“No, I’m a secretary,” said Miles Clayton.
“Out of a job, I s’pose?”
He laughed a little.
“No—I’ve got quite a good job. It sounds awfully silly, but I’ve just come over from America, and someone pinched my pocket-book, so I haven’t any money, and they won’t let me take my luggage away, and I can’t get hold of anyone I know until to-morrow.”
“Ooh!” said Flossie on a soft breath of sympathy. “What’s it like in America?”
He laughed with real amusement.
“Oh, I like it.”
“Then why’ve you come back here?”
“To look for a needle in a bundle of hay.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, that’s what I call it. I’ve got to look for a girl no one’s heard about since she was ten days old. I don’t know her name and I don’t know where to look for her. Don’t you call that hunting for a needle in a bundle of hay?”
“Sounds a bit like it,” said Flossie. A quick shiver ran over her and she edged a little nearer.
“Are you awfully cold?” said Miles.
“No—I got my coat.” She shivered again, because when she said that, it all came over her. The coat snatched down from its peg. The bolt on the area door—it had pinched her finger, but she hadn’t felt it till afterwards. And then the panic-stricken flight up the steps and down the foggy street. She’d got to have someone to talk to, or she’d be seeing that black hole in the wall again, and the man’s head with the blood running down. She drew in her breath with a shuddering sound, and heard Miles say in a voice of concern,
“I say, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
She said, “No—I got my coat.”
He could hear that her teeth were chattering. Then, between those chattering teeth, she said,
“I got a fright.”
The man who had groaned had made no sound since then. Miles was vaguely aware of him, slumped down in a heap. He and the girl might have been quite alone. They were alone. The fog shut them in. He could feel her shivering and trembling against him. She sounded very young. He said,
“What frightened you?”
“Ooh!” said Flossie. “It was awful, Mr Miles—it was, reelly!”
She didn’t care what Aunt or anyone would say. If she didn’t tell someone, she’d go potty, and even Aunt couldn’t say that he wasn’t behaving like a perfect gentleman. Come to that, she could have done with a bit of an arm round her—it ’ud have been company in the dark and no harm done. She slipped her hand inside the arm she was leaning against and her teeth stopped chattering.
“It was awful, Mr Miles—it was, reelly! I just run out of the house like I was, in my cap an’ apron, only I took off the cap and put it in my pocket, and if I hadn’t grabbed my coat as I came through the passage, I wouldn’t have nothing round me and I’d have got my death as like as not.”
“What frightened you?”
She really had a pretty voice. The London accent struck pleasantly on his ear. It went with that breathless whispering way she talked.
“What frightened you?”
Flossie settled down to enjoy herself. Holding on to his arm like that made her feel quite safe. Coo! Wouldn’t Ernie be wild if he could see her now? The thought of Ernie’s probable state of mind imparted a pleasant glow. Ernie was all right, but he’d better not start any of that sheikh stuff with her.
“Well, it’s like this,” she said. “I got a girl friend, Ivy Hodge her name is, and she was all fixed up to go to a place—house-parlour with an old invalid lady who doesn’t hardly ever come out of her room. Leastways I s’pose she’s old, but Ivy never seen her, and no more did I.”
Miles felt a very languid interest in the affairs of Ivy Hodge, but he liked the little whispering Cockney voice at his shoulder. Hard lines on a kid like that to be out all night in this fog.
He put in an encouraging “Well?”
“Well, it was a bit funny, don’t you think? No one seeing her, I mean. They just rang up the registry in an awful hurry, and they took up her reference on the ’phone, and would she come in to-morrow? And my girl friend said she would. You see, she’d had the worst row ever with her fiongcey. The banns was up and all, but she said to me, ‘I don’t care, dear—if I was half-way through the marriage service and he demeaned himself to speak to me the way he spoke to me yesterday, I’d say no and I’d mean no, same as I’ve said it now. And if he thinks he can come smarming and making it up, he’ll find out where he’s made a mistake, because I’ve just been to the registry and there’s a place all ready for me to step into, and a pound more than I’ve had yet.’ Kind of proud and independent Ivy is, and she was all worked up. See?”
Miles said he saw.
Flossie was feeling better every moment. She went on eagerly.
“That was yesterday, and this afternoon she come round and told me they’d made it up. You could have knocked me down with a feather—you could reelly. Seems he went down on his knees and said he’d drown himself—and of course she didn’t want him to do that. So then she put it to me, what about me taking the place instead of her? And I said, ‘Well, I might, but I haven’t got a reference only as a general, and I’ve been out best part of a year because of Aunt being ill and wanting me to help at home.’ And she says, ‘Well, dear, why not go as me? It’s no odds to anyone what you call yourself that I can see.’ And so that’s how we fixed it up.” A slightly dubious tone came into Flossie’s voice. “It wasn’t hurting anyone, you see.”
“You might have got into rather a mess,” said Miles.
Flossie shivered.
“I s’pose I didn’t ought to have done it—but I’d had a row too—with Aunt. Threw it up at me she did that I hadn’t been earning. And how she’d the face, when it was her that made me leave because she’d fell downstairs and broke her leg! Well, I didn’t feel like staying after that, so I told Ivy I’d take her place for her, and I put my brush and comb and my night-things in a parcel and my coat over my uniform, and I went round to 16 Varley Street and said I was Ivy Hodge. Just about nine o’clock in the evening it was, because Ivy’d let me have her black dress and I’d had to take it in.”
“Nine o’clock to-night?” said Miles.
Flossie nodded. He could feel the movement against his arm.
“Just about,” she said.
“You didn’t stay long,” he said in a bantering voice.
She shivered again.
“Ooh—it was awful, Mr Miles!”
“What happened? Don’t shiver like that—you’re all right.”
“I can’t help it, Mr Miles. I’m frightened to tell you.”
“Then don’t tell me. But there’s nothing to be frightened of.”
“That’s all you know. But I got to tell someone.”
“All right then, tell me.”
“I’m going to—I got to.”
“Go ahead then.”
Flossie pinched his arm hard.
“There was a cook there—a fat woman—name of Green. She said I’d got to take up the old lady’s Benger’s, and not to go into the room on no account and the nurse would take it at the door. There’s a nurse, and the cook, and the house-parlour-maid. So I took it up, and when I was coming down, the drawing-room door was open and I went in, just to have a look round as you might say. Ooh! Mr Miles!”
“What happened?”
“I dunno—reelly. There was a curtain looped crooked in the back part of the room and I went to pull it straight, and there was a great big mirror on the wall, taller than me and a handsome gold frame all round it. I noticed it pertickler. And when I’d put the curtain straight, I turned round, and—ooh!”
“Good gracious, Flossie—what?”
Flossie dug her fingers into his arm.
“Ooh!” she said again. “There wasn’t any glass in the mirror any more. There was the frame, but there wasn’t any glass—there was only a most awful black hole. Ooh—it was awful! And there
was a man’s head all over blood!” She caught at him with both hands and dissolved into hysterical sobs upon his shoulder.
“Oh, I say!” said Miles. “I do wish you wouldn’t do that! Look here, someone will think I’m murdering you.”
Flossie choked, gulped, and said in a trembling whisper,
“I never see such eyes.”
“What—in the head? Flossie, what on earth did you have for supper?”
She stiffened indignantly.
“I never! And it wasn’t that there poor unfortunate head that had the eyes I was talking about—it was the other one. Come and looked at me out of the hole in the wall he did. And how I got down the stairs I dunno, but thank Gawd I did, and grabbed my coat and up the area steps and never stopped running till my breath gave out. And I dursn’t go home to Aunt, not in the middle of the night, which it would have been by the time I got there in this fog, supposing I could find my way and didn’t get run over. Aunt’s that pertickler. Ooh—I wish I hadn’t told you about it!” She gulped down a sob. “I thought it’d make me feel better, but it hasn’t. It’s all come over me worse than ever. I didn’t ought to have talked about it.” Her breath came in gasps between the words.
Miles took her by the arm and shook her a little.
“Do you know what I think?”
“N’no.”
“I think you dreamt it.”
She pulled away and sat up.
“I never!”
“Well, it sounds like it.”
“Come to that,” said Flossie in a little trembling voice of rage—“come to that, what about you? Coo!” She laughed. “You must have thought I was green to swallow your tale about being a secretary come all the way over from America to look for someone you don’t know nothing about! But I got some manners, thank Gawd! I didn’t laugh at you, did I—nor tell you you were dreaming, nor yet telling lies?”
Miles couldn’t help laughing. He’d much rather she was angry than have her crying on his shoulder.
“Well, as it happens, I wasn’t telling lies. But you needn’t believe me if you don’t want to.”
“Very kind, I’m sure!”
“I’ll tell you all about it if you like.”
She tried for a haughty, languid tone.
“Well—reelly—” Native curiosity came bubbling through. “You don’t mean you’re reelly looking for a girl and you don’t know her name?”
“I do. Wouldn’t you like to hear about it? If I tell every girl I meet, perhaps I’ll strike the right one. Perhaps it’s you. It might be—you never can tell.”
“Ooh!” said Flossie. She edged nearer again. “Go on, Mr Miles!”
Miles went on.
“Well, I’m secretary to a man called Macintyre. He’s an American, and he’s got such a lot of money that he doesn’t know what to do with it. There are just a few of ’em left still. He comes out somewhere near the top.”
“I’d like to have a lot of money,” said Flossie in a dreamy voice.
“It’s not all jam. For one thing, he doesn’t know who be’s going to leave it to. That worries him a lot.”
“Hasn’t he got any relations?”
Miles laughed.
“Dozens, but he hates them all like poison. But he once had a brother whom he didn’t hate—they built up the business together. And the brother had a wife, but she quarrelled with him and ran away—just on her own, you know, not with anyone. And after she’d run away she had a baby over here in England, a girl, and she wrote to tell her husband. She’d spent all her money by then and she was pretty ill, and she wanted to come back.”
“Ooh!” said Flossie. “What happened?”
“He never opened the letter. He died last year, and old Macintyre found it unopened in his desk. There were three or four letters. None of them had been opened. They were tied up together neatly, and right on top there was one that had been opened. It wasn’t from the wife. It said:
“Dear Sir,
Your wife died this morning. Please send money for funeral expenses and my account enclosed and oblige
Yours truly
Agnes Smith.”
“Nothing about the baby?”
“Not a word.”
“Did he send the money?”
“We don’t know. We don’t know what he did. Nobody knows. And I’ve come over here to find the baby. She’d be nineteen and a half by now.”
“Ooh!” said Flossie, still in that dreamy voice. “I’m nineteen and a half.”
“But you’re not Miss Macintyre, are you?”
Flossie pounced.
“I thought you said you didn’t know her name?”
“Oh, her surname’s Macintyre of course. I don’t know what she was christened. That’s one of the things I’ve got to find out. There—that’s my story. What do you think of it?”
Flossie sniffed.
“I think you must of dreamt it,” she said.
CHAPTER IV
Mr Gilmore might be addicted to late hours, but he did not permit them to impair his efficiency. He was something in the Foreign Office—a very efficient and confidential something. Miles Clayton, entering upon him in an extremely hungry, cold, dirty, and disgruntled condition at somewhere about ten fifteen, was immediately sucked into a vortex of energy which resulted in the almost instantaneous recovery of his luggage and the production of his lost notecase, minus the notes it had contained, but with his passport and letter of credit intact.
“Ordinary station thief. Little man—not up to handling a letter of credit. Note-case chucked away—too dangerous to keep. What about the numbers of the notes? Have you got them?”
Miles shook his head.
Mr Gilmore frowned.
“Always take the number of notes,” he said. “I do. Train yourself to memorize them.… Not in the least—perfectly easy. Let your brain behave like a blancmange, and it will. Now better go and have a wash and a shave, and some sleep. Dine with me at the Luxe at eight.”
Miles was very glad to agree. He found a more modest hotel than the Luxe to stay at, wallowed in hot water, ate largely, and plunged into a deep and dreamful sleep. He didn’t dream very much as a rule—only when he was excited or tired out. He didn’t know when he had dreamed like this. Looking back afterwards, he couldn’t remember where one dream stopped and another began. He couldn’t really remember much about them, and the bits he remembered gave him the feeling that there was a great deal more that was hiding in the corners of his mind. In one of the dreams he was crawling through a long dark passage after a head which kept on rolling away. Not a nice dream. And then, after some indeterminate lapse of time, there were eyes glaring at him from the darkness and he was trying to catch them in a butterfly net. Why? What an ass one was in a dream.… And then someone said “Miss Macintyre” in a loud booming voice that went rolling about like lumps of thunder. And in the middle of it all there was a baby in his arms, and it looked up at him with incredibly solemn eyes and said, “You don’t know my name.” And after that he was running the gauntlet between two rows of girls who stretched from the Marble Arch to Waterloo bridge. One of them was Miss Macintyre, but he didn’t know which. They shouted their names at him as he ran: “Joan—Alice—Una—Marion—Flossie. Flossie.” She said in a shuddering whisper, “There was a great black hole in the wall,” and he fell over the edge of the world into another dream.
It is a long way down over the edge of the world, but it is very quiet when you get there. There was a sound of water, and a sound of trees—soft running water, and slow waving trees.… Little Kay was there. It was years since he had thought about Kay.… He stayed in this dream for a long time very pleasantly.
Then he woke up and dressed, and went to dine with Mr Gilmore at the Luxe.
It was a very good dinner, and he was still hungry. Somewhere between the fish and the entrée he found himself telling Gilmore about his wild goose chase.
“How many girls do you suppose there are in England at this minute between
the ages of nineteen and twenty, Gil?”
“Ask the editor of Tit Bits,” said Gilmore. “His line, not mine. How many halfpennies does it take to reach the moon? If you stood all the policemen in the world one on top of the other, what would be the colour of the top one’s hair? Why is a mouse when it spins?”
“Do you suppose there are a million?”
“I hope not.”
“Well, half a million?”
“Why this morbid preoccupation with flappers?”
Miles shook his head.
“They’ve stopped flapping at nineteen and a half.”
“Anyhow, why?”
“Miss Macintyre,” said Miles. “I’ve been telling you all about her and you haven’t been listening. Mother vanished into the blue twenty years ago—had a baby in Hampstead and died.”
“I heard all that. Your boss wants to find the girl and leave her his money. How do you propose setting about it? Where are the clues?”
“Well there are three letters from Mrs Macintyre, all written the same month, two before the baby was born and one afterwards. Knox Macintyre hadn’t opened any of them. The boss read them and handed them on to me. They were rather—heart-rending. I don’t know what they quarrelled about, but she wanted to make it up. That was the first letter, and she asked him to cable an answer. The next was a fortnight later. She was awfully worried because he hadn’t cabled. She was ill, and she was running out of money. She didn’t want to sell the jewels he had given her. She begged him to cable and come to her. The last was ten days later, just a scrawl in pencil. ‘Very ill. Do please come. Baby is a girl. So pretty.’ Well, that was all, except a letter which he had opened, from the landlady: ‘Dear sir, your wife died this morning. Please send money for funeral expenses and my account enclosed and oblige yours truly, Agnes Smith.’ Pretty grim, isn’t it? Knox must have been a hard nut.”
Gilmore nodded.
“Any address on the letters?”
“Oh yes—72 Laburnum Vale, Hampstead. But when I wrote to Mrs Agnes Smith, the letter came back with Not known scrawled across it in blue pencil. So then the boss told me to come over and worry round.”
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