I am certain, as the police were, that she was guiltless of all knowledge and participation in the murder of Mrs. Crippen, but she seemed as careless of that crime as any woman of the Borgias when a rival was removed from her path of love. Some old strain of passionate blood had thrust up again in this London typist girl, whose name of le Neve might hold the clue, if we knew her family history, to this secret of her personality.
I was glad to see the last of her, having written down her tale, because that was not the kind of journalism which appealed to my instincts or ideals, and I sickened at the squalor of the whole story of love and murder, as I sat with Ethel le Neve in friendly discourse, not without pity for this girl whose life had been ruined by her folly, and who would be forever haunted by the grim tragedy of Crippen’s crime.
VII
Although my reminiscences hitherto have dealt with my adventures as a special correspondent, I have from time to time sat with assumed dignity in the editorial chair. Indeed, I was an editor before I was twenty-one, and I may say that I began life very high up in the world and have been climbing down steadily ever since.
I was at least very high up—on the top floor of the House of Cassell, in La Belle Sauvage Yard—when I assumed, at the age of nineteen, the enormous title of Educational Editor, and gained the microscopic salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year.
With five pounds capital and that income, I married, with an audacity which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much younger, that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official chief, who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I sat, and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said “Hullo!” I made signs to her to depart.
“Who’s that pretty girl?” asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.
That first chief of mine was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met, and quite the rudest to all people of superior rank to himself.