I had to stop, because the brooch fell and rolled almost under Anna’s feet. She was sitting alone at a table; but I could see she hadn’t been alone long, for there were two glasses, and a chair pushed back. I retrieved the brooch and got up with it in my hand, and just as I was giving it to Fay, I saw Bobby Markham coming along with his brother. They came up to Anna, and Bobby said,
“May I introduce my brother Arbuthnot?”
Anna wasn’t too effusive-and I don’t wonder. Arbuthnot Markham isn’t exactly a human ray of sunshine. Bobby’s a fat-headed-looking sort of chump; but there’s something about Arbuthnot that makes me want to go home. He’d look better if he was bald like Bobby-his hair’s too black and shiny.
I heard him say, “I took the liberty of asking my brother to introduce me.” Then he asked her for a dance, and Fay and I finished ours.
I went and talked to Miss Willy after that. I was afraid she’d want to dance-and it’s just like dancing with a steam-engine. But she said she wanted to talk to me, and then I wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to risk being crushed. She’s a most overpowering person, and I don’t know how Isobel stands living with her. If it weren’t for Isobel, she’d have come some awful smash long ago.
I’ve never met any one with so much exuberant enthusiasm going to waste.
She began at once to talk about my uncle, and about Anna. She hadn’t any of Isobel’s hesitation. She called Anna quite a number of things that made me feel better, and she was wildly indignant on my uncle’s behalf.
And then she broke off to tell me all about a row she’d had with old Monk, and from that she got on to another row with the Vicar-I think the one with Monk had something to do with Anna, but not the one with the Vicar-and in the middle of the second row she suddenly switched back on to Uncle John and said I must come down and be reconciled to him. Now I happen to know that Miss Willy hasn’t had a good word to say for me ever since the smash. I don’t blame her, because it was on Isobel’s account; but I wondered why she should be all over me now. Then it came down on me like a cartload of bricks. If Isobel was going to marry Heron, I didn’t matter any more-Miss Willy could let her naturally kind instincts rip, have me to stay, reconcile me to Uncle John, and annoy Anna, all at one blow. I discovered that she had heard Anna allude to her as a blatant old maid. That clinched it-I was convinced that she regarded me as a convenient retort.
I seem to have written reams about last night, but I’m nearly through. I want to get it all down, and then go over it and see what I can make of it. There are just two more things to get down. I think one of them’s important.
Fay said she’d go home in a taxi, and I went out to get one. When I was coming back, I saw Anna come down the steps with Arbuthnot Markham. There wasn’t room for my taxi to draw up, so I nipped out and cut across behind the car Anna was getting into. There was rather a jam and a crowd on the pavement, and I didn’t particularly want her to see me, so I stood and waited for her to get in and shut the door. She got in, and then she leaned out of the window, and she said to Arbuthnot Markham, “He mustn’t go to the Tarrants-he mustn’t.”
He said something I didn’t catch.
Anna’s got a carrying voice. She said,
“You must stop him somehow.”
And then he stepped back, and she drew in her head, and the car went on.
Well, she must have meant me. And there isn’t anything strange in her not wanting me to go and stay with the Tarrants, because she naturally isn’t keen on my being anywhere within ten miles of Uncle John. But why tell Arbuthnot about it? I’d seen him introduced to her about half an hour before, and it struck me as pretty good going.
I got Fay, and we drove home. I wished I had walked, because she began to play up like she does sometimes. I shouldn’t want to flirt with Fay if there wasn’t another woman on earth-and she might have the common intelligence to know that I wouldn’t want to flirt with Peter’s wife. She doesn’t mean anything, of course, but it’s jolly bad form, and she riled me till I told her so straight out. In a way I’m fond of her, like you are of a second or third cousin, and it annoys me to see her making an ass of herself.
It began with my saying she ought to drop this silly Miss Everitt business and call herself Mrs. Lymington. I said it wasn’t fair. It isn’t. It worries me to hear Corinna talking about Peter as if she were engaged to him. Of course I didn’t mention Corinna-I just said it wasn’t fair. And the silly goose made eyes at me and said,
“Because some one might fall in love with me? Is that what you mean?”
It wasn’t in the least what I meant, but I let it go at that, and I supposed it encouraged her.
“If I hadn’t been married to Peter-” she stopped there and put her head against my arm.
I said, “You are married to Peter.”
“And if I weren’t,” she said-“if I’d been free all the time-would you have fallen in love with me?”
I said, “No, I shouldn’t,” and I said it pretty sharply.
“If I were free now-”
I took her by the shoulder and put her back in her own corner of the car.
“Drop it, Fay!” I said. “You don’t mean anything, and you know it, and I know it, so why the devil do you do it? If you ask me, it’s the rottenest of rotten bad form.”
She flared out at me.
“I didn’t ask you! I’m not asking you anything! I hate you!”
“Don’t be an ass, Fay,” I said.
Then she began to cry and said I was a brute.
XIX
September 2lst-I’ve just been reading over what I wrote yesterday. The two points that matter are:
Who is employing me?
and
Why?
There are a lot of subsidiary ones. The most important of these seem to be:
1. Anna’s connection with the affair.
2. Bobby Markham.
3. Fay.
I don’t know what to think about Anna. If I hadn’t lost my temper, I might have got something out of her. That’s the worst of a temper-it always lets you down. I don’t think she’s the big noise in this affair.-I think she butted in. If I thought the money came from her, I’d chuck the whole show.
Bobby Markham-I can’t make out whether it was he who interviewed me in the hut. Anna certainly gave me to understand that it was Bobby-but that’s a good enough reason for its being some one else. Then there’s the question of whether Bobby could have been in the hut to meet me after spending the evening with the Tarrants. I don’t think so much of this point as I did, because I hadn’t a watch, and though I think we were at the hut by eleven I may be mistaken. It oughtn’t to take more than an hour from Putney to Linwood, but I was thinking of other things. I didn’t notice how fast we were going, and I suspect the driver went out of the way on purpose. Then Isobel says Bobby didn’t go away till about twenty past, after starting to say good-night at eleven. That’s vague too. I can imagine time hanging a bit heavy whilst a fathead like Bobby was making pretty speeches. I suppose he could have got to the hut in ten minutes if he took the path through the woods.
All the same it sticks in my mind that it wasn’t Bobby. I wonder if it was Arbuthnot. If Anna had never met Arbuthnot before, how did she get to the point of telling him to keep me away from the Tarrants, all in about half an hour? She spoke as if she was accustomed to giving him orders, too-I noticed that. She might have been speaking to the butler, and he took it the same way, as if it was a matter of course that she should fire orders at him out of a taxi. No, I couldn’t believe that it was the first time they’d met. And if it wasn’t, why go through the farce of an introduction, unless they particularly wanted me to think that they were strangers?
Well that’s all I can get out of Bobby for the moment.