Читать книгу The Man Who Bought London - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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THE "tube" lift was crowded, and Elsie Marion, with an apprehensive glance at the clock, rapidly weighed in her mind whether it would be best to wait for the next lift and risk the censure of Mr. Tack or whether she should squeeze in before the great sliding doors clanged together. She hated lifts, and most of all she hated crowded lifts. Whilst she hesitated the doors rolled together with a "Next lift, please!"

She stared at the door blankly, annoyed at her own folly. This was the morning of all mornings when she wished to be punctual.

Tack had been mildly grieved by her innumerable failings, and had nagged her persistently for the greater part of the week. She was unpunctual, she was untidy, she was slack to a criminal extent for a lady cashier whose efficiency is reckoned by the qualities which, as Tack insisted, she did not possess.

The night before he had assembled the cash girls and had solemnly warned them that he wished to see them in their places at nine o'clock sharp. Not, he was at trouble to explain, at nine-ten, or at nine-five, not even at nine-one—but as the clock in the tower above Tack and Brighton's magnificent establishment chimed the preliminary quarters before booming out the precise information that nine o'clock had indeed arrived, he wished every lady to be in her place.

There had been stirring times at Tack and Brighton's during the past three months. An unaccountable spirit of generosity had been evinced by the proprietors—but it had been exercised towards the public rather than in favour of the unfortunate employees. The most extraordinary reductions in the sale price of their goods and the most cheeseparing curtailments of selling cost had resulted—so traitorous members of the counting-house staff said secretly—in a vastly increased turnover and, in some mysterious fashion, in vastly increased profits.

Some hinted that those profits were entirely fictitious, but that were slander only to be hinted at, for why should Tack and Brighten, a private company with no shareholders to please or pain, go out of their way to fake margins? For the moment, the stability of the firm was a minor consideration.

It wanted seven minutes to nine, and here was Elsie Marion at Westminster Bridge Road Tube Station, and Tack and Brighton's Oxford Street premises exactly twelve minutes away. She shrugged her pretty shoulders. One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, she thought. But she was angry with herself at her own stupidity. The next lift would be as crowded—she was left in no doubt as to that, for it was full as soon as the doors were open—and she might have saved three precious minutes.

She was crowded to the side of the lift and was thankful that the unsavoury and often uncleanly patrons of the line at this hour in the morning were separated from her by a tall man who stood immediately before her.

He was bareheaded, and his grey hair was neatly brushed and pomaded. His high forehead, clean-cut aquiline nose and firm chin, gave him an air of refinement and suggested breed. His eyes were blue and deep-set, his lips a trifle thin, and his cheek-bones, without being prominent, were noticeable on his sun-tanned face. All this she took in in one idle glance. She wondered who he was, and for what reason he was a traveller so early in the morning. He was well-dressed, and a single black pearl in his cravat was suggestive of wealth. His hat he held between his two hands across his breast. He was an American, she gathered, because Americans invariably removed their hats in elevators when women were present.

The lift sank downward to the platform sixty feet below, and as it did she heard the faint sound of a "ting," which told her she had missed a train. That would mean another three minutes' wait. She could have cried with vexation. It was a serious matter for her—an orphan girl absolutely alone in the world and dependent upon her own exertions for a livelihood. Cashiers were a drug on the market, and her shorthand and typewriting lessons had only advanced to a stage where she despaired of their getting any further.

Her salary was very small, and she thought regretfully of the days when she had spent more than that on shoes, before dear old spendthrift Aunt Martha had died, leaving her adopted daughter with no greater provision for the future than a Cheltenham education, a ten-pound note, and a massive brooch containing a lock from the head of Aunt Martha's love of the sixties.

Between the beginning of a lift's ascent and the moment the doors open again a girl with the cares of life upon her can review more than a man can write in a year. Before the giant elevator touched bottom Elsie Marion had faced the future and found it a little bleak. She was aware, as she turned to make her exit, that the tall man before her was watching her curiously. It was not the rude stare to which she had now grown callous, but the deeper, piercing glance of one who was genuinely interested. She suspected the inevitable smut on her nose, and fumbled for her handkerchief.

The stranger stepped aside to let her pass down first, and she was compelled to acknowledge the courtesy with a little nod. He followed her closely, instinct told her that; but so many people were following closely in that hurried slither to the platform.

There was some time to wait—two full minutes—and she strolled to the deserted end of the platform to get away from the crowd. She disliked crowds at all times, and this morning she hated them.

"Excuse me!"

She had heard that form of introduction before, but there was something in the voice which now addressed her which was unlike any of the impertinent overtures to which she had grown accustomed.

She turned and confronted the stranger. He was looking at her with a pleasant little smile.

"You'll think I'm crazy, I guess," he said; "but somehow I just had to come along and talk to you—you're scared of elevators?"

She might have frozen him—at least, she might have tried —but for some unaccountable reason she felt glad to talk to him. He was the kind of man she had known in the heyday of Aunt Martha's prosperity.

"I am a little scared," she said, with a quick smile. "It is absurd, because they are so safe."

He nodded.

"I'm a little scared myself," he confessed easily. "Not that I'm afraid of dying, but when I think of the thousands of human beings whose future rests upon me and my life—why my hair goes up every time I cross the street."

He was not asking her to be interested in himself. She felt that he was just voicing a thought that had occurred to him in a simple, natural way. She looked at him with greater interest.

"I've just been buying a lunatic asylum," he said, and with an inquiring lift of his eyebrows, which at once asked permission and offered thanks when it was granted, he lit a cigar.

She stared at him and he laughed.

Whilst suspicion was gathering in her eyes, the train came hissing into the station.

The girl saw with dismay that it was crowded, and the mob which besieged each doorway was ten deep.

"You won't catch this," said the man calmly. "There'll be another in a minute."

"I'm afraid I must try," said the girl, and hurried along to where the surging throng were struggling to get aboard.

Her strange companion followed with long strides, but even with his assistance there was no chance of obtaining foothold, and she was left behind with a score of others. "Time's money," said the grey-haired stranger cheerfully. "Don't be mean with it!"

"I can't afford to be anything else," said the girl, pardonably exasperated. "Possibly you haven't to face the wrath of an employer with a watch in his hand and doom on his face."

She laughed a little in spite of her vexation.

"I'm so sorry," she pleaded; "but I did not intend allowing myself the luxury of a grumble about my worries—you were saying you have bought a lunatic asylum."

He nodded, a twinkle in his eye.

"And you were thinking I had just escaped from one," he said accusingly. "Yes, I've just bought the Coldharbour Asylum—lock, stock, and barrel—"

She looked at him incredulously.

"Do you mean that?" she asked, and her scepticism was justified, for the Coldharbour Asylum is the largest in London, and the second largest in the world.

"I mean it," he said. "I am going to build the cutest residential club in London on that site."

There was no time to say any more. Another train came in and, escorted by the grey-haired man, who in the shortest space of time had assumed a guardianship over her which was at once comforting and disconcerting, she found a seat in a smoking carriage. It was so easy to chat with him, so easy to confide hopes and fears which till that moment she had not put into words.

She found herself at Oxford Circus all too soon, and oblivious of the fact that the hands of the station clock pointed to twenty minutes after nine. "A sheep as a lamb," said her footsteps hollowly, as she went leisurely along the vaulted passage-way to the lift.

"Were you going to Oxford Circus?" she asked, suddenly seized with a fear that she had taken this purchaser of lunatic asylums out of his way.

"Curiously enough, I was," he said. "I'm buying some shops in Oxford Street at half-past nine."

Again she shot a swift glance at him, and he chuckled as he saw her shrink back a little.

"I am perfectly harmless," he said mockingly.

They stepped out into Argyll Street together, and he offered his hand.

"I hope to meet you again," he said, but did not tell her his name —it was King Kerry—though, he had read hers in the book she was carrying.

She felt a little uncomfortable, but gave him a smiling farewell. He stood for some time looking after her.

A man, unkempt, with a fixed, glassy look in his eye, had been watching the lift doors from the opposite side of the street. He started to cross as the grey-haired stranger made his appearance. Suddenly two shots rang out, and a bullet buzzed angrily past the grey man's face.

"That's yours, Mister!" howled a voice, and the next instant the owner was grabbed by two policemen.

A slow smile gathered at the corners of the grey man's lips.

"Horace," he said, and shook his head disapprovingly, "you're a rotten shot!"

On the opposite side of Oxford Street, a man watched the scene from the upper window of a block of offices.

He saw the racing policemen, the huge crowd which gathered in a moment, and the swaying figures of the officers of the law and their half-mad prisoner. He saw, too, a grey-haired man, unharmed and calm, slowly moving away, talking with a sergeant of police who had arrived on the scene at the moment. The watcher shook a white fist in the direction of King Kerry.

"Some day, my friend!" he said between his clenched teeth, "I will find a bullet that goes to its mark—and the girl from Denver City will be free!"