ‘Noughts and Crosses’ is the newest and brightest and best of the Night Clubs. The ‘Noughts’ stand for the men, you see, and the ‘Crosses’ for the women. A pronounced humorist, who has written a book, invented the name. The cooking is excellent, the one and only Rudelli manages it — and Corinne dances there.”
Strickland jumped up with an eagerness which surprised his companion.
“Does she, indeed? I shall be introduced to her then?”
“You certainly will.” Ransome gazed reflectively at the Colonel as he added with an air of deprecation, “But, perhaps, you would be wiser not to entertain too high hopes.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Strickland assured him. “But even the most courted of damsels may throw a pitying word to an antediluvian curiosity.”
Ransome was very gentle with him. Very gentle and patient and courteous, and if his sense of humour was not very highly developed, one had no right to feel a disappointment.
“You have not quite grasped my meaning,” he explained. “There is a Spaniard, Leon Battchilena. You will no doubt meet him at the dinner, too. For he is, according to his friends, a remarkable musician Had he been a professional according to his friends — Paderewski must have taken to the oboe for very shame. For myself,” and suddenly Julian Ransome’s cheeks flamed and his voice grew violent, “I think he is the most unspeakable bounder I ever came across. In any company he must bear down everyone. Flashy and vain, but for the women he would never be allowed. He must be in love with the very latest favourite. That’s his creed and principle. Publicity in love, you understand. Corinne’s the latest favourite. So everyone must be forced to say, ‘See that man? That’s Battchilena. He’s in love with Corinne.’”
“And Corinne responds?” Strickland asked.
“If the latest favourite doesn’t respond,” Ransome answered, “Battchilena proposes passionately to blow out his brains upon her hearth-rug. They fall for it. He knows the kind of woman he pursues — none better”; and suddenly Ransome brought his fist down upon the mantelshelf.
“It’s all got to end,” he declared, and with a word of farewell, he passed out of the room.
Strickland remained for a while plunged in perplexity and distress. Not by that hot spirit was the dimly shadowed peril to be exorcised. Ariadne could always be guaranteed to match spirit with spirit. At the risk of playing the odious part of Mr. Busybody, he himself must after all figure in the cast. There had been a woman who died. Yes, Thorne had spoken her name to him in the jungle road just outside Mogok, had advised him to look up the details of the inquest. He had even forgotten the name of that woman — so dim and fanciful had his premonitions become to him during these last months. But as he sat there and recalled that edge of the road, and his motor-car stopping at Thorne’s signal, and Thorne’s approach to the side of the car, Thorne’s words returned to him too — and the name. Yes, the name as well. He would set about that work in the morning.
He rose up greatly relieved and rang for his servant. But there remained with him still a little surprise at Ariadne’s choice of a husband. He could not quite reconcile the man, as he saw him, with Ariadne’s account of him. But, of course, he reasoned, the only people who knew the truth of men were the women to whom they made love; and the women never told until they had quarrelled.
VIII. ELIZABETH CLUTTER’S MISTAKE
THE NUMBER OF a bachelor’s clubs increases as imperceptibly as the tale of his years. One of them he really uses; he occasionally lunches at a second; and at the others he gets his coat brushed if he happens to pass the door. It was towards the second kind of club that John Strickland walked about the hour of luncheon — a small club housed in a small old mansion in a quiet street behind a roaring thoroughfare. It was not identified with any one profession. Indeed, a catholicity in its membership was the chief reason of its existence. Cabinet Ministers in distress could take a meal there safe from the importunities of their followers, and newspaper editors without being pestered to reveal their secrets.
