Complete works of a e w.., p.71
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 71
“Couldn’t he be sent back?” she asked and looked away, a little ashamed of her question. “I know it sounds horrible and callous, and yet—” her voice trailed away.
Strickland shook his head.
“The French authorities would have to move, and would they? Officially no doubt Clutter’s dead, and we have no evidence to prove that he isn’t. You are convinced that he’s still alive, so am I, so is Ariadne, so is Battchilena. But what do our convictions amount to?”
“Nothing,” Ariadne agreed; and they all fell to silence.
Strickland found himself wondering for the hundredth time how strong the case for Archie Clutter actually was, the case of Clutter versus Corinne. It might be a help to know. If it was a weak case, why, a word might be dropped in an influential quarter, some steps of an unofficial kind might be taken to warn off Archie Clutter. But on the other hand there were the hints of the cautious Captain Thorne of the Burma police. Clutter’s case could hardly be a weak one. Still, to know would be valuable.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question or two?” he said abruptly to Corinne.
“Not a bit,” she answered. “Let me light a cigarette first!”
She took an inconceivable time, however, over that simple act, bending down her face and holding the match in the cup of her hands as though a gale were blowing.
“Now,” she said briskly, and she sat forward in her chair.
The first question certainly gave her not a moment of embarrassment.
“Did you know before yesterday that Archie Clutter had escaped?”
“I hadn’t an idea of it,” she said.
“Yet the moment I told my story about the man in the jungle, Battchilena had no doubt about his identity. Nor had you when he repeated it to you.”
“That’s quite true,” Corinne agreed. “But you had described Archie Clutter. Leon saw him standing against the wall in the banqueting-room.”
“But you had never seen him in your life. Nor had Battchilena. You couldn’t have — either of you. Clutter was sentenced ten years ago.”
Corinne flushed a little. She sat a little further forward.
“Elizabeth had often spoken of him to me. Their life together had been quarrelsome. She was very unhappy about him. Oh, I seemed to know him. Your description was enough.”
“For Battchilena too?”
“I had passed it on to Leon, no doubt.”
Strickland moved restlessly. The explanation was to him too weak for words. Even Ariadne, in spite of her loyalty, wore an air of discomfort. But it passed at once when Corinne added:
“Of course I knew he was going to try to escape.”
“Oh, you did?” Strickland exclaimed.
“To be sure, I did,” she returned in surprise at his question. It seemed that she expected him to be aware of that.
“How did you know?” he asked.
A letter came—”
“From him?”
“No! From a man in Dutch Guiana. There is a little band of people there who make it their business to assist in escapes. The Brethren of the Coast, they are called. This man was one of them. He wanted money for Archie.”
Once more Corinne had climbed on to solid ground. She was speaking the truth now — not a doubt of it. That letter had arrived.
“And money was sent?” Strickland asked.
There followed just a moment’s pause.
“I suppose so. Of course it wasn’t my affair. I hadn’t money to send, anyway. But certainly Elizabeth said she meant to forward all that the man wanted.”
“But she never told you that she had forwarded it.”
Corinne wrinkled her forehead and was at pains to belabour her recollections.
“I don’t think so. At all events I don’t remember.”
“And when did this letter come?”
Corinne did not answer that question at all. The colour rose into her face. She looked at Strickland with defiance, as though she feared a trap and meant not to tumble into it. It appeared to him that in a moment she might break into a storm of tears or flame into a passion; and both possibilities he equally dreaded.
“You see, it’s a time problem we have to consider,” he made haste to explain. “Elizabeth Clutter died two years ago. The money, then, was sent more than two years ago. Yet Clutter only reaches Burma six months ago and England practically yesterday. It looks as if he had made some port of Venezuela or Colombia and worked his passage either westwards through the Panama Canal or eastwards round the Cape. It looks, in a word, as if the money had never reached him.”
“We never really expected that it would,” Corinne replied.
“It might have stayed with the man who wrote for it? Yes, I see that.”
Strickland turned over that possibility carefully in his mind. To secure the addresses of the convicts’ relations and obtain money from them on the excuse of providing opportunities of escape — there was nothing improbable in a trade of that kind springing up on the edge of French Guiana.
“He was sentenced to twenty-one years, too,” Strickland reflected aloud. “The longer the sentence the less danger to the trade. Yes.”
Very likely the money had been sent. Very likely it had been stolen by the recipient. It was very possible, in the alternative, that it had been actually used for its intended purpose but that the opportunity to escape had needed an elaborate construction. The case of Clutter versus Corinne might not be so shameful after all. It might turn out at the worst to be a case for damages rather than punishment.
Why, then, need she spoil the more attractive picture into which her pretty features were beginning to shape themselves by suddenly saying: “It was just three months before Elizabeth Clutter died that the letter came. I remember its coming now.”
The date, indeed, was as good a date as Strickland could wish for. What he had dreaded was a date which had immediately preceded Elizabeth Clutter’s death, or perhaps the same date. The letter demanding money for Archie Clutter’s escape arriving in the morning, for instance, and Elizabeth Clutter dying suddenly that night. The date was very well — yes. But how could she have forgotten at all so noticeable an event as the delivery of that letter? And if she had so clean forgotten it, why should she suddenly remember it?
“It looked, didn’t it,” he asked himself, “as if she had held back her statement until she was sure that my object in asking it meant no danger to her?”
He spoke aloud in a musing voice:
“Three months, eh?”
And he looked up at her. And he knew that she was lying.
Her eyes were fixed brightly upon him. Her lips were parted; her whole face one eager question: “Is he believing me? Am I putting it over him?”
She was not, and now would not. The letter had been delivered, yes. But three months before Elizabeth Clutter died — no! Archie Clutter’s case against Corinne became all at once appallingly serious. Strickland was at pains, however, to conceal his disbelief. For the trouble in all this affair for him was Ariadne’s loyalty to her friend. The argument racing through his mind ran thus:
“I can’t prove to Ariadne that Corinne’s lying. Even if I did, it would probably make no difference. But I can’t. I can only say that I believe she is. Ariadne will then sweep me out of their councils as one of the prejudiced and a relic from the days of Mr. Disraeli “ — that phrase stung a little even after three months. “She and Corinne will put their heads together, and Heaven only knows what will come of that!”
He was careful, therefore, to accept Corinne’s answer without so much qualification as a movement or a look could imply.
“I suppose, then, that you were to hold Elizabeth Clutter’s fortune more or less in trust, on the chance of Archie’s escape,” he said gently.
“A share of it,” Corinne returned quickly. She was prepared for this point in the discussion. “You see, he couldn’t claim it under his own name if it had been left to him, and he had escaped.”
“No; I see that,” Strickland agreed.
“But there didn’t seem the slightest possibility that he could escape,” Corinne pleaded; and though she tried to keep a note of indignation out of her voice she was not quite able so to do. There was a contrariety in things which she ought not to have been expected to expect. The world seemed banded together to cause her anxiety and trouble.
“Another eleven years, and he would have been free,” Strickland said.
They had slipped into an evasive discussion of the unmentionable fact, known to them all, that the fortune had gone. The winds of twelve months had scattered it to its last guinea.
“Yes, but even then he couldn’t have left the colony,” replied Corinne.
“Are you sure of that?”
“It’s the law A sentence of more than seven years carries with it perpetual residence.”
Corinne, no doubt, had studied the code under which Archie Clutter was imprisoned. Strickland did not dispute the statement.
“And in eleven years I should have made money again,” she continued confidently. “It would have been at his disposal.”
Ariadne Ferne broke in almost for the first time upon the argument.
“Oh, if I was only rich!” she cried, drumming with her fists upon the table.
For the moment Strickland thanked God that she was not. She would have tumbled her money into Corinne’s lap and it would have gone the way of Elizabeth Clutter’s.
“Ariadne!” said Corinne, her face lighting up with a smile of affectionate gratitude, and she laid her hand upon her friend’s and squeezed it.
Strickland had one more question to ask, and the most difficult of all.
“Listen, Corinne. We are not judges,” he said gently. “All we want is to save you from trouble. But one can’t do that if one’s groping in the dark. So tell me. Archie Clutter made a long journey to reach Maung H’la. For a man without money as he was, a difficult journey and probably not without hardships.”
“To him?” asked Corinne. “After eight years in Cayenne?”
“He went out of his way, at all events,” Strickland resumed. “That he knew of his wife’s death, of the inquest, of her bequeathing her fortune to you, can’t be doubted. Well, then, answer me this, Corinne: Was there any information very serious to you which Maung H’la could have given to Archie Clutter?”
The colour ebbed slowly out of Corinne’s face.
“But, obviously, Maung H’la gave him none,” she stammered.
“What makes you say that, Corinne?”
“Maung H’la, you say, was killed.”
“Yes.”
“Why was he killed except because he gave no information, having none to give?”
Strickland, however, would not accept the argument.
“Think of the man Clutter,” he objected. “His mad attack upon the Frenchman in the hunting-box. And his existence afterwards in Cayenne.” And the worst of that had been whispered only to Mr. Ricardo that morning and was quite unsuspected by these three people in the road-side garden. “He wouldn’t set a high premium on human life, would he? Suppose that he had got just the information he wanted from Maung H’la! Suppose that he had caught him up in the jungle and frightened it out of him! What would be his next move? To slip back quite unnoticed into England and use it. As he would have done but for the chance — chance, I call it.” And his eyes rested upon Ariadne’s face. “But upon my soul, I could find a better word — that I from my machan in the tree saw him in the moonlight. And if he wanted secrecy and to walk unsuspected in the dark, what surer way could he have taken than the way he did take — the way of murder—”
He broke off with a cry of apology, for Corinne suddenly swayed in her chair, with her head loose upon her neck. But she was of stouter stuff than her lover Battchilena. Strickland’s cry quickened the spirit in her. She more than mastered her moment of weakness, for she sprang to her feet, her face uplifted, her hands clenched at her sides.
“I won’t believe that,” she said in a bold, clear voice, “Maung H’la told him nothing, for Maung H’la had nothing to tell.”
She stood in the sunlight, a brave, passionate figure in her simple straw-coloured frock, tense from the insteps of her slender feet in their scarlet shoes to the crown of her head. She flung out her defiance. Strickland at that moment could not but admire her. A liar she might be, a criminal she might be, but she had in the last resort the fine gift of courage. She could run, but, pressed, she could turn at bay. She evoked a response at that moment from the deeps of Strickland’s character. He saw in that glimpse of her the girl of whom the prima donna had spoken yesterday night, who had subdued herself to the drudgery of her art in order to achieve. He understood what in her had made its strong appeal to the chivalry of Ariadne Ferne.
The moment of revelation passed. Her frame relaxed. She changed into a disconsolate, wistful stripling before their eyes.
“But I should be glad if this terror could pass away,” she said in a small voice.
“I shall help you,” Strickland said with more warmth in his voice than he had yet exhibited. “Listen, Corinne! I shall find out this man Clutter.”
Ariadne moved sharply. A little cry of objection broke from her.
“There’s nothing else we can do,” he argued. “Let me once find him! Something can be arranged.”
He spoke with a good deal more of confidence than he felt.
“Thank you,” said Corinne, and compelling a smile to light up her face, she daintily curtsied.
“Meanwhile I confess,” he exclaimed, “I was wrong last night when I arranged our picnic. We will go back together to your house, Corinne. We’ll show the world that you have friends.”
They had met as he had arranged at Putney Bridge, but Ariadne Ferne had insisted that he should send his car home, and she should drive them in her little open car with a dickey behind. Strickland sat again in the dickey with a new question agitating his mind.
“Shall I be in time? Can I find this man before he strikes again?”
Not for anything would he have allowed a. doubt to peep out of his eyes, or to be audible in his words. But sitting behind, as the little car with its aluminium bonnet streaked past the heather-purple commons and the pine woods, slid in and out of the traffic in Esher and Kingston, and climbed over Coombe Hill, he could give his perplexities rein. He had one clue at all events to the whereabouts of Archie Clutter — the address of the agency in Shaftesbury Avenue which had supplied him to the Semiramis Hotel.
“Shall I be in time? Shall I be in time?”
The words beat themselves out to the pulsation of the engine.
Ariadne drove them up to the door of the Doll’s House at half-past four in the afternoon.
“Come in and have some tea,” said Corinne earnestly. She had no wish at that moment to be alone.
Ariadne nodded to Strickland, and obediently he said:
“I should love to.”
Corinne opened her door and went in. Ariadne at the side of her car was busy apparently with its gear-handles. Strickland stepped to her side.
“Can I help?”
“Yes.”
Ariadne did not turn her face towards him at all. Nor was there anything the matter with her gear-handles. But she said in a low voice:
“Answer me a question, Strickland. That soldier you talked about last night — so different in the field amongst his men at his chosen work from the same man in his mufti. Of the two which is the real man?”
It was a curious question which quite took Strickland aback. He could not but read into it another meaning. It was in praise of Julian Ransome that he had used the analogy of the soldier. Ariadne, however, had seen the double edge to that praise, for after all it was the man in his mufti, whether minister or soldier, who had to be lived with.
“Well?” Ariadne persisted.
He had to be honest with her. Her own honesty compelled it.
“Upon my word, I don’t know,” he said.
Ariadne nodded her head and abandoned her pretence of examining the mechanism of her car.
“Let us go in and have some tea,” she observed.
They entered the house and closed the door. The passage was empty, the door upon the left-hand closed. “Corinne!” Ariadne called. But no answer was returned. She opened the door and, followed by Strickland, passed into the little parlour. Corinne was sitting upon a couch, her hands pressed over her face and the tears running out between her fingers and falling in great drops upon her knees. On the floor at her feet a torn envelope and the letter it had enclosed lay scattered, and close by the letter was a latch-key. Ariadne Ferne ran to her, and standing behind the couch, dropped her hands gently upon her shoulders.
“My dear! What has happened?” she asked.
In a choking whisper from behind her hands Corinne uttered a name.
“Leon,” she said.
Ariadne Ferne was startled. She looked towards Strickland, who remained by the door. The same fear was in both their minds. Archie Clutter had made his first move.
“What has happened to him?” asked Ariadne in a low voice.
“He has gone.”
“Left you?”
Ariadne’s voice was incredulous. But without removing her hands, Corinne nodded her head, and her tears fell ever faster. Ariadne glanced down at the letter and the envelope and the key. They told their tale clearly enough. Her incredulity was swallowed up now by anger and contempt.
“Corinne! He’s not worth a tear,” she cried. In a breaking voice the dancer answered:
“I know, but I loved him.”
With a shrug of the shoulders Ariadne Ferne straightened herself. Her eyes went again to Strickland and a great friendliness shone in them. She could not but contrast him with the craven whose letter lay upon the ground. She made a signal to him that he should go and leave her alone with Corinne, and as he went quietly out of the door she kissed her hand to him.
It was almost with relief that Strickland walked away from the house. Clutter had not yet moved. There was still time, if only he was quick. But he must be quick! If Clutter did strike first, however he struck, there must arise a horrible scandal in which the whole of the inquest on Elizabeth Clutter would be revived under a much more searching and violent light. And the little scene which he had just witnessed in the parlour of the Doll’s House proved to him more clearly than ever that Ariadne would be in the very thick of it, championing her friend, and indifferent to all the splashes of mud with which she herself would be stained. How much time, he asked himself, had he been given?
