Читать книгу Simple Peter Cradd - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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THE business interview which followed between Mr. Spearmain and his new client was of an eminently satisfactory character, A messenger boy was despatched to Bermondsey, and duly returned with Mr. Cradd's birth certificate, which happened to be at the moment in his desk, for purposes not unconnected with a projected loan on his life policy. Meanwhile, the latter executed a deed of attorney to Messrs. Spearmain, Armitage and Spearmain in London, and Messrs. Treavor, Heaton and Company of Christchurch, New Zealand, and listened with reverence to a long list of very excellent securities of which he was ?now the possessor. It was almost eleven o'clock when at last a pause arrived, Mr, Spearmain, adjusting his eyeglass, cast a surreptitious glance at his client and leaned once more back in his chair.

"You will understand, Mr. Cradd," he explained, "that some short time must necessarily elapse before the whole of the estate will be in your hands, but, in the meantime, if you will permit it, any reasonable advance you may like to accept is yours for the asking. Your birth certificate, which seems to be in order, and which accords entirely with our information, has established the matter of your identity."

"You mean," Peter Cradd ventured—"forgive me if I am a little confused —you mean, in plain words, that I can have some money if I want it."

"Certainly," Mr. Spearmain assured him grandiloquently. "Name your sum, and I will ring for a desk clerk to draw an open cheque at once."

"It will certainly make the thing seem real," his client admitted, with a quaint little smile.

Mr. Spearmain was in benevolent accord.

"I quite agree with you," he said. "Take five hundred pounds, say, away with you. Remember, we shall want to see you often during the next week or ten days. We should like you to be here again to-morrow. If you would care for more money then, our banking account is practically at your service. There is nothing to prevent your handling a matter of twenty or thirty thousand pounds before the end of the week."

Five hundred pounds! Exactly a hundred a year more than his yearly salary. Five hundred pounds! Every debt in the world gone. Such things didn't really happen— and yet!

"I should like five hundred pounds," Mr. Cradd said.

The lawyer rang the bell and leaned back in his chair. To the slim young man in spectacles who promptly appeared, he gave a few words of direction.

"Make out a cheque, Higgins, for five hundred pounds, and debit to the account of Mr. Peter Cradd. Mr. Reginald will sign it. Step across and bring us the notes—in not too large denominations, I should think."

The young man hurried off. Mr. Spearmain settled himself down to make pleasant conversation with his strange client.

"Almost like a chapter from a story, what, Mr. Cradd?" he said—"this unexpected coming into money? Is it long since you saw your cousin?"

"Scarcely since we were boys. I'd almost forgotten his existence. Once there was a mission from New Zealand over here for some purpose or other, and I read that he was one of the members, so I gathered that he had progressed In the world. I myself have not been fortunate."

"What is your present occupation?" Mr. Spearmain enquired genially.

"I am salesman to a firm of leather merchants," Peter Cradd replied. "I have never been a great success in life. I suppose I lack the push my cousin had. My present salary," he added, "is four hundred a year."

"Four hundred a year! Dear me, dear me!" the lawyer sympathised, reflecting that it was just what he had agreed to pay his new head gardener. "You are married?"

"I have a wife and three children."

"This will be wonderful news for them."

"Marvellous!"

The lawyer was called away for a moment to speak to a distinguished client who was tired of waiting, and it was probably in that moment that Peter Cradd's fell scheme was conceived. Only the glimmering of it came to him then —just the seed of a thought—but it was a seed strongly planted. It grew and blossomed during the day. At its first inception he felt a certain sense of shame, but before many hours had passed he was obsessed with it. It was in his mind when Mr. Spearmain returned and handed over the largest sum Peter had ever handled in his life.

"Five hundred pounds, sir," the lawyer announced. "Don't be afraid of asking for more. As a matter of fact, I think that there is sixty thousand pounds lying idle in the bank at Christchurch. We must deal with it at once— sheep-shearing season, or something, my people say. Do us the favour of calling again to-morrow afternoon at two-thirty, if possible. The next mail will be in then, and we shall have more papers for you to sign."

"I will be here."

Under the dignified portals of this august office, Peter Cradd, in his shabby bowler hat, and with his umbrella under his arm, stood looking out for several moments at a blurred procession of vehicles. Suddenly he had an idea. He raised his umbrella. A taxicab drew up at the kerb.

"Proctor's Row, Bermondsey, Number Eleven," he directed.

The man slammed the door and, without any particular enthusiasm for his shabby client, started off. Peter Cradd leaned back in the corner. It was not a very nice taxicab. Some one had been smoking and left cigarette ends about, and the cushions needed brushing, but to its occupant it was a vehicle of luxury. It was, so far as he could remember, the second time in his life he had hired and ridden in a taxicab on his own account.

He arrived at his destination at something like twenty minutes past eleven. His friend William—a brawny, muscular man, who had a sneaking fondness for the firm's unfortunate little traveller—met him at the door and handed him a huge brown paper parcel with an envelope tucked under the string.

"The guv'nor's gone out to have a drink with Mr. Jennings," he confided. "He's been gone half an hour. If you skip it quick, I'll say you came just after he went. What's that you've got there? a taxi—Gawd!"

"Put the parcel in the taxi, William," Peter Cradd ordered.

William shook his head in melancholy fashion.

"You know very well, the guv'nor won't stand for it," he remonstrated. "They won't pay you out of petty cash."

"In that case," was the unconcerned reply, "I will pay for the vehicle myself."

William scratched his chin.

"You haven't been having one, have you, sir?" he asked doubtfully.

Peter Cradd smiled as he stepped inside the cab.

"I shall probably have two before the day is out, William," he confided, "You needn't be alarmed. I have had a stroke of good fortune."

He drove off, and William, after a dazed stroll around the warehouse, decided upon a hurried visit across the road to commemorate his friend's great luck. In the meanwhile, the taxicab proceeded to Tottenham, and Peter Cradd exploited his firm's goods. With that bulge in his pocket, a new confidence seemed to creep into his manner. After all, there was no sack for him if he didn't get an order, or if there was, it didn't matter. By a curious dispensation of fate, he concluded the best morning's business he had achieved for years, and faced a wrathful employer on his return about one o'clock with equanimity.

"What the devil's happened to you, Cradd?" the latter demanded angrily. "I waited for three quarters of an hour to give you instructions, and William tells me you hired a taxicab to go out to Tottenham. You know very well the firm can't afford that sort of extravagance."

"I'm willing to pay for it myself, sir," Peter Cradd replied, "to make up for having been late this morning. If you'll glance through these, sir," he added, handing over a few slips, "I think you'll see that I have been very fortunate. I was just in time to catch Rosenfeld's before they placed their order elsewhere. I was very lucky too, with Mr. Jacobs."

His employer's wrath disappeared as he scanned the order slips. He leaned over and patted his traveller upon the shoulder.

"That's a damned good morning's work, Cradd," he declared, "and just when we needed it—needed it badly, I can tell you. And so did you, if you only knew it. Stick the cab down to the petty cash. We could stand one every day on business like that."

He hurried away to his office. Peter Cradd, who had four hundred and ninety-nine pounds and sixteen shillings in his pocket—he had changed one of the notes—walked off to the nearest A.B.C. and indulged in the rare luxury of an eighteen-penny chop.

Afterwards they all declared that they had noticed something queer about the governor that night. Henry remembered that he had washed his hands and then gone upstairs and washed them again in a fit of absent-mindedness. George referred to a clean collar, which at the close of the evening seemed an absurd piece of extravagance. Lena remembered that notwithstanding the inquisitive glances of curious passers-by, he had refused to allow the blind to be lowered and sat at his place at the head of the table, looking out sometimes with a curious wistfulness at the deepening twilight. There was a joint to be carved at the long-to-be-remembered evening meal, the scrag end of a neck of mutton for which even Mrs. Cradd felt almost compelled to apologise.

"Ought to have been put in the stew-pot, I suppose," she observed, "but it's the best that Padstowe would send us, until his bill's paid. Anyhow, there'll be a bite for every one, and there's a good piece of Dutch cheese left."

There was a bite for every one, except perhaps for Peter Cradd, who suddenly awoke to the realisation that he had dispensed the whole joint without serving himself. No one, however, appeared anxious to notice the fact. He helped himself to some potatoes and watery cabbage and looked around. Not one of his family had made the slightest attempt at any change in his or her toilette. Henry's fingers were ink-stained, and by the side of his plate was one of those eternal catalogues. His hair was stiff and unparted. His tie had moved sideways. His finger nails were not above reproach. The colour of George's shirt in the twilight seemed even more offensive than in the morning, the wrong shade of blue, the tie, impossibly assertive. the clothes unhrushed. Mrs. Cradd was exactly as she had been at breakfast, only a little more dishevelled. There was a smut upon her face; she had assisted, it seemed, in the kitchen. Her hands were red and moist. A button had come off the front of her gown. Her day seemed to have been spent between disputes and slumber. Lena alone appeared to rise a little above her surroundings, from the fact of her complete contempt of them. She ate quickly and she furtively watched the window. Without waiting for the promised cheese, she brought out her tarnished mirror and remnant of lipstick, and commenced her mild effort at self-adornment. After which, she rose.

"Going out for a bit," she announced. "See you all later."

The same phrase, the same habitude, but this time interrupted by a curious and unexpected phenomenon.

"Sit down again, Lena," her father ordered. She stared at him with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her lips.

"What say. Dad?" she demanded.

Peter Cradd was sitting quite upright. As they all remembered afterwards, there was a curious, compelling look about him.

"Be so good as to resume your place, Lena," he enjoined. "I have something to say to you all."

"I've got a date," she muttered hesitatingly.

Her father pointed to her chair, and she relapsed into it without a word. Mrs. Cradd's mouth was a little open and she was too astonished for speech. Henry had looked up from his catalogue of motor bicycles. George was leaning back, with his hands in his pockets. What was the governor going to spring upon them, anyway?

"I wish," Peter Cradd began, "to enter into a brief discussion with you all, the members of my family—you, Harriett, and you, Lena, you, George, and you, Henry. I have never seemed to count for much with any one of you in your lives. I've just been the poor sucker, struggling against fate to provide you all with food and a roof. Now I want to ask you something. My first question to you all will be academic—if you, any of you, know what that means—and to judge by the literature you've all indulged in since you left school, I should doubt it; but there it is. It is a question in the air, if you understand me. I ask it out of curiosity. It may have no relation to present facts. I shall start with you, Harriett. What would you do if you suddenly became a rich woman?"

"What's the use of talking such trash?" Mrs. Cradd protested, as soon as she had recovered from the first shock of her husband's composed speech. "How are we going to get rich, I should like to know. It's borrow, borrow, borrow, debt, debt, debt, until we don't know where to turn to get food because of the bills we owe, and you sit there and ask what should I do if I were a rich woman?"

"Nevertheless," her husband begged, "humour me. I may be an unenterprising, unsuccessful fool. I may have failed in my first duty, which is to provide you all with food and shelter and clothing, but there are times when you should remember that I have done my best, even if I have failed. Now, please answer my question, Harriett."

Mrs. Cradd consented, without further protest, to this incursion into the land of dreams. She half closed her eyes.

"I should take the empty house at the corner of the street," she said, "next to the Vicarage. I should have three maids with white streamers and black dresses. I should ask every one I don't know here, and who's been rude to us, to tea, and I should give 'em tea and champagne ices, and tell them what I thought of them. That's what I should like to do! And I'd go round to the tradespeople who've bullied and worried us, and I'd place the money down on the counters, and I'd say—'Now you can all of you go to—hell! We're going to deal somewhere else!' And afterwards—?"

"Well, I think that might do," her husband interrupted. "What about you, Lena?"

The girl yawned as she put away her mirror.

"I should buy a two-seater car," she announced, "join the Tennis Club, and Golf Club, and make friends with some of the nice people round here who go up to the West End. Then I should try to get made a member of one of the really nice dancing clubs there, and dance every night —dance, dance, dance."

"And you, George?"

The young man smiled condescendingly.

"Well," he said, "I don't know that Lena's so far out. I should like to belong to Ciro's, and dine there as often as I wanted to. I should like to get a job in a stockbroker's office, get there at eleven o'clock and leave at four. I should like a coupe car, and a little flat of my own somewhere near Jermyn Street."

"And you, Henry?"

Henry tapped fiercely with his knuckles upon the catalogue he'd been reading.

"I," he answered, "would like to have a Number One, ten-horse-power Douglas motor bicycle. I should like to chuck all work, and I should like to ride until I was tired from town to town, stay at the best hotels, drink as much champagne as I wanted, wander round the place afterwards, and do what I jolly well pleased without having to get up at eight o'clock next morning to be at my office."

Peter Cradd had listened to every member of his household with the same careful and rapt attention. When they had finished, he knew that this terrible thought, which had been lurking in his mind for so long, was built upon a solid foundation. He hated his family. For some subtle reason, there was not a shadow of sympathy between him and any one of them. He hated them all. He had known beforehand just about what they would say. He had known beforehand, only to despise their narrow vision. And from his place in front of that empty table, where not one small piece of that scrag of mutton had been left for him, over his parboiled potatoes, over the untidy and uninviting head of the woman who had been his peevish companion for all these years, he looked out into the velvety twilight and up into the faint flare towards the starlit horizon, and in that moment he framed and enunciated his great lie.

"These questions," he said, "have not been altogether purposeless. I beg you not to take me too seriously, but there appears to me to be a reasonable chance that at some time during the near future you may be in a position to indulge in your various whims."

One might have expected astonishment. Instead, there remained incredulity mixed with a faint scorn. It was a curious fact, and one which Peter Cradd in those days had often been forced to realise, that not one of his family believed in him. They had, in fact, the most intense contempt for his career, his achievements, and his intellect. The books he sometimes read were strange to them. The walks he took were in regions they would, at any time, have avoided. There were remarks which sometimes fell from him which they never understood. There were seeds of curious thoughts, of sarcasm or sympathy in his conversation, which left them blankly unaware of his meaning. Their one feeling with regard to him was a lukewarm pity mingled with contemptuous self-commiseration that such a parent should have been visited upon them. So, in these few moments not one of them in their wildest imaginings believed that by any possible turn of the wheel of fate could fortune have come to so undeserving a recipient. Lena once more rose from her place. Henry turned back to his catalogue. George counted over the coins in his pocket, wondering how best to waste them. Mrs. Cradd frowned at her husband.

"What's the good of all this, Peter?" she demanded. "What are you getting them all started up for?"

"My dear," was the polite response, "I have had news to-day. Something has happened."

Again they all turned towards him—this time faintly hopeful. What could happen to the family of Cradd that was not for the better—The master of the house proceeded in his magnificent mendacity.

"I've a cousin in New Zealand," he confided, "of whom I do not suppose that one of you has ever heard. He is a wealthy man. So far as I know, I am almost his nearest relative. He has expressed a desire to see me at once. He has sent the money for me to start upon the voyage— the full fare. He has also sent sufficient money to provide for the household during my absence."

The bombshell had fallen indeed. They stared at him breathlessly. And then, Peter Cradd, in those few seconds, was vouchsafed the gift of clear-sightedness. He looked from one to the other, and he read the thoughts of each. There was Henry, his narrow eyes sticking out, his right hand still grasping that catalogue. Enough to support the household! Would there be enough to help him attain the aching desire of his days? There was George by his side, also engaged in greedy speculations. Would there be enough to enable him to go to that tailor in the Strand which he could seldom pass without a little stab at his heart? There was Lena, her really rather nice eyes wide open now, wondering, wondering how much this meant, whether it might not be a proper and decent step into another world? And opposite him was Harriett, grimly suspicious, doubtful, unable to bring herself to believe that such a man as Peter Cradd could own a cousin with real money, or if he did, one who would want to see him.

"Hitherto," Peter Cradd proceeded, "I have handed to you, Harriett, for housekeeping, the sum of four pound ten a week, which to my great regret, you have found insufficient, so that we have been frequently, I fear, annoyed with troublesome trades-people. You, George, and you, Henry, have lived here, paying nothing for your board, and I have occasionally advanced you small sums towards your expenses. Lena, I think, has paid ten shillings a week, but that has been more than crossed out by the premium I paid to Mrs. Maloney for her education in the art of manicuring. The other expenses in connection with the house I have borne myself. My salary has been, as you know, four hundred a year. Of that I believe that I have retained as much as eighteen pounds during nearly twelve months. I remind you of these financial facts so that you may not feel uneasy. My departure will leave you better off. My cousin has sent the sum of one thousand pounds to keep my household going during the period of my absence."

No one believed it. George and Henry exchanged quick glances. Neither of them had the slightest doubt as to what had happened. They had always looked upon the governor as half balmy; now he'd gone off the deep end altogether. That purposeless laugh itself was adequate proof. Mrs. Cradd had the same thought. She began to dab at her eyes with a soiled and unpleasant fragment of linen.

"I am in a position," Mr. Cradd continued, producing his only slightly reduced roll of notes, "to start you off a week or two, as I am compelled to leave to-morrow before noon. Here, you will see, are four hundred pounds. There is a fifty-pound note, Henry, for your bicycle. I think that during my absence you need not worry about any attempt to contribute to the household expenses. With regard to your own projects, George, at present I am not able to help you indulge these, but here is fifty pounds, with which I should suggest that you find some linen of less offensive design, and some clothes which would enable you, if the time should come, to assume the dignity of a flat in Jermyn Street. And Lena, you have spoken to me of a few bills. Here is your fifty pounds. Let there be no more question of bills. And remember, if at any time money is a necessity, appeal to your mother. She will have plenty in hand. Appeal to your mother, and your mother only. None of you," he went on, "need contribute to the expenses of the household. It is my desire —my cousin's desire, I should say— that you have an easy and a pleasant time during my absence. Here are two hundred and fifty pounds, Harriett, which I pay over to you. You will discharge all outstanding bills. You will, I hope, engage a more experienced servant and save yourself all unnecessary labour. The remainder of the thousand pounds promised by my cousin is in the hands of his solicitors, Messrs. Spearmain, Armitage and Spearmain, of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It will be paid to you at the rate of fifteen pounds a week and if my stay in New Zealand is protracted it will probably be increased. You see, therefore, that you will have no anxiety in the matter of finances."

"Christ!" George exclaimed, clutching his notes.

"I'm all in!" Henry muttered, poring over his catalogue.

"Dad, I'm going to shriek!" Lena exclaimed.

"Who is this cousin of yours?" Harriett demanded suspiciously.

"His name is the same as my own, and he is a wealthy sheep farmer," was the calm reply. "I am going out to see him, and I have reason to believe that for the rest of our days we shall be able to work our way on to whatever success we may deserve without being cramped by poverty. Remember that, all of you. Money is not a thing to be thrown away. Its greatest use on this earth is to enable one to live with dignity. That's all there is to be said. I should be glad if you would help me pack, Harriett. I am leaving to-night to meet the young man who is to take me down to Tilbury where I join the steamer, and sail to-morrow morning."

Harriett was speechless. The whole party seemed for a moment to have become stupefied. Then Peter Cradd rose to his feet and the spell was broken.

"Hurrah!" cried Henry.

"Dad!" Lena exclaimed, throwing her arms round his neck. "Who would have imagined you had a cousin like that! My bills paid! Sha'n't I be curt with my clients, now I haven't got to cadge for tips."

"I shall have a tea next week," Mrs. Cradd announced.

"I'm going to write off for this bike," Henry declared, making his way to the writing table.

"I shall take Lottie to the cinema," George shouted, springing up. "See you later."

They all dispersed in pursuit of their own chosen pleasures— Lena blandly indifferent to her mother's appeals for help in packing her father's clothes. Peter Cradd resumed his seat. He looked around at the four empty places and experienced the sweet relief of solitude. It was at that moment he began to wonder what life might really be like.