by Richard Hull
Meanwhile throughout the winter it was impossible to sit in the room if any of them were open, while if they were shut the room became at once in some mysterious way both cold and airless. Indeed the problem of ventilation was one which had completely defeated every committee of the Club since its inception.
In the smaller smoking library the problem had been solved. There was no ventilation. Heavy clouds of smoke started to form in it about one forty-five, and continued to get thicker as the day progressed. Into it went all those members who were most afraid of fresh air. Each as he came in looked anxiously but unnecessarily at the windows. The windows never were open. Indeed it had been suggested that, like the bathroom taps, the rooms should be labelled ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’.
Ford of course chose the wrong library first, but eventually he found Hughes and entered the smaller library. Through the haze of tobacco smoke a large fire could be seen burning furiously, though somewhat impeded by the lack of oxygen. In the background was shelf after shelf of books from floor to ceiling. The curious had often wondered what books had been used to fill the top shelves, but since the only way of finding out was to place an insecure looking ladder on a slippery floor and lean it against a row of books, or at best the shelf on which they stood, curiosity had remained unsatisfied. Judging by the contents of the lower shelves, the question was of little importance.
In the far corner a bookcase had been built at right angles to the wall to provide space for more books. In the alcove thus formed was placed one of the few comfortable chairs in the Club, a chair for the possession of which many petty battles were waged. It was one of Mr Pargiter’s self-appointed duties to see, if possible, that no one slept there in comfort for long. It was there that Morrison was sitting, his body completely relaxed, his feet on a footrest, his eyeglass lying on his lap.
With a feeling of increasing horror, Ford called him. There was no reply. He shook him but got no answer.
There was no doubt about it. Benson must have got hold of the wrong bottle after all! Ford stood, quite unable to say or do anything, the sweat breaking out on his forehead. It was very, very sad.
Then he pulled himself together. He ought to give some thought to Morrison, instead of thinking, as he had been, of the consequences, mainly so far as they concerned Benson, but partly as they affected the Club. Perhaps, after all, Morrison was not dead? He looked again. He supposed he ought to feel sorry about it if the man really had been poisoned. It was, had he known it, the nearest approach to sympathy that anyone was to feel, and even that thought faded away into a slight feeling of irritation at the uncertainty. Rather tardily he came to the conclusion that he must get a doctor and find out.
At that moment the door opened, causing Ford and Hughes to jump.
‘Ah, talk of the devil,’ came automatically to the secretary’s lips as a clean-shaven, thin-lipped man came in. ‘I was just wanting a doctor.’
The newcomer raised his eyebrows slightly. It was not Dr Anstruther’s habit to waste words unnecessarily.
‘Somebody ill?’ he asked.
‘More than ill, I’m afraid.’
Without comment Anstruther looked professionally at the figure in the chair.
‘Almost certainly dead,’ was the verdict. ‘Can we get him into a bedroom where I can examine him properly?’
With the help of Hughes the transference was effected. As chance would have it the passages on the way were empty. In a very short while the doctor straightened up from his examination and nodded.
Ford turned to Hughes who, apparently accidentally, had remained as a spectator.
‘Keep quiet about this for the present,’ he said. ‘We want no fuss here.’
Hughes’s assent was readily given. He knew very well that if there was any scandal about this, it would do the Club no good. To his mind it was just like Morrison to be a nuisance even when he was dead. He returned to his service pantry. How it was to be ‘kept quiet’ for more than an hour or so, he could not imagine. Meanwhile it was hard not to be allowed to tell other people so exciting a piece of news. Even Hughes’s really remarkably well developed sense of duty found that difficult.
In the room he had left Anstruther looked at the tall secretary.
‘Keep it quiet, eh? Why?’
‘How did he die?’
‘Can’t tell for certain without a post-mortem. Very sudden.’
Ford looked agitated. ‘Must there be a post-mortem?’
‘Why do you want to avoid it?’
Like most weak people Ford badly wanted someone to share his worries. Barely troubling to ask the doctor to keep the matter to himself, he poured out all the story of the two vanilla bottles.
‘What’s really worrying me’, he went on, ‘is what will happen to poor Benson. Of course it was a mistake, an obvious mistake, and no jury will ever think it is anything else. All the same I suppose he will have to be tried for manslaughter?’
Anstruther nodded.
‘And he’ll be away from the Club while it’s going on, and what he will be like when he comes back I tremble to think. He’s a nervous little man at the best of times. I don’t think he’ll ever face cooking here again, and he’s the one man on the staff I rely on most, and he’s got a wife and family dependent on him, too. And all because of – well, de mortuis, perhaps.’ He pulled himself up with a jerk.
‘So for the sake of the chef–’
‘Yes, and for the sake of the Club too. Whenever any mention of a decent club appears in the press, even a casual remark, it does harm. You know as well as I do that good clubs must never be talked about. Just fancy the publicity there will be if this gets out!’ Ford’s eyes goggled in horror. ‘We shall be known as the club where we poison our members. We shall never live it down.’ Anstruther considered for a moment.
‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I am the one person who can keep it quiet for you.’
Ford leapt towards him. ‘My dear fellow–’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions. I have not yet said that I will.’
‘But I’m sure you will. I mean, my dear fellow, think of the Club, think of Benson, think of Benson’s children–’
‘Don’t be theatrical. I know nothing of Benson’s children and I care less. I am thinking’ – he looked coldly towards the bed – ‘of the dead man.’
This was too difficult for Ford. He did not know how to put it, even to himself, but it did not sound, well, quite decent. He gave it up and turned to the question of how the accident of the poisoning was to be hushed up.
‘I told you I was the one man who could manage it. That is because Morrison was a patient of mine. Not, I must admit, a very valued patient.’ The word ‘valued’ came out coldly, with a peculiar emphasis contrasting sharply with the normal flatness of his speech and expressionlessness of his face. ‘The only way to avoid a post-mortem – and if there is a post-mortem nobody can hush the affair up – is for me to certify three things. First that I have seen him in the last month, secondly that I examined his heart and found something wrong with it, and thirdly that he died of heart failure.’
‘And you can?’
For a short while there was silence while Anstruther stood looking at the dead man. Ford would have given very much to have known the doctor’s reflections. Was he debating the degree of risk? Or considering how truthful the certificate would be? Or had he possibly very little difficulty about that, but found his thoughts occupied with some different aspect of the case? Try as he would Ford could not guess. He was never very good at reading other people’s minds, and Anstruther’s face was too unexpressive to have given anyone much help.
Eventually Anstruther broke the long silence.
‘Had he any relations?’
‘I believe none. I don’t of course absolutely know, but he once gave me to understand that he had no relatives except a nephew with whom he was not on speaking terms. I really think there is no one to make trouble.’
Once more silence fell in the bedroom. An
struther apparently was making up his mind slowly and with difficulty. It rather hurt Ford’s feelings that the doctor was going to come to a decision for himself. He would have liked to have felt that he counted for more; and yet, though the original proposition was his, he was glad that the responsibility for its adoption was not.
At last the silent internal struggle ended.
Anstruther nodded. ‘That is my belief also. Very well.’
It was with an immense sense of relief that Ford departed, the slight insult to his pride readily forgotten. First of all he went back to Hughes. Mr Morrison, he told him, had died of heart failure. Fortunately Dr Anstruther, who happened to be his medical adviser, knew all about it and was not in the least surprised. He had known for a long time that his heart was weak. In his anxiety that the right story should be told, Ford rather exaggerated.
‘I thought he didn’t seem very surprised, sir,’ remarked Hughes shrewdly.
‘Ah,’ said Ford, his attention called to this for the first time, ‘you thought so too? At first I put it down just to being, well, professional–’
‘Yes, sir, I understand. But of course, sir, Dr Anstruther never does seem to express any emotion at all.’
Ford decided that Hughes, even for an old servant, was getting too confidential.
‘Well, anyhow, that’s what it was. Heart failure. So fortunately there won’t be any fuss.’
‘Quite, sir.’ The tendency to gossip was too strong. ‘I should never have thought, though, sir, that Mr Morrison had a weak heart, or any heart’ – he swallowed ‘at all’, and added ‘weakness’ lamely.
‘Ah, well. It’s the unexpected that always happens.’ Ford closed the conversation. ‘I must go and see Benson.’
He left behind him a puzzled man.
‘Why on earth,’ said Hughes to himself, ‘should he want to see him?’
He gave up the problem and, wrongly leaving the care of the floor to the intermittent attentions of a page-boy, slipped off for a quarter of an hour to spread the news.
On his way back to his bedroom, Ford had time to think things over. He realised that he had left Benson on tenterhooks, and that the feelings of the naturally nervous chef would be given a further shock when he heard what had happened. He tried to concentrate on how best to break the news gently, but he could only think of how very little sympathy any of them had managed to raise for the unfortunate Morrison.
‘Another member gone!’ he thought. ‘That means one less subscription next year. If there are many resignations at Christmas, there will be another proposal to reduce my salary. And times are so hard, you can’t expect new members with our entrance fee.’
As a result of letting his thoughts wander, his announcement lacked finesse, to say the least of it.
‘Is he all right, sir?’
‘No. He’s dead.’
Benson fainted.
‘My God,’ thought Ford, ‘now someone else is going to die.’
He poured an unnecessarily large quantity of cold water on the little man, but it was some time before he got him round, and still longer before he got him to understand.
‘It was nothing to do with you. Do you understand? Nothing to do with you at all,’ he kept repeating. ‘It was just an accident. Even in the best regulated families. Nothing to do with the vanilla. Just an acc – a coincidence. Just heart failure. Do you follow me? Heart failure. Natural causes. Dr Anstruther tells me he has been his doctor for a long while, and he’s known for years that Mr Morrison has had a bad heart. A coincidence, just a coincidence.’ Over and over again he repeated the story, committing himself and the doctor a little further at each repetition.
Gradually the unfortunate chef began to recover.
‘Now look here, Benson, you’ve had a bit of a shock. Today’s Friday. There’s very little doing here on Saturday and Sunday; you go home now and stay home for the week-end. Don’t come back till Monday.’
Benson was torn in two directions. At one moment he wanted never to cook for the Club again, and at the next he wanted to preserve his record of never being absent from illness for a single day. Besides, the secretary ought to know that the Club could not get on without him! He never took a holiday except when the Club was shut.
Unconsciously Ford blundered on.
‘Just for the week-end your assistant will have to manage. Oh, I know. It won’t be the same, but still you must.’
With the utmost difficulty, eventually Ford succeeded in persuading him, and having at last seen the chef safely on his way home, with a definite promise that he would not return until Monday, the secretary went off to the smoking-room. He must abandon peace and d’Artagnan tonight. He must see to it that the members knew that Morrison’s death was due to natural causes, and to natural causes alone.
It would have been so much better to have lived up to his own suggestion of keeping it quiet.
4
The Troubles Of A Secretary
The following Monday morning was one of those lovely autumn mornings which, to their great disgust, confound those who enjoy reviling the English climate.
Ford sat in his office and looked out over the slates and tried to fall in tune with the pale but intensely bright blue of the sky, and the sparkle of the air. It was not a bit of good. He was worried. It was quite useless to repeat to himself that it was an accident and that ‘no one was really to blame’. The fact remained that it was an accident and not a coincidence, and that he had no manner of right to have decided to prevent the normal course of events from occurring. In the cold, clear light of morning he could not see how he could have been such a fool as to have suggested keeping the manner of Morrison’s death quiet. He even began to wonder if it had been his idea. He would have felt better, he thought, if he could have put the blame on Anstruther.
However, as Ford himself would have put it, it was no good crying over spilt milk, because, by now, he was thoroughly committed, and the secret and the responsibility were not his alone. If it ever came out, there would be just as much trouble for the doctor, if not more, and besides, Benson of course, and even Hughes, he supposed, might be in an awkward position.
He got up and looked at a pigeon walking on a neighbouring roof. No doubt about it. Never a coincidence, no longer an accident. Morrison’s death, since the facts had been concealed, was by now a definite crime. There was no comfort anywhere.
‘And it isn’t as if we were getting rid of our only grumbler. There will still be people here who will complain,’ he murmured. ‘Pargiter, for instance. There’s no gain in it anywhere.’
He turned back to his desk and tried by working to forget the trouble. There was the vexatious business of the Club medium dry sherry to provide a welcome counter-irritant. For some years past the Whitehall club had provided an excellent, sound before-dinner sherry, nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps, but at least it had had the merit of satisfying everybody. But, now that it was almost finished, the problem of finding a successor was proving troublesome.
Ford had started to solve the problem reasonably enough. He had got in samples from the seven or eight wine merchants with whom the Club dealt, and he had obtained the considered opinion of the Wine Committee on them. It would have seemed that to have ordered the one the majority of that body of experts had preferred would have been easy.
But here Ford’s fatal habit of trying to satisfy everybody had obtruded. Like all other clubs the Whitehall possessed two members who were, in their own opinion, if not the only connoisseurs of wine as a whole, really well qualified to give an opinion on sherry. To have ordered a new sherry without asking them would have been to risk a storm of criticism. It seemed best to Ford to let them try the proposed new Oloroso.
Of course it was the worst way. Both of the alleged experts pronounced the new sherry to be disgusting; one on the ground that it was too sweet, the other because it left an unpleasant bitter after-taste. Each insisted on various of their friends being made to sample it. The result was that Ford
had concentrated on himself four streams of criticism. Firstly, the too sweet party, secondly, the too bitter party, thirdly the Wine Committee, who rather reasonably wanted to know why the secretary was going behind their backs and trying to upset their decisions – they threatened to resign en bloc if the sherry of their choice was not immediately purchased – and fourthly, there was Mr Cardonnel.
Mr Cardonnel was one of the many lawyers in the Club. If there was one thing in which he excelled, it was in finding out minor breaches of regulations and magnifying them into a major difficulty. He had found out – and he had the finest nose in existence for discovering this sort of point – that so many of the sweet and bitter parties had insisted on sampling the proposed sherry free and gratis, that the merchants had mildly suggested that bottles in excess of the first dozen must be charged, and of course Ford had weakly consented. Under what rule, enquired Mr Cardonnel, had either the secretary or the committee any right to purchase sherry at the Club’s expense for the benefit of individual members? Mr Cardonnel could find no bye-law which permitted this to happen and, very regretfully of course, he was unable to let the matter drop until he was satisfied on the point. In his small, neat, spidery hand he wrote long letters, all in theory without prejudice in the lay rather than the legal sense of the term, to which no one could find a suitable answer in law – and with common sense Mr Cardonnel was never satisfied. Besides – and this is where the tribe of Cardonnels are always so tiresome – he was perfectly right.
Another party was rapidly being raised by him in the Club which was being recruited from all those who had not yet received a free sample. Ford vaguely wondered if it would not be cheaper in the end to give one to each of them and a dozen bottles to Cardonnel. But that was no good. The lawyer, incorruptible himself, would be screaming ‘bribery’ to the heavens.
On his desk Ford found yet another addition to the complications. Someone was starting yet another hare.
