*
It was a heavenly clear evening when Medina and I set out to walk the half-mile to Mervyn Street. I had been so cloistered and harassed during the past weeks that I had missed the coming of summer. Suddenly the world seemed to have lighted up, and the streets were filled with that intricate odour of flowers, scent, hot wood pavements, and asphalt which is the summer smell of London. Cars were waiting at house-doors, and women in pretty clothes getting into them; men were walking dinner-wards, with some of whom we exchanged greetings; the whole earth seemed full of laughter and happy movement. And it was shut off from me. I seemed to be living on the other side of a veil from this cheerful world, and I could see nothing but a lonely old man with a tragic face waiting for a lost boy. There was one moment at the corner of Berkeley Square when I accidentally jostled Medina, and had to clench my hands and bite my lips to keep myself from throttling him there and then.
The dining-room in Mervyn Street looked west, and the evening light strove with the candles on the table, and made a fairy-like scene of the flowers and silver. It was a full meeting – fifteen I think – and the divine weather seemed to have put everybody in the best of spirits. I had almost forgotten Medina’s repute with the ordinary man, and was staggered anew at the signs of his popularity. He was in the chair that evening, and a better chairman of such a dinner I have never seen. He had the right word for everybody, and we sat down to table like a party of undergraduates celebrating a successful cricket-match.
I was on the chairman’s right hand, next to Burminster, with Palliser-Yeates opposite me. At first the talk was chiefly about the Derby and Ascot entries, about which Medina proved uncommonly well posted. He had a lot of inside knowledge from the Chilton stables, and showed himself a keen critic of form; also he was a perfect pundit about the pedigree of race-horses, and made Burminster, who fancied himself in the same line, gape with admiration. I suppose a brain like his could get up any subject at lightning speed, and he thought this kind of knowledge useful to him, for I don’t believe he cared more for a horse than for a cat.
Once, during the Somme battle, I went to dine at a French Château behind the lines, as the guest of the only son of the house. It was an ancient place, with fishponds and terraces, and there were only two people in it, an old Comtesse and a girl of fifteen called Simone. At dinner, I remember, a decrepit butler filled for me five glasses of different clarets, till I found the one I preferred. Afterwards I walked in the garden with Simone in a wonderful yellow twilight, watching the fat carp in the ponds and hearing the grumbling of the distant guns. I felt in that hour the poignant contrast of youth and innocence and peace with that hideous world of battle a dozen miles off. Tonight I had the same feeling – the jolly party of clean, hard, decent fellows, and the abominable hinterland of mystery and crime of which the man at the head of the table was the master. I must have been poor company, but happily everybody was talkative, and I did my best to grin at Burminster’s fooling.
Presently the talk drifted away from sport. Palliser-Yeates was speaking, and his fresh boyish colour contrasted oddly with his wise eyes and grave voice.
‘I can’t make out what is happening,’ he said in reply to a remark of Leithen’s. ‘The City has suddenly become jumpy, and there’s no reason in the facts that I can see for it. There’s been a good deal of realization of stocks, chiefly by foreign holders, but there are a dozen explanations of that. No, there’s a kind of malaise about, and it’s unpleasantly like what I remember in June, 1914. I was in Whittington’s then, and we suddenly found the foundations beginning to crumble – oh yes, before the Sarajevo murders. You remember Charlie Esmond’s smash – well, that was largely due to the spasm of insecurity that shook the world. People now and then get a feeling in their bones that something bad is going to happen. And probably they are right, and it has begun to happen.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Leithen. ‘I don’t like this. Is it another war?’
Palliser-Yeates did not answer at once. ‘It looks like it. I admit it’s almost unthinkable, but then all wars are really unthinkable, till you’re in the middle of them.’
‘Nonsense!’ Medina cried. ‘There’s no nation on the globe fit to go to war, except half-civilized races with whom it is the normal condition. You forget how much we know since 1914. You couldn’t get even France to fight without provoking a revolution – a middle-class revolution, the kind that succeeds.’
Burminster looked relieved. ‘The next war,’ he said, ‘will be a dashed unpleasant affair. So far as I can see there will be very few soldiers killed, but an enormous number of civilians. The safest place will be the front. There will be such a rush to get into the army that we’ll have to have conscription to make people remain in civil life. The embusqués will be the regulars.’
As he spoke someone entered the room, and to my amazement I saw that it was Sandy.
He was looking extraordinarily fit and as brown as a berry. He murmured an apology to the chairman for being late, patted the bald patch on Burminster’s head, and took a seat at the other end of the table. ‘I’ll cut in where you’ve got to,’ he told the waiters. ‘No – don’t bother about fish. I want some English roast beef and a tankard of beer.’
There was a chorus of questions.
‘Just arrived an hour ago. I’ve been in the East – Egypt and Palestine. Flew most of the way back.’
He nodded to me, and smiled at Medina and raised his tankard to him.
I was not in a good position for watching Medina’s face, but so far as I could see it was unchanged. He hated Sandy, but he didn’t fear him now, when his plans had practically come to fruition. Indeed he was very gracious to him, and asked in his most genial tones what he had been after.
‘Civil aviation,’ said Sandy. ‘I’m going to collar the pilgrim traffic to the Holy Place. You’ve been in Mecca?’ he asked Pugh, who nodded. ‘You remember the hamelidari crowd who used to organize the transport from Mespot. Well, I’m a hamelidari on a big scale. I am prepared to bring the rank of hadji within reach of the poorest and feeblest. I’m going to be the great benefactor of the democracy of Islam, by means of a fleet of patched-up planes and a few kindred spirits that know the East. I’ll let you fellows in on the ground-floor when I float my company. John’ – he addressed Palliser-Yeates – ‘I look to you to manage the flotation.’
Sandy was obviously ragging, and no one took him seriously. He sat there with his merry brown face, looking absurdly young and girlish, so that the most suspicious could have seen nothing more in him than the ordinary mad Englishman who lived for adventure and novelty. Me he never addressed, and I was glad of it, for I was utterly at sea. What did he mean by turning up now? What part was he to play in the events of the night? I could not have controlled the anxiety in my voice if I had been forced to speak to him.
A servant brought Medina a note, which he opened at leisure and read. ‘No answer,’ he said, and stuffed it into his pocket. I had a momentary dread that he might have got news of Macgillivray’s round-up, but his manner reassured me.
There were people there who wanted to turn Sandy to other subjects, especially Fulleylove and the young Cambridge don, Nightingale. They wanted to know about South Arabia, of which at the time the world was talking. Some fellow, I forget his name, was trying to raise an expedition to explore it.
‘It’s the last geographical secret left unriddled,’ he said, and now he spoke seriously. ‘Well, perhaps not quite the last. I’m told there’s still something to be done with the southern tributaries of the Amazon. Mornington, you know, believes there’s a chance of finding some of the Inca people still dwelling in the unexplored upper glens. But all the rest have gone. Since the beginning of the century we’ve made a clean sweep of the jolly old mysteries that made the world worth living in. We have been to both the Poles, and to Lhasa, and to the Mountains of the Moon. We haven’t got to the top of Everest yet, but we know what it is like. Mecca and Medina are as stale as Bournemouth. We know that
there’s nothing very stupendous in the Brahmaputra gorges. There’s little left for a man’s imagination to play with, and our children will grow up in a dull, shrunken world. Except, of course, the Great Southern Desert of Arabia.’
‘Do you think it can be crossed?’ Nightingale asked.
‘It’s hard to say, and the man who tried it would take almighty risks. I don’t fancy myself pinning my life to milk camels. They’re chancy brutes.’
‘I don’t believe there’s anything there,’ said Fulleylove, ‘except eight hundred miles of soft sand.’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve heard strange stories. There was a man I met once in Oman, who went west from the Manah oasis…’
He stopped to taste the club madeira, then set down the glass and looked at his watch.
‘Great Scott!’ he said. ‘I must be off. I’m sorry, Mr President, but I felt I must see you all again. You don’t mind my butting in?’
He was half-way to the door, when Burminster asked where he was going.
‘To seek the straw in some sequestered grange… Meaning the ten-thirty from King’s Cross. I’m off to Scotland to see my father. Remember, I’m the last prop of an ancient house. Goodbye, all of you. I’ll tell you about my schemes at the next dinner.’
As the door closed on him I had a sense of the blackest depression and loneliness. He was my one great ally, and he came and disappeared like a ship in the night, without a word to me. I felt like a blind bat, and I must have showed my feeling in my face, for Medina saw it and put it down, I dare say, to my dislike of Sandy. He asked Palliser-Yeates to take his place. ‘It’s not the Scotch express, like Arbuthnot, but I’m off for a holiday very soon, and I have an appointment I must keep.’ That was all to the good, for I had been wondering how I was to make an excuse for my visit to the Fields of Eden. He asked me when I would be back and I said listlessly within the next hour. He nodded. ‘I’ll be home by then, and can let you in if Odell has gone to bed.’ Then with a little chaff of Burminster he left, so much at ease that I was positive he had had no bad news. I waited for five minutes and followed suit. The time was a quarter past ten.
*
At the entrance to the Club in Wellesley Street I expected to have some difficulty, but the man in the box at the head of the stairs, after a sharp glance at me, let me pass. He was not the fellow who had been there on my visit with Archie Roylance, and yet I had a queer sense of having seen his face before. I stepped into the dancing-room with its heavy flavour of scent and its infernal din of mountebank music, sat down at a side table and ordered a liqueur.
There was a difference in the place, but at first I could not put my finger on it. Everything seemed the same; the only face I knew was Miss Victor’s, and that had the same mask-like pallor; she was dancing with a boy, who seemed to be trying to talk to her and getting few replies. Odell I did not see, nor the Jew with the beard. I observed with interest the little casement above from which I had looked when I burgled the curiosity shop. There were fewer people tonight, but apparently the same class.
No, not quite the same class. The women were the same, but the men were different. They were older and more – how shall I put it? – responsible-looking, and had not the air of the professional dancing partner or the young man on the spree. They were heavier footed, too, though good enough performers. Somehow I got the notion that most of them were not habitués of this kind of place and were here with a purpose.
As soon as this idea dawned on me I began to notice other things. There were fewer foreign waiters, and their number was steadily decreasing. Drinks would be ordered and would be long in coming; a servant, once he left the hall, seemed to be unaccountably detained. And then I observed another thing. There was a face looking down from the casement above; I could see it like a shadow behind the dirty glass.
Presently Odell appeared, a resplendent figure in evening dress, with a diamond solitaire in his shirt and a red silk handkerchief in his left sleeve. He looked massive and formidable, but puffier than ever, and his small pig’s eyes were very bright. I fancied he had been having a glass or two, just enough to excite him. He swaggered about among the small tables, turning now and then to stare at the girl in green, and then went out again. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was a quarter to eleven.
When I lifted my head Mary had arrived. No more paint and powder and bizarre clothes. She was wearing the pale blue gown she had worn at our Hunt Ball in March, and her hair was dressed in the simple way I loved, which showed all the lights and shadows in the gold. She came in like a young queen, cast a swift glance round the room, and then, shading her eyes with her hand, looking up towards the casement. It must have been a signal, for I saw a hand wave.
As she stood there, very still and poised like a runner, the music stopped suddenly. The few men who were still dancing spoke to their partners and moved towards the door. I observed the bearded Jew hurry in and look round. A man touched him on the arm and drew him away, and that was the last I saw of him.
Suddenly Odell reappeared. He must have had some warning which required instant action. I shall never know what it was, but it may have announced the round-up, and the course to be followed towards the hostages. He signed peremptorily to Miss Victor and went forward as if to take her arm. ‘You gotta come along,’ I heard, when my eyes were occupied with a new figure.
Turpin was there, a pale taut young man with his brows knit as I remembered them in tight corners in France. The green girl had darted to Mary’s side, and Turpin strode up to her.
‘Adela, my dear,’ he said, ‘I think it is time for you to be going home.’
The next I saw was Miss Victor’s hand clutching his arm and Odell advancing with a flush on his sallow face.
‘You letta go that goil,’ he was saying. ‘You got no business with her. She’s my goil.’
Turpin was smiling. ‘I think not, my friend.’ He disengaged Adela’s arm and put her behind him, and with a swift step struck Odell a resounding smack on the cheek with the flat of his hand.
The man seemed to swell with fury. ‘Hell!’ he cried, with a torrent of Bowery oaths. ‘My smart guy, I’ve got something in my mitt for you. You for the sleep pill.’
I would have given a fortune to be in Turpin’s place, for I felt that a scrap was what I needed to knit up my ragged nerves. But I couldn’t chip in, for this was clearly his special quarrel, and very soon I saw that he was not likely to need my help.
Smiling wickedly, he moved round the pug, who had his fists up. ‘Fiche-moi la paix’, he crooned. ‘My friend, I am going to massacre you.’
I stepped towards Mary, for I wanted to get the women outside, but she was busy attending to Miss Victor, whom the strain of the evening had left on the verge of swooning. So I only saw bits of the fight. Turpin kept Odell at long range, for infighting would have been fatal, and he tired him with his lightning movements, till the professional’s bad training told and his wind went. When the Frenchman saw his opponent puffing and his cheeks mottling he started to sail in. That part I witnessed, and I hope that Mary and Miss Victor did not understand old Turpin’s language, for he spoke gently to himself the whole time, and it was the quintessence of all the esoteric abuse that the French poilu accumulated during the four years of war. His tremendous reach gave him an advantage, he was as light on his legs as a fencer, and his arms seemed to shoot out with the force of a steam-hammer. I realized what I have never known before, that his slimness was deceptive and that stripped he would be a fine figure of sinew and bone. Also I understood that a big fellow, however formidable, if he is untrained and a little drunk, will go down before speed and quick wits and the deftness of youth.
They fought for just over six minutes. Turpin’s deadliest blows were on Odell’s body, but the knockout came with one on the point of the chin. The big man crumpled up in a heap, and the back of his head banged on the floor. Turpin wrapped a wisp of a handkerchief round his knuckles, which had suffered from Odell’s solitaire, and looked a
bout him.