Читать книгу The Books of Bart - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

Table of Contents

EVERYBODY agreed that a man of twenty-eight was a poor sort of guardian for a girl of sixteen—everybody, that is, except Bart.

It is doubtful whether Bart ever knew his age or reckoned it by years.

He had accepted his trust solemnly and with an exalted sense of responsibility, and went to Cheltenham carrying a Teddy Bear and huge boxes of chocolates. He found a self-possessed orphan reading Browning under a lime tree, and pretended that he had picked up the Teddy Bear in the street. He even advertised his find in the Cheltenham Herald. That was years ago, before Fay came to live with him in the house which had been left by her mother to the erratic Bart.

It was a condition of the will that Fay should so live until her twenty-fifth birthday. Bart thought it was an excellent arrangement, and when people, very correct people, murmured “chaperon,” Bart said “Tush!” out loud and pointed to a housekeeper, a cook, several maids and a respectable butler.

Nobody need be in any sort of doubt as to the kind of man Bart was. His room described and explained him. Its most striking feature said “genius,” loudly and defiantly. The six-sheet poster which mercifully hid an oblong of the egregious wallpaper was emphatic on this point. It demanded that all the world should see “Caught by Fate,” a drama “of love, romance and action” (the phrase is lifted bodily from such letterpress as adorned the advertisement) by Bartholomew Foreman, “author of ‘Shattered Fibres,’ etc.” The lithographic portion of the poster represented a soulful lady in the grip of a villain; and however much, or however loudly, Bartholomew Foreman might deny the fact, there is no question that the lady’s face resembled that of Agatha Tamarand. There was that baby-blueness of eye, the same droopy little mouth and obstinate chin, the same thinness of cheek, and air of general discontent which distinguished Agatha in the life. The artist might very well have been supplied with the newest (as it was then) of Agatha’s picture-photographs, and Bartholomew possessed so many, that he could very well have spared one, without anyone being the wiser.

Fay Milton, coming into her guardian’s study, never saw that poster without a little smile of amusement, and amusement salted with contempt, for she lived too near this genius to share the glamour of his large and lovable mind.

If the distressed heroine was Agatha, who else was the villain, with his heavy full moustache and his exaggerated vacuity, than Harold Tirrell? Harold had protested incoherently, indignantly, at the unauthorized portraiture, and had referred ominously to his solicitors.

This adherence to nature had been responsible for the failure of “Caught by Fate,” for, however interesting an Agatha-like heroine might be to Bartholomew, and however paltry and scoundrel-like Harold might seem to his eyes, the public, knowing neither Agatha nor Harold, and accustomed to heroines more tender, and villains less vacuous, had voted the play a bore, and it had run for exactly six nights.

Bartholomew had drawn his characters too faithfully, that was the trouble.

“Make him a baronet, turn the woman into something young and innocent, put in a scene on the Thames Embankment by night, and there’s enough in the play to give it a long run.”

This was the verdict of Ohlson, who assisted with the finances of the play—he had put up a third of the cost, but so hedged about with contingencies that Bartholomew discovered at the end he had to pay the whole cost of the production himself.

The poster was not a solitary representative of its kind. There was a smaller, but less arresting, example of the lithographer’s art upon the wall over the bookcase. It proclaimed the marvellous qualities of Bart’s Boot Burnisher.

Bartholomew had invented his Burnisher, during one fussy, smelly week, when the kitchen became a place of noisome stinks, and his desk a litter of unsavoury messes. Here again something had gone wrong. Possibly Bartholomew’s superintendence of the advertisements had been at fault. He had insisted upon a range of humorous announcements, and it is an axiom in the advertising world that comic announcements do not draw trade. Money is a very serious thing and shrinks from ribaldry. Twelve hundred pounds this venture had cost, some four hundred and fifty of which Fay had contributed.

She could have paid the whole amount without any trouble, for she, the favourite niece of John Banter—as her mother had been his favourite sister—had been the heiress, through her mother, of his quarter million, but there was a streak of John Banter in her composition—and she wanted to punish Bartholomew for having engaged in a speculation against her advice.

There was nothing of John Banter in Bartholomew. He had loathed his wealthy, unforgiving uncle, and from the day when Bart, after a furious family quarrel, had circulated the fatal limerick which began:

There was a curmudgeon named Banter

Who lived very near a decanter....

his name had been anathema, and in the old man’s will was mentioned in a manner which afforded Bart almost as much glee as though he had been made heir to the property. For Bart’s legacy was that same decanter.

In the circumstances it was something of a tragedy that Mrs. Milton, dying a year after her brother, should have made Bart Foreman the sole executor of her estate, and co-trustee and guardian of her sixteen-year-old daughter. Bart was twenty-eight at the time, and in the eyes of the girl an aged man. At seventeen she respected him, at eighteen felt superior to him—at twenty she looked upon him with the contempt which capable youth has for middle-age failure. For Bart was not a success.

He had a thousand a year from his mother, and this, sufficient for his daily needs, was of little assistance to him in the crises which came so frequently in his life.

He wrote a novel and published it himself. He organized a lecture tour and financed it. He produced a new cure for neuralgia and put it on the market. The market, after an unconscionable period of reflection, had put it back on him. When the war broke out he offered his services, but was rejected on the eyesight test. Later, when that test was less rigid, he went to the Admiralty and did nothing in particular for two years.

In a score of ways you might trace the temperamental progress of Bartholomew Foreman by a careful examination of his room. It was a big apartment on the ground floor of 23, Colholm Place, Kensington. From the large, leaded windows on the north side there was a view of the garden, for Number 23 was one of those old-fashioned houses which boasted that bourgeoise appendage.

From the east side you overlooked Colholm Place, and a parallelogram of tree-shaded green, entirely surrounded by railings, where, on sunny afternoons, nursemaids gossiped, whilst their diminutive charges either slept in their expensive perambulators, or toddled recklessly about so much of the world as the railings enclosed.

One wall of the study was occupied by bookshelves, in which had assembled a whole tatter-demalion army of books, ranging from the costly volumes which Bartholomew purchased at sales, in moments of mental aberration, to the paper-covered novels which were the relics of innumerable railway journeys, and were now preserved because they contained “ideas” which Bartholomew had indicated with conspicuous blue pencil marks, though he could never recall the ideas they suggested when he came to examine the books.

The pictures which hung upon the walls were in excellent taste, the engravings, if modern, were pleasing, and the great china bowls which were kept filled with flowers all the year round, condoned, to some extent, the bizarre character of the other decorations.

On the left of a large desk (built to his own design) stood a japanned dictaphone into which, in moments of literary frenzy, Bartholomew might express the thoughts which arose in him.

Sometimes he forgot to pull the recording lever over, and the end of his efforts was a number of cylinders blandly blank and uncommunicative; whereupon he would write furious letters to the manufacturers, and they would send a pleasant young man to explain that unless the recording needle touched the wax it was impossible for the machine to do its work, since a dictaphone had no intuitions.

Picture this room, all speckled and flooded with the golden light of a sunny morning in May. Picture it in its tidiest aspect, with a desk clear of papers and a stretch of white blotting paper innocent of inky impression; with new nibs in agate pen-holders, a virgin jar of paste, the date of the month truthfully displayed in a red morocco case; with absolute serenity and quiet reigning in the house.

For Bartholomew Foreman was still in America offering a new life-saving boat to the Marine department—a boat which he had invented on the spur of the moment, whilst watching the children sail their little ships on the waters of Kensington Gardens.

He wrote a letter to Agatha Tamarand—one of many. It was addressed from the Manhattan Hotel, Forty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, to Mrs. Tamarand, 23, Penter Avenue, Chelsea, and ran: