Arrow Pointing Nowhere, page 4
Gamadge entered a fine big library, panelled and celled in oak, with two windows looking out on the lawn, and a bay window overlooking the side garden. A slender man came forward; clean-shaven, gray-haired, with a long, well-shaped head and kind blue eyes. The aquiline features that made his daughter a plain woman made Blake Fenway a handsome man; he was excellently dressed in the darkest town clothes.
“This is a very great pleasure, Mr. Gamadge.” He shook hands with Gamadge, who replied that he was aware he owed it to Miss Vauregard.
“Not at all, I am delighted to have the opportunity of meeting you. Your books—really extraordinary. Literary detection. Absorbing.”
“Great fun to do.” Gamadge glanced about him; at the high bookshelves with their cupboards and their glass doors, surmounted by busts of classical lawgivers and writers; at solid furniture, red-velvet curtains and upholstery, impressive bric-a-brac, a thick old Turkey rug. There was a portrait above the mantel, with Blake Fenway’s features but a thinner and less agreeable mouth.
There was a coffee table in front of the fire. The butler came in from a door in the north wall, carrying a tray and an after-dinner coffee service. He set it down.
“Thank you, Phillips, and you needn’t wait,” said Fenway. “Mr. Gamadge, will you have that chair?”
Gamadge sat down in the chair opposite Fenway’s, and accepted a cigar. Phillips went away; Fenway poured coffee. When Gamadge had his cup, Fenway glanced—not for the first time—at the book which Gamadge had laid on the little table beside him.
“Have you brought something to show me?” he asked. “I hope so.”
“It’s just something I borrowed—to read.”
“I’m afraid I don’t keep up with the current authors as I should. My daughter warns me that that’s a sign of advancing years, and that I ought to fight the tendency.” He smiled. “She says fiction gives one the contemporary background. Well, Caroline is always right; but when I read fiction, I want fiction, you know; I don’t want a document!”
“There’s a lot to be said for your point of view. But even your favorites—” Gamadge’s eye wandered along the shelves nearest him—“even they don’t quite keep their social bias out of their novels.”
“Perhaps,” laughed Fenway, “mine is the same as theirs!”
“Let’s see them.”
They walked from section to section of the cases, stopping to glance at the books Mr. Fenway pulled out, discussing certain finds and special treasures. At last, when they had reached the end of the east wall, Gamadge said: “There’s your Elsie Venner, I see. All correct, I suppose, misprint and all.”
Mr. Fenway looked mortified. “I’m ashamed to say it isn’t. I had no idea ours wasn’t the real, right thing until Hall enlightened me. It really makes me very restless not to have the right one; with everything else right, you know. But I don’t feel justified in indulging a hobby these days, with such a crying want of money for the war needs.”
Gamadge said: “I have the real right one.”
“You have!” Mr. Fenway gazed at him with baffled longing.
“And I don’t in the least want it. Look here, Mr. Fenway; why shouldn’t we do a trade?”
“A trade? What can I possibly have that you do want?”
“Well, you have a duplicate William Henry Letters. Mine was read to pulp when I was a boy. If you cared to part with one of them, and with your Elsie Venner —”
“You don’t mean it? The deal wouldn’t be at all a fair one.”
“I can consult J. Hall. There won’t be much cash difference.”
“My dear Mr. Gamadge, you really have no idea what a favor you’re doing me.”
“None at all, but I know how you feel. I used to buy firsts myself.”
“I’ll have the books sent down to your house today, and the man can pick up your Holmes.”
“Not at all; I’ll take them with me in a cab, and bring your book along tonight or tomorrow.”
“What fun it all is—these discoveries and coincidences! And what a piece of luck for me! I must tell Caroline about it, and my sister-in-law and her friend Mrs. Grove will be much interested too. They’re looking forward to meeting you in any case. When we’ve finished here we’ll go up.”
Gamadge was a little amused and much gratified to find that he had passed his examinations; but there was a final one to come. It came while Fenway closed the glass door of the last bookshelf:
“I believe you do your duty as a citizen in a way that few of us are qualified to do it,” he said. “Our firm has never practised in the criminal branch of the law, but we have always had the highest respect for those who face the more disagreeable aspects of it—and for criminologists in general.”
Gamadge, laughing, said that he never hoped to hear a handsomer tribute to detective investigation. He added: “I’m afraid the puzzle element in it is the element that attracts me. I can’t profess to be actuated by loftier motives when I take a case.”
Mr. Fenway seemed delighted. “A hobby; I thought so!”
“But not,” said Gamadge, “exactly a sport.”
“No, no; it could never be that. You don’t—” Mr. Fenway hesitated, and then went on in an apologetic tone—“you don’t do this work professionally?”
Gamadge laughed again. “I’ve been retained, sometimes, but now I come to think of it I’ve never been paid yet!”
Mr. Fenway was more pleased than ever, but he grew grave. “I always like to find that we are not entirely commercial now, but you put me in something of a quandary. I have a little problem of my own which I should be very glad to consult you about, but if I consulted another lawyer, or a doctor, I should expect to reimburse him for giving me the benefit of his experience.”
“I have no professional standing, Mr. Fenway; and as I said, I like little problems.” Gamadge hoped that he did not sound eager. “Let me hear what yours is. But if it’s about books, you know, I’m no expert; J. Hall’s your man.”
Fenway said: “Hall has no opinion on the matter, and I don’t suppose even you will have one. However.” He turned to a long table in the embrasure of the west window. It was heaped with what looked like an odd lot of books, some not entirely out of their wrappings; two slender dark-green quartos lay among them.
He lifted first one and then the other. “Now what,” he murmured, “can Caroline have done with Volume III?”
“Can I help, sir?”
“No, no. This is the last lot that little Hilda Grove sent down from Fenbrook. Such a good child. Now where on earth… Wait! I remember.”
He crossed the room to a buhl table at the right of the hall door; its surface was almost hidden by a large, flat-topped coffer of metal thickly inlaid with ivory; Fenway raised the lid.
“Here it is,” he said, and withdrew another of the dark-green books, which Gamadge now saw to be bound in velvet.
“If you’ll just sit down again, Mr. Gamadge, and look at this?”
Gamadge resumed his seat beside the fire, and took the quarto on his knees. It was lettered in gold: Views On The Hudson.
Fenway sat down opposite him; he watched him open it, glance at the charmingly colored frontispiece, and then look at the title page.
Views On The Hudson, he read, With Descriptions by Several Hands. In Four Volumes. Coloured Plates by Pidgeon. 1835. He turned leaves. “What a nice set.”
Fenway looked sad, “It was a nice set, Mr. Gamadge. If you’ll turn to page 50…”
On page 50 Gamadge read: “Description of Fenbrook; the old Fenway residence near Peekskill. By Julian Fenway, Esq.” He lifted his eyes to his host. “Was that your grandfather, sir?”
“That was my grandfather.”
“But there seems to be no picture of Fenbrook here.”
“No; as you see, it has been torn out.”
Gamadge discerned a trace of ragged edge where the plate had been, and another trace of its protective tissue. He said: “This is shocking!”
“You can imagine how I felt, when I looked for the picture and found that it was gone. But perhaps you can’t, unless you happen to know that the original house was torn down in 1849, and that that view was all we had left of old Fenbrook. The set is irreplaceable; some of the landowners combined and had the books made and the views taken; there is none, Hall thinks, on the market. Fenbrook was a plain little house, and my grandfather doesn’t seem to have cared much about it; he let a friend have it and the rest of that property; my father never saw it.”
Gamadge expressed his sympathy by a groan.
“The poor old gentleman,” continued Fenway, “my grandfather, of course I mean, didn’t do badly in the financial sense by the deal; he bought property here and in Westchester county, and in the 60’s he built himself this house and the new Fenbrook; they were, I can assure you, the latest thing. You should have seen the delightful house downtown that my father was born in! That went, too. So now we have this, which even to me, with all my sentiment for it, isn’t a model of architectural beauty; and one of the same period up the Hudson, completely suburban of course, and (I can assure you) well bracketed!”
“I’m sure it has immense dignity and charm.”
“Nobody but a Fenway would live in it. At least I have one thing to be thankful for—my poor brother Cort never knew that the picture of old Fenbrook would be lost. He was very fond of these books. I can see him now, sitting in the library up there with Volume III on his knees. We had a project even then, and I looked forward to carrying it out—until now. There’s not much point in it now. I wanted to write a little history of our family here—we’re extinct in England—for the Historical Society. Of course the view of Fenbrook and Grandfather’s description of it would have been the most important—the only important part of the thing. That’s why I had the books sent down; I’ve retired from law practise, and I thought it would be a delightful way of spending my leisure.”
“It’s tough, Mr. Fenway.”
“Well, now, Mr. Gamadge,” and Fenway, sitting back in his chair, looked at his guest with a smile, “you’re to tell me what can have become of the view of Fenbrook.”
“Am I?” Gamadge returned the smile.
“That’s my little problem. Mind you, I don’t hope to get it back, because it may have vanished at any time in the last twenty years; I haven’t looked for it since my brother died. But I should like a mind trained in these mysteries to tell me why on earth it and only it should have been torn out of the book, and what can have been done with it.”
Gamadge became grave. “I shouldn’t in the least mind discussing the possibilities, but it wouldn’t be an intelligent discussion unless we included all of them.”
“Of course, all of them.” Fenway looked surprised. “Why not?”
“My type of mind is a very aggravating one, you know; it pursues a question long after more comfortable minds are ready and willing to drop it. I may bore you.”
“Bore me? I venture to say that you are incapable of doing that, Mr. Gamadge.”
“Well, to make a beginning.” Gamadge looked down at the open book on his knees. “You saw the picture twenty years ago?”
“A little less than that. My brother was up at Fenbrook shortly before he died—very suddenly, of pneumonia—in the summer of 1923.”
“Where were the books kept?”
“In cases very much like these, in the Fenbrook library.”
“Not locked up?”
“No, we had nothing we thought valuable there; I mean to thieves.”
“When did they reach you here in New York?”
“They arrived on Thursday afternoon, the twenty-first. I opened the parcel there on that table, but I had no time to look at them until Friday evening, after dinner.”
“This young lady—Miss Grove—sent them down?”
“By express, with some others, on Tuesday. We don’t of course use the station wagon now for such work. It only goes out for necessary shopping. Hilda, of course, was distressed when I called her up about the view; I had a first faint hope that it might have loosened, and that it would be found somewhere in the library. But it was torn out, that’s obvious.”
“Miss Grove has looked for it?”
“She’s looked everywhere. We don’t go up there ourselves except in warm weather; we’re conserving coal. The Dobsons—a very nice couple who have been with us a long time—keep part of the house warm for themselves and Hilda. It must be lonely for her.” Fenway’s expression was doubtful. “But she insists not; she won’t complain. She’s a niece—or niece by marriage, rather—of my sister-in-law’s friend and companion, Mrs. Grove; did I mention her before? My sister-in-law was badly injured on her trip here from France in 1940—a most terrible experience it all was. She is still unable to walk, but otherwise she’s greatly improved. Mrs. Grove takes care of her; an admirable arrangement.”
“I should think it would be, if Mrs. Grove is an old friend.”
“Actually a school friend.”
Gamadge was again studying the place where the view of Fenbrook had been. He said: “The plate and the tissue guard were both removed; but of course if the plate were torn out the tissue guard would go with it. We may forget the disappearance of the guard. Our question is, why was the plate torn out? Well, there are certain more or less familiar reasons for removing illustrations from books; we might consider them first. There is the nefarious process known as grangerizing, more politely known as enlarging.”
“I don’t think I ever heard of it.”
“Since late in the eighteenth century it’s been a hobby with certain persons who have plenty of leisure, like to handle books, and enjoy light manual labor. They feel they’re creating something, and of course a grangerized set is unique; at the expense of many other books, out of which the illustrations have been ripped incontinent.”
“But who could possibly want a view of old Fenbrook for any such purpose as that?”
“I can’t imagine, unless somebody else was inspired to write up the Fenway family.”
“I have my share of family conceit, I suppose,” said Fenway, smiling, “but even I don’t think there’s any such person. There are no Fenways left but myself, my daughter, and my cousin Mott. And my nephew. They are all out of the question.”
“And we may assume that the Historical Society isn’t collecting for its archives—er—informally. Well, to proceed: people have been known to take pictures out of books in order to frame them and hang them on the wall, or to paste them on lamp shades and wastebaskets. I see on the lamp shade beside you, for instance, a rather charming woodcut portrait of—” Gamadge leaned forward—“of Theophrastus. If it wasn’t once in a book, I’ll eat it and the lamp shade too.”
Fenway started, looked guilty, and glanced sidelong at the portrait of Theophrastus. He said: “Caroline got the lamp shade for me at a decorator’s. I assure you that nothing of the sort has been done with the view of Fenbrook.”
“Can you be sure? I’m sorry to say that I once found, among my grandmother’s effects, a topographical view of old Albany behind a photograph—with whiskers—of my grandfather.”
“It’s inconceivable that anyone connected with this family should have done anything of the kind.”
“Unlikely, I agree with you; and easy to disprove by a glance at the backs of the Fenbrook pictures. The superposing process wouldn’t be a professional job. Grandfather Gamadge was clamped into place with two carpet tacks and a piece of mending tape. Well, now I’m going to shock you again. Children are known to tear or deface the pages of books; spill things on them. I say children, because older persons would confess the damage; but a young child might tear that page out; thereby not only protecting itself, but (according to child logic) making the damage non existent.”
Fenway did look shocked; he also looked uneasy. “The books were behind glass; no strange children had access to them, certainly no visiting small fry. And of course Caroline was incapable of treating a book in that way; like all of us, she took good care of her books. And if by some accident she had spoiled the picture, I can only assure you that she would have told me about it. She was not brought up,” and he raised his eyes to the portrait above the mantel, “quite as strictly as my generation was, you know; she had no fear of me. At the time—when I last saw the view, you know—she must have been eleven years old. Far too old… Oh, impossible.”
“Your nephew?”
“Alden wasn’t here; he was with his mother in Europe.”
“Who dusted the books in those days, and who does it now?”
“Responsible persons then as now, who wouldn’t dislodge a picture by accident, much less deface it and tear it out. I think the books are only dusted at long intervals; they’re in presumably dustproof cases.”
“Who’s been on the premises there in these nineteen years since you last saw the view, Mr. Fenway?”
“Old servants, myself, my daughter, my cousin Mott, and a great many innocent bystanders in the way of guests. Since 1940, in the summer and autumn, my sister-in-law, her son, Mrs. Grove, and Hilda. Oh—a young Mr. Craddock.”
“Relative?”
“Err—no. My nephew is not strong. Craddock more or less looks after him. Clever, intelligent fellow, newspaper fellow once. He’s a convalescent himself, but a very active one!”
Gamadge asked: “Is it conceivable, since your brother was interested in this scheme of writing up the family—is it conceivable that he should have removed the picture—carefully, as he thought, and with the intention of having it replaced again—” Fenway was doggedly shaking his head, but Gamadge continued: “in order to show it to artists abroad, you know; to get the best opinions on reproducing it in color.”
Fenway said: “He would have consulted me; and he never took it abroad because he never went abroad again; he died here, of a virulent type of pneumonia, not many weeks after I last saw him looking at the book you are looking at now.” For Gamadge was turning its pages.
“Well, then!” Gamadge looked up to smile at his host. “We must conclude, if we are to assume that all your assumptions are correct, that the picture left its place in the book after it reached this house, Thursday a week ago.”
