Читать книгу Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel - Zenith Brown - Страница 4

“Lord love you, sir,” said Mrs. Humpage. “Blood has run like water in these sunny streets.”

The little grey man standing by the south window of his room in the Old Angel dropped the casement curtains from his agitated fingers without turning round, and blinked his watery grey eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. It was not the idea of blood, so much, for he had got definitely used to that, during his long association with his late wife’s number one lodger, Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of New Scotland Yard. It was rather more the idea of the steep, dismal and rainy streets of the little town of Rye being called sunny. Above all it was the sudden appearance of Mrs. Humpage herself, for Mr. Evan Pinkerton had somehow thought he had locked his door. He swallowed, moistened his dry lips, and turned round.

The proprietress of the Old Angel, buxom and apple-cheeked—so Mr. Pinkerton thought; anyone else would have known it was gin—stood beaming at him from the low, studded oak door. Mr. Pinkerton’s knees shook a little. There was something too masterful about Mrs. Humpage. Something of the iron hand in the velvet glove sort of thing. More literally, something of a very determined woman under a soft and apparently yielding bosom . . . and Mr. Evan Pinkerton had once been married himself, for long painful years, to a determined woman without any disguise whatever.

“Love you, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said, with brisk cheeriness. “You must be stark frozen. How about a nice bit of fire?”

And before the little man could stammer that he didn’t want a fire—knowing as well as Mrs. Humpage that it would relentlessly appear in his bill at two shillings—she had bustled in and set a match to the paper in the high grate of the Caen stone fireplace with “1537” carved under the Tudor rose in the centre.

“We must make you comfortable, sir, mustn’t we?” Mrs. Humpage said, very comfortably herself.

Her enthusiasm was far warmer than the feeble flame creeping up about the damp edges of the Morning Chronicle and sizzling against the reluctant coals piled sparsely on top.

“We shall have a time tonight, I’m afraid, sir,” she said. “What with all them people dropping in out of the blue, as they say.”

Mr. Pinkerton noted the unprofessional concession to the leaden streaming skies and the wind howling the smoke back down the chimney-pots.

“—Sir Lionel Atwater indeed, sir. Turning the place inside out. I said, ‘If the Old Angel don’t suit you, sir, perhaps the ’all porter can move your traps to the Mermaid,’ I said.”

Mrs. Humpage, her two feet firmly planted on the hearth, placed her plump arms on her much plumper hips, her whole plump person absorbing at least tuppenny’orth of Mr. Pinkerton’s fire.

“And he starts banging on the table, and all them poor dears starts running. Now, what I’m askin’ you, sir, being a man, and a gentleman, is why don’t they settle their family differences in their own house, without coming ’ere to upset mine?”

Mr. Pinkerton moistened his dry grey lips, not moving from his position by the casement.

“Oh, dear!” he thought. He said, “I’m sure I . . . I don’t ever know, ma’am.”

“Nor I, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said flatly. Mr. Pinkerton could tell, however, by the relish with which she poked up his fire, knocking the coals to the bottom where the maid could salvage them in the morning, that she had a jolly good idea.

“Well,” Mrs. Humpage said, “I just wanted to say you’re not to mind them, sir. If they come annoying you, I’ll send them packing to the Mermaid, bag and baggage.”

She laughed suddenly, a rich and hearty laugh that made Mr. Pinkerton’s small spine chill a little.

“I said baggage, sir, and which one is a baggage and which one is not, I’ll leave to you, sir!”

Mr. Pinkerton stood staring helplessly at the stout oak door through which Mrs. Humpage had disappeared with a swish of petticoats. The perspiration stood too, in cold beads on Mr. Pinkerton’s small greyish forehead. He was above all a very modest man, and the mere idea of anybody sending anybody else packing just for him was unnerving; but to send an actual knight of the realm packing for him was utterly shattering.

He glanced uneasily at the fire sullenly eating up his coal. Mrs. Humpage, of course, had no way of knowing that the solitary reason he’d fled the comfortable fire in the inn parlour was not to be underfoot when the large, pompous, irate man whose name was Sir Lionel Atwater, with the violent beet-red face and snow-white walrus mustaches, suddenly ran entirely amuck, as he seemed on the verge of doing at any moment. Still less could she have known that Mr. Pinkerton was not nearly so terrified of the beet-faced person as at the dreadful idea that the late Mrs. Pinkerton would certainly turn over in her grave at the wanton waste of two shillings. And still more terrifying, even, was the idea that she might get up altogether, absolutely reincarnated through the sheer force of parsimony.

Though Mrs. Pinkerton on her late unlamented decease had left him the very considerable sum of £ 75,000, by the happy chance of its never occurring to her that the little grey man she had turned from an underpaid, underfed, undermaster in a Welsh school into a potboy and scullery maid at no pay at all in her lodging house in Golders Green could have greater survival value than she, Mr. Pinkerton had never in all his life spent as much as a farthing on a fire just because he was cold. In fact, he had hardly spent anything at all, on anything, without the queasy fear plucking at his viscera that he might look up and see her standing there, handing him sixpence to go fetch a kipper for a lodger’s breakfast . . . and then everything else would turn out to be a dream, including all his glorious associations in the detection of crime with Inspector Bull, and even the large stone memorial he’d bought with Mrs. Pinkerton’s money, on the assumption that it at least would keep her down.

So Mr. Pinkerton, once accustomed, during Mrs. Pinkerton’s life, to warm his toes and his soul, when he could escape, at the gas fire of her lodger, Inspector Bull of the C. I. D., had ever since warmed his toes at public fires, in inns, and even his meagre posterior, when no one was looking. His soul was still, however, in Inspector Bull’s hands. In fact the only reason he was now at Rye was that Bull was at Brighton, and he had so nearly told Mr. Pinkerton he was a bloody nuisance that Rye was as close to Brighton as he had dared go.

Standing miserably in front of his two-shilling fire, Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. It had not, so far, been as good an idea as he had thought. Though in some respects the Old Angel was very nice, it had turned out to have one substantial drawback: namely, the middle-aged angel who managed it, and the way she kept popping up when she was least expected. How, for instance, she had ever discovered he was a widower, Mr. Pinkerton did not know. It could not be his weeds, for he had never worn any, except to put a black band about his hat reserved for Sundays, a day on which he never went out. And yet, Mrs. Humpage had told him she was a widow practically the moment he came in the Old Angel’s door.

Mr. Pinkerton ran his fingers around inside his narrow celluloid collar, and straightened his purple string tie. If she were to send a knight packing for him, it could be compromising in the extreme. Even he could see that. He glanced surreptitiously at his bright new suitcase that the man had said could expand enormously to hold his immediate effects, and that he knew could contract enormously and still hold his entire wardrobe, and went across the room to the old oak cupboard.

As he swung the door back, a solid panel in the wall by the chimney piece flew open, and a white-faced girl practically fell into the room. Her startled eyes met the startled little Welshman’s; she put one hand up to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, and with the other reached behind her mechanically and pushed the panel shut. She then stood there as if paralyzed, her eyes as wide open as her mouth, her breath coming in sharp frightened spasms.

“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry!” she gasped. “I must have got the wrong stairs—don’t tell Madam, please, sir!”

Mr. Pinkerton stared, virtually as paralyzed as the girl. Just then—it sounded almost as if from the next room—he heard the loud bellow that he had already learned to recognize as the customary manner of speaking of Sir Lionel Atwater.

“I won’t tolerate that young scoundrel! . . .”

The girl’s eyes widened still farther in dread.

“. . . I’ll smoke him out of his stinking hole!”

“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought.

“Oh, please, sir, don’t tell them, will you, sir?” the girl demanded again, in a frightened whisper.

Then, as he still stood looking at her, quite speechless, she darted across the room and out the door, just as Mrs. Humpage’s voice came from below. “Kathleen, Kathleen! Take the gentlemen some hot water! Hurry along, dear!”

From somewhere through the honeycombed walls of the old inn Mr. Pinkerton heard the thunderous blustering voice again: “Foreign scum! . . .”

Another voice spoke. It was smooth and even, and plainly intended to be pacifying.

“I’ll not be intimidated!” Sir Lionel Atwater roared. “I’ll take steps, sir! They’ll not tell me what I shall and shall not do, and I’ll be obliged if you’d mind your—”

Then quite suddenly, as if a heavy door had closed, Mr. Pinkerton could hear nothing more, except a faint low rumble indicating that Sir Lionel’s conversation was still going on.

He blinked and looked cautiously about, coughing at the sharp acrid puffs of smoke that caught themselves and hurried back into his big stone fireplace and up the chimney. Then he shook his head dismally. The Old Angel was, he knew, a very old inn, and strange things could easily happen in it. But surely, Mr. Pinkerton thought . . . He tiptoed over to the old oak panel by the chimney piece and touched it gingerly. It remained very firmly in place. He pushed it, then harder, and finally pulled at it as hard as he could. Outside of a broken fingernail, nothing happened at all. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton stood there. If he had not firmly refused the glass of stout Mrs. Humpage had pressed on him at lunch, he would have thought he had made up the whole business. But he had refused it. Furthermore, the door through which the white-faced maid had gone was still ajar. He could even hear Mrs. Humpage down below, saying sharply, “Hurry along now—don’t keep the gentlemen waiting.”

Mr. Pinkerton stepped quietly over to the door and peered out. On the narrow staircase at the opposite end of the crooked uneven hall he saw the tow-thatched potboy, Jo, not Kathleen at all, carrying up the polished copper hot-water cans. Beyond him, flattened against the wall so he could pass, was the deaf and dumb gentleman in the worn, baggy Bond Street plus-fours, who had arrived the night before, shortly after he himself had come.

Mr. Pinkerton shook his head again in great perplexity, closed his door, pushed the oak settle a little closer to the fire and sat down, staring at it. After all, he thought, not only were there his rights, as one of the King’s subjects, but he had also just taken out a two-shilling stake in the Old Angel. Furthermore, though he would not dare to admit it aloud, in a place where the walls suddenly turned out to be doors, Mr. Pinkerton was very curious indeed. Why, he wondered, had the maid Kathleen come from the garret in such mortal terror; why had she been so desperately anxious not to have Mrs. Humpage know she had come; why had the savage old voice through the suddenly opened walls added so astonishingly to her fear? Why had the walls, somewhere, closed so quickly again, shutting off even Sir Lionel Atwater’s voice? And what, Mr. Pinkerton wondered, was the old gentleman shouting about?

He blinked suddenly as the idea struck him that he had heard, somewhere, of Sir Lionel Atwater; he groped vaguely in his mind, gave it up and thought of Mrs. Humpage again. What differences were they supposed to be settling? From what he had heard in those few seconds, it did not appear likely to be an amicable settlement, what with the plethoric old chap smoking foreign scum out of their stinking holes.

Mr. Pinkerton swallowed as the idea occurred to him that he himself was Welsh, of course, not English at all. Still, it hardly seemed likely that he would be worth smoking out of any place. He looked about him at the old panelled walls, and the old oak four-poster sagging definitely in the middle, with the pair of carved cherubs with slightly lewd grins on their chubby faces in the headboard under the pink silk lampshade with no bulb in it. Whatever one might say about the room, furthermore, he reassured himself, it did not smell any worse than most damp old rooms in damp old hostels.

Then, just as the fire began to take itself seriously, Mr. Pinkerton heard the gong from below. It came instantly into his mind that if he went down quickly, perhaps he could eat his dinner and get back before the others came down.