Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (8 page)

"Why, Henry!" said the woman.

"Hello, Hank," said the man.

"Dr. Gideon Fell; Mr. Alan Grantham," he intoned, "Mrs. Valerie Huret; a very old acquaintance of mine, Bob Crandall. And be good enough, Bob, not to call me Hank!"

"Wounds your dignity, does it?"

"Bear witness," said Henry Maynard, "that I have never been called a stuffed shirt. Your vulgarisms, those limericks and the collection of typographical errors, have their proper place; at the right time I welcome them. But I object to a personal vulgarism when it's totally unnecessary. You have literary pretensions of a sort, Bob. Would Henry Fielding have been called Hank? Or Henry James either?"

Mr. Crandall sighted along an extended forefinger.

"Henry Fielding," he retorted, "signed himself Hen. And don't call me a liar; I can show you a copy of the signature! If that's not worse than Hank in anybody's calligraphy, I'll eat
Tom Jones
page by page. Why, I remember, when I was a boy on the old
Times-Dispatch
in La Force, Indiana . . . !"

"Spare us!" said Henry Maynard. "Spare us another anecdote of wit or wisdom, and the perfection that may be attained with life on a small-town newspaper."

"Taking the good with the bad, Henricus, it's just about true. All right: I'll be serious. No limericks! No typographical errors! Will you hear wit and wisdom too?

"Among our literary scenes,

Saddest this sight to me, The graves of little magazines

That died to make verse free."

"Hear, hear,
hear!"
applauded Alan. "You agree, Mr. Grantham?"

"Heartily, Mr. Crandall. You must recite that to Camilla Bruce. Afterwards, if she hasn't poisoned
my
coffee
..."

"I was quoting a forgotten bard, who learned epigrammatic style on a small-town paper. Believe it or not, Henry, our very best light verse has come from those who began as members of the fourth estate. I'm out of the game now; I've retired, in my sere and yellow, with a bigger chunk of dough than I ever expected or deserved. But one four-line stanza, only part of a long and fine piece, sticks in my head when everything else has gone."

Bob Crandall rose to his feet. His voice rolled out:

"Under the broad bright windows

Of men I serve no more, The grinding of the old great wheels

Thickened to a throttled roar . . .

"To anybody who's ever heard the presses begin to roll, especially just before daylight, those are words of description that strike home. And do you know 'The Chop-House in the Alley, When the Paper's Gone to Press'?"

Valerie Huret stirred, the lamplight kindling her sleek skin and hazel eyes.

"I don't think he
wants
to know it, Bob. What are we doing here, anyway?" She appealed to their host. "He asked me for chess; I told him I can't
play
chess . . ."

"Neither can Bob," said Henry Maynard.

"There are lots of things
much
more interesting than chess. I'll tell him about them, if he asks me nicely. But hadn't we better go downstairs, Bob? In the first place, we're trespassing. We
are
trespassing, aren't we, Henry?"

"Frankly, Valerie, I'm afraid you are. Remember, Bob: as usual, one game before dinner, and I'll trim you again. Be here promptly at seven, just as it's beginning to get dark . . ."

"Forgive me!" boomed Dr. Fell, looking particularly half-witted. "But your climate can still hold surprises for the stranger. At this latitude, in the middle of May, does it begin to get dark at seven o'clock?"

"In these parts, Dr. Fell," their host informed him, "we are not on daylight-saving time. Forget the clock in New York and everywhere else. I am not accustomed to making inaccurate statements."

"In the second place," cried Valerie Huret, who had struck a pose like the Goddess of Reason, "at any moment it's going to
pour
with rain. I've just remembered; I left my car around the side of the house. It's a convertible, and open. If anybody else has an open car . . ."

Alan made a move towards the door. Henry Maynard stopped him.

"Gently, both of you! There is no need to go; George will see to it. When you have visited us more often, Valerie, you will learn that no car suffers rain-damage with George in attendance. However! Any storm will be brief, but it may be violent." Alarm rang through his voice. "Where's Madge? Where are the two boys? Where's Miss Bruce? She accompanied Dr. Fell and Mr. Grantham; I saw her from the library. But . . ."

"The la
st time I
looked," Valerie pointed to the window, "they were down on the beach. Yancey Beale and that tough-looking light-haired boy were throwing stones out over the water to see who could throw farther. The girls were with them."

Henry Maynard's lips tightened.

"For almost two weeks, ladies and gentlemen, I have been wondering when they would start on baseball. My brother, himself once captain of the Little Potatoes Hard to Peel, was patron and Maecenas of a teen-age team called the Bearcats. There is baseball equipment all over the cellar. And, since Rip Hillboro fancies himself as a pitcher . . ."

"You're a dried-up old bastard, Hank!" Bob Crandall said without rancor and almost with affection. "What's the matter with baseball?"

"There's nothing the matter with baseball, if you happen to like it. I don't. I was merely wondering—"

"And in the third place," cried Valerie, sticking insistently to her main theme, "let's us go downstairs, Bob!
You're
not a dried-up old . . . what I mean is, let's us forget chess and baseball too." Her tones grew coy and honeyed. "There
are
other things, aren't there? While I sort of hint at it, in a nice way, you can just tell me some more limericks and typographical errors. You
have
got some more of those, haven't you?"

"Woman, I've got a bushel of 'em. Come along."

Henry Maynard drew a breath of relief as they left the study. But he had not in any sense heard the last of them. Due to the carelessness either of Mrs. Huret or of Mr. Crandall, the door did not quite close. A confused murmur, no words distinct, could be heard from the enclosed staircase to the floor below. Then, suddenly, something else jabbed through serenity. Valerie Huret's voice went shrilling up.

"You're a nice man; you're too nice, really!"

"Now look, Semiramis!"

"You don't know what's happening here! I can't bear it!"

"Sh-h!"

"I can't bear it, I tell you!"

But they heard no more. They would have heard no more in any case. A deluge burst; the windows blurred and grew darker with driving rain.

More emotional pressures, but from what source? It was no use speculating, Alan decided. He turned back, and was looking round the walls when Henry Maynard caught his eye.

"It will have occurred to you, Mr. Grantham, that this room has a nautical flavor foreign to my essential tastes. Yes, that is the ship's bell from the
Palmetto,
rescued like her logbook when she sank in the Caribbean. There over the Sheraton desk—head and shoulders, full beard, gray naval uniform—is Luke Maynard himself. It is not a water-color, though it appears to be. Actually it is a photograph, enormously enlarged and tinted by hand. You, Dr. Fell, are goggling at the picture as though it stunned you. May I ask your thoughts?"

"Why, sir. . . . (harrumph!)
...
to begin with, I was thinking of colors."

"Colors, sir?"

"Various Confederate uniforms (harrumph!) which in past days I have seen at museums here in the South. Their colors varied considerably."

"Yes?"

Rain roared against the windows. Dr. Fell poked at the carpet with the ferrule of his stick.

"Some were of the customary and conventional gray. Others looked so close to what nowadays we should call air force blue that without C.S.A. on the belt-buckle I might have ascribed the uniform to the wrong side." A sniff rumbled in Dr. Fell's nose. "Then, again, as any human being must, I was thinking—O my hat!—of Commodore Maynard and his violent death on the beach."

"That happened so long ago, Dr. Fell, that surely it need not detain us?"

"To a degree, I fear, it must always detain us. And in the third place, as Mrs. Huret would say," he whacked his stick on the floor, "my thoughts (or feelings) are purely personal. I have come from some considerable distance in response to your letters of weeks ago. I arrive from the hotel, not a little dishevelled, in response to the urgency of your telephone call.
Confound it, sir, what do you want
of
me?"

"Ah, yes. What I want of you!"

Here their host took on a bustling air.

"Sit down, gentlemen; make yourselves comfortable. You will find cigarettes on the writing-table. Or a cigar, if Dr. Fell would prefer one? . . . There, that is better. At least you have sat down.

"Speaking of Commodore Maynard, there on the wall towards the billiard-room
is
a water-color: some contemporary artist's conception of the
Palmetto
leaving Charleston harbor on her last voyage. Observe the flag she flies at her mizzen-peak.

"Though most people are acquainted with only one Southern flag, the famous battle-flag of stars and bars, at various times the Confederacy adopted four different ones. That flown by the
Palmetto
—you will also see it in pictures of the
Alabama
—was the second to be adopted: a white ensign with the smaller square of the battle-flag in the upper left-hand corner. Firebrands objected to this as looking far too much like a flag of surrender. They said—"

"During a recent affair outside New York," boomed Dr. Fell, "some argument and confusion arose relating to the number of stars in the Confederate flag. But why, by thunder, are we entangled with flags
now?
What does this mean?"

"It means," replied Henry Maynard, standing beside the writing-table and brushing the fingertips of his right hand gently over its surfac
e, "that I am straying from the
subject. And you deserve better than that I will stray from the subject no longer.

"I was disturbed, Dr. Fell. I was badly disturbed, and I confess it. This arose at lunch time, after Joe Ashcroft had driven Miss Bruce to the Francis Marion Hotel to intercept Mr. Grantham; at her own request a whim of Camilla's.

"George—you remember George, the butler, who admitted you?—thought he had seen someone skulking in this room. I feared for certain papers in the Sheraton desk over there. Precipitately I rushed to the telephone and rang the hotel. I asked you, I all but entreated you, to come here at once. And now I ask you . . ."

"Yes?"

"I ask you," answered Henry Maynard, "to forget that phone call entirely."

5

Yellow lamplight fell strongly on the man's intent face. He took a cigarette from a silver box on the table, but thought better of this and put it back. The rain had slackened; it was still sluicing and splashing down the house, but the buzz of the air-conditioner could be heard again. Dr. Fell reared up in his leather chair. . "Forget it, you say?"

"If you will be so good. I was very foolish; I confess that too. I should have realized nobody could have gotten at those papers. Without smashing the desk to pieces; they are in a secret drawer. And they are still there, safe and untouched."

"May I ask, sir, the nature of these papers? For instance, are they some 'calculations' of yours?"

"Certainly not!" The other looked genuinely astonished. "Why do you ask?"

"Miss Bruce mentioned—even insisted upon—the fact that, though you still sit up here in the ev
ening and on
the terrace in the afternoon, you seem no longer preoccupied with 'calculating something.'"

"The papers, Dr. Fell, relate only to my late brother's estate. Since there has never been any mystery about the disposition of the estate, they are of no real importance at all. Believe me, they could be lost or burnt without the slightest ill-effect to Madge or to me or to anyone else on earth."

"Then why should a threat to them upset you?"

"Because, if the truth must be told, like my daughter I suffer from moods. Have you never said to yourself, 'I
must
find such and such a document; it is vital to have that document; what if it were missing?'—though it is not vital and you know it. I seldom admit this foible; the cold reasoner must not seem a sham or a fraud. But I go to an extreme—and then change my mind."