Chapter Twenty-Four I
Ten days later. A large sitting room in exclusive lodgings near Picadilly, London. Two men in an animated conversation. The decidedly younger one, breezy and Times Squarish, and yet politely deferential to the experience of his senior; the latter, a tall, wiry man immaculately dressed in a suit of neutral coloring.
The young man was saying:
“Yes, Mr. Pryor, he’s slowly warming to me. Slowly. I tell you, sir, a Japanese naval attache can give points to an icicle. Still, I think he’s biting!”
“Did you tell him that the U.S. Army of Occupation had sent machine guns to the number of three thousand two hundred and fifty to the Ukraine?”
“No. I followed your instructions to the dot. I merely said I was in a position to tell him the number.”
“Well?”
“He replied, with a sour smile, that he was in the same position as regards me. I ventured to question the correctness of his information. He volunteered the figure.”
“And the figure he gave?”
“Was three thousand two hundred and fifty.”
Mark Pryor’s rather long neck collapsed telescopically down his high, straight collar.
“And you think he’s biting!” he said, turning his roving gray eyes quizzically on his companion. “Take care, Smilo, my boy, or he’ll have you ‘biting’ before you know it. And that will be a case of the biter bit.”
“Have your little joke at the expense of the service, Mr. Pryor,” said young Smilo, with an air of tactfully conveying a rebuke. “But is a mere Jap likely to come it over a real American like you or me? I don’t think.”
“Let’s waive discussion on a point so personal. In temperament and disposition we are exact opposites. That’s why we get on so well together, and why I’m going to take you into my confidence.”
“Mr. Pryor, you mustn’t think—”
“I know it, my boy, I know it. I must never think, and I ought never to take you into my confidence, either. Both acts are first-class infractions of the rules of the military secret service. I admit it shouldn’t be done. It might result in important discoveries. It might even lead to the disentangling of one of the mysteries we’re working on. Think of it! There’d be only one thousand two hundred and fifty-six mysteries left.”
Young Smilo laughed good naturedly (to cheer the old boy up!).
“None the less,” continued Pryor, gravely, “I shall now violate another inviolable rule. I shall give you four pieces of information. The first: Running across Hutchins Burley in Paris twelve days ago, I told him the number of machine guns sent by us to the Ukraine.”
“So that was the dodge. I see! You told him the exact number?”
“Hardly. I told him three thousand two hundred and fifty. I thought that number would do as well as any. Much better than the real number for a variety of reasons which I won’t stop to detail. Suffice it, the number agrees with the number which you, in your capacity of informer to the Japanese Secret Service, offered to reveal to the attache, and which he already knew.”
“By George! With all the other dope you’ve got in the Burley case, you must be pretty nearly ready to close in on the man?”
“So I thought. But Headquarters didn’t. You see, I had followed Burley along a devious route to Brussels. By the way, he nearly slipped through my fingers there. I muffed him, so to speak. But I picked him up again before he left Belgium and dogged him to Coblenz.”
“Coblenz? In the thick of the American occupation?”
“Precisely. And bang under the noses of the American army, Mr. Hutchins walked into a tobacconist’s shop and sent a letter to the Japanese embassy. At this tremendously exciting moment, Headquarters, in all the majesty of its omniscience, shunted me off to London and ordered me to take you in tow and mark time.”
“We marked time all right,” chuckled Smilo. “You might say we hall-marked it, what little we had. Linking Burley up with the Japs on the one hand and with the smuggled Fontaine diamonds on the other, wasn’t such a bad week’s work, even though we haven’t got the goods on him yet.”
“That’s all very well, my boy. But what do I get today? Here is your second piece of information. I get word to quit the Japanese case.”
“What for?”
“For a post of honor in the business of trailing certain dangerous American radicals who are temporarily in London. How do you like that?”
“I don’t like it, Mr. Pryor. And I don’t blame you for not liking it. It looks like a raw deal. But are you sure it hasn’t some remote connection with Burley?”
“No, I’m not sure. The devil has many irons in the fire. So has Hutchins Burley. Most energetic gentlemen whether of the diabolic or the celestial brand can gobble up an astonishing number of miscellaneous jobs. For all I know, Hutchins may be the new Head Bolshevik Bomb Thrower; or he may be the old chief Agent Provocateur; or he may be merely somebody with a friend in Washington whose word can make Headquarters quail. It’s a conundrum. A pretty, picture-puzzle, play-box conundrum, if you like. Still, a conundrum. And I’m heartily sick of conundrums. I’m done with them. I joined the Secret Service to become a detective, not a musical comedy magician.”
“You don’t mean to say you are going to resign?”
“I do. You have guessed my third item of news. As fast as a steamer can carry me, I mean to proceed to Washington, there to give my resignation and sundry pieces of my mind to the Chief in person.”
“But keeping its agents in the dark is an old, cherished method of the Service, isn’t it? Mr. Pryor, I feel sure you have another reason.”
“I have. Item four: I’m being followed.”
“Followed—I don’t understand.”
“I began to suspect something the moment I came to London. Well, I put my suspicions to the test yesterday. Before going out I folded a pair of trousers in a very particular way and left them on a chair. When I came back they had been refolded in a slightly different way.”
“Did you question your landlady?”
“Yes. Naturally she denied that any stranger had entered, but her confusion was obvious. I quickly suggested that my tailor might have called, and she as quickly agreed that this was so. When, an hour later, I interviewed the tailor and he confirmed me in my belief that he had not been near the house, the inference was clear. I was being watched. And, mark you, Smilo, I have reason to believe that the watcher is one of our own colleagues.”
“Lord, no!”
“Judging from the awkward way the pockets were crumpled in the act of refolding the trousers, I have further reason to believe that the watcher is a woman.”
“Impossible!”
“Nothing is impossible in this best of impossible worlds.”
“It’s a low-down shame, Mr. Pryor. But, after all, it can’t hurt you. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, etc.’ You know the saying.”
“My dear boy, being a detective you can’t begin to realize that the knowledge that you are being carefully watched gives you a very jumpy feeling—especially when you know you’re guilty.”
“In heaven’s name, guilty of what?”
“Of doing a good job in your own line; in my case, tracking down criminals.”
“Surely you don’t mean to imply that Headquarters would permit influences—”
“I imply nothing. I give you the benefit of the facts. But if you think it’s a pleasure to surmise that your every movement has an unseen spectator—you don’t know who, but you fear it’s a young and beautiful woman—”
The sudden ring-a-ling of the telephone bell cut across the room.
Mark Pryor took up the instrument.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s Mr. Pryor speaking. A young woman? Indeed! Well, I’ll see her up here.”
He hung up the receiver.
“A young and beautiful woman,” he repeated with a singularly straight face.
Young Smilo, whose way of life was still in the green, the callow leaf, was divided between admiration and bewilderment. In half a minute or so there was a knock at the door.
The young woman who came in was Janet Barr.
II
Smilo’s parting look was one of stupefaction at the reception the visitor got, Pryor’s enthusiasm being a startling abandonment of his neutral, self-contained manner.
Left to themselves, Janet informed Pryor of the troubles that had brought her to see him. The chief of these was Hutchins Burley.
Would Mr. Pryor advise her how to deal with him if he turned up again, as seemed highly probable?
There were other difficulties. She had nearly exhausted her funds. She didn’t wish to return to the United States. Not at the moment, anyhow. Yet she couldn’t get a position without a character.
This last she had learned recently, after several bitter experiences. Europeans seemed firmly persuaded that a character existed not in yourself but in the minds of other people, or rather in their handwriting. In the United States a good presence was worth a thousand good characters and your own opinion of yourself, expressed with imaginative brilliance, went much further than other people’s opinion of you, expressed with dullness. In Europe, the reverse was true.
Would he make out a good character for her, and have it on tap within easy reach in case she referred employers to him?
She was sure that any testimonial coming from him—yes, from him—
“Oh, I know you’re a mystery,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory gesture. “But not an ordinary mystery. A mystery linked to the pink of propriety is a sublime mystery. Like Mrs. Grundy’s husband, whom you remind me of. No one has ever identified that mysterious man. Yet who’d have the courage to turn down a character made out by Mr. Grundy?”
She told him of her break with Claude, of her situation as the companion of Henriette, and of her experience with M. St. Hilaire as a result of Burley’s interference.
“I left Brussels the very next day.”
“For Coblenz?”
“Via Coblenz, for Munich, to see you, if possible. It was a Munich address you gave me, on board the ‘Baronia’.”
“I left Munich some time ago.”
“So I learned. You see, I followed you here. But how do you know I went to Coblenz?”
“On the seventh of October?”
“On the seventh of October. How did you know it?”
“I didn’t know it. The information just drifted my way.”
“You are a detective then, Sherlock Holmes and M. Gaboriau rolled into one.”
“Janet, disabuse yourself of that idea. If I were a detective I’d be a very sorry one. Let me prove it to you. In the course of my duties (whatever they are), I had occasion to look up Mr. Burley. I located him in Brussels on the sixth of October. I had scarcely found him before he slipped through my fingers.”
“Slipped through your fingers?”
“Yes. Slipped through my fingers. You see, I’m trying to live up to the detective role to oblige you. Well, I got on to Mr. Burley’s movements again on the seventh of October, just in time to follow him to Coblenz. Why Coblenz? I asked myself again and again. By the way, did you ever hear of a real, live detective asking himself a question?”
“No. But what is the answer?”
“You are the answer, of course. And I’ve only just discovered the fact. Fancy Sherlock Holmes following Hutchins Burley all the way from Brussels to Coblenz and from Coblenz to London and not discovering a quintessential answer, until the answer had crossed the Channel and stationed itself under his very nose.”
“Do you mean to tell me that that odious Hutchins Burley is also in London at this very minute?”
“Don’t be alarmed; I give you my word he sha’n’t molest you again. I was about to res—I was about to transfer my valuable services to another sphere. What you have told me determines me to hang on a little longer, for the sole satisfaction of bringing Hutchins Burley to book.”
“Oh, you mustn’t injure your prospects on my account.”
“No fear. There’s pleasure in checkmating a fellow like Burley, and profit, too. You know, Janet, the real old-fashioned heavy-weight villains are deplorably scarce. Goodness, routine goodness, is so easy nowadays, it is so much in fashion, it is so thoroughly rammed down our throats by compulsory education, that very few people are inclined to be wicked and fewer still are energetic enough to carry out the inclination. Mr. Hutchins Burley is a rare beast. He does not identify his wickedness with our goodness. Not he. He believes in himself from top to bottom. Unlike the usual criminal of today, he doesn’t suffer from the cowardice of his convictions.”
They discussed Janet’s plans. Ways and means, and how to get her off the rocks, were the first considerations.
“Do you know what?” said Pryor, reflectively; “your old friend Cornelia Covert could give you a lift.”
“Oh, no; I can’t go back to America—not yet, anyhow,” said Janet resolutely.
“But she isn’t in America. She’s in Paris. You didn’t know it? Then I’ve a big piece of news for you. She’s married!”
“Cornelia married!”
“Yes. Benedick, the married man, isn’t in it with Diana, the married woman.”
“It’s Harry Kelly, of course. Give me a moment to catch my breath. Mrs. Harry Kelly!”
“Not a bit of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve heard of Paulette crepe, haven’t you?”
“The crepe that’s all the rage this year. Mr. Pryor, when I see a Paulette crepe blouse in a London shop, the cells of my great-great-grandmother rise enviously within me and turn the clock back to Noah.”
“The curse of Eve,” said Mr. Pryor, in his driest vein. “Well, everybody knows that Paulette crepe is named after Madame Paulette, one of the first dressmakers of Paris. Not everybody knows that Madame Paulette’s real name is—”
“Cornelia!”
“Precisely.”
Prior briefly narrated the curious story of Cornelia’s migration to Paris, her marriage to Harry Kelly, her transformation into a fashionable dressmaker. Through a convergence of happy events, in which Pryor had had a hand, Cornelia had been able to enter the old and famous house of Paulette, then noticeably on the decline. Her artistic gifts and Kelly’s industry had rejuvenated the management and revived the glories of the Paulette tradition. In a little less than a year Cornelia and Kelly had bought out the aged proprietors of the firm.
“No wonder I didn’t hear from her,” said Janet. “All my letters came back unopened. I began to think she had turned her back on me.”
“Marriage has not changed her as much as that,” said Pryor, smiling. “But I warn you that it has changed her a good deal.”
“For the better or for the worse?”
“For the better and for the worse. But wait and judge for yourself.”
“Perhaps Cornelia will think me in the way, now that she has a husband to look after.”
“Cornelia lose sleep over Harry? No, dear girl; don’t worry on that score. And don’t forget that she’ll be glad to do me a favor as well as you. More than one tony customer has come to her shop at my instance. When I tell you that I brought Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the mother of the Duchess of Keswick, to her, you’ll admit that I’m a crack barker.”
“Mr. Pryor, you are my deus ex machina. I believe you are every one else’s, too. It must be a hobby with you to help people out of difficulties.”
“Quite the contrary. It’s a hobby with me to get people into difficulties. The worst of it is, I rarely succeed. I rarely get anybody into difficulties except myself.”
“Is that true?”
“Well, it’s as true of me as it is of certain other people. Sensitive people. People like you, or Charlotte Beecher, or Robert Lloyd.”
“Oh, Robert never gets himself into difficulties,” said Janet, with a trace of bitterness. “He’s too efficient, too perfect.”
“You do him an injustice, I’m sure. Lloyd merely puts up an exceptionally good front. He stands the strain of existence with skill and courage. So do you, for that matter.”
“Thanks. But I really haven’t had much to stand.”
“It seems ample to me.”
“Not half what I expected. When I went away with Claude I thought the universe would be arrayed against me. I dare say that in the margin of my thoughts there was a dim picture of Janet flinging a glove in the face of a decadent, despotic world.”
They both smiled.
“What happened?”
Janet went on, sub-ironically: “A geyser of slander and mockery that spurted up from the newspapers. Nothing else. Nothing diabolic on the world’s side. Nothing heroic on mine.”
“That’s the rule in these cases, Janet. The Flatbush suburb idea that all the world loves a lover is about as true as the Greenwich Village or Kips Bay idea that all the world hates a free union.”
“You think both ideas are fictions?”
“Not entirely. Modern society has its own way of giving a pat of approval to a regular marriage and a kick of disapproval to a free union. Apart from these casual demonstrations it doesn’t get tremendously excited over what its men and women do as males and females, so long as they pay their rent regularly, refrain from incurring bad debts with tradesmen, and bow the knee (at least in public) to the seventh commandment.”
“Yes, I soon found that out. Nobody cared a pin whether I was married or not, or whether I was more to be pitied than scorned, provided I wore the proper clothes and told the proper lies.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody, except Hutchins Burley.”
“Ah, there’s sure to be a Nemesis!”
“Yes. But why Hutchins Burley? What am I to Burley, or Burley to me? Why should that horrible wretch be commissioned to persecute me? Why was he destined to snap the bond of comradeship between Henriette and me? He isn’t exactly one’s notion of a social censor, is he?”
“A scavenger isn’t a popular notion of a sweet and clean man. Yet he serves a public purpose.”
“What an extraordinary analogy!”
“Not at all. You see, Janet, we moderns are too squeamish or too lazy to do our necessary dirty work ourselves, dirty work like punishment, for instance. The result is that when some one rashly assails the majesty of one of our institutions, we punish him by proxy. We kill by the hand of the public executioner. We get revenge by the hand of the judge. We dispense poetic justice by the hand of a Hutchins Burley.”
“Well, Hutchins Burley as society’s Nemesis is a brand new idea to me. I shall need time to let it sink in. But what have I done to deserve so mighty a thing as poetic justice? I haven’t even stolen another woman’s husband. Haven’t I been my own worst enemy, as Laura Jean Libby used to say? Isn’t that vice its own reward?”
“Janet, your question is fair. But your voice and your eyes are not. Now I come to think of it, there may after all be a teeny weeny bit to say—no, not on Hutchins Burley’s side—but on Monsieur Anton St. Hilaire’s side.”
“Mr. Pryor!”
“I don’t mean a twentieth part of what I say. But let me say it. You are strong enough to take it straight. To begin with, the enigma of Hutchins Burley: answer me this. Didn’t you of your own free will settle down amongst the Outlaws?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t touch pitch without a little of it sticking to your fingers. But let us consider what you are to do next. It’s a safer topic. We’ve talked unguardedly enough, considering that there’s a dictagraph in the room, put there by no friends of mine.”
“A dictagraph! Then you’re not a great detective,” said Janet, seriously disappointed. Hopefully, she added: “If you are not Sherlock Holmes, perhaps you are Raffles?”
“Well, it takes a thief to catch a thief,” was the enigmatic reply.
He did not tell her that the hiding place of the dictagraph had been located and that Smilo had received instructions to tamper with the instrument as soon as the coast was clear.
III
They took a bus to Janet’s lodgings.
Several plans were agreed upon. Chiefly, they were both to write to Cornelia asking her to find a position for Janet in the Paulette establishment.
Fashionable dressmaking was not precisely the work that Janet’s heart was in. But she was prepared to take any position as a means to an end. Her real goal was active participation in the later phases of the women’s movement. Recent happenings had revived in her the old longing to enter the thick of the battle, to pitch into the struggle for equal pay in every sort of occupation and for an equal title to legislative and administrative power.
“But I shall have to get an income of my own before I can be a factor in this struggle,” she said.
“One must get an income of one’s own before one can be a factor in any struggle,” said Pryor, dryly.
“Yes, I’ve learned that, too. Feminists say that a woman must have an independent income in order to enter marriage with self-respect. They could go further and say that a woman must have an independent income in order to enter a free union with self-respect.”
Pryor told her that he expected to return to the United States in a few weeks. Should he, in case he ran across Robert Lloyd, inform him of her altered views?
She said that Robert wouldn’t thank him for any information about her.
“But you were such exceptionally good friends,” expostulated Pryor. “Your little firm of Barr & Lloyd—what a pity you couldn’t pick that thread up again, instead of joining Cornelia. If Robert weren’t as poor as a church mouse, or if you both weren’t too proud to borrow a little cash from me—”
Janet interrupted to veto all suggestions along that line. Pride had nothing to do with the question. It was true that she and Robert had been very good friends and excellent working partners. But Robert had emphatically said that he had no use for a woman who had damaged her social and businesss value by indulging in an adventure such as hers
“Hm!” said Pryor. “When the shoe pinches his own foot, what astoundingly conservative exclamations even a radical fellow will make.”
Janet went on to say that, although she had changed her views, she had every reason to believe that Robert had not changed his. Thus, he had taken no step whatever to communicate with her, despite the fact that she had indirectly, in her first letter to Cornelia, asked him to do so.
“Besides,” she added, “didn’t you know that he was about to marry Charlotte Beecher?”
“Oh, ho, so that’s how the wind blows?”
Pryor, standing in front of Janet’s house, gave the curb a sharp whack with his cane.
“That marriage has no place in the scheme of your deus ex machina,” he said, with a quizzical frown. “We’ll have to take it out on Burley—give the devil an extra twist of the tail to relieve our feelings.”
“Yes, when you catch him. Meanwhile, what am I to do about him?”
“Forget him, forget him serenely for half a dozen weeks or so. Then you’ll hear from him again.”
“Hear from him again,” she said, with a shade of alarm.
“Not from him in person,” corrected Pryor, straightening up till he looked like a hickory stick. “About him, through me. Good news for us, bad news for him. Until then good-bye.”