Rinehart The Amazing Interlude

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4553-3204-5
Verlag: Seltzer Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 605 Seiten

According to Wikipedia: 'Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876-September 22, 1958) was a prolific author often called the American Agatha Christie.[1] She is considered the source of the phrase 'The butler did it', although she did not actually use the phrase herself, and also considered to have invented the 'Had-I-But-Known' school of mystery writing.... Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues and special articles. Many of her books and plays, such as The Bat (1920) were adapted for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). While many of her books were best-sellers, critics were most appreciative of her murder mysteries. Rinehart, in The Circular Staircase (1908), is credited with inventing the 'Had-I-But-Known' school of mystery writing. The Circular Staircase is a novel in which 'a middle-aged spinster is persuaded by her niece and nephew to rent a country house for the summer. The house they choose belonged to a bank defaulter who had hidden stolen securities in the walls. The gentle, peace-loving trio is plunged into a series of crimes solved with the help of the aunt. This novel is credited with being the first in the 'Had-I-But-Known' school.'[3] The Had-I-But-Known mystery novel is one where the principal character (frequently female) does less than sensible things in connection with a crime which have the effect of prolonging the action of the novel. Ogden Nash parodied the school in his poem Don't Guess Let Me Tell You: 'Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.' The phrase 'The butler did it', which has become a cliché, came from Rinehart's novel The Door, in which the butler actually did do it, although that exact phrase does not actually appear in the work.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts

Leseproben

XIV
   For four days the gray car did not come again.  Supplies appeared in another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming.  The waking hours were full, as usual.  Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always listening.  But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house.   Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the letter that went with them.   On the second day she wrote to Harvey.   "I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously using Henri's last words to her.  "I have not meant to be cruel.  And if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done what I am doing or not--and of course many could--it is worth doing. I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the British and the French will not allow women so near the lines.  The men come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. Some of them are wounded too.  I dress the little wounds.  I do give them something, Harvey dear--if it is only a reminder that there are homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing."   She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was but a plank from a destroyed house.  And she sent a great deal of love, but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her.   More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days.  Indeed she herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that.  With all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding out.  The scope of the little house had grown with its fame.  Now and then there were unexpected calls, too--Marie's mother, starving in Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income.  She had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital.   And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful.   On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone.  He disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with Rene's aid carried in the supplies.   There was the business of checking them off, and the further business of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold.  She sat at the table, Jean across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an engrossed frown between her eyebrows.   Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed.  She smiled very seldom, and her eyes were perhaps more steady.  It was a young girl he and Henri had brought out to the little house.  It was a very serious and rather anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he had brought back into little stacks.   "Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it."   "To do what?"   "To continue--here."   "No?"   "You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in London.  You and--and Henri have done miracles for me.  But soon I shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back.  And now I shall have to start on my English notes.  After that--"   "You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now--you could do without them."   "But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean."   She sat still, her hands before her on the table.  From the kitchen came the bubbling of the eternal soup.  Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down her cheek.  She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently did not notice.   "The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort too many."   "Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?"   "In England, I think."   The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in France, and that he had gone without telling her.  She had hurt him horribly.  She knew that.  He might never come back to the little house of mercy.  There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable strain.  And she had attacked his honor.  What possible right had she to do that?   The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean.   "Did he tell you anything?"   "Nothing, mademoiselle."   "He is very angry with me, Jean."   "But surely no, mademoiselle.  With you?  It is impossible."   But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner before his departure.  They had quarreled, these two.  Perhaps it was as well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee.  But he looked out, those days, on but half a world, did Jean.  So he saw only the woman hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper.  And in Sara Lee a woman, and nothing more.   And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders.   They fell to discussing ways and means.  The chocolate could be cut out, but not the cigarettes.  Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them.  Somehow Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. He gave her no moral support.   At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds dressed --a request that if possible her allowance be increased.  She did it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief.  She enclosed a snapshot of the little house.   Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri.  Not once, but several times. He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later on he told Rene.  Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by.   Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round.  After that Henri got in and they went rapidly back toward the Front.  It was a different Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back and faced.  Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing through rents in his coat.   Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, the swing of his walk.  Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which renders the French Army so mobile.   He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and an intrenching tool jingling at his belt.   Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded crossroads--smiled and then sighed.  For Jean had lost everything in the war.  His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come.  But Henri had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might happen.   Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers.  He joined a handful and stood talking to them.  But he reached the crossroads before the ammunition train.   The crossroads was crowded, as usual--many soldiers, at rest, waiting for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were working over the fire.  A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes following every gesture.  And one of them was a man Henri sought.   Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette.  The ammunition train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his attention to the train.  He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but now he became smiling, a good fellow.  He found a man he knew among the drivers and offered him a cigarette.  He also produced and presented an entire box of matches.  Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought at any price.   Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song:   "Trou la la, ce ne va guere;          Trou la la,...