The Thousandth Woman — Reading Companion

Toye was in a state of excitement even more abnormal than Cazalet's nervous despondency, which indeed it prevented him from observing. It was instantaneously clear that Toye was astounded, thrilled, almost triumphant, but as yet just drawing the line at that. A newspaper fluttered in his hand.

"Second sight?" he ejaculated, as though it were the night before and Cazalet still shaken by his dream. "I guess you've got it in full measure, pressed down and running over, Mr. Cazalet!"

It was a sorry sample of his talk. Hilton Toye did not usually mix the ready metaphors that nevertheless had to satisfy an inner censor, of some austerity, before they were allowed to leave those deliberate lips. As a rule there was dignity in that deliberation; it never for a moment, or for any ordinary moment, suggested want of confidence, for example. It could even dignify some outworn modes of transatlantic speech which still preserved a perpetual freshness in the mouth of Hilton Toye. Yet now, in his strange excitement, word and tone alike were on the level of the stage American's. It was not less than extraordinary.

"You don't mean about--" Cazalet seemed to be swallowing.

"I do, sir!" cried Hilton Toye.

"--about Henry Craven?"

"Has--something or other--happened to him?"

"You don't mean to say he's--dead?"

"Last Wednesday night!" Toye looked at his paper. "No, I guess I'm wrong. Seems it happened Wednesday, but he only passed away Sunday morning."

Cazalet still sat staring at him--there was not room for two of them on their feet--but into his heavy stare there came a gleam of leaden wisdom. "This was Thursday morning," he said, "so I didn't dream of it when it happened, after all."

"You dreamed you saw him lying dead, and so he was," said Toye. "The funeral's been to-day. I don't know, but that seems to me just about the next nearest thing to seeing the crime perpetrated in a vision."

"Crime!" cried Cazalet. "What crime?"

"Murder, sir!" said Hilton Toye. "Wilful, brutal, bloody murder! Here's the paper; better read it for yourself. I'm glad he wasn't a friend of yours, or mine either, but it's a bad end even for your worst enemy."

The paper fluttered in Cazalet's clutch as it had done in Toye's; but that was as natural as his puzzled frown over the cryptic allusions of a journal that had dealt fully with the ascertainable facts in previous issues. Some few emerged between the lines. Henry Craven had received his fatal injuries on the Wednesday of the previous week. The thing had happened in his library, at or about half past seven in the evening; but how a crime, which was apparently a profound mystery, had been timed to within a minute of its commission did not appear among the latest particulars. No arrest had been made. No clue was mentioned, beyond the statement that the police were still searching for a definite instrument with which it was evidently assumed that the deed had been committed. There was in fact a close description of an unusual weapon, a special constable's very special truncheon. It had hung as a cherished trophy on the library wall, from which it was missing, while the very imprint of a silver shield, mounted on the thick end of the weapon, was stated to have been discovered on the scalp of the fractured skull. But that was a little bit of special reporting, typical of the enterprising sheet that Toye had procured. The inquest, merely opened on the Monday, had been adjourned to the day of issue.

"We must get hold of an evening paper," said Cazalet. "Fancy his own famous truncheon! He had it mounted and inscribed himself, so that it shouldn't be forgotten how he'd fought for law and order at Trafalgar Square! That was the man all over!"

His voice and manner achieved the excessive indifference which the English type holds due from itself after any excess of feeling. Toye also was himself again, his alert mind working keenly yet darkly in his acute eyes.

"I wonder if it was a murder?" he speculated. "I bet it wasn't a deliberate murder."

"What else could it have been?"

"Kind of manslaughter. Deliberate murderers don't trust to chance weapons hanging on their victims' walls."

"You forget," said Cazalet, "that he was robbed as well."

"Do they claim that?" said Hilton Toye. "I guess I skipped some. Where does it say anything about his being robbed?"

"Here!" Cazalet had scanned the paper eagerly; his finger drummed upon the place. "'The police,'" he read out, in some sort of triumph, "'have now been furnished with a full description of the missing watch and trinkets and the other articles believed to have been taken from the pockets of the deceased.' What's that but robbery?"

"You're dead right," said Toye. "I missed that somehow. Yet who in thunder tracks a man down to rob and murder him in his own home? But when you've brained a man, because you couldn't keep your hands off him, you might deliberately do all the rest to make it seem like the work of thieves."

Hilton Toye looked a judge of deliberation as he measured his irrefutable words. He looked something more. Cazalet could not tear his blue eyes from the penetrating pair that met them with a somber twinkle, an enlightened gusto, quite uncomfortably suggestive at such a moment.

"You aren't a detective, by any chance, are you?" cried Cazalet, with rather clumsy humor.

"No, sir! But I've often thought I wouldn't mind being one," said Toye, chuckling. "I rather figure I might do something at it. If things don't go my way in your old country, and they put up a big enough reward, why, here's a man I knew and a place I know, and I might have a mind to try my hand."

They went ashore together, and to the same hotel at Southampton for the night. Perhaps neither could have said from which side the initiative came; but midnight found the chance pair with their legs under the same heavy Victorian mahogany, devouring cold beef, ham and pickles as phlegmatically as commercial travelers who had never been off the island in their lives. Yet surely Cazalet was less depressed than he had been before landing; the old English ale in a pewter tankard even elicited a few of those anecdotes and piquant comparisons in which his conversation was at its best. It was at its worst on general questions, or on concrete topics not introduced by himself; and into this category, perhaps not unnaturally, fell such further particulars of the Thames Valley mystery as were to be found in an evening paper at the inn. They included a fragmentary report of the adjourned inquest, and the actual offer of such a reward, by the dead man's firm, for the apprehension of his murderer, as made Toye's eyes glisten in his sagacious head.

But Cazalet, though he had skimmed the many-headed column before sitting down to supper, flatly declined to discuss the tragedy his first night ashore.

Discussion was inevitable on the way up to town next morning.

The silly season was by no means over; a sensational inquest was worth every inch that it could fill in most of the morning papers; and the two strange friends, planted opposite each other in the first-class smoker, traveled inland simultaneously engrossed in a copious report of the previous day's proceedings at the coroner's court.

Of solid and significant fact, they learned comparatively little that they had been unable to gather or deduce the night before. There was the medical evidence, valuable only as tracing the fatal blow to some such weapon as the missing truncheon; there was the butler's evidence, finally timing the commission of the deed to within ten minutes; there was the head gardener's evidence, confirming and supplementing that of the butler; and there was the evidence of a footman who had answered the telephone an hour or two before the tragedy occurred.

The butler had explained that the dinner-hour was seven thirty; that, not five minutes before, he had seen his master come down-stairs and enter the library, where, at seven fifty-five, on going to ask if he had heard the gong, he had obtained no answer but found the door locked on the inside; that he had then hastened round by the garden, and in through the French window, to discover the deceased gentleman lying in his blood.

The head gardener, who lived in the lodge, had sworn to having seen a bareheaded man rush past his windows and out of the gates about the same hour, as he knew by the sounding of the gong up at the house; they often heard it at the lodge, in warm weather when the windows were open, and the gardener swore that he himself had heard it on this occasion.

The footman appeared to have been less positive as to the time of the telephone call, thought it was between four and five, but remembered the conversation very well. The gentleman had asked whether Mr. Craven was at home, had been told that he was out motoring, asked when he would be back, told he couldn't say, but before dinner some time, and what name should he give, whereupon the gentleman had rung off without answering. The footman thought he was a gentleman, from the way he spoke. But apparently the police had not yet succeeded in tracing the call.

"Is it a difficult thing to do?" asked Cazalet, touching on this last point early in the discussion, which even he showed no wish to avoid this morning. He had dropped his paper, to find that Toye had already dropped his, and was gazing at the flying English fields with thoughtful puckers about his somber eyes.

"If you ask me," he replied, "I should like to know what wasn't difficult connected with the telephone system in this country! Why, you don't have a system, and that's all there is to it. But it's not at that end they'll put the salt on their man."

"Which end will it be, then?"

"The river end. That hat, or cap. Do you see what the gardener says about the man who ran out bareheaded? That gardener deserves to be cashiered for not getting a move on him in time to catch that man, even if he did think he'd only been swiping flowers. But if he went and left his hat or his cap behind him, that should be good enough in the long run. It's the very worst thing you _can_ leave. Ever hear of Franz Müller?"

Cazalet had not heard of that immortal notoriety, nor did his ignorance appear to trouble him at all, but it was becoming more and more clear that Hilton Toye took an almost unhealthy interest in the theory and practise of violent crime.

"Franz Müller," he continued, "left his hat behind him, only that and nothing more, but it brought him to the gallows even though he got over to the other side first. He made the mistake of taking a slow steamer, and that's just about the one mistake they never did make at Scotland Yard. Give them a nice, long, plain-sailing stern-chase and they get there by bedtime--wireless or no wireless!"

But Cazalet was in no mind to discuss other crimes, old or new; and he closed the digression by asserting somewhat roundly that neither hat nor cap had been left behind in the only case that interested him.

"Don't be too sure," said Toye. "Even Scotland Yard doesn't show all its hand at once, in the first inquiry that comes along. They don't give out any description of the man that ran away, but you bet it's being circulated around every police office in the United Kingdom."

Cazalet said they would give it out fast enough if they had it to give. By the way, he was surprised to see that the head gardener was the same who had been at Uplands in his father's time; he must be getting an old man, and no doubt shakier on points of detail than he would be likely to admit. Cazalet instanced the alleged hearing of the gong as in itself an unconvincing statement. It was well over a hundred yards from the gates to the house, and there were no windows to open in the hall where the gong would be rung.

He sighed heavily as in his turn he looked out at the luxuriant little paddocks and the old tiled homesteads after every two or three. But he was not thinking of the weather-board and corrugated iron strewn so sparsely over the yellow wilds that he had left behind him. The old English panorama flew by for granted, as he had taken it before ever he went out to Australia. It was as though he had never been out at all.

"I've dreamed of the old spot so often," he said at length. "I'm not thinking of the night before last--I meant in the bush--and now to think of a thing like this happening, there, in the old governor's den, of all places!"

"Seems like a kind of poetic justice," said Hilton Toye.

"It does. It is!" cried Cazalet, fetching moist yet fiery eyes in from the fields. "I said to you the other night that Henry Craven never was a white man, and I won't unsay it now. Nobody may ever know what he's done to bring this upon him. But those who really knew the man, and suffered for it, can guess the kind of thing!"

"Exactly," murmured Toye, as though he had just said as much himself. His dark eyes twinkled with deliberation and debate. "How long is it, by the way, that they gave that clerk and friend of yours?"

A keen look pressed the startling question; at least, it startled Cazalet.

"You mean Scruton? What on earth made you think of him?"

"Talking of those who suffered for being the dead man's friends, I guess," said Toye. "Was it fourteen years?"

"But I guess fourteen doesn't mean fourteen, ordinarily, if a prisoner behaves himself?"

"No, I believe not. In fact, it doesn't."

"Do you know how much it would mean?"

"A little more than ten."

"Then Scruton may be out now?"

Toye nodded with detestable aplomb. "That gives you something to chew on," said he. "Of course, I don't say he's our man--"

"I should think you didn't!" cried Cazalet, white to the lips with sudden fury.

Toye looked disconcerted and distressed, but at the same time frankly puzzled. He apologized none the less readily, with almost ingenious courtesy and fulness, but he ended by explaining himself in a single sentence, and that told more than the rest of his straightforward eloquence put together.

"If a man had done you down like that, wouldn't you want to kill him the very moment you came out, Cazalet?"

The creature of impulse was off at a tangent. "I'd forgive him if he did it, too!" he exclaimed. "I'd move heaven and earth to save him, guilty or not guilty. Wouldn't you in my place?"

"I don't know," said Hilton Toye. "It depends on the place you're in, I guess!" And the keen dark eyes came drilling into Cazalet's skull like augers.

"I thought I told you?" he explained impatiently. "We were in the office together; he was good to me, winked at the business hours I was inclined to keep, let me down lighter in every way than I deserved. You may say it was part of his game. But I take people as I find them. And then, as I told you, Scruton was ten thousand times more sinned against than sinning."

"Are you sure? If you knew it at the time--"

"I didn't. I told you so the last night."

"Then it came to you in Australia?" said Toye, with a smile as whimsical as the suggestion.

"It did!" cried Cazalet unexpectedly. "In a letter," he added with hesitation.

"Well, I mustn't ask questions," said Hilton Toye, and began folding up his newspaper with even more than his usual deliberation.

"Oh, I'll tell you!" cried Cazalet ungraciously. "It's my own fault for telling you so much. It was in a letter from Scruton himself that I heard the whole thing. I'd written to him--toward the end--suggesting things. He managed to get an answer through that would never have passed the prison authorities. And--and that's why I came home just when I did," concluded Cazalet; "that's why I didn't wait till after shearing. He's been through about enough, and I've had more luck than I deserved. I meant to take him back with me, to keep the books on our station, if you want to know!" The brusk voice trembled.

Toye let his newspaper slide to the floor. "But that was fine!" he exclaimed simply. "That's as fine an action as I've heard of in a long time."

"If it comes off," said Cazalet in a gloomy voice.

"Don't you worry. It'll come off. Is he out yet, for sure? I mean, do you know that he is?"

"Scruton? Yes--since you press it--he wrote to tell me that he was coming out even sooner than he expected."

"Then he can stop out for me," said Hilton Toye. "I guess I'm not running for that reward!"

At Waterloo the two men parted, with a fair exchange of fitting speeches, none of which rang really false. And yet Cazalet found himself emphatically unable to make any plans at all for the next few days; also, he seemed in two minds now about a Jermyn Street hotel previously mentioned as his immediate destination; and his step was indubitably lighter as he went off first of all to the loop-line, to make sure of some train or other that he might have to take before the day was out.

In the event he did not take that train or any other; for the new miracle of the new traffic, the new smell of the horseless streets, and the newer joys of the newest of new taxicabs, all worked together and so swiftly upon Cazalet's organism that he had a little colloquy with his smart young driver instead of paying him in Jermyn Street. He nearly did pay him off, and with something more than his usual impetuosity, as either a liar or a fool with no sense of time or space.

"But that's as quick as the train, my good fellow!" blustered Cazalet.

"Quicker," said the smart young fellow without dipping his cigarette, "if you were going by the old Southwestern!"

The very man, and especially the manners that made or marred him, was entirely new to Cazalet as a product of the old country. But he had come from the bush, and he felt as though he might have been back there but for the smell of petrol and the cry of the motor-horn from end to end of those teeming gullies of bricks and mortar.

He had accompanied his baggage just as far as the bureau of the Jermyn Street hotel. Any room they liked, and he would be back some time before midnight; that was his card, they could enter his name for themselves. He departed, pipe in mouth, open knife in one hand, plug tobacco in the other; and remarks were passed in Jermyn Street as the taxi bounced out west in ballast.

But indeed it was too fine a morning to waste another minute indoors, even to change one's clothes, if Cazalet had possessed any better than the ones he wore and did not rather glory in his rude attire. He was not wearing leggings, and he did wear a collar, but he quite saw that even so he might have cut an ignominious figure on the flags of Kensington Gore; no, now it was the crowded High Street, and now it was humble Hammersmith. He had told his smart young man to be sure and go that way. He had been at St. Paul's school as a boy--with old Venus Potts--and he wanted to see as many landmarks as he could. This one towered and was gone as nearly in a flash as a great red mountain could. It seemed to Cazalet, but perhaps he expected it to seem, that the red was a little mellower, the ivy a good deal higher on the great warm walls. He noted the time by the ruthless old clock. It was after one already; he would miss his lunch. What did that matter?