Appleby nodded. “I hardly supposed otherwise. But please begin.”
“It’s going to sound very queer.” Richard Poole put his hands in his trouser-pockets and paced nervously across the hall. “Perhaps you know that I’m an actor by profession? In other words, my regular concern is with illusion – with creating and sustaining one or another pleasurable illusion. And that is what, together with a group of friends, I set myself to do here last night. My motive was entirely benevolent and disinterested.”
Miss Jones gave a sardonic laugh. “What you call a charity matinée with an all-star cast?”
“We were none of us stars and it wasn’t a matinée. The curtain had to go up at night – and any old night wouldn’t do. It had to be a
dark
night. If too much had appeared – if the illusion had failed, you see – well, it would have been just too bad. As it was, only a very remarkable combination of circumstances made it possible.”
Appleby nodded. “Do I understand you to believe, Mr Poole, that this benevolent illusion did in fact pass off successfully?”
“I certainly supposed so. The only snag was its turning out that I might be suspected of having a motive that I’d never thought of. Quite suddenly, and out of the blue, I was presented with a totally unexpected moral issue. I failed to cope with it. It’s before me still.”
“I wonder.” Miss Jones, although she had the appearance of one who feels it desirable to keep her own counsel, allowed herself this enigmatical interjection with some emphasis. “But go on.”
“If you’ll keep quiet, madam, that’s just what I mean to do… I suppose we all have American cousins. I suppose even
you
are somebody’s cousin. And
my
cousin turned out to be Hiram Poole. It’s queer to think of a Poole being called Hiram – but there he was, complete with family tree. The genealogy was all quite accurate, and he actually had the thing hung up in his suite at Murray’s. Hiram is a very modest man. In fact he is quite pathologically shy and unassuming – which is an essential factor in my story. But he is excessively rich, and it wouldn’t occur to him not to put up in the best hotel in town. I found him there when I responded to his letter. I can’t say that I was summoned, since what he sent me might best be described as a mere diffident hint of his existence.
“It is essential that you should appreciate my lively feeling from the first that Hiram is an agreeable figure of considerable pathos. His money is of his own making, I gather, and has come from the manufacture of some nameless but certainly humble object of domestic utility. Might it be wash-tubs? Perhaps they are out of date. I just don’t know.
“It turned out that he had never been in Europe before, although making the trip had been a life’s dream with him. He had nerved himself to it now only because it was his last chance. Hiram is a dying man. He told me in a fashion that was entirely matter-of-fact that his doctors had given him only a few months to live. Well, that has increased the effect of pathos, I need hardly say. But it isn’t what has made poor old Hiram so attractive to me. He is thoroughly romantic, and this trip has been for him a purely romantic pilgrimage. That, to me, is appealing in itself. But he combines with it an elusive and wholly engaging sense of humour. Deep down in him there’s gaiety. I think that’s it.”
“Isn’t that a quality your family prides itself in?” Appleby had remembered Mr Buttery’s description of the Pooles. “That and resourcefulness?”
“Hiram would like that comment – because the great point about him is his family piety. It isn’t of course snobbish. Having identifiable ancestors in the thirteenth century would never occur to him as an occasion for giving himself airs. With him it’s rather something for a large wonder. And I soon saw that he had been hoping for some deep draught of it before he said goodbye.
“In the last few weeks Hiram and I have done a good many showplaces together. Have you ever been to the Tower of London? It’s perfectly horrible – the dungeon and torture chamber of England – but Hiram loved it. He told me about Pooles of whom I’d never heard who had come to a violent end there. We had an ecstatic day at Hampton Court. All that sort of thing. And now you must see, clearly enough, where all this is leading to.”
“To Water Poole.” It was Judith who replied. “You offered to get up a sort of historical pageant for him.”
“It was more than that. He has, as you can guess, a very strong feeling for Water Poole. But he hadn’t ventured down here. He hadn’t, I mean, made as much as a private trip to peep at the place. The notion of peeping would somehow offend his sense of delicacy. He was waiting for something. It was quite a while before I realised what it was.
“I did know that he had brought over from America with him a big County History published early in the present century, and the part dealing with Water Poole he had grangerised – I believe that’s the word – with all sorts of additional cuttings and engravings. But his information wasn’t very up to date – as presently appeared.
“I had asked him to lunch at my flat – I live just off Piccadilly – to meet one or two people who I thought would please him. It was a reasonable success, and he lingered with me after the others had gone. He had quite a lot to say in praise of the few old things I possess and keep lying about there; but nevertheless there was some undercurrent of disappointment that I didn’t at first catch hold of. But in the end Hiram brought out a remark that was entirely revealing. ‘This is certainly a pleasant apartment, Richard,’ he said. ‘But, all the same, you must find it wonderful when you can get away from London to Water Poole.’
“As you can see, there would have been only one honest reply to make. But for a moment I hesitated – it seemed so wicked to disillusion the old chap – and after that I was lost.”
There was a moment’s silence, broken by Judith. “And then you set about the business of what you call creating and sustaining a pleasurable illusion? You allowed it to be supposed that Water Poole is a going concern?”
“Just that. I won’t tell you how, in half an hour’s talk, I was hopelessly edged into it. Such a lamentable piece of weakness doesn’t make comfortable remembering. The crucial point was that I found Hiram to set tremendous store by the notion that I lived here. He called it keeping the flag flying, sticking to our guns, and that sort of thing. You see, he may have spent his life giving better and brighter wash-tubs to a great democracy, but at heart Hiram is an aristocrat. What made my position the more uncomfortable was the fact that there is nothing second-rate or silly about Hiram’s ideas. He would take no pleasure, for instance, in the contemplation of grand relations simply leading a fashionable life. But he liked his picture of the head of the family with his back to the ancestral wall, and holding out against the degeneracy of the modern world.
“Well, here I was in a false position, and there was only one factor which might possibly save me from disgrace. Hiram’s English visit was drawing to an end. And he was so shy – so reluctant to move in any sort of strange society – that he was quite unlikely to hear anything of the true situation here at Water Poole unless I told him myself. But of course there was a snag.” Richard Poole paused, and then appealed to Appleby. “You can see what it was?”
“It was hardly decent not to invite him here.”
“Exactly. When Hiram took his leave of me after that luncheon party it was impossible for me not to say something to that effect. To avoid it would have been utterly indecent. Of course I can see now things that I could have said. I might have declared that some theatrical tour was carrying me off to Brazil next morning. But no ingenuity of that sort came into my head. I did the only conceivably proper thing, and said that I hoped within the next few days to have some suggestion for his coming down to the old place. I could see that he was overjoyed. And as he went away he did, in his diffident fashion, say something quite positive. He would rather his visit didn’t take the form of an active social engagement. His health was as I knew it to be, and his remaining vitality was sufficient for spectatorship rather than intercourse. That gave me my idea.”
“Was it quite a new venture?” Appleby asked the question curiously. “Or are you in the habit of organising elaborate hoaxes?”
“I’ve never done anything of the sort before – and as a matter of fact it took some time to come to me. At first my only notion was of some procedure amounting to a confession, with the addition of anything I could think of to soften the blow. I’d have Hiram down, show him the place as it is, and say how much I hoped to get back one day. What prevented me from doing this was a scruple.”
“I’d call it the honest course to have pursued.”
“It would have been a sort of begging.” Richard Poole spoke with sudden heat. “Don’t you see? Hiram is a tremendously wealthy man. Showing him Water Poole in its decay would simply be asking him to put his hand in his pocket. I found I couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t believe him!” Once more the force of her emotions constrained Miss Jones to intervene. “And I shan’t believe another word he says. It is perfectly obvious that Mr Poole contrived some disgraceful mercenary plot against his relative – his distant relative-and that now he is perverting the whole matter.”
“Didn’t I say I’d meet with incredulity?” The owner of Water Poole appealed this time to Judith. “But that is the simple fact. I had reached a position at which it became a point of honour to exhibit this house as a going concern, standing in no need of the wash-tub millions. I had a good idea, by the way, to what purposes Hiram was proposing that those millions should in fact be devoted, for he had spoken to me, very briefly, of his philanthropic interests and – as he called them – testamentary dispositions. But that’s by the way. Here I was, thinking up some means of pleasing Hiram and getting myself out of a ridiculous scrape.
“Nothing at first came to me, and I let the matter rest for longer than I intended. Then I got a note from Hiram, telling me when he was due to sail for New York. He said nothing about Water Poole, of course, but in the circumstances this intimation of his departure could not be other than an implicit reproach. I was rather desperate. And then I noticed the date on which he was sailing.
“It was, as a matter of fact, today’s date – and at that I had my inspiration. I became a demon – perhaps Mr Buttery would say a goblin – of energy, and by that same evening I had got together a sort of committee of my closest friends. What had come to me was that, just at this time of the year, we could manage a sort of lightning revivification of Water Poole without raising any awkward curiosity in the neighbourhood. Anything observed, and anything talked about, would be put down at once to the lingering superstition that attaches to the place.
“Hiram, needless to say, knew the story of the first Naseby Ball, and I was sure that the notion of some species of commemoration would appeal to him. But I had an additional reason for making my party a costume affair. It was a matter of what you might call the psychology of successful illusion.
“My friends and myself were going to create the appearance of a house-party here at Water Poole, in such a way that Hiram could be asked to drop in on it and get the impression of that going concern. But in reality we should be actors putting on a show in a decayed theatre with crumbling scenery and unreliable props. For example, the whole business of lighting was going to be uncommonly tricky – probably there would have to be nothing but candles – and the project only looked remotely feasible because of that crucial fact of Hiram’s temperament: his diffidence, and his unwillingness to treat himself to more than one entranced glimpse of the ancestral home. Even so, the project was technically daunting, and I soon saw that our only chance was this:
that our illusion should be of an illusion
. If we were all confessedly engaged in creating a fiction, then the basic fiction – or the fiction within the fiction, so to speak – might be something we could get away with.”
“Your plan was undoubtedly a very clever one.” Appleby glanced at Richard Poole with what might have been reluctant admiration. “Did it occur to you that if your cousin detected the fraud it would be very much more painful for him than a frank statement of the truth?”
“It certainly did – which is why I determined not to fail. And I don’t think I
did
fail.” Poole turned a thoughtful eye on Miss Jones. “At least, that’s what I’ve been imagining.”
“It all went like clockwork?”
“Yes. We moved in with several vans just after dark. The decor had been planned in minute detail beforehand, and there wasn’t a hitch. When my cousin Hiram arrived, driving his own car, I was on the lookout for him, and got him straight round to the presentable side of the house. It was clear almost at once – an actor has a sense of these things – that we were successfully putting our show across. Mr Poole of Water Poole was giving one of his accustomed house-parties, and his guests, with others invited in for the evening, were indulging in a historically appropriate costume ball. My only fear was that Hiram, in his unassuming way, would ask if he might quietly make a tour of the whole house. He knows its history well; and there must be various rooms – some of them perhaps now in ruins – with associations of great interest to him. But of course Hiram would never have dreamed of giving even that amount of trouble. He stayed just over an hour, moving about quietly with me among the guests, accepting a few introductions, drinking a glass of champagne, and so on. And then he took his leave. The whole thing, which had been so terrifying in the prospect, proved astoundingly easy. Long before dawn – the early June dawn – we had folded our tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away.”
“But that wasn’t, in fact, all?” A sombre expression had returned to Appleby’s face. “And it would have been better if it had been?”
“Precisely.” Poole hesitated. “When Hiram left me it was plain that he was very much moved. Our imposture had been only too effective. It had been one of the deepest experiences of his life.”
“That must have been rather uncomfortable for you.”