The Emperor's Snuff-Box Read online

  “Are you going to be good?”

  “No!”

  Eve was tall, only two inches below his own height. But she was slender and soft of body, without any great physical strength. By this time it must have been apparent, even to Ned’s befuddled wits, that there was something wrong: that this was not coquetry, but real resistance. Such things are atmospheres, and Ned Atwood was no fool. But, with his arms round Eve, he had now completely lost his head.

  And it was at this point, shatteringly, that the telephone rang.

  III

  THE BLATANCY OF A ringing telephone is anywhere bad. Here, piercing the dark of the bedroom, it had a clamour and clatter of accusation. It would not shut up. Both of them, startled out of their wits, spoke in low voices as though the telephone could overhear.

  “Don’t answer it, Eve!”

  “Let me go! Suppose it’s…?”

  “Nonsense! Let it ring!”

  “But suppose they’ve seen…?”

  They were standing within reach of the telephone-table. Eve had instinctively stretched out her hand to take it; and he seized her wrist to prevent her. As a result, with a scuffle and clink the phone bumped off its cradle-hook as the base slid too, and fell with a rattling thump on the table. The shrilling peals were cut off. But in the silence they could both clearly hear a tiny voice—Toby Lawes’s voice.

  “Hello? Eve?” it said in the dark.

  Ned dropped her arms and backed away. He had never heard the voice before; but it was not difficult to guess to whom it belonged.

  “Hello? Eve?”

  Eve groped after the sliding phone, and banged it against the wall before she could finally pick it up. Her hard breathing slowed down. Any disinterested person must have admired her. When she spoke, she sounded controlled and almost casual.

  “Yes? Is that you, Toby?”

  Toby Lawes had a heavy, slow-speaking voice. Reduced to that microcosm by the telephone, its every syllable was audible to both listeners.

  “Sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night,” Toby said. “But I couldn’t sleep. I had to ring you. Do you mind?”

  Ned Atwood blundered across and switched on the light over the dressing-table.

  It might have been thought that Eve would glare at him for this. She did nothing of the kind. Aside from a quick glance to make sure the curtains were drawn, she hardly seemed to notice it: or even notice him. To judge by Toby’s apologetic cheerfulness, Eve had nothing to fear. But that was not all. Toby spoke with such concentrated tenderness that to the self-centered Ned—who could not imagine any man except himself speaking like this—it sounded startling and rather grotesque.

  Ned started to grin. But something else very quickly wiped the amusement off his face.

  “Toby darling!” Eve breathed.

  There could be no mistaking it. It was the tone of a woman who is in love, or thinks she is. Her face was radiant. Her relief, her gratitude, seemed to pour out to him.

  “You didn’t mind my ringing up?” Toby demanded.

  “Toby, of course not! How—how are you?”

  “I’m fine. Only I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I mean, where are you?”

  “I’m downstairs in the drawing-room,” replied the engrossed Mr. Lawes, who clearly saw nothing odd in this query. “I was up in my room. But I kept on thinking about how lovely you are, so I had to ring you up.”

  “Toby, darling!”

  (“Rats!” said Ned Atwood).

  There is always something particularly inane about the spectacle of somebody else’s emotion, even though you may happen to share the sentiments yourself.

  “I mean it,” Toby assured her seriously. “Er—did you like the play we saw the English Players do tonight?”

  (“Does he ring up to discuss dramatic criticism at this time in the morning?” asked Ned. “Shut the blighter off !”)

  “Toby, I did so enjoy it! I think Shaw is rather sweet.”

  (“Shaw,” said Ned. “Sweet. Oh, my God!”)

  Yet, as he watched the expression on Eve’s face, he had reason for feeling rather sick.

  Toby sounded troubled.

  “I thought parts of the play were rather broad, though. You weren’t shocked, were you?”

  (“I don’t believe it,” muttered Ned, opening his eyes wide and staring at the telephone. “I just don’t believe it!”)

  “Mother and Janice and Uncle Ben,” pursued Toby, “said it was all right. But I don’t know.” Toby was one of those people whom the views of Mr. Shaw rouse to a state of exasperated bewilderment. “I may be a bit old-fashioned. All the same, it does seem to me that there are certain things that no women, no well-bred women I mean, need to know anything about.”

  “I wasn’t shocked, Toby dear.”

  “Well,” temporized Mr. Lawes. You could imagine him fidgeting at the other end of the phone. “That’s—that’s all I wanted to say, really.”

  (“Quite a Cavalier poet, by George!”)

  But Toby gulped at something else. “Remember, we’re going picnicking tomorrow. It ought to be glorious weather. Oh, and by the way. The old man got a new trinket for his collection tonight. He’s as pleased as Punch.”

  (“Yes,” sneered Ned. “We saw the old goat gloating over it a minute ago.”)

  “Yes, Toby,” agreed Eve. “We saw —”

  She blurted this out, and it was as near a slip as makes no difference. Again sheer blind panic swam across her wits. She glanced up, seeing on Ned’s face the crooked smile which could be so detestable or so charming. But her voice flowed on:

  “I mean, we saw an awfully nice play tonight.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” said Toby. “But I mustn’t keep you out of bed any longer. Good night, dear.”

  “Good night, Toby. You don’t know, you’ll never be able to guess, how glad I’ve been to hear from you!”

  She replaced the phone, and then there was silence.

  Eve stall sat on the edge of the bed, one hand on the telephone and the other holding her lace negligée to her breast. She raised her head and looked at Ned. There was color in her cheeks, under the gray eyes. Her long silky hair, framing the delicacy of the face, gleamed rich and brown and rather dishevelled. She lifted a hand to smooth it back. The pink fingernails shone, and contrasted with the whiteness of the arm. In that sense of remoteness while being so near, of potential passion arrested while still kindling through the blood, she was lovely enough to turn any man’s brain.

  Ned watched her. Taking cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The flame of the lighter wabbled in his hand before he snapped it out. All his nerves were twitching, though he tried not to show it. The hot, heavy silence of the room was unbroken even by the ticking of a clock.

  And Ned was in no hurry.

  “All right,” he ventured at length. He had to clear his throat. “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “‘Take your hat and go.’”

  “Take your hat,” repeated Eve calmly, “and go.”

  “I see.” He examined the tip of the cigarette, inhaled smoke again, and blew it out. “Conscience bothering you, is it?”

  This was not true. But there was just enough of a fleeting grain of truth in it to make Eve’s face flame. Ned, tall and lounging, still seemed to be studying the end of the cigarette while he pursued this with devilish detective instincts.

  “Tell me, my sugar-candy witch. Don’t you ever have any qualms?”

  “About what?”

  “Life with the Lawes family.”

  “You see, Ned, you simply wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m not ‘fine’ enough, eh? Like that moron across the street?”

  Eve got to her feet, and adjusted her negligée. It was tied round the waist with a band of pink satin which was always coming untied, and she knotted it again.

  “You would be more impressive,” she said, “if you didn’t talk so much like a sulky chi
ld.”

  “Yes, and that’s another thing. When you talk to him, your style of conversation depresses me beyond endurance.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. You’re an intelligent woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But, when you talk to Toby Lawes, you seem determined to gear your mentality to his. Cripes, how you gush! Shaw is ‘sweet.’ You’ll end by passionately convincing yourself that you’re as stupid as he is. Or will you? If you have to talk to the fellow like that before you’re married, what will it be like afterwards?” He spoke softly. “Don’t you ever have any qualms, Eve?”

  (Damn you!)

  “What’s the matter?” inquired Ned, blowing up another cloud of smoke. “Don’t you dare listen to the devil’s advocate?”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “What do you know about this Lawes family, really?”

  “What did I know about you, before we were married? What have I ever learned since about your life before you met me, if it comes to that? Except that you’re selfish…”

  “Agreed.”

  “Beastly…!”

  “Eve dear, we were talking about the Lawes family. What have you fallen for? Their respectability?”

  “Of course I want to be respectable. Every woman does.”

  “Yah!”

  “That’s unworthy of your cleverness, darling. You see, I like them. I like Mama Lawes and Papa Lawes and Toby and Janice and Uncle Ben. They’re friendly people. They do the right thing, and yet they’re not stodgy. They’re so,”— she searched her mind, —“so sane.”

  “And Papa Lawes likes your bank-account.”

  “Don’t you dare say that!”

  “I can’t prove it. But one day…”

  Ned paused. He drew the back of his hand across his forehead. For a moment he stood looking at her with what she could have sworn was real affection: a new thing, a perplexed and desperate thing, even a kindly thing.

  “Eve,” he said abruptly, “I’m not going to let you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I’m not going to let you make a mistake.”

  As he walked over to crush out his cigarette in the glass tray of the dressing-table, Eve’s body went rigid. She stared at him. Knowing him as she did, she sensed a certain mood. Ned turned round again. There were fine little horizontal wrinkles across his shiny forehead, under the crisp fair hair.

  “Eve, I learned something at the Donjon today.”

  “Well?”

  “Papa Lawes, they say,” he went on, blowing out smoke and nodding towards the windows, “is rather deaf. Still, if I whopped back the curtains and shouted out to ask how he’s getting on …”

  Silence.

  A feeling of physical illness, grotesquely like the beginning of seasickness, began in Eve’s stomach and seemed to spread so that it blurred even her eyesight. Nothing seemed quite real. The cigarette-smoke was choking in that hot room. She saw Ned’s blue eyes looking at her out of smoke. She heard her own voice speaking with small and far-away effect.

  “You couldn’t play a filthy trick like that!”

  “Couldn’t I?”

  “No! Not even you!”

  “But is it a filthy trick?” Ned asked quietly. He pointed his finger at her. “What have you done? You’re perfectly innocent, aren’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “I tell you again: you’ve been a model of virtue. I’m the villain of the piece. I forced my way in here, even if I did have a key.” He held it up. “Suppose I did kick up a row? What have you got to be afraid of?”

  Her lips felt dry. Everything seemed to take place in a void, where lights splintered and sounds took a long time to reach you.

  “I’m a bounder who ought to be thrashed—that is, if Toby Lawes can do it. You tried to throw me out, didn’t you? And, of course, your loyal friends know you and they’ll believe that as soon as you tell them? All right! I won’t deny your story, I promise you. If you really loathe and despise me, if these people are all you say they are, why don’t you shout out yourself instead of having a fit when I threaten to do it?”

  “Ned, I can’t explain it…”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t understand!”

  “Why not?”

  Eve threw out her arms in a helplessness beyond speech. Explain the world, in half a dozen words?

  “I can only tell you this,” Eve said. She spoke quietly, though her eyes brimmed over. “I’d rather die than have anybody know you were here tonight.”

  Ned stood looking at her for a moment.

  “Would you, by God?” he said. And he turned round and walked rapidly towards the windows.

  Eve’s first instinct was to turn the light out. She ran forwards, almost tripping in the heavy folds of her negligée, whose satin waistband had come untied again. Afterwards she could never remember whether or not she had screamed at him. Stumbling over the dressing-table stool, she reached up for the switch of the hanging lamp, found it, swayed on her feet, and could have cried out with relief when the room went dark.

  Now it may be accounted as doubtful whether Ned—even in his present state of mind—had ever really meant to shout across the street at Sir Maurice Lawes. But, in any case, it would have made no difference.

  He flung back the brocade curtains, rattling on their wooden rings. He lifted the net curtains underneath, and peered out. But that was all he did.

  He was looking straight across the street not fifty feet away—into the lighted windows of Sir Maurice Lawes’s study. They were full-length windows, after the French fashion. They opened out on a little stone and wrought-iron balcony just above the front door. These windows stood partly open; their steel shutters were not closed; the curtains gaped open.

  But the study inside did not look as it had looked when Ned first glanced across there, only a few minutes ago.

  “Ned!” said Eve in a voice of rising terror.

  No reply.

  “Ned! What is it?”

  He pointed, and that was enough.

  They saw a medium-sized square room, its walls lined with glass-fronted curio-cabinets of odd styles and shapes. Those two windows allowed a view of nearly all the room. A bookcase or two interrupted the line of the curio-cabinets. The furniture was spindly gilt and brocade, against white walls and a gray blur of a carpet. When Ned had last looked across there, only the desk lamp had been burning. Now the blaze of the central chandelier picked out that sight with a more horrible clarity than either of the two watchers could endure.

  Through the left-hand window, they could see Sir Maurice Lawes’s big flat-topped table-desk against the left-hand wall. Through the right-hand window, they could see the white marble fireplace in the right-hand wall. And at the back of the study—that is, in the back wall facing them—they could see the door leading to the upstairs hall.

  Someone, as they watched, was softly closing that door.

  They saw it move as a certain person slipped out of the study. Eve arrived just too late to catch a glimpse of a face which was to haunt her afterwards. But Ned saw it.

  Hidden by the closing door, somebody stretched out a hand—it seemed a small hand, at that distance—in a brownish-colored glove. This hand touched the light switch at one side of the door. A curled and capable finger pressed the switch down, extinguishing the central lights. Then the tall white door, with its metal handle instead of a knob, was gently closed.

  Now only the desk lamp, a small office lamp with a green glass shade, shed a dim light down on the big flat-topped table-desk pushed against the left-hand wall, and on the swivel-chair drawn up to it. Sir Maurice Lawes, whom they could see in profile, sat in his usual swivel-chair. But he was not now holding a magnifying glass; and he would never hold a magnifying glass again.

  The magnifying glass lay on the desk blotter. Over that blotter—over the whole surface of the table—were scattered fragments of something that had been smashed there.
Many fragments. Curious fragments. Transparent fragments which shone pinkly, and gleamed and reflected back the light, as though through rose-tinted snow. Gold seemed to be among those fragments. Perhaps something else as well. But colors were difficult to discern because of all the blood-splashes, across the desk and even up the wall.

  How long Eve Neill stood there, hypnotized, with nausea rising in her throat yet refusing to credit what she saw, she could never afterwards remember.

  “Ned, I’m going to be…”

  “Quiet!”

  Sir Maurice Lawes’s head had been beaten in by repeated blows from some weapon not now visible. His knees, wedged against the opening of the table-desk, had prevented his body from sliding down out of the chair. His chin was on his breast; his limp hands hung down. Blood, descending like a painted mask across his face and along the cheek to a point below the nose, made a kind of cap for that motionless head.

  IV

  IN SUCH FASHION DIED Maurice Lawes, knight, formerly of Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, and late of the rue des Anges, La Bandelette.

  In those far-off days when newspapers had little to print and much paper to print it on, his death created a stir in the English press. True, few people even knew who he was, let alone why he had got his knighthood, until somebody mysteriously murdered him. Then everything about him became of interest. A knighthood, they discovered, had been the reward for his humanitarian activities in the old days. He had been interested in slum clearance, interested in prison reform, interested in seamen’s betterment.

  Who’s Who listed his hobbies as “collecting and human nature.” He was one of those contradictory characters who, a few years later, were to bring England almost to ruin. Though he gave large sums to charity, and was always badgering the authorities about spending for betterment, he himself lived abroad to avoid the iniquity of paying income tax. Short, tubby, rather deaf, with a mustache and little tuft of chin beard, he also lived in a world of his own. But his qualities as a popular man, a kindly man, a pleasant man in his own household, received their full tribute. And it was a deserved tribute. Maurice Lawes really was just what he pretended to be.