Elk 04 White Face

by Edgar Wallace

  She laughed at this.

  “You’re suffering from land hunger, Donald,” she said. “I shall have to write and get particulars of this desirable property!”

  He frowned. “Have you any friends at the Cape?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I know a boy there—he was a Rhodes scholar—but I haven’t written to him since he left England.”

  “H’m!” He was rather serious now. “When strangers come into the property market they soak ‘em! Let me give you a word of advice: never try to buy land in South Africa through an agent—half of ‘em are robbers, the other half an incompetent lot. One thing is certain, that the property at Paarl—that is where my farm is—will double itself in value in a couple of years. They are running a new railway through—it passes at the end of my land—and that will make an immense difference. If I had a lot of money to invest I should put every cent of it in land.”

  He explained, however, that the Cape Dutch, who were the largest landowners in the country, were a suspicious folk who never did business with an Englishman, except to the latter’s disadvantage.

  He took out the two hundred pound notes and looked at them again, rustling them affectionately.

  “Why don’t you put it back in the bank?” she asked.

  “Because I like the feel of it,” he said gaily. “These English notes are so clean-looking.”

  He returned the case to his pocket, and suddenly caught her by both arms. She saw a light in his eyes which she had never seen before. She was breathless and a little frightened.

  “How long are we going to wait?” he asked in a low voice. “I can get a special licence; we can be married and on the Continent in two days.”

  She disengaged herself; discovered, to her amazement, that she was trembling, and that the prospect of an immediate marriage filled her with a sense of consternation.

  “That is impossible,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve ever such a lot of work to do, and I’ve got to finish up my work at the clinic. And, Donald, you said you didn’t want to be married for months.”

  He smiled down at her.

  “I can wait months or years,” he said lightly, “but I can’t wait for my lunch. Come along!”

  She had only half an hour to give to him, but he promised to meet her and take her to dinner that night. The prospect did not arouse in her any sense of pleasurable anticipation. She told herself she loved him. He was everything that she would have him be. But immediate marriage? She shook her head.

  “What are you shaking your head about?” he asked.

  They were at Pussini’s, and, as it was before one o’clock, the restaurant was empty save for themselves.

  “I was just thinking,” she said.

  “About my farm?” He was looking at her searchingly. “No? About me?”

  And then suddenly she asked: “What is your bank, Donald?”

  He was completely surprised at the question.

  “My bank? Well, the Standard Bank—not exactly the Standard Bank, but a bank that is affiliated with it. Why do you ask?”

  She had a good and benevolent reason for putting the question, but this she was not prepared to reveal.

  “I will tell you later,” she said, and when she saw that she had worried him she was on the point of making her revelation. “It’s really nothing, Donald.”

  He drove down with her to Tidal Basin, but refused the offer of her car to take him back, his excuse being that he felt nervous of the London traffic. She was secretly glad that there was some feature of London life of which he stood in awe.

  Mr. Donald Bateman came back to town in a taxi and spent the afternoon in the City office of a tourist agency, examining Continental routes. He would like to have stayed in London; but then, he would like to have stayed in so many places from which expediency had dragged him. There was Inez. She had grown into quite a beautiful woman. He had seen her, though she was not aware of the fact. It was curious how women developed. He remembered her—rather sharp-featured, a gawk of a girl who had bored him utterly. In what way would Janice grow? For the moment she was very delectable, though she had qualities which exasperated him. Perfect women, he decided, were difficult to find.

  When he had caught her by the shoulders that morning and looked down into her eyes, he had expected some other reaction than that fit of shivering. She had shown her alarm too clearly for him to carry the matter any further. It must be marriage, of course. But marriage was rather dangerous in a country like this. That reporter friend of hers? He hated reporters; they were a prying, unscrupulous lot. And crime reporters were the worst.

  He began to feel uncomfortable, and turned relief to a contemplation of the physical perfection of Inez. From Inez his mind strayed to other women. What had become of Lorna, for example? Tommy had found her, probably, and forgiven everything. Tommy was always a weak-willed sap. But Inez!…

  He and Janice dined together that night, and most resolutely he chose the Howdah Club. Already the outrage had had effect upon the attendance: the dining-room was half empty, and Gasso stalked up and down, a picture of gloom.

  “This has ruined me, young miss,” he said brokenly. “You were here last night with the newspaper gentleman. People will not come unless they have no jewels. And I particularly desire jewelled people here, but not jewelled as Miss Dolly!”

  “I hope he comes tonight,” said Donald with a quiet smile.

  “You ‘ope so, eh?” asked the agitated Gasso. “You desire me to be thrown into the street with only my shirt on my back? That is good for business!”

  Janice was laughing, but she succeeded in pacifying the outraged maitre d’hotel.

  “It certainly is empty, but I don’t suppose we shall see our white-faced gentleman.” said Donald. “It’s rather like old times. I remember when I was in Australia there was a gang which held up a bank—they wore white masks, too. They got away with some money, by Jove! Ever heard of the Furses? They were brothers—the cleverest hold-up men in Australia.”

  “Perhaps this is one of them,” she said thoughtlessly.

  “Eh?”

  She could have sworn he was frightened at that moment. Something she saw in his eyes. It was absurd, of course, for Donald Bateman was afraid of nothing.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” he said.

  Half-way through dinner, when they were discussing some amiable nothing, he dropped his knife and fork on the plate. Again she saw that frightened look intensified. He was staring at somebody, and she followed the direction of his eyes.

  A man had come in. He must have been nearly sixty, was slim, dandified, rather fussy. He had a small party with him, and they were surrounded by waiters. Curiously enough, she knew him: curious, because she had made his acquaintance in a slum.

  “Who—who is that?” His voice was strained. “That man there, with the girls? Do you—do you know him?”

  “That is Dr. Rudd,” she said.

  “Rudd!”

  “He’s the police surgeon of our division—I’ve often seen him. In fact, he once came to the clinic. Quite an unpleasant man—he had nothing at all nice to say about our work.”

  “Dr. Rudd!”

  The colour was coming back to his face. He had gone pale! She was astounded.

  “Do you know him?” she asked in surprise.

  He smiled with difficulty.

  “No; he reminds me of somebody—an old friend of mine in—er—Rhodesia.”

  She noticed that when on their way out he passed the doctor’s group Donald was patting his face with a handkerchief as though he were healing a scratch.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “A little neuralgia.” He laughed cheerily. “That is the penalty one pays for sleeping out night after night in the rain.”

  He told her a story of a rainfall in Northern Rhodesia that had lasted four weeks on end.

  “And all that time,” he said, “I had not so much as a tent.”

  She left him at the door of the fla
t in Bury Street, and he was frankly disappointed, for he had expected to be asked up to her apartment. There was consolation on the way back to the hotel, certain anticipations of an interview he had arranged for the morrow. It was not with Janice.

  CHAPTER III

  In his rare moments of leisure Dr. Marford was wont to stand in his surgery, behind the red calico curtains which were stretched across the big window level with the bridge of his thin, aristocratic nose, and muse, a little sourly, upon Tidal Basin, its people and its future. He had material for speculation on those summer evenings, when the light of the brazen day still persisted in the western skies, and when every dive and tenement spilt the things that were so decently hidden in the cold days and nights of winter. On such nights the sweltering heat forced into the open the strangest beings, creatures which even the oldest inhabitants could not remember having seen before and the most hardened could hardly wish to see again.

  The red calico curtain was strung across the window of the large room which was his surgery. It had been a boot store and a confectioner’s parlour. Loucilensky, of infamous memory, had housed his “club” in it and found the side door which led to the little yard a convenient exit for his squalid patrons.

  It was a derelict property when Dr. Marford came to found his practice here. All Tidal Basin knew that the doctor was so poor that he had painted, distempered and scrubbed the place from top to bottom with his own hands. He had probably sewn his own curtains, had certainly collected from the Caledonian Market, where you may furnish a house for a few pounds, such domestic equipment as was necessary for his well-being. Tidal Basin, which favoured those cinemas which featured pictures of high life, had despised him for his poverty. A consumptive plumber had fixed the huge sink, which was an unsightly feature of one corner of the surgery, and had received, in return, free treatment and medicine until he went the dingy way of all consumptive plumbers.

  Tidal Basin had known and still knew Dr. Marford as the “penny doctor.” They knew him better as the “baby doctor,” for, after he had been in Tidal Basin a year, by some miracle he succeeded in founding a free clinic, where he gave ray treatment to children. He must have had influential friends, for on top of his other activities he founded a small convalescent home at the seaside.

  His work was his obsession, and not a penny of the money which came to him went to his own advantage. The drab surgery remained as shabby as it had always been—a very dreary place compared with the spick and span little palace of white enamel and glass where the children of Tidal Basin were made acquainted with artificial sunlight and the beneficent quality of strange rays.

  He saw Janice Harman pass the window and went to open the door to her. It was not true that this preoccupied man was hardly aware of her loveliness. He used to sit at his desk and think about her for hours on end. What strange dreams came to disorder the tidiness of his methodical mind was known only to Dr. Marford; and now, when she told him awkwardly, a little disjointedly, of her future plans, he showed no evidence of the sudden desolation and despair that crushed him.

  (“The oddest people fall in love with Janice,” said her best friend.)

  “Oh!” he said, and bit his thin lip thoughtfully. “That is very unfortunate—for the clinic. What does Mr. Quigley say to all this?”

  Hitherto he had felt an unreasonable antipathy to the young reporter, who had been a too frequent visitor to the clinic, and had written too much and too enthusiastically about Dr. Marford’s ventures to please a man who shrank instinctively from publicity.

  “Mr. Quigley has no right to raise any objections whatever.” There was a note of defiance in her voice. “He is a very good friend—or was.”

  There was an embarrassing pause.

  “But isn’t any longer,” said Dr. Marford gently.

  He experienced an inexplicable sense of kinship with Michael Quigley.

  Her native loyalty made her modify her attitude.

  “I like Michael—he is extraordinarily nice, but very domineering. He was awfully good to me the other night, and I was a beast to him. I was in the Howdah Club when that dreadful man came.”

  He turned an inquiring face to her.

  “Which dreadful man?”

  “The robber—White Face.”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, I know. I read the newspapers. I was talking to Sergeant Elk about him. There is a theory that he lives in this neighbourhood, a theory for which I am afraid your young friend is responsible. Are you wise?”

  He asked the question suddenly.

  “About—my marriage? Is any girl wise, Dr. Marford? Suppose I’d met this man every day of my life for years, should I know him—I mean, as one knows one’s husband? Men always put on their best appearance for women, and unless one lives in the same house with them it is impossible to be absolutely sure.”

  Marford nodded, fondling his bony chin.

  There was a long silence, which he broke.

  “I shall be sorry to lose you; you have been a most enthusiastic helper.”

  Now she came to a delicate stage of the interview—delicate because she knew how sensitive he was on the point.

  “I’d like to give the Institute a little present,” she said jerkily. “A thousand pounds—”

  He raised his hand; his expression was genuinely pained.

  “No, no, no; I couldn’t hear of it. You asked me once before if I would. No, I am satisfied that I have not paid you for the help you have given us. That is your splendid contribution to the clinic.”

  She knew he would be adamant on this point and had already decided that if he refused her gift it should take the form of an anonymous donation on her wedding day. Michael, in one of his more cynical moods, had once accused her of being theatrical, and the charge was so ridiculous that she had laughed. Yet there is a touch of theatricality in every sentimentalist, and Janice Harman was not without that weakness.

  Unexpectedly the doctor put out his thin hand and took hers.

  “I hope you will be happy,” he said, and this was at once a benediction and a dismissal.

  She crossed the road at Endley Street. At the corner stood a tall, good-looking man, with greying hair at his temples. To her surprise he was talking to a woman, talking confidentially it seemed. Presently the woman walked away and he came, smiling, to meet the girl.

  “What a ghastly place, darling! I am so happy you’re leaving it.”

  “Who was that woman you were speaking to?” she asked curiously.

  He laughed—she loved that laugh of his.

  “Woman? Oh, yes.” He looked round and nodded towards a slim figure walking ahead of them on the opposite side of the road. “It was rather odd—she thought I was her brother, and when she saw she’d made a mistake she was a little embarrassed. Rather a pretty girl.”

  Her car was in a near-by garage—in the early days she had driven up to the clinic, which was at the far end of Endley Street, but the doctor had advised her against the practice—advice well justified, for in a week everything that was movable in the car had been stolen by the parents of the children she cared for.

  She seated herself at the wheel, a radiant figure of youth, he thought, more beautiful than even he in his wildest imaginings had dreamed. The car came down the slope of the road; she saw the shabby figure of the doctor watching them, and waved her hand to him.

  “Who was that?” he asked carelessly.

  “That was Dr. Marford.”

  “Your boss, eh? I’d like to have had a look at him. He’s a big noise around here.”

  She laughed at this.

  “There isn’t a tinier murmur in Tidal Basin,” she said. “But he’s marvellous! I sometimes think he starves himself to keep his clinic going.”

  She rhapsodised all the way through the City. In Cranbourn Street they were held up by a traffic block. By this time he had gained command of the conversation and the excellences of Dr. Marford were relegated to a second place. He was talking of South Africa and h
is two farms, one in the wilds of Rhodesia, the other amidst the beauties of Paarl. He liked talking of the Paarl property.

  “It’s going to be terribly slow for you, though there is some sort of social life at the Cape. I’m pretty well known—”

  “There’s somebody who knows you,” she laughed.

  He turned his head quickly, but could distinguish amongst the hurrying throng on the sidewalk no familiar face.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “There—that dark man.” She looked back. “He is standing by the hosiers.”

  He looked round and frowned.

  “Oh, yes, I know him—not very well, though; I got the better of him in a business deal, and he hasn’t forgiven me.” He uttered an exclamation. “Darling, I can’t take you to the theatre tonight: I’ve just remembered. Will you forgive me?”

  She was too happy, too completely under the fascination of this exalted adventure, to resent the missed engagement. This good-looking stranger who had come from the blue, whose name she could hardly use without an unaccountable sense of shyness, was Romance—the fulfiliment of vague and delightful dreams. He was still outside the realms of reality.

  She had known him for ten days; it seemed that it was a lifetime. Once or twice during the journey she was on the point of telling him of the surprise she had for him. He was a great home-lover; his self-confessed sin was that he coveted his neighbour’s land. There was a farm adjoining his at Paarl that had come into the market, could be had for a mere PS8,000. He waxed enthusiastic on the advantage of having this additional property—vine-yards and orange groves, new pastures for his cattle.

  He returned to the subject as the car was crossing Piccadilly Circus.

  “You’ve made me ambitious, you angel,” he said. “I’m a poor farmer and can’t lay my hands on a fortune, so the farm will have to go.”

  Again she was nearly telling him. She had a friend in Cape Town, a young lawyer, a Rhodes scholar, whom she had met at Oxford. That very morning she had wired to him, asking him to buy the property.

  He parted from her at the door of her flat in Bury Street, and her chauffeur, who was waiting, drove him to his modest hotel. At parting: “I hate the thought of losing that farm—if I could cable four thousand pounds tomorrow morning I could clinch the bargain.”