Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 27

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “Funny. Jimmie knows almost everyone. You’d like him. I must bring you together.” Having failed to establish contact, Thurston seemed now to think that responsibility for the conversation devolved on me.

  “Mr. Thurston,” I said, “is there anything particular you wished to say to me? Because otherwise . . .”

  “I was coming to that,” said Thurston. “Isn’t there somewhere more private where we could go and talk?”

  It was a reasonable suggestion. Two page boys sat on a bench beside us, the hall porter watched us curiously from behind his glass screen, two or three members passing through paused by the tape machine to take a closer look at my peculiar visitor. I was tolerably certain that he was not one of the enthusiasts for my work who occasionally beset me, but was either a beggar or a madman or both; at another time I should have sent him away, but that afternoon, with no prospect of other interest, I hesitated. “Be a good scout,” he urged.

  There is at my club a nondescript little room of depressing aspect where members give interviews to the press, go through figures with their accountants, and in general transact business which they think would be conspicuous in the more public rooms. I took Thurston there.

  “Snug little place,” he said, surveying this dismal place. “O.K. if I smoke?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Have one?”

  “No thank you.”

  He lit a cigarette, drew a deep breath of smoke, gazed at the ceiling and, as though coming to the point, said, “Quite like the old Wimpole.”

  My heart sank. “Mr. Thurston,” I said, “you have surely not troubled to come here simply in order to talk to me about your club.”

  “No. But you see it’s rather awkward. Don’t exactly know how to begin. I thought I might lead up to it naturally. But I realize that your time’s valuable, Mr. Plant, so I may as well admit right out that I owe you an apology.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I’m here under false pretences. My name isn’t Thurston.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’d better tell you who I am, hadn’t I?”

  “If you wish to.”

  “Well, here goes. I’m Arthur Atwater.” The name was spoken with such an air of bravado, with such confidence of it making a stir, that I felt bewildered. It meant absolutely nothing to me. Where and how should I have heard it? Was this a fellow-writer, a distant cousin, a popular athlete? Atwater? Atwater? I repeated it to myself. No association was suggested. My visitor meanwhile seemed unconscious of how flat his revelation had fallen, and was talking away vehemently:

  “Now you see why I couldn’t give my name. It’s awfully decent of you to take it like this. I might have known you were a good scout. I’ve been through Hell I can tell you ever since it happened. I haven’t slept a wink. It’s been terrible. You know how it is when one’s nerve’s gone. I shouldn’t be fit for work now even if they’d kept me on in the job. Not that I care about that. Let them keep their lousy job. I told the manager that to his face. I wasn’t brought up and educated to sell stockings. I ought to have gone abroad long ago. There’s no opportunity in England now, unless you’ve got influence or are willing to suck up to a lot of snobs. You get a fair chance out there in the colonies where one man’s as good as another and no questions asked.”

  I can seldom bear to let a misstatement pass uncorrected. “Believe me, Mr. Atwater,” I said. “You have a totally mistaken view of colonial life. You will find people just as discriminating and inquisitive there as they are here.”

  “Not where I’m going,” he said. “I’m clearing right out. I’m fed up. This case hanging over me and nothing to do all day except think about the accident. It was an accident too. No one can try and hang the blame on me and get away with it. I was on my proper side of the road and I hooted twice. It wasn’t a Belisha crossing. It was my road. The old man just wouldn’t budge. He saw me coming, looked straight at me, as if he was daring me to drive into him. Well, I thought I’d give him a fright. You know how it is when you’re driving all day. You get fed to the teeth with people making one get out of their way all the time. I like to wake them up now and then when there’s no copper near, and make them jump for it. It seems like an hour now, but it all happened in two seconds. I kept on, waiting for him to skip, and he kept on, strolling across the road as if he’d bought it. It wasn’t till I was right on top of him I realized he didn’t intend to move. Then it was too late to stop. I put on my brakes and tried to swerve. Even then I might have missed him if he’d stopped, but he just kept on walking right into me and the mudguard got him. That’s how it was. No one can blame it on me.”

  It was just as my Uncle Andrew had described it.

  “Mr. Atwater,” I said, “do I understand that you are the man who killed my father?”

  “Don’t put it that way, Mr. Plant. I feel sore enough about it. He was a great artist. I read about him in the papers. It makes it worse, his having been a great artist. There’s too little beauty in the world as it is. I should have liked to be an artist myself, only the family went broke. Father took me away from school young, just when I might have got into the eleven. Since then I’ve had nothing but odd jobs. I’ve never had a real chance. I want to start again, somewhere else.”

  I interrupted him, frigidly I thought. “And why, precisely, have you come to me?”

  But nothing could disabuse him of the idea that I was well-disposed. “I knew I could rely on you,” he said. “And I’ll never forget it, not as long as I live. I’ve thought everything out. I’ve got a pal who went out to Rhodesia; I think it was Rhodesia. Somewhere in Africa, anyway. He’ll give me a shakedown till I get on my feet. He’s a great fellow. Won’t he be surprised when I walk in on him! All I need is my passage money—third class, I don’t care. I’m used to roughing it these days—and something to make a start with. I could do it on fifty pounds.”

  “Mr. Atwater,” I said, “have I misunderstood you, or are you asking me to break the law by helping you to evade your trial and also give you a large sum of money?”

  “You’ll get it back, every penny of it.”

  “And our sole connection is the fact that, through pure insolence, you killed my father.”

  “Oh, well, if you feel like that about it . . .”

  “I am afraid you greatly overrate my good nature.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll make you a sporting offer. You give me fifty pounds now and I’ll pay it back in a year plus another fifty pounds to any charity you care to name. How’s that?”

  “I’m afraid there is no point in our discussing the matter. Will you please go?”

  “Certainly I’ll go. If that’s how you take it, I’m sorry I ever came. It’s typical of the world,” he said, rising huffily. “Everyone’s all over you till you get into a spot of trouble. It’s ‘good old Arthur’ while you’re in funds. Then, when you need a pal it’s ‘you overrate my good nature, Mr. Atwater.’”

  I followed him across the room, but before we reached the door his mood had changed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They may send me to prison for this. That’s what happens in this country to a man earning his living. If I’d been driving my own Rolls-Royce they’d all be touching their caps. ‘Very regrettable accident,’ they’d be saying. ‘Hope your nerves have not been shocked, Mr. Atwater’—but to a poor man driving a two seater . . . Mr. Plant, your father wouldn’t have wanted me sent to prison.”

  “He often expressed his belief that all motorists of all classes should be treated as criminals.”

  Atwater received this with disconcerting enthusiasm. “And he was quite right,” he cried in louder tones than can ever have been used in that room except perhaps during spring-cleaning. “I’m fed to the teeth with motor-cars. I’m fed to the teeth with civilization. I want to farm. That’s a man’s life.”

  “Mr. Atwater, will nothing I say persuade you that your aspirations are no concern of mine?”
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  “There’s no call to be sarcastic. If I’m not wanted, you’ve only to say so straight.”

  “You are not wanted.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  I got him through the door, but halfway across the front hall he paused again. “I spent my last ten bob on a wreath.”

  “I’m sorry you did that. I’ll refund it.”

  He turned on me with a look of scorn. “Plant,” he said, “I didn’t think it was in you to say a thing like that. Those flowers were a sacred thing. You wouldn’t understand that, would you? I’d have starved to send them. I may have sunk pretty low, but I have some decency left, and that’s more than some people can say even if they belong to posh clubs and look down on fellows who earn a decent living. Good-bye, Plant. We shall not meet again. D’you mind if I don’t shake hands.”

  That was how he left me, but it was not the last of him. That evening I was called to the telephone to speak to a Mr. Long. Familiar tones, jaunty once more, greeted me. “That you, Plant? Atwater here. Excuse the alias, won’t you. I say, I hope you didn’t take offence at the way I went off today. I’ve been thinking, and I see you were perfectly right. May I come round for another yarn?”

  “No.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when shall I come?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t see you.”

  “No, I quite understand, old man. I’d feel the same myself. It’s only this. In the circumstances I’d like to accept your very sporting offer to pay for those flowers. I’ll call round for the money if you like or will you send it?”

  “I’ll send it.”

  “Care of the Holborn Post Office finds me. Fifteen bob, they cost.”

  “You said ten this afternoon.”

  “Did I? I meant fifteen.”

  “I will send you ten shillings. Good-bye.”

  “Good scout,” said Atwater.

  So I put a note in an envelope and sent it to the man who killed my father.

  VI

  Time dragged; April, May, the beginning of June. I left my club and visited my Uncle Andrew for an uneasy week; then back to the club. I took the manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle to the seaside, to an hotel where I once spent three months in great contentment writing The Frightened Footman: they gave me the best suite, at this time of year, for five guineas a week. The forlorn, out-of-season atmosphere was just as I knew it—the shuttered ballroom, the gusts of rain on the roof of the “sun lounge,” the black esplanade, the crocodiles of private-school boys on their way to football, the fanatical bathers hissing like ostlers as they limped over the shingle into the breakers; the visitors’ high church, the visitors’ low church, and the church of the residents—all empty. Everything was as it had been three years before, but in a week I was back in London with nothing written. It was no good until I got things settled, I told myself; but “getting things settled” merely meant waiting until the house was sold and the lawyers had finished with the will. I took furnished rooms in Ebury Street and waited there, my thoughts more and more turning towards the country and the need of a house there, a permanent home of my own possession. I began to study the house-agents’ advertisements on the back page of The Times. Finally I notified two or three firms of my needs, and was soon amply supplied with specifications and orders-to-view.

  During this time I received a call from young Mr. Godley of Goodchild and Godley. There was nothing at all artistic about young Mr. Godley. He looked and spoke like a motor salesman; his galleries were his “shop” and their contents “stuff” and “things.” He would have seemed at ease, if we had met casually, but the long preamble of small talk—references to mutual acquaintances, holiday resorts abroad, sport, politics, a “first-class man for job lots of wine”—suggested uncertainty; he was trying to decide how to take me. Finally he came to the point.

  “Your father used to do a certain amount of work for us, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Restorations mostly. Occasionally he used to make a facsimile for a client who was selling a picture to America and wanted one to take its place. That kind of work.”

  “Often they were his own compositions.”

  “Well, yes, I believe a few of them were. What we call in the trade ‘pastiche,’ you know.”

  “I saw some of them,” I said.

  “He was wonderfully gifted.”

  “Wonderfully.”

  A pause. Mr. Godley twiddled his Old Harrovian tie. “His work with us was highly confidential.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was wondering—our firm was, whether you had been through his papers yet. I mean, did he keep any records of his work or anything of the kind?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been through his things yet. I should think it quite likely. He was very methodical in some ways.”

  “The papers are all in your own hands?”

  “So far as I know.”

  “If anything of the kind was to turn up, we could rely on your discretion. I mean it would do no one any good . . . I mean you would want your father to be remembered by his exhibited work.”

  “You need not worry,” I said.

  “Splendid. I was sure you would understand. We had a spot of unpleasantness with his man.”

  “Jellaby?”

  “Yes. They both came to see us, husband and wife, immediately after the accident. You might almost say they tried to blackmail us.”

  “Did you give them anything?”

  “No. Goodchild saw them and I imagine he gave them a good flea in the ear. They had nothing to go on.”

  “Odd pair the Jellabys.”

  “I don’t think we shall be worried by them again.”

  “Nor by me. Blackmail is not quite in my line.”

  “No, no, my dear fellow, of course, I didn’t for a moment mean to suggest . . . Ha, ha, ha.”

  “Ha, ha, ha.”

  “But if anything should turn up . . .”

  “I shall be discreet about it.”

  “Or any studies for the paintings he did for us.”

  “Anything incriminating,” I said.

  “Trade secrets,” said Mr. Godley.

  “Trade secrets,” I repeated.

  That was almost the only amusing incident in my London season.

  The sale of the house in St. John’s Wood proved more irksome than I had expected. Ten years before the St. John’s Wood Residential Amenities Company who built the neighbouring flats had offered my father £6,000 for his freehold; he had preserved the letter, which was signed, “Alfred Hardcastle, Chairman.” Their successors, the Hill Crest Court Exploitation Co., now offered me £2,500; their letter was also signed Mr. Hardcastle. I refused, and put the house into an agent’s hands; after two months they reported one offer—of £2,500 from a Mr. Hardcastle, the managing director of St. John’s Wood Residential Estates Ltd. “In the circumstances,” they wrote, “we consider this a satisfactory price.” The circumstances were that no one who liked that kind of house would tolerate its surroundings; having dominated the district, the flats could make their own price. I accepted it and went to sign the final papers at Mr. Hardcastle’s office, expecting an atmosphere of opulence and bluster; instead, I found a modest pair of rooms, one of the unlet flats at the top of the building; on the door were painted the names of half a dozen real estate companies and the woodwork bore traces of other names which had stood there and been obliterated; the chairman opened the door himself and let me in. He was, as my father had supposed, a Jew; a large, neat, middle-aged, melancholy, likeable fellow, who before coming to business, praised my father’s painting with what I believe was complete sincerity.

  There was no other visible staff; just Mr. Hardcastle sitting among his folders and filing cabinets, telling me how he had felt when he lost his own father. Throughout all the vicissitudes of the flats this man had controlled them and lived for them; little companies h
ad gone into liquidation; little, allied companies had been floated; the names of nephews and brothers-in-law had come and gone at the head of the notepaper; stocks had been written down and up, new shares had been issued, bonuses and dividends declared, mortgages transferred and foreclosed, little blocks of figures moved from one balance sheet to another, all in this single room. For the last ten years a few thousand pounds capital had been borrowed and lent backwards and forwards from one account to another and, somehow, working sixteen hours a day, doing his own typing and accountancy, Mr. Hardcastle had sustained life, kept his shoes polished and his trousers creased, had his hair cut regularly and often, bought occasional concert tickets on family anniversaries and educated, he told me, a son in the United States and a daughter in Belgium. The company to which I finally conveyed my freehold was a brand-new one, registered for the occasion and soon, no doubt, doomed to lose its identity in the kaleidoscopic changes of small finance. The cheque, signed by Mr. Hardcastle, was duly honoured, and when the sum, largely depleted by my solicitor, was paid into my account, I found that with the insurance money added and my overdraft taken away, I had a credit balance for the first time in my life, of rather more than £3,500. With this I set about planning a new life.

  Mr. Hardcastle had been willing to wait a long time to make his purchase; once it was done, however, his plans developed with surprising speed. Workmen were cutting the trees and erecting a screen of hoarding while the vans were removing the furniture to store; a week later I came to visit the house; it was a ruin; it might have been mined. Presumably there is some method in the business of demolition; none was apparent to a layman, the roof was off, the front was down, and on one side the basement lay open; on the other the walls still stood their full height, and the rooms, three-sided like stage settings, exposed their Morris papers, flapping loose in the wind where the fireplaces and window frames had been torn out. The studio had disappeared, leaving a square of rubble to mark its site; new shoots appeared here and there in the trampled mess of the garden. A dozen or more workmen were there, two or three of them delving away in a leisurely fashion, the rest leaning on their tools and talking; it seemed inconceivable that in this fashion they could have done so much in such little time. The air was full of flying grit. It was no place to linger. When next I passed that way, a great concrete wing covered the site; it was cleaner than the rest of the block and by a miscalculation of the architects, the windows were each a foot or two below the general line; but, like them, were devoid of curtains.