by Ashby, R. C.
Yours truly,
Winifred Goff.
A letter that explains much, and leaves so much more unexplained. I wrote her the briefest note in reply; a mere line to say that I should not think of accepting any money from her and she would please consider the matter closed. Not a reference to all her tortuous circumlocution. She was always an enigma and she can remain one to the end so far as I’m concerned.
And that, Ahrman, is positively the end of my adventure.”
ENTR’ACTE (continued)
“DO you believe me?” was Mertoun’s direct question.
Ahrman did not answer immediately. He was admiring the décor of the little room—buff-washed walls with panels of dark blue and silver—and possibly half-asleep too in the depths of the dark-blue leather chair. The wood fire had burned low. The air was filled with merry, floating shapes of smoke from the pipes, wreathing now high, now low, very fascinating to follow in their effortless flight. Ahrman thought of how a world-famed ballerina might one day watch that dream of graceful motion uplifting from her own cigarette, until she died from the ache of impossible achievement. The wonder of such motion was too exquisite to be quite unconscious. The smoke veil was composed then of millions of little living creatures, glorying in their art.
“Do you believe me?” Mertoun’s voice had taken a sharper tone. He was a little hoarse from his narration. “Because if you don’t——”
“I do believe you,” Ahrman said.
“Do you mean it? You believe me! All of it! All of it!”
“Every word,” said Ahrman. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be faithful and true. But if I hadn’t—what?”
“I should have gone out into the streets,” said Mertoun. “I should have walked all night. I should have become a Flying Dutchman of a creature in the London streets—until I’d found somebody who would have listened and believed. It must be the most awful thing in the world, not to be believed . . . You did mean it?”
“Now you can’t believe me—yes!”
Mertoun cried with a touch of drama: “My soul . . . I see it all! You’re humouring the lunatic.”
“No, no! I swear I’m not.”
“Thanks.” Mertoun’s look of relief was not assumed. He went on: “You can’t think what it means to me that the first man I met should be you, and that you should believe me. Because probably no other man in London would.”
“I can think of several who would,” said Ahrman.
“Men I know?”
“Sir Hubert Torry, for instance.”
“Oh, the ghost man. I couldn’t bear a professional spook-hunter. I’ve always thought of them as being half in the clouds. This is earthy, practical, real. You believe me. Well!”
“And what now?” said Ahrman.
“What now?
“What are you going to do about it? You can’t mean this to be the end.” Ahrman chose his words carefully. “I mean . . . don’t you long to see the play out?”
“The play. Carrying on my analogy of leaving during the last act. Well, of course I could always go back to the same theatre another night if I were really keen to see how it all ended. But it doesn’t work out so neatly in actual fact. I’ve no excuse to go back to the region. I hope Ingram and Joan will soon be in London.”
“And meanwhile,” said Ahrman, “your friend Barr and the Roman ghost approach one another like blindfold gladiators in the arena. . . . I say, there are some striking analogies in this story!”
Mertoun laughed, and checked himself. “No, I mustn’t laugh about it, or soon I shall come to look upon the whole thing as an imaginative joke and hate myself for my flippancy. No, Ahrman, no laughter. It was death to two men.” He paused and then asked searchingly: “Do these things . . . do they happen? I mean, in all your life have you met anything like it before?”
Ahrman wrinkled his forehead. “Nothing quite so . . . so graphic, perhaps; but when I was young down in Cornwall there was an affair in a neighbouring village. A family of three was wiped out by—something. It was always a profound mystery, and after this long time I can’t give you the details. There wasn’t very much to know. Then there was the Tarleton Case, which you’ll remember, when Major Tarleton appealed to the police for protection against the family ghost; and the presence in his house of an utterly prosaic, thirteen-stone bobby certainly broke the spell because there was no more haunting. I know of a castle or two that the owners won’t live in . . . but no, my reminiscences are slightly childish, I’m afraid. I can’t cap your tale with a better one. I think it speaks well for England that it can still raise a decent ghost. . . . By the way, how’s your business after all this neglect? Anything doing?”
Mertoun brightened. “As it happens, yes. I’ve got quite a good commission if I care to take it up. A letter came yesterday morning from John Lecky, the show producer—I used to be at school with him. He’s putting on a big show in May and he wants me to find him a chair for his Venetian Lady; he says, the most beautiful chair in the world.”
“How long does he give you to scour the world?”
“A week. But that’s ample really. I know where the chair is—in Vienna. I rang up Lecky and told him it would cost him four hundred pounds, and he seemed quite disappointed that I hadn’t said fourteen hundred. I can negotiate and have the chair sent; though, of course, it would be better to go myself.”
“You’ll go, I take it?”
“I would, like a shot, but . . . supposing Joan writes.”
“Could she write anything that would make so much difference?”
“She might want me to go back there at once.”
“And she might not,” said Ahrman. “Young man, you’re making too much of your part in this act. You’re only a super. Go to Vienna at once; it’ll do you good. Leave to-morrow morning.”
“I may,” was all Mertoun would concede. “I may hear from Joan to-morrow too.”
They walked out into Whitehall, and Mertoun began feverishly to talk of other things, to emphasize, as it were, his normality.
Ahrman was anxious to get home, a craze which often begins to attack people after forty, so he took advantage of a suitable break in the conversation to say: “Well, now, how do you get home? We’re going the wrong way for you, aren’t we?”
“That’s all right,” Mertoun said; “I’m not in a hurry, and I can take a taxi. What about you?
“Oh, I can take a tram near here . . . put me down within five minutes of where I live. You must look me up again some time.”
“Just one thing,” said Mertoun quickly. “Thinking it over, was there anything more I could have done? Under the same circumstances, would another man have been more resourceful or effective, do you think? I can’t help wondering. Actually I can’t see anything else that I could have done, but that may be due to my own denseness.”
“I shouldn’t worry,” said Ahrman. “No two men under the same set of circumstances would ever behave in exactly the same way, but at least you didn’t seem to blunder. It seems gratuitous to bother over what you might have done. You might have made a most unholy mess of things up there if you’d been tactless—that leaps to the eye—so congratulate yourself that you’re well out of it.”
“It baffles me . . . how—if ever—I let Miss Goff down.”
“You may never know. Forget it.”
“I’ll have to.” Mertoun nodded. “So long, then. Good night.”
“Good night.” Ahrman added emphatically. “And you be sensible and go to Vienna. Business first. It’s a good rule.”
There was no letter from the North, and Mertoun left England next morning. The journey to Central Europe was no novelty to him, and he knew the Vienna to which he was travelling rapidly, the real Vienna, not the song-and-dance city of romantic leg
end thrust upon his eye by London’s theatrical posters. It would be the same as ever, a grey city with tall grey buildings, swept by the icy winds of February and grindingly cold; the Prater dingy and bare, the river—blue Danube indeed!—black and sloppy with ice; the clanking trams, round and round the Ring in noisy monotony; people in streets and cafés with their grim, unhappy faces; swarms of beggars. As for the talked-of night-life . . . well, it paid them to work up a little tinselled gaiety for the tourists.
He took a droschke to the Bristol Hotel—not that he thought it romantic to ride in a droschke, but because he had set out to walk from the station, having little luggage to carry, and sudden rain had descended, and there was no taxi in sight—and after lunch considered the job in hand.
It might take him anything from twelve to forty-eight hours to get in touch with Wertheim, the elusive Jew with whom he wanted to trade. Wertheim’s whole life was spent in “passing through” Vienna. Mertoun guessed that this deal would take him two or three days, and the sooner he took steps to catch Wertheim on the wing the better.
He was about to telephone when it occurred to him that he might walk round to the Jew’s office which was on the Kärntnerstrasse, not five minutes’ walk from the hotel.
A clerk received him.
“I want to see Mr. Wertheim,” Mertoun said in German. “When will he be here? I want the earliest possible appointment.”
“But Mr. Wertheim is here now. What is your name, please?”
This was incredible luck. “Tell him, Mr. Mertoun from London. Can he spare me a quarter of an hour?”
The clerk returned quickly. “This way, Herr Merrto’n.”
The prosperous little Jew, who always dressed very badly and never appeared to be working very hard, hauled himself out of an English saddle-bag chair.
“Vell, Mr. Merrto’n! You valk in alvays sudden, isn’t it? You’re lucky too, because I go to Italy in the morning for t’ree veeks. A little holiday, no. Vot you come for now?”
“I want that chair from the Elpenschloss,” said Mertoun. “I saw in last week’s Connoisseur that you’d acquired it. Where is it, and when can I have it? As usual I’m in a tearing hurry.”
“T’at chair,” said Wertheim, “she goes mit me to Italy to-morrow. The Count——”
“Oh, Tommy!” Mertoun interrupted with calm impatience. “How much is he giving you for it?”
The Jew began to murmur something in the fifty-thousands which proved that the complicated system of reducing practically worthless kronen to a recognizable monetary value was for the moment beyond even Hebrew technique.
“I’ll give you three-fifty,” said Mertoun, “in English notes. It’s here—seven fifties—and you’d better pocket it. That’s the best deal you’ve done this week.”
“Na, na! But I couldn’t t’ink——”
“Right-ho,” said Mertoun, taking up the notes. “I’m not arguing. I can’t be bothered. I’m going.” He was half-out of the door.
“Coom you back——”
“What for?”
“As a goot coostomer——”
“Cut that out,” said Mertoun. “How am I getting the chair to London?”
“I haf her here,” said the Jew. “I put her on the train to Paris to-morrow morning, isn’t it? She is in London Friday. You haf a little drink?”
A quarter of an hour later Mertoun was in the street again. Wertheim was reliable once he had made a bargain, and the chair would be duly delivered in London, quite safe and sound. And Mertoun realized that he had been in Vienna just over an hour and a half and all his business was done. Wasn’t that just the contrariness of life all over? It might have taken him three or four days; he had counted on two.
The next thought that occurred to him was that the time was twenty-past two and the Trans-Continental express, the best train of the day, left for Paris at three. What had he to wait for in Vienna?
An hour later, leaning back in his corner seat, rolling along towards France, he laughed long, though silently, over this whole helter-skelter business. A room booked and unbooked, all in an hour. That hadn’t worried them at the Bristol. Little Wertheim, so comic. . . . Mertoun had said at the end: “You know, you ought to come to England, Wertheim. It’s incredible that a cosmopolitan like you has never seen London!”
The little Jew gave one emphatic jerk of his head. “Not never do I come to England so long as I live. My vife is in it.”
Mertoun was back in London almost before he realized he had left it. The next morning there was a letter from Joan Hope. He called Ahrman on the ’phone directly after breakfast.
“That you, Ahrman. . . . Yes, I’ve been and come back. . . . Not impossible at all. . . . Will you have dinner with me to-night? . . . Good. Meet me in the Criterion Grill at eight. . . . So long.”
“You move quickly,” said Ahrman that night when he looked up from the tricky task of choosing his soup.
“I did in this case.” Mertoun sounded pleasantly assured. “I was in Vienna less than two hours. There wasn’t anything to tempt me to stay, so I caught the afternoon train back. I got the chair, and I was notified that it had arrived at Dover this morning. And I’ve heard from Joan—Joan Hope.”
“Oh yes? That business . . .”
“Have you thought of it since?”
Ahrman made a gesture of assent. “Quite a lot. . . . But is there anything to tell me? Anything to add to the loose end?”
“Not much,” said Mertoun; “it was reassuring to get the letter, and yet I’m disappointed. Joan isn’t coming back to London yet. Ingram won’t come. You can guess how difficult it is to keep him in the same mind for two days running. It seems that Ingram is thoroughly roused by the recent appearance of the ghost. He has been taking his bicycle out at night and scouring the moorland roads in the hope of seeing Gracchus. Think of anyone wanting to! It’s rather horrible for Joan, but she’s so plucky she makes light of the whole thing. Still, it isn’t good to think of her left behind in that disturbing neighbourhood. Ingram says that he won’t leave until he has seen Gracchus.”
“So Miss Hope has got hold of the complete story?”
“Evidently. I hope she isn’t afraid. She wouldn’t tell me if she were.”
“Any local news? Did she mention your late host, or young Barr?”
“Oh yes. She said that the Colonel’s disappearance was still a profound mystery. People were getting tired of discussing it in the village. She had been for a walk past the house and down to the beach—I wish she wouldn’t do that kind of thing alone, it drives me frantic—but she hadn’t seen anyone about the house. They say in the village that Charlie Barr never leaves the house now, and won’t see anybody. He’s got fear into his marrow, of course, and his way of facing the fact is to stand his ground doggedly and wait . . . as it were, come on now, do your worst! I couldn’t do it myself, but people are built differently. Charlie’s Yankee-bred, which may account. But I never was so sorry for a fellow in all my life. Honestly, Ahrman, if he’d asked me to stay on with him—barring my business obligations—I believe I would. He’s never had the chance to make a friend since he came over, confined to that isolated place. He must be the loneliest man in England. And then there’s Joan . . . well, as long as she’s up there and I’m down here there’s going to be about as much peace of mind for me as would lie on a threepenny bit. I’ve no right to feel it, but there it is.”
“And on the whole,” Ahrman continued, “your general impression is that you’ve got to get back into the theatre by hook or by crook.”
“How could I?” said Mertoun, as frankly as a boy.
“You admit that you want to see the end?”
“If there’s going to be an end. . . . I don’t see how there can be. But I want Joan out of it, and I want Charlie�
�s house made safe for him. It isn’t my business, it’s pure interference on my part, but I want those things.”
“Danger to yourself?”
“That wouldn’t worry me a bit. And in any case, it looks as though the danger were confined to Barrs.”
“What about that shepherd?”
“Oh, Blaik. Well, I can only think that he interfered.”
“Which you’d do yourself quite cheerfully for the sake of Miss Hope and——”
“Cut it out,” said Mertoun, attending to the menu.
“When you told me your tale,” said Ahrman suggestively, “you made the mistake of telling it to the most curious man in London; moreover, a man who has a holiday falling due to him towards the end of April. Mertoun, if nothing has happened before then, would you think it interference on my part to suggest that I go up there—fishing will do; there’s always fishing in a place like that—and see for myself?”
