Their host simmered with good humour. The company of Bobbie and fellows of that age gave him an odd feeling that he was rapidly approaching the centenarian stage, but with these two veterans for society he glowed with juvenility and careless good spirits.
“Don’t worry, Firmin,” he said, cheerfully patronising, “you may top the century yet. Anyhow, look at old Mrs. Ellis-Wood. Given up by the doctors eleven years ago and next Saturday she’s opening the flower show and I’m to propose her health at the lunch.”
“I’ll be there, too,” said Sir Beckwith Dent, drawing his wineglass to within a more convenient latitude. He yawned. “Awful bore these village functions, but they expect it of people in our position.”
“I only hope it won’t be too hot,” said Viscount Firmin, breathing heavily. “It’s all very well for youngsters of your age, Cheldon.” He drained the glass of Beaune which was his favourite wine.
Massy Cheldon returned to the subject of the gold mining market. He was a recognised expert on money greed, and the peer and the baronet listened with respectful attention to his dissertation on the art of turning sufficient into superfluity. All that was needed, he reminded them, was cleverness, astuteness, mental poise, vision and a savoir faire which to the multitude must ever be an unknown quantity. Anyone, however, fortunate enough to possess these attributes, which in rare, very rare instances, could be found allied with genius, might be certain of triumphing over the difficulties and obstacles which beset ordinary persons in their efforts to tempt Dame Fortune successfully.
At the coffee stage Sir Beckwith Dent was giving his opinion of recent events in Burmah, and Viscount Firmin was listening with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He revived, however, when his opportunity came and he demanded of his audience why the Conservative Party tolerated Mr. Baldwin?
Massy Cheldon interrupted the diatribe to explain with suitable apologies that he was catching the three ten at Lewes with the intention of spending the night in London.
“I wonder if you’d take me along with you?” said the baronet.
“Delighted, my dear fellow.”
Viscount Firmin rose and, not to give his departure too abrupt an appearance, began to stare in turn at the portraits.
“I envy you this place, Cheldon,” he said, and he meant it. “What a clever notion that was of your ancestor to keep most of the Cheldon estate in a strong room in a bank! I wish mine had. Land’s a curse.”
Had they had time the trio would have discoursed long and complainingly of the worries of landlords, but the information that Waterhouse was waiting to start the car broke up the debate.
“Poor old chap,” said Sir Beckwith Dent as he and Massy Cheldon were racing towards Lewes, “as he gets older he simply can’t stop talking about himself.” He laughed under his breath.
Massy Cheldon, unaware of the fact that all three of them had done nothing else, was moodily sympathetic.
“We’ll be attending his funeral soon,” he said, mercifully unconscious of his own impending doom, a doom which was to bring to Viscount Firmin the role of reader of the lesson at the funeral of the murdered owner of Broadbridge Manor. “But here we are.”
They parted at Victoria Station, and Massy Cheldon at once took the Underground to his sister-in-law’s flat. A man who had cleared some hundreds of pounds with no more trouble than two telephone calls could not afford a taxi all that way. Now had it been thousands instead of hundreds…
“This is a delightful surprise, Massy,” said Ruby Cheldon, the flush in her cheeks bringing to her face something better than youth. “Bobbie will be back from his office soon.”
“I thought I’d call to have a chat about him,” he said from his chair, the most comfortable in the room, “but somehow, Ruby, whenever I see you I forget Bobbie.”
She flushed again.
“I suppose it’s because it’s impossible to imagine you have a grown up son.” He spoke in level, measured tones, without any note in his voice suggestive of attempt at flattery. “How you keep young beats me. Lord Firmin and Sir Beckwith Dent were envying me my youth at lunch today, but they’re a couple of old fogies, one with his third wife and second mistake, and the other with his liver and his politics. But you are young, Ruby.” He sighed.
“I believe you’re making love to me,” she began gaily, and stopped when she observed his frame quiver.
“I wish I could, Ruby.” He looked across at her. “But things are difficult.” He stood up, looked about him and sat down again. “Tell me about Bobbie. Is he keeping regular hours?”
It was Ruby Cheldon’s favourite subject and without any effort of memory or imagination she kept it going until Bobbie, looking a little wan and tired, entered on the scene.
“Yes, uncle, I know something about rubber,” he said in answer to a polite question. A little later he excused himself on the plea that he had to make a telephone call. They heard the door close before either of them spoke.
“It’s to that girl,” said Massy Cheldon angrily.
“I don’t think so,” Ruby ventured, but her face betrayed her. “He hasn’t mentioned her name for days now.”
“A bad sign,” he muttered. Then he stood up again. Ruby thought he was remarkably restless and ill at ease that afternoon. Could it be true that he was really in love with her? It was notorious in the family that Massy Cheldon had been in love with himself for years. Still, she was a woman and he was a man.
“Ruby.” The new note in his pronunciation of her name startled her. “It’s a funny world, Ruby, for just when one believes one has everything something happens and you realise you have nothing. I would like to help you more. You’ve been a wonderful mother, and Bobbie isn’t worthy to touch the hem of your garment.”
“Old Weller would have called that ‘werging on poetry’,” she exclaimed, seeking in a well assumed extravagant delight relief from her embarrassment. Yet to be mistress of Broadbridge Manor!
“I wish I could do something.”
She smiled, thinking he was about to plead poverty.
“Ruby, it’s a wonderful world when you think you are on top of it, and I thought so until I came into your presence. Now I feel I’m completely under it and that it’s crushing me.”
“What’s happened? Have you lost money?” she asked innocently.
He smiled in compliment to his possession of that regiment of qualities which at lunchtime he had outlined as essential to success.
“For the moment money isn’t worrying me.” Then he hastened to hedge. “But, of course, one never knows from minute to minute what may happen.” A familiar moan escaped him.
“Let me make you a cup of tea,” she pleaded. “I’m so grateful to you, Massy, for having got Bobbie out of the rut. It doesn’t matter that the salary is so small. It’s something to know that he’s doing work that will make a man of him. I was terribly afraid he was sinking into the night club morass and would never get out of it.”
“Ah, Ruby, you forget he’s a Cheldon. The boy will be worthy of the name yet.” He was flattering her now and she knew it, and a curious dread seized her mind and limbs.
“Don’t bother about the tea, Ruby. It’s rather late, and I’ve something else to say. I’m in rather a fix and I want your help.”
She turned on him with the celerity of an acrobat.
“Is it a woman, Massy?” She was looking scared.
For a moment he was tempted to be truthful, but the habit of a lifetime overwhelmed him.
“If it’s a woman that woman is you,” he answered with a gallantry that sounded as false as it actually was. “Ruby, I’m staying in town overnight and the reason is that I want to see you alone when we won’t be interrupted. Will you lunch with me at the Berkeley tomorrow at half-past one?”
“Won’t I? I’ll do that easier than a duck takes to water.” Her face was alive with delight. “Why, Ma
ssy, it’s years since I’ve been in the Berkeley or it seems years—a hundred of them. You don’t know what it means to escape from a three-day joint existence.”
“I’ll see if I can’t change that,” he said significantly, and added a curse to himself when Bobbie reappeared.
When Massy Cheldon departed with the expressed intention of interviewing an old acquaintance who had written offering his services as private secretary—“I’m thinking of having one,” he explained—Ruby waited nearly three minutes for Bobbie to answer the question that was troubling her. It was only when his silence exasperated her that she gave voice to it.
“No, it wasn’t Nancy,” he answered moodily, “I couldn’t telephone to her even if I wanted to, for she’s not on the phone. It was to a chap I saw in the city today.” It was the truth, for Nosey Ruslin had waylaid him as he was leaving the office for a teashop lunch and had shared it with him. But it was also more dangerous than a lie because of what it was intended to conceal and did conceal.
“I’m glad of that.” His mother’s tone was, he thought, censorious, and he nearly flared up, but he recalled something exhilarating Mr. Ruslin had said to him and it rendered his temper foolish-proof.
“I’ll be a bit late tonight,” he remarked when another pause had reached its limit of endurance. “No, you’re wrong again, mother. It’s not Nancy. She’ll be elsewhere earning in half an hour four times what I get in a week from the bald-headed pleb who runs the office.”
She would have inaugurated one of their bickering duologues had it not been for memories of her brother-in-law’s invitation. Remorse animated her when she compared her lunch of tomorrow’s with Bobbie’s. It would not be finished by the time Bobbie was back at the office poring over uninteresting ledgers.
“I’m lunching with your uncle tomorrow,” she said suddenly.
Bobbie emitted a whistle of surprise.
“And at the Berkeley!”
A gape expressed his astonishment now.
“What’s happened to him? Has he inherited another fortune or is he in love with you? Don’t blush, mother. I don’t want to dash your hopes, but when uncle discovers that a marriage licence can cost as much as seven and six, or so I’ve been told, he’ll scratch the fixture. Still, a lunch for two at the Berkeley and uncle paying the bill! My hat, and my whole suit and wardrobe for that matter.” He came to her side and kissed her. “Will you lay me five to one, mother, that you won’t be married before me? I’ll take you to all the money I’ve got. Come now, be a sport.” His laughter filled the room pleasantly.
Not very far away Massy Cheldon was also laughing, for it was half-past seven, his appetite for dinner was rapidly improving, the profit of the day seemed to add to the beauty of that June evening, he had banished his cares, and he did not know that he had only four hours and fifteen minutes of life left.
When the Underground propelled him into the open and he found himself in Piccadilly his exhilaration was so intense that he had to mount guard over it. But the sight of pale faces and tired bodies hurrying home after the day’s labours to suburban homes and equally unlovely incomes threw his own circumstances into such strong relief that he could have voiced his satisfaction aloud. He was a free man—the others were slaves. He had the key to all the desirable and lovely things which the world produced—they had nothing except the struggle and the certainty that the struggle would avail nought.
A shadow crossed his path and materialised into Colonel Crabb, red-faced, dapper, simply impetuous when not explosive.
“Why the devil, Cheldon, do you cut your friends?” he demanded with a friendly ferocity of manner that he mistook for humour.
“Sorry, Crabb,” said the day-dreamer, smiling. “On the way to the club or is it the Carlton?”
“I never dine at the club now,” the colonel answered, falling into step. “But I don’t mind being seen with you in Piccadilly, Cheldon. You look so damned prosperous that it will do my credit good.”
Massy smiled again. It was perfectly true what Crabb was saying. The old and impecunious bore with a pension, a liver and a termagant of a wife did require some shoring up of his credit.
“I was thinking of the Berkeley,” he remarked, pensively. “They have an excellent grill room there.”
“Good. I’ll join you.” The colonel laughed boisterously. “But don’t worry, Cheldon, I’ll pay my own account.”
Cheldon took the safe and cheapest course of passing the pleasantry by, but at the same time he did some mental juggling during which he arrived at the conclusion that it would cost him at least twenty-five shillings to feed the colonel with solids and liquids.
“Can’t afford it,” he muttered unthinkingly.
“Can’t afford what?” barked his companion.
“Sorry, Crabb, thinking of something else. Ah, you may well pretend to envy me, but I’m not so well off as you think. Heavy taxation—”
In self-defence the colonel put on for a run of eleven minutes the story of a tiger he shot between tiffin and dinner at Simla just before the war. The animal was well and truly slain by the time they sat down at a table in the grill room of the Berkeley, which Massy Cheldon had thought of only because he had been thinking most of the time of his invitation to Ruby for the morrow.
As he was not a guest and therefore considered he was under no obligation to be polite the colonel departed before the coffee stage, having espied a fellow-campaigner of his Indian days in solitary greediness at a neighbouring table. Massy Cheldon, muttering the relief which he felt, wandered out of the building and sauntered in the direction of his club. It was only half-past eight, and he had three hours and fifteen minutes left of life, but his only worry was inability to decide whether to “see a picture” or drop in at one of the revue theatres before retiring to his hotel. On second thoughts he voted against the “pictures” and with it banished the idea of patronising any part of a theatre where a lounge suit was permissible. The gentility of the Cheldons was over one hundred years old, but it had not lost its veneer yet.
His club, situated in the most virtuous part of Piccadilly, afforded him for more than two hours the undisturbed solitude which his internal organs craved after the recent assault on them, but when at twenty minutes past eleven he left it he was feeling sleepy. The heavy air of a warm night increased his tendency to unconsciousness, but with a supreme effort he mastered himself and when the proximity of Piccadilly Circus revealed proof positive of London’s teeming millions he began to take an interest in life again. He was within twenty minutes of death at that moment, but to him there appeared to be no such thing. Others might die or be dying. He had fortune in his grasp and happiness within beck.
In the Circus he stopped and watched the crowd again. It was one of his favourite hobbies, far more interesting to a thinker and philosopher, as he was wont to phrase it, and also as cheap as nothing. A pretty girl without paint attracted his attention. He recalled a girl like her he had been introduced to by Gleeson of St. John’s. Poor Gleeson. A war casualty. Fine scholar. That reminded him. The international outlook was threatening and the stock markets might collapse if there was more war talk from Rome and Berlin.
Someone brushed against him and murmured an apology. Massy Cheldon looked across at the clock with the moving seconds-hand and saw that it was forty-one minutes past eleven.
“I’d better be moving,” he said to himself, and advanced down the steps leading to Piccadilly’s vast Underground station. He walked rapidly through a stone-paved corridor towards beacons of light and masses of moving humanity, observing no one in particular, and in the crowd no one took any notice of him, everyone intent on getting home as quickly as possible, hope and enjoyment apparently satiated for the time being.
When Massy Cheldon left the corridor behind him he came abreast of a telephone kiosk. At the same moment another man stepped into line with him and about half a minute later a wo
man’s scream startled the crowd, but not Massy Cheldon, who lay huddled on the ground with a knife in his heart, amid the stillness of death that is not quiet.
At the very instant of the murder of Massy Cheldon the Piccadilly Underground was a microcosm of London. At the various descents to the trains, the ticket offices and machines, the illuminated shop windows and other temporary aids to the loafer and the prowler, there were groups of men and women, small and large groups, and scattered through the arena of light and movement were hundreds of persons, any one of whom might have been an actual spectator of the deed.
But the first signal that anything unusual had happened came from a portly dame awaiting her husband’s return with the tickets. She happened to be glancing towards the entrance which Massy Cheldon had just used and he came into her line of vision. There was nothing about him to attract her and she was barely cognisant of his existence, disinclined to single him out from the other human automata until he swayed to the left and fell headlong to the ground. She was positive ever afterward that the scream came before and not after the stranger’s collapse, but no one believed her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed involuntarily, and for the benefit of an unaccompanied girl of artificial prettiness added, “Drunk.”
“Rather,” said the girl, and began to walk towards the group which could do nothing except surround the body.
Then there came another scream, a woman uttered a wail and tottered away, someone pointed to a streak of blood and there was a rush to satisfy excruciating curiosity.
“The police. Is there a doctor here?” The voice was impersonal.
A doctor was not required, and there was, as it happened, none. But presently a policeman forced his way through, and after him another, and as the crowd grew into a mob and the mob into a nuisance more police came, a stretcher was produced, and all that was mortal of Massy Cheldon was carried away into decent privacy.
For nearly a quarter of an hour London seemed to have stopped still. For fifteen minutes homes were forgotten, petty troubles banished, cares and difficulties ignored. Scores of men and women died daily in London, but on this day of days one of them had died in the very midst of a crowd and the cause of his death was a dagger piercing his heart. Death had become something very real.
Murder in Piccadilly Page 14
