Murder Abroad (17 page)

Was it possible, Bobby asked himself, that the curé, brooding in his solitude on what he believed had been promised, and then abruptly disappointed, had been pushed beyond the bounds of sanity? Not but that he seemed perfectly sane and normal now, even though he was certainly a little excitable and not altogether unaffected by his lonely existence.

Very strongly did Bobby realize how much his difficulties were increased by his comparative ignorance of the environment and psychology of these people. At home, in England, in London especially, he would have been able to place them all much more easily and to form on them a judgment much more likely to be accurate.

He ate that evening an excellent dinner that might have been boiled cabbage and tapioca pudding for all he knew to the contrary. But he did notice that young Camion was not there to supervise the service and that in consequence things did not go as smoothly as usual.

Later on, Bobby went for a short stroll that ended, as he was making it his habit, in the café he had visited before.

It was as busy as usual, and when Bobby had found a table at which to seat himself he was both pleased and surprised when Eudes came to join him. By a lucky chance the child of whom Bobby had made a sketch, and then presented it to her, was one of the schoolmaster's favourite pupils, and one who, in his opinion, showed promise of genuine artistic ability. Probably this nascent talent of hers explained the interest she had shown in Bobby's work that had first attracted his attention to her.

Eudes seemed in an expansive, genial mood, in no way diminished by the fact that Bobby's hospitality took the form of asking him to share in a bottle of the most generous and expensive wine the patron could produce. Would Bobby, asked Eudes, an artist of such high merit, one of whom Monsieur Shields had spoken with respect, and Monsieur Shields was a man who was known, who had arrived, would Bobby look at some of the child's drawings and give an opinion on them? It seemed Eudes wished her talent to be seriously cultivated. Her family disapproved, considering that any girl who knew how to cook knew all that was either necessary or desirable. Bobby expressed his willingness to do as desired, but suggested that seeking the opinion of the director of the nearest school of art and design would be more valuable. He himself, he pointed out, was neither critic nor teacher. It appeared, however, that the director in question was, in Monsieur Eudes's considered opinion, a reactionary of the blackest hue. A strongly-supported rumour declared that he had been known to attend mass. The attention of the local deputy had been drawn to this dread suspicion, but he, a Laodicean, had done nothing, and there was reason to believe that the Sous-préfet, a man far worse than merely Laodicean, had even suppressed in the waste-paper basket certain reports on the subject that had been forwarded to him.

“An intrigue, monsieur,” said Eudes darkly, permitting himself, however, the consolation of allowing his glass to be refilled. “It is the curse of France, these currents below the surface by which the people are influenced without their knowledge.”

“But surely on a question of a child's ability, no one would bother about politics?” suggested Bobby.

“When one is stone deaf,” declared Eudes, whose glass was empty again and who displayed no reluctance to its being filled once more, “one's judgment of all music is affected—whether of a Beethoven symphony or of jazz on a tin whistle.”

Bobby did not quite see the analogy, though he thought it would probably be interesting to hear jazz played on a tin whistle. However, he did his best to look impressed and Eudes went on:

“It is the gold of the Church, the enormous wealth she and her agents dispose of that gives them their power, that enables them to live in such unheard-of luxury.”

“I had a chat with your curé to-day,” Bobby remarked. “I can't say he seemed to me to be living in any kind of luxury.”

“It is their cunning,” said Eudes earnestly, “they put on an appearance of poverty in order to deceive.”

“Oh, I see,” said Bobby.

Perhaps his tone showed a certain incredulity, for Eudes continued:

“Oh, I do not deny that some of these black crows are forced to exist in a squalor that shows plainly what fate the rest of us would suffer if the Church secured the absolute dominion it aims at. Also there is a reward in view. If our curé ever succeeded in carrying out his cunning schemes to rebuild here his church in magnificence, so that that absurd block of wood he cherishes so much could become a fresh centre of degradation and superstition—”

He paused, apparently unable to find words with which to express the fear and horror he felt at this prospect.

“You mean the black Virgin?” Bobby asked.

Eudes nodded, gloomily emptied his glass, put it down again firmly.

“That shall never be,” he said, but there was uneasiness in his voice. “Never.”

“You think,” Bobby asked, “that if a new church were built, enshrining the black Virgin, it would have a great influence here?”

“It would give such fresh strength to old superstitions,” said Eudes with slow gravity, “as would undo all our work of enlightenment. A little time ago I admit I had a fear, a great fear. There threatened a danger, more formidable than I can tell. For there is nothing that these misguided, miserable tools of superstition and reaction will hesitate at, no crime at which they will draw back if it will give them and their masters the means to plunge honest folk further into morasses of ignorance and slavery and so destroy all hope of peace and progress and the liberation of the human mind.”

His eyes were blazing now with much those same fires of fanaticism which only a little time before Bobby had seen shining in the eyes of the curé. Bobby watched uneasily. With two such fanatics, it seemed many things might have been possible. Eudes lowered his voice and spoke confidentially.

“Happily that danger passed,” he said. “The money our curé hoped to get into his claws with which to enslave the population, it eluded him. Ah, what a triumph, how truly superb, for the cause of truth, of reason, of justice, if—”

“Yes?” said Bobby as Eudes paused and once more he filled the schoolmaster's glass.

“If that very money,” Eudes continued, “escaped the claws of the church and came to be used for the establishment of a journal of true enlightenment, to achieve the final victory of truth and reason?”

“How could that be?” Bobby asked, as indifferently and as carelessly as he could.

But his hope that, as sometimes happens, a simple question asked naturally and with apparent indifference, might lead to fresh confidences, was disappointed. Eudes changed abruptly. He waved aside the bottle Bobby pushed towards him. He seemed to feel he had said too much, more than he would have dreamed of saying to any one in the village, more than it would have been prudent to say to any compatriot, more indeed than it was wise to have said even to a foreigner little concerned with the conflict of ideas in another country. It even occurred to him that perhaps this rich and generous wine might have been loosening his tongue a trifle too much. All that showed plainly enough in his expression and Bobby tried again—shock tactics this time.

“Was Mademoiselle Polthwaite murdered for her money, do you think?” he asked.

Eudes leaned across the table and spoke in an undertone—a slightly thick undertone.

“Monsieur,” he murmured, “of that I know nothing, I suspect nothing, yet I have my own thoughts I breathe to no one for it would be disloyal to say things of which there is no proof. Yet this I do say, that there are fanatics of the Church who would hesitate at nothing, who would persuade themselves that in its service all is permissible. All,” he repeated. “But of that we will say no more. Nothing. One's lips are sealed. It is understood? Now we talk of other things.”

“Let me fill your glass,” Bobby said. “It is empty.”

“I thank you. No,” Eudes answered firmly. “You understand that I must set an example to the village? It is for that reason I push temperance to the verge of abstinence.” 

“Admirable,” murmured Bobby, surveying a bottle more than half empty, his share having been just one glass.

But now he set an example he hoped might be followed by filling his own glass again. Eudes remained firm. He repeated:

“We talk of other things, hein?”

Occasion was provided almost immediately when from a table near by came some loud argumentative reference to the disappearance of the still missing Volny.

“You hear?” Eudes asked. “How they talk! He has his admirers here, that lad, and there are those who think he has taken a ticket to America and that soon we shall hear of him as a new Carpentier, fighting for the world championship of the box. Ah, bah, he is not so good as all that, our little Volny, he is not even so fond of fighting as all that, not at least against those as big and strong as himself, or even bigger and stronger. Nor would he very willingly leave Citry-sur-l'eau at this moment—would you, monsieur, would any young man in love with a girl, depart and leave her to the attentions of his rival? But perhaps you do not understand that, for you are English, and you others, English, you do not understand love very well.”

“Don't we?” said Bobby meekly. “But what's become of Volny then?”

“I could make a guess,” Eudes told him gravely. “Up there, up on the hill-side, with that other old black crow who sits there, watching and waiting and hatching mischief. I saw him ride off that way on his bicycle.”

“You mean he is staying with the Abbé Taylour?”

“You have visited the Abbé Taylour? Yes, up there, for it is there he went once before, when he quarrelled with his father and wished by his absence to reduce his mother to despair and by that his father to submission, as indeed soon happened. Few know where he was then, but it happens that Monsieur Shields, your countryman and my friend, met him there that night.”

“Shields?” repeated Bobby very surprised for he could not think for what reason Shields could have been wandering about late at night near the Abbé Taylour's hut when he himself lived on the other side of the Bornay Massif. “What was Shields doing there?” he asked.

“It was on one of his visits to Mademoiselle Polthwaite,” Eudes explained. “He used to come sometimes; he would stay a night or two at the hotel, visit Miss Polthwaite, talk about her work, take little excursions to make sketches and his paintings. On one of them he stayed too long and had to take refuge with the Abbé Taylour.”

“Must have been crowded in that little hut with three of them,” observed Bobby. “I suppose if it was summer, one of them could sleep outside.”

“It was in the winter, before Christmas,” Eudes said, “early, before the snow came. It was late that year. No doubt they kept each other warm.”

Eudes laughed very much at this idea and then appeared suddenly to realize that he had taken rather more than usual of a rather stronger wine than he was accustomed to. He announced firmly that much as he regretted leaving so dear, so good, so amiable a friend as Bobby, it was time for him to return home.

He went off accordingly, walking very steadily but somehow giving the impression that he was being careful to walk steadily, and Bobby, whose own head was buzzing from the effects of a wine richer than he also was accustomed to, was not sorry to seek his own bed.

The next day was a Sunday, and Bobby thought it would be a good opportunity to visit Shields as that gentleman had invited him to do. That the missing Volny was not, as Eudes had suggested, with the Abbé Taylour in his isolated hut up in the hills, Bobby felt fairly certain. Volny had gone off on his bicycle, and one does not as a rule attempt to go hill-climbing on a bicycle. Eudes's story, though, of a previous meeting with Shields, had struck Bobby as possibly significant. Very probably the meeting of these three men, Volny, Taylour, Shields, in that lonely hut had been entirely accidental, but just possibly it had not. And if Volny, disappearing on his bicycle and without apparently much money in his pocket, since his father was said to keep him on a short allowance and he had none of his own, had taken refuge with Shields, as was at any rate a possibility, then there would be a proof of continued connection that would bear further investigation.

Bobby departed therefore by the first train available next day. At Clermont he had to wait for a train to Barsac and he remembered Shields had told him the connections were always bad. He filled in the time by taking a stroll round the town, admired the Puy de Dome from a new point of view, decided that if ever he had the time to spare he would make the ascent, admired, too, the famous statue of Vercingetorex and the less famous one of Pascal— naturally philosophers have smaller, less noble statues than have warriors—found the church where Peter the Hermit preached the first Crusade, and caught his train to land him in Barsac before eleven.

He knew roughly from the directions Shields had given him where the house lay. So first he treated himself to a light meal at a café, then smoked a reflective cigarette or two and finally reached his destination at what he hoped was the tactful hour of half-past one when he thought lunch would probably be over and yet the business or the repose of the afternoon not yet begun.

The house was situated a little distance outside the small town and did not look in very good repair. The fairly large garden surrounding it had a somewhat neglected air, too, as though Mr. Shields, though more fortunate than most artists in these days, since he seemed to possess a faithful clientele in the United States, was yet by no means inclined to spend money on his place of habitation. Nor did Bobby much like the position of the house. It lay in a hollow, it looked damp, it was cut off on the south by close-growing trees, on the north it was exposed to wind sweeping down from the high ground behind, the Bornay Massif on the other side of which lay Citry-sur-l'eau.