1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A.E.W. Mason's "Dilemmas" is a captivating exploration of moral quandaries and intricate human relationships set against the backdrop of early 20th-century societal norms. The narrative unfolds in a richly descriptive style, characterized by Mason's signature blend of sharp dialogue and psychological depth. As characters grapple with ethical dilemmas, the novel emphasizes the tension between personal desires and societal expectations, inviting readers to ponder the complexities of human motives in an era of profound change. The structure combines elements of both realism and psychological drama, presenting a thought-provoking commentary on the choices individuals face in a rapidly evolving world. A.E.W. Mason, renowned for his literary craftsmanship and keen insights into human nature, draws from his own experiences in the British colonial service and his deep understanding of social dynamics. His diverse background as a novelist and playwright equipped him with a unique perspective on the moral fabric of society, providing the impetus to craft "Dilemmas". Mason's work reflects his broader literary influences, including contemporary discussions surrounding ethics and identity, making him a pivotal figure in early 20th-century literature. "Dilemmas" is highly recommended for readers who appreciate intricate narratives that delve into the human psyche and the moral implications of personal choices. Mason's adeptness at weaving together character-driven plots with philosophical inquiries ensures that this novel resonates with both literary enthusiasts and thoughtful readers alike. It is a profound journey into the heart of human experience, illuminating the nuanced nature of dilemmas that continue to face humanity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Dilemmas
Table of Contents
Introduction
Dilemmas gathers a constellation of short fiction by A. E. W. Mason into a single-author collection whose very title signals its governing interest: the moments when choice becomes fate. Rather than presenting a single continuous narrative, the volume assembles distinct narratives that collectively display the range and control of a writer celebrated for narrative clarity and moral tension. The purpose here is not encyclopedic completeness but coherence of focus. Read together, these stories reveal how Mason uses crisis—ethical, emotional, and practical—to propel action and illuminate character, offering a compact survey of his art in concentrated, self-contained forms.
This collection is composed of short fiction: individual tales, several of them structured in numbered sections that underscore shifts of perspective or stage the escalation of events. Within that shared form, the modes vary. Readers will encounter adventure and mystery, episodes of travel and pursuit, intimations of espionage and intrigue, and stories rooted in domestic or professional life. Varied milieus—both expansive and intimate—frame the action; quiet studies of temperament sit alongside narratives of peril. The result is a flexible portfolio of story types unified by a disciplined brevity and an emphasis on event, motive, and the consequences of decisive acts.
However diverse the settings, a consistent architecture binds the pieces. Each turns on a predicament that admits no easy resolution, asking what courage, loyalty, or prudence look like when all outcomes exact a cost. Duty and desire, public obligation and private feeling, reputation and conscience cross and collide. The dilemmas are rarely abstract; they are lived, embodied, and immediate, and their pressures refine or expose those who face them. In that crucible Mason finds drama without melodrama: tension arises less from accident than from character meeting circumstance. The cumulative effect is an inquiry into responsibility under the pressure of time.
Stylistically, Mason favors lucidity over ornament. His sentences move with unobtrusive rhythm, his scenes are staged with economy, and his plots advance by clear, intelligible steps that reward attentive reading. Structural devices—division into parts, parallel episodes, carefully placed recall—give many stories a classical poise while preserving momentum. Description serves function; dialogue carries implication as well as information. He is particularly adept at balancing withheld knowledge against disclosure, creating an atmosphere of candor shadowed by mystery. The craft lies in proportion: enough detail to persuade, enough restraint to invite inference, and an unwavering sense of how to turn the screw.
Equally characteristic is his interest in vocation. Figures from varied walks of life—professionals, travelers, officials, and artists—are tested in the specific terms of their callings. The tools and customs of their worlds matter because the right or wrong choice must be made within those constraints. In these pages, competence is never mere color; it is character in action. That attention to the ethics of practice allows the stories to reach beyond their immediate plots, suggesting how integrity is forged, how it falters, and how, sometimes, it is restored. The dilemmas thus become at once personal and institutional, intimate and civic.
As a whole, the volume demonstrates why Mason’s shorter work continues to attract readers. It distills the appeal that made his longer narratives widely read—clean construction, moral focus, and an appetite for risk—into concentrated forms suitable to the short story. It also shows his adaptability across settings and tones while maintaining a consistent core of preoccupations. Without requiring prior knowledge of his novels or plays, these stories introduce a voice at once accessible and exacting. They confirm a place for the well-made tale in a literary landscape that values both immediacy and depth, suspense and reflective insight.
Approached in sequence or at will, the pieces reward a readerly patience attentive to motive and consequence. Each narrative stands alone, yet together they build a layered portrait of choice under pressure. One may read for atmosphere, for the thrill of predicament, or for the quiet satisfactions of resolution; the collection accommodates all. Above all, it invites contemplation of how lives turn on decisions that cannot be delegated, delayed, or undone. In presenting that perennial human calculus with clarity and restraint, this volume offers not merely entertainment but a durable companion in the art of judging what must be done.
Historical Context
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865–1948) emerged from late-Victorian London—educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Oxford—into a career that bridged theatre, politics, and popular fiction. Before he became Liberal MP for Coventry (1906–1910), he wrote for the West End under actor-manager George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre, a milieu that honed his feel for scene, timing, and social nuance. The success of The Four Feathers (1902) made him a household name and financed wide travel around the Mediterranean and North Africa. His later creation of Inspector Hanaud (from 1910) shows his turn toward detection and ratiocination, traits that inform the problems of conscience threaded through Dilemmas.
Mason’s fiction matured as the British Empire reached its zenith and then faltered between the 1890s and the 1930s. The Suez Canal (opened 1869) made Mediterranean ports—from Gibraltar and Tangier to Malta and Alexandria—hubs of imperial movement and intrigue, and Mason repeatedly drew on these cosmopolitan spaces. Hotels on the Riviera, boulevards in Paris, and quays in Barcelona or Marseilles furnished settings where British tourists, diplomats, sailors, and émigrés mixed. Such locales generated the cultural frictions central to moral choice: codes of honor met consular law, and private impulses met imperial duty. The resulting tensions, visible across the collection, mirror the social ambiguities of late-Edwardian and interwar Europe.
Maritime precision and ritual—implicit in titles like The Chronometer and Sixteen Bells—rest on nineteenth-century revolutions in navigation and time. The 1884 International Meridian Conference fixed Greenwich as zero longitude, while shipboard watches, sounded by bells, ordered labor and life at sea. Even as steam and steel displaced sail, the Admiralty chronometer’s authority persisted, and transoceanic lines—Cunard, White Star, P&O—tied Britain to the world. Radio telegraphy, demonstrated by Marconi in 1897 and at sea by 1901, transformed safety and surveillance, especially after Titanic (1912) pushed regulators toward the 1914 SOLAS convention. Mason’s seafaring crises unfold within this disciplined yet perilous environment where small errors cascade into fate.
The collection’s espionage atmospherics reflect Europe’s intelligence revolution. Britain’s Secret Service Bureau (1909), later MI5 and MI6, professionalized counter-espionage that had been sensationalized since the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906). During the First World War, neutral zones—Madrid, Barcelona, The Hague, Geneva—became relay points for agents and double-crosses. Mason himself undertook intelligence work for Britain during the war, experience that sharpened his feel for clandestine tradecraft and compromised loyalties. The execution of Mata Hari on 15 October 1917 at Vincennes symbolizes wartime hysteria over seduction and secrets, the very themes his stories probe. Across Dilemmas, salons, theaters, and ports double as listening posts, with rumor and coded gesture running ahead of law.
A tale such as The Law of Flight is grounded in the breathtaking pace of early aviation. From the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to Louis Blériot’s Channel crossing in 1909, the sky became a new arena of risk and national prestige. Britain’s Royal Flying Corps (1912) and the Royal Air Force (1918) framed airspace as a strategic frontier, while the Paris Convention of 1919 codified international air law. Interwar feats—Alcock and Brown’s transatlantic crossing (1919) and Schneider Trophy races (1913–1931)—fed public fascination. In Mason’s world, aeroplanes intensify classic ethical conflicts: speed compresses time for decision, and altitude isolates characters from customary social anchors.
Aristocratic maneuver and social theater—implicit in The Duchess and Lady Torrent and The Italian—take shape amid Edwardian display and interwar recalibration. Mayfair drawing rooms and Riviera villas staged reputations at a time when divorce reform (notably the 1923 act aiding wives) and women’s suffrage (1918, 1928) altered power within families. Italy’s prestige—rooted in the Risorgimento (1861–1870) and renewed by wartime alliance from 1915—fed a steady Italian presence in London’s Soho and on the Côte d’Azur, mediating art, cuisine, and finance. Mason’s high society is porous: exiles, impresarios, and titled figures trade favors and secrets, and honor collides with publicity in a culture newly sensitive to scandal.
Religious and rational currents converge around a figure like The Reverend Bernard Simmons, B.D., and in a story titled Magic. The Church of England, reshaped after the Oxford Movement (from 1833) and rattled by early twentieth-century Modernist controversies, wrestled with social missions in industrial parishes and colonial chaplaincies. Parallel to this earnestness ran London’s Golden Age of stage illusion—Maskelyne and Devant at the Egyptian Hall (to 1904), and later Houdini’s tours—where deception was an art of mechanics, misdirection, and psychology. Mason’s detective instincts thrive at this intersection: clerical conscience meets conjuror’s craft, and characters must decide whether truth belongs to doctrine, evidence, or performance.
The collection’s global outliers—Tasmanian Jim’s Specialities and The Cruise of the Virgen del Socorro—draw on wider imperial and Hispanic worlds. The Australian colonies federated in 1901, with Tasmania exporting timber and apples from Hobart while mining and whaling legacies persisted. Spanish maritime culture, steeped in Catholic devotion—names like Virgen del Socorro—linked Cádiz and the Canaries to the Atlantic since the sixteenth century, even as Spain recalibrated after 1898. Such routes supported smugglers, traders, and refugees who populate Mason’s pages. Publication in a mass-media age of serial magazines and film adaptations—Four Feathers saw screen versions from 1915 onward—ensured that these dilemmas resonated with readers navigating modernity’s accelerating circuits.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Strange Case of Joan Winterbourne
A perplexing case centers on the elusive figure of Joan Winterbourne, where conflicting testimonies and buried motives force hard choices.
The Wounded God
A tale revolving around a revered object and the human passions it arouses, exposing the fragile line between devotion and desire.
The Chronometer
A precision timepiece becomes the pivot of fate, its accuracy determining choices whose consequences ripple outward.
Sixteen Bells
A crisis unfolds against the steady march of time, as measured intervals frame a test of nerve and judgment.
The Reverend Bernard Simmons, B.D.
A clergyman confronts a moral quandary that pits doctrine against compassion, revealing the cost of integrity.
A Flaw in the Organization
A meticulously arranged scheme begins to unravel when a small oversight exposes vulnerabilities and invites betrayal.
The Law of Flight
A story about the limits that govern ascent—mechanical and moral—and the price of defying those limits.
The Key
A key—literal or figurative—unlocks more than expected, opening doors to truths that complicate duty and loyalty.
Tasmanian Jim's Specialities
Episodes from the life of a resourceful adventurer from Tasmania, whose distinctive talents solve problems while creating new ones.
The Italian
A character study in which identity, ambition, and honor come under pressure, forcing a difficult recalibration of allegiance.
Magic
The line between illusion and reality blurs as performance conceals intent, and deception becomes a tool for survival.
The Duchess and Lady Torrent
A social drama of rank and rivalry where reputation, loyalty, and leverage determine the outcome of a fraught contest.
Mata Hari
A wartime vignette tracing the allure and peril of espionage through the figure of a notorious dancer-spy.
The Cruise of the "Virgen del Socorro"
A seafaring venture tests resolve and judgment as chance, weather, and will conspire to shape the voyage’s end.
The End
A reflective coda drawing together the collection’s recurring themes of choice, consequence, and moral ambiguity.
Dilemmas
I. THE STRANGE CASE OF JOAN WINTERBOURNE
CLOSE to the foot of the staircase, the manager of the hotel was giving instructions to a liveried attendant. A little way off five young people, three men and two women, were standing together in an impatient group. It was the height of the holiday season at this watering-place, and the roar of voices from the dining-room behind the glass doors drowned altogether the thunder of the surf upon the beach.
"Joan was certain to be late," said the hostess of the party as she looked with vexation about the lounge, now alcove after alcove, a wilderness of plush upholstery and oriental tables. "It's part of her present make-up."
At that moment the girl herself came running down the wide staircase, a gleaming slender creature of twenty-two years, with large brown eyes and a fresh face which she had carefully painted a shade of orange. Her lips showed the bright scarlet which women's lips share with the tunics of the Guards. She carried, of course, neither fan nor gloves, but about her slim white throat she wore a string of iridescent beads which might have been pearls had not their enormous size boasted their artificiality. She gave to Bramley, the young surgeon who formed one of the group of five, the amusing impression that she was playing very hard at being the young lady of the dance clubs. She was certainly abrim with eagerness to make a quite complete affair of this evening's enjoyment.
"I am so sorry, Marjorie, that I am late," she cried to her hostess, and so stopped suddenly upon the last shallow tread of the stairs. All her joy was extinguished in an instant. Her hands clenched and then flew upwards to cover her face. But in the moment which intervened Bramley read so stark a terror in the gleam of her eyes and the quiver of her lips that it shocked him. A fluttering wail broke from her lips, and she crumpled as if her bones were suddenly turned to water. She slid down in a heap against the balustrade. Before Bramley could reach her she had fainted.
"What is the number of her room?" he asked.
"Twenty-three, on the first floor," said Marjorie Hastings. "Oh, I hope it's not serious."
"I don't think there's any reason for alarm," the surgeon reassured her. He turned to the manager of the hotel. "You might send a maid;" and lifting the girl up in his arms with an ease which surprised everyone, he carried her up the stairs.
At the landing he called down:
"You'd better all go in to dinner. We'll follow."
But the greater part of an hour had passed before Bramley joined the party at the table; and then he returned alone.
"Joan wants nothing," he explained. "She is asleep now."
"What was the matter?" asked Marjorie Hastings.
"I haven't one idea," replied Bramley. "There's nothing wrong with her really."
"I can explain," said a stout hearty young man who sat on the other side of Marjorie Hastings. "You met Joan for the first time yesterday. But I can tell you she has been overdoin' it for a good few years now. First she was going to be an artist and she splashed on paint all day for months. When that fell down, she splashed ink on paper all night for another set of months. When that fell down, she plumped for the open air and set out to show Miss Leitch how to play golf. When that fell down, she hit the cabarets. Now she has fallen down herself. Joan is a perfect darling, but she wants someone to smack her from time to time."
He sketched her history. No father and no mother, an aunt somewhere—utterly useless—a bachelor flat in Pall Mall, and a sufficient income. "And a little nervous always," he concluded. "She's not a case for you, Bramley, at all. She's meant for the psycho-wanglers."
Bramley shook his head vigorously. To him, already eminent as an operator and a firm believer that man's best friend was the knife, psycho-analysis was the heresy of heresies.
"Just jargon. Quacks doctoring the half-baked," he declared confidently. For like many brilliant men he was a little arrogant in his attitude towards the things which he did not know. He was none the less troubled by Joan Winterbourne's collapse, and the next morning when the rest of the party went off to the golf course, he stayed behind.
Joan came down at eleven. Her step was firm. There was not even a shadow under her eyes. Her swoon had left no other trace than this: she was dressed for a journey.
"You are going away?" Bramley asked. He saw the door of the luggage lift open and trunks painted with her initials.
"Yes. I have left a note for Marjorie. I am very sorry. I was enjoying myself here very much. But I have got to go."
"It's a pity," Bramley said regretfully. "For I should have liked to have looked after you for a little."
Joan smiled gratefully.
"That's very kind," she answered warmly. "But what happened to me last night has happened three times before; and I never can bear the place where it happened, or anything associated with it afterwards. I couldn't stay here another day. I can't give you any reason, but I couldn't."
Joan was quite without affectation now. She was not playing at being anything but herself—a girl driven hard by an unaccountable experience and seeking the one only way of relief which her instincts had taught to her. Bramley made no attempt to dissuade her.
"If you'll send your maid with your luggage on to the station by the omnibus, I'll walk along with you," he said.
They went out on to the sea-front together, and in the course of that walk, Joan was persuaded by his mere reticence to reveal more of herself than she ever had done before.
"The first time I behaved in that silly fashion," she said, "was on the sailing-yacht of Monsieur de Ferraud off Bordeaux two summers ago. In May of the next year came the second time. I was on a motor-trip to the South of France by the Route des Alpes and the car broke down in the Dauphine between La Grave and the Col de Lauteret. I was standing at the side of the road, and crumpled up as I did last night. The third time I was fortunately sitting down. It was in a circus at St. Etienne. I haven't one idea why it happens. So you see that since I can't endure a yacht, or a motor-car, or a circus, and now shall shrink from any seaside hotel, my life is becoming a little circumscribed."
She ended with a smile of humour which did not hide from him that her distress was very real. Bramley put her into a carriage.
"Will you give me a chance?" he asked, as he shook her hand. "It's all wrong that any girl as young and healthy as you are should go on being attacked in this way. There must be an explanation, and therefore there must be a cure."
The blood mounted into Joan's cheeks. Gratitude shone in her eyes. It did Bramley besides no harm in her thoughts that he was a good-looking young man of a tall and sinewy build.
"Of course I shall be ever so thankful if you'll look after me," she said; and the train moved out of the station.
Bramley walked back to the hotel and made some inquiries that evening of the ruddy-faced optimist who gave the Winterbourne family a clean bill of health.
"Never heard of any epilepsy. A nervous, kind of artistic lot—that, yes. The father, for instance, would always rather paint a bird than shoot one. Queer taste, isn't it? But all of them clean-blooded and clear-eyed just like Joan herself. No, no, it's not your affair, Bramley, so you can keep your penknife in your pocket. Joan ought to go to the psycho-boys."
This time Bramley did not shake his head in contempt. Certainly if there was anything in the theories of the "psycho-boys," here was the very patient for them. It was all heresy, to be sure, but none the less he found himself in his perplexity formulating the case from their angle. Thus:
"A girl, by heredity and of her own disposition nervous, passes through an experience which Nature, in its determination to survive, proceeds to bury deep down in the girl's subconsciousness below the levels of memory. The experience therefore was one terrible enough to shake her reason; and from time to time something, a word perhaps, or an article, associated with that experience reproduces suddenly in a milder form the original terror and shock. The only cure is to be found in restoring this experience to the patient's memory. For she will then understand; and the trouble will be at an end."
Thus he reflected, whilst he paid an indifferent attention to the conversation at the dinner-table; so indifferent indeed that he actually began to carry on his formulation aloud:
"It is quite clear, therefore, or would be quite clear, if I accepted these fantastic theories, which I don't—"
At this point Marjorie Hastings interrupted him.
"My dear man, what are you talking about?"
"Nothing, Marjorie. The idiocy with which I have long been threatened has at last declared itself."
What was, or would have been quite clear to him, if he had accepted the heresy, amounted simply to this. There was one circumstance, one factor common to all the four occasions upon which Joan had felt the inrush of terror and had swooned away. At first nothing seemed more hopeless to Bramley than to find a link between the lounge of a hotel upon the south coast of England, and a circus at St. Etienne in France, or between a yacht in the Bay of Biscay and a motor-car breakdown in the Dauphine Alps. Yet undoubtedly such a link there must be.
He turned to Marjorie Hastings.
"Do you know St. Etienne?"
"No. Where is it?"
Bramley had drawn a blank there and tried again.
"Monsieur de Ferraud's yacht, I believe, is little short of a palace."
Marjorie Hastings looked at him with sympathy.
"You poor thing!" she cried. "You must hold some ice to your forehead. Try some sarsaparilla! It may be just what you want."
"Silence, woman!" returned Bramley. He had drawn another blank, but he tried again. "Did you ever travel by the Route des Alpes?"
"Don't be silly! Of course I did. I motored to Florence one spring with Joan and—" Marjorie Hastings came to an abrupt stop. "That's curious," she resumed slowly. "I hadn't thought of it until now. Joan had just the same sort of attack and behaved just in the same strange way afterwards. She wouldn't go on with us. She went back in the Diligence to Grenoble and joined us in Nice by train."
This time Bramley had drawn a horse at all events. He turned to Marjorie eagerly.
"Tell me all about it, please."
The car had broken down just beyond a tunnel half an hour or so after passing La Grave. They had sent back to the village for a cart; they turned the car round by hand to have it ready; and after that they had all strolled idly about, admiring the great bastion of the Meije across the valley and the white velvet of its enormous glacier. The cart had emerged from the tunnel. The driver had got down to fix his tow-rope to the axle of the car and without a word Joan dropped in the middle of the road as if she had been shot. "She might have broken her nose or got concussion. I tell you, it was alarming."
"Thank you," said Bramley. The yacht of Monsieur de Ferraud off Bordeaux, the breakdown of the motorcar in the Dauphine, the circus of St. Etienne. It had flashed upon him that these three circumstances had after all a common factor. Did the empty lounge of the hotel last night contain it also? Bramley sought out the manager immediately after dinner.
"You were close to the foot of the stairs when Miss Winterbourne fainted," he said.
"Yes. I was arranging with Alphonse the space we should reserve for dancing."
"Alphonse!" cried Bramwell. "The lounge-attendant. Yes, of course. He is French?"
"But of course, as I am."
"And you were speaking in French?"
"No doubt!" The manager shrugged his shoulders. "I do not remember. But no doubt! We always do. Would you like to see Alphonse, Mr. Bramley?"
"Of all things," Bramley replied; and after a quarter of an hour, and some goings and comings of the lounge-attendant, Bramley left the office with a smile upon his face and a package under his arm. He felt the excitement of an adventurer upon a treasure-hunt who has discovered the first important clue.
Upon his return to London, he wrote to Joan Winterbourne, asking her to play golf with him on the first Saturday at Beaconsfield. She telephoned in reply: "Delighted, if we go down by train," and though she laughed as she spoke, it was clear that she meant what she said. Bramley had planned to put no questions to her at all, but to lure her on to talk about herself in any rambling way she chose. They were much more likely to approach the truth that way. But the pair had not been playing for more than five minutes before he had forgotten all about his plans and was concerned solely with approaches of quite a different kind. For he found to his surprise and a little to his discomfort that Joan could give him half a stroke a hole.
At the ninth hole, however, when she was six up, she missed the easiest of putts and sat down on a bank with her face between her hands and despair in her brown eyes.
"Look at that!" she cried, and she swore loudly and lustily so that an elderly lady close by left out the next two holes and removed herself to a less vicious part of the course.
"I shall never be any good at anything. It was just the same when I painted. Year after year I used to go in the summer to Normandy with a class and I never got anywhere."
Bramley became aware once more of his attractive patient and forgot the catastrophe of his golf.
"Oho! So you used to go to Normandy?" he repeated with the utmost carelessness.
"Yes. To St.-Vire-en-Pre, a tiny village a mile from the sea. You'll never have heard of it. I went there for three summers, until I was eighteen. Then I hated it. Shall we go on?"
"Yes. You are only five up now. So you hated it? An ugly little village, eh?"
"On the contrary, lovely. I lodged in an old farm with another girl, Mary Cole. I think she's married now."
Joan drove off from the tenth tee with her whole attention concentrated on the stroke. The memory of the summers at St.-Vire-en-Pre meant nothing to her, quite obviously. Bramley's thoughts, however, ran as follows:
"I must find Mary Cole. Marjorie Hastings must help me. I want to know if Joan was on Monsieur de Ferraud's yacht after the last summer at St.-Vire-en-Pre. If after, then we may be very near to the solution of our riddle." With the result that his ball escaped into a patch of rough grass and dug itself in.
Bramley, however, no longer minded. He was indeed rather elated, chiefly on Joan's account, but a little too because he was now minded to demonstrate to the "psycho-boys" that any old surgeon could play their game just as well as they did, if he only took the trouble.
Marjorie Hastings produced Mary Cole in due course. She was a brisk young woman, now married, with a couple of children, who had slipped quite out of the little set in which Joan played so conspicuous a part. Even the summers on the coast of Normandy had become unsubstantial as dreams to her. But she remembered how those visits ceased.
"We were a large party that year. So Joan and I had to find a lodging in a house which was strange to us. We found it at a farm a hundred yards or so beyond the end of the village, the farm of Narcisse Perdoux. The work of the farm was all done by the family and we were charged an extortionate price for our two rooms. We had made up our minds never to go back there in any case. Then came the last night before the party broke up. We had a dance in the studio. Joan and I went back to the farm at about one o'clock in the morning. The door was on the latch—a relief to us, for old Narcisse Perdoux, even with his Sunday manners on, was a grudging inappeasable person. What he would have been if we had waked him out of his bed to let us in we were afraid to think. We crept upstairs to our rooms, which stood end to end on the first floor, my window looking out towards the sea, Joan's at the back looking out past the barn to the open country. We both went at once to our separate rooms, for we had our packing to do in the morning, and I at all events was more than half-asleep already. I don't suppose that ten minutes had passed before I was in bed. I am certain that fifteen hadn't before I was asleep. I was awakened by someone falling into my room and collapsing with a thud on the floor. I lit my candle. It was Joan. For a moment I thought that she was dead. But her heart was beating and she was breathing. I got her into my bed, chafed her feet, put my salts to her nostrils, did in a word what I could and after a little while she came to. She was sick—terribly sick for a long while. The farm was stirring before she dropped off to sleep, but then she slept heavily for a long time."
"She had no injury?" Bramley asked.
"None at all."
"And how did she explain her rush into your bedroom at two o'clock in the morning," interrupted Marjorie Hastings; "and her swoon?"
"Of course she didn't explain that at all," Bramley replied, and Mary Cole stared at him in surprise.
"How could you know that?" she asked. "But it's true. Nothing might have happened to her at all, beyond that she had slept in my bed instead of her own. She never alluded to it. She went about her packing. The only unusual sign she made was a desperate hurry to get away from the house."
"But why she was in a hurry she didn't know," said Bramley, and again Mary Cole turned to him in surprise.
"That's just it. Joan suddenly hated the place. It made her ill."
"But surely you questioned her?" Marjorie Hastings urged. "I should have been frightened out of my life if anyone had come tumbling about my bedroom in a lonely farmhouse in the middle of the night. My word, I should have asked a question or two and seen that I got the answers."
Marjorie's pretty face was truculent. Bramley was smiling at her truculence when Mary Cole explained:
"I was anxious to get away too, without wasting a moment. For the farm was all upset, and we weren't wanted. You see Charles, Narcisse Perdoux's oldest son, had died during the night.—What in the world's the matter?"
This question was thrown in a startled voice at Bramley, from whose face the smile had suddenly vanished.
"Nothing," he answered gravely and hesitatingly, "except—that we are in deeper waters than ever I imagined us to be."
All Bramley's stipulations were working out in the most dreadful fashion. The first experience of Joan's, terrible enough to shake the reason; Nature's determination to thrust it beyond the reach of memory; the factor common to the original seizure and to each recurrence; and now this revelation by Mary Cole all pointed to some grim and sinister story of the darkness—an outrage upon nature, a horror upon horrors. Bramley remembered the stark look of terror which had shone in Joan's eyes during the moment when she had clung to the balustrade in the hotel lounge and before she had clapped her hands to her face to shut the vision out. He felt a chill as though ice had slipped down his spine. And this story had to be dragged up in all its dimly seen ugliness into the full light! There was no hope for Joan in any other way. She must be made to remember. After all, he realized with a sudden humility, the "psycho-boys" had their penknives too, though they were different from his.
II
He sent for Joan Winterbourne the next day and she came to him in Harley Street. From her close-fitting hat to her beige stockings and her shiny shoes, she was just one of the pretty young women in the uniform of the day. But there was a tension, a vague anxiety in her face which had already begun to set her a little apart. It would overcloud her altogether unless it was explained to her and thereby dissolved.
"You have been all right since you beat me so disgracefully at Beaconsfield?" he asked.
"Quite. But one never knows..."
"I believe we are going to know this morning," he reassured her; and a sudden wave of confidence and hope brought the colour into her cheeks. He put her into a chair by the side of his table.
"I want you to tell me one or two things."
"Ask away?" said Joan.
"When did you have this attack on Monsieur de Ferraud's yacht?"
"Three years ago."
"I see. After your last visit to St.-Vire-en-Pre?"
"Yes, a year after."
"And in the same month of the year?"
"Yes."
"Perhaps the same day of the month?"
"That I can't remember."
"Sure? Let's see! You left St.-Vire-en-Pre,"—and here Bramley was careful to speak without a hint of emphasis or significance—"the day after Charles Perdoux died at the farm. You don't remember?"
"No."
"Well, it doesn't matter."
And it didn't. The day of the week was of no importance. What did matter was the swift sidelong stare of Joan's eyes when he mentioned Charles Perdoux's name, and the curious foxiness which sharpened her face. She was suddenly disfigured. In another age he would have said that she was possessed by the devil. For the change was horrible. All her grace and youth in a second were gone. Her gaze was perfectly steady, but it was cunning. Yet cunning was too respectable a word. It was leery—as was the smile which distorted her mouth. Bramley had an inspiration that he was wrestling with some obscene spirit ages old for the possession of this girl. The spirit seemed to dare him to make her remember if he could. If he had ever doubted that he was on the right lines, he threw his doubts overboard now. Heresy or no heresy, he knew. The "psycho-boys" were one up.
"Joan," he said gently. He bent forward and took her hand in his. "Let us get back to the yacht."
"Yes," she answered, her features relaxed; she flashed back to her normal self, attentive to his questions, certain of his goodwill, dispossessed of the devil.
She marshalled her memories.
"It was in the morning. I was on deck. The yacht was a schooner. We were going to race that day. The crew were busy with their preparations. Almost over my head a sailor seated on the yard was fitting a new rope through a block. I remember the end of the rope slipping down the side of the mast like a snake. I was for no reason shocked out of my wits and I fainted."
"Thank you," Bramley interrupted. "I needn't bother you any more about the yacht. You saw a rope shaking down the side of the mast, and you passed out. Right! Let's come now to the breakdown of the motor on the Route des Alpes."
Joan leaned forward.
"Yes?"
"You were all out of the car on the road."
"Yes."
"Across the valley the Meije rose."
"Yes."
"It's a huge mass of a mountain with pinnacles and glaciers flowing down its flank."
"Yes."
"But at that moment you weren't admiring it. You weren't looking at it at all. Just visualize that exact spot if you can!"
Joan leaned back in her chair and concentrated her thoughts, a little timidly at first lest her experience on the road should be repeated here in Bramley's consulting-room; and afterwards, since nothing happened, with a greater freedom.
"I had the Meije upon my left," she resumed slowly. "It's true. I was not looking at the mountain. I was facing the tunnel through which we had come. The broken-down car was in front of me. A cart had come through the tunnel from La Grave to tow us back. The driver of the car was fixing a rope to the front axle of the car, I remember the same horrible sense of sickness and terror overwhelming me."
"Exactly," said Bramley. She was rather white now, but he was smiling at her cheerfully. "It's all working out. Don't worry!"
Joan did not answer in words, but the deep breath she drew was sign enough of her desperate need to free herself from the ghastly obsession which was darkening all her life.
"Every time I cross a road," she said, "I ask myself, 'Shall I go down here under the wheels?'"
"We shall answer that, Joan, before we have finished," Bramley replied, with every sign of confidence. "Now let's see what was happening in the circus at St. Etienne."
