Текст книги "Rogue Male "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

I say Class X because there is no definition of it. To talk of an upper or a ruling class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry who probably do belong to Class X but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the State—terms which are self-contradictory.

I wish there were some explanation of Class X. We are politically a democracy—or should I say that we are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent?—and the least class-conscious of nations in the Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X and don’t: the suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives, especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux.

Who belongs to Class X? I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing. I am not talking, of course, of provincial society in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education.

I should like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that in England a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat (that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty) and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon Bar if he enters the Public.

I worry with this analysis in the hope of hitting on some new method of effacing my identity. When I speak a foreign language I can disguise my class, background, and nationality without effort, but when I speak English to an Englishman I am at once spotted as a member of X. I want to avoid that, and if the class could be defined I might know how.

Mr Vaner received me in his cabin. He was a dashing young man in his early twenties, with his cap on the back of a head of brown curls. His tiny stateroom was well hung with feminine photographs, some cut from the illustrated weeklies, some personally presented and inscribed in various languages. He evidently drove himself hard on land as well as sea.

As soon as we had shaken hands, he said:

‘Haven’t met you before, have I?’

‘No. I got your name from one of the hands. I hear you are sailing tomorrow.’

‘Well?’ he asked guardedly.

I handed him my passport.

‘Before we go any further, I want you to satisfy yourself that I am British and really the person I pretend to be.’

He looked at my passport, then up at my face and eyeshade.

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Take a seat, won’t you? You seem to have been in trouble, sir.’

‘I have, by God! And I want to get out of it.’

‘A passage? If it depended on me, but I’m afraid the old man …’

I told him that I didn’t want a passage, that I wouldn’t put so much responsibility on either him or the captain; all I wanted was a safe place to stow away.

He shook his head and advised me to try a liner.

‘I daren’t risk it,’ I answered. ‘But show me where to hide, and I give you my word of honour that no one shall see me during the voyage or when I go ashore.’

‘You had better tell me a little more,’ he said.

He threw himself back in his chair and cocked one leg over the other. His face assumed a serious and judicial air, but his delightfully swaggering pose showed that he was enjoying himself.

I spun him a yarn which, so far as it went, was true. I told him that I was in deadly trouble with the authorities, that I had come down the river in a boat, and that an appeal to our consul was quite useless.

‘I might put you in the store-room,’ he said doubtfully. ‘We’re going home in ballast, and there’s nowhere in the hold for you to hide.’

I suggested that the store-room was too dangerous, that I didn’t want to take the remotest chance of being seen and getting the ship into trouble. That seemed to impress him.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘if you can stand it, there’s an empty freshwater tank which we never use, and I could prop up the cover so that you’d get some air. But I expect that you’ve slept in worse places, sir, now that I come to think of it.’

‘You recognized my name?’

‘Of course. I wouldn’t do this for anyone.’

All the same I think he would, given a story that appealed to him.

I asked when I could come aboard.

‘No time like the present! I don’t know who’s down in the engine-room, but there’s nobody on deck except the cook. I’ll just deal with the cops!’

He waited till the couple of police had walked two hundred yards up the wharf and then started waving and shouting good-bye as if someone had just gone away between the warehouses. The two looked round and continued their stroll; they had no reason to doubt that a visitor left the ship while they had their backs to her.

Mr Vaner sent the cook ashore to buy a bottle of whisky.

‘You’ll need something to mix with your water,’ he chuckled, immensely pleased that he had now committed himself to the adventure, ‘and I don’t want him around while I open up the tank. You wait here and make yourself comfortable.’

I asked him what I had better say if anyone came aboard unexpectedly and found me in his cabin.

‘Say? Oh, tell ’em you’re her father!’ He pointed to a photograph of a giggling young girl who was bashfully displaying her legs as if to advertise silk stockings. ‘I should surely have urgent business elsewhere if you were. Inside the water tank myself, as likely as not!’

He settled his cap over one ear and marched out of the cabin, whistling with such an elaborate air of unconcern that any one of his young women would have known he was planning some deception. But I was pretty sure he would take no risks. His play-acting was for his own amusement and for me, his partner in crime. To the rest of the world he was the responsible ship’s officer.

He was back in ten minutes.

‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘The cops have just gone round the corner.’

We did have to hurry. The manhole was on a level with and in full view of the wharf, being set into the quarterdeck between the after wall of the chart-room and a lifeboat slung athwart ship. We took a hasty look round and I pushed myself through into a space about the size of half a dozen coffins.

‘I’ll make you comfortable later on,’ he said. ‘It will be slack water in about two hours.’

I was comfortable enough, more relaxed than I had been since the first week on the river. The darkness and the six walls gave me an immediate sense of safety. I had gone to ground after the hunt, and the cold iron of the closed tank was more protective than the softest grass in the open. This was the first of my dens, and I think that it provided me with the idea of the second.

At the bottom of the ebb, when the quarter-deck had sunk well below the edge of the wharf, Mr Vaner turned up with blankets, the cushion of a settee, water, whisky, biscuits, and a covered bucket for my personal needs.

‘Snug as a bug in a rug!’ he declared cheerfully. ‘And what’s more, I’ve given you a safety-valve.’

‘How’s that?’

‘I’ve disconnected the outflow. Can you see light?’

I looked down a small pipe at the bottom of the tank and did see light.

‘That’s on the wall of the captain’s bathroom,’ he said. ‘I never knew we could get fresh water there. The worst of these labour-saving ships is that one never has time to find out all the gadgets. Now, you have that and you have the air intake, so if the old man notices the manhole and I have to screw it up for a time, you’ll be all right.’

‘Where do you dock?’ I asked.

‘We’re going right up the river to Wandsworth. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to slip ashore.’

I heard steps on the deck—one heard in that tank everything that touched or struck the deck—and Mr Vaner disappeared. I never saw him again.

I dozed uneasily until all the noises ceased; the crew, I suppose, had come on board and settled down for the night. Then I slept in good earnest and awoke to the sound of heavy boots trampling above and below me; it was morning, for I could see light at the end of my two pipes. The manhole was screwed up tight with a finality which I didn’t enjoy—not that there was the slightest risk of asphyxiation, but it suddenly occurred to me that if Mr Vaner were washed overboard I should be in the tank until the captain discovered, if he ever did discover, that he could fill his bath with fresh water by making a simple connexion. That was the sort of ridiculous fear which alcohol can dispel quicker than self-control, so I poured myself a stiff whisky and ate some biscuits.

Then we sailed—an unmistakable jangle of sounds like a hundred iron monkeys playing tag in a squash-court. Some hours later my manhole was opened and propped, and a cold mutton chop, with a note attached to it instead of a frill, descended on my stomach. I ate the chop and knelt below the crack of light to read the message.

‘Sorry I had to screw you down. The cops found a boat and traced it to you. They turned us inside out this morning and all other ships at the wharf. Caught four stowaways, I hear. We are outside territorial waters, so you’re OK. They know all about your eyeshade. If you’re likely to run into any trouble, take it off. I’ll slip you a pair of dark glasses when it’s time to go. Dock police reported that a chap of your build had come on board and left. I said I had been asked for a passage, and refused. If you have any papers you want to get rid of, leave them in the tank and I’ll deliver them wherever you direct.

R. VANER (First Officer)

PS. Try not to upset anything. Have just remembered that if you do, it will run into the old man’s bathroom.’

I wish I could have given the dashing Mr Vaner some convincing evidence that he was serving his country instead of a—well, I can’t call myself a criminal. If there were any crimes committed, they were committed on my person. But, as I say, I do not blame them. They had every reason to think they had caught an assassin.

Their police organization is superb; but the finding of that paralysed thing which had crawled and bled was a casual job for foresters. Only within the last day or two, I expect, when an exhaustive search for my corpse at last suggested that there might be no corpse to find, did the House extend enquiries to road, rail, and river, and learn about the boating schoolmaster who had an eyeshade and always kept on his gloves. Then the police came into action. They hadn’t picked me up, I should guess, for the simple reason that they had just begun to look for a boat with red sails and happened to miss the little yard where I changed them; but when some official noticed an unfamiliar dinghy moored where I probably had no right to moor her, she was at once identified.

Vaner’s suggestion that my troubles might by no means be over when I reached London was disturbing. I hadn’t given the matter any thought. One’s instinct is against looking too far forward when the present demands all available resource.

I began to speculate on what would happen if I reappeared quite openly in England. I was perfectly certain that they would not appeal to the Foreign Office or to Scotland Yard. Whatever I might have done or intended, their treatment of me wouldn’t stand publicity. They couldn’t be sure how the English would react; nobody ever is. After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins—though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity.

Would they, then, follow me up themselves? Mr Vaner, with his taste for romance, appeared to think they would. I myself had assumed that once I was over the frontier, bygones would be bygones. I now saw that this was a foolishly optimistic view. They couldn’t go to the police, true, but nor could I. I had committed an extraditable offence; if I complained of being molested, I might force them into telling why I was molested.

It came to this: I was an outlaw in my own country as in theirs, and if my death were required it could easily be accomplished. Even assuming they couldn’t fake an accident or suicide, no motive or a wrong motive would be discovered for the crime, and no murderer or the wrong murderer would be arrested.

Then I thought that I had let myself be carried away by a casual phrase of Vaner’s, and that this uneasiness was preposterous. Why on earth, I argued, should they take the unnecessary risk of removing me in my own country? Did they imagine that I was likely to put the wind up them by another of these sporting expeditions?

I reluctantly admitted that they might very well imagine it. They knew that I was an elusive person who could quite possibly return, if he chose, and upset the great man’s nerves once more. As to whether I would so choose, there were among my opponents—I can’t call them enemies—some notable big-game shots who would realize that the temptation was not unthinkable.

The manhole was never screwed up again, and I lay on my cushion suffering little more discomfort than I generally suffer at sea. I am a good sailor, but even in a first-class stateroom I feel gently and sleepily bilious, disinclined to do more than walk from my cabin to the library and back, or be faintly polite to a fellow passenger at the hour of the aperitif. On the credit side of this voyage was the fact that I hadn’t got to be polite to anyone; on the debit, that I hadn’t got a book. I passed my time in sleep and slightly nightmarish meditation.

The boom and thump of the Diesels, resonant and regular as distant tribal drums, signalled to me our progress up the Thames. They slowed to pick up the pilot; they were fussed and flurried by the engine-room telegraph in the crowded waters of Gravesend Reach; they handed over to the whir of electric capstans when we tied up, as I guess, somewhere below bridges (for she rode too high to pass up-river on the top of the flood); they beat slowly seven hours later, while I imagined them carrying us up through the Pool and the City, through Westminster and Chelsea, until the telegraph belled them into incoherent rhythms and finished with the engines.

There were bangings and tramplings, and then silence. After a while my tank settled over to port, and I assumed that we were resting on the Wandsworth mud. Another note was dropped through the manhole, accompanied by a pair of formidably dark glasses wrapped in brown paper.

‘Don’t go out through the gates. There’s a chap watching I don’t like the look of. The dinghy is under the starboard quarter. As soon as she floats I’ll give you a knock, and you beat it quick. Row across to the public steps by Hurlingham east wall. I’ll take the boat back later. Best of luck.

R. VANER (First Officer)’

He rapped on the manhole an hour or so later, and I pushed out my arms and shoulders by merely standing up; indeed I could stand up no other way. There was a light in Mr Vaner’s cabin and a loud noise of conversation; he was assuring my privacy by entertaining the night watchman. I dropped into the dinghy, and pulled quietly across the river through the pink band of water that reflected the glare of London into the black band of water beneath the trees. My arrival was noticed only by a boy and girl, the inevitable boy and girl to be found in every dark corner of a great city. Better provision should be made for them—a Park of Temporary Affection, for example, from which lecherous clergymen and aged civil servants should be rigorously excluded. But such segregation is more easily accomplished by the uncivilized. Any competent witchdoctor could merely declare the Park taboo for all but the nubile.

It was nearly ten o’clock. I walked to the King’s Road and found a grill-room where I ordered about all the meat they had to be put on the bars and served to me. While I waited I entered the telephone box to call my club. I always stay there when I have to be in London, and that I should stay there this time I never doubted until the door of the box shut behind me. Then I found that I could not telephone my club.

What excuses I gave myself at the moment, I can’t remember. I think I told myself that it was too late, that they wouldn’t have a room, that I didn’t wish to walk through the vestibule in those clothes and in that condition.

After my supper, I took a bus to Cromwell Road and put up at one of those hotels designed for gentlewomen in moderately distressed circumstances. The porter didn’t much care about taking me in, but fortunately I had a couple of pound notes and they had a room with a private bath; since their regular clientele could never afford such luxury, they were glad enough to let me the room. I gave them a false name and told them some absurd story to the effect that I had just arrived from abroad and had my luggage stolen. To digest my meal I read a sheaf of morning and evening papers, and then went to my room.

Their water, thank God, was hot! I had the most pleasurable bath that I ever remember. I have spent a large part of my life out of reach of hot baths; yet, when I enjoy a tub at leisure, I wonder why any man voluntarily deprives himself of so cheap and satisfying a delight. It rested and calmed me more than any sleep; indeed I had slept so much on the ship that my bath and my thoughts while lying in it had the flavour of morning rather than of night.

I understood why I had not telephoned my club. This was the first occasion on which I recognized that I had a second enemy dogging my movements—my own unjust and impossible conscience. Utterly unfair it was that I should judge myself as a potential murderer. I insist that I was always sure I could resist the temptation to press the trigger when my sights were actually on the target.

I have good reason now for a certain malaise. I have killed a man, though in self-defence. But then I had no reason at all. I may be wrong in talking of conscience; my trouble was, perhaps, merely a vision of the social effects of what I had done. This stalk of mine made it impossible for me to enter my club. How could I, for example, talk to Holy George after all the trouble I had caused him? And how could I expose my fellow members to the unpleasantness of being watched and perhaps questioned? No, I was an outlaw not because of my conscience (which, I maintain, has no right to torment me) but on the plain facts.

There was no lack of mirrors in the bathroom, and I made a thorough examination of my body. My legs and backside were an ugly mess—I shall carry some extraordinary scars for life—but the wounds had healed, and there was nothing any doctor could do to help. My fingers still appeared to have been squashed in a railway carriage door and then sharpened with a pen-knife, but they were in fact serviceable for all but very rough or very sensitive work. The eye was the only part of me that needed attention. I didn’t propose to have anyone monkeying with it—I dared not give up any freedom of movement for the sake of regular treatment or an operation—but I wanted a medical opinion and whatever lotions would do it the most good.

In the morning I changed all the foreign money in my possession, and bought myself a passable suit off the peg. Then I got a list of eye specialists and taxied round and about Harley Street until I found a man who would see me at once. He was annoyingly inquisitive. I told him that I had hurt the eye at the beginning of a long voyage and had been out of reach of medical care ever since. When he had fully opened the lid, he fumed over my neglect, folly, and idiocy and declared that the eye had been burned as well as bruised. I agreed politely that it had and shut up; whereupon he became a doctor instead of a moralist and got down to business. He was honest enough to say that he could do nothing, that I’d be lucky if I ever perceived more than light and darkness, and that, on the whole, he recommended changing the real for a glass eye for the sake of appearance. He was wrong. My eye isn’t pretty, but it functions better every day.

He wouldn’t hear of my going about in dark glasses with no bandage, so I had him extend the bandages over the whole of my head. He humoured me in this, evidently thinking that I might get violent if opposed; my object was to give the impression of a man who had smashed his head rather than a man with a damaged eye. He was convinced that my face was familiar to him, and I allowed him to decide that we had once met in Vienna.

The next job was to see my solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The partner who has the entire handling of my estate is a man of about my own age and an intimate friend. He disapproves of me on only two grounds: that I refuse to sit on the board of any blasted company, and that I insist upon my right to waste money in agriculture. He doesn’t mind my spending it on anything else, finding a vicarious pleasure in my travels and outlandish hobbies. He himself has a longing for a less ordered life, shown chiefly in his attitude to clothes. During the day he is sombrely and richly attired, and has even taken in recent years to wearing a black silk stock. At night he puts on tweeds, a sweater, and a tie that would frighten a newspaperman. One can’t make him change for dinner. He would rather refuse an invitation.

Saul greeted me with concern rather than surprise; it was as if he had expected me to turn up in a hurry and the worse for wear. He locked the door and told his office manager we were not to be disturbed.

I assured him that I was all right and that the bandage was four times as long as was necessary. I asked what he knew and who had enquired for me.

He said that there had been a pointedly casual enquiry from Holy George, and that a few days later a fellow had come in to consult him about some inconceivable tangle under the Married Women’s Property Act.

‘He was so perfectly the retired military man from the West of England,’ said Saul, ‘that I felt he couldn’t be real. He claimed to be a friend and neighbour of yours and was continually referring to you. When I cross-examined him a bit, it looked as if he had mugged up his case out of a law book and was really after information. Major Quive-Smith, he called himself. Ever heard of him?’

‘Never,’ I replied. ‘He certainly isn’t a neighbour of mine. Was he English?’

‘I thought so. Did you expect him not to be English?’

I said I wasn’t answering any of his innocent questions, that he was, after all, an Officer of the Court, and that I didn’t wish to involve him.

‘Tell me this much,’ he said. ‘Have you been abroad in the employ of our government?’

‘No, on my own business. But I have to disappear.’

‘You shouldn’t think of the police as tactless,’ he reminded me gently. ‘A man in your position is protected without question. You’ve been abroad so much that I don’t think you have ever realized the power of your name. You’re automatically trusted, you see.’

I told him that I knew as much of my own people as he did—perhaps more, since I had been an exile long enough to see them from the outside. But I had to vanish. There was a risk that I might be disgraced.

A nasty word, that. I am not disgraced, and I will not feel it.

‘Can I vanish? Financially, I mean?’ I asked him. ‘You have my power of attorney and you know more of my affairs than I do myself. Can you go on handling my estate if I am never heard of again?’

‘So long as I know you are alive.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘A postcard this time next year will do.’

‘X marks my window, and this is a palm tree?’

‘Quite sufficient if in your own handwriting. You needn’t even sign it.’

‘Mightn’t you be asked for proof?’ I enquired.

‘No. If I say you are alive, why the devil should it ever be questioned? But don’t leave me without a postcard from time to time. You mustn’t put me in the position of maintaining what might be a lie.’

I told him that if he ever got one postcard, he’d probably get a lot more; it was my ever living to write the first that was doubtful.

He blew up and told me I was absurd. He mingled abuse with affection in a way I hadn’t heard since my father died. I didn’t think he would take my disappearance so hard; I suppose he is as fond of me, after all, as I am of him, and that’s saying a lot. He begged me again to let him talk to the police. I had no idea, he insisted, of the number and the subtle beauty of the strings that could be pulled.

I could only say I was awfully sorry, and after a silence I told him I wanted five thousand pounds in cash.

He produced my deed box and accounts. I had a balance of three thousand at the bank; he wrote his own cheque for the other two. That was like him—no nonsense about waiting for sales of stock or arranging an overdraft.

‘Shall we go out and lunch while the boy is at the Bank?’ he suggested.

‘I think I’ll leave here only once,’ I said.

‘You might be watched? Well, we’ll soon settle that.’

He sent for Peale, a grey little man in a grey little suit whom I had only seen emptying the waste-paper baskets or fetching cups of tea.

‘Anybody taking an interest in us, Peale?’

‘There is a person in the gardens between Remnant Street and here feeding the birds. He is not very successful with them, sir’—Peale permitted himself a dry chuckle—‘in spite of the fact that he has been there for the past week during office hours. And I understand from Pruce & Fothergill that there are two other persons in Newman’s Row. One of them is waiting for a lady to come out of their offices—a matrimonial case, I believe. The other is not known to us, and was observed to be in communication with the pigeon-man, sir, as soon as this gentleman emerged from his taxi.’

Saul thanked him, and sent him out to fetch us some beer and a cold bird.

I asked where he watched from, having a vague picture of Peale hanging over the parapet of the roof when he had nothing better to do.

‘Good God, he doesn’t watch!’ exclaimed Saul, as if I had suggested a major impropriety. ‘He just knows all the private detectives who are likely to be hanging around Lincoln’s Inn Fields—on very good terms with them, I believe. They have to have a drink occasionally, and then they ask Peale or his counterpart in some other firm to keep his eyes open. When they see anyone who is not a member of the Trades Union, so to speak, they all know it.’

Peale came back with the lunch, and a packet of information straight from the counter of the saloon bar. The bird-man had been showing great interest in our windows and had twice telephoned. The chap in Newman’s Row had hailed my taxi as it drove away. He would be able to trace me back to Harley Street and to the clothes shop, where, by a little adroit questioning, he could make an excuse to see the suit I discarded; my identification would be complete. It didn’t much matter, since the watchers already had a strong suspicion that I was their man.

Peale couldn’t tell us whether another watcher had been posted in Newman’s Row or whether the other exits from Lincoln’s Inn Fields were watched. I was certain that they were, and complained to Saul that all respectable firms of solicitors (who deal with far more scabrous affairs than the crooked) should have a back door. He replied that they weren’t such fools as they looked, and that Peale could take me into Lincoln’s Inn or the Law Courts and lose me completely.

Perhaps I should have trusted them; but I felt that, while their tricks might be good enough to lose a single private detective, I shouldn’t be allowed to escape so easily. I decided to throw off the hunt in my own way.

When I kept my gloves on to eat, Saul forgot his official discretion and became an anxious friend. I think he suspected what had happened to me, though not why it had happened. I had to beg him to leave the whole subject alone.

After lunch, I signed a number of documents to tidy up loose ends, and we blocked out a plan I had often discussed with him of forming a sort of Tenants’ Co-operative Society. Since I never make a penny out of the land, I thought they might as well pay rent to themselves, do their own repairs, and advance their own loans, with the right to purchase their own land by instalments at a price fixed by the committee. I hope it works. At any rate Saul and my land agent will keep them from quarrelling among themselves. I have no other dependants.

Then I told him something of the fisherman, and passed on the address that he had given me; we arranged for an income to be paid where it would do the most good—a discreet trust that couldn’t conceivably be traced to me. It appeared to come from the estate of a recently defunct old lady who had left the bulk of her money to an institution for inoculating parrots against psittacosis, and the rest to any charitable object that Saul, as sole trustee, might direct.

There was nothing further to be done but arrange my cash in a body belt, and say good-bye. I asked him, if at any time a coroner sat on my body and brought in a verdict of suicide, not to believe it, but to make no attempt to reopen the case.

Peale walked with me across the square and into Kings-way by Gate Street. I observed that we were followed by a tall, inoffensive fellow in a dirty mackintosh and shabby felt hat, who was the bird-man. He looked the part. We also caught sight of a cheerful military man in Remnant Street, wearing a coat cut for riding and trousers narrower than were fashionable, whom Peale at once recognized as Major Quive-Smith. So I knew two at least whom I must throw off my track.

We parted at Holborn underground station, and I took a shilling ticket with which I could travel to the remotest end of London. The bird-man had got ahead of me. I passed him on the level of the Central London, and went down the escalator to the west-bound Piccadilly Tube. Ten seconds after I reached the platform, Major Quive-Smith also appeared upon it. He was gazing at the advertisements and grinning at the comic ones, as if he hadn’t been in London for a year.