The Dinner Club

by H. C. McNeile

The sandy-haired man took a sip of his drink: then he put the glass on the table beside him and began.

“Well, if it won’t bore you, I’m agreeable. I’ll tell you the whole thing exactly as it took place, only altering the names of the people involved. It happened before the war—in that hot summer of 1911, to be exact. I’d been working pretty hard in London, and about the end of July I got an invitation to go down and stop with some people in Devonshire. I will call them the Marleys, and they lived just outside a small village on the north coast. The family consisted of old Marley, who was a man rising sixty, and his two daughters, Joan and Hilda. There was also Jack Fairfax, through whom, as a matter of fact, I had first got to know them.

“Jack was about my own age—thirty odd, and we’d been up at Cambridge together. He was no relation to old Marley, but he was an orphan, and Marley was his guardian, or had been when Jack was a youngster. And from the very first Jack and the old man had not got on.

“Marley was not everybody’s meat, by a long way—rather a queer-tempered, secretive blighter; and Jack Fairfax had the devil of a temper at times. When he was a boy he had no alternative except to do as his guardian told him, but even in those early days, as I gathered subsequently, there had been frequent storms. And when he came down from Cambridge there were two or three most unholy rows which culminated in Jack leaving the house for good.

“It was apparently this severance from the two girls, whom he had more or less regarded as sisters, which caused the next bust-up. And this one, according to Jack, was in the nature of a volcanic eruption. The two girls had come up to London to go through the season with some aunt, and Jack had seen a good deal of them with the net result that he and Joan had fallen in love with each other. Then the fat was in the fire. Jack straightway had gone down to Devonshire to ask old Marley’s consent: old Marley had replied in terms which, judging from Jack’s account of the interview, had contained a positive profusion of un-Parliamentary epithets. Jack had lost his temper properly—and, well, you know, the usual thing. At any rate, the long and the short of it was that old Marley had recalled both his daughters from London, and had sworn that if he ever saw Jack near the house again he’d pepper him with a shot-gun. To which Jack had replied that only his grey hairs and his gout saved Mr. Marley from the biggest hiding he’d ever had in his life—even if not the biggest he deserved. With which genial exchange of playful badinage I gathered the interview ended. And that was how matters stood when I went down in July, 1911.

“For some peculiar reason the old man liked me, even though I was a friend of Jack’s. And in many ways I quite liked him, though there was always something about him which defeated me. Of course, he had a foul temper—but it wasn’t altogether that. He seemed to me at times to be in fear of something or somebody; and yet, though I say that now, I don’t know that I went as far as thinking so at the time. It was an almost indefinable impression—vague and yet very real.

“The two girls were perfectly charming, though they were both a little afraid of their father. How long it would have taken Joan to overcome this timidity, and go to Jack without her father’s consent, I don’t know. And incidentally, as our legislators say, the question did not arise. Fate held the ace of trumps, and proceeded to deal it during my visit.”

The sandy-haired man leant back in his chair and crossed his legs deliberately.

“I think it was about the fourth day after I arrived (he went on, after a while) that the tragedy happened. We were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner—a couple of men whose names I forget, and a girl friend of Hilda’s. Hilda herself was there, and Joan, who seemed very preoccupied, had come in about a quarter of an hour previously. I had noticed that Hilda had looked at her sister inquiringly as she entered, and that Joan had shrugged her shoulders. But nothing had been said, and naturally I asked no questions with the others there, though from the air of suppressed excitement on Joan’s face I knew there was something in the wind.

“Old Marley himself was not with us: he was in his study at the other end of the house. The fact was not at all unusual: he frequently retired to his own den after dinner, sometimes joining the rest of the party for a few minutes before going to bed, more often not appearing again till the following morning. And so we all sat there talking idly, with the windows wide open and the light shining out on to the lawn. It must have been somewhere about ten to a quarter past when suddenly Hilda gave a little scream.