PALMER AT WORK
‘Go and catch a falling star.’
――_Donne._
In full view of the Weston family Palmer took his seat in the car,
closed the door, and nodded reply to the chauffeur’s “All right,
sir?”――nevertheless, this was not the way he would have managed
things himself. Much better to have done it quietly on the following
evening, and without sending the car at all. For Palmer was, after
his own fashion, a true artist, and showiness did not appeal to him,
though there might be a bit of swagger when the work was done. He
felt no admiration, rather a good-natured contempt, for those who run
unnecessary risks, and if he sometimes modelled his manner upon that
of certain story-book heroes, he did so simply to satisfy his dramatic
instinct, and only when there was no danger of its interfering with
his plans. The whole thing was a game, an elaborate and curious game.
Those day-dreams in which Inspector X. of Scotland Yard happily
remarked, ‘It’s well for us, Mr. Dorset, you’re on the side of the
law!’ were really but a survival from the period when he had sailed
under the skull and cross-bones, or taken to the road on a coal-black
stallion, a true minion of the moon.
He had been frightfully lucky, he considered, to have chanced on these
two cases――mentally he always referred to the unfortunate George as
a case――the only drawback had been their simplicity. He had been
frightfully lucky, even though the cases were not up to the standard
of those he sometimes conducted in imagination. Of course, for the
real thing, he was badly handicapped. He had no electric torch, no
disguises, no burglar’s kit, no means of taking casts of footprints,
no chemicals by which to secure the prints of fingers. The persons he
pursued did _not_ drop cigarette ashes, and if they had done so, he
couldn’t see how it would have helped matters. George, if he smoked
cigarettes at all, almost certainly smoked Woodbines:――and at any rate
establishment of identity was not the question in either case. It was
of no importance whether Mr. Bradley left finger-prints on the church
music, of no importance that there was a slight twitching in his left
eyelid――all such things availed nothing: he had to work at present on
the impalpable stuff of intuition and imagination.
It might, for instance, be important that Mr. Bradley appeared, as he
walked along the road, now and then to cast a furtive glance at some
invisible thing beside him. Palmer had had a little talk with Aunt
Caroline that afternoon before tea, and he had tried an experiment with
Grif――a very small one, it is true, for he had been mortally afraid of
going too far――but the results had left him nothing solid to work upon.
How could they? he reflected, since a sane mind cannot possibly put
itself into touch with an insane one, cannot follow a reasoning which
itself follows no law. It was like trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp,
or build walls round a mirage.
The car stopped at Doctor O’Neill’s, and he got out. He rang the bell,
and was shown into the consulting-room, where the doctor was busy,
seated before a large roll-top desk.
He glanced up as the door opened. “That you, Palmer? I’ll have finished
directly.” He scribbled something in a book, while Palmer looked slowly
round him.
Presently the doctor closed the book with a snap and threw it into a
drawer. He pushed back his chair a little, and smiled at his visitor.
“So you managed to get away? No further news, I suppose?”
Palmer shook his head, and the doctor opened another drawer, from
which he took a revolver――not the old one Palmer had been obliged to
relinquish, but a new one, smaller and lighter. The boy examined it
admiringly before dropping it into his coat pocket.
“That is a present from me,” said the doctor, “though I couldn’t get
you a licence for it, because they won’t issue licences to anyone under
eighteen. You must keep it a secret,――I mean, until you go back to your
own home. Miss Annesley would only be nervous if she knew you had it.”
Palmer took out the revolver and examined it anew. “Thanks, awfully,”
he murmured, his face beaming with pleasure.
“As an expression of confidence I think it really _does_ go pretty
far,” the doctor admitted. “In fact, from this on, I’ll probably suffer
agonies of remorse. My only stipulation is that you tell your father
about it.”
“I promise to tell him,” said Palmer.
“That’s all right then. And now I suppose we may as well go and call
upon our friend.”
Palmer looked up in surprise. “It’s too soon,” he exclaimed. “We must
wait till it gets dark; otherwise, we won’t be able to tell whether he
is in or out.”
“Can’t we ask?”
“Of course; but that won’t be much good if he happens to be there. You
see, we must call when he’s _not_ in.”
The doctor looked doubtful. “You still keep to that plan?”
Palmer was silent, sitting with lowered eyes. “I fancy perhaps I’d
better do it alone,” he said at last.
“You think I’m trying to back out of it?” the doctor laughed.
Palmer had once more taken the revolver from his pocket, and this time
he laid it quietly down on the desk. At the same moment he got up and
looked round for his cap. The doctor placed his hands on his shoulders,
and pushed him back into his chair. He felt slightly annoyed, but
he also felt――perhaps unnecessarily――that he was in the wrong, and
apologized. “Come, you mustn’t mind what I said. I undertook this job
and I’ll go through with it.” As a matter of fact, he regretted his
undertaking, but he was at the same time young enough to be amused by
it, and his curiosity was keen.
Palmer was easily appeased, and very soon, on their former footing,
they were talking together, Palmer describing to the doctor a method
of reading cyphers of the simpler kind, in which letters are replaced
by arbitrary signs. There was, in the lucidity of his exposition,
something which gave his companion a pleasure that was almost
æsthetic. The exhibition of this fresh young intelligence at work was
to him extremely fascinating, and the difficulty he experienced in
getting at any conception of the temperament behind it added to his
interest.
“Aren’t you very good at mathematics?” he asked.
“Fairly good. Not good enough to specialize――at least, I don’t want to
specialize. There are three or four chaps at school who are probably
just as good as I am; and of course they work a great deal harder.”
But darkness had crept up while they were talking, and Palmer signified
that they might now proceed with what they had to do. “If he is in,
there will be a light in his window: if there isn’t a light, we can
call. I don’t fancy he is a person who sits much in the dark when he is
alone.”
They walked up the street in the direction of the house where Mr.
Bradley lodged. This house stood on the extreme outskirts of the town;
nevertheless, it did not take them many minutes to reach it. They had
chosen the farther side of the road, so that they could see from some
distance whether there was a light in the window or not. There was
none, and they were about to cross over when Palmer suddenly pulled his
companion back into the shadow of a gateway. Simultaneously, the door
of Mr. Bradley’s house opened, and the organist himself came out. They
watched him walk on down the street.
“That was a close shave,” Palmer murmured. “I think we’d better wait
for ten minutes, just to see if he turns up again. He may only have
gone to the post or something, and it will take him about ten minutes
to go there and back. If I had been alone I would have followed him
till I was sure of not being interrupted. You see, he hasn’t taken the
direction of the church.”
“Oh, he’ll not come back,” said the doctor, optimistically, as they
strolled on. “The shops are closed: he has gone for a walk.”
“He may have. He had his stick with him, and he would hardly have
taken that if he had only been going to the post. Besides, he hadn’t a
letter, unless it was in his pocket. Still, I fancy it would be better
to give him a quarter of an hour.”
The doctor, however, was impatient, and in the end Palmer allowed
himself to be persuaded. They retraced their steps and knocked at the
door. Mr. Bradley’s landlady informed them that the organist was out,
but could give no information as to when he would return.
“Perhaps we could wait for a few minutes?” the doctor suggested.
“Certainly, Doctor O’Neill. I’m sure he’d be sorry if he thought he had
missed you.”
She took them upstairs and lit the lamp, lingering for a little to
discuss the weather and the crops, much to Palmer’s annoyance. At last
she left them, and the boy, gliding across the room noiselessly as a
cat, opened the door and listened.
“She’s gone into the kitchen,” he said. “It’s all right.”
He looked about him eagerly. It was a fair-sized room, with two windows
giving on the street, and two doors, one by which they had entered,
and another which, as Palmer opened it, they saw led into a bedroom.
Between the two windows was a bookcase, and in a corner by the bedroom
door was a writing-table, with two rows of drawers. By the wall, facing
the bookcase, stood a piano.
With the exceptions of a table and half a dozen chairs and a
gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace, this was all the furniture
the room contained: there were no pictures, no ornaments of any sort.
Palmer went straight to the bookcase and took out an armful of the
oldest-looking volumes. Presently he handed one of these to the doctor,
open at a page across which Mr. Bradley’s name was scribbled; and next
he gave him a book which had evidently been bought not long ago.
“They seem to be the same,” the doctor murmured, gathering that he was
expected to compare the autographs.
“Yes; but the original fly-leaf of the old book has been torn out.
It’s the same with all of them: it’s not a mere matter of chance. He
has been pretty careful. It was in a manuscript music book that I saw
his full name written: it ought to be about here somewhere.” He went
to the piano and turned over rapidly a pile of music. In a few moments
he found what he was in search of, and brought it to the doctor. “You
see, the writing is the same. Only the name was then Clement Bradley
Tennant. The two pages have got stuck together. That’s why he didn’t
notice it perhaps; or he may have pasted them together purposely, to
keep the music that is written on the other side. If you hold it up to
the light you can make it out quite distinctly. It was the pages being
stuck together that attracted my attention.”
The doctor gazed at the signature. “It certainly appears to be the
same,” he admitted.
Palmer replaced the books and began to prowl about once more. He
approached the writing-table, and Doctor O’Neill, with qualms of
conscience, watched him examine the contents of a letter-rack, and
then turn over the leaves of a blotter. This last he brought to the
mirror and held each leaf of it separately up before the glass,
scanning it closely, though the blotting-paper was so much used that
very little could have been decipherable. The boy’s movements were
extraordinarily rapid and silent, and the doctor could only stare at
him with a growing consciousness of disapproval. In the end nothing but
the recollection of his promise not to interfere prevented him from
direct remonstrance.
Palmer, however, apparently did not find what he wanted, for he
muttered to himself, and at last replaced the blotting-book and turned
his attention to the drawers. Two of these were unlocked, and Palmer
searched them swiftly, but it was when he asked the doctor to lend him
his keys, and at the same time produced a penknife and a piece of wire
from his pocket, that the latter felt constrained to speak. “I say――you
can’t do that, you know!” And he half rose from his chair.
Palmer paused. “Perhaps it won’t be necessary,” he answered; and
crossing the room he disappeared into the bedroom.
The doctor followed him, and saw him light a candle, and then softly
lock the bedroom door giving on the landing. “You promised not to
interfere,” he whispered back over his shoulder.
“I know I did, but――――”
“If you go back to the other room you won’t see me. Open the door a
little, so that you will be able to hear if anybody comes upstairs.”
The doctor returned to the sitting-room, and in quite a short time
Palmer rejoined him there. “I’ve got what I wanted. I think we may go
now.”
The doctor looked at him questioningly. “I hope you didn’t pick any
locks.”
“No; I didn’t want to try the locks if I could avoid it. I haven’t got
the proper things to pick them with, and I don’t want to leave any
marks.”
“And what have you discovered?”
Palmer slipped past him and closed the door, while the doctor, at the
same time, became aware of footsteps approaching along the pavement
of the street. The footsteps stopped and they heard the rattle of a
latch-key.
“We’re in for it now,” the doctor murmured, conscious that his own
share in the performance was about to begin, and not feeling happy at
the thought.
They heard Mr. Bradley running up the stairs. Then the door was flung
wide, and he stood on the threshold, gazing from one to the other of
his visitors, while the flush on his face deepened. It was obvious that
he was more astonished than pleased by this unexpected civility, and
the situation was an awkward one, for he advanced no further, nor did
he make any attempt to pretend that he was glad to see them. He simply
stood there in silence, as if awaiting an explanation.
The doctor had not been prepared for this attitude of immediate
hostility, and the words he uttered, as he found himself apologizing,
sounded remarkably lame. Palmer, however, had a better excuse.
“Grif has lost the music of that thing he was to sing in church on
Sunday. I don’t think he’ll be well enough to sing, but I thought, as
we were passing your house, I would ask you if you had another copy. He
was hunting everywhere for it to-day.”
“Yes, he can have my own copy. I expect it is down in the hall. I’ll
just go and see.”
He left them and they heard him running downstairs.
“He’s gone to ask the landlady how long we’ve been here,” said Palmer.
“It doesn’t matter. That was rather a lucky whopper of yours.”
“It wasn’t a whopper. He _has_ lost it, because I took it myself; and
he was looking for it all over the place this morning.”
“Well, I fancy it might be better for you to cut along as soon as you
get the music, and leave me to tackle him alone.”
“He’ll think it queer if I go, when we came together.”
“I fancy he thinks it pretty queer as it is. My idea, you know, was to
speak perfectly openly to him, and I can hardly do that if you’re here.”
“What do you want to speak to him about?”
“About Grif, of course. I shall approach the subject as gently as
possible.... Do you _want_ to stay?”
“Only for a few minutes. Do you mind sitting there? and I’ll sit here.”
He moved the lamp a little, also the chair which Mr. Bradley presumably
would take.
The organist came in. It seemed that the music wasn’t downstairs after
all; he must have left it in the church: but he did not ask how Grif
was, which was what Doctor O’Neill wanted him to do.
The doctor was himself obliged to broach the subject, saying that the
little boy was not getting on so well as he had expected; but Mr.
Bradley’s regrets were politely indifferent――so markedly so, that the
doctor decided he had better defer any further mention of the matter
till Palmer should be gone. Presently he made a sign to the boy, but
Palmer appeared all at once to have grown stupid, and merely gazed at
the doctor with an irritating blankness of expression.
They discussed music, of which the doctor knew nothing, and Mr.
Bradley, with an air of boredom so profound that it must have been
assumed, listened to the remarks he hazarded. They talked on, and
never in his life had Doctor O’Neill been subjected to such a subtle
rudeness. He felt that he should not be able to stand it much longer.
Every observation Mr. Bradley now let drop was, he knew, a more or
less direct invitation for them to take their departure, and the
doctor at last began to experience a certain curiosity as to how far
such a conversation could go before it became brutally explicit. He
had endeavoured to lead Mr. Bradley to talk about the past, but very
soon he had seen the uselessness of such an attempt. Mr. Bradley, he
now felt sure, knew precisely what they were there for, and it was
only because he derived a malicious satisfaction from the doctor’s
discomfort that he did not cut the interview short on the spot.
Certainly, if he _had_ seen through them, he was taking an ample
revenge.
The doctor felt at present that where he had made a fatal mistake
was in bringing Palmer. It was Palmer who had aroused the organist’s
suspicions: without Palmer all might have been well. Meanwhile, the
red-haired boy seemed to take no notice of anything they were saying.
He had begun to examine the books on the shelf near him, reading out
several of the titles in an undertone.
“_Hallucinations!_ My father has that book, I think.”
Mr. Bradley glanced malevolently in the boy’s direction, and the doctor
asked politely, “Are you interested in the subject?”
“Not in the least,” replied the organist, coldly. “Half those books
don’t even belong to me――that is to say, I didn’t buy them. I read very
little.”
“Isn’t an hallucination a kind of ghost that isn’t really there?”
Palmer innocently inquired, turning to Mr. Bradley.
“Yes, something like that:――an idea that enters the heads of stupid
people, and leads them to make themselves ridiculous.”
The doctor laughed. He decided that, since Palmer was evidently
determined not to budge without him, they had both better go. After
all, his coming here had probably conveyed to Mr. Bradley the message,
or the warning, which was all――considering he had no definite knowledge
to go upon――that at the best he could have given him.
“Well, I expect it’s about time we moved on,” he murmured, preparatory
to getting up; but Palmer sat staring at the wall opposite him as if
he had not heard. His face had altered, his forehead was wrinkled up,
and a curious, fixed expression had come into his eyes. The doctor, who
had half risen from his chair, sat down again. If ever anyone had the
appearance of being confronted by an hallucination, it was Palmer at
that moment.
The organist was watching him too, and, as he watched, his long thin
fingers all at once began to move nervously. He seemed on the verge of
saying something; his lips parted to speak; but he checked himself. At
last he broke into a thin high laugh. “What are you staring at?” he
asked.
Palmer started up out of a dream. “Nothing,” he answered a little
confusedly. And then, as if in spite of himself, “I was just looking at
your shadow on the wall.”
The organist moved quickly, and pushed back the lamp.
“Don’t,” said Palmer, getting up. “There’s a boy at school who can do
ripping silhouettes from people’s shadows:――some of them are awfully
queer!... If I had a piece of paper I could do yours.”
As he spoke he took a pencil from his pocket, and moved towards the
writing-table. Simultaneously Doctor O’Neill became aware that
something had happened. A moment previously he had had before him an
elderly gentleman, perhaps a little eccentric-looking, but obviously
refined, and even distinguished, in appearance. What was it, then, that
had taken place; what incredible transformation? For in that white
grimacing mask of hate turned towards the back of the retreating boy he
saw only the face of a devil.
The impression passed so quickly that had it been less vivid he might
have doubted of its reality. Mr. Bradley recovered himself even before
Palmer had time to reach the desk. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to do
your drawing to-night,” he said acidly. “I must go now. I want to try
over some music before it gets too late.”
The doctor rose to his feet at once. “I really must apologize for
keeping you.”
“Not at all; it has been delightful. I was under the impression you
were very busy, otherwise we might have had more of these pleasant
evenings together. Does this interesting boy――I hope he will pardon me
for not knowing his name?――does he invariably accompany you on your
rounds?”
“Oh, we’re great pals,” the doctor said, with a rather pumped-up
geniality. He pushed Palmer out of the room before him, for Mr.
Bradley’s little bow, delivered with his hands clasped behind his
back, was quite sufficient indication that they were dismissed.
The doctor was conscious that all through he had played a subordinate
and rather hopeless part, and that he had played it extremely badly.
“You’re right,” he remarked, when they once more found themselves in
the street. “The man is certainly insane――I should think dangerously
so. I wonder how long he has been like this? At any rate, steps must
be taken at once: in fact, I don’t know whether I oughtn’t to warn the
people he is with now.”
“You saw his face when I got up to draw his shadow? That’s the way
he looked when he caught me in the church――only to-night he was a
good deal worse. If you hadn’t been there there might have been
developments.”
“Perhaps too many developments,” said the doctor briefly.
“I was ready for him; I was watching him in the mirror.”
“I don’t think he’d have given you much time. And at any rate, if you
_had_ used your revolver, what would you have felt like afterwards?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d have felt a great deal.”
“I expect your bark is worse than your bite, Palmer.... Well, I’m
coming home with you. I must have a talk with Canon Annesley.”
“About this?”
“Yes; something will have to be done. The man isn’t safe.”
They walked side by side along the road, in the direction of the Glebe,
the doctor a good deal worried in more ways than one.
“We shouldn’t have gone as we did,” he said at last. “We ought to have
managed differently. The worst possible thing was to excite him.”
“But if we hadn’t gone we shouldn’t have known. It was a pity he came
back so soon.”
“I might have found out――found out sufficient at all events――simply by
leading him on to talk.... That is, if you had given me a hint. _Your_
method, I’m afraid, was rather drastic. Another thing;――I think you
should have told me all you knew. I thought you _had_ done so, this
afternoon.”
“I did tell you all I knew, sir. This was only a guess――from something
Miss Annesley told me Grif had said when he was ill. It was after I had
seen you, just before tea this evening, that she told me. And my guess
might have been all wrong. I wouldn’t have risked it if I hadn’t seen
he knew what we had come about.”
“And what do you make of it now?”
“I can’t make very much of it. But _he_ did. It had some meaning for
_him_. And it was because he thought I had hit on the truth that he
looked like that. It has something to do with his shadow. I noticed
once or twice before, when I saw him out walking, that he kept looking
at something――something which seemed to me not to be there....”
The doctor grunted; he felt dissatisfied. “What was it you found in his
bedroom?” he asked.
“An address for you to write to――to make inquiries.”
They walked along in silence for a little way, Palmer from time to time
glancing uncertainly at his companion. The road was deserted, and the
high hedges, black in the still moonlight, seemed to shut them in. A
freshening breeze filled the night with murmuring sound, and blew the
scent of honeysuckle in their faces.
“Do you think it is rotten――all I have done?”
The doctor started out of a train of uncomfortable cogitation. “No, no;
certainly not. I think it very possible you may have averted some――some
disaster.”
“You didn’t like it, all the same――when we first went in,” said Palmer
despondently.
The doctor forced a laugh. “Oh, well――perhaps not. You see, a person
suffering from delusions isn’t exactly a criminal. And then, it was
all――rather outside my experience.”
Palmer was silent a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “But you don’t
think I’d do that kind of thing without a very good reason, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I wouldn’t, you know,” said the boy eagerly.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” He laid a friendly hand on Palmer’s shoulder.
Palmer, however, was determined to be honest. “The first thing of
that sort I tried was at home. It was long ago, and I was only a kid
of about ten or eleven. Mamma had lost some money――two sovereigns
had been taken out of her purse, she said. I remembered seeing one
of the servants, a girl called Jane, come out of mamma’s room, and I
remembered that she had hurried past me in the passage. I was sure
Jane had taken the money. There was a fuss made, but mamma didn’t
want to call in the police or anything like that, though when papa
laughed at her it only made her more sure than ever that she had been
robbed. I waited till I saw Jane by herself, and then I said to her
that perhaps mamma had dropped the money, and that it might have rolled
under the fender in her room; but I had first looked under the fender
to make sure there was nothing there. Jane was quite excited by the
idea, and she ran upstairs, while I dawdled behind so as to give her
plenty of time. When I came in she was standing in the middle of the
floor, and she called out in a queer nervous kind of way, ‘You can
look for yourself, Master Palmer; I won’t have anything to do with
it; I won’t go near it.’ So I lifted up the fender, and there were
the two sovereigns; and she was so stupid that she had actually laid
one exactly on the top of the other. Then suddenly she began to cry.
She put her arms round me and kissed me. I told her she must keep the
money; that if she didn’t they would know she had stolen it. And in
the end she confessed, and told me why she had taken it. It was for
one of her brothers, who had got into trouble in some way, and she had
intended to pay it back. I promised not to tell, and persuaded her at
last to keep the two pounds. She left a little while afterwards, and
I never saw her again. But she paid back the money. She sent mamma a
postal order nearly a year later, and though they suspected it came
from Jane, nobody was ever quite sure.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t give the girl away,” said the doctor
quietly.