Three Act Tragedy (Hercule Poirot 11)

Mr. Satterthwaite began to feel a pleasant curiosity.

“Not to me—to Oliver. Oliver Manders—he was at dinner that night, but perhaps you don’t remember him.”

“Yes, I remember him very well. Is he a great friend of yours?”

“Used to be. Now we scrap most of the time. He’s gone into his uncle’s office in the city, and he’s getting—well, a bit oily, if you know what I mean. Always talks of chucking it and being a journalist—he writes rather well. But I don’t think it’s any more than talk now. He wants to get rich. I think everybody is rather disgusting about money, don’t you, Mr. Satterthwaite?”

Her youth came home to him then—the crude, arrogant childishness of her.

“My dear,” he said, “so many people are disgusting about so many things.”

“Most people are swine, of course,” agreed Egg cheerfully. “That’s why I’m really cut up about old Mr. Babbington. Because you see, he really was rather a pet. He prepared me for confirmation and all that, and though of course a lot of that business is all bunkum, he really was rather sweet about it. You see, Mr. Satterthwaite, I really believe in Christianity—not like Mother does, with little books and early service, and things—but intelligently and as a matter of history. The Church is all clotted up with the Pauline tradition—in fact the Church is a mess—but Christianity itself is all right. That’s why I can’t be a communist like Oliver. In practice our beliefs would work out much the same, things in common and ownership by all, but the difference—well, I needn’t go into that. But the Babbingtons really were Christians; they didn’t poke and pry and condemn, and they were never unkind about people or things. They were pets—and there was Robin….”

“Robin?”

“Their son…He was out in India and got killed…I—I had rather a pash on Robin….”

Egg blinked. Her gaze went out to sea….

Then her attention returned to Mr. Satterthwaite and the present.

“So, you see, I feel rather strongly about this. Supposing it wasn’t a natural death….”

“My dear child!”

“Well, it’s damned odd! You must admit it’s damned odd.”

“But surely you yourself have just practically admitted that the Babbingtons hadn’t an enemy in the world.”

“That’s what’s so queer about it. I can’t think of any conceivable motive….”

“Fantastic! There was nothing in the cocktail.”

“Perhaps someone jabbed him with a hypodermic.”

“Containing the arrow poison of the South American Indians,” suggested Mr. Satterthwaite, gently ridiculing.

Egg grinned.

“That’s it. The good old untraceable stuff. Oh, well, you’re all very superior about it. Someday, perhaps, you’ll find out we are right.”

“We?”

“Sir Charles and I.” She flushed slightly.

Mr. Satterthwaite thought in the words and metre of his generation when Quotations for All Occasions was to be found in every bookcase.

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“Of more than twice her years,

Seam’d with an ancient swordcut on the cheek,

And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes

And loved him, with that love which was her doom.”

He felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking in quotations—Tennyson, too, was very little thought of nowadays. Besides, though Sir Charles was bronzed, he was not scarred, and Egg Lytton Gore, though doubtless capable of a healthy passion, did not look at all likely to perish of love and drift about rivers on a barge. There was nothing of the lily maid of Astolat about her.