Читать книгу The Road to London - Edgar Wallace - Страница 3

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GIVE a dog a bad name and hang him; give a woman a name which is neither Mary nor Jane, but hovers somewhere between the opposite ends of the poles, and she attracts to herself qualities and weaknesses which in some inevitable way are traceable to the misguided people who named her.

They who named October Jones were with the shades. There was only one of them had lived long enough to repent. October, under local and topical influences, had at various times and on particular occasions styled herself Doris Mabel and Mary Victoria and Gloria Wendy. At school she was Virginia Guinevere. She chose that name before she left home and had her baggage initialled "V.G.J."

"I'm afraid I can't get rid of the Joneses," she said thoughtfully, her disapproving eye upon them. "That old man of the sea will hang around with his chubby little knees under my ears until I'm dead."

"Or married," said her parent wearily.

He had been a tall man, hollow-cheeked, long-bearded. Children did not interest him. October bored him. His wife, in those days something of a social butterfly, he seldom saw. Moreover, October had a trick of borrowing rare volumes from his library and leaving them on the damp grass of the lawn, or wherever she happened to be when it started raining.

"Jones is a miserable kind of name," she suggested. "Can't you change it, daddy?"

Mr. Jones had sighed, and tapped his nose with a tortoiseshell paper-knife.

"It satisfied my father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and innumerable ancestors before them."

Her brows knit.

"Who was the first Jones?" she demanded.

"I suppose they came out of their protoplasm simultaneously," murmured Mr. Jones. "I wish you would get out of that habit, October."

October groaned.

"What's the matter with Virginia?" she asked.

There was nothing that was October in her appearance, though October is a red and brown month. She was pinkish and whitish; she had April eyes, and her hair was harvest colour, when the corn is growing red. Nobody ever called her Virginia or Alys or Gloria Wendy or Guinevere, or anything but October. The nearest she came to an acceptable nickname was when somebody, reasoning along intelligent lines, called her "Huit." In another age she would have been a Joan of Arc. Lost causes had for her an attraction that she could not resist. She was by turns a Socialist, a Worker of the World, an Anarchist, and a Good Christian Woman. Cross October in the pursuit of her legitimate rainbows, and she was terrible. Thwart her, and you trebled her resolution. Forbid her, and she bared her feet for the red hot shares across which she was prepared to walk for her convictions.

Mr. George Loamer, who was not greatly interested in women, young or old, accepted the guardianship which came to him on her mother's death without any idea of the complicated piece of mechanism he was taking in charge. In a sense he subdued her by his magnificent lack of comprehension. Her subtle sarcasms were wasted on a man whose subtlety was supplied by a mother of whom he stood in dread, and of whose existence October had not the slightest inkling, until one day when, crouched with a tramp behind certain bushes, she saw that eagle-faced woman pass. But that is anticipating.

This was Mary October Jones—she had acquired a "Mary" in passing—who was one day to take the London road, hide under hedges, creep into deserted factories, her companion a disreputable tramp with a black eye.

As to Mr. Loamer, her guardian...

There is a department at Scotland Yard which deals with Curious Happenings. In a big room, the double-windows of which look, across the Thames, sits a man who has no other business in life than to tabulate gossip. The by-products of fact that come into that gloomy building reach him and are noted. From the vast heaps of waste that are examined he sometimes extracts a few fine particles of golden truth which are often immensely valuable to the more prosaic branches of his profession.

Central Inspector Simpson strolled in one afternoon and found him poring over a grisly photograph which had come to him from an East London coroner's court.

"Pity that man Quilting had no friends or relations—got an idea this is the feller."

"Quilting?"

"In List C—Missing."

The inspector remembered.

"Queer coincidence—five—six people all in the same class. Men with money who have flutters on the market—no friends—all operated through Loamer's—all vanished."

Simpson sucked at his pipe glumly.

"Loamer handles thousands of accounts. You're thinking of Dr Elvington? Loamer reported that himself."

"In the past twenty years—" began the patient collector of news.

"Nonsense! Loamer is a very rich man."

"I wonder!" said the collector of gossip, who believed in nothing and nobody.

That same day Mr. Simpson had an interview with the head of the City Police, and certain investigations were put in trim—a few days too late, as it proved, to save October Jones from a great deal of fear and discomfort, and Mr. Nigel Black, that wealthy young man from New York, from several narrow escapes from death.