The Rynox Mystery
Philip MacDonald
A classic Golden Age crime novel, and the first time Philip MacDonald wrote a crime novel without a detective.‘Rynox’ is at that point where one injudicious move, one failure of judgement, one coincidental piece of bad luck will wreck it. So why would anyone send more than a million pounds in one-pound notes to Mr Salisbury of the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan Assurance Corporation? Who would shoot F.X. Benedik, the senior partner of the firm, through the head in his study? And where is the choleric Mr Marsh, who had an appointment with F.X. on the night of his death? Rynox is on the edge of big things. But the edge of big things is a narrow edge. And narrow edges are slippery . . .Philip MacDonald’s Rynox is an engrossing murder mystery set in the business world, a crime novel without a detective in which murder and big business are inextricably combined. Beginning with the Epilogue and ending with the Prologue, it is a subtle and exciting book by one of the greatest masters of the mystery story.This Detective Club classic includes a rare introduction by author Philip MacDonald himself, never before published in the UK, and also ‘The Wood-for-the-Trees’, the only short story to feature his series detective, Anthony Gethryn.
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB (#ulink_49feb40c-f903-5814-9b16-7b27256f7b94)
E. C. BENTLEY • TRENT’S LAST CASE
E. C. BENTLEY • TRENT INTERVENES
E. C. BENTLEY & H. WARNER ALLEN • TRENT’S OWN CASE
ANTHONY BERKELEY • THE WYCHFORD POISONING CASE
ANTHONY BERKELEY • THE SILK STOCKING MURDERS
LYNN BROCK • NIGHTMARE
BERNARD CAPES • THE MYSTERY OF THE SKELETON KEY
AGATHA CHRISTIE • THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD
AGATHA CHRISTIE • THE BIG FOUR
WILKIE COLLINS • THE MOONSTONE
HUGH CONWAY • CALLED BACK
HUGH CONWAY • DARK DAYS
EDMUND CRISPIN • THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE CASK
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE PONSON CASE
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE PIT-PROP SYNDICATE
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE GROOTE PARK MURDER
MAURICE DRAKE • THE MYSTERY OF THE MUD FLATS
FRANCIS DURBRIDGE • BEWARE OF JOHNNY WASHINGTON
J. JEFFERSON FARJEON • THE HOUSE OPPOSITE
RUDOLPH FISHER • THE CONJURE-MAN DIES
FRANK FROËST • THE GRELL MYSTERY
FRANK FROËST & GEORGE DILNOT • THE CRIME CLUB
ÉMILE GABORIAU • THE BLACKMAILERS
ANNA K. GREEN • THE LEAVENWORTH CASE
DONALD HENDERSON • MR BOWLING BUYS A NEWSPAPER
VERNON LODER • THE MYSTERY AT STOWE
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE RASP
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE NOOSE
PHILIP MACDONALD • MURDER GONE MAD
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE MAZE
NGAIO MARSH • THE NURSING HOME MURDER
G. ROY McRAE • THE PASSING OF MR QUINN
R. A. V. MORRIS • THE LYTTLETON CASE
ARTHUR B. REEVE • THE ADVENTURESS
FRANK RICHARDSON • THE MAYFAIR MYSTERY
R. L. STEVENSON • DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
J. V. TURNER • BELOW THE CLOCK
EDGAR WALLACE • THE TERROR
ISRAEL ZANGWILL • THE PERFECT CRIME
FURTHER TITLES IN PREPARATION
Copyright (#ulink_a1a4e936-6377-556e-9758-5004d2166555)
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1930
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1931
Copyright © Estate of Philip MacDonald 1930, 1963
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008248994
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008249007
Version: 2017-10-30
Contents
Cover (#uec09d327-ff38-5387-b68f-125784d4b88b)
The Detective Story Club (#u105345bf-e670-52af-b0fd-86576c1f6477)
Title Page (#ue16db368-e756-5f07-882c-47df7cebdc61)
Copyright (#u9d4f948d-ba60-5e8a-8831-018d42a77410)
Introduction (#ud09de074-8b8a-5ab1-9da1-85c10f22ef67)
Epilogue (#u97384b1c-4019-5398-b7e4-e7739798bd7e)
Reel One (#u5f943094-b769-5b54-a467-175de6eb6885)
Sequence the First (#u7e06f9fe-57e2-51e6-9fbe-5a81f17d6847)
Sequence the Second (#u7f567084-df5e-51be-99cc-9ed14fd2e75d)
Sequence the Third (#uc8665688-06c3-5463-827f-831a6d835037)
Sequence the Fourth (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Fifth (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Sixth (#litres_trial_promo)
Reel Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Reel Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the First (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Second (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Third (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Fourth (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wood-for-the-Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_c38e8e52-a528-5e83-8443-adfc128ae70a)
I WONDER how many professional storytellers can look back on their own early work with true objectivity. If there are any, I envy them. Because I know I can’t. I always fall into the egocentric trap of disliking mine far too much; of feeling (as was once said of a friend of mine who was forever working on the great American novel and never finishing the first chapter) that ‘it isn’t good enough for me to have written.’
The only time I’m ever halfway satisfied with any work I’ve done is for a short while after I’ve finished it; a depressingly short and evanescent while. A week later any satisfaction with my labours is beginning to fade. In a month I am more than dubious. After a year, I’m convinced the whole thing smells to high heaven, and I can’t imagine why anyone would ever trouble to read it.
But I realize that these are conditioned reflexes, and auto-conditioned at that, so I made up my mind to ignore them as I approached the task of going over the three books in this collection. But I still started on the job with trepidation; because (to be euphemistic) the tales were written some time ago
and I was terrified that, in spite of their original success, they might prove hopelessly out of date.
But somehow they didn’t; and I was able to confine such editing as I did to matters of cutting, wording and style, of writing qua writing. Surprisingly, the stories themselves, as examples of three completely different types of what is now (unfortunately, I think) generically labelled ‘Mystery Story’, seemed to me to hold up pretty well: The Rasp as a pure, dyed-in-the-wool Whodunit; Murder Gone Mad as a tale of mass-murder, half Whodunit and half (to use a label of my own coining) Howcatchem; and Rynox, called a ‘light-hearted thriller’ at the time of its birth, as one of those razzle-dazzle, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t affairs which many of us case-hardened toilers in the field of the roman policier
like to throw off once in a while.
The Rasp was my third novel. It was also my first detective story,
and long before I’d finished it I was determined it should be my last. Conceived during a decade which was a Whodunit heyday, a time when it seemed that everyone in the storytelling business was trying his hand at the form, it was begun in a burst of youthful egotism, to show the world not only that I could do this too, but that I could do it better!
However, by the time I’d finished it I wasn’t at all sure that I was showing anybody anything. All I knew was that this was hard, hard work; I had discovered that if the writer of romans policiers believes (as I think he has to) that his books should be novels as well as puzzles; that they must, always, be literate and credible as well as scrupulously fair to the reader, the writing of them is pure self-torture!
But—well, The Rasp made quite a splash when it came out, first in England and later in the US.
And I’m still torturing myself for a living, nowadays not only between book covers but also in the dramatic forms of film and television. Although I have, at various and several times, sought relief quite successfully in telling other sorts of story, I seem always to come masochistically back to the sweat and the frustration, the challenge and the agony, of working at what John Dickson Carr has called ‘the greatest game of all’. And it might be worth noting that, when I do, I frequently use as my chief instrument a character (Anthony Gethryn) whom I never imagined, when I tucked him tidily away in matrimony at the end of The Rasp, would ever show his inquisitive and somewhat supercilious nose again …
Now for Murder Gone Mad. This was my third or fourth detective novel, and is a very different cup of tea from the first. An attempt to break away from the then accepted, and terribly confining, limits of the pure Whodunit (blunt-instrumented corpse in copse or library—eight suspects—least likely murderer) it was suggested by the macabre but very real-life exploits of the greatest mass murderer of the century, the monster of Düsseldorf.
I’m not sure of my memory on this point, but I think I started the book with the idea that, as well as being a departure from the straight Whodunit form, it would also be easier to write. If I did think this, I was sadly mistaken. It was, in its own demonic way, every bit as tough to do. Because, after all, when the author (or policeman, if it comes to that) is faced with a clever and careful and motiveless killer, how does he set about uncovering him?
But the book got finished somehow and was very well received,
so I suppose I did all right by the theme, which is, after all, timeless. An interesting point, however, did occur to me while I was going over it; a point which might be worth some elaboration.
It concerns the present-day preoccupation with the psyche and all its widely bandied but only dimly understood -iatrys and -opaths and -ologies. If I were to be writing this book today, I believe I would feel bound to probe at length into the subconscious past of the murderer (in search, so to speak, of the psora and trauma of that dark district) so that I could eventually reveal that the whole trouble was caused by the fact that, at an early age, this unfortunate homicidal maniac (like the character in Cold Comfort Farm) had seen something nasty in the woodshed.
But, in the days when I did write Murder Gone Mad I felt no such compulsion. It was enough, then, that the murderer was mentally unhinged; that the murderer was killing without sane motive; that the murderer was eventually caught …
That was the way we used to do it—and I’m not at all sure we weren’t right …
This leaves Rynox. As I have already intimated, it is a much lighter book than the others; lighter in every way. Writing it was really a sort of busman’s holiday; and, at the time, I almost had fun working on it, particularly since it satirized several persons and institutions in the London of that time—
I have just caught myself wondering whether the satire, unrecognizable here and now, was the only reason for the book doing as well as it did. And this means, I fear, that I’m back with my conditioned reflexes and had better stop, before I start saying, ‘It isn’t good enough for me to have written,’ and thereby open the door temptingly wide for any critic who might feel like adding the words, ‘or anyone else’ …
PHILIP MACDONALD
in Three for Midnight, 1963
EPILOGUE (#ulink_dfa1449a-71f0-50a2-940a-d33e533ac457)
1
GEORGE surveyed the Crickford’s man and the package with pompous disapproval.
‘Bringing a thing like that to the front!’ said George. ‘Oughter know better. If you take your van down Tagger’s Lane at the side there, you’ll find our back entrance.’
George may have been impressive; was, indeed, to a great many people. But the vanman was not impressed. He evidently cared little for George’s bottle-green cloth and gilt braid; less for George’s fiercely-waxed moustache, or George’s chest, medals or no medals.
‘This unprintable lot,’ said the vanman, ‘’as got this ’ere obscene label on it. My job ain’t to stand ’ere chewin’ the unsavoury rag with any o’ you scoutmasters! My job’s to deliver. Are you or are you not medically goin’ to take unclean delivery?’
The normal purple of George’s cheeks turned slowly to a rich black. George could not speak.
‘If you don’t,’ said the vanman, ‘gory well ’urry, off we go with the lot.’ He stooped and looked at the label. ‘And it’s addressed to one of your big noises … F. MacDowell Salisbury, Essquire. President: Naval, Military and Cosmo … Cosmos … whatever the ’ell it is, Assurance. That’s you, ain’t it?’
He held out a grimy thin-leaved book, together with a quarter-inch stub of unpointed pencil. A dark thumb pointed to the foot of the open page.
‘You signs,’ said the vanman, ‘along dotted line ’ere, if you can write. Otherwise you’d better put your mark and I’ll write somethink against it for yer. ’Urry up now!’
It will always be matter for conjecture as to what George would have done at this stage had not at this moment the car of F. MacDowell Salisbury drawn up immediately behind the Crickford’s van. This left George only one course. Quickly he signed. Quickly he laid hold of the unwieldy package, which consisted of two large and heavy sacks tied together at the tops. With considerable exertion of his great strength he managed to drag them up the two remaining steps and in through the swing doors of glittering glass and mahogany. Just as, puffing, he had rested them against a corner of the panelled wall, the President came up the steps. George got to the door just in time; held it open; touched his cap; strove to keep his laboured breathing silent.
‘’Morning, George!’ said the President.
George touched his cap again. He could not speak yet. The President was in good humour. Instead of striding straightway down the marble-floored corridor to the lift, he halted, his head on one side. He surveyed George.
‘George,’ he said, ‘you look hot.’
‘I am—fuf—sir!’
The President’s eyes strayed to the unwieldy sacks. ‘Weightlifting, George?’
‘Yessir. Just as you come, sir, I was telling the Crickford’s man that he ought to ’ve took the lot round to the Lane entrance, but I saw it’s for you, sir, so I brought it in this side.’
‘For me?’ The President’s tone and his eyebrows went up.
‘Yessir, according to the label.’
‘Extraordinary thing!’ The President walked over to the corner, bent down over the sacks and lifted the label. ‘Extraordinary thing!’ he said again. He put a podgy white hand to the joined sacks and tried their weight. ‘Feels heavy,’ he said.
‘Heavy, sir,’ said George, ‘it is!’
Again the President stooped to the label. Yes, it bore his name; also, in red ink and capital letters—staring capitals—the words:
‘EXTREMELY PRIVATE AND
CONFIDENTIAL
PERSONAL FOR MR SALISBURY ONLY.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ said the President. ‘Better get a couple of men and have it brought up to my office.’
2
The President, with fat white forefinger, pressed the third of the bell pushes upon his desk.
‘Miss Winter,’ he said, to the bell’s genie, ‘have they brought up those sacks?’
‘The sacks have just come, Mr Salisbury.’
‘Right! Just give the fellows a bob each out of the Petty Cash and then I’ll come out. Most extraordinary-looking thing, isn’t it, Miss Winter?’
‘Yes, Mr Salisbury.’
Miss Winter, very severe, very neat, most efficient, went back to the outer office. The President, walking slowly after her, saw her distribution of largesse; saw the porters touching clean hats with dirty forefingers; saw the door close behind them; went out into Miss Winter’s room.
Very untidily heaped in its very tidy centre were the sacks. Miss Winter was bending down, reading the label.
‘Got a knife?’ said the President.
Miss Winter had a knife. Miss Winter always had everything.
‘Just see,’ said the President, ‘whether you can cut the string.’
Miss Winter could cut the string and did. The sacks fell apart. The President stirred one with his toe. The contents were hard, yet yielding.
‘I can’t make it out!’ said the President.
‘Shall I open a sack?’ said Miss Winter. A very practical woman.
‘Yes, yes. Let’s have a look.’
Once more Miss Winter stooped; once more the penknife came into play as it ripped the stout thread which kept the mouth of the sack closed. Miss Winter inserted a hand …
‘Good God!’ said the President.
He took two short steps and stood at Miss Winter’s shoulder. Upright again, she was holding between her hands a thick elastic-bound wad of one-pound Bank of England notes.
‘Good God!’ said the President again.
He bent himself over the mouth of the open sack and thrust in his own arm. His hand came away with yet another package …
He let the sack lie flat upon the floor, bent over it, caught it a little way down from its top and shook. Other packets fell from it upon the floor …
He looked into the sack …
There could be no doubt! The sack—it looked like a hundredweight-and-a-half corn sack—was filled, crammed, with bundles of one-pound Bank of England notes. They were not new, these notes. The bundles did not bear that solid, block-like appearance of unused paper money, but, although neat, were creased, and numbered—as Miss Winter at once was to find—in anything but series.
‘Good God!’ said the President. Himself, with Miss Winter’s knife, he cut the threads which bound the mouth of the other sack. And this second sack was as its brother. If, indeed, there was any difference, it was that this second sack held still more bundles than the first. The President stood in the middle of the floor. Round his feet there lay, grotesque and untidy, little disordered heaps of money.
The President looked at Miss Winter. Miss Winter looked at the President.
‘I suppose,’ said the President, ‘that I am at the office, Miss Winter? I’m not by any chance at home, in bed and fast asleep?’
Miss Winter did not smile. ‘You certainly are at the office, Mr Salisbury.’
‘And would you mind telling me, Miss Winter, what these things are that I’m treading on?’
‘Certainly, Mr Salisbury. Bundles of one-pound notes, not very clean, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m going back to my room to sit down,’ said the President. ‘If you wouldn’t mind coming in again in a few minutes, Miss Winter, and telling me all over again what there is in those sacks, I should be very much obliged. Also you might empty the sacks and find out if there is anything else in them except … except … well, except bundles of one-pound notes!’
‘Very well, Mr Salisbury. And would it not be as well, perhaps, if I also ring up Crickford’s and see whether I can ascertain who is the sender of this, er … of this, er …’ Even Miss Winter for once was at a loss for words.
‘Do! Do!’ said the President. ‘And don’t forget: come in and tell me all about it all over again!’
‘Very well, Mr Salisbury.’
3
‘If,’ said F. MacDowell Salisbury to his friend Thurston Mitchell, who was Vice-President of the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan Assurance Corporation, ‘you can beat that, I shall be much surprised.’
Mr Mitchell could not beat it. He said so. ‘If I hadn’t,’ said Mr Mitchell, ‘seen the damn’ stuff with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe you now, Salisbury … What did Crickford’s say when Winter got on to them?’
‘Crickford’s,’ said Mr Salisbury, ‘agreed to make inquiries of their branches. They did. This package was delivered yesterday evening at their Balham Receiving Office. The customer, who did not give his name, paid the proper rate for delivery, asked when that delivery would be made, and …’ Mr Salisbury shrugged his plump shoulders despairingly, ‘… just went.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘According to what Crickford’s managing director told me on the phone, the clerk said that the sender was a “tall, foreign-looking gentleman.” Little beard, broken English, rather exaggerated clothes—that sort of thing. Came in a car.’
‘Car, did he?’ said Mr Mitchell. ‘Now did they …’
Mr Salisbury shook his head sadly. ‘Mitchell, they did not. They couldn’t tell me whether that car was blue or green, open or closed, English or American. They couldn’t tell anything. After all, poor devils, why should they?’
Mr Thurston Mitchell paced the Presidential room with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, and a frown drawing his eyebrows together into a rigid bar across his high-bridged nose. He said:
‘And there wasn’t anything, Salisbury? Nothing in those sacks except money?’
‘Nothing,’ said the President. ‘Nothing, Mitchell, of any description—except one grain of corn which I have here upon my desk. I thought I’d better keep it as a souvenir.’
‘Well, I’m damned!’ said the Vice-President.
‘Quite,’ said the President, ‘probably … Yes, Miss Winter, what is it?’
Miss Winter came to the Presidential desk. There was about her a certain excitement, intensely restrained, but discernible nevertheless. She bore, rather in the manner of an inexperienced but imaginative recruit carrying a bomb, a small, oblong brown-paper parcel. She placed it upon the Presidential table. She said:
‘This has just come, Mr Salisbury. By registered post. I thought I’d better let you have it at once because … well, because I fancy that the printing on it is the same as the printing on the sack label.’
The President stared. The Vice-President came to his shoulder and did the same thing.
‘By Jove!’ said the President. ‘It is! Here, Mitchell, you open it. You haven’t had a thrill today.’
The Vice-President, having borrowed Miss Winter’s penknife, cut the parcel string, unwrapped three separate coverings of brown paper and found at last a stout, small, deal box. It had a sliding lid like a child’s pencil-box. The Vice-President slid away the lid. He looked, and put the box down before the President. He said:
‘Look here, Salisbury, if any more of this goes on, I shall go and see a doctor. Look at that!’
Mr Salisbury looked at that. What he saw was a sheet of white paper, and in the centre of the sheet of white paper a new halfpenny …
‘Don’t,’ said the Vice-President, ‘look like that, Salisbury. Damn it, you don’t want any more money!’
The President removed the halfpenny and the sheet of paper. ‘I’ve got it!’ he said, ‘whether I want it or not!’
Underneath the sheet of paper were, in three lines of little round stacks, forty-six new pennies. They were counted, with a composure really terrific, by Miss Winter. And underneath them was another piece of plain white paper. But this piece of plain white paper bore in its centre—neatly printed with a thick pen and in thick black ink:
‘THIS IS THE BALANCE. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
Total: £287,499 3s. 10½d …
(Two hundred and eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and ninety-nine pounds, three shillings and tenpence halfpenny.)
N.B.—Not for Personal Use. For the coffers of the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan Assurance Corporation.’
The President looked at the Vice-President. Both looked at Miss Winter.
‘Miss Winter,’ said the President, ‘would you be so very kind as to leave the room? I’m sure that in one moment Mr Mitchell will say something which it would be better for you not to hear.’
END OF EPILOGUE
REEL ONE (#ulink_1c37613b-b78c-5c20-8107-903a0e2cbf29)
SEQUENCE THE FIRST (#ulink_7926a514-75b9-585c-8eaf-27a39156ed8a)
Thursday, 28th March, 193— 9 a.m. to 12 noon
ENTWHISTLE, the Fordfield postman, pushed his bicycle up the steep hill into Little Ockleton. The sack upon his back was heavy and grew heavier. The March sun, even at half-past eight this morning, seemed to carry the heat of July. Entwhistle stopped, puffed and mopped his head. He thought, as he thought every morning, that something ought to be done by the authorities about this hill. He pushed on again and at last was able to mount.
It was so rarely that he had a letter for Pond Cottage that he was nearly a hundred yards past it when he remembered that not only did he have a letter for Pond Cottage but that he had an unstamped letter for Pond Cottage. That meant collecting no less than threepence from Pond Cottage’s occupier. The extra hundred yards which he had given himself was alleviated by the thought that at last—if indeed Mr Marsh were at home—he would see Mr Marsh and talk to Mr Marsh. He had heard so many stories about Mr Marsh and never had occasion to add one of his own to the many, that the prospect was almost pleasing. He dismounted, rested his bicycle against the little green paling and went through the gate and up the untidy, overgrown, flagged path.
Mr Marsh, it seemed, was at home. In any event, the leaded windows of the room upstairs stood wide.
Entwhistle knocked with his knuckles upon the door … No reply. He fumbled in his satchel until he found the offending, stampless letter … He knocked again. Again no answer came. Perhaps after all he was not going to see and talk with the exciting Mr Marsh. Still, one more knock couldn’t do any harm! He gave it and this time an answer did come—from above his head. An answer in a deep guttural voice which seemed to have a curious and foreign and throaty trouble with its r’s.
‘Put the dratted letters down!’ said the voice. ‘Leave ’em on the step. I’ll fetch ’em.’
Entwhistle bent back, tilting his head until from under the peak of his hat he could see peering down at him from that open window the dark-spectacled, dark-complexioned and somewhat uncomfortable face of Mr Marsh. Mr Marsh’s grey moustache and little pointed grey beard seemed, as Entwhistle had so often heard they did, to bristle with fury.
He coughed, clearing his throat. ‘Carn’ do that, sir,’ he said. ‘Letter ’ere without a stamp. I’ll ’ave to trouble you for threepence, sir.’
‘You’ll have to trouble me for … What the hell are you talking about? Put the damn letters down, I say, and get your ugly face out of here. Standing there! You look like a … Put the letters down and be off.’
Very savage, the voice was.
Entwhistle began to experience a doubt as to whether it would be quite as amusing to see and talk to Mr Marsh as he had supposed. But he stuck to his guns.
‘Carn’ do that, sir. Letter ’ere unstamped. ’Ave to trouble you for threepence, sir.’
‘Dios!’ said the voice at the window, or some sound like that. The window shut with a slam. Involuntarily Entwhistle took a backward step. He half-expected, so violent had been the sound, to have a pane of glass upon his hat. He stood back a little from the doorstep. He could hear quite distinctly steps coming down the creaking staircase and then the door was flung open. In the doorway stood a tall, bulky figure wrapped in a shabby brown dressing gown. Its feet were in shabbier slippers of red leather. The hair was black, streaked with grey. The moustache and little beard were almost white. The tinted glasses staring straight into Entwhistle’s Nordic and bewildered eyes frightened Entwhistle. They gave to Entwhistle, though he could not have expressed this, a curious uneasy feeling that perhaps there were no eyes behind them.
‘Where’s this damn letter? Come on, man, come on! Don’t keep me standing about here all day. It’s cold!’ The bulk of Mr Marsh shivered inside his dressing-gown. He thrust out an imperious hand.
Into this hand, Entwhistle put the letter. It was twitched from his fingers.
‘I’ll ’ave to trouble you for threepence, I’m afraid, sir.’
Mr Marsh made a noise in his throat; a savage animal noise; so fierce a noise that Entwhistle involuntarily backed two steps. But he stayed there. He stuck to his guns. He was, as he was overfond of saying, a man who knoo his dooty.
Mr Marsh was staring down at the envelope in his hands. A frown just showed above the tinted spectacles; white teeth below them glared out in a wild snarl. Mr Marsh was saying:
‘Damn greaser!’ and then a string of violent-sounding and most unpleasing words. He put his thumb, as Entwhistle watched, under the flap of the envelope and with a savage jerk freed its contents; a single sheet of typewritten paper. Mr Marsh read.
‘F. X. Benedik,’ growled Mr Marsh. And then another word. This time an English word which Entwhistle omitted when telling of the adventure to Mrs Entwhistle.
‘I’ll ’ave,’ began Entwhistle bravely, ‘to trouble you for …’ There was a flurry within the door. It slammed. The violence of the slamming detached a large flake of rotting timber which fell at Entwhistle’s feet.
Entwhistle pushed the postman’s hat forward on to the bridge of his snub nose. The stumpy fingers of his right hand scratched his back hair. What, he wondered, was he to do now? It did not, it must be noted, occur to him to knock at the door again. Mr Marsh might be good gossip, but Mr Marsh was most obviously not the sort of man for a peace-loving postman to annoy. But there was the excess fee and when he got to Fordfield he would have to account for that. Well, threepence isn’t much, but threepence is a half of Mild …
He was still debating within his slow mind when something—some hard, small, ringing thing—hit the peak of his cap with sharp violence. He started. The cap, dislodged by his jerk, fell off; rolled to the path. Bewildered, he looked down at it; stooped ponderously to pick it up. There beside it, glinting against a mossy flag, was a florin. Still squatting, Entwhistle looked up. The upstairs window was open again. From it there glared out Mr Marsh’s face. ‘It was,’ said Entwhistle to Mrs Entwhistle that evening, ‘like the face of a feen in ’uman shape. And,’ said Entwhistle, ‘he was laughin’. To ’ear that laugh would make any man’s blood run cold, and I don’t care ’oo ’e was. Laughin’ he was; laughin’ fit to burst hisself. What did I do? Well, I picks up the two-bob and me hat and I says as dignified like as I can: “You’ll be requirin’ your change, sir.” Just like that I said it, just to show him I wasn’t ’avin’ no nonsense. What does ’e say? When he’s finished laughin’ a few minutes later, he says; “You can keep the something change and swallow it!” Funny sort of voice he’s got—a violent sort of voice. That’s what he says; “You can keep the something change and you can something well swallow it!” What did I say? Well, I says, still calm and collected like: “D’you know, sir, throwin’ money like that, you might ’ave ’it me in the face,” and then ’e says: “Damn bad luck I didn’t!” just like that: “Damn bad luck I didn’t! You something off now or I’ll chuck something a bit heavier.”.’
Thus the indignant Entwhistle to his wife. Thus, later that same evening, the histrionic Entwhistle in the bar of The Coach and Horses. Thus the important Entwhistle in the Fordfield police station three days later.
2
James Wilberforce Burgess Junior was whipping his top upon the cement path outside Ockleton station booking office.
James Wilberforce Burgess Senior, Ockleton’s stationmaster, porter and level-crossing operator, watched for a moment with fatherly pride and then turned away to enter the hutch which was his booking office. He came out of the hutch a moment later a good deal faster than he had gone in. A sudden howl from James Wilberforce Junior had torn wailing way through the sunny morning.
James Wilberforce Junior was huddled against the wall with one hand at his ear and the other rubbing at his eyes. His top and his whip lay at his feet. Just within the doorless entrance was ‘that there Mr Marsh.’
The Ockleton Burgesses have not, for many generations, been renowned for physical courage. Some fathers—however big, however sinister-seeming, the assaulter of their innocent child—would have hit first and spoken afterwards. Burgess did not hit at all. He said, instead, a great deal. That there Mr Marsh stood in the shadow, the odd, pointed black hat tilted forward upon his head. The dark glasses made pits in his face instead of eyes; his white teeth gleamed when he smiled his savage, humourless and twisted smile. He seemed to Burgess, no less than previously to Entwhistle, ‘a feen in ’uman shape.’ He cut presently across the whiningly indignant outburst of outraged fatherhood. He said:
‘Cut it out! Cut it right out! I want a ticket for London.’ His deep, somehow foreign voice boomed round the tiny brick box.
‘Goin’ about,’ said James Wilberforce Burgess Senior, ‘strikin’ defenceless children! Don’t you know it’s dangerous to ’it a child on the yeerole?’
Mr Marsh took a step forward. Mr Burgess took three steps backwards. Mr Marsh pointed to the door of the ticket hutch. Mr Marsh said, and Mr Burgess swore afterwards that his teeth did not part when he said it:
‘Into the kennel you go, little puppy. And give me a ticket for London.’
Here Mr Marsh, Burgess reported, put his hand into his pocket and pulled out half a crown which, with a half-turn of his body, he threw to the still snivelling James Wilberforce Junior.
‘There,’ he said, ‘that’ll buy him a new ear! Blasted kid!’
‘All very well, sir,’ said Burgess, now speaking through the pigeon-hole, ‘walking about, striking defenceless children …’
Into the pigeon-hole Mr Marsh thrust his dark face.
‘Give me,’ said Mr Burgess afterwards, ‘a fair turn, sort of as if the devil was looking at you through a ’ole.’
Mr Marsh received his ticket. Mr Marsh was presently borne away by the 9.10 Slow Up from Ockleton. He had bought a day-return ticket.
Upon the Ockleton platform that night, there waited for Mr Marsh’s return not only James Wilberforce Burgess Senior but James Wilberforce Burgess Senior’s sister’s husband, one Arthur Widgery. This was a big and beery person whose only joy in life, after beer, was performing the series of actions which he invariably described as ‘drawin’ off of ’im and pastin’ ’im one alongside the jaw!’
But Mr Marsh did not take advantage of the return half of his ticket.
3
Mr Basil Musgrove, who had charge of the booking office of the Royal Theatre, was this morning presenting an even more than usually bored exterior to the world. Last night Mr Musgrove had been out with a set of persons to whom he referred as the boys. Consequently Mr Musgrove, underneath his patent leather hair, had a head which was red hot and bumping.
Mr Musgrove said into the telephone: ‘No, meddam. We do not book any seats at all under three shillings!’
Mr Musgrove said, to a purply-powdered face peering in through his pigeon-hole: ‘No, meddam, we have no stalls whatsoever for this evening’s performance. I am sorry.’
Mr Musgrove, when the face had vanished, put his head upon his hand and wished that the boys would not, quite so consistently, be boys. Mr Musgrove’s heavy lids dropped over his eyes. Mr Musgrove slept.
Mr Musgrove was awakened most rudely. Something cold and sharp and painful kept rapping against the end of his nose. Mr Musgrove put up feeble hands to brush this annoyance away, but, instead of being brushed away, its rappings grew more frequent and really so discomfortable that Mr Musgrove’s eyes were forced to open. With the opening of his eyes, the world came back with a rush. Mr Musgrove had been sleeping at his job! He saw now what it was that had awakened him. It was the ferrule of an ebony walking-stick. He looked down this stick. The ferrule was now hovering barely half an inch from the end of his nose. Peering round the stick, he saw a strange unusual sight; a pair of dark goggling, blank eyes set in a face which, he told some of those boys the next night, was just like Old Nick looking at you …
Mr Musgrove drew back with a start. His chair tilted underneath him and he narrowly escaped a fall.
The walking-stick was withdrawn. The window now was filled with this devil’s head under the strange, pointed black hat; there were dark glasses; a little grey block of beard; a white, twisted, inimical smile.
‘Er …’ said Mr Musgrove, ‘er … er … I beg … er …’
The stranger said a word. And then: ‘Any stalls tomorrow night?’
‘No. No,’ said Mr Musgrove, ‘no, no, no!’
‘I heard,’ said the stranger, ‘what you said the first time.’
Mr Musgrove strove to collect his scattered wits. ‘No, sir. No. We are entirely full for both the matinee and the evening performance today.’
The face seemed to come nearer. It was almost through the pigeon-hole. Mr Musgrove recoiled; once more felt his chair rock beneath him.
‘I didn’t,’ said the harsh voice, which seemed to find trouble with English r’s, though none with English idiom, ‘I didn’t ask for today’s performance. I asked about tomorrow!’
‘Oh! Er … I’m sorry!’ Mr Musgrove babbled. ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I didn’t catch what—’
‘Cut it out! Have you or have you not three stalls for tomorrow night’s performance?’
‘Tomorrow, sir, tomorrow?’ said Mr Musgrove. ‘Three stalls, sir, three stalls. Would you like them in the middle, sir, at the back, or in the front at the side … I have a nice trio in H—’
‘I don’t care,’ said the voice, ‘in the least where the hell the damn seats are! All I want is three stalls. Give ’em to me and tell me how much they are so that I can get away from your face. It’s not a pleasant face, I should say, at the best of times. This morning it’s an indecency.’
Mr Musgrove flushed to the top of his maculate forehead. The tips of his ears became a dark purple colour. As he said to the boys that evening: ‘D’you know, you chaps, if it had been any other sort of man, well, I’d have been out of that office and set about him in half a second. You know me! But as it was, well, believe me or believe me not, I just couldn’t move. I was rooted! All I could do was to give him his three seats and take his money. You see some odd customers in my job, but I’ve never seen such an odd one as that before and I don’t want to see another one like it. Horrible old bloke! Sort of nasty, sinister way to him, and what with that beard and those dark glasses and that limp—he sort of seemed to drag his left leg after him and yet go pretty fast—he was a horrible sort of chap! I’m going to look out for him tomorrow night and see what sort of company he’s got … Thanks, Ted; mine’s a port and lemon. Cheerioski!’
COMMENT THE FIRST
NOT a pleasant person, Mr Marsh. Little Ockleton—where he has had a weekending cottage for the past six months—cannot abide him. Nor can any one, it seems, with whom he comes into contact. And how he dislikes having to pay excess postage—or was that outburst more by reason of his feelings towards the sender of that particular letter?
SEQUENCE THE SECOND (#ulink_6a247082-2213-5665-bc29-10faef9424a4)
Thursday, March 28th, 193— 12.30 p.m. to 3.30 p.m.
THE offices of RYNOX (Unlimited) are in New Bond Street. A piece of unnecessary information this, since all the world knows it, but it serves to get this Sequence started.
Up the white marble steps of Rynox House—RYNOX themselves use only one floor in the tall, narrow, rather beautiful building—there walked, at 12.30 in the early afternoon of this Thursday, Francis Xavier Benedik—‘F. X.’ to his many friends and few but virulent enemies.
The door-keeper, a thin, embittered person with the name of Butterflute, smiled. The effort seemed—as F. X. had once indeed remarked—to sprain the poor man’s face. But smile he did. Everybody smiled at F. X.—except those few but very bitter enemies. F. X. paused upon the top step.
‘’Morning, Sam,’ he said.
‘Good-morning, sir,’ said Butterflute.
‘How’s the sciatica?’
‘Something chronic, sir.’
‘That’s a bad job. How’s the family?’
‘Not too well, sir,’ said Butterflute. ‘Wife’s confined again; I dunno ’ow she does it! Me boy got three weeks yesterday, for D. and D. in charge of a motor car, and me daughter—well, sir—’
F. X. was grave and sympathetic, also determined. ‘Damned hard luck, Butterflute. Damned hard! Anything you want, just let me know, will you?’
Butterflute touched his cap. ‘Yes, sir. I will that, sir. Thank you, sir.’
F. X. went on and through the main doors and so along the corridor to the lift; a tall, burly but trim, free-striding figure which might have been from the back that of an athletic man of thirty. It was only when you saw his face that you realised that F. X. was a hard-living, hard-working, hard case of fifty-five. You realised that, and you were quite wrong. Wrong about the age, anyhow, for this day was the sixty-seventh birthday of Francis Xavier Benedik. But whatever your guess, whoever you were—unless indeed you were one of those few but very violent enemies—you loved F.X. on sight. He was so very much the man that all the other men who looked at him would have liked to have been. He had obviously so much behind him of all those things of which, to be a man, a man must have had experience.
‘’Morning, sir!’ said Fred. Fred was the liftboy. In direct contrast to Butterflute Fred did not smile. You see, Fred otherwise always smiled, but Fred felt, as every one, that one must do something different for F.X. So instead of smiling, Fred looked grave and important.
‘’Morning, Frederick! Lovely day!’
‘It is that, Mr Benedik, sir. Beautiful day.’
The lift purred softly and swiftly upwards. Frantic would-be passengers on the first, second and third floors were passed with a cool contempt. Had not Fred got RYNOX in his lift!
The lift stopped. For other passengers Fred was wont to jerk the lift, being the possessor of rather a misguided sense of humour, but for F. X. Fred stopped the lift as a lift should be stopped; so smoothly, so gently, so rightly that for an appreciable instant the passenger was not aware of the stopping.
At the gates F. X. paused. He said over his shoulder:
‘You look out for that girl, Frederick.’
From between Fred’s stiffly upstanding cherry-coloured collar and Fred’s black-peaked cherry-coloured cap, Fred’s face shone like a four o’clock winter sun.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’ said Fred. ‘Which girl was you meanin’, sir?’
‘You can’t tell me, Fred! That little dark one; works on the first floor. Between you and me, you might tell her that their Enquiries door wants a coat of paint, will you? … She’s all right, Fred, but you want to look out for that sort with black eyes and gold hair.’
The winter sun took on an even deeper shade.
‘Oh, Fred!’ said F.X.
The lift shot downwards at the maximum of its speed.
Past the big main doors upon this top floor—the big doors with their cunningly blazoned sign:
RYNOX
S. H. RICKFORTH
ANTHONY X. BENEDIK
F. X. BENEDIK
went F. X., with his long, free stride which seemed somehow out of place in a city. Past these and past the next small door bearing the sign:
RYNOX
ENQUIRIES HERE
and so to the modest mahogany door—the door which most people passing along this corridor thought was that of a lavatory. The handle of this door turned in F. X.’s fingers. He went in, shutting the door behind him.
‘’Morning, Miss Pagan. ’Morning, Harris.’ Thus F. X., hanging up his light grey, somehow dashing-looking hat.
‘Good-morning, Mr Benedik,’ said Miss Pagan, her sad, blond beauty illumined by one of her rare smiles.
‘’Morning, sir,’ said Harris.
‘Mr Rickforth in, Miss Pagan?’
‘Yes, Mr Benedik. I think he’s in your room. He said he wanted to see you particularly before you started work.’
‘Mr Anthony here?’
‘Not yet, Mr Benedik. Mr Anthony wired from Liverpool that he was coming in on the twelve-fifty; would you wait lunch for him?’
F. X. crossed the room, stood with his fingers upon the baize door which separated this outer office of his from the corridor leading to the partners’ rooms.
‘Anything else, Miss Pagan?’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to come in with the letters just yet. Wait until I’ve seen Mr Rickforth.’
‘Very well, Mr Benedik.’ Another of Miss Pagan’s rare and sadly beautiful smiles. ‘No, nothing else except Mr Marsh.’
A frown marred the pleasantness of the senior partner’s tanned face. ‘Marsh,’ he said. His voice grated on the ear. ‘Has he been bothering you?’
Miss Pagan shrugged elegant shoulders. ‘Well, not bothering, Mr Benedik, but he’s rung up twice this morning; the second time only five minutes before you got here. He seems to want you very urgently.’
‘Ever know him,’ growled F. X., ‘when he didn’t want to see me very urgently?’
Miss Pagan shook her blond head. ‘I’ve never seen Mr Marsh, Mr Benedik. I must say, though, on the telephone he always does sound cross.’
‘Crosser than his letters?’ said F. X.
‘That,’ said Miss Pagan, ‘would be impossible … Anyhow, he said would you please telephone him as soon as you got here.’
F. X. raised his eyebrows. ‘Number?’ he said.
‘I asked him for the number, Mr Benedik, and he wouldn’t give it.’ Miss Pagan’s eyebrows suggested that Mr Benedik should know by this time what Mr Marsh was like. ‘All he’d say was “the Kensington number”.’
F. X. laughed, a snorting contemptuous laugh. ‘That’s like the fool!’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll get on to him. I’ll see Mr Rickforth now. I’ll ring when I want you, Miss Pagan.’
2
‘But good gracious me!’ said Rickforth. ‘My dear Benedik, I daresay that I have not your push, your ability to handle big things courageously, but I do know, and I think that you know too, that I’m a man with a certain amount of business knowledge, and what I say, Benedik—’
F. X., whose gravity throughout this interview had amounted to more than sadness, suddenly grinned. The whole man, with that flash of white teeth, shed twenty hard-fought years. He said:
‘Sam, my boy, when you clasp your hands over that pot-belly of yours and start calling me Benedik, I can’t help it, but I want to kick your bottom. You know, Sam, the trouble with you is that you’ve got the ability of a Hatry, the tastes of a sexless Nero, and the conscience of an Anabaptist minister. You’re a mess, Sam, an awful mess, but you’re not a bad fellow as long as you don’t hold your belly and call me Benedik, and’—momentarily the smile faded—‘and as long as you don’t try to teach F. X. Benedik his job. Good Lord, man, don’t you think that I know what state the business is in? You seem to forget, as a matter of fact, that I made the damn business. I know how deep we are in it, but I know, too, how high we’re going to soar out of it after this waiting business is over, so for God’s sake stop moaning. If you want to get out, get out! Go for a holiday or something. Go and hold your belly in a cinema. Don’t come here and try to make that fat face of yours all long. I can’t stand it and I won’t!’
Samuel Harvey Rickforth laughed; but it was a laugh that had in it an undercurrent of fear.
‘My dear F. X.,’ he said, ‘I’m not being what I suppose you’d call “a wet sock.” I’m merely trying to show you the sensible point of view. RYNOX gave up practically all their other interests for the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company. You did it. You backed your own judgment and we, very naturally, followed you. But even at the time—at the beginning, I mean—I freely confess I got nervous. I thought to myself, can he pull it off? … What’s the matter? …’
F. X. had sunk into an armchair of deep and yielding leather. His long legs were thrust stiffly out before him. A large white silk handkerchief covered his face. His hands were folded over his chest in the manner of a sleeping Crusader. From under the handkerchief his voice came hollow:
‘Nothing’s the matter. Go on, Samuel, go on!’
Again Rickforth laughed. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but I will finish. It’s my opinion, F. X., and I’m not joking, that you’ve done what you’d call “bitten off more than you can chew.” Look at us, overdrawn here, overdrawn there; creditors beginning to get uneasy, and what are we waiting for? Orders that may come but equally may not, and … and …’ His fat, well-to-do voice grew suddenly sharp. ‘And, F. X., RYNOX is unlimited! You would have it, and it is, and whereas I might not say all this if we were a limited company, as a partner in an unlimited company I must say all this.’
The handkerchief flew a foot into the air as F. X. let out his pent breath. Suddenly he hoisted his bulky length from the chair, took two steps, and clapped a lean brown hand—which to Samuel Harvey Rickforth felt like the end of a steel crane—upon Samuel Harvey Rickforth’s shoulder.
‘My dear Sam!’ said F. X., ‘if you don’t know me by this time well enough to know that I wouldn’t let a blue-nose go into your house and sell your glass while you’re drinking out of it, you’re an old fathead! Now, for God’s sake, go out, buy yourself a couple of bottles of Pol Roget ’19 and charge ’em down to the travellers’ expenses. And when you come back, for God’s sake come back cheerful. I’ve got enough troubles without seeing those podgy hands of yours clasping that obscenity you call a stomach. What you wear those buff waistcoats for, I can’t make out! They only accentuate it. What you want, Sam, is a bit more of your daughter’s spirit. If I were to tell Peter what you’ve been saying this morning—’
‘I say, F. X., you wouldn’t do that, would you?’ Mr Rickforth was alarmed.
F. X. put back his head and laughed. ‘By God, Sam! I believe I’ve got you!’ he said. ‘I haven’t tried it before, but I’ll try it now. If I have any more of this S.O.S. stuff, I’ll tell Tony and then you’ll get it hot all round. Now, buzz off, you old blight!’
Rickforth went, but the door was only just closed behind him when it opened again. It admitted his round pink-and-white face, somehow frightened-looking under the ivory white sheen of his baldness.
‘I say, F. X.’ said the face, ‘you won’t really tell Peter, will you? I mean, damn it, business is business …’
The 193—edition of the Directory of Directors smote the door with all its half-hundredweight of matter one-tenth of a second after Samuel Harvey Rickforth had closed it.
F. X. reached out for the telephone; picked it up; lay back in the chair with the receiver at his ear and the body of the instrument cuddled closely against his chest. He always spoke. like many men who have lived at least half their lives, in very different places from city offices, very loudly over the telephone. ‘Kensington,’ he shouted, ‘four-double-nine-nine-oh … Is that Kensington four-double-nine-nine-oh? …’ His voice was thunderous. ‘Can I speak to Mr Marsh? … Eh? … What’s that? … Mr Marsh, I said. M for Marjorie, A for Ambrose Applejohn, R for rotten, S for sausage, H for How-d’ye-do … Marsh … Oh, right. I’ll hold on.’
He reached out a long arm, the receiver still at its end, and pressed that one of the buttons on his desk which would bring Miss Pagan. When Miss Pagan came he was talking again. He was saying:
‘Well, certainly, we’ve got to get this matter settled. I can’t make you see reason by writing, so I suppose we’d better meet. Now, I’m very busy. I suggest we should meet some evening, as soon as you like. Not tonight. I’ve got a dinner party. Tomorrow night, say. Just a moment, I’ll ask my secretary … All right, keep your shirt in! Keep your shirt in! Keep letting it hang out like that and you’ll be arrested for exhibitionism.’
He looked up from the telephone, clasping the mouthpiece firmly to his waistcoat.
‘Miss Pagan,’ he said, ‘got my book?’
‘Yes, Mr Benedik.’ Miss Pagan’s tone was faintly injured. Of course she had his book.
‘Am I doing anything tomorrow night?’
‘There’s nothing in this book, Mr Benedik.’
‘Well, I don’t know of anything,’ said Benedik; then into the telephone: ‘Marsh, still there? … Look here, Marsh, I’m free tomorrow night. Come along to my house and see me, will you? And I want to assure you that we’re going to settle. You worry the life out of me and you worry the life out of my people and your voice is beastly over the telephone anyhow! Understand what I’m talking about? I’m going to settle! Are you free tomorrow night? … Right, ten o’clock suit you? … Right. Well, come to my place ten o’clock … What’s that? … You great sap, you know damn well where I live. Oh, well, perhaps you’re right, perhaps I never told you; thought you might come round worrying the servants or something. 4 William Pitt Street, West one … No, Mayfair … Yes, come through the market if you’re coming from the Piccadilly side. Four. That’s right … Right, ten o’clock tomorrow night. Good-bye!’
He replaced the receiver with a savage click; set the telephone down upon his desk with a bang. ‘And,’ he said, looking at it, ‘God blast you!’ He looked up at Miss Pagan. ‘Shove that down, will you? Ten p.m., house—for tomorrow this is, you understand—ten p.m., house, Marsh. And put it in big red capital letters. And I’d like to tell you this, Miss Pagan, that if ever that’—he drew a deep breath—‘if ever that person—I can’t say more in front of a gently nurtured English girl—if ever he puts his wart-hog’s nose in this office after tomorrow night, you have my instructions to crown him with the heaviest thing you can lay your hands on. And if he rings up, ring off … Mr Anthony back yet?’
‘Not yet, Mr Benedik. Shall I ask him to come and see you as soon as he gets in?’
‘Please,’ said F. X. ‘And now you might bring me that last lot of composers’ reports from Lisbon, and tell Mr Woolrich to come and see me.’
The Lisbon reports had been brought and read and digested before Woolrich came. Twice F. X., now alone, had looked at his watch before there came a soft tapping upon the door and round its edge Woolrich’s sleek fair head.
F. X. looked up. He said:
‘Enter Secretary and Treasurer with shamefaced look. And you’d better hurry, too.’
Woolrich came in.
‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘Afraid I missed my train this morning. I’d been down to … down to … to the country.’
F. X. looked at him. F. X., after one frosty instant, smiled. ‘You’re always,’ he said, ‘going down to the country. You know, Woolrich, you ought to be careful of that country. I’m not sure it’s doing you much good … in fact, if you weren’t such a damned good man I should have a great deal more to say about the country … Sit down!’
Woolrich moved over to the big chair at the far side of the desk. He was a tall and broad-shouldered and exquisitely-dressed person of an age difficult to determine. He might have been anything between twenty-five and forty. Actually he was thirty-six. His tan was as deep almost as F. X.’s own, and his ash-blond hair was bleached by the sun and open air … but under the startlingly blue eyes were dark and lately almost permanent half-moons.
‘Look here, Woolrich!’ F. X. leaned forward. ‘I’ve just been looking over this last lot of reports from Lisbon. I expect you’ve read ’em.’
Woolrich nodded. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I could say them over by heart.’
‘You mean,’ said F. X., ‘you know you could … Look here, there’s only one thing that worries me, and that’s Montana. You know and I know that Montana’s not square—unless it pays him to be—and is it paying him?’
Woolrich nodded. He said, with emphasis:
‘It is. If he went over to real rubber he’d never get the money. There aren’t any flies on Montana. You know that, sir, and he must realise that if he started any double-crossing he might do well for a bit but in the long run he’d get ditched. I’ve thought it all out.’
‘That,’ said F. X., ‘is my opinion too … All right, we’ll leave that at that. Now …’
They plunged into many and intricate details of business. They did, in ten minutes, so used were they to each other, as much work as most other couples in London, standing in the same relation, would have spent two hours and more upon.
F. X. rose and stretched himself. His big body seemed suddenly to tower. He said:
‘Well, that’s that! Anything else, Woolrich?’
Woolrich pondered a moment. His blue eyes narrowed as he thought and one corner of his well-cut, clean-shaven mouth twitched to a little constricted grin of concentration. At one corner of this mouth there showed a gleam of teeth as white as F. X.’s own. He pulled out a small notebook; flipped over its pages.
‘Nothing today, sir.’
‘You don’t want,’ said F. X., looking at him keenly, ‘to go down to the country this afternoon?’
A dark flush darkened Woolrich’s tan. He shook the blond head. ‘No, sir.’ He stood up. ‘If there’s nothing else I’ll go and have a bite of lunch. Busy afternoon after what we’ve done.’
F. X. nodded. ‘No, there’s nothing else.’
Woolrich walked to the door. With his fingers on its handle he turned. He said:
‘By the way, sir, I hear that fellow Marsh has been ringing up—’
‘Oh, him!’ said F. X. ‘That was before you came … All right, don’t blush. I meant to tell you, Woolrich, I’ve made an appointment with Marsh for tomorrow night. I’m going to meet him after all. And I’m going to settle with him.’
Woolrich came away from the door, back into the centre of the room.
‘Good Lord, sir!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to—’
F. X. shook his head. ‘No, no, no! Woolrich, I’m not wringing wet—you know that. No, I’m going to tell Mr Marsh that if he likes to take a little douceur he can buzz off; if he doesn’t like to take it, he can buzz off just the same. I’m fed up with him … And if after tomorrow he ever rings up or shoves his face in here again, you can have him buzzed off with my love. Anyhow, we don’t want things like that blocking up the place.’
Woolrich paused on his journey to the door. He said:
‘I’ve never seen him, sir, and I don’t want to. But from what you said I should imagine you’re right.’
‘I am!’ said F. X., with feeling. ‘Anthony here yet?’
‘I’ll send him along, sir,’ said Woolrich, and was gone.
3
Francis Xavier Benedik and Anthony Xavier Benedik stood expectant just within the main doors of the Alsace Restaurant. They were waiting for Peter. Peter Rickforth was Samuel Harvey Rickforth’s daughter and did not look it. She was also—or perhaps primarily—the future wife of Anthony Xavier Benedik. She was very, very easy to look at. Her engagement to Tony Benedik had broken, at least temporarily, more hearts than any feminine decision in London for the past six months.
Peter was always late. Tony looked at F. X. ‘I think,’ said Tony, ‘another little drink.’
‘That’ll be three,’ said his father.
‘Right-ho, if you say so!’
They drank standing, their eyes fixed upon the revolving doors through which Peter would presently come. Standing there, utterly unconscious of their surroundings, glasses in hands, they were a couple which brought the gaze of many eyes to bear upon them. Exactly of a height, exactly of a breadth, with the same rather prominent-jawed, imperious nosed, hard-bitten good looks, the same deep, wide shoulders and narrow horseman’s hips, they were a walking, talking proof that heredity is not an old wife’s tale. What lineage, God knows, for F. X. himself could scarcely tell you from whence he came, but wherever this was, it and his own life had stamped their stamp upon the man, and this stamp was upon the son. They did not, these two, behave like father and son. They were more like elder and younger brother—much more. In only one particular was their aspect different. In the dress of F. X. was a careless, easy mixture of opulent cloth and ‘I-like-a-loose-fit-blast-it-what-do-clothes-matter?’ carelessness. In the dress of Tony was a superb and apparently unconscious elegance.
The revolving doors revolved. The little negro page-boy smiled until his face looked like an ice pudding over which chocolate has unevenly flowed.
‘Mawnin’, miss!’ said the page-boy.
‘’Morning, Sambo!’ said Peter Rickforth. She looked about her. She did not have far to look. Father and son were straight before her. She came towards them with her hands outstretched.
‘My dears,’ she said, ‘do not—do not say all those things which are trembling on your tongue and shooting darts of fire from your too amazingly similar pairs of eyes! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! And I’m sorry! How’s that?’
‘Very well,’ said F. X. ‘In fact, Peter, I think you are too well-mannered. After all, you know, any couple of men ought to be only too damn glad for you to lunch with them at all, let alone worry if you’re a few minutes late.’
‘Few minutes!’ said Tony. ‘Few minutes! If you do this, my girl, after we’re married, you’ll only do it once. At least, only once a month.’
Peter’s golden eyes stared at him. ‘Only a month? Why only once a month? Why not once a week?’
‘The effects,’ said Tony, ‘of the beatings will last three weeks, five days and seven hours exactly. We’ve got a table. Shall we go in, F. X.?’
‘If,’ said his father, ‘the lady wills.’
The lady did will, and presently they sat, a trio to draw all eyes, over a meal which was probably for that one day at least the best of its kind in all London.
It was over coffee that F. X. said:
‘Peter, I want to talk to you about your family.’
Peter laughed. ‘Family, sir?’ she said. ‘It’s the first I know about it!’
‘I mean,’ said F. X., ‘the other way round, backwards. Your father.’
‘Oh, Daddy!’ said Peter. ‘What’s he been doing? You don’t mean to tell me that squinting one in the Palazzo chorus has been getting Daddy into trouble, do you? She does squint, you know. She’s got the most awful cast in one eye!’
‘My good girl,’ said Tony, ‘you want a twisted snaffle in that mouth of yours.’
‘Your father, Peter,’ said F. X., ‘said nothing to me about squinting Palazzo’s. Nothing at all. He wouldn’t. He might think I’d take a fancy to them. I’m worried about your father’—his smile was gone now—‘because your father is getting worried about RYNOX.’
‘And a fat sauce,’ said Peter, ‘he’s got. Worried about RYNOX. I’ll scald his fat little ears! What d’you mean, F. X.—worried about RYNOX?’
She leant her elbow on the table and looked steadily, with a seriousness belying her words, into the eyes of F. X.
‘Have a cigar, Tony?’ said F. X. ‘All right, Peter, I’m going to shoot in a minute. There’s a maitre d’hotel with long pitchers just behind. Have a cigar, Tony, go on? … Look here, Peter, I don’t know whether Tony’s told you. Being Tony he probably has, but RYNOX is on about the stickiest patch of country we’ve ever struck. The position exactly is this—that if we can keep going for another six months, we shall be rolling along on top of the world, and right on top of the world. If we can’t keep going for six months, we shall be rolling along somewhere in Lambeth gutter. Now, I’m not joking, Peter. I’m talking dead straight. RYNOX is mine. I mean, I started it, and I don’t believe, for business purposes, in limited companies. A limited company means limited credit, and I like my credit hot, strong and unbounded. Hence the unlimited condition of RYNOX. But, Peter, do you know what an unlimited company means? It means that if the company fails, all the creditors can come down upon not only the company, but upon all the individual partners in the company. That is, upon me first, then Tony, and then your father. They can take not only the chairs and desks and pictures and carpets out of the office, but the tables and pianos and bath-taps out of your house.’
‘All right, sir! All right!’ Peter was smiling again now. A very different smile, a smile which made Tony gasp at his luck, and F. X. mentally raise a hat.
‘All right, sir,’ said Peter again. ‘Yes, I knew that.’
A good lie; she hadn’t known that. Both men knew that she hadn’t known that. Both men if possible loved Peter more than they had five minutes ago.
‘Your father,’ said F. X., ‘being, if I may say so, Peter, a very shrewd but rather timid Leadenhall Street business man, has frankly got the wind up. I keep soothing him down but I’d like you to help. I’d like you really to soothe him right down.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony, has Sam said anything to you lately?’
‘Sam,’ said Tony. ‘Sorry, Peter, Daddy thinks that if a man is under fifty he ought still to be playing with rattles. Sam doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand Sam. How on earth Peter ever managed to be—sorry, old thing! Anyway, in answer to your question, F. X. Benedik, Sam has not said anything to me. I think he has to Woolrich, though.’
F. X. laughed. ‘If he said anything against RYNOX to Woolrich, I know what he’d get! That boy’s keener on his job than anybody so fond of trips into the country’s any right to be. RYNOX is graven on his liver.’
Tony moved the glasses from before him; leaned across the table; said in a different tone:
‘Look here, Dad, we’re going to pull this off, aren’t we? Because if you think it’s too much for you … but of course you don’t!’
‘I don’t think anything,’ said F. X. ‘I know, boy, I know. By the way, did you see that friend of yours? Young Scott-Bushington?’
Tony’s lip curled. ‘I saw him all right. Cold feet though. Nothing doing, F. X.’
F. X. grinned. ‘Don’t look so solemn! That’s all right. Look here, Peter’—he turned to the woman who was going to be his son’s wife—‘I don’t know how much Tony tells you, but I’d tell you everything and then some. What RYNOX wants, Peter, is a hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.’
‘That all?’ said Peter.
F. X. smiled. ‘It sounds a lot of money, my dear, but in this sort of business it’s, well, just nothing. You know what RYNOX are doing, don’t you, Peter? RYNOX have practically chucked all their other interests into the fire to back the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company.’
Peter nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I know that. Tony does tell me things.’
‘I expect,’ said F. X., ‘he does, and if I may say so, quite right, too. Well, the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company’s going—not west, but big. We’ve got the plant, we’ve got the stock, we’ve got the orders—some of them. We’ve got four big orders, Peter, hanging fire. They’re coming along all right; they’re German, three of them. But we’ve got to last out until they do come and then a bit, see? And that’s what your father’s worried about. He thinks we can’t hang on, and I tell him we can. I tell him we’ve damn well got to! So you get at him, Peter, and tell him so, too.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony!’
‘Sergeant?’
‘Paris for you, my lad. I want you to go and see Menier. If we don’t recall that Valenciennes loan within the next six months we ought to be shot. I’d like it within a month. Just see what you can do, will you?’
Tony drew patterns upon the cloth with the haft of his fork. ‘Right! Yes, I know Menier pretty well. We’re rather pally, as a matter of fact. When do you want me to go?’
‘Better take the five o’clock air mail. That gets you there in time for a full day tomorrow and Saturday and as much of Sunday as you’d like. Come back Monday morning …’ F. X. looked at his son for a long moment. ‘Stick at it, Tony. And by the way …’
Tony cocked an unobtrusive ear. He knew F. X.’s ‘by-the-ways.’ They generally concealed a major point.
‘By the way,’ said F. X., ‘while you’re with Menier, you might sound him. That Caporal group of his might put up fifty thousand. You could tell him six months and ten per cent, if you like. Anyway, try.’
Tony nodded. And at that moment the faces of father and son were so alike in every line that they might have been, not elder and younger brothers, but twins.
Peter looked at the watch upon her wrist. ‘My dears,’ she said, ‘I must go. What about you? Or don’t RYNOX do any work in the afternoon?’
F. X. stood up. ‘They do. We’ve been chewing the rag here a bit too long as it is. Come on.’
They went on. Outside, father and son put Peter into a taxi; watched while the taxi purred out of Alsace Court and into the Strand.
F. X. turned to his son. ‘Going back to the office, boy?’
Tony nodded. ‘And you?’
F. X. shook his head. ‘Not this afternoon. I’m going away to think.’
Tony waved a stick—they were half-way up the court by this time—at a taxi with its flag up. ‘You have this?’ he said. ‘Or me?’
‘You,’ said F. X. ‘I’m walking.’
The taxi came to a standstill abreast of them. Tony put a foot upon its running board and fingers to the handle of its door. ‘RYNOX House,’ he said to the driver.
His father looked at him.
Tony opened the taxi door. He said over his shoulder:
‘See you on Monday then.’ He made to enter the cab.
‘Tony!’ said his father.
‘Hullo!’ Tony turned round; saw his father’s outstretched hand; raised his eyebrows. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, but he took the hand. They shook; a firm grip, each as strong as the other.
‘Do your best,’ said his father, ‘with Menier.’
Tony nodded and leapt into the cab and slammed the door. The engine churned. Tony looked out of the window. ‘So long, F. X.,’ he said.
‘Good-bye!’ said F. X., and raised his hand in salute.
COMMENT THE SECOND
ALL is not well with RYNOX. F. X. is probably not so confident even as his most pessimistic words to his son.
RYNOX is at that point where one injudicious move; one failure of judgment; one coincidental piece of bad luck, will wreck it. And it ought not—thinks F. X.—to be wrecked. For if it can struggle on for another six or seven months all his speculation, all his endeavour, will meet with incalculable success.
SEQUENCE THE THIRD (#ulink_e2b466bb-a7ab-559a-8d4b-69c5da34f8f4)
Friday, 29th March 193— 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
F.X. sat at breakfast. Through the big French windows of his dining-room in William Pitt Street, the spring sun blazed, turning the comfortable but rather sombre room into a chamber of temporary glory. F.X., so to speak, read The Morning Mercury with one hand and with the other conversed with his man, Prout.
Prout was a short, stiff little man. There was a legend about Prout—started probably by F. X. himself—to the effect that he had nineteen hairs and that twelve of these were upon the right side of his parting and seven upon the other. He was clean-shaven—very shaven and very, very clean. He was also very quiet. There was another legend—this one having its birth with Tony—to the effect that Prout really was a ‘foreigner,’ only knowing three words of English: ‘Very good, sir.’ Prout, who had been with F. X. now for seven years—ever since RYNOX had been founded—adored F. X. In a lesser, quieter way he was fond of Tony. For Peter, he would have gone through nearly as much, if not quite, as for F. X. himself.
‘If you, Prout,’ said F. X., ‘were Lord Otterburn and owned the daily paper with the largest net sale (don’t forget net, Prout, there’s always a lot of holes in a net) what would you do?’
Prout put a cover upon the dish of kidneys. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Prout.
F. X. looked at him. ‘And a very good answer too. Don’t know what it is about you, Prout, but you always say the right thing with the most delightfully innocent air of not knowing you’ve said it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Prout. ‘Excuse me, sir, but Mrs Fairburn wanted me to ask you whether you could see her for a moment before you leave for the office.’
F. X. nodded. ‘Certainly, certainly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better tell her to come in now, hadn’t you? I shall be off in a few minutes.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Prout, and left the room so silently, so unobtrusively that the moment he was gone F. X. wondered, as he always wondered on these occasions, whether Prout had really ever been with him at all.
The door opened again. Mrs Fairburn came in. Mrs Fairburn was F. X.’s housekeeper. She, too, had been with F. X. for seven years. She, too, strictly within her very strict notions of right and wrong, would have done anything for F. X. She was, as Tony frequently said, almost too good to be true. Her hair, quite black despite her fifty-four years, was scraped from her forehead and piled high upon the back of her head. She wore black satin always. Sometimes there were bugles upon the black satin, but at other times the black satin was plain. Always when she walked the black satin rustled. About her severely corsetted waist was a belt and inevitably there dangled from this belt a bunch of keys. No one in the house had ever discovered—since nothing in this house ever was locked—what these keys were for. But always they were there, swinging and dangling and jangling. They told you, in fact, where Mrs Fairburn, moving about her duties in the tall, narrow house, could be found. You had only to stand still and listen. Presently you would hear them and then you could track Mrs Fairburn.
‘Good-morning!’ said F. X. ‘Lovely morning, Mrs Fairburn.’
‘Gord-mooning, Mr Baynedik. Truly a delaiteful day. It makes one feel really as if spring were drawing on.’
F. X. nodded. ‘Yes, doesn’t it? Well, what’s the trouble, Mrs Fairburn?’
The thin lips of Mrs Fairburn writhed themselves into one of their sudden smiles. ‘No trouble, Mr Baynedik. Nothing of the sort. Only rather an extraordinary thing has happened.’ She produced, from some recess in the black-clad angularity of her presence, an envelope; advanced, bearing this rather like a lictor his symbolic bundle, towards the table. ‘Mr Baynedik,’ she said, ‘this letter came by a district maysenger boy last night when you were out. It is, as you see, addressed to the housekeeper and staff. Seeing this address, Mr Baynedik, Ay opened the letter and inside Ay found three orchestra fauteuils for the Royal Theatre for tonight’s performance. It is a piece which is apparently entitled The Sixth Wife of Monsieur Paradoux … rather, I must say, an astonishing title, Mr Baynedik.’
F. X. struggled with a smile. ‘Certainly. Certainly. Damn silly names some of these people call their damn silly plays. Well, what about it, Mrs Fairburn? Do you want to go?’
‘Ay did think, Mr Baynedik, that perhaps we would like to go as these seats have been presented to us so kindly, albeit so mysteriously.’
F. X. frowned. ‘We’d like to go … Oh, I see. You want to take the rest of the staff, Mrs Fairburn? Yes, take them by all means. Do you all good, I’m sure. And you can keep an eye on them and see that they don’t get into mischief. Wonder who’s sending you theatre tickets …’
‘Ay cannot,’ said Mrs Fairburn, ‘understand the gift mayself, Mr Baynedik, but Ay believe there is a saying to the effect that one should not look at the mouth of a horse that has been given to one. Ay must confess that Ay could never see the meaning of this saying, but Ay have no doubt it is an apposite one.’
F. X. buried himself behind his paper. ‘Yes. Go, by all means. It’s very good of you, I’m sure, to chaperone the other two.’
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