Читать книгу The Secret of the Barbican and Other Stories - J. S. Fletcher - Страница 3

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At five minutes to one o’clock on that spring Saturday afternoon, Ledbitter, senior clerk at Watson & Metcalfe’s, contractors, of Walford, had no other idea in his mind than that of joy that the week-end interval was near at hand. He was a hard-working, cheerfully energetic young man, who never shirked his job from Monday to Saturday—but he was always thankful when Saturday arrived. Saturday meant so much. Ledbitter was a husband of three years’ standing, and there was a youthful Ledbitter at home, who was just beginning to walk and talk. On Saturday afternoons Ledbitter took him out in the Park, guiding his tottering steps, and conversing with him about the ducks and wild-fowl on the ponds. Moreover, Saturday heralded Sunday. On Sunday you could stay in bed an hour longer and eat all your meals without hurrying; on Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Ledbitter took the rising hope to see his grandparents. Oh, yes, Saturday and Sunday were oases in the desert of labour—splendid days of rest and leisure. No fear, said Ledbitter, of a man like himself failing to appreciate them. Three minutes more, and the clock would strike one, and he would be free to race home, and——

Sharman, the manager, came across to Ledbitter’s desk as the clerk was locking it up.

“You posted that tender of Steel & Cardyke’s all right yesterday?” he asked.

“Yesterday, yes!” answered Ledbitter. “Last night it was.”

“Registered it, of course?” said Sharman.

“Yes, it was registered,” replied Ledbitter.

Sharman took up a book that lay on the desk and turned it over.

“I don’t see the receipt,” he remarked. “Haven’t you pasted it up?”

“It’s in another waistcoat pocket at home,” answered Ledbitter. “I’ll bring it Monday.”

“Don’t forget,” said Sharman. “You should always paste these receipts up at once. It’s all we’ve got to show the governors that a tender’s been sent.”

He turned away to his own desk, and Ledbitter said good-morning and hurried out. He was glad to get out, glad that Sharman had not kept him talking—had not looked at him. For in the very act of telling Sharman that he had posted the tender to London, and that the receipt for it was at home, Ledbitter suddenly remembered that he had neither posted it nor had any receipt for it, and he went away from the office curiously afraid.

Ledbitter was one of those wise young men who know when they have got a good job, and who would rather do anything than lose it. He had been with Watson & Metcalfe seven years, and his salary was four pounds per week, and it was steadily increasing. He was a good servant, and he had good masters, and up to now he never remembered making a mistake since he picked up a pen in Watson & Metcalfe’s service. But here was a bad one. He had forgotten to post a tender which involved a sum of half a million of money! It was no formidable document in appearance, to be sure. The tender, a mere matter of round figures, was written—by Watson himself—on an ordinary sheet of office notepaper and enclosed in an ordinary office envelope, sealed and blue pencilled.

If it had only been a big, heavy document, Ledbitter would never have forgotten it. But, being as small as it was, he had slipped it within an inside pocket of a winter waistcoat which he was wearing on the previous morning, intending to register it when he went home to dinner—and it had escaped his memory. How he could have been so forgetful he could not think. But he did remember that on going home he had found that winter waistcoat becoming much too warm, and had changed it for a lighter one. Of course, the tender was safe enough—he would hurry home and get it off. And, after all, it would be in time. The tenders which Steel & Cardyke were inviting had to be delivered, by post or by hand, at their office in London by four o’clock on the following Monday. Heaps of time—if he got the tender off at once, as he would take care to do. The only thing he was afraid of was that Sharman, if he inspected the post-office receipt, might notice that the letter had not been handed in on Friday, but on Saturday. However, Sharman would be satisfied, most likely, to hear that the receipt had been pasted up in the book kept for that purpose, and would not even glance at it. And the great thing was to get the tender off so that it would be in London first thing on Monday morning.

Ledbitter lived in a small bandbox of a house, just outside the centre of the town. There was a pleasant odour of beefsteak and onions in the hall when he opened the door, and his wife, on hearing his step, immediately called to him that dinner was ready.

But Ledbitter self-denyingly shouted an entreaty for delay, and darted up the stairs to his bedroom. He dashed at a wardrobe wherein he kept his garments, and a moment later began to yell over the top of the staircase:

“Fanny, where’s that winter waistcoat of mine?” he vociferated. “Where’s it got to? You know, the one I took off yesterday noon when I came home to dinner.”

Mrs. Ledbitter looked out of the back-parlour door.

“Bless me, Herbert,” she exclaimed, “you must be losing your memory! Don’t you remember that you told me a fortnight ago, that you’d about done with that old waistcoat, and that when you left it off this spring I could sell it with a lot of other old clothes of yours? I sold a whole bundle of stuff yesterday afternoon. And, by the by——”

Ledbitter let out a groan that seemed to shake the house. He made two leaps down the stairs. His wife opened her lips to scream, but the scream died as she caught a full sight of his white face.

“You—you sold it!” he stammered hoarsely. “Good heavens! To whom?”

“Milson’s, of course!” answered Mrs. Ledbitter. “But, as I was saying——”

Ledbitter was already at the door. He was quite deaf and half blind as he dashed at the gate of the little garden and darted into the street. His wife’s cry might as well have been addressed to the paving-stones.

“Herbert, Herbert, come back! I say, Herbert!” she called after him. “If you’re wanting——”

But Ledbitter was utterly obsessed by one idea, and he ran madly away towards the town.

Milson was well known in Walford. He dealt—extensively—in second-hand clothing. He would buy every and any article, no matter what its age and condition. He gave good prices for what he bought. That was one side of his business. The other was his selling side. It was a mystery to the curious what Milson did with the cast-off garments that he purchased. But there was this fact, that he had always in stock an enormous quantity of second-hand clothes, at ridiculously cheap figures, which looked almost as good as new. Cast-off garments went into one department at Milson’s, passed through some extraordinary transformation in another, and emerged in a third looking quite spick and span, carefully cleaned and pressed, and ticketed at prices which encouraged purchasers to buy half a dozen suits at once.

Ledbitter dashed into Milson’s main shop and ran up against Milson himself—a little podgy man with a goatee beard and a large cable chain of heavy gold across his ample girth. He buttonholed him without ceremony, and made an effort to get his breath.

“You bought some cast-off clothes from my wife yesterday!” he gasped. “Mrs. Ledbitter, Acacia Terrace—you know.”

“Quite right, my boy,” answered Milson affably. “Price quite satisfactory, I hope?”

“Hang the price!” said Ledbitter. “I want a certain winter waistcoat that was amongst those things—a dark red ground with black spots in it, flannel-lined. Must have it. She shouldn’t have sold it.”

“Very sorry, my boy, but it’s impossible,” replied the second-hand clothes dealer, rubbing his beringed hands. “Odd, now, but I sold that there waistcoat as soon as I’d bought it. I put your wife’s little lot down on that very counter to sort ’em out when I came in from calling on her, and just then there was a feller walked in as took a fancy to that waistcoat, and bought it straight off—with other warm things what he’d come special for. He was a feller, my boy, as was just going to emigrate, d’ye see, to Canada.”

“Canada!” exclaimed Ledbitter. “Is—is he off?”

Milson removed a large cigar from the corner of his lips and waved it in the air expansively.

“I should say he might by now, my boy,” he answered. “It runs in my mind that he said he was going to-day. He was a feller, d’ye see, that was going what they call going prospecting, in the old regions of ice and snow, where the bitter winds do blow, my boy, and he thought it ’ud be a good notion to take a nice bundle of warm stuff out with him. Which,” concluded Milson, digging his hands into his pockets and rattling his money—“which, my boy, I sold him with pleasure. And with profit—mutual, of course.”

Ledbitter had grown deadly calm. For the first time in his life he began to know what book-writing folk mean when they talk about the calmness of despair.

“You don’t know where this man lived in Walford?” he asked.

“You’re wrong, my boy, for I do!” replied Milson. “Or I should say did, for, as I observed previous, I should think he’s gone. He was a navvy feller, d’ye see, and his name was Terry, and his address was Barcoe’s lodging-house, round the corner in Mill Street. I sent him his parcel there last night. And what might you be wanting that particular waistcoat for, Mr. Ledbitter, now? Because——”

But Ledbitter was out of the door and running across the road towards Mill Street. That was a narrow alley in the poorest quarter of the town, and it was celebrated for its registered lodging-houses. Ledbitter looked for Barcoe’s as he might have looked for something of inexpressible value. He caught sight of the name at last, in white letters on a black board, and he dashed through a group of men, sitting on the door-steps, into a white-washed passage, to find himself confronting the deputy, a big, bullying-looking fellow who scowled at him as if he took him for an unwelcome visitor.

“Now, then, mister?” demanded this person.

“Have you got a man named Terry here?” panted Ledbitter. “He was here yesterday, I know. Milson, the clothes-dealer, says he was here. I want him—at once.”

“Do yer?” sneered the deputy. “Don’t you wish yer may get him, then! He’s off, mister.”

“Where?” demanded Ledbitter.

“Canada,” retorted the deputy. “That’s where he’s gone. ’Taint exactly next door, neither.”

“But—which way?” entreated Ledbitter. “Where−-you know what I mean—what place is he sailing from?”

The deputy folded his enormous arms, bared to the shoulders, and scratched his elbows. He sized Ledbitter up.

“What do you want to know for?” he growled. “I ain’t going to give my customers’ private business away to no strangers. You ain’t a ’tec.—I knows that, but you might be a lawyer’s clerk by the look of yer.”

Ledbitter rose to the occasion—gladly.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “We want this Terry—something to his advantage—bit of money, you know. If I can catch him before he sails, eh?”

He slipped a half-crown into the deputy’s hand, and the deputy relaxed.

“Oh, if that’s it, mister!” he said. “Well, he went off to Liverpool this morning—him and a mate of his name of Scaby. They expected to sail late to-night or early to-morrow, didn’t know which, so they went in good time. On the Starnatic they was going, so I heard ’em say—steerage, ov course. You ain’t ever seen this Terry? Big, red-haired chap—”

But Ledbitter was off again. He leapt through the idlers at the door, ran down the street, and made for the Central Station. As he ran three names beat themselves on his aching brain like unappeasable steam-hammers: Terry—Liverpool—Starnatic! Starnatic—Liverpool—Terry! Liverpool—Terry—Starnatic! Everything else in the world was blotted out. He had no home, no wife, no baby, no nothing! He never would have anything until he seized that infernal letter.

He dashed into the booking-office of the big station and clapped a sovereign on the ledge of the ticket window, hoarsely demanding to be booked to Liverpool.

“How—how soon is there a train?” he faltered. “Soon?”

The clerk turned an unconcerned eye at the clock.

“If you do double time up No. 6,” he answered, as he pushed ticket and change across the ledge, “you’ll just catch or just miss one.”

Ledbitter ran. He was dimly aware of colliding with various moving bodies in his progress. Some of them were soft and yielding, and they cried out. Some were hard, and they hurt him. Then a guard used severe language, and threw him into some receptacle, where he fell into a corner. Presently he looked up, and found himself in an otherwise empty carriage. The train was moving. Outside its windows he caught a glimpse of the big dome of Walford Town Hall. It slid away. So did the spire of the parish church. So did the roofs and chimneys of the last outskirts of Walford. Then Ledbitter realised matters, and he put his throbbing head in his hands and groaned heavily.