Death Makes a Prophet

by John Bude

  The Garden City, in fact, seemed to settle down to its customary winter-time activities. There was the usual seasonal outburst of amateur theatricals, lectures, chamber-music, religious, political and educational meetings. There was the usual spate of head colds, chills, neuralgia, catarrh and laryngitis—striking impartially at meat-eater and vegetarian alike. There was the inescapable arctic wind blowing down Broadway, constant, penetrating, bitter, so that before March was out tempers were frayed and the lightest disagreement liable to break out into downright hostility.

  Poor Eustace was miserable to a degree. The feeling that all was not well in the world of Cooism, deepened. Several ugly quarrels flared up between members of the Inmost Temple over trivial matters of procedure and dogma. Periodically Mrs. Hagge-Smith descended on Welworth from her country seat to attend these meetings, put several spokes in several wheels, issued a few high-handed manifestos concerning finance and publicity, paid a few lush compliments to her dear Mr. Penpeti and departed in a whirl of last-minute amendments and reminders. To Eustace she was polite rather than friendly, still angry over his refusal to produce The Nine Gods of Heliopolis. It was, in fact, a lonely and unhappy period for the High Prophet. Opposed by Alicia and Penpeti, seemingly abandoned by Hansford Boot, humoured like a small child by Penelope, high-hatted by his worthless offspring, he grew more and more morose. There were times when he wanted to run away from it all; to resign his high office and cut himself adrift for ever from the Movement he had originated. If it had not been for his pride and Penelope, perhaps he would have left the Garden City. Of late his letters had grown more passionate, more outspoken, more demanding, until, finally driven almost desperate by her detachment, he actually wrote and asked her to marry him. Penelope was very kind, very tactful, but very firm. She thought that, in the circumstances, it would be better if Eustace refrained from writing her in the future. She was sorry, but for his own sake…

  Sadly Eustace took the hint and, from that day onward, continued to worship her, but only from afar.

  II

  During those winter months Penpeti realised that, from a financial point-of-view, he was sitting pretty. Hansford was disbursing with the regularity and efficiency of a ticket-machine. Yacob, aware that his own interests were being served by these extortions, remained comparatively tractable. Provided he got his rake-off from the blackmail, and occasional extra slices of “the necessary” (for what he termed his “running expenses”) he was prepared to leave Penpeti, more or less, alone. On top of all this Penelope seemed not only ready to loosen her purse-strings, but to leave them permanently untied. Of course he had to work hard to retain her in this generous mood, but as Penpeti, since the age of sixteen, had taken to love-making as other boys to cricket, wood-carving or stamp-collecting, he was blessed with that facility of execution which accrues naturally from years of practice.

  Yes—from the financial angle, Penpeti was satisfied that he was doing very well for himself. Yet his peace-of-mind was not without blemish. The shooting affair in Mayblossom Cut had not escaped his attention and he was fly enough to spot the joke that had been levelled at him by the ingenious Sid Arkwright. And the more he analysed the incident, the more certain he grew that he had been the intended victim of those shots in the dark. When Yacob next slipped up to Welworth and sidled in through his front door to collect “the necessary”, Penpeti showed him the reports in the local papers. Yacob whistled.

  “So it’s like that is it? Dear! Dear! You don’t suppose that—?”

  “I’ve my own suspicions,” broke in Penpeti. “That’s why I showed you these cuttings. I want your opinion, Yacob.”

  “You’re thinking of Gaussin, eh?”

  Penpeti nodded solemnly.

  “Naturally.”

  “But that’s impossible!” exclaimed Yacob. “Out of the question. I happen to know that Pierre Gaussin’s out of town. He’s been out for some months now. Working the Côte D’Azur. The usual racket.”

  Penpeti breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  “You’re sure of your facts?”

  “Certain! I’ve always made a point, a very special point, my dear fellow, of checking up on Pierre’s movements. After all”—Yacob flashed Penpeti a quick, meaning smile—“you know I’ve always got your interests at heart. Oh no—you can’t pin this on to Gaussin. He’s a slippery customer, but he’d have to work darn fast to put anything across me.” Yacob paused, lit a cigarette and suddenly observed: “There’s another possibility, you know.”

  “Well?”

  “Our mutual friend. The plump pigeon you’re now picking.”

  “Sam Grew?” exclaimed Penpeti. “Confound it! I hadn’t thought of him. But he wouldn’t dare try anything as drastic as that.”

  “A cornered rat will dare anything,” commented Yacob sagaciously. “If you’ll take my advice, you’ll watch your step with Mr. Sam Grew. You can leave Pierre out of it.”

  One dark night towards the end of March, Penpeti had good cause to remember Yacob’s advice. He was just entering the house, when something whizzed by his left ear and thudded into the woodwork of the door. Even before it had stopped quivering, Penpeti had wrenched the object free and swung round on the gate. Unfortunately a large lilac bush afforded perfect cover and, by the time he had rushed into the roadway, he saw no more than a rapidly diminishing shape receding into the shadows. The sequence of events had been so rapid that Penpeti had difficulty in believing that they had really happened. But the long, wicked-looking knife in his hand proved unquestionably that they had!

  Penpeti shuddered as he let himself into the house. He felt sick and dizzy. Another inch to the right and…he shuddered again. Like Eustace, he had grown acutely aware of the malignant forces abroad in the Garden City. Was Yacob right? Was it Sam Grew alias Hansford Boot who had thrown that knife? He doubted it. Hansford didn’t strike him as the type of man to make a cold-blooded and calculating murderer. Too weak-kneed. Too imaginative. But if Pierre Gaussin were in the South of France…then who, who?

  Thereafter, Penpeti never went out after dark. He pretended to Penelope that his eyesight was failing. But refusing to be diddled of his company during the long evenings, she finally persuaded him to stay the night. He bowed his head to the inevitable and, to prevent the domestics from gossiping, slunk away from Elysium before Hilda and the cook were awake.

  He toyed with the idea of discarding his caftan and fez. But in the end he realised that such a move might prove dangerous. It might mean questions, awkward questions, and questions were something he was most anxious to avoid. For that same reason Penpeti never made any mention, save to Yacob, of the knife-throwing episode. He knew only too well that he was in no position to suffer the searching cross-examinations of a police enquiry.

  III

  And so it was, with all these unsolved enigmas hanging like a huge question-mark over the Cult of Coo, that the hierarchy of the Order, towards the end of May, made preparations for their imminent departure to Sussex.

  Part II

  Old Cowdene

  Chapter IX

  Sid Arkwright Listens In

  I

  Alicia Hagge-Smith’s vision was already well on the way to becoming a reality. As she sat by the mullioned window of her boudoir—a severely Spartan room with no feminine non-sense about it—her somewhat beady eye raked the broad acres of the park and brightened with a gleam of satisfaction. Near and far, amidst the clumps of bosky elms, workmen were busy digging ditches, erecting tents, driving pegs, tying off guy-ropes, laying wires, water-pipes and cinder-tracks. The pink and white mayblossom was in full flower and a golden tide of buttercups seemed to sweep up to the outer confines of the manor garden and break in silence against the mellow brick walls. Under her window a motor-mower was buzzing like a trapped bee as the third-gardener moved up and down the gently-undulating lawns. The fourth-gardener was visible beyond the rose
-walk, engaged in mulching the peony-beds with liquid manure. The fifth, no more than a dot at the far end of the kitchen-garden, was busy pricking out young lettuce plants. The second-gardener was not to be seen, since he was sitting on a barrow in the centre of a rhododendron clump enjoying a leisured pipe. The head-gardener, as befitted a man of such eminence, was taking a post-prandial nap in the potting-shed.

  Mrs. Hagge-Smith was content. All was going well. Two days earlier the members of the Inmost Temple had arrived at Old Cowdene as an advance party to the flood of ordinary members who were due in about a week. Their distribution about the estate had now been completed, for it had been agreed that all the spare rooms in the manor should be reserved for the more enfeebled members of the Movement. Penelope, with Hilda and the cook, were now comfortably installed in the Dower House on the south fringe of the park. Eustace, with typical modesty, had claimed nothing more grandiose than a furnished lodge at the north entrance. Terence and the blonde housekeeper, Mrs. Summers, had travelled down in the Daimler with him. Sid Arkwright had taken up his quarters in a nearby barn where the car was to be garaged. Other members of the Inmost Temple, including Hansford Boot, had, at their own request, been accommodated in a cluster of bell-tents not far from the Chinese summer-house, which had been converted into a quiet and tasteful Temple of Meditation. Penpeti alone had refused to remain within the hallowed precincts of the estate. For reasons, upon which he was obviously not prepared to enlarge, he had engaged a couple of rooms at the local inn—The Leaning Man. Alicia was naturally shocked. It was infra dig, she felt, for a Prophet-in-Waiting to take up residence in a public-house. She begged him to change his mind, but Penpeti remained adamant. He spoke vaguely of that “isolation and detachment necessary to come to terms with one’s Higher Self”; the need for a private retreat “away from the commendable hubbub of mass devotion”. And as Alicia had no more idea of what he meant than Penpeti himself, she was forced to accept his explanation and leave it at that. She was disappointed, a little huffy, but resigned.

  Once every twenty-four hours, at dinner, the members of the Inmost Temple foregathered at the manor and went into a huddle. For the remainder of the day they busied themselves about the thousand and one practical activities demanded by the impending conventicle. A casual onlooker might have supposed that a certain amount of the tension which had been so noticeable in Welworth had evaporated.

  But beneath the crust of all this activity, the yeast of personal prejudices and problems was still working overtime. The “goodly apple”, alas, was still thoroughly “rotten at the core”.

  II

  For months Terence had been dreaming of this moment—dreams in superb technicolour, starring the one and only woman in his life…Denise Blake. Once at Old Cowdene he felt sure that he would be able to see Denise alone. It was an extensive estate and his father and the Blot could not possibly police all of it all of the time. True, Denise was tied to her job most of the day, but surely sometime, in the evening in the gloaming…? He had attended his first dinner-party at the manor in a whirl of excitement and anticipation. But, to his acute disappointment, Denise didn’t show up. After all, how was Terence to know that Alicia and Eustace had laid their heads together and decided to do all in their power to keep the couple apart? Alicia because she didn’t want to lose a good secretary: Eustace because he didn’t want to lose his influence over his son.

  Once Terence had glimpsed Denise in the distance—a sylph-like figure slipping through the rose-garden with a basket of flowers on her arm. Daring all, he had called her by name—an anguished, love-lorn bellow that echoed against the grey-stoned walls like a roll of thunder. The result had been disheartening—a collection of heads bobbing up from the most unexpected places, all staring in his direction. Gardeners peering over shrubs, maids from windows, workmen from holes in the ground; and, finally, like some outraged diva, Alicia Hagge-Smith herself, glaring at him from the terrace. Denise had fled into the house. Terence, flushing to the roots of his hair, had stumbled off across the park.

  He was furious with his father, the Blot, himself, life, every damn thing! Any normal chap with a normal father would have been allowed to make contact with a decent, normal girl like Denise. It was sickening, vile! If he had to bottle himself up much longer, he’d…he’d…

  But Terence wasn’t sure just what he would do when the critical moment arrived. Something drastic and dramatic. Of that he was convinced!

  III

  Penelope had given instructions that Mr. Penpeti was to be admitted without question to the Dower House whenever he chanced to call. Now, more than ever, she needed a strong arm upon which to lean; a stimulating personality to revitalise her jaded nerves. For Penelope, after a lifetime of ease and security, suddenly found herself in a jam. Two days before leaving Welworth, like a bolt from the blue, she had received a letter from her broker in the City. Its contents left no room for doubt. Due to a totally unexpected fluctuation of certain shares, a large slice of Penelope’s private income had, so to speak, vanished overnight. Retrenchment was now the order of the day—a cutting down here, a denial there, and so on. All unnecessary luxuries would have to go, including, of course, her little “loans” (as she optimistically liked to call them) to Peta. Penpeti was horror-struck when he learnt the news, for Yacob, as the result of a series of losses on the turf, had suddenly begun to tighten the screw. True, there was still Hansford Boot’s fifty pounds a quarter, but without Penelope’s extra disbursements it was going to be the very devil to keep Yacob sweet and reasonable.

  But this financial set-back was as thistledown to the second worry which tormented Penelope. For weeks she had been wrestling with a new and terrifying complication, determined that Penpeti’s life should not be darkened by her secret. But two days after her arrival in Sussex, she broke down and confessed everything.

  “But good God!” cried Penpeti, shaken to the core. “It can’t be true! It can’t!”

  “Oh, I’ve tried to persuade myself that I’ve been imagining things!” cried Penelope in stricken tones. “But I’m not, Peta. We’ve got to face up to it. I’m going to have a child—your child! It’s terrible, I admit, but it’s true!”

  “But good heavens, don’t you see?” blustered Penpeti. “If this leaks out, I’m ruined. Ruined! Imagine Alicia’s reaction to the news. Me, the Prophet-in-Waiting, the father of—”

  “Peta darling, we must keep our heads.”

  “Confound it—I’m trying to. But you must see it from my point-of-view. As Prophet-in-Waiting I receive certain emoluments that go with the office. What happens to my income if—?”

  “Then Alicia mustn’t find out!”

  “Don’t be absurd. How the devil can we prevent her? Unless,” he added, suddenly brightening, “unless you’re prepared to go away. Is that it? You’re willing to go abroad, perhaps?”

  Penelope shook her head.

  “No, Peta. For one thing I couldn’t afford it. For another, my darling, I just couldn’t bear to be away from you at this awful moment. I just couldn’t! Surely you see that?”

  “Then how can we hoodwink Alicia, Eustace and all the rest of them? In a few more weeks your condition will be obvious to everybody. I tell you, Penelope, this will ruin me. I shall be done for in the Movement. Defrocked! Disgraced!” Penpeti threw his arms wide in a gesture of despair and began to pace rapidly up and down the room. “That this should happen now—now, when there’s a strong possibility of my promotion. Only the other day, Alicia was hinting to me…there’s a growing faction inside the Order who would like to see Eustace out of office. Too unenterprising. Too dogmatic. Too reactionary. I haven’t spoken about this before, but Alicia’s convinced that if the matter were put to a general vote…” He clasped his hands dramatically to his head. “And now it’s hopeless, hopeless! This has finished me. I can be written off!”

  He dropped into an armchair and lay back exhausted, scowling at the
overcast sky beyond the window. All his plans thwarted. All his hopes dashed to the ground. Suddenly he was aware of Penelope’s cool hand brushing over his cheek.

  “Peta.”

  “Well?” He snatched aside her hand with a surly gesture and glared up at her with an expression of impatience.

  “I want to show you something.”

  She went to a small antique bureau, unlocked the lid, picked up her letter-case, unlocked it in turn and took out a bundle of letters tied with ribbon.

  “These,” she murmured, handing the bundle to Penpeti. “Read them. I think they may interest you.”

  Penpeti briskly untied the ribbon, flattened out the first letter and began to read. He did so without comment. Then he took up a second epistle, then a third, and gradually his scowl evaporated. He leaned forward in his chair, stroking his beard, absorbed, devouring page after page of the closely-written sheets with unbridled attention.

  Then: “Eustace!” he cried. “Good heavens, it’s impossible!” He began to laugh softly, derisively. “Of all the damned hypocrites. I can’t believe it. How long has this been going on?”

  “Oh months,” said Penelope. “Until I put a stop to it a few weeks ago…after he’d made me a proposal of marriage.”

  “A proposal?” shot out Penpeti. “Eustace?” He laughed again; then suddenly recalling the conversation which had led up to the revelation of these letters, he went on tartly: “This is all very amusing, I admit, but why show them to me now?”

  “But, Peta, don’t you see?”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “I haven’t the—”

  Penelope broke in tenderly.

  “Do you think I want to spoil your career, my darling? Your chances of becoming High Prophet? Peta dear, don’t be so obtuse. Surely you think a little more highly of your adoring Penelope than that? Don’t you realise? I was wondering if Eustace, perhaps, wasn’t the one person who could get us out of this dilemma.”