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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
A.E.W. Mason's "The House of the Arrow" is a masterful blend of psychological intrigue and detective fiction that delves into themes of betrayal, revenge, and familial secrets. Set against the backdrop of an English country estate, the narrative unfolds through a series of meticulously crafted characters and a labyrinthine plot that keeps readers engaged. Mason employs a rich, descriptive style that captures the nuances of human relationships and the moral ambiguities faced by the protagonists. The book reflects the early 20th-century literary context of the crime genre, drawing on the tradition of mystery while weaving in social commentary that resonates deeply with its time. A.E.W. Mason (1865-1948) was a British author and playwright renowned for his contributions to both literature and the world of espionage, as a Royal Flying Corps officer during World War I. His diverse career, encompassing journalism and politics, undoubtedly enriched his storytelling, infusing his characters with depth and psychological insight. "The House of the Arrow" showcases his keen understanding of human nature, honed by his varied life experiences that shaped his literary voice. For readers who appreciate a sophisticated blend of mystery, character-driven plots, and moral complexity, "The House of the Arrow" is highly recommended. It invites reflection on the darker aspects of human emotion while providing a compelling narrative that will engage fans of classic crime fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The House of the Arrow
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The House of the Arrow, A. E. W. Mason draws a taut circle around a prosperous household and asks whether disciplined reason can pierce the comfortable armor of reputation when a death, a legacy, and a persistent hint of malice send suspicion arrowing through every room.
First published in 1924, this novel belongs to the classic period often called the Golden Age of detective fiction, and it is set chiefly in Dijon, France, where provincial calm masks complex social ties and private anxieties; it also forms part of Mason’s series featuring the celebrated French detective Hanaud of the Sûreté, whose presence signals a case in which patient inquiry, shrewd observation, and cultural nuance matter as much as any single piece of evidence.
The premise is deliberately spare and unsettling: the death of a wealthy woman triggers quiet doubts, the administration of an estate becomes a point of contention, and an enigmatic sign associated with an arrow lingers in the background like a challenge to common sense, drawing a visiting English solicitor and Hanaud into a house whose routines conceal as much as they reveal, inviting readers to follow an investigation that unfolds through interviews, small discrepancies, and the steady pressure of logic.
Readers encounter a mystery that privileges atmosphere and inference over spectacle, with careful attention to how people speak, hesitate, and perform certainty under strain; Mason’s narration is measured and observant, allowing tension to accumulate across domestic spaces, legal offices, and streets that feel recognizably lived in, while the detective’s methods balance procedure and intuition, producing an experience that rewards patience, close reading, and a taste for puzzles grounded in character rather than in mere mechanical trickery.
Beneath its elegant surface, the book explores the fragility of appearances, the ethics of suspicion within families, and the uneasy intersection of affection, money, and responsibility; it also traces the negotiation between personal conscience and institutional duty, as law, medicine, and common opinion vie to define what counts as fact, all within a cross-channel frame that contrasts British legal habits with French investigative practice without reducing either to caricature.
For contemporary readers, its questions retain bite: how do we weigh testimony shaded by fear or loyalty, what kind of evidence truly convinces, and when does the desire for certainty become a danger in itself; the novel invites reflection on the costs of inference, the power of rumor, and the discipline required to withhold judgment until the pattern of small truths aligns into a coherent—if uneasy—picture.
Approached today, The House of the Arrow offers the satisfactions of a classic detection tale—lucid prose, deliberate pacing, and an investigation that respects the intelligence of its audience—while opening a window onto the social textures of its time; it is a story to be read attentively and savored slowly, an invitation to inhabit ambiguity until clarity emerges, and a reminder that even the quietest rooms can harbor conflicts sharp enough to mark every life they touch.
Synopsis
The House of the Arrow opens in Dijon, where a wealthy English widow, Madame Harlowe, has settled in a dignified old townhouse known locally as the House of the Arrow. After a short illness she dies, and her physician certifies natural causes. The cremation that follows leaves little scope for a later medical inquiry. Yet the household whispers of oddities in the sickroom and the lingering legend behind the house’s name feed rumor across the city. Questions drift to London, where those concerned with the Harlowe estate are troubled by hints of irregularities. What seemed a closed matter begins to look incomplete and in need of careful scrutiny.
A young English solicitor, Jim Frobisher, is dispatched to Dijon to safeguard the legal interests of the late woman’s English relatives and to learn precisely what occurred. He encounters Julius Ricardo, an acquaintance versed in French society, who introduces him to Inspector Hanaud of the Sûreté. Hanaud has a reputation for patient, unconventional methods. While local officials consider the case concluded, Hanaud agrees to review the circumstances. Frobisher’s brief is to observe, assist where appropriate, and ensure that his client’s position is not imperiled by gossip. From the outset he is drawn into a maze of uncertain testimony, incomplete records, and a house burdened by superstition.
Frobisher meets the principal figures living under the roof. Betty Harlowe, the young niece who stands to inherit, faces quiet suspicion because of her position. Ann Upcott, an English companion, is reserved, attentive, and difficult to read. The staff are divided, with a devoted housekeeper, a nervous maid, and others whose loyalties are unclear. The attending doctor asserts his original diagnosis and resents any challenge. A local magistrate listens but remains cautious. The quick cremation denies investigators a post-mortem, and a rumored codicil to the will, perhaps altering the distribution of the estate, deepens uncertainty. Every conversation adds detail without settling what should be decisive facts.
Hanaud begins by reconstructing the final days in the sickroom, attending to items that seem trivial until placed together. A locked window, an unusual scent, the adjustment of a lamp, a stain on a mantel, and a scrap of paper shaped like an arrow lodge in his mind. The house’s nickname, once merely romantic, becomes a thread to be tested rather than a legend to be feared. Frobisher, moving between interviews and quiet watches in the dim corridors, feels the pressure of inference without proof. Hanaud’s counsel is steady: arrange what is known, leave space for what is unknown, and refrain from fastening on a single, convenient explanation.
The inquiry broadens beyond the household. Acquaintances of Madame Harlowe, recent visitors, and local tradesmen are questioned for movements and timings. A shadowy caller is reported near the house on a crucial night. Discussions of exotic poisons and small darts, carried by whispers from travel books and museum cases, enter conversation and are neither dismissed nor accepted. Medical opinions differ on what signs should have been present. The notion that an arrow, literal or figurative, might explain the death remains a possibility rather than a conclusion. Amid these cross-currents, Frobisher’s professional task persists: to understand the will, the assets, and any document whose existence could alter motives.
A fresh disturbance within the house upsets the uneasy balance. A private drawer is forced, or a room thought sealed is furtively entered, and something is searched for or removed. A frightened servant reports a late-night figure on the landing. Pressure mounts on the most obvious suspect, and the authorities weigh an arrest that would satisfy appearances more than evidence. Hanaud urges patience, places a discreet watch on the entrances, and asks Frobisher to keep careful notes of who knows what and when. Inheritance papers, letters, and fragments of handwriting are reviewed with new attention, and the rumor of a missing codicil becomes less a story than a potential fact.
Hanaud tests possibilities in practice as well as in theory. He arranges small experiments to judge distances, lines of sight, and the behavior of light and scent in the rooms. He consults specialists quietly to clarify what an instrument or poison could do and what traces it might leave. Each trial trims away an appealing but untenable conjecture. Frobisher’s sympathies shift uneasily as fresh details reposition suspicion among Betty Harlowe, Ann Upcott, and others whose opportunities were less visible but perhaps more real. A concealed nook in the house yields an unexpected find that reframes earlier testimony. The case turns from speculation toward a pattern that can be shown, not merely argued.
With the pattern nearly complete, Hanaud engineers a controlled confrontation inside the House of the Arrow. He gathers the principal figures at night, when shadows and silence can be used to reproduce crucial circumstances. A hidden watcher is flushed out; an attempted retrieval betrays a necessary knowledge; and the arrow motif is shown to be more than legend yet not what gossip supposed. The significance of the lamp, the window, and the missing document becomes clear in sequence. The chain of events is set out plainly, wrong inferences are corrected, and the central misdirection is removed. The identity of the true actor emerges from the facts already in sight.
In the aftermath, legal matters are put in order and reputations are measured against the evidence rather than rumor. The House of the Arrow loses its sinister aura as its tricks and stories are replaced by verifiable history. The novel’s movement from suspicion to demonstration underscores its larger idea: that patient arrangement of small, ordinary details can dissolve the most imposing mystery. It also reflects on the hazards of haste, whether in medical judgment, gossip, or accusation, and on the way inheritance can distort perception. Across a French setting with English observers, the case resolves within the law, and the house stands explained rather than haunted.
Historical Context
Set chiefly in Dijon, the capital of Côte-d’Or in Burgundy, The House of the Arrow unfolds in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, roughly the early 1920s. The locale is a provincial yet affluent French milieu—walled townhouses, notaries’ offices, and quiet streets linked by the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée (PLM) railway. The atmosphere reflects interwar modernity: electric lighting, telephones, motorcars, and a professionalized criminal investigation apparatus. Mason’s recurring French detective operates within the legal rhythms of the Third Republic’s provincial courts, where a juge d’instruction leads inquiries. The setting’s Anglo-French dimension—English visitors, cross-Channel travel, and questions of inheritance—anchors the plot in a cosmopolitan, postwar Europe negotiating new borders, documents, and social expectations.
The Great War (1914–1918) decisively shaped French society, politics, and daily life. France suffered approximately 1.3 million military deaths and millions more wounded; memorials appeared in nearly every commune. The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) ended hostilities but ushered in reconstruction, population loss anxieties, and the "années folles"—an uneasy blend of gaiety and grief. Although Burgundy saw less physical destruction than the north and east, its families and institutions bore the war’s demographic and economic scars. The novel’s tension—quiet rooms, suppressed resentments, cautious authority—mirrors a society learning to live with mourning, suspicion, and the need for procedural certainty. Its Anglo-French cast reflects renewed cross-Channel ties forged in wartime and sustained in peace.
The modernization of French policing and forensic science between 1900 and the 1920s is central to the world the novel inhabits. Under Georges Clemenceau, Célestin Hennion reorganized policing and created the Brigades mobiles (popularly the "Brigades du Tigre") in 1907, pioneering motorized, telephone-connected, and nationally coordinated criminal pursuit. Scientific police expanded rapidly: Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry (1880s) and photographic catalogues gave way to fingerprints in the early 1900s, while Edmond Locard founded the first modern police laboratory in Lyon in 1910, articulating the exchange principle that trace evidence passes between criminal and scene. Toxicology, built on the work of Mathieu Orfila (early 19th century) and the Stas–Otto method (mid-19th century) for isolating alkaloid poisons, matured into routine interwar practice alongside handwriting analysis, fiber comparison, and chemical assays. The French Code d’instruction criminelle (Napoleonic-era, revised repeatedly) empowered the juge d’instruction to marshal these techniques through expert witnesses, preserving chain of custody. Against this backdrop, Mason stages a suspicious death in a bourgeois home where testimony, minute physical traces, and medical inference matter as much as eyewitness accounts. His inspector’s reliance on laboratory corroboration, controlled re-enactments, and coordinated provincial–Parisian expertise echoes Locard’s influence and the reach of the Brigades mobiles into regional cities like Dijon, a short rail distance from Lyon. The novel’s emphasis on quiet, methodical inquiry—sealed rooms, measured interviews, and the sifting of objects—aligns with the French Police judiciaire’s interwar ethos that reason, instruments, and disciplined procedure could pierce the opacity of domestic crime.
French civil law, codified in the Code civil (1804), frames inheritance and family property with the réserve héréditaire—forced heirship protecting descendants’ shares—limiting testamentary freedom compared with common law England. Notaries (notaires) manage wills, inventories, and successions; the juge d’instruction may become involved when a death appears criminal. While the 1907 reform improved married women’s control over earned income, broader marital authority persisted until 1938; in the 1920s, female heirs and wards often depended on male guardians and legal officers. In contrast, England’s Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) entrenched greater separate ownership. The novel’s estate anxieties—contested wills, guardianship shadows, and motives tied to bequests—mirror these Franco-British legal contrasts and the leverage created by forced heirship and notarial procedure.
Crime sensationalism in France shaped public expectations for investigations in the interwar years. The press’s faits divers—vivid reports of intimate, often domestic crime—filled mass-circulation papers like Le Petit Parisien. Henri Désiré Landru’s trial (Versailles, November 1921) and execution by guillotine on 25 February 1922, for murdering multiple women he courted, fixated readers on deception within bourgeois homes. The Seznec Affair (disappearance of Pierre Quéméneur in May 1923; Guillaume Seznec convicted at Quimper in 1924) stirred nationwide debate on evidence and judicial fallibility. Mason’s plot, centered on a death within a respectable household and the peril of circumstantial suspicion, taps this climate: it reflects a society enthralled by domestic mystery yet anxious about proof, motive, and miscarriage of justice.
Postwar France endured inflation and fiscal instability until Raymond Poincaré’s stabilization. Between 1919 and 1926 the franc depreciated sharply; by mid-1926 sterling traded at roughly 240 francs, compared with about 25.2 before 1914. Poincaré’s government (from July 1926) restored confidence through austerity and new taxes; the 1928 monetary law fixed the "franc Poincaré" at one-fifth of its prewar gold content. These shifts altered purchasing power, estate values, and cross-border investment. English and French families navigated currency risk, property sales, and liquidations through notaries and solicitors. The novel’s preoccupation with wealth transfers, inheritance timing, and the temptation to accelerate succession reflects the era’s volatile valuations, where a will or life insurance policy could mean ruin or security overnight.
Anglo-French mobility in the early 1920s linked London to Dijon via ferry and fast trains. After wartime controls, standardized passports and visas spread across Europe (consolidated through League of Nations conferences in 1920–1926). Travelers crossed the Channel (Dover–Calais), continued to Paris, then by PLM to Burgundy—journeys feasible within a day. The telephone and telegraph allowed solicitors, notaries, and police to coordinate across borders, while new identity papers complicated alibis and movements. The novel uses this infrastructure: an English legal representative can plausibly arrive in Dijon to advise on a succession, while French investigators corroborate statements by wire and rail. The logistics of timetables, tickets, and documents become practical tools for testing stories and tracing motives.
Mason’s book works as a discreet social critique of interwar bourgeois France and its Anglo-French intersections. It exposes how respectability, wealth, and guardianship can conceal coercion, particularly where women’s legal autonomy remains constrained and where forced heirship and notarial secrecy create shadows. The reliance on magistrates and experts underscores both the promise and peril of technocratic justice: scientific procedure can rescue the innocent, yet institutional routines risk sanctifying prejudice. By situating a lethal dispute within a comfortable provincial house, the novel interrogates class protections and the discretion of closed rooms, critiquing a culture that prizes reputation over transparency. Its cross-border legal frictions further reveal how national systems can be manipulated to evade accountability.
The House of the Arrow
CHAPTER 1 LETTERS OF MARK
Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt, the solicitors on the east side of Russell Square, counted amongst their clients a great many who had undertakings established in France; and the firm was very proud of this branch of its business.
"It gives us a place in history," Mr. Jeremy Haslitt used to say. "For it dates from the year 1806, when Mr. James Frobisher, then our very energetic senior partner, organized the escape of hundreds of British subjects who were detained in France by the edict of the first Napoleon[1]. The firm received the thanks of His Majesty's Government and has been fortunate enough to retain the connection thus made. I look after that side of our affairs myself."
Mr. Haslitt's daily batch of letters, therefore, contained as a rule a fair number bearing the dark-blue stamp of France upon their envelopes. On this morning of early April, however, there was only one. It was addressed in a spidery, uncontrolled hand with which Mr. Haslitt was unfamiliar. But it bore the postmark of Dijon, and Mr. Haslitt tore it open rather quickly. He had a client in Dijon, a widow, Mrs. Harlowe, of whose health he had had bad reports. The letter was certainly written from her house, La Maison Grenelle, but not by her. He turned to the signature.
"Waberski?" he said, with a frown. "Boris Waberski?" And then, as he identified his correspondent, "Oh, yes, yes."
He sat down in his chair and read. The first part of the letter was merely flowers and compliments, but half-way down the second page its object was made clear as glass. It was five hundred pounds. Old Mr. Haslitt smiled and read on, keeping up, whilst he read, a one-sided conversation with the writer.
"I have a great necessity of that money," wrote Boris, "and—"
"I am quite sure of that," said Mr. Haslitt.
"My beloved sister, Jeanne-Marie—" the letter continued.
"Sister-in-law," Mr. Haslitt corrected.
"—cannot live for long, in spite of all the care and attention I give to her," Boris Waberski went on. "She has left me, as no doubt you know, a large share of her fortune. Already, then, it is mine—yes? One may say so and be favourably understood. We must look at the facts with the eyes. Expedite me, then, by the recommended post a little of what is mine and agree my distinguished salutations."
Haslitt's smile became a broad grin. He had in one of his tin boxes a copy of the will of Jeanne-Marie Harlowe drawn up in due form by her French notary at Dijon, by which every farthing she possessed was bequeathed without condition to her husband's niece and adopted daughter, Betty Harlowe. Jeremy Haslitt almost destroyed that letter. He folded it; his fingers twitched at it; there was already actually a tear at the edges of the sheets when he changed his mind.
"No," he said to himself. "No! With the Boris Waberskis one never knows," and he locked the letter away on a ledge of his private safe.
He was very glad that he had when three weeks later he read, in the obituary column of The Times, the announcement of Mrs. Harlowe's death, and received a big card with a very deep black border in the French style from Betty Harlowe inviting him to the funeral at Dijon. The invitation was merely formal. He could hardly have reached Dijon in time for the ceremony had he started off at that instant. He contented himself with writing a few lines of sincere condolence to the girl, and a letter to the French notary in which he placed the services of the firm at Betty's disposal. Then he waited.
"I shall hear again from little Boris," he said, and he heard within the week. The handwriting was more spidery and uncontrolled than ever; hysteria and indignation had played havoc with Waberski's English; also he had doubled his demand.
"It is outside belief," he wrote. "Nothing has she left to her so attentive brother. There is something here I do not much like. It must be one thousand pounds now, by the recommended post. 'You have always had the world against you, my poor Boris,' she say with the tears all big in her dear eyes. 'But I make all right for you in my will.' And now nothing! I speak, of course, to my niece—ah, that hard one! She snap her the fingers at me! Is that a behaviour? One thousand pounds, mister! Otherwise there will be awkwardness[2]es! Yes! People do not snap them the fingers at Boris Waberski without the payment. So one thousand pounds by the recommended post or awkwardnesses"; and this time Boris Waberski did not invite Mr. Haslitt to agree any salutations, distinguished or otherwise, but simply signed his name with a straggling pen which shot all over the sheet.
Mr. Haslitt did not smile over this letter. He rubbed the palms of his hands softly together.
"Then we shall have to make some awkwardnesses too," he said hastily, and he locked this second letter away with the first. But Mr. Haslitt found it a little difficult to settle to his work. There was that girl out there in the big house at Dijon and no one of her race near her! He got up from his chair abruptly and crossed the corridor to the offices of his junior partner.
"Jim, you were at Monte Carlo this winter," he said.
"For a week," answered Jim Frobisher.
"I think I asked you to call on a client of ours who has a villa there—Mrs. Harlowe."
Jim Frobisher nodded. "I did. But Mrs. Harlowe was ill. There was a niece, but she was out."
"You saw no one, then?" Jeremy Haslitt asked.
"No, that's wrong," Jim corrected. "I saw a strange creature who came to the door to make Mrs. Harlowe's excuses—a Russian."
"Boris Waberski," said Mr. Haslitt.
"That's the name."
Mr. Haslitt sat down in a chair.
"Tell me about him, Jim."
Jim Frobisher stared at nothing for a few moments. He was a young man of twenty-six who had only during this last year succeeded to his partnership. Though quick enough when action was imperative, he was naturally deliberate in his estimates of other people's characters; and a certain awe he had of old Jeremy Haslitt doubled that natural deliberation in any matters of the firm's business. He answered at length.
"He is a tall, shambling fellow with a shock of grey hair standing up like wires above a narrow forehead and a pair of wild eyes. He made me think of a marionette whose limbs have not been properly strung. I should imagine that he was rather extravagant and emotional. He kept twitching at his moustache with very long, tobacco-stained fingers. The sort of man who might go off at the deep end at any moment."
Mr. Haslitt smiled. "That's just what I thought."
"Is he giving you any trouble?" asked Jim.
"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt. "But Mrs. Harlowe is dead, and I think it very likely that he will. Did he play at the tables?"
"Yes, rather high," said Jim. "I suppose that he lived on Mrs. Harlowe."
"I suppose so," said Mr. Haslitt, and he sat for a little while in silence. Then: "It's a pity you didn't see Betty Harlowe. I stopped at Dijon once on my way to the South of France five years ago when Simon Harlowe, the husband, was alive. Betty was then a long-legged slip of a girl in black silk stockings with a pale, clear face and dark hair and big eyes—rather beautiful." Mr. Haslitt moved in his chair uncomfortably. That old house with its great garden of chestnuts and sycamores and that girl alone in it with an aggrieved and half-crazed man thinking out awkwardnesses for her—Mr. Haslitt did not like the picture!
"Jim," he said suddenly, "could you arrange your work so that you could get away at short notice, if it becomes advisable?"
Jim looked up in surprise. Excursions and alarms, as the old stage directions have it, were not recognized as a rule by the firm of Frobisher and Haslitt. If its furniture was dingy, its methods were stately; clients might be urgent, but haste and hurry were words for which the firm had no use. No doubt, somewhere round the corner, there would be an attorney who understood them. Yet here was Mr. Haslitt himself, with his white hair and his curious round face, half-babyish, half-supremely intelligent, actually advocating that his junior partner should be prepared to skip to the Continent at a word.
"No doubt I could," said Jim, and Mr. Haslitt looked him over with approbation.
Jim Frobisher had an unusual quality of which his acquaintances, even his friends, knew only the outward signs. He was a solitary person. Very few people up till now had mattered to him at all, and even those he could do without. It was his passion to feel that his life and the means of his life did not depend upon the purchased skill of other people; and he had spent the spare months of his life in the fulfilment of his passion. A half-decked sailing-boat which one man could handle, an ice-axe, a rifle, an inexhaustible volume or two like The Ring and the Book—these with the stars and his own thoughts had been his companions on many lonely expeditions; and in consequence he had acquired a queer little look of aloofness which made him at once noticeable amongst his fellows. A misleading look, since it encouraged a confidence for which there might not be sufficient justification. It was just this look which persuaded Mr. Haslitt now. "This is the very man to deal with creatures like Boris Waberski," he thought, but he did not say so aloud.
What he did say was: "It may not be necessary after all. Betty Harlowe has a French lawyer. No doubt he is adequate. Besides"—and he smiled as he recollected a phrase in Waberski's second letter—"Betty seems very capable of looking after herself. We shall see."
He went back to his own office, and for a week he heard no more from Dijon. His anxiety, indeed, was almost forgotten when suddenly startling news arrived and by the most unexpected channel.
Jim Frobisher brought it. He broke into Mr. Haslitt's office at the sacred moment when the senior partner was dictating to a clerk the answers to his morning letters.
"Sir!" cried Jim, and stopped short at the sight of the clerk. Mr. Haslitt took a quick look at his young partner's face and said: "We will resume these answers, Godfrey, later on."
The clerk took his shorthand notebook out of the room, and Mr. Haslitt turned to Jim Frobisher.
"Now, what's your bad news, Jim?"
Jim blurted it out. "Waberski accuses Betty Harlowe of murder."
"What!"
Mr. Haslitt sprang to his feet. Jim Frobisher could not have said whether incredulity or anger had the upper hand with the old man, the one so creased his forehead, the other so blazed in his eyes.
"Little Betty Harlowe!" he said in a wondering voice.
"Yes. Waberski has laid a formal charge with the Prefect of Police at Dijon. He accuses Betty of poisoning Mrs. Harlowe on the night of April the 27th."
"But Betty's not arrested?" Mr. Haslitt exclaimed.
"No, but she's under surveillance."
Mr. Haslitt sat heavily down in his arm-chair at his table. Extravagant! Uncontrolled! These were very mild epithets for Boris Waberski. Here was a devilish malignity at work in the rogue, a passion for revenge just as mean as could be imagined.
"How do you know all this, Jim?" he asked suddenly.
"I have had a letter this morning from Dijon."
"You?" exclaimed Mr. Haslitt, and the question caught hold of Jim Frobisher and plunged him too among perplexities. In the first shock of the news, the monstrous fact of the accusation had driven everything else out of his head. Now he asked himself why, after all, had the news come to him and not to the partner who had the Harlowe estate in his charge.
"Yes, it is strange," he replied. "And here's another queer thing. The letter doesn't come from Betty Harlowe, but from a friend, a companion of hers, Ann Upcott."
Mr. Haslitt was a little relieved.
"Betty had a friend with her, then? That's a good thing." He reached out his hand across the table. "Let me read the letter, Jim."
Frobisher had been carrying it in his hand, and he gave it now to Jeremy Haslitt. It was a letter of many sheets, and Jeremy let the edges slip and nicker under the ball of his thumb.
"Have I got to read all this?" he said ruefully, and he set himself to his task. Boris Waberski had first of all accused Betty to her face. Betty had contemptuously refused to answer the charge, and Waberski had gone straight off to the Prefect of Police. He had returned in an hour's time, wildly gesticulating and talking aloud to himself. He had actually asked Ann Upcott to back him up. Then he had packed his bags and retired to an hotel in the town. The story was set out in detail, with quotations from Waberski's violent, crazy talk; and as the old man read, Jim Frobisher became more and more uneasy, more and more troubled.
He was sitting by the tall, broad window which looked out upon the square, expecting some explosion of wrath and contempt. But he saw anxiety peep out of Mr. Haslitt's face and stay there as he read. More than once he stopped altogether in his reading, like a man seeking to remember or perhaps to discover.
"But the whole thing's as clear as daylight," Jim said to himself impatiently. And yet—and yet—Mr. Haslitt had sat in that arm-chair during the better part of the day, during the better part of thirty years. How many men and women during those years had crossed the roadway below this window and crept into this quiet oblong room with their grievances, their calamities, their confessions? And had passed out again, each one contributing his little to complete the old man's knowledge and sharpen the edge of his wit? Then, if Mr. Haslitt was troubled, there was something in that letter, or some mission from it, which he himself in his novitiate had overlooked. He began to read it over again in his mind to the best of his recollection, but he had not got far before Mr. Haslitt put the letter down.
"Surely, sir," cried Jim, "it's an obvious case of blackmail."
Mr. Haslitt awoke with a little shake of his shoulders.
"Blackmail? Oh! that of course, Jim."
Mr. Haslitt got up and unlocked his safe. He took from it the two Waberski letters and brought them across the room to Jim. "Here's the evidence, as damning as anyone could wish."
Jim read the letters through and uttered a little cry of delight. "The rogue has delivered himself over to us."
"Yes," said Mr. Haslitt.
But to him, at all events, that was not enough; he was still looking through the lines of the letter for something beyond, which he could not find.
"Then what's troubling you?" asked Frobisher.
Mr. Haslitt took his stand upon the worn hearthrug with his back towards the fire. "This, Jim," and he began to expound. "In ninety-five of these cases out of a hundred, there is something else, something behind the actual charge, which isn't mentioned, but on which the blackmailer is really banking. As a rule it's some shameful little secret, some blot on the family honour, which any sort of public trial would bring to light. And there must be something of that kind here. The more preposterous Waberski's accusation is, the more certain it is that he knows something to the discredit of the Harlowe name, which any Harlowe would wish to keep dark. Only, I haven't an idea what the wretched thing can be!"
"It might be some trifle," Jim suggested, "which a crazy person like Waberski would exaggerate."
"Yes," Mr. Haslitt agreed. "That happens. A man brooding over imagined wrongs, and flighty and extravagant besides—yes, that might well be, Jim." Jeremy Haslitt spoke in a more cheerful voice. "Let us see exactly what we do know of the family," he said, and he pulled up a chair to face Jim Frobisher and the window. But he had not yet sat down in it, when there came a discreet knock upon the door, and a clerk entered to announce a visitor.
"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt before the name of the visitor had been mentioned.
"Very good, sir," said the clerk, and he retired. The firm of Frobisher and Haslitt conducted its business in that way. It was the real thing as a firm of solicitors, and clients who didn't like its methods were very welcome to take their affairs to the attorney round the corner. Just as people who go to the real thing in the line of tailors must put up with the particular style in which he cuts their clothes.
Mr. Haslitt turned back to Jim. "Let us see what we know," he said, and he sat down in the chair.
CHAPTER 2 A CRY FOR HELP
"Simon Harlowe," he began, "was the owner of the famous Clos du Prince vineyards[3] on the Côte d'Or to the east of Dijon. He had an estate in Norfolk, this big house, the Maison Grenelle in Dijon, and a villa at Monte Carlo. But he spent most of his time in Dijon, where at the age of forty-five he married a French lady, Jeanne-Marie Raviart. There was, I believe, quite a little romance about the affair. Jeanne-Marie was married and separated from her husband, and Simon Harlowe waited, I think, for ten years until the husband Raviart died."
Jim Frobisher moved quickly and Mr. Haslitt, who seemed to be reading of this history in the pattern of the carpet, looked up.
"Yes, I see what you mean," he said, replying to Jim's movement. "Yes, there might have been some sort of affair between those two before they were free to marry. But nowadays, my dear Jim! Opinion takes a more human view than it did in my youth. Besides, don't you see, this little secret, to be of any value to Boris Waberski, must be near enough to Betty Harlowe—I don't say to affect her if published, but to make Waberski think that she would hate to have it published. Now Betty Harlowe doesn't come into the picture at all until two years after Simon and Jeanne-Marie were married, when it became clear that they were not likely to have any children. No, the love-affairs of Simon Harlowe are sufficiently remote for us to leave them aside."
Jim Frobisher accepted the demolition of his idea with a flush of shame. "I was a fool to think of it," he said.
"Not a bit," replied Mr. Haslitt cheerfully. "Let us look at every possibility. That's the only way which will help us to get a glimpse of the truth. I resume, then. Simon Harlowe was a collector. Yes, he had a passion for collecting and a very catholic one. His one sitting-room at the Maison Grenelle was a perfect treasure-house, not only of beautiful things, but of out-of-the-way things too. He liked to live amongst them and do his work amongst them. His married life did not last long. For he died five years ago at the age of fifty-one."
Mr. Haslitt's eyes once more searched for recollections amongst the convolutions of the carpet.
"That's really about all I know of him. He was a pleasant fellow enough, but not very sociable. No, there's nothing to light a candle for us there, I am afraid."
Mr. Haslitt turned his thoughts to the widow.
"Jeanne-Marie Harlowe," he said. "It's extraordinary how little I know about her, now I come to count it up. Natural too, though. For she sold the Norfolk estate and has since passed her whole time between Monte Carlo and Dijon and—oh yes—a little summer-house on the Côte d'Or amongst her vineyards."
"She was left rich, I suppose?" Frobisher asked.
"Very well off, at all events," Mr. Haslitt replied. "The Clos du Prince Burgundy has a fine reputation, but there's not a great deal of it."
"Did she come to England ever?"
"Never," said Mr. Haslitt. "She was content, it seems, with Dijon, though to my mind the smaller provincial towns of France are dull enough to make one scream. However, she was used to it, and then her heart began to trouble her, and for the last two years she has been an invalid. There's nothing to help us there." And Mr. Haslitt looked across to Jim for confirmation.
"Nothing," said Jim.
"Then we are only left the child Betty Harlowe and—oh yes, your correspondent, your voluminous correspondent, Ann Upcott. Who is she, Jim? Where did she spring from? How does she find herself in the Maison Grenelle? Come, confess, young man," and Mr. Haslitt archly looked at his junior partner. "Why should Boris Waberski expect her support?"
Jim Frobisher threw his arms wide. "I haven't an idea," he said. "I have never seen her. I have never heard of her. I never knew of her existence until that letter came this morning with her name signed at the end of it."
Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing his folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the letter.
"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,' she writes. She doesn't address the firm at al!"; and he waited, looking at Jim, expecting him to withdraw his denial.
Jim, however, only shook his head.
"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or tail of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the truth, so utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should Ann Upcott write to me? I have been asking myself that question for the last half-hour. And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who have had her affairs in your care?"
"Ah!"
That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face took a livelier expression.
"The answer to that is in Waberski's second, letter. Betty—she snap her fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge seriously. She will have left it to the French notary to dispose of it. Yes—I think that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible, too. The ceremonies of the law in a foreign country would frighten a stranger, as this girl is apparently, more than they would Betty Harlowe, who has lived for four years in the midst of them. So she writes to the first name in the title of the firm, and writes to him as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man rubbed his hands together in his satisfaction.
"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real person. So she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can take my word for it."
Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it; he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window over Frobisher's head. "But that doesn't bring us any nearer to finding out what is Boris Waberski's strong suit, does it? We haven't a clue to it," he said ruefully.
To both of the men, indeed, Mr. Haslitt's flat, unillumined narrative of facts, without a glimpse into the characters of any of the participants in the little drama, seemed the most unhelpful thing. Yet the whole truth was written there—the truth not only of Waberski's move, but of all the strange terrors and mysteries into which the younger of the two men was now to be plunged. Jim Frobisher was to recognize that, when, shaken to the soul, he resumed his work in the office. For it was interrupted now.
Mr. Haslitt, looking out of the window over his partner's head, saw a telegraph-boy come swinging across the square and hesitate in the roadway below. "I expect that's a telegram for us," he said, with the hopeful anticipation people in trouble have that something from outside will happen and set them right.
Jim turned round quickly. The boy was still upon the pavement examining the numbers of the houses.
"We ought to have a brass plate upon the door," said Jim with a touch of impatience; and Mr. Haslitt's eyebrows rose half the height of his forehead towards his thick white hair. He was really distressed by the Waberski incident, but this suggestion, and from a partner in the firm, shocked him like a sacrilege.
"My dear boy, what are you thinking of?" he expostulated. "I hope I am not one of those obstinate old fogies who refuse to march with the times. We have had, as you know, a telephone instrument recently installed in the junior clerks' office. I believe that I myself proposed it. But a brass plate upon the door! My dear Jim! Let us leave that to Harley Street and Southampton Row! But I see that telegram is for us."
The tiny Mercury with the shako and red cord to his uniform made up his mind and disappeared into the hall below. The telegram was brought upstairs and Mr. Haslitt tore it open. He stared at it blankly for a few seconds, then without a word, but with a very anxious look in his eyes, he handed it to Jim Frobisher.
Jim Frobisher read: Please, please, send someone to help me at once. The Prefect of Police has called in Hanaud, a great detective of the Sûreté in Paris. They must think me guilty.—BETTY HARLOWE.
The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like a cry for help at night coming from a great distance.
"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.
"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently. Jim, however, had enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was fired, as is the way with lonely men, by the picture his imagination drew. The little girl, Betty Harlowe! What age was she? Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been wandering with all the proud indifference of her sex and youth, until suddenly she found her feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and looked about her; and terror came and with it a wild cry for help.
"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly into the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of false and cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at in the dark, to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and ankle? And with that question he was seized with a great discouragement.
"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country, in this office," he said regretfully.
"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the Firm first and last. Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt never went into the Criminal Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind, was frowned upon. It is true there was a small special staff, under the leadership of an old managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor, like an unpresentable relation in a great house, which did a little of that kind of work. But it only did it for hereditary clients, and then as a favour.
"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I haven't a doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is wanted. But remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't know."
Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man was becoming parrot-like—a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of the girl in Dijon, and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not "snapping her the fingers" now.
"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard over a case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a crime first, and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This is a case for an autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man Hanaud"—and he stopped.
He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.
"Yes—Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's three-volume novel, and Betty's telegram"—he gathered the papers together and enclosed them in a long envelope—"and I shall expect you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."
Mr, Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell. "There is someone waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk who answered it.
The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.
"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with a reproach.
"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.
But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt's mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.
"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her she will come of her own accord."
But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher's office.
Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and was locking up the drawers of his desk.
"Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man Hanaud before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He's one of our clients."
"Yes," said Frobisher. "I remember him—a rather finicking person in Grosvenor Square."
"That's the man. He's a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather scandalous crime some time ago—at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well, Ricardo will give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you something about him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five this afternoon."
"Capital!" said Jim Frobisher.
He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third, and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth. Jim discounted Mr. Ricardo's enthusiasm, but he got the letter and crossed the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him that if Hanaud was a man of such high mark, he would not be free, even at an urgent call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces in an instant. Jim broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in the course of the morning found his way to the direction of the Sûreté on the Quai de l'Horloge just behind the Palais de Justice.
"Monsieur Hanaud?" he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and his letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then, he thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit with electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer. There he rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an hour whilst his confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang and a policeman in plain clothes went up to him. One side of the corridor was lined with a row of doors.
"It is for you, sir," said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one of the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened his shoulders and marched in.
CHAPTER 3 SERVANTS OF CHANCE
Frobisher found himself at one end of an oblong room. Opposite to him a couple of windows looked across the shining river to the big Théâtre du Châtelet[4]. On his left hand was a great table with a few neatly arranged piles of papers, at which a big, rather heavily built man was sitting. Frobisher looked at that man as a novice in a duelling held might look at the master swordsman whom he was committed to fight, with a little shock of surprise that after all he appeared to be just like other men. Hanaud, on his side, could not have been said to have looked at Frobisher at all; yet when he spoke it was obvious that somehow he had looked and to very good purpose. He rose with a little bow and apologized.
"I have kept you waiting, Mr. Frobisher. My dear friend Mr. Ricardo did not mention your object in his letter. I had the idea that you came with the usual wish to see something of our underworld. Now that I see you, I recognize your wish is more serious."
Hanaud was a man of middle age with a head of thick dark hair, and the round face and shaven chin of a comedian. A pair of remarkably light eyes under rather heavy lids alone gave a significance to him, at all events when seen for the first time in a mood of good-will. He pointed to a chair.
"Will you take a seat? I will tell you, Mr. Frobisher, I have a very soft place in my heart for Mr. Ricardo, and a friend of his. These are words, however. What can I do?"
