The Complete Stories (9 page)

  On the second day he interviewed Mr. Youkoumian. They sat down together with a bottle of mastika at a little round table behind Mr. Youkoumian's counter at ten in the morning. It was three in the afternoon before the reporter stepped out into the white-dust heat, but he had won his way. Mr. Youkoumian had promised to conduct him to the bandits' camp. Both of them were pledged to secrecy. By sundown the whole of Matodi was discussing the coming expedition, but the journalist was not embarrassed by any inquiries; he was alone that evening, typing out an account of what he expected would happen next day.

  He described the start at dawn ... "grey light breaking over the bereaved township of Matodi ... the camels snorting and straining at their reins ... the many sorrowing Englishmen to whom the sun meant only the termination of one more night of hopeless watching ... silver dawn breaking in the little room where Prunella's bed stood, the coverlet turned down as she had left it on the fatal afternoon ..." He described the ascent into the hills—"... luxuriant tropical vegetation giving place to barren scrub and bare rock ..." He described how the bandits' messenger blindfolded him and how he rode, swaying on his camel through darkness, into the unknown. Then, after what seemed an eternity, the halt; the bandage removed from his eyes ... the bandits' camp. "... twenty pairs of remorseless eastern eyes glinting behind ugly-looking rifles ..." here he took the paper from his machine and made a correction; the bandits' lair was to be in a cave "... littered with bone and skins." ... Joab, the bandit chief, squatting in barbaric splendour, a jewelled sword across his knees. Then the climax of the story; Prunella bound. For some time he toyed with the idea of stripping her, and began to hammer out a vivid word-picture of her girlish frame shrinking in the shadows, Andromeda-like. But caution restrained him and he contented himself with "... her lovely, slim body marked by the hempen ropes that cut into her young limbs ..." The concluding paragraphs related how despair suddenly melted to hope in her eyes as he stepped forward, handing over the ransom to the bandit chief and "in the name of the Daily Excess and the People of Great Britain restored her to her heritage of freedom."

  It was late before he had finished, but he retired to bed with a sense of high accomplishment, and next morning deposited his manuscript with the Eastern Exchange Telegraph Company before setting out with Mr. Youkoumian for the hills.

  The journey was in all respects totally unlike his narrative. They started, after a comfortable breakfast, surrounded by the well wishes of most of the British and many of the French colony, and instead of riding on camels they drove in Mr. Kentish's baby Austin. Nor did they even reach Joab's lair. They had not gone more than ten miles before a girl appeared walking alone on the track towards them. She was not very tidy, particularly about the hair, but, apart from this, showed every sign of robust well-being.

  "Miss Brooks, I presume," said the journalist, unconsciously following a famous precedent. "But where are the bandits?"

  Prunella looked inquiringly towards Mr. Youkoumian who, a few steps in the rear, was shaking his head with vigour. "This British newspaper writing gentleman," he explained, "e know all same Matodi gentlemen. E got the thousand pounds for Joab."

  "Well, he'd better take care," said Miss Brooks, "the bandits are all round you. Oh you wouldn't see them, of course, but I don't mind betting that there are fifty rifles covering us at this moment from behind the boulders and bush and so on." She waved a bare, suntanned arm expansively towards the innocent-looking landscape. "I hope you've brought the money in gold."

  "It's all here, in the back of the car, Miss Brooks."

  "Splendid. Well, I'm afraid Joab won't allow you into his lair, so you and I will wait here, and Youkoumian shall drive into the hills and deliver it."

  "But listen, Miss Brooks, my paper has put a lot of money into this story. I got to see that lair."

  "I'll tell you all about it," said Prunella, and she did.

  "There were three huts," she began, her eyes downcast, her hands folded, her voice precise and gentle as though she were repeating a lesson, "the smallest and the darkest was used as my dungeon."

  The journalist shifted uncomfortably. "Huts," he said. "I had formed the impression that they were caves."

  "So they were," said Prunella. "Hut is a local word for cave. Two lions were chained beside me night and day. Their eyes glared and I felt their foetid breath. The chains were of a length so that if I lay perfectly still I was out of their reach. If I had moved hand or foot ..." She broke off with a little shudder ...

  By the time that Youkoumian returned, the journalist had material for another magnificent front-page splash.

  "Joab has given orders to withdraw the snipers," Prunella announced, after a whispered consultation with the Armenian. "It is safe for us to go."

  So they climbed into the little car and drove unadventurously back to Matodi.

  VII

  Little remains of the story to be told. There was keen enthusiasm in the town when Prunella returned, and an official welcome was organized for her on the subsequent Tuesday. The journalist took many photographs, wrote up a scene of homecoming that stirred the British public to the depths of its heart, and soon flew away in his aeroplane to receive congratulation and promotion at the Excess office.

  It was expected that Prunella would now make her final choice between Kentish and Benson, but this excitement was denied to the colony. Instead, came the distressing intelligence that she was returning to England. A light seemed to have been extinguished in Azanian life, and in spite of avowed good wishes there was a certain restraint on the eve of her departure—almost of resentment, as though Prunella were guilty of disloyalty in leaving. The Excess inserted a paragraph announcing her arrival, headed ECHO OF KIDNAPPING CASE, but otherwise she seemed to have slipped unobtrusively from public attention. Stebbing, poor fellow, was obliged to retire from the service. His mind seemed permanently disordered and from now on he passed his time, harmlessly but unprofitably, in a private nursing home, working out hidden messages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide. Even in Matodi the kidnapping was seldom discussed.

  One day six months later Lepperidge and Bretherton were sitting in the Club drinking their evening glass of pink gin. Banditry was in the air at the moment for that morning the now memberless trunk of the American missionary had been found at the gates of the Baptist compound.

  "It's one of the problems we shall have to tackle," said Lepperidge. "A case for action. I am going to make a report of the entire matter."

  Mr. Brooks passed them on his way out to his lonely dinner table; he was a rare visitor to the Club now; the petrol agency was uniformly prosperous and kept him late at his desk. He neither remembered nor regretted his brief popularity, but Lepperidge maintained a guilty cordiality towards him whenever they met.

  "Evening, Brooks. Any news of Miss Prunella?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact I heard from her today. She's just been married."

  "Well I'm blessed ... I hope you're glad. Anyone we know?"

  "Yes, I am glad in a way, though of course I shall miss her. It's that fellow from Kenya who stayed here once; remember him?"

  "Ah, yes, him? Well, well ... Give her my salaams when you write."

  Mr. Brooks went downstairs into the still and odorous evening. Lepperidge and Bretherton were completely alone. The Major leant forward and spoke in husky, confidential tones.

  "I say, Bretherton," he said. "Look here, there's something I've often wondered, strictly between ourselves, I mean. Did you ever think there was anything fishy about that kidnapping?"

  "Fishy, sir?"

  "Fishy."

  "I think I know what you mean, sir. Well some of us have been thinking, lately ..."

  "Exactly."

  "Not of course anything definite. Just what you said yourself, sir, fishy."

  "Exactly ... Look here, Bretherton, I think you might pass the word round that it's not a thing to be spoken about, see what I mean? The missus is putting it round to the women too ..."

  "Quite, sir. It's not a thing one wants talked about ... Arabs, I mean, and frogs."

  "Exactly."

  There was another long pause. At last Lepperidge rose to go. "I blame myself," he said. "We made a great mistake over that girl. I ought to have known better. After all, first and last when all's said and done, Brooks is a commercial wallah."

  BELLA FLEACE GAVE A PARTY

  Ballingar is four and a half hours from Dublin if you catch the early train from Broadstone Station and five and a quarter if you wait until the afternoon. It is the market town of a large and comparatively well-populated district. There is a pretty Protestant Church in 1820 Gothic on one side of the square and a vast, unfinished Catholic cathedral opposite it, conceived in that irresponsible medley of architectural orders that is so dear to the hearts of transmontane pietists. Celtic lettering of a sort is beginning to take the place of the Latin alphabet on the shop fronts that complete the square. These all deal in identical goods in varying degrees of dilapidation; Mulligan's Store, Flannigan's Store, Riley's Store, each sells thick black boots, hanging in bundles, soapy colonial cheese, hardware and haberdashery, oil and saddlery, and each is licensed to sell ale and porter for consumption on or off the premises. The shell of the barracks stands with empty window frames and blackened interior as a monument to emancipation. Someone has written The Pope is a Traitor in tar on the green pillar box. A typical Irish town.

  Fleacetown is fifteen miles from Ballingar, on a direct uneven road through typical Irish country; vague purple hills in the far distance and towards them, on one side of the road, fitfully visible among drifting patches of white mist, unbroken miles of bog, dotted with occasional stacks of cut peat. On the other side the ground slopes up to the north, divided irregularly into spare fields by banks and stone walls over which the Ballingar hounds have some of their most eventful hunting. Moss lies on everything; in a rough green rug on the walls and banks, soft green velvet on the timber—blurring the transitions so that there is no knowing where the ground ends and trunk and masonry begin. All the way from Ballingar there is a succession of whitewashed cabins and a dozen or so fair-size farmhouses; but there is no gentleman's house, for all this was Fleace property in the days before the Land Commission. The demesne land is all that belongs to Fleacetown now, and this is let for pasture to neighbouring farmers. Only a few beds are cultivated in the walled kitchen garden; the rest has run to rot, thorned bushes barren of edible fruit spreading everywhere among weedy flowers reverting rankly to type. The hothouses have been draughty skeletons for ten years. The great gates set in their Georgian arch are permanently padlocked, the lodges are derelict, and the line of the main drive is only just discernible through the meadows. Access to the house is half a mile further up through a farm gate, along a track befouled by cattle.

  But the house itself, at the date with which we are dealing, was in a condition of comparatively good repair; compared, that is to say, with Ballingar House or Castle Boycott or Knode Hall. It did not, of course, set up to rival Gordontown, where the American Lady Gordon had installed electric light, central heating and a lift, or Mock House or Newhill, which were leased to sporting Englishmen, or Castle Mockstock, since Lord Mockstock married beneath him. These four houses with their neatly raked gravel, bathrooms and dynamos, were the wonder and ridicule of the country. But Fleacetown, in fair competition with the essentially Irish houses of the Free State, was unusually habitable.

  Its roof was intact; and it is the roof which makes the difference between the second and third grade of Irish country houses. Once that goes you have moss in the bedrooms, ferns on the stairs and cows in the library, and in a very few years you have to move into the dairy or one of the lodges. But so long as he has, literally, a roof over his head, an Irishman's house is still his castle. There were weak bits in Fleacetown, but general opinion held that the leads were good for another twenty years and would certainly survive the present owner.

  Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace, to give her the full name under which she appeared in books of reference, though she was known to the entire countryside as Bella Fleace, was the last of her family. There had been Fleces and Fleysers living about Ballingar since the days of Strongbow, and farm buildings marked the spot where they had inhabited a stockaded fort two centuries before the immigration of the Boycotts or Gordons or Mockstocks. A family tree emblazed by a nineteenth-century genealogist, showing how the original stock had merged with the equally ancient Rochforts and the respectable though more recent Doyles, hung in the billiard room. The present home had been built on extravagant lines in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the family, though enervated, was still wealthy and influential. It would be tedious to trace its gradual decline from fortune; enough to say that it was due to no heroic debauchery. The Fleaces just got unobtrusively poorer in the way that families do who make no effort to help themselves. In the last generations, too, there had been marked traces of eccentricity. Bella Fleace's mother—an O'Hara of Newhill—had from the day of her marriage until her death suffered from the delusion that she was a Negress. Her brother, from whom she had inherited, devoted himself to oil painting; his mind ran on the simple subject of assassination and before his death he had executed pictures of practically every such incident in history from Julius Caesar to General Wilson. He was at work on a painting, his own murder, at the time of the troubles, when he was, in fact, ambushed and done to death with a shotgun on his own drive.

  It was under one of her brother's paintings—Abraham Lincoln in his box at the theatre—that Miss Fleace was sitting one colourless morning in November when the idea came to her to give a Christmas party. It would be unnecessary to describe her appearance closely, and somewhat confusing, because it seemed in contradiction to much of her character. She was over eighty, very untidy and very red; streaky grey hair was twisted behind her head into a horsy bun, wisps hung round her cheeks; her nose was prominent and blue veined; her eyes pale blue, blank and mad; she had a lively smile and spoke with a marked Irish intonation. She walked with the aid of a stick, having been lamed many years back when her horse rolled her among loose stones late in a long day with the Ballingar Hounds; a tipsy sporting doctor had completed the mischief, and she had not been able to ride again. She would appear on foot when hounds drew the Fleacetown coverts and loudly criticize the conduct of the huntsman, but every year fewer of her old friends turned out; strange faces appeared.