He looked up. Over the fence which divided the garden from the one next
door a familiar face was peering. It was his hostess of last night.
But, whereas then she had been curling-pinned and dressing-gowned, she
was now neatly clad in print and wore on her head a becoming cap. Her
face, moreover, which had been hard and hostile, was softened by a
friendly grin.
“Good morning,” said Sam.
“How did you get there?”
“When you turned me out into the night,” said Sam reproachfully, “I took
refuge next door.”
“I say, I’m sorry about that,” said the girl remorsefully. “But how was
I to know that you were telling the truth?” She giggled happily. “Mr.
Braddock came back half an hour after you had left. He made such a rare
old row that I came down again----”
“And shot him, I hope. No? A mistake, I think.”
“Well, then, he asked where you were. He said your name was Evans.”
“He was a little confused. My name is Shotter. I warned you that he was
not quite himself. What became of him then?”
“He went up to bed. I’ve just taken him up a tray, but all he did was to
look at it and moan and shut his eyes again. I say, have you had any
breakfast?”
“Don’t torture me.”
“Well, hop over the fence then. I’ll get you some in two ticks.”
Sam hopped. The sun seemed very bright now, and the birds were singing
with a singular sweetness.
“Would it also run to a shave and a bath?” he asked, as they walked
toward the house.
“You’ll find Mr. Wrenn’s shaving things in the bathroom.”
“Is this heaven?” said Sam. “Shall I also find Mr. Wrenn by any chance?”
“Oh, no, him and Miss Kay have been gone half an hour.”
“Excellent! Where is this bathroom?”
“Up those stairs, first door to the left. When you come down, go into
that room there, and I’ll bring the tray in. It’s the drawing-room, but
the dining-room table isn’t cleared yet.”
“I shall enjoy seeing your drawing-room, of which I have heard so much.”
“Do you like eggs?”
“I do--and plenty of them. Also bacon--a good deal of bacon. Oh, and by
the way----” added Sam, leaning over the banisters.
“Yes?”
“----toast--lots and lots of toast.”
“I’ll get you all you can eat.”
“You will? Tell me,” said Sam, “it has been puzzling me greatly. How do
you manage to get that dress on over your wings?”
CHAPTER TEN
SAM FINDS A PHOTOGRAPH
Sam, when he came downstairs some twenty minutes later, was definitely
in what Mr. Hash Todhunter would have described as the pink. The night
had been bad, but joy had certainly come in the morning. The sight of
the breakfast tray on a small table by the window set the seal on his
mood of well-being; and for a long, luxurious space he had eyes for
nothing else. It was only after he had consumed the eggs, the bacon, the
toast, the coffee and the marmalade that he yielded to what is usually
the first impulse of a man who finds himself in a strange room and began
to explore.
It was some half minute later that Claire Lippett, clearing the
dining-room table, was startled to the extent of dropping a butter dish
by a loud shout or cry that seemed to proceed from the room where she
had left her guest.
Hurrying thither, she found him behaving in a strange manner. He was
pointing at a photograph on the mantelpiece and gesticulating wildly.
“Who’s that?” he cried as she entered. He seemed to have difficulty with
his vocal cords.
“Eh?”
“Who the devil’s that?”
“Language!”
“Who is it? That girl--who is she? What’s her name?”
“You needn’t shout,” said Claire, annoyed.
The photograph which had so excited this young man was the large one
that stood in the centre of the mantelpiece. It represented a girl in
hunting costume, standing beside her horse, and it was Claire’s
favourite. A dashing and vigorous duster, with an impressive record of
smashed china and broken glass to her name, she always handled this
particular work of art with a gentle tenderness.
“That?” she said. “Why, that’s Miss Kay, of course.”
She came forward and flicked a speck of dust off the glass.
“Taken at Midways, that was,” she said, “two or three years ago, before
the old colonel lost his money. I was Miss Kay’s maid then--personal
maid,” she added with pride. She regarded the photograph wistfully, for
it stood to her for all the pomps and glories of a vanished yesterday,
for the brave days when there had been horses and hunting costumes and
old red chimneys against a blue sky and rabbits in the park and sunlight
on the lake and all the rest of the things that made up Midways and
prosperity. “I remember the day that photograph was took. It was printed
in the papers, that photograph was.”
Sam continued to be feverish.
“Miss Kay? Who’s Miss Kay?”
“Miss Kay Derrick, Mr. Wrenn’s niece.”
“The man who lives here, do you mean?”
“Yes. He gave Miss Kay a home when everything went smash. That’s how I
come to be here. I could have stopped at Midways if I’d of liked,” she
said. “The new people who took the place would have kept me on if I’d of
wanted. But I said, ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going with Miss Kay,’ I said.
‘I’m not going to desert her in her mis-for-chewn,’ I said.”
Sam started violently.
“You don’t mean--you can’t mean--you don’t mean she lives here?”
“Of course she does.”
“Not actually lives here--not in this very house?”
“Certainly.”
“My gosh!”
Sam quivered from head to foot. A stupendous idea had come to him.
“My gosh!” he cried again, with bulging eyes. Then, with no more
words--for it was a time not for words but for action--he bounded from
the room.
To leap out of the front door and clatter down the steps to the board
which stood against the fence was with Sam the work of a moment. Beneath
the large letters of the To Let, Furnished, he now perceived other
smaller letters informing all who might be interested that applications
for the tenancy of that desirable semi-detached residence, Mon Repos,
should be made to Messrs. Matters & Cornelius, House Agents, of Ogilvy
Street, Valley Fields, S. E. He galloped up the steps again and beat
wildly upon the door.
“Now what?” inquired Claire.
“Where is Ogilvy Street?”
“Up the road, first turning to the left.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Out on the gravel, he paused, pondered and returned.
“Back again?” said Claire.
“Did you say left or right?”
“Left.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Claire.
This time Sam performed the descent of the steps in a single leap. But
reaching the gate, he was struck by a thought.
“Fond of exercise, aren’t you?” said Claire patiently.
“Suddenly occurred to me,” explained Sam, “that I’d got no money.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“These house-agent people would expect a bit of money down in advance,
wouldn’t they?”
“Sounds possible. Are you going to take a house?”
“I’m going to take Mon Repos,” said Sam. “And I must have money. Where’s
Mr. Braddock?”
“In bed.”
“Where’s his room?”
“Top floor back.”
“Thanks.”
“Dee-lighted,” said Claire.
Her statement that the guest of the house was in bed proved accurate.
Sam, entering the apartment indicated, found his old school friend lying
on his back with open mouth and matted hair. He was snoring
rhythmically. On a chair at his side stood a tray containing a teapot,
toast and a cold poached egg of such raffish and leering aspect that
Sam, moving swiftly to the dressing table, averted his eyes as he
passed.
The dressing table presented an altogether more pleasing picture. Heaped
beside Mr. Braddock’s collar box and hair-brushes was a small mountain
of notes and silver--a fascinating spectacle with the morning sunshine
playing on them. With twitching fingers, Sam scooped them up; and
finding pencil and paper, paused for a moment, seeking for words.
It is foolish to attempt to improve on the style of a master. Hash
Todhunter had shown himself in a class of his own at this kind of
literary composition, and Sam was content to take him as a model. He
wrote:
“DEAR BRADDER: You will doubtless be surprised to learn that I have
borrowed your money. I will return it in God’s good time.
Meanwhile, as Sir Philip Sidney said to the wounded soldier, my
need is greater than yours.
“Trusting this finds you in the pink,
“Yrs. Obedtly,
“S. SHOTTER.”
Then, having propped the note against the collar box, he left the room.
A sense of something omitted, some little kindly act forgotten, arrested
him at the head of the stairs. He returned; and taking the poached egg,
placed it gently on the pillow beside his friend’s head. This done, he
went downstairs again, and so out on the broad trail that led to the
premises of Messrs. Matters & Cornelius, House Agents, of Ogilvy
Street.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SAM BECOMES A HOUSEHOLDER
What Mr. Matters would have thought of Sam as he charged breezily into
the office a few minutes later we shall never know, for Mr. Matters died
in the year 1910. Mr. Cornelius thought him perfectly foul. After one
swift, appraising stare through his gold-rimmed spectacles, he went so
far as to share this opinion with his visitor.
“I never give to beggars,” he said. He was a venerable old man with a
white beard and bushy eyebrows, and he spoke with something of the
intonation of a druid priest chanting at the altar previous to sticking
the knife into the human sacrifice. “I do not believe in indiscriminate
charity.”
“I will fill in your confession book some other time,” said Sam. “For
the moment, let us speak of houses. I want to take Mon Repos in Burberry
Road.”
The druid was about to recite that ancient rune which consists of the
solemn invocation to a policeman, when he observed with considerable
surprise that his young visitor was spraying currency in great
quantities over the table. He gulped. It was unusual for clients at his
office to conduct business transactions in a manner more suitable to the
Bagdad of the _Arabian Nights_ than a respectable modern suburb. He
could hardly have been more surprised if camels laden with jewels and
spices had paraded down Ogilvy Street.
“What is all this?” he asked, blinking.
“Money,” said Sam.
“Where did you get it?”
He eyed Sam askance. And Sam, who, as the heady result of a bath, shave,
breakfast and the possession of cash, had once more forgotten that there
was anything noticeable about his appearance, gathered that here was
another of the long line of critics who had failed to recognise his true
worth at first sight.
“Do not judge me by the outer crust,” he said. “I am shabby because I
have been through much. When I stepped aboard the boat at New York I was
as natty a looking young fellow as you could wish to see. People nudged
one another as I passed along the pier and said, ‘Who is he?’”
“You come from America?”
“From America.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Cornelius, as if that explained everything.
“My uncle,” said Sam, sensing the change in the atmosphere and pursuing
his advantage, “is Mr. John B. Pynsent, the well-to-do millionaire of
whom you have doubtless heard.... You haven’t? One of our greatest
captains of industry. He made a vast fortune in fur.”
“In fur? Really?”
“Got the concession for providing the snakes at the Bronx Zoo with
earmuffs, and from that moment never looked back.”
“You surprise me,” said Mr. Cornelius. “Most interesting.”
“A romance of commerce,” agreed Sam. “And now, returning to this matter
of the house----”
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Cornelius. His voice, as he eyed the money on the
table, was soft and gentle. He still looked like a druid priest, but a
druid priest on his afternoon off. “For how long a period did you wish
to rent Mon Repos, Mr.--er----”
“Shotter is the name.... Indefinitely.”
“Shall we say three months rent in advance?”
“Let us say just those very words.”
“And as to references----”
Sam was on the point of giving Mr. Wrenn’s name, until he recollected
that he had not yet met that gentleman. Using his shaving brush and
razor and eating food from his larder seemed to bring them very close
together. He reflected.
“Lord Tilbury,” he said. “That’s the baby.”
“Lord Tilbury, of the Mammoth Publishing Company?” said Mr. Cornelius,
plainly awed. “Do you know him?”
“Know him? We’re more like brothers than anything. There’s precious
little Lord Tilbury ever does without consulting me. It might be a good
idea to call him up on the phone now. I ought to let him know that I’ve
arrived.”
Mr. Cornelius turned to the telephone, succeeded after an interval in
getting the number, and after speaking with various unseen underlings,
tottered reverently as he found himself talking to the great man in
person. He handed the instrument to Sam.
“His Lordship would like to speak to you, Mr. Shotter.”
“I knew it, I knew it,” said Sam. “Hello! Lord Tilbury? This is Sam. How
are you? I’ve just arrived. I came over in a tramp steamer, and I’ve
been having all sorts of adventures. Give you a good laugh. I’m down at
Valley Fields at the moment, taking a house. I’ve given your name as a
reference. You don’t mind? Splendid! Lunch? Delighted. I’ll be along as
soon as I can. Got to get a new suit first. I slept in my clothes last
night.... Well, good-bye. It’s all right about the references,” he said,
turning to Mr. Cornelius. “Carry on.”
“I will draw up the lease immediately, Mr. Shotter. If you will tell me
where I am to send it----”
“Send it?” said Sam surprised. “Why, to Mon Repos, of course.”
“But----”
“Can’t I move in at once?”
“I suppose so, if you wish it. But I fancy the house is hardly ready for
immediate tenancy. You will need linen.”
“That’s all right. A couple of hours shopping will fix that.”
Mr. Cornelius smiled indulgently. He was thoroughly pro-Sam by now.
“True American hustle,” he observed, waggling his white beard. “Well, I
see no objection, if you make a point of it. I will find the key for
you. Tell me, Mr. Shotter,” he asked as he rummaged about in drawers,
“what has caused this great desire on your part to settle in Valley
Fields? Of course, as a patriotic inhabitant, I ought not to be
surprised. I have lived in Valley Fields all my life, and would not live
anywhere else if you offered me a million pounds.”
“I won’t.”
“I was born in Valley Fields, Mr. Shotter, and I love the place, and I
am not ashamed to say so.
“‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead,’” inquired Mr. Cornelius,
“‘Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose
heart hath ne’er within him burned as home his footsteps he hath turn’d
from wandering on a foreign strand?’”
“Ah!” said Sam. “That’s what we’d all like to know, wouldn’t we?”
“‘If such there breathe,’” proceeded Mr. Cornelius, “‘go mark him well!
For him no minstrel raptures swell. High though his titles, proud his
name, boundless his wealth as wish can claim, despite those titles,
power, and pelf, the wretch, concentred all in self----’”
“I have a luncheon engagement at 1:30,” said Sam.
“‘----Living, shall forfeit fair renown, and, doubly dying, shall go
down to the vile dust from whence he sprung, unwept, unhonour’d and
unsung.’ Those words, Mr. Shotter----”
“A little thing of your own?”
“Those words, Mr. Shotter, will appear on the title page of the history
of Valley Fields, which I am compiling--a history dealing not only with
its historical associations, which are numerous, but also with those
aspects of its life which my occupation as house agent has given me
peculiar opportunities of examining. I get some queer clients, Mr.
Shotter.”
Sam was on the point of saying that the clients got a queer house agent,
thus making the thing symmetrical, but he refrained.
“It may interest you to know that a very well-known criminal, a man who
might be described as a second Charles Peace, once resided in the very
house which you are renting.”
“I shall raise the tone.”
“Like Charles Peace, he was a most respectable man to all outward
appearances. His name was Finglass. Nobody seems to have had any
suspicion of his real character until the police, acting on information
received, endeavoured to arrest him for the perpetration of a great bank
robbery.”
“Catch him?” said Sam, only faintly interested.
“No; he escaped and fled the country. But I was asking you what made you
settle on Valley Fields as a place of residence. You would seem to have
made up your mind very quickly.”
“Well, the fact is, I happened to catch sight of my next-door
neighbours, and it struck me that they would be pleasant people to live
near.”
Mr. Cornelius nodded.
“Mr. Wrenn is greatly respected by all who know him.”
“I liked his razor,” said Sam.
“If you are going to Tilbury House it is possible that you may meet him.
He is the editor of Pyke’s _Home Companion_.”
“Is that so?” said Sam. “Pyke’s _Home Companion_, eh?”
“I take it in regularly.”
“And Mr. Wrenn’s niece? A charming girl, I thought.”
“I scarcely know her,” said Mr. Cornelius indifferently. “Young women do
not interest me.”
The proverb about casting pearls before swine occurred to Sam.
“I must be going,” he said coldly. “Speed up that lease, will you. And
if anyone else blows in and wants to take the house, bat them over the
head with the office ruler.”
“Mr. Wrenn and I frequently play a game of chess together,” said Mr.
Cornelius.
Sam was not interested in his senile diversions.
“Good morning,” he said stiffly, and passed out into Ogilvy Street.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SAM IS MUCH TOO SUDDEN
§ 1
The clocks of London were striking twelve when Sam, entering the Strand,
turned to the left and made his way toward Fleet Street to keep his
tryst with Lord Tilbury at the offices of the Mammoth Publishing
Company.
In the interval which had elapsed since his parting from Mr. Cornelius a
striking change had taken place in his appearance, for he had paid a
visit to that fascinating shop near Covent Garden which displays on its
door the legend, “Cohen Bros., Ready-Made Clothiers,” and is the Mecca
of all who prefer to pluck their garments ripe off the bough instead of
waiting for them to grow. The kindly brethren had fitted him out with a
tweed suit of bold pattern, a shirt of quality, underclothing, socks, a
collar, sock suspenders, a handkerchief, a tie pin and a hat with the
same swift and unemotional efficiency with which, had he desired it,
they would have provided the full costume of an Arctic explorer, a duke
about to visit Buckingham Palace, or a big-game hunter bound for Eastern
Africa. Nor had they failed him in the matter of new shoes and a
wanghee. It was, in short, an edition de luxe of S. Pynsent Shotter,
richly bound and profusely illustrated, that now presented itself to the
notice of the public.
The tonic of new clothes is recognised by all students of human nature.
Sam walked with a springy jauntiness, and his gay bearing, combined with
the brightness of his exterior, drew many eyes upon him.
Two of these eyes belonged to a lean and stringy man of mournful
countenance who was moving in the opposite direction, away from London’s
newspaper land. For a moment they rested upon Sam in a stare that had
something of dislike in it, as if their owner resented the intrusion
upon his notice of so much cheerfulness. Then they suddenly widened into
a stare of horror, and the man stopped, spellbound. A hurrying
pedestrian, bumping into him from behind, propelled him forward, and
Sam, coming up at four miles an hour, bumped into him in front. The
result of the collision was a complicated embrace, from which Sam was
extricating himself with apologies when he perceived that this person
with whom he had become entangled was no stranger, but an old friend.
“Hash!” he cried.
There was nothing in Mr. Todhunter’s aspect to indicate pleasure at the
encounter. He breathed heavily and spoke no word.
“Hash, you old devil!” said Sam joyfully.
Mr. Todhunter licked his lips uncomfortably. He cast a swift glance over
his shoulder, as if debating the practicability of a dive into the
traffic. He endeavoured, without success, to loosen the grip of Sam’s
hand on his coat sleeve.
“What are you wriggling for?” asked Sam, becoming aware of this.
“I’m not wriggling,” said Hash. He spoke huskily and in a tone that
seemed timidly ingratiating. If the voice of Mr. Cornelius had resembled
a druid priest’s, Clarence Todhunter’s might have been likened to that
of the victim on the altar. “I’m not wriggling, Sam. What would I want
to wriggle for?”
“Where did you spring from, Hash?”
Mr. Todhunter coughed.
“I was just coming from leaving a note for you, Sam, at that place
Tilbury House, where you told me you’d be.”
“You’re a great letter writer, aren’t you?”
The allusion was not lost upon Mr. Todhunter. He gulped and his
breathing became almost stertorous.
“I want to explain about that, Sam,” he said. “Explain, if I may use the
term, fully. Sam,” said Mr. Todhunter thickly, “what I say and what I
always have said is, when there’s been a little misunderstanding between
pals--pals, if I may use the expression, what have stood together side
by side through thick and through thin--pals what have shared and shared
alike----” He broke off. He was not a man of acute sensibility, but he
could see that the phrase, in the circumstances, was an unhappy one.
“What I say is, Sam, when it’s like that--well, there’s nothing like
letting bygones be bygones and, so to speak, burying the dead past. As a
man of the world, you bein’ one and me bein’ another----”
“I take it,” said Sam, “from a certain something in your manner, that
that moth-eaten whippet of yours did not win his race.”
“Sam,” said Mr. Todhunter, “I will not conceal it from you. I will be
frank, open and above board. That whippet did not win.”
“Your money then--and mine--is now going to support some bookie in the
style to which he has been accustomed?”
“It’s gorn, Sam,” admitted Mr. Todhunter in a deathbed voice. “Yes, Sam,
it’s gorn.”
“Then come and have a drink,” said Sam cordially.
“A drink?”
“Or two.”
He led the way to a hostelry that lurked coyly among shops and office
buildings. Hash followed, marvelling. The first stunned horror had
passed, and his mind, such as it was, was wrestling with the insoluble
problem of why Sam, with the facts of the whippet disaster plainly
before him, was so astoundingly amiable.
The hour being early even for a perpetually thirsty community like that
of Fleet Street, the saloon bar into which they made their way was free
from the crowds which would have interfered with a quiet chat between
friends. Two men who looked like printers were drinking beer in a
corner, while at the counter a haughty barmaid was mixing a cocktail for
a solitary reveller in a velours hat. This individual had just made a
remark about the weather in a rich and attractive voice, and his
intonation was so unmistakably American that Sam glanced at him as he
passed; and, glancing, half stopped, arrested by something strangely
familiar about the man’s face.
It was not a face which anyone would be likely to forget if they had
seen it often; and the fact that it brought no memories back to him
inclined Sam to think that he could never have met this rather
striking-looking person, but must have seen him somewhere on the street
or in a hotel lobby. He was a handsome, open-faced man of middle-age.
“I’ve seen that fellow before somewhere,” he said, as he sat with Hash
at a table by the window.
“’Ave you?” said Hash, and there was such a manifest lack of interest in
his tone that Sam, surprised at his curtness, awoke to the realisation
that he had not yet ordered refreshment. He repaired the omission and
Hash’s drawn face relaxed.
“Hash,” said Sam, “I owe you a lot.”
“Me?” said Hash blankly.
“Yes. You remember that photograph I showed you?”
“The girl--Nimrod?”
“Yes. Hash, I’ve found her, and purely owing to you. If you hadn’t taken
that money it would never have happened.”
Mr. Todhunter, though he was far from understanding, endeavoured to
assume a simper of modest altruism. He listened attentively while Sam
related the events of the night.
“And I’ve taken the house next door,” concluded Sam, “and I move in
to-day. So, if you want a shore job, the post of cook in the Shotter
household is open. How about it?”
A sort of spasm passed across Hash’s wooden features.
“You want me to come and cook?”
“I’ve got to get a cook somewhere. Can you leave the ship?”
“Can I leave the ship? Mister, you watch and see how quick I can leave
that ruddy ocean-going steam kettle! I’ve been wanting a shore job ever
since I was cloth-head enough to go to sea.”