Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was nervous. Actually nervous.
She shuffled the pages of her notebook aimlessly, and seemed hardly
able to sit through the few preliminaries which had to be settled
before Roger asked her to give the solution which she had already
affirmed, privately, to Alicia Dammers, to be indubitably the correct
one of Mrs. Bendix’s murder. With such a weighty piece of knowledge in
her mind one would have thought that for once in her life Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming had a really heaven-sent opportunity to be
impressive, but for once in her life she made no use of it. If she had
not been Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, one might have gone so far as to say
that she dithered.
“Are you ready, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming?” Roger asked, gazing at this
surprising manifestation.
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming adjusted her very unbecoming hat, rubbed her
nose (being innocent of powder, it did not suffer under this habitual
treatment; just shone a little more brightly in pink embarrassment),
and shot a covert glance round the table. Roger continued to gaze in
astonishment. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was positively shrinking from the
lime-light. For some occult reason she was approaching her task with
real distaste, and a distaste at that quite out of comparison with the
task’s significance.
She cleared her throat, nervously. “I have a very difficult duty to
perform,” she began in a low voice. “Last night I hardly slept.
Anything more distasteful to a woman like myself it is impossible to
imagine.” She paused, moistening her lips.
“Oh, come, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” Roger felt himself impelled to
encourage her. “It’s the same for all of us, you know. And I’ve heard
you make a most excellent speech at one of your own first nights.”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked at him, not at all encouraged. “I was not
referring to that aspect of it, Mr. Sheringham,” she retorted, rather
more tartly. “I was speaking of the burden which has been laid on me
by the knowledge that has come into my possession, the terrible duty I
have to perform in consequence of it.”
“You mean you’ve solved the little problem?” enquired Mr. Bradley,
without reverence.
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming regarded him sombrely. “With infinite regret,”
she said, in low, womanly tones, “I have.” Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was
recovering her poise.
She consulted her notes for a moment, and then began to speak in a
firmer voice. “Criminology I have always regarded with something of a
professional eye. Its main interest has always been for me its immense
potentialities for drama. The inevitability of murder; the predestined
victim, struggling unconsciously and vainly against fate; the
predestined killer, moving first unconsciously too and then with full
and relentless realisation, towards the accomplishment of his doom;
the hidden causes, unknown perhaps to both victim and killer, which
are all the time urging on the fulfilment of destiny.
“Apart from the action and the horror of the deed itself, I have
always felt that there are more possibilities of real drama in the
most ordinary or sordid of murders than in any other situation that
can occur to man. Ibsenish in the inevitable working out of certain
circumstances in juxtaposition that we call fate, no less than
Edgar-Wallacish in the _καθαρσις_ undergone by the emotions of the
onlooker at their climax.
“It was perhaps natural then that I should regard not only this
particular case from something of the standpoint of my calling (and
certainly no more dramatic twist could well be invented), but the task
of solving it too. Anyhow, natural or not, this is what I did; and the
result has terribly justified me. I considered the case in the light
of one of the oldest dramatic situations, and very soon everything
became only too clear. I am referring to the situation which the
gentlemen who pass among us in these days for dramatic critics,
invariably call the Eternal Triangle.
“I had to begin of course with only one of the triangle’s three
members, Sir Eustace Pennefather. Of the two unknown one must be a
woman, the other might be woman or man. So I fell back on another very
old and very sound maxim, and proceeded to _chercher la femme_. And,”
said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, very solemnly, “I found her.”
So far, it must be admitted, her audience was not particularly
impressed. Even the promising opening had not stirred them, for it was
only to be expected that Mrs. Fielder-Flemming would feel it her duty
to emphasise her feminine shrinkings from handing a criminal over to
justice. Her somewhat laborious sentences too, obviously learned off
by heart for the occasion, detracted if anything from the interest of
what she had to convey.
But when she resumed, having waited in vain for a tributary gasp at
her last momentous piece of information, the somewhat calculated
tenseness of her style had given way to an unrehearsed earnestness
which was very much more impressive.
“I wasn’t expecting the triangle to be the hackneyed one,” she said,
with a slight dig at the deflated remains of Sir Charles. “Lady
Pennefather I hardly considered for a moment. The subtlety of the
crime, I felt sure, must be a reflection of an unusual situation. And
after all a triangle need not necessarily include a husband and wife
among its members; any three people, if the circumstances arrange them
so, can form one. It is the circumstances, not the three protagonists,
that make the triangle.
“Sir Charles has told us that this crime reminded him of the Marie
Lafarge case, and in some respects (he might have added) the Mary
Ansell case too. It reminded me of a case as well, but it was neither
of these. The Molineux case in New York, it seems to me, provides a
much closer parallel than either.
“You all remember the details of course. Mr. Cornish, a director of
the important Knickerbocker Athletic Club, received in his Christmas
mail a small silver cup and a phial of bromo-seltzer, addressed to him
at the club. He thought they had been sent by way of a joke, and kept
the wrapper in order to identify the humorist. A few days later a
woman who lived in the same boarding-house as Cornish complained of a
headache and Cornish gave her some of the bromo-seltzer. In a very
short time she was dead, and Cornish, who had taken just a sip because
she complained of it being bitter, was violently ill but recovered
later.
“In the end a man named Molineux, another member of the same club, was
arrested and put on trial. There was quite a lot of evidence against
him, and it was known that he hated Cornish bitterly, so much so that
he had already assaulted him once. Moreover another member of the
club, a man named Barnet, had been killed earlier in the year through
taking what purported to be a sample of a well-known headache powder
which had also been sent to him at the club and, shortly before the
Cornish episode, Molineux married a girl who had actually been engaged
to Barnet at the time of his death; he had always wanted her, but she
had preferred Barnet. Molineux, as you remember, was convicted at his
first trial and acquitted at his second; he afterwards became insane.
“Now this parallel seems to me complete. Our case is to all purposes a
composite Cornish-cum-Barnet case. The resemblances are extraordinary.
There is the poisoned article addressed to the man’s club; there is,
in the case of Cornish, the death of the wrong victim; there is the
preservation of the wrapper; there is, in Barnet’s case, the triangle
element (and a triangle, you will notice, without husband and wife).
It’s quite startling. It is, in fact, more than startling; it’s
significant. Things don’t happen like that quite by chance.”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming paused and blew her nose, delicately but with
emotion. She was getting nicely worked up now, and so, in consequence,
was her audience. If there were no gasps there was at any rate the
tribute of complete silence till she was ready to go on.
“I said that this similarity was more than startling, that it was
significant. I will explain its particular significance later; at
present it is enough to say that I found it very helpful also. The
realisation of the extreme closeness of the parallel came as quite a
shock to me, but once I had grasped it I felt strangely convinced that
it was in this very similarity that the clue to the solution of Mrs.
Bendix’s murder was to be found. I felt this so strongly that I
somehow actually _knew_ it. These intuitions do come to me sometimes
(explain them as you will) and I have never yet known them fail me.
This one did not do so either.
“I began to examine this case in the light of the Molineux one. Would
the latter help me to find the woman I was looking for in the former?
What were the indications, so far as Barnet was concerned? Barnet
received his fatal package because he was purposing to marry a girl
whom the murderer was resolved he should not marry. With so many
parallels between the two cases already, was there—” Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming pushed back her unwieldy hat to a still more
unbecoming angle and looked deliberately round the table with the air
of an early Christian trying the power of the human eye on a
doubtfully intimidated covey of lions—“_was there another here?_”
This time Mrs. Fielder-Flemming was rewarded with several real and
audible gasps. That of Sir Charles was quite the most audible, an
outraged, indignant gasp that came perilously near to a snort. Mr.
Chitterwick gasped apprehensively, as if fearing something like a
physical sequel to the sharp exchange of glances between Sir Charles
and Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, those of the former positively menacing in
their warning, those of the lady almost vocal with her defiance of it.
The Chairman gasped too, wondering what a Chairman should do if two
members of his circle, and of opposite sexes at that, should proceed
to blows under his very nose.
Mr. Bradley forgot himself so far as to gasp as well, in sheer,
blissful ecstasy. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming looked as if she were to prove
a better hand at bull-baiting than himself, but Mr. Bradley did not
grudge her the honour so long as he was to be allowed to sit and hug
himself in the audience. Not in his most daring toreador-like antics
would Mr. Bradley have ever dared to postulate the very daughter of
his victim as the cause of the murder itself. Could this magnificent
woman really bring forward a case to support so puncturing an idea?
And what if it should actually turn out to be true? After all, such a
thing was conceivable enough. Murders have been committed for the sake
of lovely ladies often enough before; so why not for the lovely
daughter of a pompous old silk? Oh God, oh Montreal.
Finally Mrs. Fielder-Flemming gasped too, at herself.
Alone without a gasp sat Alicia Dammers, her face alight with nothing
but an intellectual interest in the development of her fellow-member’s
argument, determinedly impersonal. One was to gather that to Miss
Dammers it was immaterial whether her own mother had been mixed up in
the murder, so long as her part in it had provided opportunities for
the sharpening of wits and the stimulation of intelligence. Without
ever acknowledging her recognition that a personal element was being
introduced into the Circle’s investigations, she yet managed to
radiate the idea that Sir Charles ought, if anything, to be detachedly
delighted at the possibility of such enterprise on the part of his
daughter.
Sir Charles however was far from delighted. From the red swelling of
the veins on his forehead it was obvious that something was going to
burst out of him in a very few seconds. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming leapt,
like an agitated but determined hen, for the gap.
“We have agreed to waive the law of slander here,” she almost
squawked. “Personalities don’t exist for us. If the name crops up of
any one personally known to us, we utter it as unflinchingly, in
whatever connection, as if it were a complete stranger’s. That is the
definite arrangement we came to last night, Mr. President, isn’t it?
We are to do what we conceive to be our duty to society quite
irrespective of any personal considerations?”
For a moment Roger indulged his tremors. He did not want his beautiful
Circle to explode in a cloud of dust, never again to be re-united. And
though he could not but admire the flurried but undaunted courage of
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he had to be content to envy it so far as Sir
Charles was concerned, for he certainly did not possess anything like
it himself. On the other hand there was no doubt that the lady had
right on her side, and what can any President do but administer
justice?
“Perfectly correct, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” he had to admit, hoping
his voice sounded as firm as he would have wished.
For a moment a blue glare, emanating from Sir Charles, enveloped him
luridly. Then, as Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, evidently heartened by this
official support, took up her bomb again, the rays of the glare were
switched again on to her. Roger, nervously watching the two of them,
could not help reflecting that blue rays are things which should never
be directed on to bombs.
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming juggled featly with her bomb. Often though it
seemed about to slip through her fingers, it never quite reached the
ground or detonated. “Very well, then. I will go on. My triangle now
had the second of its members. On the analogy of the Barnet murder,
where was the third to be found? Obviously, with Molineux as the
prototype, in some person who was anxious to prevent the first member
from marrying the second.
“So far, you will see, I am not out of harmony with the conclusions
Sir Charles gave us last night, though my method of arriving at them
was perhaps somewhat different. He gave us a triangle also, without
expressly defining it as such (perhaps even without recognising it as
such). And the first two members of his triangle are precisely the
same as the first two of mine.”
Here Mrs. Fielder-Flemming made a notable effort to return something
of Sir Charles’s glare, in defiant challenge to contradiction. As she
had simply stated a plain fact however, which Sir Charles was quite
unable to refute without explaining that he had not meant what he had
meant the evening before, the challenge passed unanswered. Also the
glare visibly diminished. But for all that (patently remarked Sir
Charles’s expression) a triangle by any other name does _not_ smell so
unsavoury.
“It is when we come to the third member,” pursued Mrs.
Fielder-Flemming, with renewed poise, “that we are at variance. Sir
Charles suggested to us Lady Pennefather. I have not the pleasure of
Lady Pennefather’s acquaintance, but Miss Dammers who knows her well,
tells me that in almost every particular the estimate given us by Sir
Charles of her character was wrong. She is neither mean, grasping,
greedy, nor in any imaginable way capable of the awful deed with which
Sir Charles, perhaps a little rashly, was ready to credit her. Lady
Pennefather, I understand, is a particularly sweet and kindly woman;
somewhat broad-minded no doubt, but none the worse for that; indeed as
some of us would think, a good deal the better.”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming encouraged the belief that she was not merely
tolerant of a little harmless immorality, but actually ready to act as
godmother to any particular instance of it. Indeed she went sometimes
quite a long détour out of her way in order to propagate this belief
among her friends. But unfortunately her friends would persist in
remembering that she had refused to have anything more to do with one
of her own nieces since the latter, on learning that her middle-aged
husband kept, for purposes of convenience, a different mistress in
each of the four quarters of England, and just to be on the safe side
one in Scotland too, had run away with a young man of her own with
whom she happened to be very devotedly in love.
“Just as I differ from Sir Charles over the identity of the third
person in the triangle,” went on Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, happily
ignorant of her friends’ memories, “so I differ from him in the means
by which that identity is to be established. We are at complete
variance in our ideas regarding the very heart of the problem, the
motive. Sir Charles would have us think that this was a murder
committed (or attempted, rather) for gain; I am convinced that the
incentive was, at any rate, a less ignoble one than that. Murder, we
are taught, can never be really justifiable; but there are occasions
when it comes dangerously near it. This, in my opinion, was one of
them.
“It is in the character of Sir Eustace himself that I see the clue to
the identity of the third person. Let us consider it for a moment. We
are not restricted by any considerations of slander, and we can say at
once that, from certain points of view, Sir Eustace is a quite
undesirable member of the community. From the point of view of a young
man, for the sake of example, who is in love with a girl, Sir Eustace
must be one of the very last persons with whom the young man would
wish that girl to come into contact. He is not merely immoral, he is
without excuse for his immorality, a far more serious thing. He is a
rake, a spendthrift, without honour or scruples where women are
concerned, and a man moreover who has already made a mess of marriage
with a very charming woman and one by no means too narrow to overlook
even a more than liberal allowance of the usual male peccadilloes and
lapses. As a prospective husband for any young girl Sir Eustace
Pennefather is a tragedy.
“And as a prospective husband for a young girl whom a man loves with
all his heart,” intoned Mrs. Fielder-Flemming very solemnly, “it is
easy to conceive that, in that particular man’s regard, Sir Eustace
Pennefather becomes nothing short of an impossibility.
“And a man who _is_ a man,” added Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, quite mauve
with intensity, “does not admit impossibilities.”
She paused, pregnantly.
“Curtain, Act I,” confided Mr. Bradley behind his hand to Mr. Ambrose
Chitterwick.
Mr. Chitterwick smiled nervously.