Читать книгу Dilemmas - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 8

Table of Contents

THERE were only two really young people in Mrs. Maine's drawing-room that evening and naturally enough they sat apart talking to each other. At least that is how Cynthia Maine would have put it. The young man in fact was dutifully listening and Cynthia was in full flight. The eager thrill of her voice, her face a-quiver, the sparkling intensity of her charming and charmingly dressed person, all suggested that she was satisfactorily solving one of the world's great problems. But she was not. She was debating with her beau—as Cynthia understood debate—where they should go and dance the night away as soon as these tiresome elders had trailed off to their beds. Should it be the Fifty-Fifty, or the Embassy, or the Cafe de Paris? But before the momentous decision was reached, Cynthia suddenly gave up. She leaned back in her chair and her hands dropped over the arms.

"I have been fighting against it all the evening, but I'm beaten," she said moodily. Then she rose abruptly and slipped out between the curtains on to the balcony.

Her bewildered companion found her there. She was leaning, her elbows propped upon the red cushion which stretched along the top of the balcony's parapet, and her hands pressed tightly over her eyes in a vain endeavour to shut out some vision which obsessed her.

"Cynthia, what in the world have I done to hurt you?" the youth asked remorsefully.

Cynthia lifted her face up and stared at him. She found his quite natural question utterly inexplicable.

"You, Jim? Why, nothing of course."

She looked out over the Green Park, and threw up her head as though she was bathing her forehead and her throat in its cool fresh darkness; and drew from it some balm for her agitation.

"This is one of Mummy's parties," she said. "There are people here whom I don't know. People she met this spring when I wasn't with her, at Cairo, or Tunis, or Algiers, or somewhere. So I can't tell which of them is doing it. Can I?"

"No, you certainly can't," Jim asserted stoutly.

Cynthia swerved like a filly when a sheet of paper blows across the road in front of her, and with a frown wrinkling her pretty forehead, surveyed through the gaps between the curtains her mother's guests. Jim looked over her shoulder, frowning still more portentously, and forgot his manners.

"They look as commonplace a crowd as I ever saw gathered together in my life. Not one of them has got anything on you," he said.

"Yes, but there is one of them who isn't commonplace at all," returned Cynthia with conviction. "One of them is doing it."

Jim was half inclined to jest and sing, "Everybody's doing it." But tact was his strong suit on this summer night.

"Doing what, Cynthia?" he asked gently.

"Hush!"

An appealing hand was thrust under his arm and pressed into his coat-sleeve. Cynthia wanted companionship, not conversation.

"I shall have an awful night, Jim, unless we put up a barrage."

Cynthia was very miserable. Jim turned back his hand and got hold of Cynthia's.

"I know. We'll slip out now and get away. I have got my little car at the door."

Cynthia, however, shook her head.

"It wouldn't be fair on Mummy. We must wait. They'll all go very soon. Besides, it is important to me to find out which of them it is who's doing it. Then I can make sure that whoever it is never comes to this house again."

It was an appalling threat, but Jim recognized that it was just. People had no right to do things to Cynthia which would give her an awful night, even across a drawing-room. They must be black-balled thoroughly. Then a dreadful explanation of Cynthia's misery smote him.

"My dear, you are not a natural medium, are you?" he asked in a voice of awe. He turned her towards him and contemplated her with pleasure. He looked her up and down from her neatly shingled fair brown hair to her shining feet. She was a slim, long-legged, slinky creature. All that he had ever heard about mediums led him to believe that as a rule they ran to breadth and flesh. He drew a breath of relief, but Cynthia looked at him very curiously.

"No," she answered after a moment's reflection. "It's just this one thing. I am not odd in any other way. And this one thing isn't my fault either. And there's a very good real reason for it too." She broke off to ask anxiously, "I don't seem to you to be incoherent at all, do I, Jim?"

Jim firmly reassured her.

"No one could be more lucid."

Cynthia breathed her relief.

"Thank you. You are a comfort, Jim. I'll tell you something more now. This thing—somebody in that drawing-room knows about it—has been thinking about it all the evening—has been making me think about it—has come here to-night to make me think about it. And it's a horror!"

And she suddenly swept her arm out across the expanse of the Green Park, from Piccadilly on the north to Buckingham Palace on the south.

"Yes, it's a horror," she repeated in a low voice.

She was watching a dreadful procession go by, endlessly and always from north to south. It moved not in the darkness, but along a straight white riband of road under a hot sun, between pleasant and sunny fields, but in a choking mist of yellow dust. There was a herd of white oxen at one point of the procession, and here a troop of goats and there a flock of bleating sheep. But the bulk of it was made up of old clumsy heavy carts, drawn by old, old horses, and accompanied by old, old men, and piled up with mattresses and stores and utensils, on the top of which lurched and clung old, old women and very young children. It was the age of all, men and beasts, who were taking part in this stupendous migration which gave to it its horror. These were no pioneers. It was a flight. There was one particularly dreadful spectacle, an old man without cart or horse who carried upon his bent back like a sack a still older woman. All through the day, dipping down from the northern horizon and rising to the edge of the southern, the procession streamed slowly by. At nightfall it just stopped; at daybreak it resumed. There would come a moment, Cynthia knew well—it always did come—but after she was asleep—when the procession would begin to race, when the old men and the old horses would begin to leap and jump, grotesquely with stiff limbs, like marionettes—and that was much more horrible. For some of them would fall and be trampled under foot, and no one would mind. But that moment was not yet.

There was a stir in the drawing-room behind her.

"They are going," she said.

Both of these young people turned to the window, and Cynthia laid her hand again on Jim's arm and detained him.

"Wait! Wait!" she whispered eagerly. "I believe we shall find out which of them it is."

They watched through the gap between the curtains all the preliminary movements of a general and on the whole eagerly welcomed retreat, the guests rising as one person, the hostess with just a little less but not much less alacrity and murmurs about a delightful evening coming as if from the mouths of a succession of polite automata. They saw Mrs. Maine turn her head towards a picture on the wall. They heard her say:

"That? Yes, it is quite lovely, isn't it? Let us look at it."

Both Cynthia and Jim fixed their eyes upon the particular guest who had called Mrs. Maine's attention to the picture and now crossed the room with her. A woman, if anything a little below the average height, of an indeterminate age somewhere between thirty-six and fifty, she had no distinctive personality. She was dark, neither ugly nor beautiful. There was even something ungraceful in her walk.

"She is as commonplace as a sheep," said Jim, meaning that it could not possibly be she who had so disturbed and controlled the shining young creature just in front of him.

"Wait!" Cynthia advised. "Were you introduced to her, Jim?"

"No."

"I suppose that Mummy introduced me to her. But I don't remember anything about her. She was at the other end of the dinner table too."

"It can't be her," said Jim.

Mrs. Maine led her visitor to the picture, a sketch of an old French chateau glowing in a blaze of sunlight. A great lawn, smooth and green as an emerald and set in a wide border of flowers, spread in front of a building at once elegant and solid; and a wide stream with a glint of silver, bathed the edge of the lawn in front. At the sides of the chateau, tall chestnut trees made an avenue and behind the chateau rose a high bare hill.

"Many years ago, my husband and I saw that house when we were touring in France," Mrs. Maine explained. "I fell in love with it and he bought it for me. We spent four months a year there. After my husband died, I still went back to it, but five years ago Cynthia—"

"Your daughter?" interrupted the stranger.

"Yes, my daughter took a distaste for it. So I sold it to a Monsieur Franchard. He made a great fortune out of the War and is very fond of it, I am told."

"That's the woman, Jim," said Cynthia with a little shake in her voice.

But the woman in question showed no further interest in the picture. Jim had a fear lest the very intensity of Cynthia's regard, the concentration of all her senses, should draw that strange woman's eyes to the curtain behind which the pair of them stood concealed. But not a bit of it! The strange woman smiled, thanked her hostess for her evening, shook her hand and waddled—the word was in Jim's thoughts—waddled out of the room. Nothing could have been more banal than her exit.

As soon as she had gone Cynthia slipped back between the curtains and took her place by her mother's side.

"Who was it who was talking to you about the Chateau Dore, Mummy?" she asked in an interval between shaking hands with departing guests.

"A Madame D'Estourie," replied her mother. "She was kind to me in Algiers. She came to London a week ago and called upon me. So I asked her to dinner."

"Algiers!" Cynthia repeated with a start, and to herself she said: "I was right. She must never come to the house any more. I'll speak to Mummy to-morrow."

The room was now empty except for her mother, herself and Jim.

"We are going off now to dance," she said.

Cynthia's mother smiled.

"You have got your latchkey?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Maine turned to the young man.

"And, Jim, don't let her stay up too late. She's going to dance again to-morrow. Good night, my dear."

At the door of the drawing-room Cynthia said:

"Jim, I am going to run up for a cloak and you can start your old car and wait for me in the hall."

She ran upstairs, through her little sitting-room and into her bedroom beyond it. Whilst she was getting her cloak out of the cupboard, it seemed to her that she heard a slight movement in her sitting-room. When she reentered that room she saw that the door on to the staircase was closed; and that Madame D'Estourie was sitting in a chair, waiting for her.

But Madame D'Estourie was no longer insignificant.