He did not have to wait very long for Hesther. He had scarcely sat down—the covers disturbed themselves in fresh clouds of dust as he did so—when he heard her hand faltering on the door handle; and then quietly, almost stealthily it seemed to him, she opened the door and stood there. She was still dressed all in black as he had seen her in the Park. But now she was wearing a close black bonnet as well. It drained the last, thin vestige of colour from her cheeks, leaving her pale and sexless. She seemed magically to have added a generation to her age.
“So you’ve come,” she said, not looking up at him but keeping her eyes to the floor all the time. “My prayers were answered.”
He saw as she spoke that her hands—they were long and white and thin-fingered—were pressed against each other as though she were still praying as she stood there.
“I’m not here in answer to your prayers,” he said. “I’m here because I want to talk to you.”
“You’re here because you want to take John away from me,” she replied. “You can go away again.”
She raised her eyes to his for a moment as she spoke and he saw that hers were deep and burning. There was a new light in them. But she did not seem to be seeing him; it was as though she were looking through him and beyond.
“How did you know I was coming?” he asked.
“I saw you on Sunday,” she told him. “You were following us. I knew then that John was in danger. So I prayed.”
“To protect him from me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard warnings. Voices.”
She had not crossed over from where she was standing. Her gaze was still cast down to the floor and her hands remained clasped in front of her. But her head was moving; it was shifting slowly from side to side as though she were listening. Was she even now hearing voices with him there in the room beside her? he wondered. And as he looked at her he saw that she was no longer quite of this world at all. His mind hardened: at all costs he must rescue the boy upstairs; do something for that silent child dressed in his mean clothes with the long stockings like a girl’s. He was careful, however, to keep his voice level and steady as he spoke to her.
“Does he go to school yet?” he asked.
“He doesn’t need a school,” she said. “I teach him myself.”
“Has he got any friends?”
“He’s got me,” she replied. “I’m his mother.”
She raised her eyes again for an instant as she said it. There was the same distant look in them, the same suggestion of being fixed on things invisible.
“He’ll have to go to school sometime,” he said.
“Mr. Tuke will attend to that,” she answered. “He’ll educate him.”
“Does he never go out alone?” he asked.
As he asked the question he saw Hesther’s hands suddenly come close sharply together again. The blood was driven from them and the knuckles showed white and papery.
“Never,” she said. “There’s always someone with him. Always. If you spoke to him he’d only run away. I’ve warned him about you.”
“So you don’t even want me to see him?”
“I’ve got the key of his room here,” she said. She raised her hands and brought them up close to her bosom. “You couldn’t get in to him if you tried.”
He paused and leaning back on the white dust sheet he continued to study her. She was still sitting there as though she were waiting to hear something that only her ears could catch.
“What do your voices say to you?” he asked abruptly.
The question did not seem to surprise her. Evidently the voices were her familiars, she had grown used to them.
“They tell me to do things,” she said. “They help.”
He rose.
“And do they tell you not to let me see my son?” he asked.
She nodded.
“They tell me that,” she said.
They did not speak again as he went towards the front door. Hesther stood behind it in the hall blocking it. It was not until the door was already open that she addressed him.
“Good-night,” she said. “I shall pray for you.”
Before he had reached the bottom of the steps he heard the sound of the heavy bolts being driven home and the chain being put up. Number twenty-three Clarence Gardens was a fortress that had repelled the invader, and was impregnable again.
v
It was a week later when he returned. They had been tortuous, difficult days, days that did not relate themselves to the ordinary conduct of life at all. He had spent whole hours of them first in the dingy obscurity of Dr. Hanson’s surgery in Edgware Road and then in the prosperous magnificence of Dr. Yarberry-Blane’s consulting-room in Harley Street. And now all three of them were seated in the Yarberry-Blane carriage and were clopping along through Bayswater.
“I shall go in first,” John Marco was saying. “And I shall tell her that you’re simply two friends of mine. She’ll let you come in as Mr. Tuke will be there.”
“Are you sure you can rely on this parson fellow?”
It was Dr. Hanson who spoke: he seemed apprehensive of having brought this aristocrat from Harley Street out to Bayswater for nothing.
“He’ll be there,” John Marco answered. “I wrote to him myself and sent the note round by hand. He wouldn’t miss a thing like this.”
“You didn’t tell him our real object I hope,” Dr. Yarberry-Blane interposed. “I want to see the patient at her most natural.”
“I told him nothing,” John Marco replied. “Nothing except that I wanted to see him there.”
“Because this isn’t quite the sort of thing that Dr. Yarberry-Blane is used to.” Dr. Hanson said suavely.
“You mustn’t expect him to be ready to certify on the strength of one visit. She’s not dangerous, remember.”
“Judge for yourselves,” John Marco answered. “Look into her eyes.”
They had reached the corner of Clarence Gardens by now, and the carriage was travelling more slowly as the coachman began searching for the number.
John Marco reached for the speaking tube that dangled against the edge of the seat beside him.
“It’s here,” he said. “At the next lamp-post.”
“I hope that parson won’t be late.” Dr. Hanson observed.
Mr. Tuke was not late, however. He was standing on the pavement staring up at the house when they got there. As John Marco dismounted and the others climbed out after him, he saw him—saw him first, and then saw the house.
But the house was empty and in darkness. The shutters were fastened and a large notice, “TO BE SOLD,” leaned vacantly over the gateway.
Chapter XXIX
The Disappearance of Hesther and the child was final and complete; they had simply and astonishingly vanished.
The estate agent whose board was outside could say nothing except that he had been instructed to put the house on the market and accept any offer over fifteen hundred pounds that he could get. As soon as he had got the money, his instructions were to pass it on to a firm in Clifford’s Inn. But the firm in Clifford’s Inn did not know anything, they did not even have any address for their client except that of the empty house in Clarence Gardens; in short, they had not been advised. Nor could the bank be of any assistance. The bank manager was obviously disturbed by the whole affair. Mrs. Marco, he said, had called in on the previous Wednesday—the day after John Marco’s visit—and had drawn out all she possessed: it was obvious that the man felt that in some obscure fashion he had been slighted.
After the bank manager, John Marco tried the local tradesmen. They knew just as little about the whole affair; so far as they were concerned, it was simply that Hesther had come in and paid off her debts right up to the minute, telling them vaguely that she was moving away somewhere. The milkman was the last to have seen her; his roundsman had been told to pay one more early morning visit and then stop for ever, and he had gone round to the house to find out why. But it was only Emmy he had been able to see
. From behind the half-opened door—all transactions with tradesmen at number twenty-three Clarence Gardens were conducted only after the chain had been slipped into position—she had told him that they were going away into the country and not coming back.
It was nearly a week later before John Marco was able to discover the firm of removers who had taken away the stuff. And on the day he found out he went himself over to Clapham to interview them. The visit was wasted, however. They had still got the goods there in their warehouse. The lady, they said, had paid them for a whole year’s storage in advance and had told them that they would be hearing from her. They offered, as soon as they got her new address, to forward any letter that John Marco cared to write to them.
John Marco returned to Bayswater, empty and depressed. It was obvious that Hesther had been too clever for him. With only a week in which to arrange everything, she had hidden herself so secretly that he would never be able to find her again. Like all frightened, hunted things, she had covered up her track as she went. And at this moment somewhere behind other locked doors she was guarding the boy that she had rescued so skilfully from the danger that was in pursuit.
But there were other things in John Marco’s mind besides the disappearance. There was the Opening. It would not be long now. The whole of the long frontage of the shop was completed; Tredegar Terrace looked already as if it had a palace running down one side of it. Between the cracks in the hoardings could be seen the glitter of plate glass and the gleam of woodwork. And through the gap, where the revolving door, the most up-to-date of its kind was to go, could be seen the vast, shadowy interior. With its pillars and its galleries and its sweeping staircase, it was like looking on the reconstructed glories of Thebes.
John Marco nowadays spent a great part of his time wandering about this emptiness alone. He was like a Bishop, impatient for his Cathedral to be finished. But he was more than a Bishop; in this particular temple he was the little God himself. It was his name, JOHN MARCO, that was repeated in letters of gold two feet high all down the street and round the corner. Everyone who came in to buy a piece of ribbon or a pair of stockings would really be making a suitable offering to this new, retail deity who had just installed himself.
In the whole place, it was the pneumatic change conveyors that pleased John Marco most; the bright brass pipe-work of the apparatus ran everywhere. The class of a shop, he had long considered, could be determined by the way in which it handled the customer’s money. In really small establishments, the assistants left their stations and carried the money, spread out on their counter-books, to the cashier somewhere in the background. But in the rush of modern business that sort of thing was unthinkable. And so the overhead system of inclined slipways had been introduced. Along openwork tunnels of flimsy deal the bill and the money went trundling along in a hollow wooden ball like a conjuror’s sphere. But to John Marco’s mind there had always been something clumsy and rather childish about the system; and it had seemed like a new era in culture when he saw the first spring wire conveyor. All that the assistant had to do there was to pull an elastic cord and the message went tearing away through space like a captive rocket. He dreamed of, and lived for, his own spring wire conveyor until one day in a mammoth store in Oxford Street he saw the first pneumatic tube. And he stood entranced in front of it. The whoosh from the intake of air, and the abandon with which the little projectile hit the hanging flap at the end of the tube and fell limply into the reception basket, decided him. He would have been ready at that moment to found his own business simply for that pneumatic conveyor alone.
And in six weeks’ time, he reflected, there would be money, real money, pouring along those tubes. The air inside them would be full of it. That bare parquet where he was standing would be scarred and dented under the passage of high, fashionable heels. And the counters, the naked, gleaming counters that at present were piled at one end of the building, would be covered with boxes and lengths of material and books of patterns. The Mayor of Bayswater would cut the ribbon across the central doorway and the crowd—up till then held back by the commissionaire with John Marco’s initials on his collar—would be free to surge in and fill the place.
It was strange standing there in the darkness and seeing it all happen in front of him. But he had thought about it so long that it seemed that the day, when it came, would be only the pale shadow of the event; it had already been a reality inside his brain for years. . . .
From nowhere, the image of a boy dressed like an orphan, his hand gripped in the clasp of a woman who did not speak to him, slid into his mind and remained there for a moment. The image startled him. Less than a month ago he had sworn to find that boy and deliver him; and already he had forgotten. But why shouldn’t he forget? It was the shop that he had been sent on earth to look after; not Hesther’s son.
With a little shrug of his shoulders, as though he were angry almost at the boy for having distracted him, he turned and went up the central gangway to see if the display cases were in position.
ii
John Marco left the engagement of the extra staff to Mr. Hackbridge. And Mr. Hackbridge, still as morbidly afraid as ever of making a mistake under his new master, worked from eight in the morning until nearly ten o’clock at night, interviewing, taking up references, appointing. He was a director now, and not merely a shop-walker. John Marco had insisted on appointing him to the board along with his other appointment, Mr. Skewin: there were five directors in all on the board and John Marco wanted men that he could rely on. He had similarly elevated little Mr. Lyman who was a wizard with the cash. And having listened to the stammered, overwhelmed words of gratitude of the three of them he was careful to treat them even more curtly, more disdainfully, than before: there was to be no nonsense about equality.
Mr. Hackbridge, faced with the unthinkable task of engaging an army of fifty-four assistants, sweated. There was always the terror, the ever-present haunting terror that he might appoint a mischief-maker or a thief. But there was one side of it all that Mr. Hackbridge enjoyed enormously. His old spirit of authority, pent up so long in fear and trepidation, re-asserted itself; and in the temporary office with the words “Staff Manager” on the door he bullied the young ladies unmercifully. They came in their dozens, polite and timid and respectable, drawn from the ends of London by a single advertisement, like moths to a beacon. And once he had got them there, he put them through their paces, making them take their hats off and stand up facing the light where he could see them; criticising their accents—his own on these occasions was full and fruity and over-bearing; taking hold of their hands in his to see if they were properly cared for.
He was in the middle of one such interview when John Marco himself came in and interrupted him. The girl—she did not appear to be more than about eighteen or nineteen—was standing there with her hat in her hand where Mr. Hackbridge had placed her.
“And why do you imagine you should be able to sell lingerie,” Mr. Hackbridge was asking sarcastically, “if you haven’t got any experience? You’re just wasting my time coming here, upon my word you are.”
Then he saw John Marco and rose respectfully to his feet.
“What’s the matter?” John Marco asked.
He glanced at the girl as he spoke. She was small and dark and her hair was combed up on either side of a pale oval face.
“She’ll be good-looking later on,” John Marco thought to himself, “when she’s come out a bit.”
At the moment, however, she looked as if she might be going to cry.
“She’s got no experience, sir,” Mr. Hackbridge said, flicking her letter of application contemptuously with the back of his hand. “Our advertisement said ...”
But John Marco had turned towards the girl.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Eve Harlow, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Do you want to learn?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
He turned to Mr. Hackbridge.
“Give her a chance,” he said. “Fifteen shillings a week. They’ve all got to learn sometime.”
“As you say, sir,” said Mr. Hackbridge sadly.
John Marco caught the girl’s eye. She smiled at him, and he smiled back at her for a moment. It seemed something to him to have a friend, even a friend at only fifteen bob a week, among that regiment of strangers.
Chapter XXX
The Day of the opening was cold but sunny. John Marco looked out of his window and reflected that it was perfect shopping weather. But somehow, now that the day had come round, the first excitement had already gone from it. He was tired, desperately tired. All that he wanted was to settle down to being a shopkeeper again, to put this vast piece of machinery into motion and begin earning money once more. He wished now that he had let the doors be opened at nine o’clock that morning to catch every penny that was going. But, instead of that, the whole place was to be locked up like a prison until half-past-three when the Mayor was coming. He was bringing the Lady Mayoress with him; and the wives of the other Aldermen were coming as well. They were nearly all the wives of tradesmen and the big dais in the central hall would contain the cream of the retail aristocracy of Bayswater.
The hall itself was to be filled by specially invited guests drawn from the old customers of Morgan and Roberts. He had sent out five hundred invitations, and one hundred-and-twenty of the best-connected ladies in the neighbourhood had accepted. For a moment after the invitations had gone he had questioned whether anyone would come. But the two words “AFTERNOON TEA” at the bottom of the card had proved sufficient. Even without the promise of a mannequin parade they would have been there for their free hot drink and refreshments—he remembered from his old Tabernacle days that there was something about gratis beverages and uncharged-for sandwiches that drew people from their homes like the call of the muezzin.
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