Arrow Pointing Nowhere (5 page)

He returned to eat his own dinner. Was he getting an occupational disease, he wondered? This case, if it was a case, oppressed and frightened him. He couldn't settle down to other work, and after he had had his coffee he dragged on his outdoor things again and went doggedly into the dark streets. He walked uptown, approaching the Fenway house from the rear.

It reminded him of those pleasant old chromos that used to hang in pairs on cottage walls—
Life In The City, Life In The Country
. Here was
Life In The City
, its very tone and quality restored by the dim-out and the storm. The big, square brick house in its snowy grounds looked cosy and festive; yellow light from its windows filtered out on the whiteness of the garden, and on its bushes and leafless trees. One was a sycamore; each of the brown balls that adhered to its upper branches had a little cap of snow.

He went on to the corner. A taxi—it would no doubt have been a fine town car some days earlier, but the pleasure-driving ban was in force—drove up to the curb opposite the double flight of steps. Two silk-hatted men stepped out, and
one lady. She was furred to the ears in sable, with multicolored earrings just showing above her collar. She had dark hair, and a plain, dark, aquiline face.

“Be careful, Miss Fenway,” said one of the men, and the other raised an umbrella. Strange, hard times for these people.

The front door closed behind them. Gamadge lighted a cigarette and turned to walk home. A double shadow moved in front of him, the paler half of which did not seem to have any connection with the other or with himself. Like this phantom of a case, he thought; a dim, doubtful, formless thing that couldn't be accounted for unless one had special knowledge.

He went home and did some work. Clara and Sergeant Bantz came in, not very late; Harold looked gratified.

“Lipowitsky had a fine time,” he said. “Told me so. He thinks New York girls are fine.”

Gamadge, with a glance at his wife, said he was glad Lipowitsky wasn't disappointed.

“I suppose nothing more turned up about the case?” Harold asked it idly.

“Oh—one thing more. My client isn't Miss Caroline Fenway.”

A
T HALF PAST
two o'clock on Sunday, January 31st, Gamadge stood in bright sunshine, a book under his arm, and took a corner view of the Fenway house. Even in daylight it had a semiurban look; he could imagine ladies with parasols walking in the garden on fine afternoons, and old Mr. Fenway driving down to business every morning in a barouche.

He strolled down the side street, past the double flight of stone steps. There was the bay window; there, below and in front of it, the spot where the paper balls had lain. Beyond stretched the high brick wall with the dark-green door in it. He mounted the nearer flight and looked into a neatly paved side yard, with shrubs and a row of trees against the wall that divided the Fenway grounds from the next house.

He rang, and entered a Pompeian vestibule with painted walls and ceiling. Black-and-white marble was underfoot, and facing him were ponderous walnut doors, their upper halves of glass frosted in pseudoclassic designs. The Fenways certainly had the sense of the past. A very old manservant admitted
him, said that Mr. Fenway expected him, and took away his hat and coat; he retained his book, however, carrying it with what he hoped was an absent-minded air as he followed the old butler down the hall.

He had a glimpse into immense reaches of drawing room on the left, of a bay-windowed dining room on the right. A broad stairway rose into dimness; at the turn of the second-floor landing he saw a niche, with Psyche (marble) holding a lamp. Oil lamp; they couldn't very well wire Psyche.

At the end of the hall a glassed door let in a filtered, grayish light; by it could be distinguished a door under the stairs (coat cupboard?) another beyond (back drawing room?) and two opposite. The butler opened the last of these.

“Mr. Gamadge.”

Gamadge entered a fine big library, panelled and celled in oak, with two windows looking out on the lawn, and a bay window overlooking the side garden. A slender man came forward; clean-shaven, gray-haired, with a long, well-shaped head and kind blue eyes. The aquiline features that made his daughter a plain woman made Blake Fenway a handsome man; he was excellently dressed in the darkest town clothes.

“This is a very great pleasure, Mr. Gamadge.” He shook hands with Gamadge, who replied that he was aware he owed it to Miss Vauregard.

“Not at all, I am delighted to have the opportunity of meeting you. Your books—really extraordinary. Literary detection. Absorbing.”

“Great fun to do.” Gamadge glanced about him; at the high bookshelves with their cupboards and their glass doors, surmounted by busts of classical lawgivers and writers; at solid furniture, red-velvet curtains and upholstery, impressive bric-a-brac, a thick old Turkey rug. There was a portrait above the mantel, with Blake Fenway's features but a thinner and less agreeable mouth.

There was a coffee table in front of the fire. The butler came in from a door in the north wall, carrying a tray and an after-dinner coffee service. He set it down.

“Thank you, Phillips, and you needn't wait,” said Fenway. “Mr. Gamadge, will you have that chair?”

Gamadge sat down in the chair opposite Fenway's, and accepted a cigar. Phillips went away; Fenway poured coffee. When Gamadge had his cup, Fenway glanced—not for the first time—at the book which Gamadge had laid on the little table beside him.

“Have you brought something to show me?” he asked. “I hope so.”

“It's just something I borrowed—to read.”

“I'm afraid I don't keep up with the current authors as I should. My daughter warns me that that's a sign of advancing years, and that I ought to fight the tendency.” He smiled. “She says fiction gives one the contemporary background. Well, Caroline is always right; but when I read fiction, I want fiction, you know; I don't want a document!”

“There's a lot to be said for your point of view. But even your favorites—” Gamadge's eye wandered along the shelves nearest him—“even they don't quite keep their social bias out of their novels.”

“Perhaps,” laughed Fenway, “mine is the same as theirs!”

“Let's see them.”

They walked from section to section of the cases, stopping to glance at the books Mr. Fenway pulled out, discussing certain finds and special treasures. At last, when they had reached the end of the east wall, Gamadge said: “There's your
Elsie Venner
, I see. All correct, I suppose, misprint and all.”

Mr. Fenway looked mortified. “I'm ashamed to say it isn't. I had no idea ours wasn't the real, right thing until Hall enlightened me. It really makes me very restless not to have the right one; with everything else right, you know. But I
don't feel justified in indulging a hobby these days, with such a crying want of money for the war needs.”

Gamadge said: “I have the real right one.”

“You have!” Mr. Fenway gazed at him with baffled longing.

“And I don't in the least want it. Look here, Mr. Fenway; why shouldn't we do a trade?”

“A trade? What can I possibly have that you do want?”

“Well, you have a duplicate
William Henry Letters
. Mine was read to pulp when I was a boy. If you cared to part with one of them, and with your
Elsie Venner
—”

“You don't mean it? The deal wouldn't be at all a fair one.”

“I can consult J. Hall. There won't be much cash difference.”

“My dear Mr. Gamadge, you really have no idea what a favor you're doing me.”

“None at all, but I know how you feel. I used to buy firsts myself.”

“I'll have the books sent down to your house today, and the man can pick up your Holmes.”

“Not at all; I'll take them with me in a cab, and bring your book along tonight or tomorrow.”

“What fun it all is—these discoveries and coincidences! And what a piece of luck for me! I must tell Caroline about it, and my sister-in-law and her friend Mrs. Grove will be much interested too. They're looking forward to meeting you in any case. When we've finished here we'll go up.”

Gamadge was a little amused and much gratified to find that he had passed his examinations; but there was a final one to come. It came while Fenway closed the glass door of the last bookshelf:

“I believe you do your duty as a citizen in a way that few of us are qualified to do it,” he said. “Our firm has never practised in the criminal branch of the law, but we have always had the highest respect for those who face the more disagreeable aspects of it—and for criminologists in general.”

Gamadge, laughing, said that he never hoped to hear a handsomer tribute to detective investigation. He added: “I'm afraid the puzzle element in it is the element that attracts me. I can't profess to be actuated by loftier motives when I take a case.”

Mr. Fenway seemed delighted. “A hobby; I thought so!”

“But not,” said Gamadge, “exactly a sport.”

“No, no; it could never be that. You don't—” Mr. Fenway hesitated, and then went on in an apologetic tone—“you don't do this work professionally?”

Gamadge laughed again. “I've been retained, sometimes, but now I come to think of it I've never been paid yet!”

Mr. Fenway was more pleased than ever, but he grew grave. “I always like to find that we are not entirely commercial now, but you put me in something of a quandary. I have a little problem of my own which I should be very glad to consult you about, but if I consulted another lawyer, or a doctor, I should expect to reimburse him for giving me the benefit of his experience.”

“I have no professional standing, Mr. Fenway; and as I said, I like little problems.” Gamadge hoped that he did not sound eager. “Let me hear what yours is. But if it's about books, you know, I'm no expert; J. Hall's your man.”

Fenway said: “Hall has no opinion on the matter, and I don't suppose even you will have one. However.” He turned to a long table in the embrasure of the west window. It was heaped with what looked like an odd lot of books, some not entirely out of their wrappings; two slender dark-green quartos lay among them.

He lifted first one and then the other. “Now what,” he murmured, “can Caroline have done with Volume III?”

“Can I help, sir?”

“No, no. This is the last lot that little Hilda Grove sent down from Fenbrook. Such a good child. Now where on earth… Wait! I remember.”

He crossed the room to a buhl table at the right of the hall door; its surface was almost hidden by a large, flat-topped coffer of metal thickly inlaid with ivory; Fenway raised the lid.

“Here it is,” he said, and withdrew another of the dark-green books, which Gamadge now saw to be bound in velvet.

“If you'll just sit down again, Mr. Gamadge, and look at this?”

Gamadge resumed his seat beside the fire, and took the quarto on his knees. It was lettered in gold:
Views On The Hudson
.

Fenway sat down opposite him; he watched him open it, glance at the charmingly colored frontispiece, and then look at the title page.

Views On The Hudson
, he read,
With Descriptions by Several Hands. In Four Volumes. Coloured Plates by Pidgeon. 1835
. He turned leaves. “What a nice set.”

Fenway looked sad, “It was a nice set, Mr. Gamadge. If you'll turn to page 50…”

On page 50 Gamadge read: “Description of Fenbrook; the old Fenway residence near Peekskill. By Julian Fenway, Esq.” He lifted his eyes to his host. “Was that your grandfather, sir?”

“That was my grandfather.”

“But there seems to be no picture of Fenbrook here.”

“No; as you see, it has been torn out.”

Gamadge discerned a trace of ragged edge where the plate had been, and another trace of its protective tissue. He said: “This is shocking!”

“You can imagine how I felt, when I looked for the picture and found that it was gone. But perhaps you can't, unless you happen to know that the original house was torn down in
1849, and that that view was all we had left of old Fenbrook. The set is irreplaceable; some of the landowners combined and had the books made and the views taken; there is none, Hall thinks, on the market. Fenbrook was a plain little house, and my grandfather doesn't seem to have cared much about it; he let a friend have it and the rest of that property; my father never saw it.”

Gamadge expressed his sympathy by a groan.

“The poor old gentleman,” continued Fenway, “my grandfather, of course I mean, didn't do badly in the financial sense by the deal; he bought property here and in Westchester county, and in the 60's he built himself this house and the new Fenbrook; they were, I can assure you, the latest thing. You should have seen the delightful house downtown that my father was born in! That went, too. So now we have this, which even to me, with all my sentiment for it, isn't a model of architectural beauty; and one of the same period up the Hudson, completely suburban of course, and (I can assure you) well bracketed!”