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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'They Wouldn't Be Chessmen,' A.E.W. Mason weaves a gripping tale that explores the intricacies of human motives against the backdrop of espionage in World War I. Set amidst the chaotic landscape of international politics and personal ambition, Mason employs a captivating narrative style filled with rich characterization and vivid descriptions. The novel is marked by its clever dialogue and suspenseful pacing, drawing readers into a world where loyalty and treachery intertwine, making it a resonant contribution to both the war literature and detective fiction genres of the early 20th century. A.E.W. Mason, a British author and playwright, was deeply influenced by his experiences during the war and his background in law and literature. His firsthand encounters with the complexities of human behavior in both civilian and military life inform the nuanced portrayals of his characters. Mason's keen observational skills, coupled with his understanding of intricacies in strategic thinking'—an allusion to chess'—provide an intellectual depth to his storytelling, allowing readers to grapple with moral dilemmas reflective of the time. This novel is a must-read for enthusiasts of historical fiction and espionage narratives, offering a compelling blend of suspense and psychological insight. Mason's adept storytelling not only enthralls with its plot but also invites readers to ponder the ethical choices of characters in a world rife with conflict. 'They Wouldn't Be Chessmen' deserves a cherished place on your bookshelf for its historical significance and literary merit. 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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They Wouldn't Be Chessmen
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen turns on the refusal of human beings to be reduced to pieces on a board, asserting will and responsibility against designs that would move them unseen.
They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen by A. E. W. Mason belongs to the tradition of Golden Age mystery, appearing in the mid-1930s when tightly constructed puzzles and moral inquiry defined much of British crime fiction. While it draws on recognizable conventions of the period—careful plotting, a steady accumulation of evidence, and attention to social surfaces—its title signals a particular preoccupation with agency. Mason, already a respected novelist by this time, uses the form not merely to entertain but to test how far characters can be directed by schemes and stratagems before asserting their own choices. The result is a work that marries structure to psychological interest.
The novel’s premise is elegantly straightforward: an event disrupts decorum and compels a searching inquiry, and from that disturbance a pattern gradually emerges. The investigation opens into a tangle of relationships, motives, and opportunities, each angle illuminating the next but never fully cancelling ambiguity. Readers encounter the measured procedures of a classic mystery—interviews, re-examinations, shifting alibis—tempered by Mason’s interest in what people want and what they will do to keep it. The experience is less about shock than about accumulation: a quiet tightening of the net as contradictions are tested, stories compared, and a coherent account of responsibility takes shape.
Central to the book is the tension between manipulation and autonomy. Plans exist, but people do, too, and they do not always move as predicted. Mason probes how power operates—through charm, coercion, secrecy, or the seduction of easy outcomes—and how conscience resists or capitulates. The theme extends beyond motive to method: strategy versus chance, calculation versus the unexpected slip of memory or feeling. In observing characters who reject being used, the novel presses questions about moral ownership: who truly acts, who merely reacts, and what it costs to refuse a role assigned by others. These questions animate the narrative without overwhelming its puzzle.
Stylistically, Mason favors clarity over flourish. Scenes unfold with a controlled pace that rewards attention to detail, and descriptive passages serve the drama rather than distract from it. Clues are seeded with fairness, yet the book’s satisfactions are not purely mechanical; they accumulate through tone, implication, and the friction between what is said and what is withheld. Dialogue carries much of the weight, revealing character through cadence and evasion, while the narrative voice maintains a judicious distance. The craft is old-school in the best sense: patient, lucid, and attuned to the small signals by which truth separates itself from plausible performance.
Read today, They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen remains resonant because it treats mystery as a way to think about freedom and pressure within systems—social, familial, or professional—that nudge people into predetermined moves. Its questions feel contemporary: how to keep one’s judgment intact amid competing narratives; how to distinguish prudence from manipulation; how to refuse instrumentalization without retreating into cynicism. The book also offers the enduring satisfactions of the period: civility tested by crisis, intelligence applied to confusion, and the promise that patient reasoning can still clear a fog of rumor and fear. It is as reflective as it is suspenseful.
For readers seeking a classic mystery experience with a thoughtful core, this novel offers a dignified, steadily tightening investigation that culminates in moral as well as narrative closure. It invites careful reading without demanding specialized knowledge, balancing the pleasures of inference with an interest in character. Approach it for its craftsmanship—its orderly layering of testimony and counter-testimony—and stay for its humane conviction that people are not merely movable pieces. In a field crowded with ingenious contrivances, They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen distinguishes itself by insisting that the game has consequences, and that the players must account for the moves they choose.
Synopsis
A.E.W. Mason’s They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen is a Hanaud mystery in which the famed French detective and his fastidious English friend, Mr. Ricardo, confront a crime shaped by calculation and resisted by human will. The story opens in a society of privilege and display, where a charismatic magnate prides himself on moving people as if they were pieces on a board. Invitations to a glittering house party assemble a mixed company of intimates, dependents, and rivals. Beneath courtesy and ritual, Mason sketches frictions over money, loyalty, and desire, establishing a field of potential moves before any decisive stroke is made.
The host’s entertainment becomes a subtle test of influence. Private interviews are granted, old obligations renewed, and new promises hinted. Guests are placed, displaced, and provocations arranged, as if a grand combination were forming. The magnate’s language of strategy and his relish for manipulation establish the novel’s governing metaphor. Mr. Ricardo observes the social tactics with fascination; Hanaud, quieter, studies character. The atmosphere—luxurious yet tense—makes the villa both theatre and board. A few gestures, a mislaid token, and an unexpectedly sharp word create a fragile equilibrium that promises advantage to someone willing to strike at the opportune moment.
The equilibrium breaks with a sudden death that appears, at first, to be an accident or a desperate choice. The circumstances are plausible enough to satisfy routine inquiry, but several small details refuse to align. Hanaud notices what is explained too easily and what is not explained at all. The house, once managed by a host who delighted in control, becomes a place of sealed rooms, late whispers, and careful alibis. Ricardo supplies social intelligence; Hanaud gathers facts. The official conclusion hesitates. A private investigation begins, almost invisibly, to test whether the event resulted from chance, misfortune, or a deliberate, disguised attack.
Early questioning reveals a pattern of stories polished in advance. Timetables dovetail too neatly; a witness’s vantage point is less certain than claimed; an object turns up where it should not be, bearing a trace of scent out of place. A note in a change of voice, a door that could not have been left ajar by habit, a financial paper with a date altered by a hand unfamiliar with the household routine—these modest misfits accumulate. The chess metaphor persists in arrhythmic ways: some suspects play for position, others for time, and several seem to be moving under directions issued before the party began.
The cast includes a beneficiary both grateful and endangered, a secretary loyal beyond prudence, a companion whose candor conceals calculation, and an associate impatient with the host’s authority. Around them move a cousin with claims, a performer eager for patronage, and a servant who knows more of patterns than of motives. Each possesses a motive—money, escape, vindication, protection—yet each also resists the roles assigned by the powerful. The title’s promise takes shape: intentions strain against design. Hanaud concentrates on moments where free choice pierced arrangement, noting where a supposed pawn chose not to move or moved in a way the planner did not foresee.
Midway, the past becomes present. Old transactions surface: a partnership soured by secret terms, a risk shifted from one signature to another, letters that once soothed now sharpen suspicion. A prior scandal, muffled by influence, is reassembled from fragments of rumor and ledger. The dead person’s world, apparently coherent, proves constructed to bind others to a dominating will. A carefully staged alibi falters when routine contradicts recollection. A small act of kindness, performed outside the planner’s schedule, throws the intended arrangement into disarray. The investigation narrows, not by accusation, but by eliminating coincidences too artful to have occurred without guidance.
As pressure intensifies, the danger expands. There is a second attempt—part warning, part silencing—that fails through a mix of vigilance and chance. Night scenes, a garden path, and the quick confusion of pursuit show how fragile design becomes in motion. Hanaud anticipates a move and prevents a greater harm by acting one step sooner than the maker of the plan expects. Alliances shift. A reluctant witness speaks; a careless boast returns at a difficult hour. The circle tightens to those who could combine means and knowledge without being seen, and to those who mistook human unpredictability for a piece obeying a touch.
Hanaud brings the company together for a demonstration that is explanation without verdict. He reconstructs the sequence, substituting reasonable acts for improbable happenstance, and shows where a theory of control demanded more obedience than any person, however dependent, would render. The critical clue is not a flamboyant token but a modest inconsistency made inevitable by character. A trap—quiet, almost courteous—is set to confirm opportunity and intent. The game’s planner, who relied on remote moves and intermediaries, is invited to make a final, decisive play and does so in a way that cannot be mistaken. The outline of guilt emerges without naming it.
The conclusion restores order and underscores the theme contained in the title: people, however constrained, would not be chessmen. The design collapses where free choices intrude, loyalties complicate lines, and compassion or pride disrupts calculation. Justice proceeds through legal forms, and the house resumes a semblance of poise. Ricardo, reflective, considers how easily a social comedy became a tragedy averted only by attention to what could not be scripted. Hanaud, discreet, leaves the setting as he found it, save for clarified truths. Mason’s novel ultimately presents a contest between control and character, deciding in favor of the latter without overturning the realism of consequence.
Historical Context
They Wouldn't Be Chessmen is situated in the unsettled, cosmopolitan interwar landscape of Europe, with settings that evoke both metropolitan sophistication and provincial tensions, especially in France and Britain during the early 1930s. The novel’s time frame aligns with the waning stability of the French Third Republic and the social unease of post-World War I Britain. Urban centers such as Paris and London, alongside resort locales on the Riviera and Alpine frontiers, form an environment where luxury, law, and clandestine commerce intersect. The atmosphere is marked by financial anxiety, political scandal, and a heightened visibility of policing institutions, all of which furnish the narrative with its air of surveillance, manipulation, and resistance.
The aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918) is the foundational historical backdrop. Europe was reshaped by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), mass demobilization, and the social dislocations of veterans, war widows, and refugees. France mourned nearly 1.4 million dead; Britain lost over 700,000. Paris swung between remembrance and the années folles, while Britain navigated memorial culture and industrial readjustment. A. E. W. Mason’s own wartime intelligence service gave him insight into clandestine networks, codes of loyalty, and duplicity—all themes that surface as characters refuse to be “pawns.” The novel’s distrust of grand narratives reflects a continent reckoning with trauma, secrecy, and fractured authority after 1918.
The Great Depression, triggered by the 1929 Wall Street Crash, struck Europe from 1930 onward. Britain abandoned the gold standard on 21 September 1931; unemployment surpassed 20% in some regions. France initially clung to the gold standard, experiencing prolonged deflation and austerity between 1931 and 1935. Financial scandals—such as the Oustric affair (1930), tied to banker Albert Oustric—shook public confidence. In this climate, speculative schemes, bankruptcies, and capital flight proliferated between London, Paris, and the Riviera. Mason’s plot mechanics mirror this volatility: fortunes at risk, reputations manufactured, and characters navigating markets and credit, suggesting how economic precarity enables both elite fraud and desperate, opportunistic crime.
The Stavisky Affair (1933–1934) epitomized the French Third Republic’s crisis of credibility. Serge Alexandre Stavisky used the Crédit municipal de Bayonne to float fraudulent bonds; exposure in late 1933 led to a scandal touching deputies, magistrates, and police. Stavisky was found dead on 8 January 1934 at Chamonix; the official suicide verdict ignited rumors of a cover-up. On 6 February 1934, right-wing leagues and veterans’ groups rioted in Paris near the Chamber of Deputies; casualties and chaos forced successive governments—Camille Chautemps and then Édouard Daladier—to fall. Gaston Doumergue formed a “National Union” cabinet. The novel’s insistence that people “won’t be chessmen” resonates strongly here: it dramatizes agency amid a system tainted by patronage, front-men, and expendable scapegoats.
Interwar policing and international crime cooperation expanded rapidly. The International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC, later Interpol) was founded in Vienna in 1923, convening annual congresses to standardize extradition, identification, and information-sharing. In France, the Sûreté and the Préfecture de Police professionalized, while forensic science advanced through pioneers like Edmond Locard in Lyon (police laboratory established 1910). After the 6 February 1934 crisis, the French state tightened oversight and restructured policing to restore public trust. Mason’s investigative milieu reflects this world: dossiers cross borders; suspects exploit jurisdictional seams; and scientific methods complement informants and surveillance. The book’s cat-and-mouse dynamics echo a Europe where crime became transnational as quickly as policing tried to keep pace.
British social tensions after the war provided a parallel current. The 1926 General Strike (3–12 May), led by the Trades Union Congress in support of coal miners, dramatized class conflict and the power of organized labor. The National Government of 1931 imposed austerity during sterling’s crisis, sharpening divides between financial centers and distressed regions. Urban modernization—telephones, motorcars, and mass media—intensified scrutiny of public figures and blurred private lives. In Mason’s narrative world, reputations are commodities and social mobility can be weaponized. The plot’s resistance to manipulation channels Britain’s debates over elite authority, working-class solidarity, and the fragility of public trust in an age of propaganda and rumor.
The Mediterranean and transalpine corridors shaped the period’s illicit economies. The Rif War (1921–1926) in Spanish and French Morocco, culminating in Marshal Pétain’s 1925 offensive against Abd el-Krim, expanded military and colonial networks that later fed smuggling routes. Marseille’s underworld, notably figures like Paul Carbone and François Spirito in the 1920s–1930s, organized prostitution and heroin trafficking via Levantine and North African links. Meanwhile, the Côte d’Azur—Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo—boomed as a winter resort for British and American elites, a stage for conspicuous wealth. Mason’s plotting draws on this geography: borders as opportunities, ports as funnels of contraband, and resorts as arenas where criminals masquerade as cosmopolitans and attempt to turn others into instruments.
The book functions as a social and political critique by exposing how institutions—finance, policing, politics, and the press—can transform individuals into expendable pieces. Its emphasis on personal agency challenges systems that reward compliant functionaries and protect well-connected manipulators. By situating intrigue amid economic contraction and scandal-ridden governance, it indicts elite impunity, the commodification of reputation, and the precarity imposed on those outside closed networks. The narrative questions whether justice can emerge from apparatuses compromised by patronage, while highlighting class asymmetries in risk and punishment. In refusing the logic of the “chessboard,” it demands accountability from the era’s power brokers and sympathy for those resisting orchestration.
They Wouldn't Be Chessmen
CHAPTER I THE GATE CRASHER
A SMALL wizened man stood on the top step of the Prince Town Cinema and watched the raindrops bounce up from the pavement like steel beads. It was an afternoon late in January, and growing dark. The little man wore a suit of threadbare shoddy so much too big for him that it was drapery rather than clothes, and his rusty billycock hat would have hidden the bridge of his nose but for the protuberant flaps of his ears. The rain was tropical, a sheet of glistening filaments with the patter of innumerable small feet, and the cold had the raw creeping chill which eats the hope out of the heart. The little man shivered.
Behind and above him the lights in the Cinema Hall went out, when they should have gone on. Big men, bearded and moustached and clean-shaven, but all of them muscle and bone and trim with the trimness of disciplined officials, slipped on their mackintoshes and tramped off behind the screen of water. Not one of them had a word for the small scarecrow on the top of the steps. But the last of them, a burly giant, stopped to button the collar of his raincoat about his throat. The little man spoke with an insinuating whine.
"Mr. Langridge, sir, I don't know what I'm going to do for to-night."
All the good humour went out of Mr. Langridge's face.[1q] "You, Budden?" he answered grimly. "You do just what you like. You're a gentleman at large. You've the key of the street."
"Without the price of a fag," said Mr. Budden bitterly.
During the last few days the Prince Town Cinema had become a Court of Assize. A savage mutiny had broken out during November of the last year in the great convict prison up the road. The offices had been burned to a shell. An effort had been made to hang the Governor. This afternoon the long trial of the mutineers had come to an end, and of all of them just one had been acquitted—Mike Budden, the pitiable little man in the outsize clothes shivering on the top of the steps.
Nicholas Langridge, the big warder, reluctantly pulled a packet of Woodbines[2] from his pocket.
"Here's one," he said.
"Thank you, Mr. Langridge," declared Budden. "I always said—"
"You're a liar," Langridge interrupted. "Here's a light."
"Thank you, Mr. Langridge."
Mike Budden took off his hat to shield the match from the rain, but he would have done better to have kept it on. Before, he had been little and squalid, a figure of fun for schoolboys and a reproach to men beyond their teens. But with his hat off he became definitely significant, and evil as a toad. He had a broad, flat and furrowed face, the colour of yellowish clay, and his bald head was seamed with red scars and the white lines of a surgeon's stitches. A pair of small, black, quick eyes were sunk deep between reddened eyelids, and he had the strong teeth of a rodent. In olden days he would have been matched against a rat with his hands tied behind his back, and he would have carried the big money.
Nicholas Langridge, however, was now too used to his face to be afflicted by it any more. He looked down at Mike Budden's clothes and laughed.
"They rigged you up proper at Exeter," he said.
Budden's sentence had expired when he was on remand for his share in the mutiny, and he had spent the intervening weeks in the prison at Exeter.
"Yus, they was cruel to me, Mr. Langridge," he whined. "Fairly sniggered at me in these old slops. Not English, you know, Mr. Langridge, no, not English. Now you, Mr. Langridge..."
"I'm a foreigner too," said Langridge drily. "Why, you old rascal, you ought to go down on your knees in a puddle and thank 'em all at Exeter for their kindness. You had your head shaved, too, I see, so as you could pretend all those old scars were Christmas presents from us. What with the cheek of that lie and your age and your concertina trousers, you made the jury laugh so that they hadn't got enough breath left to convict you. Fairly put it over them, didn't you?"
Mike Budden grinned for a moment and then thrust out his under-lip.
"I overdone it, Mr. Langridge, sir. That's the truth."
"Overdone it?" the warder cried sharply. "What do you mean by that?"
Mike Budden turned a blank face and a pair of expressionless eyes upon the warder. For half a minute he stood silent. Then he answered in an even, white voice which matched the vacancy of his face:
"What I mean, Mr. Langridge—look at that there rain. Torrentuous, I call it. It's all very well for you, but I ain't used to it, am I?"
And Mike was right. Nearer to seventy years of age than sixty, he had spent nearer to forty of them than thirty in the dry retirement of his country's prisons. Langridge the warder might tramp backwards and forwards between his cottage and the gaol in weather torrentuous or otherwise. Mike Budden kept his feet dry.
"Well, I can't help you," said Langridge abruptly, and shouldering the curtain of rain aside, he swung off down the steps. The lights in the Hall windows were by now extinguished, the hammering had ceased, the makeshift Court of Assize was dismantled, and finally the one big lamp above the entrance and the steps went out with a startling suddenness There was now darkness, the unchanging roar of the rain, and one little old shivering scarecrow on the top of a steep flight of steps.
Mike Budden made a small whimpering noise. Within his limits he was a very good actor. He had just twopence in his pocket. He could not make a dash for the inn. No house, however mean, in this small town of the Moor, would offer him a shelter for the night. Very well, then, there was nothing for it but the old home. Mike ran down the steps and sidled along the walls of the cottages up the road. Here and there a lighted window and the leaping glow of a fire spoke of comfort and warmth. Mike's boots let in the water. Mike's clothes became a pudding; the cottages came abruptly to an end. There were big trees now along the left-hand side of the open road, ghostly, whispering, unpleasant things. Budden took to the middle of the road. Beyond a bend on the left-hand side once more lights shone from windows. The Doctor's house. A little farther along, more lights. The Governor's house, and on the far side of the Governor's house towards the stone arch, the iron gates of the old homestead.
Budden rang the great bell and sent the rooks in the high trees opposite scurrying about the sky. A warder came forward and flashed a light upon the bedraggled Peri at the Gates.
"Here, what do you want?" he cried in an outraged voice. "Buzz off!"
As he turned away, Mike clung to the bars and screamed:
"You can't treat me like that, mister. I'm Mike Budden, I am. Number 8-0-3. You remember me. You can't leave me out here all night."
The warder turned again swiftly, and lifted and lowered his lamp until he had taken in every detail of the sopping horror in front of him.
"Mike Budden!" he said at length, with a soft note of satisfaction in his voice. It could be felt that behind the lamp the warder's face was smiling. Undoubtedly Mike was not popular on Dartmoor. "Mike Budden! So it is. But your room's engaged, Mike. You ought to have sent us a wire. Why not try the Ritz? Buzz off!"
Mike couldn't buzz, but his teeth could chatter; and they chattered now like a man with the ague. He was an excellent actor, considering his inexperience.
"I'll die here, mister. I will," he whined. "Right in front of the prison. I'll be found here in the morning—dead. Think of it, mister!" The warder seemed to be thinking of it with equanimity. "It'll be in all the papers. 'In-umanities at Dartmoor.' Questions too in Parlemink[3]!" And thus Mike Budden hit the right nail truly and well.
If there is one thing which a Government official loathes and dreads more than another, it's a Question in Parlemink. He may be a great man with an Office to himself on St. James's Park, or he may be the porter of a convict prison. Social status makes no difference. To one and all a Question in Parlemink is the world's great abomination. The Porter at the Gate took another look at Mike Budden. He certainly might die in the night if he was left out till morning. An end desirable anywhere else than at the front door of Dartmoor Prison[1]. For Mike was a really bad old lag. Ill-conditioned and sly, with an exact knowledge of his rights and liabilities, he gave just as much trouble as within the regulations he possibly could; and that was a great deal. He was the sea-lawyer of lags. But he must not be allowed to criticise the Institution by finding a watery grave in front of its doors.
"I'll go and see the Chief Warder. You wait here!" said the porter.
Mr. Budden raised his flat face towards the pouring heavens.
"God bless you, mister," he said in fervent tones.
Unfortunately the words carried. The porter could stand much, but his stomach turned at the invocation. He came grimly back to the rails.
"You can take back that patter, Mike! If you don't know me, I know you," he said slowly and unemotionally. "You darned old gorilla-faced hypocrite! If I can't get the blessing of God without your agency, I'm better off in all my sins."
"I'm perishing, mister," said Mike.
"Take it back, Mike. I'm getting wet," said the porter remorselessly.
Mr. Budden realised that the time and the weather were unsuitable for a theological discussion. He capitulated hurriedly.
"I'm not fit to call down a blessing on any man. I knows that, mister. It was a manner of speaking..." he whined, and the porter cut him short.
"You make me sick," he said simply, and he went across the outer square, leaving the Governor's house upon his right, to the lodge at the inner gates. The door of the lodge stood open upon a lighted room with a fine coal fire blazing cheerfully upon the hearth. At a desk in that room sat the Chief Warder, and he looked up with surprise.
"Hallo, Williams!"
Williams jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"We've got one of them gate crashers out there," he said.
"Know him?" asked the Chief Warder.
Williams's face registered gloom.
"Mike Budden."
"Well! Of all the infernal cheek! What does he want?"
"A night's lodging, sir."
Words failed the Chief Warder. There was no doubt that Mike was unpopular. Nobody liked him, not even his fellow-convicts. He would never get into P.O.P., however long he served.
"Tell him to buzz off," said the Chief Warder.
"I used them very words, sir," said Williams.
"And there wasn't a buzz, eh?"
Williams shook his head.
"I think he'll die if we leave him out there."
"He might, just to make things uncomfortable for us," the Chief Warder agreed.
He tilted his cap on one side and scratched his head. That would not do. There was the credit of the establishment to be considered, the good name of the school.
"The Doctor's in the surgery. I'll go along and see him."
The Chief Warder tightened his belt and went off upon his errand. And that night Mike Budden slept in the prison infirmary.
The rain had cleared off by the morning and the sky was blue. The prison provided Mike Budden with a less unseemly suit of clothes and a breakfast; which he took by himself in the little mess-room which would be used later in the day by the good-conduct prisoners with the stripes down their trousers, for smoking and conversation. There Dr. Holt found him. Mike tried an ingratiating smile on the Doctor, but it had no success. Dr. Holt stroked his brown beard, eyed him coldly, and asked:
"Where are you going to from here, Budden?"
"Tavistock, sir. I've got friends there who'll be glad to see me," said Budden.
"They must be an odd lot," the Doctor remarked offensively. "How do you mean to go? You've only got tuppence."
"I'll walk a bit, sir, and then like as not I'll get a lift."
Dr. Holt counted out six half-crowns from his pocket. "Here are two from the Governor, two from the Chaplain, and two from myself, and we can ill afford them. We don't give them to you because you're old, or because a harsh first sentence poisoned your early youth, or because we like you. We don't like you, Budden, we never have liked you, and we never shall like you. We know you to be a treacherous, cunning little malingering liar, and we make you this present in the hope that the next time you're jugged it'll be in Scotland and you'll be sent to Peterhead. We don't want you on Dartmoor any more."
Mike Budden grabbed up the six half-crowns and touched his forehead.
"You won't see me any more, Doctor," he said humbly. "I've made my mistakes, I know. But I've had my lesson and I'm going straight from now on."
The Doctor grunted.
"Just as straight as a jack-snipe flies," he said unpleasantly.
But field sports and the ways of wild birds had played no substantial part in the education of Mike Budden; though they had in another member of the Dartmoor fellowship with whom this history is connected.
"You will catch the omnibus to Tavistock which passes our gates at eight o'clock this morning," the Doctor continued.
"I will, sir," said Mike.
"You certainly will," said the Doctor; and carefully shepherded by a warder, so that not by any chance could he exchange a word with a prisoner, Mike Budden certainly did.
II
But Dr. Holt had not seen the last of Mike Budden that day. He drove to Plymouth in his small car during the afternoon to meet a young cousin, Oliver Ransom, who was returning from India. Ransom, an officer of promise in the Bengal Police, had been dangerously wounded in a riot at Chandernagore, and at the age of twenty-eight had been invalided out of his service. Holt saw a tall young man with fair hair and a face still thin from a long illness, in the Customs House, under the letter R, and went up to him.
"Oliver Ransom?"
"Yes."
"You'll stay with me for a little while, won't you?"
"Thank you! I shall be glad. I'm at a loose end for the moment."
The two men shook hands. Ransom's heavy luggage was going forward by sea to London. There were only the cabin trunks to be passed and strapped on to the car. On the way up from the quay Dr. Holt stopped the car at the North Road Station.
"You sit here," he said to Ransom. "I shan't be a moment."
The advice was undoubtedly sound from the Doctor's professional view, but it none the less was the most terrible catastrophe for Oliver Ransom. For he followed the advice and continued to sit in the car whilst Holt went on to the departure platform.
The prison Doctor, though of a bluff and stolid appearance, was very secretly and rather ashamedly a romantic. A solitary person, with his lot cast in a disheartening place, he would people his quarters on gloomy evenings with gay and charming visions of fine adventure. He climbed Everests, he sailed single-handed through tropical archipelagos, he flew high over infinite deserts, he dined with exquisite women in the restaurants of Monte Carlo. But since he had actually seen nothing of any one of these Elysia, he had to get the picture papers to help him out. He made straight for the bookstall and bought a bundle of them; and whilst he was waiting for them to be tied up in a roll, he saw out of the tail of his eye Mike Budden slip furtively out of the refreshment-room, in a good suit of clothes, with a suit-case in his hand and a cigar, a big fat cigar, stuck in the corner of his mouth.
The London train had just drawn up in the station. Mike nipped into an empty third-class compartment, settled himself in a corner, and lit his cigar. Holt, with his picture papers under his arm, strolled across to the compartment, very much to Mike's annoyance. Dr. Holt had really no wish to bait the little man. He was only anxious to assure himself that he was going as far away as the remainder of his fifteen shillings, plus the contributions of the odd friends at Tavistock, would carry him. But his manner of address was unfortunate.
"Quite the little gentleman, Mike, I see."
And anything less gentlemanly than Mike's reception of his remark even Dartmoor could hardly have supplied. Budden for a second lost his poise. The one expressive short word which he used was the least offensive part of his behaviour. His head darted forwards as if he was about to strike with it, the tip of his tongue shot out beyond his lips and curled upwards and about them, as though it had an independent life of its own, a prolonged low hiss escaped between his bared, strong teeth. He was in a second no longer the old humble, whining lag, but a small brute, malignant as an adder and as dangerous. The change was so startling, the look of the little man so beyond Nature and horrible, that the Doctor stepped back with an unpleasant queasiness in the pit of his stomach. Men couldn't be like that, he felt, couldn't so spread about them an aura of abomination. Mike Budden became important through the very excess of his ferocity. But the revelation was gone the next moment, the face wiped clean of cruelty, the shoulders cringing.
"You can't grudge me a smoke, Doctor," he whined reproachfully. "All these weeks in Exeter Gaol, an innocent man, sir, proved innocent by word of jury, and not one pull at a fag. Disgraceful, I call it. What I says is, what's Parlemink doing? Here, Doctor," and as the bright idea occurred to Mike he gazed upon Holt with admiration, "you're wasting your time, dosin' a measly lot of convicts at Dartmoor. You're the man to go into Parlemink and see that innocent old boys like me aren't grudged a tuppeny smoke."
"Before I called that a tuppeny smoke, Budden, I should take the nice gold band off its middle," said Holt drily; and an inspector with his clip came up to the door.
"Tickets, please!"
Mr. Budden fumbled in his pocket.
"Good-bye, Doctor," he said, "and thank you very much"; and the Doctor didn't move.
"Tickets, please," the Inspector repeated, and very reluctantly Budden produced his ticket.
"London," said the Inspector, as he clipped it and passed on.
"Ah! London's a good way, Mike," said Dr. Holt. "Got anything to read?"
"I've got me thoughts," said Mike Budden darkly, and the train slid quietly out of the station.
III
Holt's satisfaction that Mike Budden was travelling a very long way did not last. He found himself suddenly very hot under the collar. The price of a third-class ticket to London was twenty-eight shillings and twopence. He knew it, and so did the Chaplain, and so did the Governor; for that was the only class which they could afford. And he had squeezed five shillings out of each of them with the idea of setting on his feet a dangerous little viper who could buy himself a suit-case, and a ticket to London, to say nothing of a Havana cigar. Dr. Holt was justifiably angry, but he was uneasy too; and as he drove Ransom up on to the Moor he became more uneasy than angry. So uneasy, indeed, that as he opened his house door he said to Ransom:
"Will you tell the servant to carry your traps up to your room? You might take in that bundle of papers, too. I think I ought to say a word or two to the Governor."
He ran across to the house at the corner of the outer courtyard and found the Governor, in knickerbockers, taking his tea with his family. He was offered a cup, and excused himself on the grounds of his guest.
"But I did want to see you, Major, if I could, for a minute."
Major Burrows, the Governor, rose at once. He was a broad-shouldered, practical soldier, without theories or illusions, but he was just and prompt, and under him quiet now reigned over the prison. He took Dr. Holt into his study, looking out upon the road.
"I've got to apologise to you and to the Chaplain, sir," said Holt. "That little rascal Budden fairly put it over me last night, just as he put it over that pie-faced jury. He had money to burn waiting for him at Tavistock."
Major Burrows silently offered Holt a box of cigarettes.
"I'm a little uneasy myself," he confessed. "He had only tuppence in his pocket and a slop suit last night, and now he's off to London, you say, all dressed up, with a Havana cigar. I don't like it."
The Doctor nodded his head. He had an unpleasantly vivid recollection of that venomous old face striking at him from the window of the railway carriage.
"I ought to have left the little rascal out in the rain," he said remorsefully. But Major Burrows pushed the apology away with a sweep of the hand.
"You couldn't have done it, Holt. No one could have done anything but what you did. But I'm a bit worried, all the same. Langridge was chaffing him after the trial was over on his get-up and his defence. And what do you think he said? 'I overdone it, Mr. Langridge, and that's the truth.' It struck Langridge as a queer sort of remark, and he reported it to me...And I, too, think it queer. I think Budden expected a light sentence. He couldn't have got a heavy one, for he didn't do much more than encourage the others. But he might have got a light one, and I shouldn't wonder if he was prepared to take a light one."
"You mean that he wanted to get back into the prison?"
"I shouldn't wonder," said the Governor. "My belief is that he had got something rather special to say to one of the convicts who's coming out pretty soon."
Dr. Holt sat down in a chair.
"Oh, I see! Yes, he did get in, and he was in funds this afternoon."
The Governor leaned his elbows on his writing-table. "Let's see now! Budden spoke to Langridge, to the porter at the gate, to the Chief Warder, to you, and to the hospital orderly. Where did he sleep?"
"In A Ward, the big one. None of the hospital cells were available. I put him next to the door."
"Who was on the other side of him?" asked Burrows.
"Garrow, the forger. He has got six years of his sentence still to run."
"Well, he's not the man, then, but he'd pass on a message, of course."
"I gave orders that Budden shouldn't be allowed to talk," said Holt rather miserably, "and the orderly tells me that he didn't."
The Governor grunted and shrugged his shoulders.
"Yes, but—any old lag can put it over us at that game. You wouldn't hear a whisper, but he'd have said his piece all the same."
Major Burrows thumped gently on his blotting pad with his ruler.
"I got on to Exeter," he continued, "after Langridge had reported, to find out who visited Mike Budden whilst he was on remand there. Only his brother, and his brother only once. But once was enough, no doubt. We might try and find out, perhaps, if they could discover in Tavistock whom Budden went to see."
Major Burrows rang up the Police Headquarters at Tavistock on the telephone and asked for a report. But Tavistock had no message of consolation. A police constable had seen someone fitting the description of Mike Budden descend from the motor omnibus in the Market Square. But Mike had disappeared thereafter. Discreet enquiries were made in London of the brother who had visited Mike in Exeter Gaol. He was a cobbler on Hornsey Rise, and had never himself been in the hands of the Police at all. He frankly and entirely disapproved of his brother, and lamented his wasted life. Why, then, had he travelled such a long way to Exeter to see him?
"'Umanity," said Arthur Budden, the cobbler. "'Umanity, sir, makes even brothers kin."
"'Umanity," was clearly the king word of the Budden family. Major Burrows, in a phrase, had reached two dead ends; and gradually the exacting duties of his post washed the whole affair out of his mind.
IV
Dr. Holt crossed the road again to his house at the edge of the wood, to find that Oliver Ransom had driven the car into the garage and was now changing his clothes for dinner. Holt knocked upon his door, and having been told to come in, looked round the room.
"There's no woman to superintend this house, Oliver, so if you miss anything you must shout for it. Meanwhile, I'd like to have a look at that wound of yours."
It was a clean enough shot, but it had grazed the left lung and drilled a hole through the shoulder.
"Lucky for you it wasn't an explosive bullet. You'll be all right in a month or two," Dr. Holt decided. "But once your lung has been touched up, even when it's healed, I should think you are better out of that climate. You must tell me after dinner what you think of doing."
After dinner the two men sat one on each side of a blazing fire in the Doctor's comfortable book-lined library, and over their cigars, Dr. Holt's one great luxury, Oliver Ransom spoke quietly of his plans.
"I shall read for the Bar. Of course I am old for it. Twenty-eight. But others have passed as late, I think, and succeeded."
The Doctor looked at his cousin, and was doubtful about that plan. Others at his age—yes. But Oliver Ransom—that was another matter. Push would be wanted, not reserve. More of the buffalo, a delicacy less fastidious than this young man with the face of a scholar looked like possessing. He would have to trample. Could he?
"And meanwhile?" Holt asked. "You can wait till you are called?"
Oliver shook his head.
"Not altogether. I have a gratuity and a pittance. But I thought that I might get perhaps some private enquiry work to help me through."
For a moment Dr. Holt was astonished. Then he realised that his astonishment was due to the grace of Ransom's appearance. But a slim figure and a thoughtful face were not trustworthy standards. These were to be found behind the big gates across the road. One instance in particular rose very vividly at that moment before the Doctor's eyes—George Brymer, serving now his second sentence for blackmail.
"An enquiry agent! I hadn't thought of that!"
Oliver Ransom laughed.
"I don't mean, of course, to follow adulterous couples on a bicycle, but there are other cases, aren't there? I managed, you know, to bring off one or two jobs that weren't perhaps so very easy whilst I was in India."
Dr. Holt felt inclined to stamp with annoyance.
"One or two jobs that weren't so very easy." That wouldn't do. That wasn't the modern way. You must cry your wares now and be sure to buy a megaphone to do it with. A job or two not so easy! Who would pay any attention to that? Why, it was a disclaimer, or next door to it. Something quite different was needed. "I solved the appalling mystery of Chandernagore, and don't you forget it!" Or: "They worked at it for a year before I was called in. Then, old man, the murderer was inside next day." Diffidence and modesty had no share values and the sooner Oliver Ransom learned it the better.
"We'll talk it over again," said the Doctor.
"Right," said Oliver Ransom, and he opened one of the picture papers on his knees.
But Holt had a worrying mind. Of course if Oliver found an incentive, a big special whale of an incentive! If he fell head over heels irrecoverably in love, for instance! The grand passion they write about! That might turn him into the buccaneer he had somehow got to be. If he had a touch of George Brymer, for instance, the look of him, the easy way and cheek of him, the odd attraction he, a cold devil himself, had for women and animals and even birds.
"I'll tell you about Brymer," Dr. Holt said. "He's hopeless, no doubt. He'll come back here again and again. There's nothing really to like in him. He wouldn't, I believe, hesitate before the most heartless murder you can imagine. Yet there are women, who ought to know better, always wanting to see him, and he has only got to go out on to one of the fields of our farm here and stretch out his arms, and every bird in the neighbourhood will fly down and settle on his shoulders and hands and strut about all over him as if he was St. Francis of Assisi. A touch of the buccaneer! Not enough to plant you down in Dartmoor, but just a touch of it, what? Not you nor I could get a single bird to come and say how do you do to us! Yet Brymer—odd, eh? And girls, too! Brymer."
It was the only time Dr. Holt ever mentioned Brymer to his cousin, and he certainly never showed that convict to him. But a touch of Brymer, eh? The bird side, the woman side. It probably went with brutality, however. Dr. Holt ran over the names of the damsels in the neighbourhood who might be suitable, and bring suitable patrimonies to Oliver Ransom, but he could not select one. However, there was time.
"You'll stay for a week or so, won't you?" said Holt.
"Thank you," Oliver Ransom answered, a little absently. He had been gazing at the same page in the Tatler all through the Doctor's reflections. Now he handed the paper across to his companion.
"Rather lovely, eh?" he said with a smile.
Dr. Holt looked at a photograph of a moonlit water between tropical islands. A slim, tall and beautiful girl was aquaplaning behind a motor launch, her face radiant with pleasure, her hair streaming back from her face in the wind of her going. She was wearing a white satin evening dancing-frock, which just fell to her feet, and the water frothed and glistened about her white satin shoes, and tumbled away in the wake like snow. Underneath the photo group ran the legend:
Lydia Flight, the young mezzo-soprano of the Metropolitan Opera House, aquaplaning at Nassau after a ball at the Porcupine Club.
Dr. Holt laughed aloud. Here was the very text which he wanted.
"Yes, she's lovely, and a lesson to you, Oliver. No hiding her light under a bushel, eh? That's real publicity. Worth a thousand interviews. I give her top marks. That girl must have brains as well as looks."
The photograph showed her brimful of youth. She balanced herself upon her board, her lithe body leaning back, and her lovely face turned upwards to the moonlit skies, as though she meant to take all the warm-scented breath of that night into her lungs. She was not wearing the customary mirthless, suitable smile with which the ladies of screen or stage consciously face a camera. She had been caught in such an abandonment of pleasure that some of her delight must pass on even to those who only shared it through the medium of a photograph.
"Yes," said Dr. Holt the romantic, "we owe her something for existing."
He was contrasting her with his loathsome little gate crasher of this morning, Mike Budden. She was tall as Rosalind, supple and sweet as Nausicaa upon her beach of the Aegean. Oliver Ransom had the same thought, but he expressed it with a greater moderation.
Neither of them looked for news of her in the letterpress. Neither of them, in consequence, understood why, with the opera season hardly yet at its height, she had turned her back on New York.
CHAPTER II BRASS RAGS
SPRING came early to Europe that year, and to Paris a little earlier than to most cities. On an evening of March a window in an apartment of the Avenue Matignon stood wide open on the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. A fire burned upon the hearth, more for the intimate look and comfort of it than from any need of its heat. The air was warm outside with a scent of flowers, and the rumble of traffic in the Champs-Élysées and the distant streets had here a pleasant rhythm. But the two young people in this dainty drawing-room with the pale grey panels were insensible to the balm of the night and the murmur of the roads. They sat on high chairs at a round table under the crystal chandelier and with frowning and concentrated faces they put together a jig-saw puzzle of the Battle of Waterloo[5]. It was close upon midnight, and the work was almost done. A few tortured pieces of coloured wood alone refused malignantly to be fitted into their places.
Of the two seated at the table, one was a young Indian of twenty-one years, small and slender and smartly buttoned up in a double-breasted dinner jacket. His colour was a pale brown; he had sleek black hair, and melting eyes; he was very good-looking, and he had the easy carriage of a youth trained in the gymnasium and on the polo ground. He was the eldest son and the heir of the Maharajah of Chitipur[4], in Northern India, and was on his first visit to Europe.
His companion was a girl older by some six years than he, and pretty with the smoothness of youth. Her hair had the fashionable tint of platinum, she had a wide mouth, a pair of big blue eyes, almost too innocent to be true, cheeks, chubby now but definitely fat in ten years' time, and a stubborn little chin against which all the intelligence in the world would break in vain.
"This is the loveliest evening we have ever had, Elsie," the boy whispered, slipping his arm round her shoulders.
"Yes, darling," she answered inattentively, as she picked up a squiggly fragment of the puzzle from the table and tried to insert it where it wouldn't go. "Damn!" she said. "Do you know, Natty, I think I'd like a brandy and soda."
Nahendra Nao were his names. He rose, and crossing behind her to a small table in the corner, mixed her drink. From where he stood he could see her head bent forward over the table, the platinum tendrils on the nape of her neck, the shoulders snow-white and satin-smooth.
"It's marvellous, Elsie," he cried. "I never get used to it. There you are, with all Paris running after you—Paris, just think of it!" And for a moment he raised his eyes from the girl to look out through the window and the balmy night on the lights of the City of Enchantment The murmur of the streets was music to this youth from a sleeping palace, where most of every day was Sunday afternoon. He held his breath to listen. Beyond the gardens and the houses the loom of the lamps in the Place de la Concorde made daylight of the upper air. Paris! "Six weeks ago I had never seen it," the boy continued. "I had never lived, and then I cut right through all your beaux and adorers, and carried you off, didn't I?"
"Yes, darling," said Elsie, and she took up another sliver of the puzzle. "I wonder whether this'll go?"
"Young Lochinvar, eh?" the boy asked, with a rather shrill, high laugh.
It was true enough that Elsie Marsh of the Casino de Paris had a large wake of followers. She was pretty, but not outstandingly pretty. She had lovely movements when she danced, and long slim legs free from the hips, but others could match her. She sang, but with a poor little scrannel voice which stopped at the fourth row of the stalls. But these things, qualities and faults, did not matter. She made an appeal to the passions which was indefinable but manifest. She came across the footlights instantly, kindling the blood and waking desire. She had something which other women had not. It was not charm—that is too cold and polite a word. It was a vital, stinging appeal to the animal in men, and it carried somehow an assurance that the response would be fierce too.
"But I think this evening is perfect, don't you, Elsie?" he went on.
The Casino de Paris had been shut for a week whilst a new revue was being staged. For Elsie Marsh and Nahendra Nao it had been a hectic week of expeditions into the country, large meals at crowded tables, and noisy parties ending with the dawn. On this one night at the end of the week they had dined together alone, in the charming apartment he had taken for her—a domesticated couple engrossed in the simple pleasure of a jig-saw puzzle.
"Perfect, dear," said Elsie. "What about my drink?"
The Prince carried it to her, and sitting down, drew her close to him.
"To-night has made such a difference, hasn't it?" he said in a low and pleading voice. "We've been happy, haven't we? Just you and I together. Don't you think"—and his voice now took on a still more urgent note, and Elsie's face looked up warily from the puzzle towards the window—"don't you think that somehow it could all keep going on for good?"
