E. Standing.
“It’s a rude letter-isn’t it?” said Egbert sleepily. “I remember I nearly tore it up.”
“You would have been tearing up about three million pounds if you had,” said Mr. Hale in his most impressive voice.
CHAPTER IX
Charles Moray walked twenty yards up Sloane Street, and then walked twenty yards down again. He continued to do this. Across the street was a lighted window with one hat on a stand and a piece of gold brocade lying carelessly at the foot of a bright green bowl full of golden fir-cones. Charles was aware that these things were there, because he had stood in front of the window and peered in; all that he could actually see from across the road was a blur of light in the fog. He hoped he would be able to see Margaret when she came out.
He went up close to a street lamp and looked at his watch. It was past six o’clock and the fog was getting thicker every minute. He crossed the street and again began to walk up and down.
It was a quarter past six before Margaret came out. He was only a couple of yards away, and even so, he nearly missed her. There was a shadow that slipped past him in the fog and was gone.
Charles ran after the shadow. He could not have said how he knew that it was Margaret who had passed him; he did not stop to think about it at all. He ran after her, came in sight of the shadow, and kept pace with it, a little behind.
He was in a strange mood. There came first the quick certainty that this was Margaret. And then, like a flood, this sense of her and of her nearness swept over him. She walked before him; but if she had been in his arms, as she once had been, he could not have felt her more near. If he looked, he would see her very thoughts. He told himself that all he had ever seen was a mirage-the real Margaret had never shared a single thought with him.
He had been quite sure that it was going to be immensely interesting to meet her again; it had not entered his head that he would be angry. Yet he had not walked half a dozen yards behind her before he was as angry as he had ever been in his life. He was angry in a new way-angry with Margaret for earning her living, angrier because she had mixed herself up in who knew what ridiculous and criminal conspiracy, and angriest of all because she had made him angry. Mixed with his anger-curiosity. What was at the bottom of it? What did it all mean? The explorer in him was most keenly on the alert. He meant to get to the bottom of the business.
Perhaps his step quickened a little; he was nearer her than he had meant to be when they passed under a street lamp. The light hung above it like a faint white cloud. _ He said, “How d’you do, Margaret?” and said it lightly and pleasantly. To Margaret Langton the voice came out of the fog and out of the past. There was a step that kept pace with her own. And then Charles Moray said her name- Charles. She turned, a ghost in a nimbus. The quick movement was Margaret, the rest a blur.
“Charles!”
Her voice was unbelievably familiar; it might have been some voice of his own speaking to him. It shook him, and a hotter anger than before leapt in him.
“Charles! How dare you frighten me like that!”
“Did I frighten you!” He spoke smoothly and easily.
Margaret caught her breath.
“I thought someone was following me. It’s horrible to be followed in a fog.”
“I was waiting for you, and I nearly missed you. That ass Archie had forgotten your address, so I had to try and catch you here.”
They walked on; the lamp receded. Margaret said,
“Why did you want to-catch me?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ve been away. Perhaps you haven’t noticed. One comes back, one sees one’s friend-”
“Friends-are we friends? I shouldn’t have thought you would ever want to see me again.”
This was the old Margaret, fiercely untactful. Charles leapt at the opening. He wanted to hit hard, to hurt her as much as possible. He kept his indifferent tone very successfully.
“Why on earth shouldn’t I want to see you? After all, we were friends for about ten years before we ever thought of getting engaged. Wasn’t it ten years? We were friends for ten years, and then we were engaged for six months, and then-we stopped being engaged. Well, the engagement being only an episode, it can be just wiped out. You see?”
No woman likes to be told that she was only an episode. Charles was pleasantly aware of this; aware too that he had succeeded in piercing some armour of defense.
She said, with a hot resentment, in her voice,
“How can we be friends? How can you possibly want to be friends with me?”
Charles laughed.
“My dear girl, why not? Do let us be modern. These things don’t last, you know. Do you expect me to be tragic after four years? I was naturally a bit peeved at the time. But one doesn’t go on being peeved.” He paused, then struck again and struck hard. “I’ve been looking forward immensely to seeing you-but of course I thought you would be married.”
“Married! I!”
“Well,” said Charles, “I didn’t suppose you turned me down just for the fun of the thing. Naturally there was someone else.”
Margaret turned on him, her head up.
“Did you say that just to hurt? Or did you believe it?”
Charles laughed again.
“A bit of both. I believed it all right.”
She made a sound-not a sigh or a sob, but a quick angry breath.
“Look here,” said Charles, “I’ll put nearly all my cards on the table if you like. I propose that we should wash out the episode and revert to the status quo ante. If you won’t do this, I shall naturally conclude that you mind meeting me, that you find it embarrassing or painful.”
Margaret was certainly very angry.
“My dear Charles, doesn’t it occur to you that I might simply be bored?”
“No, it doesn’t. We could fight like fiends, and we could hate each other like poison; but we could never be bored. When can I come and see you?”
“You can’t come and see me.”
“Too embarrassing? Too painful?”
There was no answer. He thought he heard her catch her breath again. He continued in a pleasant social manner:
“I was proposing, you know, to revert to the days before the episode. You were ten, weren’t you, when your people came to George Street? I seem to remember that you didn’t mince your words in those days. Why bother to mince them now? Why not revert-say anything you like?”
Margaret said nothing; she walked without turning her head. Charles walked beside her. He was sorry there was a fog; he would have liked to see her face. He gave her a moment; then he spoke again.
“No words bad enough?”
There were no words at all.
“When can I come and see you?”
Silence-the fog-a black slippery crossing- Basil Street. They crossed, and passed through another patch of hazy light.
“You used not to sulk,” said Charles meditatively.
She flung round on him then like an angry school-girl.
“How dare you?”
Charles was immensely pleased.
“Touché!” he said to himself; and then aloud, “I’m sorry-I haven’t any manners. I’ve been deprived of the refining influence of woman for four years, you see. When can I come and see you?”
They had reached the Knightsbridge pavement, and he stopped instinctively on its dark brink. It was very dark, the lights of the crawling cars only just discernible, the noise of the traffic a bewildering dull sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Charles stopped, but Margaret Langton never hesitated; she walked straight on, and even as he looked round her she was lost in the shuffling, whispering, hooting gloom. Charles plunged after her. Someone swore, a hoarse voice shouted. “Where are you gettin’ to?” The hooter of a car went off right in his ear, and his shoulder collided violently with somebody’s driving-mirror. The next half minute continued to be like that, only more so.
He fetched
up on the island in the middle of the road with feelings of relief. The island was crowded. Under the powerful light it was possible to see one’s next door neighbour. Charles annoyed all the rest of the people on the island by being neighbour to each of them in turn. He trod on several toes, was prodded in the ribs by a very powerful umbrella, and a number of people asked him what he thought he was doing. As it was impossible to explain that he was looking for Margaret, he had to say he was sorry a good many times.
Margaret was not on the island. He came to a standstill behind abroad blue serge back. A heavily built man stood just in front of him. He wore a rough blue coat of the pea-jacket style and had about this neck a large khaki muffler-the sort of thing that one’s aunts knitted stacks of during the war. The thought passed through Charles’ mind and then pricked him so sharply that he very nearly cried out. He had made the same comparison before, within the last few days; and he had made it about the same muffler. He had stared at that blue serge back and that khaki comforter before. He had stared through the knot-hole of his mother’s cupboard and seen that lumpy shoulder and that bullet head come into view as Number Forty, the deaf janitor, opened the door to Grey Mask’s visitors.
He pushed against the man, hoping to see his face; and as he did so, he said mechanically,
“I beg your pardon.”
In a moment his interest was dashed. The man turned half round and said,
“Granted.”
Charles saw a square, fresh-coloured face, clean-shaven, and then the man turned again and stepped off the island into the road. Charles stepped off too.
Forty was stone deaf. This man was not stone deaf. He must have heard Charles say “I beg your pardon,” because he immediately turned round and said “Granted.” He might have turned because Charles pushed him; but you don’t say “Granted” when someone barges into you from behind. No, he must have heard. Then he wasn’t Forty, because Forty was deaf. Grey Mask said that Forty was deaf.
Charles considered what he knew of Forty. He was Grey Mask’s janitor-in other words a villain who was trusted by other villains. And Grey Mask said he was deaf. To Charles he was merely a bullet head, a blue serge coat, a pair of broad shoulders, and a khaki muffler.
Charles inclined strongly to the evidence of his own eyes. He followed the muffler. He followed it to the corner and along twenty yards or so of pavement. Then he followed it into a Hammersmith bus.
CHAPTER X
The bus went creaking and clanking on its way. It was quite full, and it smelt very strongly of fog, petrol and wet umbrellas. Charles sat opposite the man with the muffler and looked at him curiously. He had a square, fresh face and very blue eyes; he had the look of a man who has followed the sea. Forty had been with Mr. Standing on his yacht. But Forty was deaf, and this man wasn’t deaf.
Just on the impulse Charles leaned across and addressed him.
“Bad fog-isn’t it? I’m glad I’m not at sea.”
The man looked at Charles after a pleasant puzzled fashion and shook his head.
“Sorry, sir, but I’m deaf.”
Charles raised his voice:
“I only said it was a bad fog.”
He shook his head again and smiled deprecatingly.
“It’s no good, sir. Hill 60 going up was the last thing I heard.”
The other people in the bus looked round with interest. A fat woman in a brown velvet dress and stout laced boots said, “What a shime!”
Charles sat back and closed his eyes. Grey Mask had said Forty was deaf-and that this was Forty, Charles had now no more doubt than that he himself was Charles Moray; yet Forty, apologised to by a casual stranger in a fog-no, let’s get it clearer, Forty taken unawares-had answered a casual stranger’s apology. But Forty in a crowded lighted bus not only maintained that he was stone deaf but produced a picturesque reminiscence to account for it. What did it mean?
Charles thought that he would find out what it meant; and when presently the man in the muffler got out of the bus, Charles got out too.
“The one point about this perfectly beastly weather,” he explained to Archie over dinner, “is that you can follow a fellow without his spotting you. I followed him very successfully and tracked him to his lair. He appears to be lodging at No. 5, Gladys Villas, Chiswick. The house belongs to an old lady and her daughter who’ve been there for about forty years-I found that out at the grocer’s. But there I’m stuck. The old lady’s name is Brown, and she’s the widow of a sea captain. I could have found out lots more of that sort of thing. But how am I going to find out the things I want to know about Forty?”
“Get a trained sleuth to do it,” said Archie firmly. “That’s what they’re for. I can put you on to one if you like.”
“A good man?”
“A sleuthess,” said Archie impressively. “A perfect wonder-has old Sherlock boiled.”
Charles frowned.
“A woman?”
“Well, a sleuthess. She’s not exactly what you’d call a little bit of fluff, you know.”
“What’s her name?”
“Maud Silver.”
“Mrs. or Miss?”
“My dear old bean!”
“Well-which is she?”
“Single as a Michaelmas daisy,” said Archie.
“But who is she? And why drag in a sleuthess when there are lots of perfectly good sleuths?”
“Well,” said Archie, “I put my money on Maud. I only saw her once, and she didn’t make my heart beat any faster. I went to see her because my cousin Emmeline Foster was in the dickens of a hole. She’d done one of the silly sort of things women manage to do-can’t imagine how they think of them myself. I can’t give you the lurid details; but what it amounted to was that she’d gone and lost the family jewels, and she was shakin’ in her shoes for fear her mother-in-law would find out. Well, little Maudie got them back. No fuss, no scandal, no painful family scene-a very neat piece of work. That’s only one story. I know half a dozen more, because Emmeline just rushed round with her mouth open tellin’ all her friends what a wonder Maudie was, and all the friends who had private scrapes of their own went and bleated to Maudie about ’em, and when Maudie had got ’em all straightened up again, they came back and told Emmeline, and Emmeline told me.”
Charles took down Miss Maud Silver’s address. If she specialized in getting silly women out of messes, she would just about suit his book. He put the address away in his pocket-book, and as he looked up he caught sight of Freddy Pelham dining at a table with Massiter, the artist, and a large, dull, respectable couple whom Charles did not know. Massiter had the air of a man who is bored to the verge of coma. Freddy looked so forlorn that Charles felt a genuine pang of pity.
Later, when he and Archie were going out, he found himself almost touching Freddy in the doorway, and in a moment Freddy was shaking him by the hand.
“My dear fellow! You’re back-yes, back! Dear me, you’re back again.!”
“As you see,” said Charles.
Freddy dropped the hand he had been shaking; his little grey eyes looked deprecatingly at the young man whom his step-daughter had jilted; his rather high and plaintive voice became more plaintive still.
“My dear fellow-you’re back! Pleased to see you-very pleased to see you!”
“I’m pleased to be back,” said Charles cheerfully.
At another time it might have amused him to observe Freddy’s embarrassment. He plunged straight into the cause of it.
“By the way, can you give me Margaret’s address?”
Freddy blinked.
“Margaret’s address-er-Margaret’s address?”
“Yes.”
Freddy blinked again.
“You’ve heard that she’s deserted me,” he said. “I don’t know why girls can’t stay at home. But it seems to take them all the same way. Now there’s Nora Canning-now let me see, was it Nora? Or is Nora the married one, and am I thinking of Nancy? Or is it Nancy who is the married one? And who the deuce did s
he marry? It wasn’t Monty Soames, and it wasn’t Rex Fossiter. Now who was it she married? I know I was at the wedding, because I remember they gave us deuced bad champagne-and Esther couldn’t go, but Margaret and I went-” He broke off, and looked down like a shy child. “You’ve heard about Esther?”
Charles felt horribly sorry for him.
“Yes, I-I heard. I can’t say how sorry I am. She-there was something about her.”
Freddy wrung his hand.
“I know, my boy, I know. No one like her-was there? Can’t think what she ever saw in me. Well, well, I’m glad to see you back, Charles. She always liked you very much. I’d be sorry to think there was any sort of feeling now you’ve come back.”
“Oh, there isn’t.”
“Bygones be bygones, eh? That’s right! Stupid to keep things up-that’s what I’ve always said-what’s the sense of keeping things up? I’ve always said that. I remember now saying that twenty years ago to Fennicker-no, if it was Fennicker it couldn’t have been twenty years ago, because that Fennicker was in China until 1914, unless I’m thinking of the other one-their mothers married cousins you know-deuced pretty women both of them-lovely shoulders. Women don’t have shoulders now, eh? Nothing but bones-that’s what I say-scraggy, my boy-and it don’t make them look any younger-”
“What about Margaret’s address?” said Charles quickly. If he had to wait whilst Freddy disentangled the Fennickers for a few generations or so, he would do so; but there seemed to be just a chance of escape; Archie was punching him in the ribs. “What about Margaret’s address?”
“I thought she might have stayed with me,” said Freddy. “But I don’t want you to think we quarrelled-I shouldn’t like anyone to think that.”
“Can you give me her address?”
It took Charles another ten minutes to get it, and Archie had reached groaning point before they finally got away.
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