Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 782
Cassie said:
“But I don’t believe that Walter knew anything about Norman White’s handing that book to the art student. He said that as far as his responsibility was concerned it ended with his handing the book to ‘N. White.’” She added after a moment: “It’s true that we said almost nothing about the book or the whole plan. Almost nothing because, like Mr White, he was afraid we might be overheard. So it is possible that he knew about the plan and told me nothing about it simply because it was the most dangerous point of the whole affair.” She added further: “You know, this is one hell of an affair. You must be as cold-blooded as any ophidian not to want to scream at the top of your voice. I sit on my own safety-valve because you have said that if I had hysterics it would interfere with....” Her voice trembled in her throat and her speech remained unfinished. Mr Penkethman patted her invisible hand.
“You can throw a great fit in front of the Commissaire,” he said. “As great a fit as you like. It might interrupt his thoughts but we’ve no evidence that that might not be an advantage. Frenchmen are emotional when it comes to dealing with women in a state of emotion and if he happened to have any little bit of information up his sleeve that he was not quite certain of giving us a good fit of hysterics might well bring it out....”
Cassie said:
“I’m terribly out my depth here. You will have observed that during all this evening I have hardly spoken. That is unusual with me. But I’ll certainly take any orders you give me....”
“It’s not very easy to give orders,” he answered. “Not in this particular juncture. When representing Scotland Yard I had occasion to study what the French functionary expects of the English gentleman — but obviously he will expect something different of the American lady. The pose of the English in good position is that of stern repression of the feelings until a break comes. Even then they must not become coherent or consecutive. They have to make their case plain by ejaculations and in half finished sentences. The French functionary is above all humane. He wishes to inflict penalties and is perfectly remorseless when he is convinced that he ought to exact them. But if he can see beneath the surface that the person to be punished is normally virtuous and if that person can express his or her sufferings so as to get them over to him as being genuine his attitude at once becomes different. A French tax-collector, for instance, will be remorseless in exacting the last centime that very oppressive codes will let him exact from persons he dislikes or distrusts... He added:” Wait a minute. I’m afraid I’m not helping you much.... Let me think of an instance...”
He remained silent for a time, his face a jolted oval of grey luminescence.
“I had a cousin,” he said at last, “who lived and died in Paris. He left a little money — enough to keep his widow in a faded comfort. But his last illness had been very long, extremely costly; during it his house-property deteriorated; his widow, my cousin, was permanently weakened. The surveyor of taxes had it up to him, if he thought fit, to leave her almost destitute. But by dignified pleading which rose at times — but only at times — to a sort of tragic force she succeeded in persuading him that the State ought to be lenient in its claims on her. She had proved that she was the sort of citizen that the State would do well to perpetuate. So that surveyor of taxes claimed almost nothing in the way of death duties and allowed her to pay very gradually.” He paused again:
“Of course,” he finally went on, “she had the advantage of the very best dramatic advice from a lawyer who was both adept in that sort of thing and intimately acquainted with the Surveyor. And you, unfortunately won’t have such good advice.... I know Paris and the French functionary pretty well.... I have told you that I was employed by Scotland Yard for many years as an interpreter... but it was as an interpreter of a certain importance who latterly was sent on rather delicate missions in various parts of the world. And London being so near Paris it was very often to Paris. So I am at home here. But as I have said, I don’t know what is expected of American ladies here. I fancy that they are supposed to be more voluble and more commanding than the English.... So what attitude the commissaire or M. de la Penthièvre may take to you I can’t say. There is only one thing certain. You must impress them with the fact that you are serious...
Cassie exclaimed:
“Angels and ministers of Grace! I’m serious enough about Walter to kill both of them and go to prison for life or let them cut off my left hand.”
He put his immense arm suddenly about her shoulders so that his heavy hand patted the elbow that was farthest from him.
“That’s good,” he said, “that’s very good.... If you can get that over to them it will be enough.... Tonight to the Commissaire, tomorrow to M. de la Penthièvre....”
She exclaimed passionately:
“Then, oh, you think they’ve got him. You think it’s they that are detaining him.... I never trusted that man with the black beard. Or rather I trusted his left hand side and not his right. I felt that all the words he said were absolutely the very truth of God but that all sorts of thoughts ran round inside his head. And that he would be remorseless....”
“I think,” Mr Penkethman said, “that he would be remorseless — but with all the considerateness possible in the world if he thought you were serious.”
“He’ll know,” she questioned, “that I’ve been living in open sin — for about ten hours, won’t he?”
“In the eyes of both of them,” he answered comfortingly, “to live in open sin, if it’s done seriously, is a vastly more serious and difficult matter than to be serious under the shelter of marriage. Both the Commissaire and M. de la Penthièvre will know your secret. But how they will act towards you will be determined by whether or not you can convince them that you intend to extend that ten hours into ten years...
“We’ve made plans,” she said indignantly, “for fifty years.”
Mr Penkethman exclaimed:
“That I’m glad to hear. That takes a load off my heart....”
“You don’t,” she asked indignantly, “think that he is less serious than I? Let me tell you, I know men... And that boy...”He asked with a sudden solicitude:
“Has he told you that his father was mentally affected? Not violently, but with intermittences of delusions....” She exclaimed convincingly:
“That’s why we talked of fifty years ahead.... He imagined his having intervals of feeble-mindedness. And how I was to act then... Oh, you know, not to ruin my life as his mother has ruined hers.”
He said in a voice she did not know:
“His mother certainly ruined her life. And life is a long affair. And you are dead a terribly long time. So that if you have had a ruined life...” His voice died down.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you knew him. You knew his mother... And his father. And he did not know you... I know he did not know you.... At any rate on the Bourgogne he said that he had never seen you before in his life.... But he said that, all the same, you seemed familiar to him.”
They had crossed the Seine and were running through the rabbit-warren of streets through which you arrive at the Boulevard St Germain.
CHAPTER 6
THE OPEN DOOR OF THE COMMISSARIAT THREW A GREAT shaft of light out onto the wet darkness. A large number of agents in their capes and caps were playing cards or backgammon at tables round the room. A man at a high desk was talking to another with torn clothes and a black eye who stood before him. The thin Commissaire they had seen that morning was shrugging his shoulders whilst he talked to a woman in a widow’s dress. When they entered he joined them, as it were, to his conversation.
“Alas,” he said, “it is useless to conceal that during the day the city has been very disturbed. Apart from the clearance effected by the police and soldiers there have been innumerable little affairs between individuals or between small crowds of opposing opinions. So, mesdames, disappearances have been inevitable. Such disappearances are not easy to trace even in normal times when the police is at liberty to devote all its energies to tracing the disappearances. And, at a time like the present...”
“You haven’t,” Cassie suddenly interrupted, “found Walter Leroy. You haven’t any trace of him. I shall go mad. It’s your duty to trace him. What else are you for?” The very thin man with the wrinkled face shrugged his scraggy shoulders up to his red ears.
“Not any more,” he said, “than we have been able to trace the son of madame here.” And he indicated with his right hand the widow at his side. “I would have you believe, madame, that we shall use every effort in the service of both you ladies....”
Cassie exclaimed in a high voice:
“You forget that Mr Leroy is an American citizen. You ought to make special efforts in his case. The good opinion of the American Republic is of importance to you.”
The Commissaire fixed Cassie with an intent stare and painfully screwed the end of his thin moustache.
“Madame,” he said with frigid politeness, “your natural agitation obscures to you the fact that if the good opinion of the American Republic is of importance to us the good opinion of every subject of France, from the humblest to the highest is of an importance exactly equal. In each case the importance is of the highest possible. The protecting arm of a just Prince is as mighty in the service of those to whom he chooses to render hospitality as of those to whom he stands in the capacity of father. No more and no less. I have said that we shall render every effort. More than every effort in either case we cannot exert. But be sure that we shall exert all of that!”
He pressed both palms of his thin white hands together before him and, bowing slightly to the other lady, handed her over to the man from the desk who had finished with the man with the black eye.
He opened a door towards which he directed Cassie and Mr Penkethman. He said that workmen were engaged on altering his office. But they would no doubt excuse. They would there be more private. Though indeed there was nothing to be said.
Inside the door Cassie suddenly let out a scream like a thin flame and staggered back against the two men who were following her. She exclaimed:
“Look. It was terrible...”
Two agents, their uniforms covered with white blouses, were struggling, one on each side of a double ladder, with a new, large, shiny portrait that they were seeking to hang high up on the wall that confronted the door.
“I thought it would come over on my head,” Cassie sobbed. The two policemen were no doubt excellent as preservers of law and order and even as paper-hangers, for they had nearly completed the decoration of the room with a white paper scattered with golden fleurs de lis. But, as picture-hangers they were very evidently inexpert and, between them as they leaned one on each branch of the ladder the canvas wavered ominously. It represented a young man of dignified expression, wearing a white uniform, chestnut hair and moustache and full red lips.
“There’s even,” Cassie sobbed, “a certain resemblance... Not when they hold it still and you can see it... But when it staggered over towards me....”
The Commissaire maintained his goodnatured calm. He went to the back of his bureau on the wall behind which the portrait was to hang.
“There, there, my children,” he exclaimed to his troubled subordinates, “descend the picture and abandon your efforts.... Place the picture with its face to the wall so that the dust may not settle on it and, in spite of Ordinance One, we will pay a professional to hang it with the security it demands.”
He placed himself, as if with relief, in the chair behind his desk and, with his elbows on its top, rubbing his palms together, he seemed twice the man he had been. The blushing young agents went away on tiptoe. He begged Cassie to excuse, and to be seated.
“Ordinance One,” he exclaimed to the Commissioner, “is the first act of the new reign which is also to be a new era. It decrees that for the first fortnight of the reign and of every succeeding quarter-year no taxes shall be recoverable from the subjects of France with of course the eventual aim of the extinction of all taxation.... No edict could be more enthusiastically received by every Frenchman. It puts however a certain strain on the servants of the state upon whom, as you perceive, it is enjoined to perform services other than those of their titular functions....” Cassie who had stopped sobbing exclaimed with a certain dryness:
“You omit to consider, M. le Commissaire, that you have before you a distracted woman. Presumably your titular functions should come before your secondary occupations.”
The Commissaire said amiably that that was true. But he had wished her to have time to recover herself. He drew from a drawer a blue folder that contained a number of documents. He expressed the deepest regret on the part of himself and of the royal government that they presented no information whatever as to the whereabouts of M. Walter Leroy. Absolutely no American and indeed no Anglo-Saxon foreigner had that day passed through the hands of the police; no hospitals had reported the admission of any American or English casualty. The police of no arrondissement had reported seeing anyone resembling an American or an Englishman in any bagarre. He begged Madame to understand that particular pains had been taken by his subordinates. And the results were nothing. And he asked: Was it not possible that the husband of Madame might have been detained by some private business? It was not unusual for foreigners arriving in Paris — particularly from New York — to find themselves caught up in a whirl of business....
Mr Penkethman said with a heavy huskiness:
“But not on the first day of a honeymoon in the city.” The Commissaire surveyed Cassie with an intent seriousness. He inclined himself over his desk and exclaimed: “Evidently not.... Then we must entertain another theory.” He directed his serious and unwinking gaze upon the Commissioner.
“Has it not, Monsieur,” he asked softly and conciliatorily, “presented itself to your ideas that the disappearance of this young friend of yours — if it is a disappearance — may be connected with yourself?” He folded his hands in front of himself, on the desk.
“I do not have to tell Monsieur the Commissioner that his presence in this city is always the occasion of some anxiety to us. For certain disorderly forces the Commissioner is a marked man. If he occupies himself with malefactors the malefactors no less carefully watch M. the Commissioner.” The Commissioner moved the two thumbs of his enormous hands that were clasped in his great lap. He sat on a frail walnut wood chair like an immense boulder of rock insecurely perched on a small trivet. The movement of his thumbs indicated his complete agreement with what the Commissaire had been saying.
“So that,” that functionary went on, “is it not possible that the young man may be being held for ransom?... Such a crime would be unusual in the extreme in France. But it is ordinary in the extreme, I believe, in America.... Let us say that Monsieur the Commissioner is near discovering the secret of a formidable gang....”
The Commissioner moved his two thumbs again. “Monsieur, then,” the Commissaire went on, “is upon the point of tracking down a formidable American-International gang. These gangs are spread world-wide, have capitals of millions of dollars in jeopardy.... We ourselves watch over him so carefully that, though it is always possible that one day his body may be found in the Seine with a knife between his shoulders, the likelihood is that it will be rather in the Hudson or the Thames — or the Lake of Geneva.... But obviously we cannot, without warning, watch everyone who is intimately acquainted, or a habitué, of Monsieur the Commissioner.”... He paused and then went on, since the Commissioner offered no objection and the young woman did no more than fix him with the round eyes of horror:
“We have been informed that on the Bourgogne Monseiur the Commissioner and the husband of Madame were inseparable. Or appeared at any rate very intimate....” The Commissioner was wiping his eyes. He had that air of weeping that was habitual with him.
“So that, supposing there should have been on board the boat any American member of the gang that M. the Commissioner is... sleuthing; they would undoubtedly be sleuthing him.”
The Commissioner nodded his immense head.
“There were two,” he said. “You will have them both in the Santé tomorrow.”
“Then,” the Commissaire asked, “it is likely that tomorrow, before their arrest, you will receive a ransom note, asking for the immunity of those two as against the release of the husband of Madame whom they will have taken for the assistant, or the relative... the son, even, of Monsieur.”
Cassie said determinedly:
“That is not possible. We know that my husband is detained. But that he is not in danger.”
The Commissaire scrutinised her with impassive disbelief. The Commissioner said, rather hurriedly for him.
“My young friend has these premonitions. They are not unusual with her compatriots.”
The Commissaire rubbed his hands before him on the desk. He whistled noiselessly, as if he were spouting water from his lips.
“That is of course serious.... If you are withholding information from us,” he shrugged his shoulders nearly up to his ears.... “Then there would remain nothing for us but to wash our hands of the affair....”
Cassie sprang out of her chair.
“It’s you,” she exclaimed violently, “who are withholding information from us. That at least we know. I have a premonition.... It’s a certainty.... Haven’t you heard that women have second sight when their husbands are concerned?... My God... Are you wooden?... A block of wood.... You threaten a woman who is in desperation... Yes, threaten.... What is it but threatening a woman to say you will wash your hands of it when her husband is lost in your desperate, cut-throat city.... And I tell you we’ve proof... proof that you are withholding information. And understand. I am not without resources. There is the Commissioner here who will see me righted. I have an Embassy behind me. And there is M. de la Penthièvre.... What will you do if I tell you to put me onto M. de la Penthièvre and tell him that you are withholding information from me?” She had an air of panting excitement. “Not without resources!”
