Читать книгу White Face - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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AFTER Janice had left, Dr. Marford walked slowly to that corner of the surgery where his drugs were stocked and began to dispense the medicines he had prescribed in the course of the day. This was generally his afternoon task, but he had spent most of the day at the clinic.

He wearied of the task very soon and went to his desk. There was a heap of papers to go through—the accounts from the clinic showed a heavy deficit. The place ate money: there was always new apparatus to buy, new equipment to furnish. The daily report from the convalescent home in Eastbourne, which maintained the progress of a dozen small hooligans of Tidal Basin, was as cheerless; but it brought no sense of depression to Dr. Marford. He grudged nothing to these ventures of his—neither time nor exertion.

He was expecting a remittance almost any day. There was a man in Antwerp who sent him money regularly, and another in Birmingham—he pushed the papers aside, looked at his watch and went out by the side door into the yard.

It was a fairly large yard. At one end was the big shed in which old Gregory Wick's kept his taxicab, paying a small weekly rent.

Old Gregory Wicks had been a famous driver even in the days of the festive hansom. And always he had housed his horses and his resplendent cab in Tidal Basin, where he was born and where he hoped to end his days. In his advanced middle age came the taxicab. Gregory refused to regard motor vehicles as new-fangled crazes that would soon go out of fashion. He was one of the first to sit at a driving wheel at a motor school and solve the mysteries of clutches and gears. He found his lameness no obstacle in obtaining a cab-driver's licence—he limped from a thirty-year-old injury to his ankle.

Always he was a night bird; even in the horse cab he went clop-clopping along Piccadilly in the early hours of the morning, picking up swells from the clubs and driving them unimaginable distances to their country houses. And when the taxi came he continued his nocturnal wanderings. A silent, taciturn man, who never stood on a rank or invited the confidence of his brother drivers, he was known locally and abroad for his rigid honesty. It was he who restored to a certain Austrian baron a million kroners in hard paper cash, left in the cab by the Herr Baron in a moment of temporary aberration caused by a quarrel with a lady friend. Old Gregory had returned thousands of pounds' worth of goods left by absent-minded riders. In the police books he was marked "Reliable; honest; very excellent record."

You could see him and his cab on certain nights prowling along Regent Street, his long, white hair hanging over the collar of his coat, his fierce white moustache bristling from his pink, emaciated face, choosing his fares with a nice discrimination. He had no respect for any man save one. In his more than seventy-year-old arms he packed a punch that was disconcerting to the punchee.

The doctor unfastened a door and passed through into Gallows Court. That narrow and unsavoury passage was alive with children—bare-legged, unwashed and happy. Nobody offered the doctor a friendly greeting. The frowsy men and women lounging in the doorways or at the upstairs windows favoured him with incurious glances. He was part of the bricks and mortar and mud of the place, one with the brick wall which separated his yard from this human sty. He belonged there, had a right in Gallows Court, and, that being so, might pass without notice or comment.

The last house in the court was No. 9; smaller than the others; the windows were clean, and even the lower one, which was heavily shuttered, had a strip of chintz curtain. He knocked at the door—three short quick raps, a pause and a fourth. This signal had been agreed as between himself and old man Wicks; for Gregory had been annoyed by runaway knocks and by the appearance on his doorstep of unwelcome visitors. He knew the regular hour at which the milkman called and the baker, and could cope with them. Whosoever else knocked at the door during the daytime received no answer. Marford heard the shuffle of feet on uncarpeted stairs and the door was opened.

"Come in, Doctor." Gregory's voice was loud and hearty. He had been a shouter all his life, and age had not diminished the volume of his tone. "Don't make a row; I expect the lodger's asleep," he said as he closed the door with a slam.

"He must be a very good sleeper if you don't wake him, you noisy old man!" said Marford, with his quiet smile.

Gregory guffawed all the way up the stairs, opened the door of his room and the doctor passed in. "How are you?"

"Fit as a flea, except this other little trouble, and I'm not going to mention that. I'm doing fine. Doctor. Sit down. Where's a chair? Here we are! What I owe to you, Doctor! If the people in Tidal Basin knew what you've done for me—"

"Yes, yes," said Marford good-humouredly. "Now let me have a look at you."

He turned the old man's face to the light and made a careful examination.

"You're no better and no worse. If anything you're a little better, I should think. I'll test your heart."

"My heart!" said the other scornfully. "I've got the heart of a lion! There was an Irish family moved in here and the woman wanted to borrow a saucepan, and when I told her just what I thought of people who borrow saucepans, along came her husband—a new fellow, full of brag and bluster! I gave him one smack in the jaw and that was his finish!"

"You shouldn't do it, Gregory. It was a stupid thing to do. I heard about it from one of my other patients."

The old man was chuckling gleefully.

"I needn't have done it at all," he said. "Any of the boys round here would have put him out if I'd said the word. I dare say the lodger would, but of course I wouldn't have wakened him up."

"Is he here to-day?"

Gregory shook his head. "The Lord knows! I never hear him come in or go out, except sometimes. I've never known a quieter fellow. Reformed, eh, Doctor? I'll bet you I know who reformed him! You'd never dream"—he lowered his voice—"that he was a man who'd spent half his life in stir—"

"You're giving him a chance," said Marford.

He was going, when the old man called him back. "Doctor, I want to tell you something. I made my will to-day—not exactly a will, but I wrote down what I wanted doing with my money."

"Have you got a lot, Gregory?" asked the other good-humouredly.

"More than you think." There was a significance in the old man's voice. "A lot more! It's not money that makes me do what I'm doing—it's pride—swank!"

To most men who had known him for years, Gregory Wicks was a taciturn and uncommunicative man. Marford was one of the few who knew him. He often thought that this loquacity which Gregory displayed at home was his natural reaction to the hours of silence on the box. Night after night for nearly half a century this old cabman had placed himself under a vow of silence. Once he explained why, and the reason was so inadequate that Marford, who was not easily amused, laughed in spite of himself. Gregory had in a talkative moment allowed a client—he always called his fares "clients"—to wish a counterfeit half-crown upon him. It was a lesson never to be forgotten.

The doctor often came in to chat with the old man, to hear stories of dead and forgotten celebrities whose names were famous in the eighties and the late seventies. As he was leaving, Gregory referred again to his lodger.

"It was a good idea putting up that shutter to keep out the noise, though personally there's nothing that would stop me sleeping. I sometimes wish he'd be a bit more lively—"

"And come up and have a little chat with you at times?" suggested Marford.

Gregory almost shuddered.

"Not that! I don't want to chat with anybody, especially strangers. I chat with you because you've been God's-brother-Bill to me, to use a vulgar expression. I don't say I'd have starved, because I shouldn't have done. But I'd have lost something that I'd rather die than lose."

He came down to the door and stood looking out after the doctor, even when Marford was out of sight. The noisy children did not gibe at him, and none of these frowsy ones hurled their inevitable and unprintable jests in his direction. A wandering policeman they would have covered with derision. Only the doctor and Gregory Wicks escaped their grimy humour; the latter because of that ready fist of his, the doctor—well, you never know when the doctor will be called in, and if he's got a grudge against you who knows what he'll slip into your medicine? Or suppose he had to use the knife, eh? Nice so-and-so fool you'd look, lying under chloroform with your inn'ards at his mercy! Fear was a governing factor of life in Gallows Court.