The Disentanglers Part 4

'I don't know yet,' said Miss Martin, 'it just comes as I go on. It has just got to come. It is a fourteen hours a day business. All writing. I crib things from the French. Not whole stories. I take the opening situation; say the two men in a boat on the river who hook up a sack. I don't read the rest of the Frenchman, I work on from the sack, and guess what was in it.'

'What was in the sack?'

'_In the Sack_! A name for a story! Anything, from the corpse of a freak (good idea, corpse of a freak with no arms and legs, or with too many) to a model of a submarine ship, or political papers. But I am tired of corpses. They pervade my works. They give "a _bouquet_, a fragrance," as Mr. Talbot Twysden said about his cheap claret.'

'You read the old Masters?'

'The obsolete Thackeray? Yes, I know him pretty well.'

'What are you publishing just now?'

'This to an author? Don't you know?'

'I blush,' said Logan.

'Unseen,' said Miss Martin, scrutinising him closely.

'Well, you do not read the serials to which I contribute,' she went on.

'I have two or three things running. There is _The Judge's Secret_.'

'What was that?'

'He did it himself.'

'Did what?'

'Killed the bishop. He is not a very plausible judge in English: in French he would be all right, a _juge d'instruction_, the man who cross- examines the prisoners in private, you know.'

'Judges don't do that in England,' said Logan.

'No, but this case is an exception. The judge was such a very old friend, a college friend, of the murdered bishop. So he takes advantage of his official position, and steals into the cell of the accused. My public does not know any better, and, of course, I have no reviewers. I never come out in a book.'

'And why did the judge a.s.sa.s.sinate the prelate?'

'The prelate knew too much about the judge, who sat in the Court of Probate and Divorce.'

'Satan reproving sin?' asked Logan.

'Yes, exactly; and the bishop being interested in the case--'

'No scandal about Mrs. Proudie?'

'No, not that exactly, still, you see the motive?'

'I do,' said Logan. 'And the conclusion?'

'The bishop was not really dead at all. It takes some time to explain.

The _corpus delicti_--you see I know my subject--was somebody else. And the bishop was alive, and secretly watching the judge, disguised as Mr.

Sherlock Holmes. Oh, I know it is too much in d.i.c.kens's manner. But my public has not read d.i.c.kens.'

'You interest me keenly' said Logan.

'I am glad to hear it. And the penny public take freely. Our circulation goes up. I asked for a rise of three pence on the thousand words.'

'Now this _is_ what I call literary conversation,' said Logan. 'It is like reading _The British Weekly Bookman_. Did you get the threepence?

if the inquiry is not indelicate.'

'I got twopence. But, you see, there are so many of us.'

'Tell me more. Are you serialising anything else?'

'Serialising is the right word. I see you know a great deal about literature. Yes, I am serialising a featured tale.'

'A featured tale?'

'You don't know what that is? You do not know everything yet! It is called _Myself_.'

'Why _Myself_?'

'Oh, because the narrator did it--the murder. A stranger is found in a wood, hung to a tree. n.o.body knows who he is. But he and the narrator had met in Paraguay. He, the murdered man, came home, visited the narrator, and fell in love with the beautiful being to whom the narrator was engaged. So the narrator la.s.soed him in a wood.'

'Why?'

'Oh, the old stock reason. He knew too much.'

'What did he know?'

'Why, that the narrator was living on a treasure originally robbed from a church in South America.'

'But, if it _was_ a treasure, who would care?'

'The girl was a Catholic. And the murdered man knew more.'

'How much more?'

'This: to find out about the treasure, the narrator had taken priest's orders, and, of course, could not marry. And the other man, being in love with the girl, threatened to tell, and so the la.s.so came in handy.

It is a Protestant story and instructive.'

'Jolly instructive! But, Miss Martin, you are the Guy Boothby of your s.e.x!'

At this supreme tribute the girl blushed like dawn upon the hills.

'My word, she is pretty!' thought Logan; but what he said was, 'You know Mr. Tierney, your neighbour? Out of a job as a composition master.

Almost reduced to University Extension Lectures on the didactic Drama.'

Tierney was talking eagerly to his neighbour, a fascinating lady laundress, _la belle blanchisseuse_, about starch.

Further off a lady instructress in cookery, Miss Frere, was conversing with a tutor of bridge.