As usual she took ample time to make herself up and dress with care, then she went out and took a bus up to the Green Man on the corner of Putney Heath. Owing to the fine weather there were quite a lot of people about, and twice single men driving slowly by in cars attempted to pick her up. But she was used to such unwelcome attentions when alone and, ignoring them, struck out with her long firm stride across the common. In turn she visited all her favourite spots; the old Windmill, the dell where William Pitt the younger, while Prime Minister, was said to have fought a duel, and the ponds on which the children were sailing their boats.
The fresh air and the long walk did her a power of good, the healthy sights and sounds around her drove from her mind haunting thoughts of the Great Ram, and after making a hearty tea at a little place just off the Common, to which she had been on a few previous occasions, she returned to London in excellent form for her next encounter with Barney.
They had arranged to meet at seven-thirty, and when she arrived at the Hungaria there he was in the foyer looking as devil-may-care as ever, but with an eye-shade over his left eye, and the curve of his cheek below it badly discoloured.
With a slightly amused grimace she said: 'It looks as if you have been mixed up in a fight.'
'I have,' he laughed. 'I'll tell you all about it when you've parked your coat.'
When she came out of the cloakroom he took her downstairs to the cocktail lounge and, as soon as they had ordered drinks, she asked, 'Now! What have you been up to?'
'I hit a man smaller than myself, and got the worst of it!'
'Then you deserved your lesson,' she said, although she did not believe him. He might be a thoroughly bad hat where women were concerned, but she felt certain he was not the type of man to do anything cowardly. All the same, it intrigued her that, instead of producing some cooked-up story about having defended a child or a dog against ill-treatment by a gang of toughs, he should elect to pretend to have been in the wrong.
'As a matter of fact,' he told her with a lopsided grin, 'I got it in a free-for-all. Last night some pals of mine suggested that we should try our luck at a gambling joint that one of them knew of up in St. John's Wood. After a bit of a binge we went along there and played chemi for a while. Of course the game was rigged, as it always is in those sort of places; but the bloke who runs it made it a bit too obvious that he took us all for suckers. When we caught him out red-handed, we decided to break the place up. By ill luck I found myself up against the chucker-out. He was only a little runt of a man, but I suppose he had served in the Commandoes or something. Anyhow, before I knew what was huppening, he had given me this whopper, and a couple of minutes later he bundled me out into the street.'
The truth was very different. The previous night he had attended a Union meeting down in Shoreditch and come up against one of the casual risks inseparable from his investigation.
His work entailed his covering the activities of several Branches, each of a different Union, for all of which his office had provided him with forged membership cards, and he could, at most, have taken a regular job in the area of only one of them. Since it would have been pointless to devote eight hours a day to working as a docker, busman or some other category of labourer, having told the Secretary at each branch that he had recently come to London from Ireland for family reasons, he had registered himself at them all as unemployed and since skilfully evaded, on one excuse or another, taking such jobs as had been offered him.
The Party ticket he carried was evidence enough for the Communist members on the committees of the Branches to which he belonged that he was to be trusted, but to induce them actually to confide in and make use of him, he had lost no opportunity of putting himself forward at every meeting he attended as an active trouble-maker. It followed that the more conservative members of the branches had come to regard him as the type of hot-head who is a menace to regular employment and good relations with the bosses. The night before, on his leaving the meeting, three such anti-Communists had followed and later tackled him in an ill-lit street. They had charged him with being a 'professional out-of-work' and a 'bloody agitator' who wanted to see everyone else out of work in support of his Communist opinions. Then, while two of them had stood by, the third stalwart, a man with the build of a blacksmith, whom they referred to as 'good old Ed', had made him put his fists up and sailed into him.
As Barney was nowhere near the weight of his opponent, and in such circumstances pulling one of the fast tricks he knew was out of the question, he had had the sense to let himself be knocked down early in the encounter; so he had got off fairly lightly. Actually, too, he was more sorry for the man who had attacked him than for himself, since the two other men who had been present might talk about 'old Ed's' exploit; so he dared not refrain from reporting the affair to his Communist friends on the committee, which meant for certain that they would put 'old Ed's' name on their black list and, sooner or later, find an excuse to victimize him.
Mary, of course, knew nothing of all this, and she readily accepted Barney's story of the gambling joint, because it fitted in with the picture of him, as an unprincipled young roisterer, that she knew of old. After a moment, she remarked with a smile:
'See what comes of being one of the idle rich and staying up half the night to throw your money about.'
'Have a heart!' he protested. 'I'm only one of those poor Irish Earls who has to get his robes out of pop when there's a coronation. As for being idle, I spent hours and hours last week trying to persuade Civil Aircraft lines to run tourist flights to Kenya.' He then launched into an account of established flight schedules and the numbers of passengers carried, from information he had mugged up since last they had met, the better to establish his cover-story with her.
After a second cocktail they went up to the restaurant, and she told him about two model shows for which she had been booked in the coming week; but all the time she was wondering why he had not yet asked her about her meeting with Ratnadatta. At length the temptation to broach the subject proved too strong for her and she said, a shade coldly: 'It seems you are no longer interested in learning how I got on last night.'
He had deliberately refrained in order to pique her, and now he laughed. 'I guessed you were bursting to tell me; so I've been holding out on you. But to tell the truth I'm itching to hear, and near as damn it gave you best only a moment ago. How's the form for your becoming a pretty white nannygoat and me a big black toad?'
'In your case, pretty good,' she replied lightly, 'though you needn't flatter yourself I'd have you as my familiar. Last night Mr. Ratnadatta took me to a place in Chelsea and gave me dinner upstairs in a private room!'
'What!' he exclaimed. 'Of all the nerve! And you let him?'
'Why not? He is a nice little man, and extremely learned.'
'Nice little man, my foot!' Barney stuck his chin out aggressively. 'He's a smarmy no-good Babu. It was damned impertinent of him to take you to a place like that, and I'd like to kick his learned bottom.'
'Really Barney!' It was the first time she had used his Christian name, although he had asked her to when she had dined with him the previous Thursday. 'You sound as though you had only just climbed out of the bog. It's silly to take such a primitive view of it. He wanted to tell me about the secret doctrine and he couldn't do that in a restaurant with other people nearby who might overhear him.'
'Oh, all right then. What had he to say about it?'
For the best part of half-an-hour, between mouthfuls of food and wine, she gave him the highlights of Ratnadatta's discourse, and as they discussed them Barney had to agree that much of it made sense. Just after the main course they had chosen - a Hungarian goulash - had been served, he enquired: 'And when you had finished dinner, what happened then?'
She gave her sweetest smile. 'He took me to a Satanic temple.'
'The little swine! That's just what I feared he might do. Still, it seems you came to no harm, otherwise you wouldn't be looking so cheerful.'
; 'No; I enjoyed it. I found it absolutely fascinating.'
Barney was on the point of giving way to an outburst but, his duty coming uppermost in his mind, he checked it and asked, 'Whereabouts was this place?'
'I've no idea,' she replied lightly. 'He took me to and from it in a taxi, and both ways he insisted on putting a bandage over my eyes. Going there took a long time and for no very good reason I got the impression that it was somewhere in north-east London. But I'm sure the distance we covered coming back was much shorter, and when he dropped me at Hyde Park Corner the taxi had just come up the slope from Knightsbridge; so it may be anywhere.'
'You must have seen something of it when you got out of the taxi. What was it like outside?'
'It was an old Georgian mansion with a high wall all round it, except for its front; and there it faced on to a semi-private courtyard. But it was in the heart of a slum district. That's all I can tell you.'
'That doesn't get us far. In a great area like London there must be dozens of derelict places like that in districts that have gradually deteriorated into slums.'
'Oh, but it wasn't derelict. Inside it was beautifully decorated, and furnished in keeping with its period.'
'That doesn't surprise me. Those sort of crooks have oodles of money. What happened after you arrived there?'
For a second Mary hesitated. She had not forgotten Ratnadatta's threat that he and his friends would know about it if she betrayed their secrets, and take steps to exact a grim penalty. But now that she had made up her mind to break with them, and would soon have lost touch with him altogether, she felt that she need no longer take serious notice of his threat. Besides, she was thoroughly enjoying Barney's reactions to the dangers she had courted and was tempted by the urge to see him becoming more wrought up on her account.
'Well,' she said, 'if I do tell you I must ask you to keep it to yourself. You see, I'm not supposed to speak about these people's doings to anyone, and if it leaked out that I had they might make trouble for me.'
'I fully appreciate that,' he nodded. 'So the last thing you need be afraid of is that I'd let you down.'
'All right then. He took me up to a gallery where without being seen we could look down on the interior of the temple. There were about thirty men and women in it, all masked and wearing only gossamer-thin cloaks, through which one could see absolutely everything.'
Barney's face had become grim, and he muttered, 'That's more or less the kind of form I expected. But, damn it all, Margot! You mustn't let yourself get involved further in this sort of thing. You really mustn't!'
'I don't know.' She gave a shrug that implied sophisticated detachment. 'I haven't yet quite made up my mind. I wouldn't have missed this show last night for anything. By comparison, the sort of things one sees at Mrs. Wardeel's are child's play. Ratnadatta and his friends really can call down power, and I'm awfully tempted to go with him again next Saturday. It depends on whether I can screw up my courage to go through the initiation ceremony.'
'What form does it take? Something pretty beastly, I bet.'
'Not necessarily. But once in, I might be expected to take part in the, er - social activities of the Brotherhood.'
'I don't quite get you?'
'Well, Ratnadatta let me watch them do their serious stuff, but then he said that I'd seen quite enough for a first visit. Just as we were leaving they were about to sit down to a feast, and I've rather uneasy suspicions about the kind of fun and games they may have got up to afterwards.'
'Suspicions! Be your age, Margot! You'd get yourself raped for a certainty.'
She turned her big blue eyes on him with an innocent look. 'D'you really think so?'
'Of course I do! You mustn't even think of going to this place again. You've got nothing to offer them except your body, and that's what they're after. They might even dope and white-slave you. Let's hear now about what you did see - their serious stuff?'
With secret amusement at his agitation, Mary replied: 'First of all they made their reports to the High Priest about what they had been up to since last attending a meeting. He looked a charming old man; the sort of priest that no woman would mind confessing anything to. Then, after a long period of silence, came the manifestations of genuine occult power. Somehow, I didn't see exactly how it happened, but the Arch-Priest of the Brotherhood appeared from some curtains that hung behind the altar.
'They all seemed a bit scared of him, and so was I. Apparently he is the big-shot of a world-wide organization, and only in London on a visit. The greater part of his face was hidden under a horned headdress, he was dressed in black tights - just as one sees pictures of the Devil - and he was wearing a fortune in jewels. He listened to the requests made by the congregation, and granted nearly all of them what they asked for - beauty, ways to make money, restoration of sight and all sorts of other favours and cures.'
Barney stopped eating and a slow smile spread over his face as he said, 'Oh, come on; you're pulling my leg?'
'No, really! And after that there came the most extraordinary and terrifying thing of all. A small cloud of smoke formed down at his feet and from it there materialized a hideous black imp.'
While she was speaking, Barney had picked up from in front of him the wicker cradle in which lay the bottle of Burgundy they were drinking with their goulash. With his other hand he took her glass and refilled it. As she was about to take it from him, somehow, they fumbled it. At the moment she said the word 'imp', the glass slipped from between their hands and precipitated the whole of its contents into her lap.
With exclamations of dismay, both of them stood up. A passing waiter quickly pulled out the table and muttered expressions of sympathy while Mary hurried off to the ladies' room. The splashed table cloth was replaced, the remains of the goulash taken away and fresh places laid.
Mary was furious. As an aid to her designs to ensnare Barney she had put on her best semi-evening frock. It was brand new, and of a yellow material which she had chosen because, now that she was a brunette, she knew that the colour would set off her dark beauty to perfection.
In the cloakroom she quickly wriggled out of it and the attendant did her best to remove the stain by sponging with hot water. But when they had rough-dried it in front of an electric fire, the edge of the great circular splodge, where the wine had soaked in, was still plainly visible, and to their dismay they found that some of the wine having trickled through between Mary's legs, there was a smaller stain on the back of the skirt. As the wine there had had longer to penetrate the material, sponging the place had less effect and the woman glumly declared that she doubted if even proper cleaning would get it out.
Conscious of the many pairs of eyes taking stock of her misfortune as she recrossed the restaurant twenty minutes later, and still seething with rage, Mary rejoined Barney. He accepted the blame, and apologized profusely. She, out of good manners, did her best to make light of the matter and said that it had been her fault; but she was unable, altogether, to conceal her annoyance, and when new portions of goulash were served to them she petulantly told the waiter to take hers away as she had had enough.
Barney ate some of his in an uncomfortable silence; then in an endeavour to take her mind off her misfortune, he said: 'I didn't really mean it when I said I thought you were pulling my leg. Do go on and tell me more about the extraordinary things you saw last night. You'd got as far as the appearance of the black imp.'
As though she had received a mild electric shock, Mary stiffened slightly. It had flashed into her mind that the spilling of the wine might not have been an ordinary accident. In defiance of Ratnadatta's warning, she had been giving away the secrets of the Brotherhood. Was it possible that she was being overlooked and some occult force had been set in motion to check her? Thinking about it again she knew that the mishap had been more her fault than Barney's, because it was through her hand that the glass had actually slipped. Momentarily it had seemed as if her fingertips had lost their sense of touch, and next second the wine
had cascaded into her lap. Suddenly she felt convinced that the temporary paralysis, although it had come and gone in less time than it takes to draw breath, could have been caused only by supernatural means.
Striving to conceal the fear with which the thought filled her, she stammered: 'The . . . the imp! Yes, I . . . I. But, of course, I was pulling your leg. There was no imp or priest who used it to perform an abortion. . . .'
Barney shot her a swift, shocked suspicious glance and broke in, 'You never mentioned that.'
'Oh . . . didn't I? Well, it doesn't matter. I was making the whole thing up. I mean about them all wearing masks but having no clothes on, and about an Arch-Priest they called the Great Ram performing miracles.'
'D'you mean that? Honestly?'
'Of course.' She forced a smile. 'I was just seeing how much I could get you to swallow.'
He smiled back. 'I boggled at the miracles, and the black-clad gent producing an imp was a bit too much; but you sold me the general set-up. Anyhow, praise be to God you were only fooling. What did Ratnadatta's game turn out to be after all, though?'
'It was as I thought - Yoga.' Mary quickly tried to recall the little she had heard about Yoga, and went on: 'It really was rather thrilling. One of them, wearing only a loin cloth, lay down on a bed of nails, and another walked on live coals without burning his feet. It can be of practical use, too, if one works at it hard enough. Ratnadatta swears to me that through having learnt to breathe in a certain way he can keep himself warm on the coldest day without wearing an overcoat. It is also the royal road to getting out of one's body; so I mean to take up practising the exercises.'
'Does that mean that you are going to this place again next Saturday?'
Mary still had no intention of doing so; but the temptation to re-arouse Barney's concern for her, even to a more limited extent, led her to reply, 'Yes, why not?'
The Satanist Page 12
