He straightened, and with a pleasantly idle gesture thrust his stick forward through the opening. And then, for the second time that evening, something incredible happened to him.
He wheeled sharply. Nobody was paying any attention. The auction was dead on its feet. The silent men were drifting out into the night. In a pause, hammering sounded at the back of the shop. The plump little auctioneer looked more and more as if he were eating a bad egg.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish looked down at his gloved right hand. There was no stick in it. There was nothing in it. He stepped to one side and looked behind the door. There was no stick there, on the dusty floor.
He had felt nothing. Nothing had jerked at him. The stick had merely passed part way through the door and then—it had merely ceased to exist.
He leaned down and picked up a piece of torn paper, wadded it swiftly into a ball, glanced behind him again and tossed the ball through the open part of the door.
Then he let out a slow sigh in which some neolithic rapture struggled with his civilized amazement. The ball of paper didn’t fall to the floor behind the door. It fell, in midair, clean out of the visible world.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish reached his empty right hand forward and very slowly and carefully pushed the door shut. Then he just stood there, and licked his lips.
After a while: “Harem door,” he said very softly. “Exit door of a harem. Now, that’s an idea.”
A very charming idea, too. The silken lady, her night of pleasure with the sultan over, would be conducted politely to that door and would casually step through it. Then nothing. No sobbing in the night, no broken hearts, no blackamoor with cruel eyes and a large scimitar, no knotted silk cord, no blood, no dull splash in the midnight Bosphorus. Merely nothing. A cool, clean, perfectly timed, and perfectly irrevocable absence of existence. Someone would close the door and lock it and take the key out, and for the time being that would be that.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish didn’t notice the emptying of the shop. Faintly he heard its street door close, but without giving it any meaning. The hammering at the back stopped for a moment, voices spoke. Then steps came near. They were weary steps in the silence, the steps of a man who had had enough of that day, and of many such days. A voice spoke at Mr. Sutton-Cornish’s elbow, an end-of-the-day voice.
“A very fine piece of work, sir. A bit out of my line—to be frank.” Mr. Sutton-Cornish didn’t look at him, not yet. “Quite a bit out of anybody’s line,” he said gravely. “I see it interests you, sir, after all.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish turned his head slowly. Down on the floor, off his box, the auctioneer was a mere wisp of a man. A shabby, unpressed red-eyed little man who had found life no picnic.
“Yes, but what would one do with it?” Mr. Sutton-Cornish asked throatily.
“Well—it’s a door like any other, sir. Bit ’eavy. Bit queerlike. But still a door like any other.”
“I wonder,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said, still throatily. The auctioneer gave him a swift appraising glance, shrugged and gave it up. He sat down on an empty box, lit a cigarette and relaxed sloppily into private life.
“What are you asking for it?” Mr. Sutton-Cornish inquired, quite suddenly. “What are you asking for it, Mr.—”
“Skimp, sir. Josiah Skimp. Well, a £20 note, sir? Bronze alone ought to be worth that for art work.” The little man’s eyes were glittering again.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish nodded absently. “I don’t know much about that.”
“’Ell of a lot of it, sir.” Mr. Skimp hopped off his box, patted over and heaved the leaf of the door open, grunting. “Beats me ’ow it ever got ’ere. For seven-footers. No door for shrimps like me. Look, sir.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish had a rather ghastly presentiment, of course. But he didn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t. His tongue stuck in his throat and his legs were like ice. The comical contrast between the massiveness of the door and his own wisp of a body seemed to amuse Mr. Skimp. His little, round face threw back the shadow of a grin. Then he lifted his foot and hopped.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish watched him—as long as there was anything to watch. In fact he watched much longer. The hammering at the back of the shop seemed to get quite thunderous in the silence.
Once more, after a long time, Mr. Sutton-Cornish bent forward and closed the door. This time he twisted the key and dragged it out and put it in his overcoat pocket.
“Got to do something,” he mumbled. “Got to do—Can’t let this sort of thing—” His voice trailed off and then he jerked violently, as though a sharp pain had shot through him. Then he laughed out loud, off key. Not a natural laugh. Not a very nice laugh.
“That was beastly,” he said under his breath. “But amazingly funny.”
He was still standing there rooted when a pale young man with a hammer appeared at his elbow.
“Mr. Skimp step out, sir—or did you notice? We’re supposed to be closed up, sir.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish didn’t look up at the pale young man with the hammer. Moving a clammy tongue he said:
“Yes… Mr. Skimp… stepped out.”
The young man started to turn away. Mr. Sutton-Cornish made a gesture. “I’ve bought this door—from Mr. Skimp,” he said. “Twenty pounds. Will you take the money—and my card?”
The pale young man beamed, delighted at personal contact with a sale. Mr. Sutton-Cornish drew out a note case, extracted four five-pound notes from it, also a formal calling card. He wrote on the card with a small, gold pencil. His hand seemed surprisingly steady.
“No. 14 Grinling Crescent,” he said. “Have it sent tomorrow without fail. It’s… it’s very heavy. I shall pay the drayage, of course. Mr. Skimp will—” His voice trailed off again. Mr. Skimp wouldn’t.
“Oh, that’s all right, sir. Mr. Skimp is my uncle.”
“Ah, that’s too—I mean, well, take this ten-shilling note for yourself, won’t you?”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish left the shop rather rapidly, his right hand clutching the big key down in his pocket.
An ordinary taxi took him home to dinner. He dined alone—after three whiskies. But he wasn’t as much alone as he looked. He never would be any more.
It came the next day, swathed in sacking and bound about with cords, looking like nothing on earth.
Four large men in leather aprons perspired it up the four front steps and into the hall, with a good deal of sharp language back and forth. They had a light hoist to help them get it off their dray, but the steps almost beat them. Once inside the hall they got it on two dollies and after that it was just an average heavy, grunting job. They set it up at the back of Mr. Sutton-Cornish’s study, across a sort of alcove he had an idea about.
He tipped them liberally, they went away, and Collins, the butler, left the front door open for a while to air the place through.
Carpenters came. The sacking was stripped off, and a framework was built around the door, so that it became part of a partition wall across the alcove. A small door was set in the partition. When the work was done and the mess cleared up Mr. Sutton-Cornish asked for an oil-can, and locked himself into his study. Then and only then he got out the big bronze key and fitted it again into the huge lock and opened the bronze door wide, both sides of it.
He oiled the hinges from the rear, just in case. Then he shut it again and oiled the lock, removed the key and went for a good long walk, in Kensington Gardens, and back. Collins and the first parlormaid had a look at it while he was out. Cook hadn’t been upstairs yet.
“Beats me what the old fool’s after,” the butler said stonily. “I give him another week, Bruggs. If she’s not back by then, I give him my notice. How about you, Bruggs?”
“Let him have his fun,” Bruggs said, tossing her head. “That old sow he’s married to—”
“Bruggs!”
“Tit-tat to you, Mr. Collins,” Bruggs said and flounced out of the room.
Mr. Collins remained long enough to sample the whisky in the big square decanter on Mr. Sutton-Co
rnish’s smoking table.
In a shallow, tall cabinet in the alcove behind the bronze door, Mr. Sutton-Cornish arranged a few odds and ends of old china and bric-a-brac and carved ivory and some idols in shiny black wood, very old and unnecessary. It wasn’t much of an excuse for so massive a door. He added three statuettes in pink marble. The alcove still had an air of not being quite on to itself. Naturally the bronze door was never open unless the room door was locked.
In the morning Bruggs, or Mary the housemaid, dusted in the alcove, having entered, of course, by the partition door. That amused Mr. Sutton-Cornish slightly, but the amusement began to wear thin. It was about three weeks after his wife and Teddy left that something happened to brighten him up.
A large, tawny man with a waxed mustache and steady gray eyes called on him and presented a card that indicated he was Detective-sergeant Thomas Lloyd of Scotland Yard. He said that one Josiah Skimp, an auctioneer, living in Kennington, was missing from his home to the great concern of his family, and that his nephew, one George William Hawkins, also of Kennington, had happened to mention that Mr. Sutton-Cornish was present in a shop in Soho on the very night when Mr. Skimp vanished. In fact, Mr. Sutton-Cornish might even have been the last person known to have spoken to Mr. Skimp.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish laid out the whisky and cigars, placed his fingertips together and nodded gravely.
“I recall him perfectly, sergeant. In fact I bought that funny door over there from him. Quaint, isn’t it?”
The detective glanced at the bronze door, a brief and empty glance.
“Out of my line, sir, I’m afraid. I do recall now something was said about the door. They had quite a job moving it. Very smooth whisky, sir. Very smooth indeed.”
“Help yourself, sergeant. So Mr. Skimp has run off and lost himself. Sorry I can’t help you. I really didn’t know him, you know.”
The detective nodded his large tawny head. “I didn’t think you did, sir. The Yard only got the case a couple of days ago. Routine call, you know. Did he seem excited, for instance?”
“He seemed tired,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish mused. “Very fed up—with the whole business of auctioneering, perhaps. I only spoke to him a moment. About that door, you know. A nice little man—but tired.”
The detective didn’t bother to look at the door again. He finished his whisky and allowed himself a little more.
“No family trouble,” he said. “Not much money, but who has these days? No scandal. Not a melancholy type, they say. Odd.”
“Some very queer types in Soho,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said mildly.
The detective thought it over. “Harmless, though. A rough district once, but not in our time. Might I ask what you was doing over there?”
“Wandering,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said. “Just wandering. A little more of this?”
“Well, now, really, sir, three whiskies in a morning… well, just this once and many thanks to you, sir.”
Detective-sergeant Lloyd left—rather regretfully.
After he had been gone ten minutes or so, Mr. Sutton-Cornish got up and locked the study door. He walked softly down the long, narrow room and got the big bronze key out of his inside breast pocket, where he always carried it now.
The door opened noiselessly and easily now. It was well-balanced for its weight. He opened it wide, both sides of it.
“Mr. Skimp,” he said very gently into the emptiness, “you are wanted by the police, Mr. Skimp.”
The fun of that lasted him well on to lunch time.
In the afternoon Mrs. Sutton-Cornish came back. She appeared quite suddenly before him in the study, sniffed harshly at the smell of tobacco and scotch, refused a chair, and stood very solid and lowering just inside the closed door. Teddy stood beside her for a moment, then hurled himself at the edge of the rug.
“Stop that, you little beast. Stop that at once, darling,” Mrs. Sutton-Cornish said. She picked Teddy up and stroked him. He lay in her arms and licked her nose and sneered at Mr. Sutton-Cornish.
“I find,” Mrs. Sutton-Cornish said, in a voice that had the brittleness of dry suet, “after numerous very boring interviews with my solicitor, that I can do nothing without your help. Naturally I dislike asking for that.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish made ineffectual motions towards a chair and when they were ignored he leaned resignedly against the mantelpiece. He said he supposed that was so.
“Perhaps it has escaped your attention that I am still comparatively a young woman. And these are modern days, James.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish smiled wanly and glanced at the bronze door. She hadn’t noticed it yet. Then he put his head on one side and wrinkled his nose and said mildly, without much interest:
“You’re thinking of a divorce?”
“I’m thinking of very little else,” she said brutally.
“And you wish me to compromise myself in the usual manner, at Brighton, with a lady who will be described in court as an actress?”
She glared at him. Teddy helped her glare. Their combined glare failed even to perturb Mr. Sutton-Cornish. He had other resources now.
“Not with that dog,” he said carelessly, when she didn’t answer.
She made some kind of furious noise, a snort with a touch of snarl in it. She sat down then, very slowly and heavily, a little puzzled. She let Teddy jump to the floor.
“Just what are you talking about, James?” she asked witheringly.
He strolled over to the bronze door, leaned his back against it and explored its rich protuberances with a fingertip. Even then she didn’t see the door.
“You want a divorce, my dear Louella,” he said slowly, “so that you may marry another man. There’s absolutely no point in it—with that dog. I shouldn’t be asked to humiliate myself. Too useless. No man would marry that dog.”
“James—are you attempting to blackmail me?” Her voice was rather dreadful. She almost bugled. Teddy sneaked across to the window curtains and pretended to lie down.
“And even if he would,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said with a peculiar quiet in his tone, “I oughtn’t to make it possible. I ought to have enough human compassion—”
“James! How dare you! You make me physically sick with your insincerity!”
For the first time in his life James Sutton-Cornish laughed in his wife’s face.
“Those are two or three of the silliest speeches I ever had to listen to,” he said. “You’re an elderly, ponderous and damn dull woman. Go out and buy yourself a gigolo, if you want someone to fawn on you. But don’t ask me to make a beast of myself so that he can marry you and throw me out of my father’s house. Now run along and take your miserable brown beetle with you.”
She got up quickly, very quickly for her, and stood a moment almost swaying. Her eyes were as blank as a blind man’s eyes. In the silence Teddy tore fretfully at a curtain, with bitter, preoccupied growls that neither of them noticed.
She said very slowly and almost gently: “We’ll see how long you stay in your father’s house, James Sutton-Cornish—pauper.”
She moved very quickly the short distance to the door, went through and slammed it behind her.
The slamming of the door, an unusual event in that household, seemed to awaken a lot of echoes that had not been called upon to perform for a long time. So that Mr. Sutton-Cornish was not instantly aware of the small peculiar sound at his own side of the door, a mixture of sniffing and whimpering, with just a dash of growl.
Teddy. Teddy hadn’t made the door. The sudden, bitter exit had for once caught him napping. Teddy was shut in—with Mr. Sutton-Cornish.
For a little while Mr. Sutton-Cornish watched him rather absently, still shaken by the interview, not fully realizing what had happened. The small, wet, black snout explored the crack at the bottom of the closed door. At moments, while the whimpering and sniffing went on, Teddy turned a reddish brown outjutting eye, like a fat wet marble, toward the man he hated.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish snapped out of it rather suddenly.
He straightened and beamed. “Well, well, old man,” he purred. “Here we are, and for once without the ladies.”
Cunning dawned in his beaming eye. Teddy read it and slipped off under a chair. He was silent now, very silent. And Mr. Sutton-Cornish was silent as he moved swiftly along the wall and turned the key in the study door. Then he sped back toward the alcove, dug the key of the bronze door out of his pocket, unlocked and opened that—wide.
He sauntered back toward Teddy, beyond Teddy, as far as the window.
“Here we are, old man. Jolly, eh? Have a shot of whisky, old man?”
Teddy made a small sound under the chair, and Mr. Sutton-Cornish sidled toward him delicately, bent down suddenly and lunged. Teddy made another chair, farther up the room. He breathed hard and his eyes stuck out rounder and wetter than ever, but he was silent, except for his breathing. And Mr. Sutton-Cornish, stalking him patiently from chair to chair, was as silent as the last leaf of autumn, falling in slow eddies in a windless copse.
At about that time the doorknob turned sharply. Mr. Sutton-Cornish paused to smile and click his tongue. A sharp knock followed. He ignored it. The knocking went on sharper and sharper and an angry voice accompanied it.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish went on stalking Teddy. Teddy did the best he could, but the room was narrow and Mr. Sutton-Cornish was patient and rather agile when he wanted to be. In the interests of agility he was quite willing to be undignified.
The knocking and calling out beyond the door went on, but inside the room things could only end one way. Teddy reached the sill of the bronze door, sniffed at it rapidly, almost lifted a contemptuous hind leg, but didn’t because Mr. Sutton-Cornish was too close to him. He sent a low snarl back over his shoulder and hopped that disastrous sill.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish raced back to the room door, turned the key swiftly and silently, crept over to a chair and sprawled in it laughing. He was still laughing when Mrs. Sutton-Cornish thought to try the knob again, found the door yielded this time, and stormed into the room. Through the mist of his grisly, solitary laughter he saw her cold stare, then he heard her rustling about the room, heard her calling Teddy.