The Red Lacquer Case

Chapter OneThe front door of Sally Meredith’s cottage opened straight into the living room. There were a red brick floor, very clean, a much worn Persian rug, and a big open fireplace. Of the two large chairs only one was really comfortable, but M. Frederic Lasalle who occupied it was not really being fair to its well cushioned curves. He sat on the extreme edge, elbow on knee, chin in hand, and looked frowningly into the fire. Sally thought him altered. His round face was not as rosy as it should have been, but, after all, seven years were seven years, and those between 1914 and 1921 might well count for double. Sally was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, her lap full of papers which she was sorting. On her right she made a small pile of those she wished to keep. On her left a rubbish heap grew apace. “It’s exactly like dips in a lucky bag,” she said. “Cousin Eliza kept everything, and I never know whether I’m going to come across a five-pound note or an invitation to tea in the sixties.” She unfolded a yellow paper as she spoke, and read aloud the endorsement. “ ‘My honoured grandmother’s recipe for making black currant jelly. Very economical.’ I’ll keep that.” She laid it down on her right, and Lasalle, leaning forward, picked it up and began to read “Take nine pounds of black currants and nine scant pints of water”—there he stopped, remained looking for a moment at the paper, and then said: “This old Cousin Eliza, was she good to you? Have you been happy here?” Sally looked up. Her very candid eyes held a little humour. “Oh, well,” she said, “she simply hated me because I had to do things for her, and she’d always been so frightfully independent. It was very decent of her to leave me everything—” “Two years you were with her?” said M. Lasalle. Sally nodded. He rose and walked over to the fire, a little man frowning vigorously. When he had pushed the log with his foot he said: “And why were you with her at all? Why do I not find you married?” Sally’s colour rose a little. “Alas, Fritzi, we are both bachelors,” she said. M. Lasalle snorted. “When last we met,” he said, “you were happily and suitably betrothed. To me also it was a happiness. I thought ‘Youth is headstrong, but now all will be well.’ Always you were a trouble to my mind. Always I felt you a so sacred trust; for, see you, Sally, when your mother was dying she said to me, very soft and earnest, ‘Fritzi, we have not been step-brother and sister, you and I, but nearer and dearer than the brothers and sisters of one blood’—and because of that you are to me, in my heart, as if the good God had given me a child, and when you are hurt I am hurt—” He ran his fingers through his thick grey hair, kicked the log violently, and concluded in a tone of wrath. “We speak just now of your cousin—I can see she made you no happiness, but I can forgive her before I forgive the other woman who has spoiled your life and broken your betrothal—that Mrs. Stevens-Vine—” “Vine-Stevens,” murmured Sally. “What does it matter, her name? It is what she has done. To drag a child innocent, unknowing, into an affair of politics—do I say politics—madness rather, and of a publicity, of a scandal—it is this she has done to you, and I forgive her never.” “Just what the magistrate said,” said Sally sweetly—“and Bill, and the relations and everyone.” “Speak not to me of her—never. As for your Cousin Eliza—phui—an old maid! Will you be one too?” Sally regarded him with a dangerous smile. “Fritzi darling, you are quite out of date. There aren’t any old maids now.” “And no suffragettes?” He hurled the question at her with violence. “Why, no, since we have the vote.” “The vote!” said Lasalle very angrily. “It makes you happy, that vote? It warms your heart? It is your companion, your support, that vote?” “Fritzi,” said Sally steadily, “you’re being a beast.” M. Lasalle ruffled his hair again, with both plump hands this time. “Yes, yes, my child; but it is because I care. One is not angry like that unless one cares. If I were the step-uncle who does not care, I would shrug my shoulders and say: “ ‘It is a pity of my niece Sally Meredith. She was betrothed to a fine young man—oh, some years ago now, before the war; and she obstinates herself to be a suffragette, and to break windows with a hammer, and in public places to cry aloud “Votes for Women.” Sequel, she is arrested, she is in your Bow Street police court—what will you have? The betrothal is broken—what does it matter to me? It is a pity, that is all.’ ” Then, with a complete change of manner: “Like that I cannot speak, Sally. I have a heart that is torn until I know how it is with you.” There was a silence. The ash dropped in the fire. The room was nearly dark. Sally folded her papers, got up, and began to light the lamps. With her back to M. Lasalle, she said: “Fritzi, it’s dear of you to care.” Then with a noticeable effort—“It’s all such ages ago; need we dig it up?” “He is alive?” “Yes, he came through the war all right.” “Do you see him, hear from him?” “Oh, no.” Sally adjusted the lamp shades and turned, smiling: “Fritzi, you’re an incurable Victorian romantic. Do stop digging, and come and be comfortable.” She altered the angle of the big chair, patted it invitingly, and said, “Let’s talk about you for a change. You know you’re ever so much nicer and more interesting than me. What have you been inventing?” M. Lasalle sat down without speaking. Cousin Eliza’s recipe still lay where he had dropped it when he rose so abruptly. He bent now, and picked it up, folding and refolding it in an odd, absent-minded manner. “Yes,” he said after a long pause. “Let us speak about me, but it is not a comfortable thing to speak of, this me.” Sally threw a big cushion on the floor, and sat down on it cross-legged. The little room was full of a warm glow. Yellow shades made the lamplight golden. M. Lasalle sat with the lamp at his elbow, and behind him three little windows showed a strip of sky still warmed by the sunset. “See then, Sally, if I speak of you, if I tease you, if I am, as you say, ‘brute’ to you, it is because—” He broke off sharply, stared at her out of round blue eyes, and then began again. “There are two of me, Sally. There is the old uncle whom you call Fritzi, kind and peaceable, a good citizen of his Switzerland, a man to be envied, a man, as you say—comfortable. Then there is the other—he who is Lasalle, chemist, inventor, man of science pure and simple. Up to now he, too, has been happy, as one is happy when he does the work which he loves beyond all the world. I say up to now, for now there has come upon this other me, this one who is Lasalle the man of science—” “Fritzi, what is it?” said Sally. Her breath came a little faster, her eyes widened. She looked at him with concern and great affection. “It is—I do not know how to call it—tragedy? Perhaps. A strain beyond what I can bear? Certainly. And this for weeks, Sally, until there is no Fritzi any more, but only this tormented Lasalle. But when I come here and speak of you and think of you—then I am Fritzi again, just for a little. Oh, mon Dieu, the relief! And you say, ‘Fritzi, let us talk of you and be comfortable.’ ” He had taken the same uncomfortable attitude as before—on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, one hand propping his head, the other closing and unclosing on the half sheet of paper which he had picked up. Sally rose to her knees, and put her hand over his. “Fritzi, for goodness gracious sake, what is it?” He pushed her away from him gently. “I am telling you, but you must stay still. You asked me of my work. Have I invented, have I discovered? And it is as if you struck me upon a wound. And I say, ‘Yes, I have worked, I have invented, I have discovered.’ And like a fool, I was happy. You are not an inventor, Sally; you do not know how one is plunged in it and lost. One does not think what will I do with this. One thinks only ‘This is mine; here no one has passed; I am the first.’ ” He gave a sort of groan. “It was like that with me. It was a gas that I have found, like nothing else, swift, sudden, and deadly beyond what words can describe. Then when the discovery is complete, and I have made my experiments, I think, ‘What to do?’ I come out of that work dream so absorbing, and I begin to reason, ‘My own country, Switzerland, she is neutral for ever. Thank God she needs no poison gases.’ After my own country I think of England. With all my heart I love her, and with all my heart I believe that she loves peace. I think to myself, ‘England shall have this secret.’ And I write to your War Office. All that takes time. We write backwards and forwards, we have conversations. And you will understand I am not yet troubled. Then something happens; there come to me in three separate ways offers from other nations. I say ‘No!’ to them. I will not correspond and will not talk. I say they are misinformed. They do not take my answer. First in small ways, and then in big, I am pressed. I cannot describe it; but I begin to feel ‘What have I here? What forces are stirring? And can I resist them?’ ” His voice sank to a whisper. Sally stared at him, her face quite pale. After a moment’s pause he spoke again, a sudden energy in his voice. “After that there began the spying. I cannot tell you. I came to think there were no honest people left. I will tell you of one. He was a refugee from Poland, a youth, violinist by profession, and he came to me with an introduction from one whose name I will not say, because it is a name much honoured. He was sickly and penniless, and for the sake of that honoured name I took him into my house, I got for him engagements and in a week I find him in my laboratory at three in the morning, trying to open, with a false key, my desk. He is impudent beyond words. He says that all these machines of mine inspire his genius, that he has the wish to compose a Symphonie Chemique, music futuristic and explosive. I tell him that my machines are to inspire my genius, mine, and not that of chance-come musicians who violate the most sacred laws of hospitality. He departs. But he is only one. I am never safe, I am never free. I say to your War Office that I will come over here, and they must make haste and complete our negotiations. And all the time my trouble becomes greater. I think; I see what it is that I have made, what a fearful thing in wicked hands. And I see how, all the wicked ones of the world, they will never rest until they have it too. I begin to be torn, Sally; I begin to be torn. With all my heart I believe that England guards the peace of the world, and at one moment I think that with this weapon she can guard it safely. Next moment I think of all those others, those who wish for war, driven along terrible paths by what they call ambition. And I think that once this thing is loose in the world they will not rest until they have it too. I shall have set the pattern, and they will work and work until they can follow it. And my dreams—mon Dieu, Sally, my dreams!” He shuddered violently, and was silent. Sally watched him with a little frown. “Poor old Fritzi,” she said at last. “But if you feel like that, why go on with it? Why not cut the whole thing out, and invent some nice beneficent-uncle sort of thing instead? You know, I don’t think poison gas is in your line, I really don’t.” M. Lasalle threw out his hands with an impatient gesture. “You sit there comfortably, and tell me that! To you it is so easy. There is a formula written down, no more than half a sheet of paper, which will burn in five seconds; a match, a flame, a little white ash, and the devils that are plaguing me go back to hell and stay there. To you it seems like that?” “Well, why not?” said Sally. She had locked her arms about her knees, and was rocking gently to and fro. Her eyes were sorry for Fritzi who was in trouble; her vivid lips were pressed together in a smile that was just a little scornful. “Yes, to you it is easy; but for me, I am torn, I walk in a fog and cannot see my way, and in the fog are voices that always say a different thing. When I listen to one, and am at the point when I will destroy everything because of the voice which says ‘Destroy!’ then comes another voice that says: ‘You have gone too far. You are pledged in your honour. To draw back now, it is impossible.’ And so it goes by day, by night, and I have no rest. But to you it seems easy—Would you like to make such a decision, Sally? Would you find it easy then, do you think?” Sally’s lips parted on a quickened breath. Colour flickered in her cheeks, and then died again. “See here,” said M. Lasalle. He undid coat buttons, waistcoat buttons, and appeared to be wrestling with some further complex fastening. In the end, and not without a struggle, he brought into view what appeared to be a cigar case made of red lacquer deeply carved. “Look, Sally, look well, for in all the world there is not another like it. When I was young I went once to China, and there a very strange thing happened to me, a thing that I tell to no one, ever. I bring away that secret memory and this case, and until now my life has been so easy, so placid—like a Dutch canal. And now, when a thing terrible and tragic comes to me again, I put the secret of it here inside this case which comes with me from China.” He turned, and with a quick movement flung back the falling frill of yellow silk which shaded the lamp, leaving half the little room fully illumined. “Now see, come close and see, Sally, whilst I show you what no one in all this world knows except myself. Look well, and remember; for, if anything should happen to me, you will have need to remember.” Sally caught the arm of the chair, and pulled herself into a kneeling position. M. Lasalle bent forward, the red lacquer case in his left hand, and over his shoulder the lamplight fell upon it full, and Sally saw the pattern of raised roses and fishes with goggling eyes. Fritzi was speaking in a quick, eager voice. “Here, in this case, is my secret, my formula; nowhere else, nowhere at all, excepting only in my brain. Now see, Sally, this is the secret of the case. You touch here and here, pressing, and, with the other hand touching this flower on one side and this on the other, you pull. Easy, is it not?” The case slid into two halves, opening as a card-case opens, but along an irregular line. Metal showed at the edges. From the larger half a piece of paper protruded. M. Lasalle touched it with his forefinger lightly. “Just a sheet of note paper,” he said, “like this one.” Cousin Eliza’s recipe still lay folded on the broad arm of the chair, and he touched it with the same finger, the same gesture. “A sheet of paper and a little ink. They are the same to look at—but one will fill your jam cupboard, and the other will kill you and a million men.” He shut the case. The irregular edges came together with just the faintest click. Sally looked with all her eyes, but the opening had vanished. “Clever, is it not? Now, do you remember what I showed you? Take it, and let me see you open it.” Sally took the case, held it as she had seen M. Lasalle hold it, touched what she had seen him touch; and in a moment his strained gaze saw the tiny crack appear, widen—and Sally with a half of the case in either steady hand. She looked up, smiling in triumph, and saw the sweat stand on his brow. It seemed a long time before he said rather loudly: “Mon Dieu, what a chance!” Then, as Sally stared—“I only told you half. If you had put just one of your fingers on the wrong place, if you had made any mistake at all, if you had tried to open it by force, there is a spring inside which would release enough acid to destroy that clever paper of mine. The acid is in a glass-lined compartment up here; and I said to myself, ‘I will take the chance. If she makes a mistake, and the paper is destroyed, I will take it for an omen.’ And you made no mistake.” Sally, kneeling upright before him, had been gazing first at the case and then at his face with its harassed, altered look. But suddenly she looked past him over his shoulder at the three uncurtained windows a bare five feet away. They were black now, for the last of the glow was utterly gone. The unshaded lamplight struck them full. Sally looked, and caught her breath. There was a hand pressed against the glass of the left-hand window, a large hand that looked unnaturally white, the blood driven from it by the pressure of a man’s weight upon it. The light showed the pale fingers—thick, long fingers—and the still paler palm crossed by a dark, jagged scar. Just in the instant that Sally caught her breath the hand slipped on the glass. She heard the sharp sound of it on the wet pane, and screamed. Instantly the hand was gone. She heard the gravel grate under a heavy foot, and, as M. Lasalle sprang up with a violent start, she screamed again.