"'Dr. Dryasdust,' " said H. M. suddenly. He raised his head "Bohun! Got it! But it can't be the same, son. This Bohun I was thinkin' of — no. Senior Proctor. Oxford. 'Lectures on the Political and Economic History of the Seventeenth Century.' Do you mean to tell me —!'
Bennett nodded.
"It's the same man. I told you I'd been invited to a place in Surrey for the holidays. It's the Bohuns' place called White Priory, near Epsom. And, for a certain historical reason I'll describe in a minute, the whole crowd is going down in quest of atmosphere. The doddering scholar, it seems, has suddenly begun to cut capers on paper. On the other hand, there's John Bohun. He has always played around with theatrical enterprises; never done much, never interested in much else, I understand. Well, John Bohun appeared in America as the close friend and boon travelling-companion of Lord Canifest.
"He didn't say much; he rarely does. Bohun is the taciturn, umbrella-carrying, British-stamp type. He walked around, and he looked up at the buildings, and exhibited a polite interest. That was all. Until — it appears now it was a prearranged plan — until Marcia Tait arrived in New York from Hollywood."
"So?" said H. M. in a curious voice. "Amatory angle?"
This was the thing that puzzled Bennett, among others. He remembered the echoing gloom at Grand Central, and flashbulbs popping in ripples over the crowd when Marcia Tait posed on the steps of the train. Somebody held her dog, autograph-books flew, the crowd buckled in and out; and, standing some distance off, John Bohun cursed. He said he couldn't understand American crowds. Bennett remembered him craning and peering over the heads of smaller men: very lean, with one corded hand jabbing his umbrella at the concrete floor. His face was a shade swarthier than Marcia Tait's. He had not ceased to glare by the time he fought his way to where she stood..
"As a lovers' meeting," said Bennett slowly, "no. But then you can't describe an atmosphere, any more than you can describe a sultry day. And it's atmosphere that Tait carries with her. For a public face she tries to be-what's the word? effervescent. She's not. You've hit it exactly in saying she looks like one of those Restoration women on canvas. Quiet. Speculative. Old-time, if you follow me. Patches and languor, and thunder in the distance. You could feel it in the air, again like a sultry day. I suppose all these fancy words simply mean Sex, but I should say there's something else too; something," said Bennett, with more vehemence than he had intended, "that really did make great courtesans in the old days. I can't make it quite clear. "
"Think not?" said H. M., blinking over his spectacles. "Oh, I don't know. You're doin' pretty well. You seem to have been a good deal bowled over yourself."
Bennett was honest. "God knows I was — for a while. Everybody is who has the customary number of red corpuscles. But," he hesitated, "competition aside, I don't think I'd care for the emotional strain of staying bowled over by that woman. Do you see, sir?"
"Oh, ah," said H. M. "Competition was brisk, then?"
"It was ceaseless. There was even a gleam in Canifest's eye, I'm fairly sure. Thinking back on what you said.
"So. She met Canifest?"
"She'd known him in England, it seems; he was a friend of her father. Canifest and his daughter-Louise, her name is; she was acting as his private secretary — Canifest and his daughter and Bohun were staying at the Brevoort. Very fine and sedate and dignified, you see. So (to the astonishment of everybody) the flamboyant Tait also puts up at the Brevoort. We drove straight there from Grand Central. Canifest was photographed shaking hands with and congratulating the famous British artiste who had made her name on the screen: that sort of thing. It was as fatherly and disinterested as though she were shaking hands with Santa Claus. Where I began to wonder was when Carl Rainger, her director, arrived the next day with almost as big a public following; and the press agent with him. It was none of my affair — I was there to escort Canifest. But Bohun had arrived with the script of his brother's play: Tait made no secret of that. There was a sort of armed truce between Tait and Bohun on one side, and Rainger and Emery on the other. Whether we liked it or not, we were all mixed up together. It was explosive material. And in the middle of it was Marcia Tait, as expressionless as ever."
Staring at the lamp on H. M.'s desk, he tried to remember just when he had first been conscious of that ominous tension, that uneasiness which scratched at the nerves in this incongruous company. Sultriness again. Like that drum-beat, muffled under the music, at the Cavalla Club. It would be, he thought, in Tait's suite on the night Rainger arrived. An old-fashioned suite in an ancient hotel, heavy with guilt and plush and glass prisms that suggested gaslight: yet with the pale glitter of Fifth Avenue outside the windows. Tait's sultry beauty was appropriate to the setting. She wore yellow, and sat back in an ornate chair under a lamp. Bohun, who always looked thinner and more high-shouldered in black and white, was manipulating the cocktail-shaker. Canifest, fatherly and heavy-mouthed, was talking interminably with his usual unction. Nearby Canifest's daughter sat on a chair which somehow seemed lower than the others; silent, efficient, and freckled, Louise was a plain girl made plainer still by her father's wishes; and she was permitted only one cocktail. "Our Spartan English mothers," declared Lord Canifest, evidently scenting a moral somewhere, "knew nothing of it. No." It was shortly afterwards that the house-phone buzzed.
John Bohun — Bennett tried to explain it to H. M.- John Bohun straightened up and looked at it sharply. He made a movement to answer it, but Marcia Tait intercepted him: her face had a faint incurious smile, and her hair under strong light was brown instead of black. She said only, "Very well," before she replaced the receiver, still smiling. John Bohun asked who it was, in a voice that seemed as incurious as hers. He was answered in no very long time. Somebody knocked briefly at the outer door of the suite and threw it open without waiting for an invitation. There entered a quiet little man, pudgy but not comical in stiff-jawed anger, with two days' growth of beard on his face. Paying no attention to the others, he said quietly, "Exactly what the devil do you mean by walking out on us?" Marcia Tait asked to be allowed to present Carl Rainger.
"— and that," said Bennett, "was nearly three weeks ago. It was, in a way, the beginning of it. But the question is this."
He leaned across and put his finger on H. M.'s desk. "Who in our party would send Marcia Tait a box of poisoned chocolates?"
CHAPTER TWO
Weak Poison
"One of your party, eh?" said H. M. meditatively. Been sending her poisoned chocolates. Well. Did she eat 'em?”
I'm getting ahead of the story. The poisoned-chocolates business occurred only yesterday morning, and it's nearly a month ago that Tait arrived in New York. I never expected to come to England, you see; I never thought I should meet the party again once I had gone back to Washington; and it wasn't as though I had made particular friends with any of them. But it was that damned atmosphere. It stuck in your mind. I don't want to make the thing sound too subtle,
H. M. grunted.
"Bah. Subtlety," he said, "is only statin' a self-evident truth in language nobody can understand. And there's nothing subtle about trying to poison somebody. Have another drink. Then how did you come to be tied up with these people later?"