Oliver Onions

“ I could understand old William Dadley feeling sorry for him. At the same time, I had not one single atom of sorrow for him myself.
For we are not ruled by these municipal virtues. We say we are; it is as much as our lives are worth to say anything else; but we know better. Wonderful Case, to bring all this out, to present so dramatically that single Question—the first man had to answer it and the last man will have to answer it—without which there is no society nor state nor government at all! Westbury had the whole weight of intellectual approval—and nothing whatever else! ”

“ What else is life, their own life or that other-own their friend's, when it is held at this instant readiness? The coil about it all is not for them, but for us, who peer about for bullets and cartridge-cases and holes in the floor. Chummy's every breath would not have been his absolution had he not laughed with Esdaile's children and, with Joan perched on the carrier behind him, cheerfully fouled the Santon roads with the stench of his exhaust. ”

“ And, as I sat down in the chair at the end of his desk, he plunged straight into the matter by asking me how long I had known Esdaile.
Now how long you have known a man, in the sense of how well you know him, is not always simply a matter of time. I have told you how humdrum my own War services were. They had not included those incredible moments of intensified action that may more truly reveal a man to you than years of desultory familiarity. It was plainly something of this kind that Hubbard had in his mind now. He frowned as he trifled with a paper-weight. ”

“ Every word is possible peril, every silence a hanging sword. In all my acquaintance I know of no happier marriage than the Esdailes'. You never go into their house and feel that the air is still charged with some scene that your arrival has interrupted, you never leave wondering what weapons will be picked up again the moment your back is turned. Philip is not without his tempers nor Mollie without her own purposes, but it stops at that. ”

“ Oh, I wish Mollie was here!"
"Come upstairs," Philip repeated gently. "Bring her up, Monty."
But she went on with even less and less control.
"Oh, I think it's cruel! You're all cruel! You never think of us! Joan's to go on being told nothing, and Mollie's kept in the dark—oh, I know she is—and I'm made to feel that I'm not wanted here.... I want to go back to Oakley Street, Monty. I can't stop here. I won't. Everything's been wrong ever since that accident. It's horrible. I'm going away. I dare say they'll let me keep my room on; if they won't I must find somewhere else. ”

“ Twice at least I had flatly lied, once when I had told him that I had not seen Mackwith since the morning of the accident, and once when I had given him to understand that I knew nothing of the police search of Esdaile's premises. I say nothing of the greater lie, that we were all ready to help him in his efforts to get to the bottom of the Case. I count that as more the natural momentum the Case itself had now acquired than any personal untruthfulness on my own part.
Next, I now saw that as an eavesdropper my technique had been painfully clumsy. I had attracted attention to myself. ”

“ You may believe it or not, but until this moment I don't think this aspect of the affair had occurred either to Hubbard or Esdaile. All had been Chummy. More than this: so exclusively had Chummy occupied their thoughts that they had forgotten the ordinary physical fact that a bullet fired into a man's body makes a hole—the same ugly kind of hole whether the person who makes it is your friend or not. Loyalty to friendship in the teeth of the Law is not always the simple thing it sounds. ”

“ Half a mile away across the young corn you saw her white sweater at the cliff's edge, and it seemed part of the whiteness of the screaming seabirds, of the whiteness of the awful glimpses of chalk where the turf suddenly ended in air, of the crawling whiteness of the waves far below. And on the shore—but any young girl is a Nausicaa on any shore. Esdaile has drawn and painted her a score of times—young neck, fair thick yellow hair, the none-too-small white feet with the sand disappearing from them as she waded into the anemonied pools. ”

“ Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very poultry of its farmyards. ”

“ For example, Cecil Hubbard tells me that the man who nowadays does not know at least the elements of all this lore of wave-lengths and directional wireless has no business to say that he belongs to his age at all, and sadly I believe him. Yet Philip Esdaile contrives to keep abreast, not by joining in the banging and burnt-cork of so much contemporary painting, but by virtue of something else, often temporarily hidden, that will still be quietly there when the whistles have ceased to scream and the tom-toms to thud. ”

“ I therefore kept silence while Hubbard pointed all this out.
And as Esdaile's spirits seemed to revive a little and things began to seem not quite so hopeless after all, I began to rummage in my memory for recollection of this Chummy Smith of theirs. I remembered now that I had at any rate heard his name. And I confess that I am a little curious, not to say jealous, about some of these intensive War friendships. It interests me to note which of them survive the quieter and more persistent pressure on the lower levels, and which fail to do so. Not every one of them succeeds. ”

“ Mollie tied the strings of the print sunbonnet under her plump chin and walked with her head a little averted in order to see round the print blinker. Beyond the waving grass-heads the sea appeared, a wide silver glitter. You cannot see the shore from that hill. The sands and the mile-long rollers lie far below that cliff's edge over which the men are let down by ropes to gather the eggs from the awful ledges. ”

“ Rights? I know nothing of the law of the matter, nor whether a dead man has rights; but if he has they should be all the more enforceable because he is in no position to enforce them for himself. What would Maxwell have had to say about his own shooting? What had brought about that shooting? Was he the kind of man who, in Monty Rooke's large and equable view of the crime of murder, ought to have been shot? Or was he the other kind, whose death was a loss to the world? These were a few of the questions I wanted Dud Hanson to help me to answer. ”

“ Then all at once something seemed to give way in her. She put the candle down on one end of the sheeted sofa and turned to Philip. Her hands were clasped at her breast, the honeysuckle fingers interworking.
"Oh, please tell me!" she begged. "What is it makes this place so queer? There's something—I can feel it—like eyes on me—I've a being-watched sort of feeling, as if something was wrong——"
Philip took up the candle. "Then let's go upstairs," he said promptly.
But something almost like hysteria seemed to take her. Her voice rose. ”

“ Think for a moment how we men, solemnly, ponderously and sure that we were doing the decent thing, had decided that at all costs certain facts of our Case should be kept from the womenfolk. To that end we had evaded, temporized, shuffled. And now suppose—just suppose—that all our care and concealment had been wasted, and that two of the women at any rate knew as much as Philip Esdaile knew and far, far more than any of the rest of us? ”

“ Lennox Street was positive luxury by comparison, yet here was Audrey preferring this. Then there was Audrey herself, heavy-eyed, drained of energy, probably thinking of George Cunningham and wondering whether any experience was worth repeating. With Joan for breakfast and Audrey for supper, poor Mollie had had about enough of it for one day.
"About this marriage," she said abruptly. "Of course, it's not going to be put off. I shall see to that. I shall have a talk with Monty too when I've finished with Philip. You're simply run down and want a tonic." ”

“ But this was impossible to explain without dragging in the thing of all things that he wished to keep from Audrey, from Mollie, and above all from Joan—that beastly episode of the pistol, with all it involved.
And here at any rate he was quite firm. Chance what might, that must be kept the men's affair only. As far as the women were concerned at present the accident was a pure accident. Well, an accident it must remain.
But what about that Police Inspector who had appeared so suddenly in our midst the night before, and for all Philip knew might be round again at any moment? ”

“ As I walked along the Cromwell Road I could not but be put in mind of the last occasion when I had called at Esdaile's studio—that midday when I had found all locked up, Rooke departed, and had run him to earth in his old quarters in Jubilee Place. I have spoken of Mrs. Cunningham as an enigmatic sort of person, possibly as much an enigma to herself as to others, and inspiring more of compassion and kindness than of that other feeling that is supposed to be akin to these. Now I could not help wondering about her again. What had made her so suddenly break off with Monty? ”

“ The merry fellows of the Chelsea Arts Club might pull Esdaile's leg about his haunted house, and want to know whether the White Lady dropped any hairpins as she passed, or if the horrible shrouded [Pg 135] figure with the crimson-dripping hands would make a good film; but we journalists have to take these things a good deal more seriously than that. Publicity, sometimes of the most incredibly silly kind, is our meat and drink and hourly breath. All day and every day our brains are on the stretch in our endeavors to secure it. ”

“ Mollie's eyes went round the room. I myself have never been in Mrs. Cunningham's bed-sitter, but I have been in many others and can picture its frugality—the gas-ring, the little cupboard with the bread and jar of marmalade in it, the chintz-covered grocer's box on which Mollie's cup of cocoa stood, probably a slightly fresher wallpaper-pattern where the Jacobean wardrobe had stood. ”

“ I happen to have some experience of how much fiction people swallow when they take up their morning papers, and also of how much mere hurdy-gurdy-grinding they accept as "human nature" when it comes to them in the form of a novel. But that is their look-out. [Pg 32] I told them that with their help I would do my best.
I had to have their help. Obviously I could not always be at the side of this person or that, Rooke or Esdaile or Hubbard, throughout every winding of a complicated chain of events. ”

“ The North Sea cannot be quite the same to me that it was to Esdaile and Hubbard, the air means just what it meant to Maxwell and Chummy Smith. For this I am afraid there is no help. But there is always the chance that if I have minimized, they might have stressed a little unduly. For while our Case has nothing to do with War, War is always antecedent to it, as for a generation to come it will be antecedent to everything. ”

“ It may even have something to do with my position as a younger novelist. I constantly forget that one man is as good as another because he is as many.
So here I was, a clumsy, unmannerly fellow with a guilty conscience to boot, face to face with a very Chesterfield of the best licensed establishments and the whole body of law and order and public duty over [Pg 162] whelmingly on his side. We stood there under the unlighted public-house lamp, while the violet light of the May evening slowly faded from what Hodgson had called "Chelsea's pleasant roofs." ”

“ Personally you will always find me the broadest-minded and most tolerant of men until these lofty qualities begin to react on my own private affairs; after that I become a pattern of the narrow and the hidebound. Whether in their place I should have done as Hubbard and Esdaile did I have fortunately not to answer. ”

“ It's you I'm worrying about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a bit of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help."
To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull here and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power ends. I consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age that it gives to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed of. Indeed, if one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's ailment, it seems to carry within itself hope of its own cure. ”

“ I don't think that at the bottom of her anti-social heart any woman does. A delayed wedding or a post without a lover's letter is a far greater thing than a capital charge in which all who conspire are principals.
Then, in spite of her fatigue, her skeptical common sense came to her aid. Philip might involve himself in a web of unelucidated stuff of which one-tenth perhaps was fact of sorts and the rest pure speculation; but she knew Chummy. ”