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Sunday, November 15th

The Café du Soleil in Goodge Street is always busy at lunch time on Sundays. The narrow white-walled room with its two rows of little tables attracts a clientele from an area far wider than the somewhat shabby neighbourhood that surrounds it. The customers, indeed, are a mixed collection. Many are foreign, some are shabby, a few prosperous, hardly any smart. They are united by one characteristic and one only—that they know and appreciate good food. And Enrico Volpi, the stout little Genoese who learned the art of the kitchen in Marseilles and refined it in Paris, sees that they are not disappointed.

Frank Harper, clerk in the firm of Inglewood, Browne & Company, Auctioneers and Estate Agents of Kensington, had discovered the Soleil in the course of a visit on his employer’s business to the Tottenham Court Road. He had been agreeably surprised by the food, and after his meal less agreeably by the bill. Regretfully, as he paid, he had decided that the Soleil was not an eating-house for poor men. He had resolved that so far as he was concerned it must be reserved for some special occasion.

This was such an occasion. Harper had been to a good deal of trouble to plan a meal that should be worthy of it, and Volpi, who knew a young man in love when he saw one, had excelled himself in its execution. So it was with a tone of confidence well justified that over the coffee Harper murmured to his companion:

“Well, Susan, enjoyed your lunch?”

Susan smiled contentedly.

“Frank, it’s been the dream of a lunch. I’ve made a perfect pig of myself, and I shan’t be able to eat anything at dinner. You’re a perfect genius to have found this place. If only—” Her candid grey eyes had a troubled expression.

“If only—what?”

“If only it wasn’t so ruinously expensive.”

Harper’s rather fatuous expression of happiness gave way to a look of disgust.

“Need you bring that up now?” he asked wearily. “I should have thought——”

Susan was all contrition.

“Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything to spoil things. It was beastly of me.”

“Angel, you couldn’t be beastly if you tried.”

“Yes, I can, and I was. But all the same,” she went on, returning to the attack, “we’ve got to be practical sometimes.”

“All right, then,” said the young man roughly, “let’s be practical. I know what you’re thinking. I’m a clerk in a dud firm that pays me two pounds ten shillings a week, which is probably about two pounds nine shillings more than I’m worth. I have been there four years and my prospects of getting any further are precisely nil. You have a dress allowance of fifty pounds a year, and if your father can raise it to a hundred when you’re married you will be lucky. Being what are known as gentlefolk, we can’t get married under seven hundred a year—say six hundred as a bare minimum. And if we tried it even on that we should hate it, and your father would have seventeen distinct apoplectic fits if we suggested it. Is that practical enough for you?”

“Yes,” said Susan in a small sad voice.

“Therefore,” he continued, “it ill becomes me to spend fifteen shillings on a decent meal, when I might be putting it in a nice little savings bank, like that ghastly young pup who shares my room at the office.”

Susan made a gesture of despair.

“It does seem pretty hopeless, doesn’t it?” she said. Harper looked out past her at the grey prospect of Goodge Street.

“I hate London,” he said suddenly.

A silence followed his outburst, and when he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice.

“Susan,” he said diffidently, “I’ve had a letter from a fellow I know out in Kenya. He’s got a farm there—sisal, coffee and so on. There’s not much money in it nowadays, he says, but it’s a good sort of life. If he could take me on—would you come?”

She clapped her hands in joy.

“Darling!” she cried. “But this is marvellous! Why on earth have you kept so quiet about it? You didn’t really think I wouldn’t come, did you?” Then seeing the irresolute expression on his face, she added: “Frank, there’s something else in this. What is it?”

“Yes, there is something else,” he answered unwillingly, as though regretting that he had said so much already as to make further disclosure necessary. “There is something else. What this man is offering is a partnership in the farm.”

“M-m?”

“And he wants fifteen hundred pounds for it.”

“O-oh!” Susan’s castle in Kenya tumbled in a long drawn sigh of disappointment. “What is the good of talking about things like that? Frank, I thought you were being practical!”

He flushed darkly.

“Perhaps I am,” he muttered.

“What do you mean? Frank, you make me angry sometimes. You know you haven’t got fifteen hundred pounds or the remotest chance of getting it——”

“Suppose I had?”

“What’s the good of supposing?” She looked him in the face, and then: “You don’t mean——? Darling, I hate mysteries. Are you seriously saying that you can really pay for this partnership, or whatever it is? Tell me.”

He smiled at her, though his face was still clouded with anxiety.

“I can’t tell you anything now. I’m sorry, darling, but there it is. I’ve got to see how things work out. But if—just if—I came along in a week’s time, perhaps less, and told you that the show was on, would you come with me?”

“You know I would!”

“And ask no questions?”

“Why not?”

“And ask no questions, I said.”

“Frank, you frighten me when you look like that. It seems so silly.... Oh, yes, I suppose so—ask no questions.”

“That’s all right, then.”

She looked at her watch.

“Darling, I must fly, or I shall miss my train, and you know what father is.”

She pulled on her close-fitting hat over her mass of auburn hair and dabbed powder on her nose while Harper paid the bill.

“I wish,” she murmured when the waiter had gone, “I wish you could tell me just a little more about it, all the same.”

“No, I can’t,” he answered shortly. “It’s just—just something that’s happened lately, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what’s happened lately,” she said as they made their way out. “I tried to read the paper on the way up, but I went to sleep instead. All I saw were some headlines about a Big City Sensation. Has that anything to do with it?”

Harper laughed sardonically.

“In a roundabout way, it might have,” he replied, as he pushed open the street door.

On the doorstep Susan almost ran against a small, sallow man who was just coming in. He gave her a look of open admiration of a kind to which she, who was quite aware of her own good looks, was well accustomed. Ordinarily she felt flattered or amused, according to her mood, by these tributes; but for some reason which she could not explain, this man’s glance, momentary though it was, filled her with resentment and vague disquiet. She felt as though she were being appraised by a snake.

Meanwhile the new-comer entered the restaurant and seated himself at a table by the window. Whatever the impression he made upon Susan, he was evidently a valued client of the management, for he was no sooner in his place than Volpi, looking like an agitated black water-beetle as he flitted between the tables, came up to him.

“Ah, Monsieur Du Pine!” he cried. “It is a long time since we had the honour. What will monsieur be pleased to take?”

“A café filtre,” said Du Pine shortly.

Volpi’s face fell, but it was not for him to criticize his client’s orders, disappointing though they might be. Besides, he too had read the headlines in the newspapers, and he was a man of tact. The coffee was brought with as much ceremony as though it were the most elaborate dish in the menu, and if Volpi had any comments to make they were uttered only to his wife behind the desk.

Du Pine drank his coffee in slow deliberate sips. When it was finished, he lit a cigarette, and that done, another. Little by little the room emptied, but still he showed no signs of leaving. It was almost deserted when at last a man came in and went straight to the vacant seat at his table.

He was of medium height, his thin body clad in a grey suit and overcoat, that had seen better days. Neither his face nor his jerky cock-sparrowlike manner was particularly prepossessing, but there was something in his appearance, whether it was the close-cut sandy moustache or the set of his shoulders, that gave the impression that this had once been an officer—even a gentleman.

Du Pine looked up as he came in. His expression did not change, and when he spoke, only his lips moved.

“You’re very late, Eales,” he said in a low tone.

“Fog in the Channel,” answered Eales shortly. “A double brandy and soda,” he added to Volpi, who had appeared at his elbow.

Volpi expressed regret with voice, face and arms.

“Alas, sare, but I am afraid it is too late. These licensing hours——”

“None the less, I think you can get my friend what he wants,” put in Du Pine.

“Ah, monsieur must not ask me——”

“But I do ask you,” was the cold rejoinder, and the drink was forthcoming immediately.

“I can’t think why you wanted me to come to an out-of-the-way hole like this,” grumbled Eales as he put down his glass.

“Because it is out of the way. Things have been happening.”

“I know that.”

“I wonder,” said Du Pine with a penetrating stare, “just how much you do know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know, for example, exactly where Ballantine is at this moment?”

“Why should I?”

“Do you know? was my question.”

“If it comes to that, do you?”

They looked at each other, mutually suspicious, and then as by common consent looked away.

“We are wasting time,” said Du Pine after a short pause. “You haven’t told me if your business went off satisfactorily.”

“Only because you haven’t asked me. In point of fact, it did.”

Eales’s hand went to his pocket. Du Pine stopped him with a restraining gesture.

“Not here,” he murmured. “I have to be rather careful just now. We will do our business in a taxi, if you don’t mind. Pay for your drink and we will be off.”

Eales displayed his discoloured teeth in a mirthless smile.

“You don’t like paying for things, do you, Du Pine?” he remarked.

“I pay for what I get, not otherwise.”

In the taxi, Du Pine said affably, “Would you like me to drop you near Mount Street?”

“Why near Mount Street?”

“It occurred to me that Mrs. Eales might be glad of your company just now.”

“You can leave my wife out of it, blast you!” said Eales violently.

“Just as you please. Now next time——”

“There isn’t going to be a next time!”

“All the same, I think there is,” said Du Pine softly.