Overlooked

"I must think it over," said Sabran. "For the present I do not see any completely satisfactory solution. I am convinced of one thing only, and that is that the novelist drew false deductions from facts which were perhaps sometimes correctly observed."

I said I agreed with him. Rudd's deductions were wrong; his facts were probably right in some cases; Sabran's deductions were right, I thought, as far as they went; but we either had not enough facts or not enough intuition to arrive at a solution of the problem.

As I was saying this, Sabran interrupted me and said:

"If we only knew what was in the letter that the Russian received when he was with you we should have the key of the enigma. It was from the moment that he received that letter that he was different, wasn't it?"

I said this was so, and what happened afterwards proved that it was not my imagination.

"What in the world can have been in that letter?" said Sabran.

I said I did not think we should ever know that.

"Probably not," he said, musingly. "And that incident about the story of the Brass Ring. Do you think that happened? Did they say all that?"

I was able to tell him exactly what had happened with regard to that incident.

"I was sitting in the garden. It was, I think, the morning after they had all been to the lakes, and about the middle of the day, after the band had stopped playing, shortly before déjeuner, that Rudd, Miss Brandon, Kranitski and Mrs. Summer all came and talked to me before I went into the hotel.

"Miss Brandon gave the copy of the Saturday Review, or whatever the newspaper was, back to Rudd, and mentioned the story of the 'Brass Ring,' and they discussed it, and I asked what it was about. Rudd was asked to read it aloud to us, and he did. Miss Brandon and Kranitski made no comments; and Rudd asked Kranitski if he thought the man had done right to throw away his ring, and Kranitski said: 'A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.'

"Rudd said: 'Perhaps the brass ring was the strongest link.'

"Kranitski and Miss Brandon said nothing, and Mrs. Summer said she was glad the man had not thrown the ring away. Then Rudd asked Miss Brandon whether she had ever thrown away her brass ring.

"Miss Brandon said she hadn't got one, and changed the subject. Then they all left me. That was all that happened."

"I understand," said Sabran; "that is interesting, and it helps us to understand the methods of the novelist. But we are still no nearer a solution. I must think it over. Que diable y avait-il dans cette lettre?"

THE PAPERS OF ANTHONY KAY – PART II

III

The more I thought over the whole story the more puzzling it seemed to me. The puzzle was increased rather than simplified by a letter which I received from Kranitski from Africa, in which he expressed no intention of coming back, but said he was living by himself, quite contented in his solitude.

I told Sabran of this letter and the Doctor said we were without one important donnée, some probably quite simple fact which would be the clue of the whole situation: the contents of the letter Kranitski had received when he was with me —

"What we want," he said, "is a moral Sherlock Holmes, to deduce what was in that letter – "

It was after I had been at Haréville about ten days, that Sabran asked me whether I would like to make the acquaintance of a Countess Yaskov. She was staying at Haréville and was taking the waters. He had only lately made her acquaintance himself, but she was dining with him and he wanted to ask a few people to meet her. I asked him what she was like. He said she was not exactly pretty, but gentle and attractive. He said: "Elle n'est pas vraiment jolie, mais elle a une jolie taille, de beaux yeux, et des perles."

She had been divorced from her husband for years and lived generally at Rome, so he had been told.

I went to Sabran's dinner. There were several people there. I had never met Countess Yaskov before. She seemed to be a very pleasant and agreeable lady. I sat next to her. She was an accomplished musician, and she played the pianoforte after dinner with a ravishing touch. She was certainly gentle, intelligent, and natural. We were talking of Italy, when she astonished me by saying she had not been there for some time. Later on she astonished me still more by talking of her husband in the most natural way in the world. But I had heard cases of Russians being divorced and yet continuing to be good friends. I longed to ask her if she knew Kranitski, but I could not bring his name across my lips. I asked her if she knew Princess Kouragine. She said, "Which one?" And when I explained or tried to describe the one I knew, there turned out to be about a dozen Princess Kouragines scattered all over Europe; some of them Russian and some of them not, so we did not get any further, and Countess Yaskov was vagueness itself.

We talked of every conceivable subject. As she was going away she asked Sabran if he could lend her a book. He lent her Rudd's Unfinished Dramas, and asked me if he might lend her Overlooked. I said certainly, but I explained that it was more or less a private book about real people.

Two or three days later I met her in the park. She asked me if I had read Rudd's story. I told her it had been read to me.

"But it is meant to happen here, isn't it?" she said. "And aren't you one of the characters?"

I said this was, I believed, the case.

"Then you were here when all that happened?" she said. "Did it happen like that, or was it all an invention?"

I said I thought there was some basis of fact in the story, and a great deal of fancy, but I really didn't know. I did not wish to let her know at once how much I knew.

"Novelists," I said, "invent a great deal on a very slender basis, especially James Rudd."

"You know him?" she said. "He was here with you, of course?"

I told her I had made his acquaintance here, but that I had never seen him before or since.

"What sort of man is he?" she asked.

I gave her a colourless, but favourable portrait of Rudd.

"And the young lady?" she said, "Miss – I've forgotten her name."

"The heroine?" I asked.

"Yes, the heroine who is 'overlooked.' Do you think she was 'overlooked'?"

"In what sense?"

"In the fairy-tale sense."

I said I thought that was all fancy-work.

"I wonder," she said, "if she married the young man."

"Which one?"

"The Englishman."

I said I had not heard of her being married.

"And was there a Russian here, too?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "his name was Kranitski."

"That sounds like a Polish name."

I said he was a Russian.

"You knew him, too?"

"Just a little."

"It is an interesting story," she said, "but I think Rudd makes all the characters more complicated than they probably were. Does Mr. Rudd know Russia?"

I said I believed not at all.

"I thought not," she said.

I said that Kranitski seemed to me a far simpler character than Rudd's Anikin.

"Did Dr. Sabran know all those people?" she asked.

I said Dr. Sabran had not been here while it was going on.

"It would be very annoying for that poor girl to find herself in a book," she said, "if he published it."

I said that Rudd would probably never publish it – although he would probably deny that he had made portraits, and to some extent with reason, as his Kathleen Farrel was quite unlike Miss Brandon.

"Oh, her name was Miss Brandon," Countess Yaskov said, pensively. "If she comes here this year you must introduce me to her. I think I should like her."

"Everyone said she was beautiful," I said.

"One sees that from the novel. I suppose James Rudd invented a character which he thought suited her face."

I said that that was exactly what had happened. Rudd had started with a theory about Miss Brandon, that she was such and such person, and he distorted the facts till they fitted with his theory. At least, that was what I imagined to have been the case.

I asked Countess Yaskov what she thought of the psychology of Rudd's Russian. I said she ought to be a good judge. She laughed and said:

"Yes, I ought to be a good judge. I think he is rather severe on the Slavs, don't you? He makes that poor Anikin so very complicated, and so very sly and fickle as well."

I said I thought the excuses which Rudd credited the Russian with making to himself for breaking off the engagement with the heroine of the book, were absurd.

"Do you think the Russian said those things or that the novelist invented them?" she asked.

I said I thought he had said what he was reported to have said.

"If he said that, he was not lying," she said.

I agreed, and I also thought he had said all that; but that Rudd's explanation of his words was wrong. If that was true he must have broken off his engagement.

"There is nothing very improbable in that, is there?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. And yet I thought that Kranitski had finished with whatever there was in the past that might have been an obstacle to his present.

"Did he tell you that?" she asked.

As she said that, although the tone of her voice was quite natural, almost too natural, there was a peculiar intonation in the way she said the word "he," in that word and that word only, which gave me the curious sensation of a veil being lifted. I felt I was looking through a hole in the clouds. I felt certain that Countess Yaskov had known Kranitski.

"He never told me one word that had anything to do with what Rudd tells in his novel," I said.

I felt that my voice was no longer natural as I said this. There was a strain in it. There was a pause. I do not know why I now felt certain that Countess Yaskov possessed the key of the mystery. I suddenly felt she was the woman whom Kranitski had known and loved for seven years, so much so, that I could say nothing further. I also felt that she knew that I knew. We talked of other things. In the course of the conversation I asked her if she thought of staying a long time at Haréville.

"It depends on my husband," she said. "I don't know yet whether he is coming here to fetch me, or whether he wants me to meet him. At any rate I shall go back to Russia for my boys' holidays. I have two sons at school."

The next time I saw Sabran I asked him what he had meant by telling me that Countess Yaskov was divorced from her husband. I told him what she had said to me about her husband and her sons. He did not seem greatly surprised; but he stuck to his point that she was divorced.

The next time I saw Countess Yaskov, she told me she had told a friend of hers about Rudd's story. Her friend had instantly recognized the character of Anikin.

"My friend tells me," she said, "that the novelist is quite false as far as that character is concerned, false and not fair. She said what happened was this: The man whom Rudd describes as Anikin had been in love for many years with a married woman. She was in love with him, too, but she did not want to divorce her husband, for various reasons. So they separated. They separated after having known each other a long time. Then the woman changed her mind and she settled she would divorce, and she let Anikin know. She wrote to him and said she was willing, at last, to divorce. My friend says it was complicated by other things as well. She did not tell me the whole story, but the man went to Africa and the woman did not divorce. What Anikin was supposed to have said to the novelist was true. He told the truth, and the novelist thought he was saying false things. That is what you thought, too. But all has been for the best in the end, because do you know what there is in to-day's Daily Mail?" she asked.

I said no one had read me the newspaper as yet.

"The marriage is announced," she said, "of Miss Brandon to a man called Sir Somebody Canning."

"That," said I, "is the Englishman in the book."

"So Mr. Rudd was wrong altogether," she said, and she laughed.

That is all that passed between us on this occasion, and I think this is a literal and complete transcription of our conversation. Countess Yaskov told me her story, the narrative of her friend, with perfect naturalness and with a quiet ease. She talked as if she were relating facts that had no particular personal interest for her. There was not a tremor in her voice, not an intonation, either of satisfaction or pain, nothing but the quiet impersonal interest one feels for people in a book. She might have been discussing Anna Karenina, or a character of Stendhal. She was neutral and impartial, an interested but completely disinterested spectator.

The tone of her voice was subtly different from what it had been the other day towards the end of our conversation. For during that conversation, admirably natural as she had been, and although her voice only betrayed her in the intonation of one syllable. I feel now, looking back on it, that she was not sure of herself, that she knew she was walking the whole time on the edge of a precipice.

This time I felt she was quite sure of herself; sure of her part. She was word-perfect and serenely confident.

Of course, what she said startled me. First of all, the soi-disant explanation of her friend. Had she told a friend about the story? I thought not. Indeed, I feel now quite certain that the friend was an invention, quite certain that she knew I had recognized her as the missing factor in the drama, and that she had wished me not to have a false impression of Kranitski. But at the time, while she was talking she seemed so natural that for the moment I believed, or almost believed, in the friend. But when she told me of Miss Brandon's marriage she furnished me with the explanation of her perfect acting, if it was acting. I thought it was the possession of this piece of news which enabled her to tell me that story so calmly and so dispassionately.

Of course I may still be quite wrong. I may be seeing too much. Perhaps she had nothing to do with Kranitski, and perhaps she did tell a friend. She has friends here.

Nevertheless I felt certain during our first conversation, at the moment I felt I was looking through the clouds, that she had been aware of it; aware that I had not been able to go on talking of the story as naturally as I had done before. Her explanation, what her friend was supposed to have said, fitted in exactly with my suppositions, and with what I already knew. Sabran had been right. The clue to the whole thing was the letter. The letter that Kranitski had received when he was talking to me and which had made so sudden a change in him was the letter from her, from Countess Yaskov, saying she was ready to divorce and to marry him. He received this letter just after he was engaged to be married to Miss Brandon. It put him in a terrible situation. This situation fitted exactly with what Rudd made him say to the novelist in the story: his obligation to the past conflicted with his inclination, namely, his desire to marry Miss Brandon.

Of course I might be quite wrong. It might all be my imagination. The next day I got a belated letter, from Miss Brandon, forwarded from Cadenabbia, telling me of her engagement. She said they were to be married at once, quite quietly. She knew it was no use asking me, but if I had been in London, etc. She made no other comments.

That evening I dined with Sabran. I told him the news about Miss Brandon, and I told him what Countess Yaskov had told me her friend had told her about the story.

"Half the problem is solved," he said. "The story of Countess Yaskov's friend explains the words which Rudd lends to the Russian. His inclination, which was to marry Miss Brandon, coincides with the religious duty of a croyant, which is not to marry a divorcée, and not to put himself once more outside the pale of the Church, but it clashes with his obligation, which is to be faithful to his friend of seven years. His inclination coincides with his duty, but his duty is in conflict with his obligation. What does he do? He goes away. Does he explain? Who knows? He was, indeed, in a fichu situation. And now Miss Brandon marries the young man. Either she had loved him all the time, or else, feeling her romance was over, she was marrying to be married. In any case, her novel, so far from being ended, is only just beginning. And the Russian? Was it a real amour or a coup-de-tête? Time will show. For himself he thought it was only a coup-de-tête: he will go back to his first love, but she will never divorce."

I asked him again whether he was sure that Countess Yaskov was divorced from her husband. He was quite positive. He knew it de source certaine. She had been divorced years ago, and she lived at Rome. I was puzzled. In that case, why did she try and deceive me, and at the same time if she wanted to deceive me why did she tell me so much? Why did she give me the key of the problem? I said nothing of that to Sabran. I saw it was no use.

A few days later, Countess Yaskov left Haréville. She told me she was going to join her husband. I did not remain long at Haréville after that. A few days before I left, Princess Kouragine arrived. I told her about Miss Brandon's marriage. She said she was not surprised. Canning deserved to marry her for having waited so long. "But," she said, "he will never light that lamp."

I asked her if she was sorry for Kranitski. She said:

"Very, but it could not be otherwise."

That is all she said. When I told her that I had made the acquaintance of Countess Yaskov, she said:

"Which one?"

I said it was the one who lived in Rome and who was separated from her husband.

The next day she said to me: "You were mistaken about Countess Yaskov. The Countess Yaskov who was here is Countess Irina Yaskov. She is not divorced, and she lives in Russia now. The one you mean is Countess Helene Yaskov. She lives at Rome. They are not relations even. You confused the two, because they both at different times lived at Rome." I now saw why I had been put off the scent for a moment by Sabran. I asked her if she knew my Countess Yaskov. She said she had met her, but did not know her well.

"She is a quiet woman," she said. "On dit qu'elle est charmante."

Just about this time I received a long letter from Rudd. He said he must publish Overlooked. He had been told he ought to publish it by everybody. He might, he said, just as well publish it, since printing five hundred copies and circulating them privately was in reality courting the maximum of publicity: the maximum in quality if not in quantity. By doing this, one made sure that the only people it might matter reading the book, read it. He did not care who saw it, in the provinces, in Australia, or in America. The people who mattered, and the only people who mattered, were friends, acquaintances and the London literary world, and now they had all seen it. Besides which, his series of unfinished dramas would be incomplete without it; and he did not think it was fair on his publisher to leave out Overlooked. "Besides which," he said, "it is not as if the characters in the books were portraits. You know better than anyone that this is not so." He ended up, after making it excruciatingly clear that he had irrevocably and finally made up his mind to publish, by asking my advice; that is to say, he wanted me to say that I agreed with him. I wrote to him and said that I quite understood why he had settled to publish the story, and I referred to Miss Brandon's marriage at the end of my letter. Before I heard from him again, I was called away from Haréville, and I had to leave in a hurry. It was lucky I did so, because I got away only just in time, either to avoid being compelled to remain at Haréville for a far longer time than I should have wished to do, or from having to take part in a desperate struggle for escape. The date of my departure was July 27th, 1914.

The morning I left I said good-bye to Princess Kouragine, and I reminded her that when I had said good-bye to her two years ago she had said to me, talking of Miss Brandon: "The man behaved well." I asked her which man she had meant. She said:

"I meant the other one."

"Which do you call the other one?" I asked.

She said she meant by the other one:

"Le grand amoureux."

I said I didn't know which of the two was the "grand amoureux."

"Oh, if you don't know that you know nothing," she said.

At that moment I had to go. The motor-bus was starting.

I feel that Princess Kouragine was right and that, after all, perhaps I know nothing.