Читать книгу The Man Without Nerves - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 8

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Mr. Huitt’s proficiency at the game was always a source of wonder to the members of the Oasis Lawn Tennis Club. Notwithstanding the fact that he chose to play in spectacles, his timing of the ball was usually perfect. With arms like the pipestems to which Timothy Sarson had once good-naturedly compared them, he seemed to drive upon occasions as hard as any of the younger members of the club. He never varied his serve and with him a double fault was an unknown occurrence. He admitted to being forty-four years of age but no one had ever seen him out of breath. He played with cold and merciless precision but without any outward evidence of enjoyment. Tyssen, who had been his unsuccessful opponent for three sets, came and sat down by his side during the service of the home-made lemonade which was the staple beverage of the place.

“Even a coroner’s inquest, Mr. Huitt,” he remarked, “does not seem to upset your nerve.”

“Why should it?” was the calm retort.

Tyssen rolled a cigarette with agile but yellow-stained fingers. He tore off the ends of the tobacco and lit it.

“I don’t know,” he reflected. “I suppose, because I am trying to be a writer, I have developed an undue sense of drama.”

“I would embrace some other profession, then,” Mr. Huitt suggested.

“I shall have to find out first of all whether I am going to be a rotten failure at my present one or not. I may have luck. You cannot tell.”

Mr. Huitt looked as though he did not care. He edged farther away from his companion and affected to be interested in a set which was being played. Tyssen, however, had no idea of being shaken off.

“There seems to me,” he confided, “to be something thrilling about the thought of that poor fellow Jesson having to come to you—one of his best friends—to draw out all his money from your bank and yet not be able to offer you any explanation.”

“Your imagination is too indefinite,” Huitt commented drily. “Apart from a sense of regret which one always feels when a friend does a foolish thing, the situation made no appeal to me.”

“I think it was Mr. Anthony Sarson who said the other day that you hadn’t a nerve in your body,” Tyssen remarked.

“Taken literally, the statement was, of course, ridiculous. On the other hand, I certainly do not understand the modern use of the term ‘nerves.’ ”

Tyssen smoked furiously for a minute or two and then threw away the tangled remains of his untidily rolled cigarette.

“You yourself,” he pointed out, “admit that poor Mr. Jesson’s hurried and furtive visits to you seemed to indicate that he was being blackmailed. Isn’t there something dramatic to you in that thought?”

Tyssen turned suddenly and faced his companion with a freshly rolled cigarette between his rigid fingers. Mr. Huitt, however, continued to follow the movements of the players in the set which he was watching. He answered indifferently.

“Not in the least. Blackmail, of course, is an odious crime, but in this case it is only a suggestion. Something drove Jesson to take his own life. One only wearies oneself with profitless speculation as to what it may have been. The facts are unalterable and Jesson is dead.”

“If every one felt like you,” Tyssen reflected, “a great many crimes in the world would go unpunished.”

“Not at all,” was the frigid reply. “I am a bank manager, not a policeman. It is my affair to concentrate the whole of my brain, for what it is worth, on the day-by-day happenings in the bank over which I have control. I leave other people’s business alone.”

With the utmost deliberation Mr. Huitt rose to his feet and walked into the locker room. He adjusted his racquet neatly into its press, counted the number of his tennis balls, discharged his reckoning with Mrs. Harris for one cup of tea, two slices of bread and butter and one glass of lemonade, donned his sweater and prepared to take that little stroll along the side of the stream up to his house. Tyssen, with his sweater knotted around his neck and the inevitable cigarette in his mouth, joined him.

“I am afraid I make myself rather a nuisance to you, Mr. Huitt,” he apologised awkwardly. “I can’t help it. I shall claim the privilege of my profession to hang on to you now and then.”

“You are a guest here and, I gather, for a short time only, or I might perhaps find it possible to say to you that I am not concerned in your profession,” was Mr. Huitt’s calm response. “Furthermore, if it is these nerves, which you think every man should possess, which drive you out of your bed at night to make nocturnal expeditions all over the neighbourhood, I do not see that I am much worse off for their absence as I have to catch the eight-twenty train every morning.”

If Tyssen was startled by his companion’s thrust, he showed no signs of it.

“I always sleep badly,” he admitted. “I hope my wandering round the place does not annoy anybody.”

“It doesn’t annoy me,” Mr. Huitt answered. “Other people with more curiosity might find themselves wondering as to your object.”

“I can assure you that I am not a burglar!” Tyssen declared. “I have a perfectly legitimate reason for my night walks.”

They had reached the gate of the bank manager’s pleasant little abode. He paused for a moment with his hand upon the latch. There was obviously no intention on his part to invite his companion in.

“No, I don’t imagine that you are a burglar,” Mr. Huitt conceded. “If you wish to do inexplicable things, I suppose you have the right. On the other hand, this is a very quiet neighbourhood and by twelve o’clock we think that every one should be asleep. I myself am not addicted to the use of firearms but I am quite sure that if I woke at three o’clock and found a man who looked as though he might be going to enter my garden, whether he was suffering from nerves or sleeplessness, I should consider myself justified in assuming that he was there for no good purpose.”

“I shall keep the other side of the stream,” Tyssen observed calmly.

“You will do well.”

“Good evening, Mr. Huitt.”

“Good evening, sir.”

Mr. Huitt let himself in to his very attractive-looking abode with a latchkey, mounted the stairs, divested himself of his clothes and without any obvious signs of enjoyment nevertheless indulged in a prolonged spray. Afterwards he performed a leisurely toilet and descended to his small library. Arrived there—it was a room of formal and not displeasing appearance—he did a singular thing for a man who was going to a country-house dinner party with the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the County. After a few moments of impassive listening, he opened first a cabinet and then with another key he unlocked a private drawer. From that he took out a revolver and a small bag of cartridges. He loaded the weapon, moved the catch with firm fingers to safety and dropped it into his hip pocket. It was just as though Mr. Huitt, the bank manager, had been in the habit of carrying a gun all his life.