far as I'm concerned, is at an end.'
'Thank you, Bradley,' said Mr. Sheringham.
'So three cheers for our sleuth - like President,' continued Mr. Bradley with great heartiness, 'coupled with the name of Graham Reynard Bendix for the fine run he's given us. Hip, hip - - '
'And you say you've definitely proved the purchase of the typewriter, and the contact of Mr. Bendix with the sample - book at Webster's, Mr. Sheringham?' remarked Alicia Dammers, who had apparently been pursuing a train of thought of her own.
'I do, Miss Dammers,' said Roger, not without complacence.
'Would you give me the name of the typewriter - shop?'
'Of course,' Roger tore a page from his notebook and copied out the name and address.
'Thank you. And can you give me a description of the girl at Webster's who identified the photograph of Mr. Bendix? '
Roger looked at her a little uneasily; she gazed back with her usual calm serenity. Roger's uneasiness grew. He gave her as good a description of Webster's young woman as he could recall. Miss Dammers thanked him imperturbably.
'Well, what are we going to do about it all?' persisted Mr. Bradley, who seemed to have adopted the role of showman for his President. 'Shall we send a delegation to Scotland Yard consisting of Sheringham and myself, to break the news to them that their troubles are over? '
'You are assuming that everybody agrees with Mr. Sheringham?'
'Of course.' 'Isn't it customary to put this sort of question to a vote? ' suggested Miss Dammers coolly.
''Carried unanimously,'' quoted Mr. Bradley. 'Yes, do let's have the correct procedure. Well, then, Sheringham moves that this meeting do accept his solution of the Poisoned Chocolates Mystery as the right one, and send a delegation of himself and Mr. Bradley to Scotland Yard to talk pretty severely to the police. I second the motion. Those in favour . . .? Mrs. Fielder - Flemming?'
Mrs. Fielder - Flemming endeavoured to conceal her disapproval of Mr. Bradley in her approval of Mr. Bradley's suggestion. ' I certainly think that Mr. Sheringham has proved his case,' she said stiffly.
'Sir Charles?'
'I agree,' said Sir Charles, in stern tones, equally disapproving of Mr. Bradley's frivolity.
'Chitterwick?'
'I agree too.' Was it Roger's fancy, or did Mr. Chitterwick hesitate just a moment before he spoke, as if troubled by some mental reservation which he did not care to put into words? Roger decided that it was his fancy.
'And Miss Dammers?' concluded Mr. Bradley.
Miss Dammers looked calmly round the table. 'I don't agree at all. I think Mr. Sheringham's exposition was exceedingly ingenious, and altogether worthy of his reputation; at the same time I think it quite wrong. Tomorrow I hope to be able to prove to you who really committed this crime.'
The Circle gaped at her respectfully.
Roger, wondering whether his ears had not really been playing tricks with him, found that his tongue too utterly refused to work. An inarticulate sound oozed from him.
Mr. Bradley was the first to recover himself. 'Carried, non - unanimously. Mr. President, I think this is a precedent. Does anybody know what happens when a resolution is not carried unanimously? '
In the temporary disability of the President, Miss Dammers took it upon herself to decide. 'The meeting stands adjourned, I think,' she said.
And adjourned the meeting found itself.
CHAPTER XV
ROGER arrived at the Circle's meeting - room the next evening even more agog than usual. In his heart of hearts he could not believe that Miss Dammers would ever be able to destroy his case against Bendix, or even dangerously shake it, but in any event what she had to say could not fail to be of absorbing interest, even without its animadversions of his own solution. Roger had been looking forward to Miss Dammers's exposition more than to that of any one else.
Alicia Dammers was so very much a reflection of the age. Had she been born fifty years ago, it is difficult to see how she could have gone on existing. It was impossible that she could have become the woman - novelist of that time, a strange creature (in the popular imagination) with white cotton gloves, an intense manner, and passionate, not to say hysterical yearnings towards a romance from which her appearance unfortunately debarred her. Miss Dammers's gloves, like her clothes, were exquisite, and cotton could not have touched her since she was ten (if she ever had been); tensity was for her the depth of bad form; and if she knew how to yearn, she certainly kept it to herself. Passion and purple, one gathered, Miss Dammers found quite unnecessary to herself, if interesting phenomena in lesser mortals.
From the caterpillar in cotton gloves the woman - novelist has progressed through the stage of cook - like coccoondom at which Mrs. Fielder - Flemming had stuck, to the detached and serious butterfly, not infrequently beautiful as well as pensive, whose decorative pictures the illustrated weeklies are nowadays delighted to publish. Butterflies with calm foreheads, just faintly wrinkled in analytical thought. Ironical, cynical butterflies; surgeon - butterflies thronging the mental dissecting - rooms (and sometimes, if we must be candid, inclined to loiter there a little too long); passionless butterflies, flitting gracefully from one brightly - coloured complex to another. And sometimes completely humourless, and then distressingly boring butterflies, whose gathered pollen seems to have become a trifle mud - coloured.
To meet Miss Dammers and look at her classical, oval face, with its delicately small features and big grey eyes, to glance approvingly over her tall, beautifully dressed figure, nobody whose imagination was still popular would ever have set her down as a novelist at all. And that in Miss Dammers's opinion, coupled with the ability to write good books, was exactly what a properly - minded modern authoress should hope to achieve.
No one had ever been brave enough to ask Miss Dammers how she could hope successfully to analyse in others emotions which she had never experienced in herself. Probably because the plain fact confronted the enquirer that she both could and did. Most successfully.
'We listened last night,' began Miss Dammers, at five minutes past nine on the following evening, 'to an exceedingly able exposition of a no less interesting theory of this crime. Mr. Sheringham's methods, if I may say so, were a model to all of us. Beginning with the deductive, he followed this as far as it would take him, which was actually to the person of the criminal; he then relied on the inductive to prove his case. In this way he was able to make the best possible use of each method. That this ingenious mixture should have been based on a fallacy and therefore never had any chance of leading Mr. Sheringham to the right solution, is rather a piece of bad luck than his fault.'
Roger, who still could not believe that he had not reached the truth, smiled dubiously.
'Mr. Sheringham's reading of the crime,' continued Miss Dammers, in her clear, level tones, 'must have seemed to some of us novel in the extreme. To me, however, it was perhaps more interesting than novel, for it began from the same starting - point as the theory on which I myself have been working; namely, that the crime had not failed in its objective.' Roger pricked up his ears. 'As Mr. Chitterwick pointed out, Mr. Sheringham's whole case rested on the bet between Mr. and Mrs. Bendix. From Mr. Bendix's story of that bet, he draws the psychological deduction that the bet never existed at all. That is clever, but it is the wrong deduction. Mr. Sheringham is too lenient in his interpretation of feminine psychology. I began, I think I may say, with the bet too. But the deduction I drew from it, knowing my sister - women perhaps a little more intimately than Mr. Sheringham could, was that Mrs. Bendix was not quite so honourable as she was painted by herself.'
'I thought of that, of course,' Roger expostulated. 'But I discarded it on purely logical grounds. There's nothing in Mrs. Bendix's life to show that she wasn't honest, and everything to show that she was. And when there exists no evidence at all for the making of the bet beyond Bendix's bare word . . .'
'Oh, but there does,' Miss Dammers took him up. 'I've been spending most of today in establishing that point. I knew I should never really be able to shake you till I could definitely prove that there was a bet. Let me put
