A Case in Camera

Strictly speaking, it is not on the Santon headland that Charles Valentine ("Chummy") Smith ought to make his first appearance in this story; but it was there that I myself first saw him, and I want to give you my impression of him as I received it, if at the cost of taking a slight liberty with time. So I first set these eyes on him during a month I spent with the Esdailes somewhat later in that year.

I may say to begin with that he would probably have passed unnoticed among the innumerable other young men of to-day who at one time looked just a little civilian in their new uniforms but now wear their mufti again with a subtle but unmistakable difference. You know the young men I mean-they still speak of distances in kilometers, can talk for hours on end about motor-bicycles, and sprinkle their conversation with the jargon of ragtime French they are proud to share with their own privates and sappers and bombardiers. A year or so ago you went into a restaurant that was brown as a beechwood with khaki; you go there to-day and the khaki is gone-yet still hauntingly and mysteriously there, edging (as it were) the mufti with a faint rim like a color-print a little out of register. The ghost of khaki still clings about faces, movements, speech, the glances of eyes. Or if it isn't khaki it is the navy-and-gold, or Charles Valentine ("Chummy") Smith's unbelted sky-blue with the black cap-band.

He and Joan (in this little peep ahead which I am taking) were waiting for me on the platform of Santon Station. It was a week or so before the Company's Inter-Station Flower Competition-that annual Show that makes the whole line with its tiny stations as gay with flowers as a row of Thames houseboats. Geraniums and marguerites hung in boxes from the canopies; the sills of the porters' room were a rage of bloom; and lobelia and red bachelor's-buttons and white pebbles from the shore were set in patriotic emblems all the way from the booking-office to the signal-box, which alone was bare. As the train drew up I saw them standing together on the sunny platform, with a bower of ramblers over their heads and a heaven of larkspur behind them.

Charles Valentine Smith was for taking my two bags to the trap that waited at the level crossing, but peremptorily Joan pushed him away and called a porter. The presence of the trap did not mean that Chummy could not walk yet, for with the help of a stick he got about quite well, though the cliff-path down to the shore was still too much for him. And I may here mention, quite incidentally, the r?le I was apparently cast for in advance. "Auntie Joan" was supposed to take the children down to the shore every day. Charles Valentine Smith could not yet manage the shore climb. This necessarily meant a temporary separation. Two days later I was taking the children down to the shore. Whether Miss Joan had urged my invitation for that very purpose I cannot tell you.

So I was introduced to our young murderer, or he to me, I forget which of us was the personage in Joan's eyes, and we sought the trap. Joan drove, and paved the way for our better acquaintance by telling Mr. Smith, in these words, that I was "still young at heart." And her pleasant young assassin called me "Sir." I suppose I am entitled to be called "Sir" by these youngsters, but I am far from standing on my rights in this respect. He had his Joan, and I saw no reason for rubbing it in. People who go about murdering other people need not lay quite so much stress on the minor conventions.

"Yes, sir, thanks-practically all right again," he said as we bowled across that high world of flaming poppies and silky corn. "But I say-I'm afraid you'll have rather a crow to pluck with me."

All things considered, I thought one crow a particularly modest estimate; but "Oh?" I said inquiringly.

"Yes. I know it's your room, sir, and any old fleabag would do for me, but it's all Joan and Mrs. Esdaile. In fact, I carried all my gear out this morning, but they've toted everything back again."

"Oh, but he likes that little room at the end!" Joan cooingly reassured him. "He gets the morning sun, and it's beautifully cool in the afternoons--"

"If you mean that I'm in the habit of sleeping in the afternoons I wish to inform you that I'm not," I answered her coldly. "And if the room you speak of is that little cupboard place just above where the hens are fed--"

"Yes, that's the one," she answered with a darling smile. "I call it quite large, and I've put you one or two nice books to read, and I arranged the flowers myself. Come up, Robin!"

So Smith had the room that I, the introducer of these Esdaile people to my loved Santon, had hitherto always had, and I was given the one with the morning sun. You might suppose from Joan's words that the sun shone directly in, filling it with gayety and brightness. Not a bit of it. That morning sunlight she so extolled was a greenish and aquarium-like half light thrown up from the steep bit of paddock that comprised the whole of my view. And, lest I should oversleep, an enormous bronze cock, mounting to the little sloping roof of the hen-house below, was able to sound his clarion note practically on the drum of my ear.

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