A Case in Camera

Strictly speaking, it is not on the Santon headland that Charles Valentine ("Chummy") Smith ought to make his first appearance in this story; but it was there that I myself first saw him, and I want to give you my impression of him as I received it, if at the cost of taking a slight liberty with time. So I first set these eyes on him during a month I spent with the Esdailes somewhat later in that year.

I may say to begin with that he would probably have passed unnoticed among the innumerable other young men of to-day who at one time looked just a little civilian in their new uniforms but now wear their mufti again with a subtle but unmistakable difference. You know the young men I mean-they still speak of distances in kilometers, can talk for hours on end about motor-bicycles, and sprinkle their conversation with the jargon of ragtime French they are proud to share with their own privates and sappers and bombardiers. A year or so ago you went into a restaurant that was brown as a beechwood with khaki; you go there to-day and the khaki is gone-yet still hauntingly and mysteriously there, edging (as it were) the mufti with a faint rim like a color-print a little out of register. The ghost of khaki still clings about faces, movements, speech, the glances of eyes. Or if it isn't khaki it is the navy-and-gold, or Charles Valentine ("Chummy") Smith's unbelted sky-blue with the black cap-band.

He and Joan (in this little peep ahead which I am taking) were waiting for me on the platform of Santon Station. It was a week or so before the Company's Inter-Station Flower Competition-that annual Show that makes the whole line with its tiny stations as gay with flowers as a row of Thames houseboats. Geraniums and marguerites hung in boxes from the canopies; the sills of the porters' room were a rage of bloom; and lobelia and red bachelor's-buttons and white pebbles from the shore were set in patriotic emblems all the way from the booking-office to the signal-box, which alone was bare. As the train drew up I saw them standing together on the sunny platform, with a bower of ramblers over their heads and a heaven of larkspur behind them.

Charles Valentine Smith was for taking my two bags to the trap that waited at the level crossing, but peremptorily Joan pushed him away and called a porter. The presence of the trap did not mean that Chummy could not walk yet, for with the help of a stick he got about quite well, though the cliff-path down to the shore was still too much for him. And I may here mention, quite incidentally, the r?le I was apparently cast for in advance. "Auntie Joan" was supposed to take the children down to the shore every day. Charles Valentine Smith could not yet manage the shore climb. This necessarily meant a temporary separation. Two days later I was taking the children down to the shore. Whether Miss Joan had urged my invitation for that very purpose I cannot tell you.

So I was introduced to our young murderer, or he to me, I forget which of us was the personage in Joan's eyes, and we sought the trap. Joan drove, and paved the way for our better acquaintance by telling Mr. Smith, in these words, that I was "still young at heart." And her pleasant young assassin called me "Sir." I suppose I am entitled to be called "Sir" by these youngsters, but I am far from standing on my rights in this respect. He had his Joan, and I saw no reason for rubbing it in. People who go about murdering other people need not lay quite so much stress on the minor conventions.

"Yes, sir, thanks-practically all right again," he said as we bowled across that high world of flaming poppies and silky corn. "But I say-I'm afraid you'll have rather a crow to pluck with me."

All things considered, I thought one crow a particularly modest estimate; but "Oh?" I said inquiringly.

"Yes. I know it's your room, sir, and any old fleabag would do for me, but it's all Joan and Mrs. Esdaile. In fact, I carried all my gear out this morning, but they've toted everything back again."

"Oh, but he likes that little room at the end!" Joan cooingly reassured him. "He gets the morning sun, and it's beautifully cool in the afternoons--"

"If you mean that I'm in the habit of sleeping in the afternoons I wish to inform you that I'm not," I answered her coldly. "And if the room you speak of is that little cupboard place just above where the hens are fed--"

"Yes, that's the one," she answered with a darling smile. "I call it quite large, and I've put you one or two nice books to read, and I arranged the flowers myself. Come up, Robin!"

So Smith had the room that I, the introducer of these Esdaile people to my loved Santon, had hitherto always had, and I was given the one with the morning sun. You might suppose from Joan's words that the sun shone directly in, filling it with gayety and brightness. Not a bit of it. That morning sunlight she so extolled was a greenish and aquarium-like half light thrown up from the steep bit of paddock that comprised the whole of my view. And, lest I should oversleep, an enormous bronze cock, mounting to the little sloping roof of the hen-house below, was able to sound his clarion note practically on the drum of my ear.

* * *

I repeat, at a first glance he was very like the rest of the young fellows of his day; but I admit there was something about him that grew on you. After watching him for a while I decided that this ascendancy was principally in his eyes. I do not wish to overwork the popular clichés of fire and flash and smolder; Smith's eyes certainly had something of this quality; but it was combined with an expression that, until I can define it better, I will risk calling discontent.

I don't mean by this the discontent that is common enough among those other flashers and smolderers, the artists and poets and suchlike. That is usually little more than peevishness and incapacity, and, as one of the breed myself, I rather liked Smith's attitude towards us. With perfect sincerity he looked on us as immensely clever fellows, particularly the late Mr. Jack London and the author of The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow; but there he had finished with us. We were high and he could not attain to us. Our affairs were so little his affairs that I regret to have to say that, Malvern notwithstanding, I have heard him make use of the expression "between you and I." That is an awful thing for a nice girl to marry.

But the War has taught me, among other things, the overwhelming importance of other men's jobs and the comparative insignificance of my own. If young Smith did not express himself in the terms to which I was accustomed, he expressed himself none the less. Don't ask me how, except in a general way. Here again what he calls a "dreadfully gulf" is fixed, across which I can only gaze at the New Wonder.

For Chummy, for all his Crimson Specters and his "between you and I," his cocktails at Hatchetts' and his stuffed-bird tympani in the Helmsea Mess, was part of that Wonder that to-day a George takes from an Elizabeth's hands. Four hundred years ago I suppose he would have sold a farm and gone to sea; this, briefly, is what he did in our own day:-

Denied admission to the Flying Corps on the grounds that he was not yet seventeen, he had made his way to London, dressed himself as a mechanic or plumber, had forced his way into a foreign Embassy under pretext of repairing the ambassadorial pipes or cisterns or something, and had actually succeeded in presenting himself before the Ambassador, demanding to be taken on in the service of a foreign country. Naturally he had been refused and referred back to his own Government. Then had ensued what Chummy cheerfully described as a hell of a dust-up. General Officers had stormed and had wanted to know "what the devil he meant by it"; the correspondence, I have been told, weighs between eleven and twelve pounds; but in the end he had received his ticket-already endorsed for improper conduct in offering his services to a foreign if friendly Power. You will believe that this endorsement had stood very little in his subsequent way. The story had run like wildfire throughout the whole of the Service. It may have hindered his promotion, but what on earth did promotion matter? Any number of civilian-ingrain business-men, turning their business talents to the Services, have obtained promotion. Few of them have attained to the distinction of such an endorsement as that which made bright young Smith's ticket.

And-to return to what I have called that discontent of his-I for one cannot see that a young man of daring and vision, elementally put down into the midst of our world to-day and asked what he makes of it all, must either write a stuffy book or paint a jazz picture or else be told that the fire of his personality has no expression and his chosen work no value. Very much on the contrary. I think myself that Charles Valentine Smith was a thinker so single of purpose that it never occurred to him that he thought at all. And why not a technique, an artist's technique, of the wrist and eye and nerve and indomitable heart? Is my dictation more a wonder than his zooming? Is my life so full and his so empty? I cannot see it.

* * *

To look at, he had not in the very least the air of a man over whose head a terrible menace hung. Indeed, I have rarely sat down at a table with a less personally odious young murderer. He was lithe and of a darkish brown complexion, a perfect anatomy of graven and incised muscle when later I saw him bathe, and with hands the movements of which were full of power and grace. Then there were his eyes. Of all his features his mouth was that which communicated the least, except when he smiled. With the rest of us I am afraid that our mouths generally communicate the most.

I knew, at the time of this our peep forward, that Philip had had his éclaircissement with him, but had no idea of what had passed between them. Calling at Lennox Street one midday on my way to the office I had found the house shut up and even Rooke unexpectedly gone. Therefore I half expected that Philip would tell me the whole story on the night of my arrival at Santon. In fact, I gave him every opportunity to do so, remaining behind after all but he and I had gone to bed. But he talked about anything else, and at half-past ten rose, yawned, said he thought he would turn in, apologized again for the change of my room, and gave me my candle. The same thing happened the next night.

On the third night I asked him point blank.

"Eh?" he said. "Oh, that's all right-so far, at any rate. He doesn't know anything about it."

"What!" I exclaimed. "Know nothing about it!... What do you mean-that he was too stunned or dazed or something to remember?"

"Oh, no, I don't mean that exactly," Esdaile replied. "He remembers that part of it all right. It was the other I didn't tell him."

"What other?"

"Why, that anybody else knows anything about the-accident."

"But didn't you mention the shooting to him, if there was any?"

"Oh, he admits that, of course."

"Then in that case he knows you know?"

"Of course he knows I know. How could I ask him if I didn't know? What he doesn't know is that you fellows know. So I told him the best thing he could do was to come down here and get fit again, and not say anything to Joan."

"And-he agreed not to say anything to Joan?" I exclaimed in astonishment.

"Certainly. What good would that do? Look here: he's here getting himself well again; I'm here painting; and you're here on a holiday. If there's any trouble ahead we can't stop it, and so it's no good worrying about it. Don't you think I'm right?"

"Oh ... very well," I said in bewilderment, suddenly ceasing my questions; and I took my candle and went up to my little room over the hen-house with somewhat mixed feelings.

Just look at a few of the ingredients of the mixture. Here was Joan, knowing nothing about anything except that her lover had had a tumble, had given her a few weeks of torturing anxiety, but was now blessedly up and about again and in her pocket all day long. Then there was this Charles Valentine Smith, also knowing nothing (for apparently a mere trifle like shooting a man and admitting that you shot him didn't count), and, with the Brand of Cain on his untroubled brow, offering Joan his blood-stained hand in the most matter-of-fact way in the world. And here was Philip, apparently accepting the whole extraordinary situation with complete calm. I admit that I found all this serenity just a little perplexing.

But look at the charm of the situation for me as a novelist! Few of us have the opportunity of studying what I think I may call the amenities of murder at first hand. I dare say that grim mutterings à la Specter of Hangman Hollow would have bored me, writhings and agonies made me uncomfortable; but this new view of murder I found full of pleasing interest. And the whole of the interest lay in seeing, hearing and asking no questions. Philip was "there painting," I on a holiday. Very well. I was content.

And, in case you have any preconceived notions about the daily trifling routine of murderers' lives, I can only wish you had been at Santon with me at that time. As far as I could see, not a cloud marred the blue heaven of these young people's days. They disappeared as soon as breakfast was cleared away and returned when they returned. I don't for a moment suppose that the intervening hours were spent in the contemplation of death, judgment or the burden of undivulged crime. Chummy enjoyed his pipe, and, as he sat at high tea, idolized by the Esdaile boys because he flew, ate as heartily as ever in his pre-murder days. If his crash on the Lennox Street roof was not mentioned, that seemed to be only because everything had ended perfectly happily and there was nothing more to be said about it. In fact, here is a bit of conversation, taken almost at random, just to show you the way to be entirely happy is to shoot somebody and say nothing to your best girl about it.

Coming down to breakfast one morning I thought it my duty to administer a sharp rebuke to Miss Merrow about the throwing of a handful of hen-corn into my window in order (she said) to wake me.

"I had been up ten minutes, I had shaved, and was more than half dressed," I said sternly. "I'll tell you what you are doing; you are trying to train those hens to come into my room by throwing corn in. I have now to inform you that I intend to write this morning, and so shall not be able to relieve you of your duties down on the shore."

"Oh, I say, sir--" young Smith began, but I thought fit to put a spoke into his wheel also.

"Not a word!" I ordered him. "Hen-corn has been thrown into my room. What was thrown into your room yesterday morning?"

(She had tossed up to his casement a bud of the William Allen Richardson that grew up the cottage end. Coming round the corner from an early stroll up the dewy paddock I had seen her do it, as well as the little token from her lips that went with it.)

"I don't care which room I'm given, but I will not share it with poultry," I continued firmly. "Also I object to this unfair discrimination about things thrown in at windows. So understand that I am busy writing this morning."

"Well, we're going to Flaunton in the trap," said Joan defiantly.

"Children," I said, turning to them, "Mr. Smith and Miss Merrow are going to Flaunton in the trap. The tuckshop at Flaunton is a much better one than the Santon one, and there are smugglers there. They are armed to the teeth, and they carry contraband into their echoing caves usually at about midday."

"That," declared Joan, "I call mean! Bringing the children in!"

"It's no worse than bringing the hens in," I retorted; and our murderer guffawed and took another egg.

I cannot say that I gained much by my protest, since, having put the idea into their heads, I had to hire the station fly and take the children to Flaunton myself. But it was a change from the sands, and it gave me the opportunity for studying the blood-stained path of their dalliance against a fresh background.

* * *