"Well, miss, I _have_ heard that that Order is usually returned to His Majesty on the death of the holder. Yes, miss." Then in a whisper to a footman, "More b.u.t.ter for the pop-corn in King Charles"s Corner." He stopped behind my chair. "Your room is Number Eleven, sir. May I trouble you for your keys?"
He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had announced she would not go to bed ""less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater takes me--so there!"
He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing for dinner. "Not at all, sir," he replied to some compliment I paid him. "I valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years. He was very abrupt in his movements, sir. As a rule I never received more than an hour"s notice of a journey. We used to go to Syria frequently. I have been twice to Babylon. Mr. and Mrs. Zigler"s requirements are, comparatively speaking, few."
"But the guests?"
"Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their ordinaries.
Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir."
I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was rewarded with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of Abraham Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land by blood and fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens. "My brother, suh," she said, "fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonise New England to-day. If I took any interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my son-in-law Laughton yondah, I should say that my brother"s death had been amply avenged."
The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread. Her eyes twinkled over the flames she had lit.
"Don"t these folk," she said a little later, "remind you of Arabs picnicking under the Pyramids?"
"I"ve never seen the Pyramids," I replied.
"Hm! I didn"t know you were as English as all that." And when I laughed, "Are you?"
"Always. It saves trouble."
"Now that"s just what I find so significant among the English"--this was Alice"s mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted almonds. "Oh, I know how _you_ feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner like myself--I"m Buffalo--even though we come over every year--notices the desire for comfort in England. There"s so little conflict or uplift in British society."
"But we like being comfortable," I said.
"I know it. It"s very characteristic. But ain"t it a little, just a little, lacking in adaptability an" imagination?"
"They haven"t any need for adaptability," Madam Burton struck in. "They haven"t any Ellis Island standards to live up to."
"But we can a.s.similate," the Buffalo woman charged on.
"Now you _have_ done it!" I whispered to the old lady as the blessed word "a.s.similation" woke up all the old arguments for and against.
There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me--nor afterwards when the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the discussion of that land"s future, till there was talk of c.o.o.n-can. When all the company had been set to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined study, where I noticed he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a child, gravely as a bishop, of the years that were past since our last meeting.
"That"s about all, I guess--up to date," he said when he had unrolled the bright map of his fortunes across three continents. "Bein" rich suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country? You heard what that Detroit man said at dinner. "A Government of the alien, by the alien, for the alien." Mother"s right, too. Lincoln killed us. From the highest motives--but he killed us. Oh, say, that reminds me. "J"ever kill a man from the highest motives?"
"Not from any motive--as far as I remember."
"Well, I have. It don"t weigh on my mind any, but it was interesting.
Life _is_ interesting for a rich--for any--man in England. Ya-as! Life in England is like settin" in the front row at the theatre and never knowin" when the whole blame drama won"t spill itself into your lap. I didn"t always know that. I lie abed now, and I blush to think of some of the breaks I made in South Africa. About the British. Not your official method of doin" business. But the Spirit. I was "way, "way off on the Spirit. Are you acquainted with any other country where you"d have to kill a man or two to get at the National Spirit?"
"Well," I answered, "next to marrying one of its women, killing one of its men makes for pretty close intimacy with any country. I take it you killed a British citizen."
"Why, no. Our syndicate confined its operations to aliens--dam-fool aliens.... "J"ever know an English lord called Lundie[5]? Looks like a frame-food and soap advertis.e.m.e.nt. I imagine he was in your Supreme Court before he came into his lordship."
[Footnote 5: "The Puzzler": _Actions and Reactions_.]
"He is a lawyer--what we call a Law Lord--a Judge of Appeal--not a real hereditary lord."
"That"s as much beyond me as _this_!" Zigler slapped a fat Debrett on the table. "But I presoom this unreal Law Lord Lundie is kind o" real in his decisions? I judged so. And--one more question. "Ever meet a man called Walen?"
"D"you mean Burton-Walen, the editor of--?" I mentioned the journal.
"That"s him. "Looks like a tough, talks like a Maxim, and trains with kings."
"He does," I said. "Burton-Walen knows all the crowned heads of Europe intimately. It"s his hobby."
"Well, there"s the whole outfit for you--exceptin" my Lord Marshalton, _ne_ Mankeltow, an" me. All active murderers--specially the Law Lord--or accessories after the fact. And what do they hand you out for _that_, in this country?"
"Twenty years, I believe," was my reply.
He reflected a moment.
"No-o-o," he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring. "Twenty months at the Cape is my limit. Say, murder ain"t the soul-shatterin" event those nature-fakers in the magazines make out. It develops naturally like any other proposition.... Say, "j"ever play this golf game? It"s come up in the States from Maine to California, an" we"re prodoocin" all the champions in sight. Not a business man"s play, but interestin". I"ve got a golf-links in the park here that they tell me is the finest inland course ever. I had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche--last year. It was just before I signed the papers that our murder eventuated. My Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix up something or other--about Peters and the linen, I think "twas. Mrs.
Zigler took a holt of the proposition. She understood Peters from the word "go." There wasn"t any house-party; only fifteen or twenty folk. A full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me. "Guess we must be near on that to-night. In the smoking-room here, my Lord Marshalton--Mankeltow that was--introduces me to this Walen man with the nose. He"d been in the War too, from start to finish. He knew all the columns and generals that I"d battled with in the days of my Zigler gun. We kinder fell into each other"s arms an" let the harsh world go by for a while.
"Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. _He_ was a new proposition to me. If he hadn"t been a lawyer he"d have made a lovely cattle-king. I thought I had played poker some. Another of my breaks. Ya-as! It cost me eleven hundred dollars besides what Tommy said when I retired. I have no fault to find with your hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or your press.
"Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here.... Psha! Think o"
your rememberin" my religion! I"ve become an Episcopalian since I married. Ya-as.... After lunch Walen did his crowned-heads-of-Europe stunt in the smokin"-room here. He was long on Kings. And Continental crises. I do not pretend to follow British domestic politics, but in the aeroplane business a man has to know something of international possibilities. At present, you British are settin" in kimonoes on dynamite kegs. Walen"s talk put me wise on the location and size of some of the kegs. Ya-as!
"After that, we four went out to look at those golf-links I was hirin".
We each took a club. Mine"--he glanced at a great tan bag by the fire-place--"was the beginner"s friend--the cleek. Well, sir, this golf proposition took a holt of me as quick as--quick as death. They had to prise me off the greens when it got too dark to see, and then we went back to the house. I was walkin" ahead with my Lord Marshalton talkin"
beginners" golf. (_I_ was the man who ought to have been killed by rights.) We cut "cross lots through the woods to Flora"s Temple--that place I showed you this afternoon. Lundie and Walen were, maybe, twenty or thirty rod behind us in the dark. Marshalton and I stopped at the theatre to admire at the ancestral yew-trees. He took me right under the biggest--King Somebody"s Yew--and while I was spannin" it with my handkerchief, he says, "Look heah!" just as if it was a rabbit--and down comes a bi-plane into the theatre with no more noise than the dead. My Rush Silencer is the only one on the market that allows that sort of gumshoe work.... What? A bi-plane--with two men in it. Both men jump out and start fussin" with the engines. I was starting to tell Mankeltow--I can"t remember to call him Marshalton any more--that it looked as if the Royal British Flying Corps had got on to my Rush Silencer at last; but he steps out from under the yew to these two Stealthy Steves and says, "What"s the trouble? Can I be of any service?" He thought--so did I--"twas some of the boys from Aldershot or Salisbury. Well, sir, from there on, the situation developed like a motion-picture in h.e.l.l. The man on the nigh side of the machine whirls round, pulls his gun and fires into Mankeltow"s face. I laid him out with my cleek automatically. Any one who shoots a friend of mine gets what"s comin" to him if I"m within reach. He drops. Mankeltow rubs his neck with his handkerchief. The man the far side of the machine starts to run. Lundie down the ride, or it might have been Walen, shouts, "What"s happened?" Mankeltow says, "Collar that chap."
"The second man runs ring-a-ring-o"-roses round the machine, one hand reachin" behind him. Mankeltow heads him off to me. He breaks blind for Walen and Lundie, who are runnin" up the ride. There"s some sort of mix-up among "em, which it"s too dark to see, and a thud. Walen says, "Oh, well collared!" Lundie says, "That"s the only thing I never learned at Harrow!"... Mankeltow runs up to "em, still rubbin" his neck, and says, "_He_ didn"t fire at me. It was the other chap. Where is he?"
""I"ve stretched him alongside his machine," I says.
""Are they poachers?" says Lundie.
""No. Airmen. I can"t make it out," says Mankeltow.
""Look at here," says Walen, kind of brusque. "This man ain"t breathin"
at all. Didn"t you hear somethin" crack when he lit, Lundie?"
""My G.o.d!" says Lundie. "Did I? I thought it was my suspenders"--no, he said "braces."
"Right there I left them and sort o" tiptoed back to my man, hopin" he"d revived and quit. But he hadn"t. That darned cleek had hit him on the back of the neck just where his helmet stopped. He"d got _his_. I knew it by the way the head rolled in my hands. Then the others came up the ride totin" _their_ load. No mistakin" that shuffle on gra.s.s. D"you remember it--in South Africa? Ya-as.
""Hsh!" says Lundie. "Do you know I"ve broken this man"s neck?"
""Same here," I says.
""What? Both?" says Mankeltow.
""Nonsense!" says Lord Lundie. "Who"d have thought he was that out of training? A man oughtn"t to fly if he ain"t fit."