Читать книгу The Mind Readers - Margery Allingham - Страница 3

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The great city of London was once more her splendid self: mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.

In the tightly packed clusters of villages with the ancient names—Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow—new towers were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces, if fewer, were neater; the old houses were painted; the monuments were clean.

Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostled together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future.

Early one Thursday evening, late in the year at one particular moment, just before the rush hour, when the lights were coming up and the shadows deepening, five apparently unrelated incidents in five ordinary, normal lives were taking place at points set far apart within the wide boundaries of the town. Five people, none of whom was particularly aware of the others, were taking the first casual steps in one of those mystic, curling patterns of human adventure that begin with imperceptible movement, like the infinitesimal commotion which surrounds a bud thrusting through the earth but which then sometimes develops, gathers speed and swells and grows up swiftly into a huge and startling plume to alter the whole landscape of history.

The first of the five was no more than an idle thought. The D.D.I. of the Eastern Waterside Division of Metropolitan Police was sitting in his office kicking himself gently because he had forgotten to tell his old friend Detective Superintendent Charles Luke of the Central Office, who had just left after a routine visit, a little piece of nonsense which might have intrigued that great man. They had been so busy moralizing over the effects of the latest threat of total world annihilation on the local suicide rate among teenagers that he had quite forgotten his own story about that well-known city “character,” the End of the World Man, which had come into his mind and gone out again while Luke was talking.

It was an odd thing he had seen with his own eyes as he had traveled through the West End in a police car at the end of the summer. As he had passed the corner of Wigmore Street and Orchard Street up by the park, he had observed the familiar figure of the old fanatic in the dusty robes and hood, carrying his banner proclaiming the worst, striding away from him among the shopping crowds on the pavement. Less than four minutes later by his own watch after a clear run, he had seen him again, head on this time, walking up the Haymarket from the direction of the Strand. So, as Luke might possibly have been entertained to hear, the man had either developed a power of miraculous transportation, which seemed unlikely on form, or there were two of him dressed exactly alike and one of them at any rate taking great care to resemble the other. This was funny in view of what he and Luke had been saying about the increase of interest in these people’s gloomy subject.

The second stirring in the hard ground, taking place at exactly the same time, was a conversation which occurred on the western side of the city, where two people were talking in a Regency rectory in a half-forgotten backwater called St. Peter’s Gate Square.

They were in a book-filled study, the smaller of two downstairs reception rooms. Canon Avril had lived there so long that the tremendous changes which had dismembered the world outside had come very gently to his own household. Now in his old age, a widower for many years, his daughter married and away, he lived on the ground floor humbly but comfortably while William Talisman, his verger, made his home in the basement and Mrs. Talisman kept an eye on them both.

Upstairs there was the canon’s daughter’s suite, which was now let as a pied-à-terre to his nephew Mr. Albert Campion and his wife when they visited London; and above that there was a cottagelike attic flat, at the moment also let to relatives. These were Helena Ferris and her brilliant young American husband, who fled to it whenever they could escape from the island research station on the East Coast where he was working.

The canon was a big man with a great frame and untidy white hair. He had a fine face which, despite its intelligence, was almost disconcertingly serene. He had seen the neighborhood decline from Edwardian affluence to near-slum conditions and now edge back again to moneyed elegance. Throughout all the changes his own income had remained the same and his present poverty could have been agonizing, but he had few needs and no material worries whatever. He was certainly shabby, and it was true that at the end of each week it was literally impossible to borrow so much as a shilling from him, but he remained not only happy but secure throughout the harrowing crises which so often sprang up around him. Nor was he a visionary. There was an intensely practical element in his outlook, even if it was apt to appear slightly out of alignment to those who were unaware that he did not stand in the dead center of his own universe.

One of his most practical and sensible innovations was in the room with him at the moment, interrupting him almost unbearably with her well-meaning chatter.

Miss Dorothy Warburton was a thin maiden lady of certain everything—income, virtue and age—and she lived in one of the two cottages just past the church next door. She managed the canon’s personal finances in exactly the same way as she managed the church fête—that is to say, firmly, openly and, of course, down to the last farthing. He had no privacy, nothing of his own, no excuses. His charities, which were his only extravagance, were subject to her scrutiny and had to be justified, and this kept him factual and informed about what things did or did not cost. However, apart from these, material considerations were not permitted to weigh upon him, and he never forgot how blessed he was or how much he owed his dear Decimal Dot, as he called her.

On her side she respected him deeply, called him her “church work” and bossed him as she would certainly have done a father. Mercifully she did not consider herself unduly religious, seeing her role as a Martha rather than a Mary, and it may have been something to do with the classic resentment which made her a little insensitive where he was concerned, especially when she was curious.

This was the hour which the canon liked to set aside. It had become for him a period of intense technical and professional activity for which few gave him credit. He never explained, being well aware of the pitfalls in that direction, but accepted interruptions meekly if he could not avoid them. On the other hand, he never permitted himself to be discouraged from what he felt was his chief duty. With the years he had become one of the more practiced contemplative minds in a generation which largely neglected the art; simple people often thought him lovable but silly, and those who were not so simple, dangerous. Avril could not help that; he did what he had to do and looked after his parish, and every day he sat and thought about what he was doing and why and how he was doing it.

Miss Warburton could not make out what he was up to, wasting time and not even resting, and every so often when she had an excuse, she used to come in and prod him to find out.

Today she was full of news and chatter.

“House full tomorrow!” she said brightly. “You will enjoy that! Albert and Amanda and their little nephew Edward, and Helena and Sam, all home for half term. That will be lovely for you and such a change!”

Avril knew it would be. After weeks of having the place empty he could hardly miss it. It was she who was most lonely, he feared, and he let her chatter on. “Mrs. Talisman is baking a cake in case they ask Superintendent Luke over. She thinks that because she can cook and lives in a basement it’s the correct thing to do, since he’s a policeman! I wonder she doesn’t make it a rabbit pie and have done with it since we’re all out to be Victorian. Poor Martin Ferris. He works far too hard on that dreadful electronics island.”

“Does he?”

“It sounds like it, if he can’t be spared for a weekend up here with his family when the child comes home for half term, but must stay out on that freezing marsh researching. I never saw two young people so much in love when they started, but I warn you, Canon, that marriage could founder if they drive him like that. I suppose we’re going to have another war.”

“I hope not!”

“So do I. Things are quite dear enough already. I only have to put my nose in the supermarket and I spend a pound. I saw Mrs. Flooder, by the way, and heard a most extraordinary story. The poor wretched man could have died and burned the house down.”

Avril did not rise to the bait, but his eyes lost their introspection as a trickle of corrosive poison crept into his heart. She had reminded him of a silly incident and his own behavior in it, which had been careless and not even like him. He would not have believed he could have been so stupid.

“She told me you saw her,” Miss Warburton continued in her instructive way. “You ran right into her, I believe, just as she was coming out of the shop. She nearly dropped her parcels and you changed the subject by telling her that her sister’s boy had put up the banns at last.”

The canon bowed his venerable head. It had not happened like that at all. The bison of a woman, maddened with acquisitiveness and laden with loot, had almost knocked him over, sworn at him for being in the way and turned to sycophantic mooing as she recognized her parish priest. It was then that the fatal statement had escaped him.

“Why, it’s Mrs. Flooder. I’ve just been hearing your nephew’s good news. A grand wedding in the family, eh?”

Before the final word was out of his mouth he had recognized his mistake. He had broken rule number one in his book; he had made trouble.

The news had crept into Mrs. Flooder’s intelligence visibly like a flame creeping up a fuse, and the explosion was quite frightful.

“Cat! My sister Lily’s a cat. Never told me one bloody word! Hoping I’ll stay away. Just you wait until I get hold of her. Dirty little lying cat. I’ll drop in as I go past!”

Avril had seen her rush off with his heart full of selfloathing. The tasteless blunder had bothered him out of all proportion and all today he had been irked by it. He slid a little lower in his chair.

“It was the first she’d heard of the marriage, so she went straight to her sister’s house,” continued Miss Warburton, relieved that she had interested him; at least he wasn’t ill. “She told me to tell you she would never have dreamed of dropping in if you hadn’t mentioned the white wedding and the hired hall ...”

“I said no such thing!”

“Never mind; it’s a mercy if you did. Lily was out, you see, and Mrs. Flooder found the poor man choking, smoke coming from under his door. It seems he’d fallen over and broken his hip—caught his foot in the cord of the electric heater. He was too weak to shout by the time Mrs. Flooder got there.”

Avril sat up in astonishment and concern.

“Who was this?”

“Lily’s lodger—taken in to help pay for the wedding, I shouldn’t be surprised. He could have burned to death if that woman Flooder hadn’t broken in to look for her sister. She thought she was hiding up.”

“I’d never heard of him.”

“Nor had I. He moved in one evening and this happened the next morning. Mrs. Flooder can’t get over it. She said she’ll always ‘take notice of a clergyman’ because she’d ‘gone in to make a beastly row’ and before she knew it, there she was, a heroine! There, I thought that would make you laugh, so I’ll leave you in peace. Have a little doze.”

As the door closed very softly behind her, presumably in case he had fallen asleep already, Avril tried to rearrange his mind so that the sense of insult which the story had aroused in him could be isolated and exorcised.

He was not in the least surprised by the coincidence. He spent his existence watching life’s machinery and could hardly be expected to be astonished if he saw the slow wheels move, but he was startled by his grievance. What had so upset him was that it should be a weakness and not a strength of his own which had been graciously permitted to play its tiny part in assisting this unknown fellow sojourner. He had caught himself thinking that surely he might have been allowed to make a kindly or constructive gesture instead of a vulgar breach of confidence! As the absurdity of his complaint crystallized he took himself in hand and his professional philosophy stirred itself to meet the tiny emergency.

At length he bent his head and folded his hands on his waistcoat; his eyes were bright and intelligent in the dusk. The question which had arisen so absurdly was, he saw, a vast one, beset with dangers. For the next half hour he proceeded through the spiritual mine field, his heart in his mouth. It was this, rather than the little coincidence which occasioned it, which was to be of such curious significance in the break-through.

The third of the five tiny incidents which seemed at first to be so slightly related to each other was another private conversation that also concerned the vocation of the speakers, but this time of very different people.

While old Canon Avril was listening to Dot Warburton far across the park, a black limousine with a custom-built body crept up the incline in Brick Street West and stopped outside a small house whose windows were dark.

The shadow sitting in the back tossed a key to the chauffeur, who slid out of his seat to unlock the front door before returning to release his passenger, who passed inside like a dark cloud. The chauffeur closed the street door behind him, faded back to the car and drove away, unaware that the visit was not quite the normal Thursday-evening routine with the boss in a black mood.

Within the house the vestibule was dimly lit and the gray walls and carpet gave no indication of the distinctive décor of the one big room which took up most of the first floor.

The thin woman who waited in it was a little too old to be so palely blond but was still extremely good-looking. As soon as she heard the car door slam she rose and stood waiting, a trace of deference by far the softest thing about her. The apartment surrounding her was remarkable and achieved the effect at which the designer had aimed, both reflecting and opposing the painting which was its centerpiece.

Miss Merle Rawlins had bought the picture at the fabulously successful Louis Celli’s first postsurrealist exhibition. She had indicated where it should hang on the long wall directly opposite the door and had left the rest to a young Frenchman who was becoming almost equally well known. The result was that most people entering for the first time found themselves shocked without understanding why, although Miss Rawlins and Bertram Alexander, first Baron Ludor of Hollowhill in Surrey and chairman of UCAI, who paid for it, had no difficulty whatever.

The painting was called “Gitto” and was a life-size portrait of the fully-grown male gorilla of that name in the Wymondham Zoo. Celli’s realism, which was always so much more than ruthlessly photographic, had here achieved a passionate quality, and the great black primate, standing in a lime-green jungle with one paw on a tortured tree stump and the other scratching a thigh of truly terrible muscle, had captured the black-ice tragedy of the brute.

The portrait had caused a sensation when it was first shown, for the stony face was strong enough for nobility and probably sufficiently intelligent to recognize that it was without hope of evolution. It met one as one arrived, unutterably sad but dangerous and certainly not for pity. Merle Rawlins had bought the work of art because she adored it, and the Frenchman had hung the wall behind it with a formal Florentine flock paper of black on gray, flooded the floor with cherry pile, and shrouded the window end of the room with lime-green glass fabric. He had then subdued the furnishing to one twelve-foot curved couch in black leather and simulated monkey fur and the joke, such as it was, was over. Lord Ludor enjoyed it; he knew that whereas other people might snigger, if they were brave enough, at the likeness between himself and the portrait, Merle had certainly been crazy to get it and liked to live with it because it epitomized the terror and excitement he had always been able to kindle in her. She had been the finest secretary he had ever had, and as a mistress she worked hard to please, studying him in all things, putting him first, soaking herself in his needs until, as on an evening like this, she came into her own and was irreplaceable. At his home in the Surrey town of Hollowhill Lady Ludor attended to the furnishings, but here evidences of his own taste were everywhere. The only moving thing when he came in was the new toy which Merle had been given by the sales manager of a subsidiary in a more or less open attempt to capture Ludor’s personal interest. It looked exactly like an orthodox television set, but showed film of a kind which even in these uninhibited days could not have been put out by any public broadcasting service in the world. She was running it without the sound because he expected her to be alone and might for a moment have mistaken the canned words for conversation and torn the house down. As it was, his heavy glance, which noted her and passed on without altering, came to rest on the screen, and he stood for a second looking at its somewhat laborious salacity before he said: “Turn that thing off.”

She obeyed him at once, but without hurry, because he disliked jerky movement, and he came forward on to the rug before the synthetic log fire and stood where he usually did, under the picture.

Even when one saw the two together there was a definite likeness, and not only in spirit. Indeed, the sight would not be comic and bearable until he was much older and less powerful than he was now at sixty. Today he was still nine-tenths of the force he had been at forty-five, when the huge electronics combine, the Universal Contacts empire, was being won.

Merle recognized his mood as any of his close associates would have done, but she was probably less alarmed by it than most. It was not that she knew how to dispel it, but because she understood that she would only be expected to do what she was told. Worry and decision and invention were not required of her; he would do all that.

He began at once. “Did you lay on all the calls without trouble?”

“Not without trouble.”

“But you got all three arranged? Person to person?”

“Yes. They all want to speak to you, so it was only technical delays. They are being put through for us at hourly intervals, starting at seven. No bother is expected except perhaps over Mr. Kalek’s, so I’ve made his last. He’s at Lunea and there’s no scrambler yet. Can you manage?”

“I shall have to, shan’t I?” He never wasted energy on the unalterable. “The sheik in clear would be more of a menace!”

“Oh, he’s all right. He’s at the winter palace with all the aides. I spoke to the prince, but the old man was in the room.”

“And Cornelius?”

“He’s in Lausanne in the nursing home. Hetty is still in Johannesburg.”

“What about Daniels?”

“Mr. Daniels is there with Mr. Cornelius. He’s being called the Secretary now.”

“I see.” He stood silent for a moment, hand on the back of one of the thin black chairs in unconscious imitation of the portrait, his face somber.

“Oh well. Not bad.” It was great praise. She felt it almost more than she deserved, although she had been at the telephone for sixteen hours and had performed miracles without any other priorities than those she could call her own. It was only on these very rare occasions when the business was most secret that he used her lines. She kept them, and sometimes used them, for social contacts so that the records could never conceivably show anything unusual.

“What’s Kalek doing on that pimple in the Caribbean?”

“Resting. He likes to be with his ceramics. You’ve got an island yourself, Bae.” It was not a pet name but the version of some of his initials used by those closest to him.

He grunted: “I don’t try to live on it! Perhaps I should. This wouldn’t have happened if I had. Nor do I need rest all the time. Damn Kalek. He’s the youngest and the weakest of us all.”

“It’s the world danger,” she said, edging to the door of the kitchen pantry, because often, when he started to look about like this, he was hungry. “He feels he wants to look at his pieces while he can. He’s still frightened of the bomb.”

Ludor laughed, but his eyes did not change. “He’s old hat,” he said. “He’ll be more frightened by what I’ve got to tell him. This could hit him. Right in the gelt-bag.”

She stood waiting by the door of the pantry, knowing that it would be unwise either to question or to disappear. She had known Ludor intimately for something over fourteen years and he was still a mystery, and, as an intelligence herself, she found the fact irresistible. His sudden change of subject surprised her.

“Sanderton was buried today. You didn’t send flowers, did you?”

“You said not.”

“Good. I don’t want even a thought to go through any little mind in Fleet Street. He’s got to be replaced by our new contact at once. His sudden collapse took me by surprise; one never thinks of death at that age except on the road, and he was chauffeur-driven always. He ought to have told me about his blood pressure.”

Merle ventured a question which had been bothering her. She was a conventional soul and, in her own limited way, not unkind.

“I thought I might telephone Mrs. Sanderton? Not write, just telephone and say I’m sorry. She adored him and they were up here such a lot.”

“I don’t think I would. Not yet.” He was thinking about it, giving it the same consideration he accorded to every detail which could concern him or his great interests. “Wait until we have our new man functioning. I’ve got old ‘Pa’ Paling attending to it now. It’s a little tricky because Lord Feste sees to it that they screen all their people so very carefully. He’s nobody’s fool, and at this moment the old fox could surprise me any morning, which is damn dangerous! Leave it now and take the woman to lunch in a week or two and say you hadn’t liked to intrude before. Then you need never see her again.”

She nodded but added: “I quite liked her.”

“Did you? Predatory type. Nice line in dirt but fundamentally a clinger and a bore. Loyalish, I suppose.” He dismissed the subject and glanced at the clockface built into the ebony fitment which ran round half the room and was designed to contain the paraphernalia of modern living in much the same way that the Victorian workbox was arranged to hold crochet hooks and bobbins.

“I’ve got twenty minutes,” he observed. “What have you got in there that’s hot?”

“The ‘fridge’ is full. It wouldn’t take me a minute to heat something.”

“Very well; smoked sprats. Then I can have a Scotch. Did you get any sprats?”

“After no end of bother. The last kiln in the south is at Tosey and even they’re thinking of closing now. You’ll have to buy it and run a campaign to popularize them. The fish are cheap enough.”

“Could do,” he said, and the proposition with all its pros and cons ran through his mind as visibly as if he had discussed it. He decided against and returned to immediate refreshment. “One Scotch now and one after I’ve spoken to Kalek. I shall need it. Do you want to know all about this or can you pick it up as I talk?”

“I expect I can get it,” she said from the pantry, whose wide sliding doorway brought it virtually into the room. “It’s the leak from Godley’s island, I suppose? You didn’t think it was going to be serious when you came in on Tuesday.”

“I don’t now. It can be handled, of course. There is very little of this new element isolated and we’re gathering in all there is as fast as we dare. However, more can always be obtained later and meanwhile we are investigating this crazy idea of Paggen Mayo’s, so the big boys are entitled to ask what the hell I think I’m up to, letting some Commie spill the beans all over the foreign propaganda machine for any damned technician to read. I have to reassure them and yet point out that the danger of some success with the stuff must still persist. Then they can share my nightmares! I shall go down to the island tomorrow and placate the Allied clients. They’ve been blowing off steam all day, so I thought I’d have ’em all to lunch down there and let them see the personnel for themselves.”

“You’ll be able to control the invention when it comes and, if necessary, stifle it,” she said placidly.

“Of course I shall, but only if I can keep it safe down there under my hand. That has been the intention from the beginning. It’s such an amazing concept. What a secret weapon if it came off, eh? Everything is all right, but the leak is a nuisance and I don’t see how it happened—which is serious. Official security is completely useless. They’ve only just given us the all-clear after taking the place apart. It’s some damned innocent. Some little head so full of wool it doesn’t know it’s bleating!”

His face had changed and she threw up her hands.

“Bae! You told me to tell you when you look like that. People don’t understand. I’ll just get your food. Could you help yourself to the drink?”

“Probably.” He was laughing at her admonition. He knew he made faces and thought it childlike and rather gay.

He went over to the ebony compendium and parted the panels to reveal a cut-glass glitter within, which lit up as the shutter passed. He was relaxing visibly. His jungle fastness was warm and well stocked and very quiet, as he liked it best. When there was any noise at all he preferred it to be roaring, with himself the loudest of all; but now, in the very midst of the city, the soundproofing was so thorough that they could have been in the depth of a forest.

His huge body was shaped like a grand piano on its tail, but his step was light and his hands were sure and careful, so that he took the glass from among the others without a sound. The telephone which would link him presently with the three other men, who with himself controlled directly or indirectly at least three parts of the whole of the world’s communications, was an elegant crystal instrument. His sad eyes noted that it was to hand and that the extra-heavy table he liked to have beside him was waiting with a new pad on it for him to draw upon while he talked. He felt for his pen and found it ready, and only then did he sigh and pour his pale drink, which was the exact color of Merle’s hair. This was, possibly, why he liked the tint and never let her change it, although it no longer suited her as well as it once had done.

He sat down as she came in with the tray and looked almost domesticated waiting for his food, so that she ventured a flattery of the only kind he found amusing.

“I know why you like these damn sprats. Because you can bite them up whole!” she said.

As in the first, the fourth of the five stirrings heralding the main movement took place in one man’s mind and again closely concerned his own dedicated labors.

While the Waterside D.D.I. was regretting, Canon Avril meditating and Lord Ludor machinating, down in the center of Fleet Street the office of Lord Feste’s journal, The Daily Paper, had begun to stir. It was the youngest in spirit of all the “mornings” and it had scooped the best publicity of its career on the day when it had first announced its impudent title to a string of established rivals. They had attempted to restrain it by due process of law but without avail, and it had never lost the initial lead. Just now its imposing building was beginning to vibrate as the staff came streaming back to whip up the nightly fit of excitement in which it was “put to bed.”

As yet, the two editorial mezzanine floors were comparatively quiet and W. Pegg Braithwaite, working snugly in his sacred corner, was almost as peacefully comfortable as was decent in that bedlam of an office. If it had not been for the twitter from the John Aubrey “Column” cubicle which separated him from “Features,” he might have thought he was in his cubbyhole at home overlooking the river at Chiswick.

“Peggie” was one of the first journalists to popularize science without insulting it and was by now a considerable figure in both fierce worlds. His other claim to rarity was that he was one of the very few men who had worked for Lord Feste continuously ever since they had both arrived in London in the same month many years before. The chief attribute they shared was an essential youthfulness, epitomized by that naïve and obstinate faith in the invincible might of the pen which is both the strength of Fleet Street and its Achilles’ heel.

Compared with everybody else in the building, Peggie was practically secure; he had a name and a following and a private reference library on his own subject, kept safe from rivals in his own bald head. The chatter from next door came from two less happily placed people. The male voice, which belonged to the compiler of the column, was verging on the shrill as the nightly dilemma over the lead story became acute. The scout, a woman, was working hard. Her drawl, which Peggie had known when it was pure south London, was now very Mayfair, and it jarred upon him most unreasonably; he himself became more Yorkshire the longer he stayed in the south.

“Journalists may be unimportant, but Giles Sanderton was business editor. It really was quite a funeral,” she was saying.

“Who cares? We are playing the whole thing down. We can use your little bit about Edith Lady Trier being in black down to her pearls, but that will be all. There’s to be a par in the news.”

“But why, for heaven’s sake? Sanderton worked for Lord Feste, he held a very trusted and influential position on a leading newspaper, his death was tragically sudden, and there were more names at his funeral than we tagged on to the Howard first night yesterday.”

“Dearest girl ...” The man was talking through his teeth, and old Peggie chuckled softly to himself as he was apt to do when the nerves of younger people showed through. “Just take my word for it. I do not want to irritate the owner. I can’t and won’t put it clearer.”

“Really?” She was on to it like a terrier. Peggie had to hand it to her. “And he used to be the Old Man’s white-headed boy! What was it? ‘The wrong associates,’ as they say?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Fortunately he’s dead, so nobody need know anything. Drop it. Now then, what else have we got? My God, this is thin!”

“There’s the dress show and the wedding,” she said obediently. “I shall have to fall back on my teashop.”

“Who? Oh, that old pansy teashop keeper you’re always quoting. You eat there, don’t you?”

“I have my coffee and croissant there in the mornings instead of breakfast; he’s so near my flat. You can sneer at him if you like, but it was my dear Mr. Witty and his ‘pussums’ who gave us the first whisper of the Coalhouse divorce.”

“Too clinical, my dear.” The other voice dropped easily into the revived twenties vernacular. “Well, what had he got this morning?”

“Let me see ... not a lot; but there might be something in it, if it was properly investigated. He was all on about a libel case pending between two masters—or a master and an examiner—in one of the public schools. The boys come home tomorrow for half term, and he was going to hear more from one of the matrons and tell me. Shall we phone the school?”

“No. That’s not us. That’ll be a news story. We couldn’t touch that.”

“Oh, it’s nothing unpleasant. Neither Mr. Witty nor his beautiful white cat would soil their claws with common dirt. You don’t know Mr. Witty. He calls his teashop the Milestone, and he’s always toying with the idea of changing his name to Whittington. I think he sees himself as a principal boy! This is all about cheating in exams.”

“Is it? Well, there’s nothing there for us. Give me that corny ‘talking tiger’ story news turned in.”

Content in his corner, Peggie continued to doctor the article he was vetting for one of his young relatives who edited a technical journal round the corner at the Thousand and One Nights Press.

The Braithwaites were a family of journalists as closely knit as any of the country’s nuclei of born tradesmen—weavers, coachbuilders, masons or smiths. These were the families who had formed the guilds and later inspired the birth of the trade unions. Powerful, obstinate, skillful men, they served their masters and earned their money, but their greatest loyalty was always to the craft itself. Although Peggie was deep in his task, he spared a secret grin at the inefficiency of the two next door. Gossip! They didn’t recognize gossip when they heard it. The school they were talking about was St. Josephus, the preparatory side of Totham, and whatever the facts of the pending libel action, it was a two-penny-ha’penny tale compared with the real story which had involved that establishment earlier in the week when Panda, the propaganda journal of the Eastern powers, had trotted out one of its periodic fairy tales. This one had been too wild even for the news boys, and Peggie himself had been able to inform the editor of The Daily Paper, that volatile demon Rafael, that there was nothing in it. They had both regretted it, despite their headshaking; but it really was no good: they had had to agree that even the incredible Ludor would hardly stand for that little item. Peggie just had to laugh whenever he thought of it. “Guinea-pig public-school boys”! The oriental propagandist was a performer on his own! Even Lord Feste himself, in the old days when his name had been Phil Jones, had not been quite in their class. Peggie dismissed the chatterers next door. They bored him and he closed his ears in the way he was trained to, finished his little job for the “young ’un” and inserted a fresh sheet in his typewriter. Then he hitched his sleeves and settled down to the one utterly important task in his universe: the composition of his own authoritative Saturday piece.

The fifth tremor round the rising bud was in its own way the most momentous of all, and yet it was no more than a reckless impulse in a young man who never appeared in the story again.

For him it was a moment which he remembered with horror all his life, the instant when he decided to take a risk without knowing the form.

While Peggie was in his corner, listening to the gossips, four floors above him young Peter Clew, who until the day before had been a very successful accountant and who was now the new business editor of The Daily Paper in the place of the late Mr. Sanderton, stood regarding his new array of telephones. There were four of them and, scarcely aware of extending his neck, he made there and then a mental note to drop that celebrated “fixer,” Pa Paling, forthwith.

The man had been most useful in putting him forward for this wonderful post which had been thrust into his hands like a gift from the gods, but Mr. Clew felt in his sophisticated young bones that the fellow was not very safe.

He decided, therefore, that he would telephone him at home late on Saturday night and make an excuse to pass up the round of golf on the links at Hollowhill which had been so carefully arranged between them for Sunday morning. On the whole, he thought it would be better to meet Lord Ludor in some other way, at some other time. Pa Paling might be a little sore, but even so Peter Clew thought he could risk that. What was one enemy when one was as powerful as this oneself? A faint doubt assailed him, but the sight of the telephones stiffened him; he sighed, and his mind closed with a snap.

Although he learned afterward that at that moment he had flung his business career over a cliff, what he never knew was that he had also implemented one of those extraordinary little chances which have such disproportionate consequences in the history of mankind.

These five small indications appeared on Thursday, and the pressure from below, at the center, became evident on Friday morning. Properly enough, it was most noticeable at Godley’s island research station.