THE GIRL AT THE HEXAGON
That the Okewoods obeyed the Chief’s instructions to the letter I can
testify, for I happened to be drinking my after-luncheon in the lounge
of the hotel at Broadstairs when they arrived with suitcases and
golf-bags. Desmond was wearing a bandage about his head, and, after we
had exchanged greetings, I asked him what he had been doing to himself.
“I got a crack on the head from a ball playing racquets at Queen’s,”
unblushingly replied this master of improvisation, “and so I’ve decided
to revert to golf. We think it’s less dangerous, don’t we, Francis?”
“Sure,” rejoined his brother, who likes to flavour his speech at times
with certain exoticisms acquired from his American wife, “but a heap
less exciting, eh, old man?”
At this time, naturally, I had no idea of the hidden meaning of these
seemingly innocent remarks. There was certainly nothing to suggest their
secret significance in the blandly smiling countenances of the two
brothers. That is the Okewood pair all over. Their team-work is
wonderful. They always remind me of two acrobats on a trapeze: one is
invariably there when he is required to catch or support the other. I
can imagine no more devastating combination than these two quiet but
supremely competent young men on any mission requiring a blend of
excessive tact and sublime audacity.
“Are you down here for long?” Desmond asked me.
I told him I expected to stay for a month.
“Splendid!” he retorted. “That means there’ll always be a partner for
Francis or me when we’re sick of playing against each other.”
“It means nothing of the sort,” I replied, indignant at such shameless
opportunism. “I’ve come down here to finish a book. I’m not in the War
Office, you know: I have to work for _my_ living.”
“‘The Industrious Apprentice Rebukes His Idle Companion,’” quoted
Francis. “He’s being smug, Des. Let’s sit on his head!”
The conversation degenerated into a most undignified wrestling match,
which ended, after I had been nearly smothered by a cushion, by my
consenting, as a rare and notable exception, to accompany them forthwith
to the North Foreland for a three-ball match before tea.
Looking back, I find it hard to realize that my light-hearted and
amusing companions on that blustery February afternoon were living under
a grave and terrible menace. Even now I can scarcely bring myself to
believe that Desmond, as debonair, as bright and as sparkling as ever,
had only just emerged from such nerve-racking experiences as the affair
of the purple cabriolet and the case of the Constantinople courier. Now
that I come to think of it, I remarked that his nervous air which had
attracted the attention of old Erasmus Wilkes had completely vanished. I
can well believe Francis when he says that the one thing his brother
cannot stand is inaction and that danger is his best tonic.
In the upshot it proved that my two friends could get on very well
without me. For the best part of four weeks I was left in peace with my
writing, and very often I did not see the Okewoods until the evening
when we usually assembled in the bar for a cocktail before dinner. If I
had not been so absorbed in my book, I should probably have noticed that
Desmond appeared to benefit very little by his change. As it was, it was
not until my bulky parcel of manuscript had been posted off to London
and I accompanied them to the golf-course for a round before lunch that
I observed how quiet and abstracted Desmond had become.
I chaffed him mildly on his low spirits; but he did not, as usual, take
up the challenge and my jokes fell flat. He was playing very badly on
this morning and, usually a strong and accurate driver, was slicing and
pulling his balls all over the place.
We were on the tee near the Captain Digby public-house when a telegraph
boy appeared from nowhere, as telegraph boys do, and thrust a telegram
into my hand. Absent-mindedly I opened it and read:
Dine with me at Hexagon Saturday night eight P.M.—Chief.
At a glance I realized that the message was not for me and, looking at
the envelope, saw that it was addressed to “Major Desmond Okewood.” With
a word of apology I handed the telegram to my friend. The change in his
face, as he read it, was extraordinary. A long sigh, almost a groan, of
relief burst from his lips and his whole face lighted up. He showed the
message to Francis, who grinned cheerfully and said “Good.”
“Come on,” cried Desmond, suddenly addressing me. “It’s your honour. I
lay you a new ball I take this hole off you.”
Needless to say, for my thoughts were anywhere but on the game, I
foozled my drive. But Desmond who, as I have said, had been playing
disgracefully, hit a perfect ball, and, from that moment on, recovered
his form. He was in the wildest spirits, and to see him one would have
said that the telegram which had wrought this astonishing change in him
had brought him news of a great inheritance rather than a banal
invitation to dinner at that rather disreputable West-End haunt, the
Hexagon.
But even if he had known to what perilous enterprise that invitation was
the prelude, I believe he would have shown himself no less heartened.
Danger, as Francis says, was ever the best pick-me-up for Desmond
Okewood.
“Okewood,” said the Chief quietly, “the girl has just come in. Don’t
look up for a moment! She’s taken the table next to the door: in black
she is: you can’t mistake her, she’s so deathly pale!”
The Chief fell to studying his plate with every appearance of
absorption, while Desmond Okewood, from behind the cover of the
wine-list, glanced casually across the roaring evening life of the
Hexagon Buffet.
He saw the girl at once. Her extreme pallor, as the Chief had been quick
to note, was her most distinctive feature. She wore her hair, which was
raven-black, piled high in the Spanish fashion with a tall, white ivory
comb, richly carved, at the back. She had retained her fur coat and
against its shaggy blackness one white shoulder gleamed milkily.
She was obviously a familiar visitor at the Hexagon Buffet, for the head
waiter greeted her with a friendly smile as he fussed the table to
rights. She ordered her dinner composedly and without hesitation, as one
accustomed to fend for herself. In her whole comportment there was an
air of dignity, of reserve, which clearly imposed itself on the _maitre
d’hôtel_, accustomed as he was to the rather promiscuous familiarity of
the other unaccompanied ladies who frequented the Buffet. Her orders
given, the girl dropped her eyes to her plate and remained seemingly
lost in thought, her long lashes resting like black crescents upon her
dead-white cheeks.
“Not quite the style of the Hexagon, eh?” remarked Desmond.
“They get all sorts here now!” retorted his companion. “The old Hexagon
is quite the rage again, I’m told!”
Fashion, always capricious, is never more fickle than in the
distribution of her favours among those who cater for the _monde ou l’on
s’amuse_. For no apparent reason a grill-room, a bar, a night-club, or
the like will suddenly receive from the hand of the goddess the patent
that confers fame. It lives its little hour; for a spell it resounds to
laughter and music, the popping of corks, and the scurry of waiters,
while the shareholders bask in the warmth of unwonted prosperity like a
cat in the sun. Then as mysteriously, but also as suddenly as success,
decline sets in: the nightly line of private cars and taxis outside the
brilliantly lighted portico dwindles: the gold lace on the porter’s cap
begins to tarnish; and ultimately provincials, to whose ears the fame of
the resort has only tardily come, find themselves facing fellow
provincials across a vista of empty tables.
Sometimes the wheel turns full circle and popularity comes back. So it
had gone with the Hexagon Buffet. Time was, in the days of the “Crutch
and Toothpick Brigade,” when it had rivalled “Jimmie’s” as the haunt of
the _jeunesse dorée_ in their skin-tight clothes, their opera-capes, and
their covert-coats. Then oblivion had slowly claimed it and, in the
years between, the riff-raff of the West End had gathered nightly at the
long bar with the battered brass rail where once the chappies had stood
and chaffed “Maudie” and “May” over a “B. and S.”
But now, in the fullness of time, prosperity had returned to the “old
Hex.” The fine proportions of its big central room left ample space for
a dancing-floor between the long bar at one end and the railed-off
enclosure at the other where one dined or supped. A jazz band of negroes
and an expatriated mixer who, when America knew not Volstead, had
enjoyed continental fame, showed that the Hexagon had adapted itself to
the spirit of the age.
Custom flowed back. It was as though the trainers and the jockeys and
the bookmakers, the fighting-men and their managers, their impresarii
and tame journalists, had suddenly remembered the old Hexagon. At their
heels came the wealthy patrons of sport, the older men at first, drawn
by memories fast fading of wild nights in the eighties, then the young
“knuts,” and with them, to dance a little and eat devilled bones after
the theatre, chorus ladies, revue girls, and females, unattached or
attached, of varying ages and social standing.
But mingling with this heterogeneous crowd were old frequenters of the
Hexagon in its evil days, mysterious “financiers,” confidence trick men
with their touts and runners, slim Latins, with hair like blue satin and
the gait of a panther, from the dancing-clubs, and benevolent-looking
old ladies, a little too freshly complexioned and a little too
bejewelled, who take an interest in any girl that is young and pretty.
In brief, the Hexagon was preëminently a resort where the head of a
Secret Service organization, to say nothing of one of his principal
lieutenants, might expect to make fruitful observations.
It was Saturday night and the Hexagon was roaring full. On the
dancing-floor, crowded with gliding couples, the red-coated blacks were
syncopating themselves into an epileptic frenzy; at the long bar, whence
resounded the rattle of the cocktail-shakers, the white-coated
attendants were opening oysters as though their lives depended on it;
while at the far end of the room, waiters darted incessantly between the
thronged tables.
Through the long violet curtains that screened the Buffet from the outer
lobby new arrivals kept appearing, men and women, old and young, in
evening dress and in tweeds, in ermine-collared opera-cloaks and in
tailor-mades. And from the merry, noisy, busy, jostling assembly rose,
as persistently as the swathes of blue tobacco smoke that drifted aloft
on the overheated air, a confused Babel of voices as incessant as the
hum of a threshing-floor or the pounding of the sea.
“Her name,” said the Chief suddenly, as though he divined his
companion’s thoughts, “or at any rate the name by which she chooses to
be known, is Madeleine McKenzie. She has been coming here now for a week
or more. Nobody knows much about her. Ah!”
He nudged Desmond’s elbow. Two youths, very sleek and impeccably attired
in evening dress, had sat down at the girl’s table. One of them, a
fair-haired, clean-looking boy, was slightly merry with wine.
“And now”—unexpectedly the Chief’s voice had become grave—“watch!”
His tone quickened Desmond’s whole attention. Ever since the Chief had
asked him to dine at the Hexagon on this particular Saturday night, he
had been cudgelling his brains to discover with what motive his senior
officer had wished to entertain him at this amusing but very bohemian
night-resort. Over their Clover Club cocktails at the bar and on various
pretexts during dinner itself, Desmond had sought in vain to probe the
depths of his host’s thoughts. Now came this summons to watchfulness,
stirring in the young man that hunger for adventure which had carried
him to such heights of success in the Secret Service.
The girl had finished her dinner and was taking her coffee when a woman
with a basket of flowers approached the table. Desmond had remarked the
flower-seller during the evening, a rather sinister-looking person in
black with neat lace apron and cuffs, plying her wares at the bar and
among the diners. She stopped in front of the girl and her two
companions and, resting her basket on her hip, took from it a little
nosegay and laid it silently upon the girl’s plate. The girl smiled and
pinned the flowers to the lapel of her fur coat.
“Did you see the flowers?” said the Chief.
“Of course,” replied Desmond.
“I mean, did you notice what flowers they were?”
Desmond glanced across the room. “They seem to be a white carnation with
some sort of blue flowers—cornflowers, probably—set round it!”
“I see!” mused the other. “Then I think we can be moving, Okewood!”
“And leave the charming and mysterious Madeleine here?” queried Desmond.
“No,” replied the older man, signing to a waiter, “she’s going too!”
Hardly were the words out of his mouth when the girl rose up from her
table by the door, gathering her heavy coat about her. It was quite
obvious that the young men were seeking to detain her. But laughingly
she put them off.
“Not to-night!” they heard her say as a sudden lull came in the music.
“I shall see you here again!”
Then, without looking to left or right, she hurried from the room.