DR. LAFFIN COMMANDS
Betty Carew listened, aghast. In that gloomy, dusty room, ill-lit,
badly ventilated, redolent of musty paper and ancient leather
bindings, she had heard many fantastic views and commands expressed by
Dr. Joshua Laffin, but never one so bizarre as this.
“I don’t quite understand.” She was speaking no more than the truth.
“Why do you wish me to do this?”
He took a pinch of snuff from a tortoiseshell box, replaced the box on
the table and leant back in his high-backed chair, his dark eyes fixed
on hers. He wore his customary black, and in the candle-light and
against the dark background he was just a long, yellow face and a pair
of lined, thin hands that moved restlessly.
“I give you neither ‘why’ nor ‘wherefore’,” he said, in a queer voice
that had something of the softer tones of an owl in it; the whoo-ing
of a man who habitually spoke through lips that were pursed as if to
whistle. “I command. You know me, Elizabeth. I will have my way.
Especially now. One has had disappointments; certain plans have
miscarried. In this last matter there must be no hitch. As you know, I
am but the servant of others--not of this plane.”
He waved his hand to the shadowy corners of the room, and the girl
experienced all the old terror that this gloomy house had inspired in
her during the fourteen years she had been an inmate.
“Here is Kama, the tamed Nemesis, vitalised by my genius. Here the
great Manasuputra, divine force of beneficence,” he said. “You, who
might have become acquainted with these mysteries, preferred the
transient pleasure of sense.”
An old story and an old reproach that left her unperturbed.
“My immeasurable superiority to the world,” he went on, “and,
therefore, to its opinions, should have helped you to overcome any
stupid qualms. You are vain, you are conceited, just as all girls with
a title to prettiness are vain and conceited. Your ego is distorted.
Contact with me, which would have humbled most people, has merely
puffed you up with pride. I am not even flattered. I would wish that
my greatness abashed you. But no! Charity child, workhouse child,
though no decent man or woman could know the truth about you without
shrinking in horror, you persist in opposing your wishes, your ‘whys’
to my instructions. Gutter brat, gallows child, scum of the very
dregs, I cannot teach you humility!”
He did not raise his voice in anger; the epithets fell in his cold
tones, like the tappings of rain upon glass.
She was neither distressed nor amused. The candlelight played upon the
mouldings of a spiritual face, singularly lovely. Another mystery than
that he spoke about was in the shadowed eyes, mystery in the dusky
shadings of her throat. Only the glory of her hair persisted, as
superior to the meagre illumination as Dr. Laffin was to the world.
Dr. Laffin saw nothing of beauty in her through his hard, brown eyes.
“I may be all these things,” said Betty calmly, “and yet feel a
natural diffidence at sitting in a shop window for people to gape at
me. I see no sense in it. I don’t profess to be a great actress--I
know I’m not--but I love my profession too much to let it down in the
way you suggest. What am I supposed to advertise?”
A gesture answered her.
“That doesn’t matter, I suppose? Well, I’ll not do it.”
She got up slowly from the side of the worn writing-table, resolution
in the poise of her head, the set of her fine mouth.
“Good night,” said Laffin, not rising. “You will find your way out. I
am going to take my ten. Close the door carefully.”
She never expected him to say any more than this. For a second she
looked down at him, her lips curled, a bitter loathing in her heart
for the man who had tortured her childhood with fear, and had blasted
her future to humour his whim. His head was drooping--the “ten” had
overtaken him--that ten minutes of sleep so profound that nothing had
ever awakened him. How helpless he was now! For one wild, mad moment
she stood over him, her hands clenched, trembling in her impotent
anger, and then, wrenching herself free from the hate that gripped
her, she ran out of the room, down the uncarpeted stairs and into the
street. The door boomed behind her.
“I hope he heard it in his dreams,” she said.
The tall man who had been waiting for her at the garden gate laughed
softly.
“That sounds vicious,” he said.
“You like him, Clive?”
Clive Lowbridge chuckled as he helped her into the little coupé that
had been waiting outside.
“Yes--in a way. His pomposity doesn’t annoy me, because he is sincere.
He really does think he is the greatest man in the world.”
“How did you come to know him?”
Clive did not answer until he had brought the car on to the main road
and had dodged a fast-moving tramcar.
“That fellow is exceeding all road-car limits,” he growled savagely.
“What were you saying? I’ve known him all my life. He was the family
physician. The home of our illustrious family used to be in Bath, and
the Laffins have been our doctors for hundreds of years. It is a sort
of tradition. He was my tutor--did you know that? Laffin’s clever.
Most of these weird birds are. You’re glad to be away from that
menage, aren’t you, Betty?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a queer devil. My uncle used to swear by him, and so did my
great-uncle, the seventh baron----”
She interrupted him, obviously anxious to turn the subject.
“How do your new honours sit upon you, Clive--heavily?”
The ninth Lord Lowbridge was mildly amused.
“The honours are a featherweight, but the mortgages--phew! How Uncle
Ferrers got rid of his money, heaven knows! At least, heaven and the
accountants! We always thought he was immensely wealthy. I fear it is
art or nothing with me, but I shall be obliged to paint one
masterpiece a year to pay the interest on the mortgages.”
She laughed softly.
“Your celebration party was premature.”
He grinned again as he sent the car whizzing through the gates of
Regent’s Park, narrowly avoiding a sedate limousine.
“La Florette,” he said tersely, as he glimpsed the woman in its
blazing interior. “That woman just hates being unnoticed! Why she
doesn’t have her name in lights on the top of the car is a standing
wonder to me. You know her, of course?”
Betty Carew made a little face in the dark. She knew La Florette very
well, only too well.
“Poor Clive!” she said. “A lord without money is a pathetic creature!
Not so pathetic, perhaps, as an ambitious actress who is doomed to be
a showgirl--at least, that is what I’m going to be if Robespierre has
his way.”
“Robespierre--oh, you mean the doctor? He _does_ look like the
sea-green incorruptible now that you mention the fact. What does he
want you to do?”
“He has one of his mad schemes--I am to accept an engagement from a
man who wishes to advertise a desk. He mentioned a desk early in the
conversation, so I suppose that is what it is.”
“But how?”
“I am to sit in a store window for four hours a day--the window is to
be built furnished like a study--wearing a green dress, and writing,
or pretending to write, at the desk, on which”--she laughed in spite
of her anger--“will be a jade vase with one red rose. Can you imagine
it?”
Clive Lowbridge did not answer for a long time.
“Do you think he’s mad?” he asked.
“I’m sure--there is no question about it--and oh! there is another
thing! A man will one day come to me and ask me for ‘the message’ and
I am to give him a letter which will be kept in the top right-hand
drawer of the desk.”
“He _is_ mad,” said Lowbridge emphatically, “and of course you’ll do
nothing of the kind, Betty.”
“I don’t know. I may be obliged…”
“Obliged! Jumping cats! I’ll talk to him if he starts anything of that
kind. The future Lady Lowbridge isn’t going to figure in a puppet
show.”
She squeezed his arm affectionately.
“Clive, you’ve other things to think about than marriage--and so have
I, my dear. Do you know Pips?”
“Orange or lemon?” he asked, as he helped her alight.
“Pips--Pawter’s Intensive Publicity Service? They are advertisers and
press agents. And they have the further handicap of employing the most
insufferable young man in London. Clive, that youth haunts me! I’m
sure the doctor has engaged him to shadow me.”
“What is his name--I mean the objectionable young man?”
“Holbrook--W. Holbrook. I suppose that the ‘W’ stands for William. Mr.
van Campe calls him ‘Bill,’ and so do most people round the theatre.
If you ever have the chance will you squash him for me, Clive, dear?”
“He’s squashed,” said Clive solemnly, and brushed her cheek with his
lips.
An hour later he was standing before his mirror, fastening his dress
tie with great care, a frown on his pink face. A good-looking young
man, with the classic features that the old Greek sculptors gave to
the heroes of mythology, he had the clear eyes and the frame of a
trained athlete. A series of accidents had brought him from the
obscurity and poverty of a Chelsea apartment, where he won a
precarious livelihood from painting landscapes of dubious originality,
to the lordship of Lowbridge and the attenuated income of estates so
heavily encumbered that it was difficult to find a labourer’s
tumbledown cottage that did not represent collateral security against
an overdraft negotiated by his improvident uncle.
His mind alternated between Betty and the eccentric doctor, in whose
house he had first met her five years before--slim, a gaunt-eyed
child, watchful, suspicious, pitiably ready to shrink at a word, all
too willing to humour the tyrant who was both parent and guardian.
Finishing his dressing, he rang the bell for his servant.
“Benson, you used to work in a club before you misguidedly accepted
service with me?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Then you ought to know everybody. I want you to discover who Holbrook
is--Mr. W. Holbrook of Pawter’s Publicity Service. You’ll find their
names in the telephone directory.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Benson, stocky and broad of shoulder, needed no further instructions.
Half his attraction to Clive was his taciturnity.
“And, Benson,” as the man was leaving the room, “my cigars have been
evaporating at an alarming rate. Will you order a hundred of the
cheaper brand? They need not be bad cigars--get some that suit your
palate.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Benson was unmoved, neither apologetic nor confused. He had seen Dr.
Laffin slip a bundle into his pocket the last time the doctor had
called, but it was not his place to report the delinquencies of a
guest.