The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie
She nodded.
‘Good, solid, genuine English,’ she murmured softly.
Mr Satterthwaite stared at her. He caught a meaning behind these words. The English room–the flaming beauty of the Chinese screen…No, it was gone again.
‘I met Miss Stanwell in the lane,’ he said conversationally. ‘She tells me she is going to be Pierrette in this show tonight.’
‘Yes, said Denman. ‘And she’s awfully good, too.’
‘She has clumsy feet,’ said Anna.
‘Nonsense,’ said her husband. ‘All women are alike, Satterthwaite. Can’t bear to hear another woman praised. Molly is a very good-looking girl, and so of course every woman has to have their knife into her.’
‘I spoke of dancing,’ said Anna Denman. She sounded faintly surprised. ‘She is very pretty, yes, but her feet move clumsily. You cannot tell me anything else because I know about dancing.’
Mr Satterthwaite intervened tactfully.
‘You have two professional dancers coming down, I understand?’
‘Yes. For the ballet proper. Prince Oranoff is bringing them down in his car.’
‘Sergius Oranoff?’
The question came from Anna Denman. Her husband turned and looked at her.
‘You know him?’
‘I used to know him–in Russia.’
Mr Satterthwaite thought that John Denman looked disturbed.
‘Will he know you?’
‘Yes. He will know me.’
She laughed–a low, almost triumphant laugh. There was nothing of the Dutch Doll about her face now. She nodded reassuringly at her husband.
‘Sergius. So he is bringing down the two dancers. He was always interested in dancing.’
‘I remember.’
John Denman spoke abruptly, then turned and left the room. Mr Quin followed him. Anna Denman crossed to the telephone and asked for a number. She arrested Mr Satterthwaite with a gesture as he was about to follow the example of the other two men.
‘Can I speak to Lady Roscheimer. Oh! it is you. This is Anna Denman speaking. Has Prince Oranoff arrived yet? What? What? Oh, my dear! But how ghastly.’
She listened for a few moments longer, then replaced the receiver. She turned to Mr Satterthwaite.
‘There has been an accident. There would be with Sergius Ivanovitch driving. Oh, he has not altered in all these years. The girl was not badly hurt, but bruised and shaken, too much to dance tonight. The man’s arm is broken. Sergius Ivanovitch himself is unhurt. The devil looks after his own, perhaps.’
‘And what about tonight’s performance?’
‘Exactly, my friend. Something must be done about it.’
She sat thinking. Presently she looked at him.
‘I am a bad hostess, Mr Satterthwaite. I do not entertain you.’
‘I assure you that it is not necessary. There’s one thing though, Mrs Denman, that I would very much like to know.’
‘Yes?’
‘How did you come across Mr Quin?’
‘He is often down here,’ she said slowly. ‘I think he owns land in this part of the world.’
‘He does, he does. He told me so this afternoon,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.
‘He is–’ She paused. Her eyes met Mr Satterthwaite’s. ‘I think you know what he is better than I do,’ she finished. ‘I?’
‘Is it not so?’
He was troubled. His neat little soul found her disturbing. He felt that she wished to force him further than he was prepared to go, that she wanted him to put into words that which he was not prepared to admit to himself.
‘You know!’ she said. ‘I think you know most things, Mr Satterthwaite.’
Here was incense, yet for once it failed to intoxicate him. He shook his head in unwonted humility.
‘What can anyone know?’ he asked. ‘So little–so very little.’
She nodded in assent. Presently she spoke again, in a queer brooding voice, without looking at him.
‘Supposing I were to tell you something–you would not laugh? No, I do not think you would laugh. Supposing, then, that to carry on one’s’–she paused–‘one’s trade, one’s profession, one were to make use of a fantasy–one were to pretend to oneself something that did not exist–that one were to imagine a certain person…It is a pretence, you understand, a make believe–nothing more. But one day–’
‘Yes?’ said Mr Satterthwaite.
He was keenly interested.
‘The fantasy came true! The thing one imagined–the impossible thing, the thing that could not be–was real! Is that madness? Tell me, Mr Satterthwaite. Is that madness–or do you believe it too?’
‘I–’ Queer how he could not get the words out. How they seemed to stick somewhere at the back of his throat.
‘Folly,’ said Anna Denman. ‘Folly.’
She swept out of the room and left Mr Satterthwaite with his confession of faith unspoken.
He came down to dinner to find Mrs Denman entertaining a guest, a tall dark man approaching middle age.
‘Prince Oranoff–Mr Satterthwaite.’
The two men bowed. Mr Satterthwaite had the feeling that some conversation had been broken off on his entry which would not be resumed. But there was no sense of strain. The Russian conversed easily and naturally on those objects which were nearest to Mr Satterthwaite’s heart. He was a man of very fine artistic taste, and they soon found that they had many friends in common. John Denman joined them, and the talk became localized. Oranoff expressed regret for the accident.
‘It was not my fault. I like to drive fast–yes, but I am a good driver. It was Fate–chance’–he shrugged his shoulders–‘the masters of all of us.’
‘There speaks the Russian in you, Sergius Ivanovitch,’ said Mrs Denman.
‘And finds an echo in you, Anna Mikalovna,’ he threw back quickly.
Mr Satterthwaite looked from one to the other of the three of them. John Denman, fair, aloof, English, and the other two, dark, thin, strangely alike. Something rose in his mind–what was it? Ah! he had it now. The first Act of the Walküre. Siegmund and Sieglinde–so alike–and the alien Hunding. Conjectures began to stir in his brain. Was this the meaning of the presence of Mr Quin? One thing he believed in firmly–wherever Mr Quin showed himself–there lay drama. Was this it here–the old hackneyed three-cornered tragedy?
He was vaguely disappointed. He had hoped for better things.
‘What has been arranged, Anna?’ asked Denman. ‘The thing will have to be put off, I suppose. I heard you ringing the Roscheimers up.’
She shook her head.
‘No–there is no need to put it off.’
‘But you can’t do it without the ballet?’
‘You certainly couldn’t have a Harlequinade without Harlequin and Columbine,’ agreed Anna Denman drily. ‘I’m going to be Columbine, John.’
‘You?’ He was astonished–disturbed, Mr Satterthwaite thought.
She nodded composedly.
‘You need not be afraid, John. I shall not disgrace you. You forget–it was my profession once.’
Mr Satterthwaite thought: ‘What an extraordinary thing a voice is. The things it says–and the things it leaves unsaid and means! I wish I knew…’
‘Well,’ said John Denman grudgingly, ‘that solves one half of the problem. What about the other? Where will you find Harlequin?’
‘I have found him–there!’
She gestured towards the open doorway where Mr Quin had just appeared. He smiled back at her.
‘Good lord, Quin,’ said John Denman. ‘Do you know anything of this game? I should never have imagined it.’
‘Mr Quin is vouched for by an expert,’ said his wife. ‘Mr Satterthwaite will answer for him.’
She smiled at Mr Satterthwaite, and the little man found himself murmuring:
‘Oh, yes–I answer for Mr Quin.’
Denman turned his attention elsewhere.
‘You know there’s to be a fancy dress dance
Mr Satterthwaite shook his head very decidedly.
‘My years will excuse me.’ A brilliant idea struck him. A table napkin under his arm. ‘There I am, an elderly waiter who has seen better days.’
He laughed.
‘An interesting profession,’ said Mr Quin. ‘One sees so much.’
‘I’ve got to put on some fool pierrot thing,’ said Denman gloomily. ‘It’s cool anyway, that’s one thing. What about you?’ He looked at Oranoff.
‘I have a Harlequin costume,’ said the Russian. His eyes wandered for a minute to his hostess’s face.
Mr Satterthwaite wondered if he was mistaken in fancying that there was just a moment of constraint.
‘There might have been three of us,’ said Denman, with a laugh. ‘I’ve got an old Harlequin costume my wife made me when we were first married for some show or other.’ He paused, looking down on his broad shirt front. ‘I don’t suppose I could get into it now.’
‘No,’ said his wife. ‘You couldn’t get into it now.’
And again her voice said something more than mere words.
She glanced up at the clock.
‘If Molly doesn’t turn up soon, we won’t wait for her.’
But at that moment the girl was announced. She was already wearing her Pierrette dress of white and green, and very charming she looked in it, so Mr Satterthwaite reflected.
She was full of excitement and enthusiasm over the forthcoming performance.
‘I’m getting awfully nervous, though,’ she announced, as they drank coffee after dinner. ‘I know my voice will wobble, and I shall forget the words.’
‘Your voice is very charming,’ said Anna. ‘I should not worry about it if I were you.’
‘Oh, but I do. The other I don’t mind about–the dancing, I mean. That’s sure to go all right. I mean, you can’t go very far wrong with your feet, can you?’
She appealed to Anna, but the older woman did not respond. Instead she said:
‘Sing something now to Mr Satterthwaite. You will find that he will reassure you.’
Molly went over to the piano. Her voice rang out, fresh and tuneful, in an old Irish ballad.
‘Shiela, dark Shiela, what is it that you’re seeing?
What is it that you’re seeing, that you’re seeing in the fire? ’
‘I see a lad that loves me–and I see a lad that leaves me,
And a third lad, a Shadow Lad–and he’s the lad that grieves me.’
The song went on. At the end, Mr Satterthwaite nodded vigorous approval.
‘Mrs Denman is right. Your voice is charming. Not, perhaps, very fully trained, but delightfully natural, and with that unstudied quality of youth in it.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed John Denman. ‘You go ahead, Molly, and don’t be downed by stage fright. We’d better be getting over to the Roscheimers now.’
The party separated to don cloaks. It was a glorious night and they proposed to walk over, the house being only a few hundred yards down the road.
Mr Satterthwaite found himself by his friend.
‘It’s an odd thing,’ he said, ‘but that song made me think of you. A third lad–a Shadow Lad–there’s mystery there, and wherever there’s mystery I–well, think of you.’
‘Am I so mysterious?’ smiled Mr Quin.
Mr Satterthwaite nodded vigorously.
‘Yes, indeed. Do you know, until tonight, I had no idea that you were a professional dancer.’
‘Really?’ said Mr Quin.
‘Listen,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. He hummed the love motif from the Walküre. ‘That is what has been ringing in my head all through dinner as I looked at those two.’
‘Which two?’
‘Prince Oranoff and Mrs Denman. Don’t you see the difference in her tonight? It’s as though–as though a shutter had suddenly been opened and you see the glow within.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Quin. ‘Perhaps so.’
‘The same old drama,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘I am right, am I not? Those two belong together. They are of the same world, think the same thoughts, dream the same dreams…One sees how it has come about. Ten years ago Denman must have been very good-looking, young, dashing, a figure of romance. And he saved her life. All quite natural. But now–what is he, after all? A good fellow–prosperous, successful–but–well, mediocre, Good honest English stuff–very much like that Hepplewhite furniture upstairs. As English–and as ordinary–as that pretty English girl with her fresh untrained voice. Oh, you may smile, Mr Quin, but you cannot deny what I am saying.’
‘I deny nothing. In what you see you are always right. And yet–’
‘Yet what?’
Mr Quin leaned forward. His dark melancholy eyes searched for those of Mr Satterthwaite.
‘Have you learned so little of life?’ he breathed.
He left Mr Satterthwaite vaguely disquieted, such a prey to meditation that he found the others had started without him owing to his delay in selecting a scarf for his neck. He went out by the garden, and through the same door as in the afternoon. The lane was bathed in moonlight, and even as he stood in the doorway he saw a couple enlaced in each other’s arms.
For a moment he thought–
And then he saw. John Denman and Molly Stanwell. Denman’s voice came to him, hoarse and anguished.
‘I can’t live without you. What are we to do?’
Mr Satterthwaite turned to go back the way he had come, but a hand stayed him. Someone else stood in the doorway beside him, someone else whose eyes had also seen.
Mr Satterthwaite had only to catch one glimpse of her face to know how wildly astray all his conclusions had been.
Her anguished hand held him there until those other two had passed up the lane and disappeared from sight. He heard himself speaking to her, saying foolish little things meant to be comforting, and ludicrously inadequate to the agony he had divined. She only spoke once.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t leave me.’
He found that oddly touching. He was, then, of use to someone. And he went on saying those things that meant nothing at all, but which were, somehow, better than silence. They went that way to the Roscheimers. Now and then her hand tightened on his shoulder, and he understood that she was glad of his company. She only took it away when they finally came to their destination. She stood very erect, her head held high.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I shall dance! Do not be afraid for me, my friend. I shall dance.’
She left him abruptly. He was seized upon by Lady Roscheimer, much bediamonded and very full of lamentations. By her he was passed on to Claude Wickam.
‘Ruined! Completely ruined. The sort of thing that always happens to me. All these country bumpkins think they can dance. I was never even consulted–’ His voice went on–went on interminably. He had found a sympathetic listener, a man who knew. He gave himself up to an orgy of self-pity. It only ended when the first strains of music began.
Mr Satterthwaite came out of his dreams. He was alert, once more the critic. Wickam was an unutterable ass, but he could write music–delicate gossamer stuff, intangible as a fairy web–yet with nothing of the pretty pretty about it.
The scenery was good. Lady Roscheimer never spared expense when aiding her protégés. A glade of Arcady with lighting effects that gave it the proper atmosphere of unreality.
Two figures dancing as they had danced through time immemorial. A slender Harlequin flashing spangles in the moonlight with magic wand and masked face…A white Columbine pirouetting like some immortal dream…
Mr Satterthwaite sat up. He had lived through this before. Yes, surely…
Now his body was far away from Lady Roscheimer’s drawing-room. It was in a Berlin Museum at a statuette of an immortal Columbine.
Harlequin and Columbine danced on. The wide world was theirs to dance in…
Moonlight–and a human figure. Pierrot wand
Pierrot wandering on through the wood…darkness…his voice dies away in the distance…
The village green–dancing of village girls–pierrots and pierrettes. Molly as Pierrette. No dancer–Anna Denman was right there–but a fresh tuneful voice as she sings her song ‘Pierrette dancing on the Green’.
A good tune–Mr Satterthwaite nodded approval. Wickham wasn’t above writing a tune when there was a need for it. The majority of the village girls made him shudder, but he realized that Lady Roscheimer was determinedly philanthropical.
They press Pierrot to join the dance. He refuses. With white face he wanders on–the eternal lover seeking his ideal. Evening falls. Harlequin and Columbine, invisible, dance in and out of the unconscious throng. The place is deserted, only Pierrot, weary, falls asleep on a grassy bank. Harlequin and Columbine dance round him. He wakes and sees Columbine. He woos her in vain, pleads, beseeches…
She stands uncertain. Harlequin beckons to her to begone. But she sees him no longer. She is listening to Pierrot, to his song of love outpoured once more. She falls into his arms, and the curtain comes down.
The second Act is Pierrot’s cottage. Columbine sits on her hearth. She is pale, weary. She listens–for what? Pierrot sings to her–woos her back to thoughts of him once more. The evening darkens. Thunder is heard…Columbine puts aside her spinning wheel. She is eager, stirred…She listens no longer to Pierrot. It is her own music that is in the air, the music of Harlequin and Columbine…She is awake. She remembers.
A crash of thunder! Harlequin stands in the doorway. Pierrot cannot see him, but Columbine springs up with a glad laugh. Children come running, but she pushes them aside. With another crash of thunder the walls fall, and Columbine dances out into the wild night with Harlequin.
Darkness, and through it the tune that Pierrette has sung. Light comes slowly. The cottage once more. Pierrot and Pierrette grown old and grey sit in front of the fire in two armchairs. The music is happy, but subdued. Pierrette nods in her chair. Through the window comes a shaft of moonlight, and with it the motif of Pierrot’s long-forgotten song. He stirs in his chair.