CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STORMY TIMES AT MON REPOS
THERE are few pleasanter things in life than to sit under one’s own rooftree and smoke the first pipe of the morning which so sets the seal on the charms of breakfast. Sam, as he watched Hash clearing away the remains of as goodly a dish of bacon and eggs and as fragrant a pot of coffee as ever man had consumed, felt an uplifted thrill of well-being. It was Saturday morning, and a darned good Saturday morning at that—mild enough to permit of an open window, yet crisp enough to justify a glowing fire.
“Hash,” said Sam, “have you ever felt an almost overwhelming desire to break into song?”
“No,” said Hash, after consideration.
“You have never found yourself irresistibly compelled to render some old Provençal chansonnette breathing of love and youth and romance?”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Perhaps it’s as well. You wouldn’t be good at it, and one must consider the neighbours. But I may tell you that I am feeling the urge to-day. What’s that thing of Browning’s that you’re always quoting? Ah, yes!
‘The morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled.
God’s in his heaven;
All’s right with the world.’
That is how I feel.”
“How’d you like this bacon?” inquired Hash, picking up a derelict slice and holding it against the light as if it were some rare objet d’art.
Sam perceived that his audience was not attuned to the lyrical note.
“I am too spiritual to be much of a judge of these things,” he said, “but as far as I could gather it seemed all right.”
“Ha’penny a pound cheaper than the last,” said Hash with sober triumph.
“Indeed? Well, as I was saying, life seems decidedly tolerable to-day. I am taking Miss Derrick to the theatre this afternoon, so I shall not be back until lateish. Before I go, therefore, I have something to say to you, Hash. I noticed a disposition on your part yesterday to try to disintegrate our odd-job man. This must not be allowed to grow upon you. When I return this evening I shall expect to find him all in one piece.”
“That’s all right, Sam,” replied Mr. Todhunter cordially. “All that ’appened there was that I let myself get what I might call rather ’asty. I been thinking it over, and I’ve got nothing against the feller.”
This was true. Sleep, which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, had done much to soothe the troubled spirit of Hash Todhunter. The healing effect of a night’s slumber had been to convince him that he had wronged Claire. He proceeded to get Sam’s expert views on this.
“Suppose it was this way, Sam: Suppose a feller’s young lady went and give another feller a cup of hot tea and cut him a slice of cake. That wouldn’t ’ave to mean that she was flirting with ’im, would it?”
“Not at all,” said Sam warmly. “Far from it. I would call it evidence of the kind heart rather than the frivolous mind.”
“Ah!”
“I may be dangerously modern,” said Sam, “but my view—and I give it fearlessly—is that a girl may cut many a slice of cake and still remain a good, sweet, womanly woman.”
“You see,” argued Hash, “he was wet.”
“Who was wet?”
“This feller Twist. Along of washing the dog. And Claire, she took and give him a nice cup of hot tea and a slice of cake. Upset me at the time, I’ll own, but I see where maybe I done ’er an injustice.”
“You certainly did, Hash. That girl is always doing that sort of thing out of pure nobility of nature. Why, the first morning I was here she gave me a complete breakfast—eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, marmalade and everything.”
“No, did she?”
“You bet she did. She’s a jewel, and you’re lucky to get her.”
“Ah!” said Hash with fervour.
He gathered up the tray alertly and bore it downstairs to the kitchen, where Chimp Twist eyed him warily. Although on his return to the house on the previous night Chimp had suffered no injury at Hash’s hands, he attributed this solely to the intervention of Sam, who had insisted on a formal reconciliation; and he had just heard the front door bang behind Sam. A nervous man who shrank from personal violence, particularly when it promised to be so one-sided as in his present society, Chimp felt apprehensive.
He was reassured by the geniality of his companion’s manner.
“Nice day,” said Hash.
“Lovely,” said Chimp, relieved.
“’As that dog ’ad ’er breakfast?”
“She was eating a shoe when I saw her last.”
“Ah, well, maybe that’ll do her till dinnertime. Nice dog.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Nice weather.”
“Yes, yes.”
“If the rain ’olds off, it’ll be a regular nice day.”
“It certainly will.”
“And if it rains,” continued Hash, sunnily optimistic, “I see by the paper that the farmers need it.”
It was a scene which would have rejoiced the heart of Henry Ford or any other confirmed peacemaker; and Chimp, swift, in his canny fashion, to take advantage of his companion’s miraculous cordiality, put a tentative question.
“Sleep well last night?”
“Like a top.”
“So did I. Say,” said Chimp enthusiastically, “that’s a swell bed I’ve got.”
“Yes, sir, that’s one swell bed. And a dandy room too. And I been thinking it over, and it don’t seem right that I should have that dandy room and that swell bed, seeing that I came here after you. So what say we exchange?”
“Change rooms?”
“Yes, sir; you have my swell big front room and I have your poky little back room.”
The one fault which undoes diplomatists more than any other is the temptation to be too elaborate. If it had been merely a case of exchanging rooms, as two medieval monarchs, celebrating a truce, might have exchanged chargers and suits of armour, Hash would probably have consented. He would have thought it silly, but he would have done it by way of a gesture indicating his opinion of the world’s excellence this morning and of his desire to show Mr. Twist that he had forgiven him and wished him well. But the way the other put it made it impossible for any man feeling as generous and amiable as he did to become a party to a scheme for turning this charming fellow out of a swell front room and putting him in a poky back one.
“Couldn’t do it,” he said.
“I cert’nly wish you would.”
“No,” said Hash. “No; couldn’t do it.”
Chimp sighed and returned to his solitaire. Hash, full of the milk of human kindness, went out into the garden. It had occurred to him that at about this time of day Claire generally took a breather in the open after the rough work of making the beds. She was strolling up and down the gravel path.
“Hullo,” said Hash. “Nice day.”
A considerable proportion of the pathos of life comes from the misunderstandings that arise between male and female through the inability of a man with an untrained voice to convey the emotions underlying his words. Hash supposed that he had spoken in a way that would show Claire that he considered her an angel of light and a credit to her sex. If he was slightly more formal than usual, that was because he was feeling embarrassed at the thought of the injustice he had done her at their last meeting.
Claire, however, noting the formality—for it was customary with him to couch his morning’s greeting in some such phrase as “Hullo, ugly!” or “What cheer, face!”—attributed it to that growing coldness of which she had recently become aware. Her heart sank. She became provocative.
“How’s Mr. Twist this morning?”
“Oh, he’s fine.”
“Not been quarrelling with him, have you?”
“Who, me?” cried Hash, shocked. “Why, him and me is the best of friends!”
“Oh?”
“We just been having a chat.”
“About me?”
“No; about the weather and the dog and how well we slept last night.”
Claire scraped at the gravel with the toe of her shoe.
“Oh! Well, I’ve got to go and wash the dishes,” she said. “Goo’ mornin’.”
Hash Todhunter was not a swift-thinking man. Nor was he one of those practised amateurs of the sex who can read volumes in a woman’s glance and see in a flash exactly what she means when she scrapes arabesques on a gravel path with the toe of her shoe. For some three hours and more, therefore, he remained in a state of perfect content. And then suddenly, while smoking a placid after-luncheon pipe, his mood changed and there began to seep into the hinterlands of his mind the idea that in Claire’s manner at their recent meeting there had been something decidedly peculiar.
He brooded over this; and as the lunch which he had cooked and eaten fought what was for the moment a winning battle with his organs of digestion, there crept over him a sombre alarm. Slowly, but with a persistence not to be denied, the jealousy of which sleep had cured him began to return. He blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke and through it stared bleakly at Chimp Twist, who was in a reverie on the other side of the kitchen table.
It came to him, not for the first time, that he did not like Chimp’s looks. Handsome not even his mother could have called Chimp Twist; and yet there was about him a certain something calculated to inspire uneasiness in an engaged man. He had that expression in his eyes which home wreckers wear in the movies. A human snake, if ever there was one, felt Hash, as his interior mechanism strove vainly to overcome that which he had thrust upon it.
Nor did his recollection of Claire’s conversation bring any reassurance. So brief it had been that he could remember everything she had said. And it had all been about that black-hearted little object across the table.
“How’s Mr. Twist this morning?” A significant question. “Not been quarrelling with him, have you?” A fishy remark. And then he had said that they had been having a chat, and she had asked, “About me?”
So moved was Hash by the recollection of this that he took the pipe out of his mouth and addressed his companion with an abruptness that was almost violent:
“Hey!”
Chimp looked up with a start. He had been pondering whether it might not possibly come within the scope of an odd-job man’s duties to put a ladder against the back of the house and climb up it and slap a coat of paint on the window frame of the top back room. Then, when Hash was cooking dinner——
“Hullo?” he said, blinking. He was surprised to see that the other, who had been geniality itself during lunch, was regarding him with a cold and suspicious hostility.
“Want to ask you something,” said Hash.
“Spill it,” said Chimp, and smiled nervously.
It was an unfortunate thing for him to have done, for he did not look his best when smiling. It seemed to Hash that his smile was furtive and cunning.
“Want to know,” said Hash, “if there are any larks on?”
“Eh?”
“You and my young lady next door—there’s nothing what you might call between you, is there?”
“’Course not!” cried Chimp in agitation.
“Well,” said Hash weightily, “there better hadn’t be. See?”
He rose, feeling a little better, and, his suspicions momentarily quieted, he proceeded to the garden, where he chirruped for a while over the fence. This producing no response, he climbed the fence and peeped in through the kitchen window of San Rafael. The kitchen was empty.
“Gone for a walk,” diagnosed Hash, and felt a sense of injury. If Claire wanted to go for a walk, why hadn’t she asked him to come too? He did not like it. It seemed to him that love must have grown cold. He returned to Mon Repos and embarrassed the sensitive Mr. Twist by staring at him for twenty minutes almost without a blink.
Claire had not gone for a walk. She had taken the 12:10 train to Victoria and had proceeded thence to Mr. Braddock’s house in John Street. It was her intention to put the facts before her mother and from that experienced woman to seek advice in this momentous crisis of her life. Her faith in Aunt Ysobel had not weakened, but there is never any harm done by getting the opinion of a second specialist. For Claire’s uneasiness had been growing ever since that talk with Hash across the fence that morning. His manner had seemed to her peculiar. Nor did her recollection of his conversation bring any reassurance.
“How’s Mr. Twist this morning?” she had asked. And instead of looking like one about to joust, he had replied heartily, “Oh, he’s fine.” A disturbing remark.
And then he had gone on to say that he and Chimp were the best of friends. It was with tight lips and hard eyes that Claire, replying absently to the paternal badinage of Sleddon, the butler, made her way into her mother’s presence. Mrs. Lippett, consulted, proved uncompromisingly pro-Aunt Ysobel.
“That’s what I call a sensible woman, Clara.”
“Claire,” corrected her daughter mechanically.
“She knows.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Ah, she’s suffered, that woman has,” said Mrs. Lippett. “You can see that. Stands to reason she couldn’t know so much about life if she hadn’t suffered.”
“Then you’d go on testing him?” said Claire anxiously.
“Test him more and more,” said Mrs. Lippett. “There’s no other way. You’ve got to remember, dearie, that your Clarence is a sailor, and sailors has to be handled firm. They say sailors don’t care. I say they must be made to care. That’s what I say.”
Claire made the return journey on an omnibus. For purposes of thought there is nothing like a ride on the top of an omnibus. By four o’clock, when the vehicle put her down at the corner of Burberry Road, her resolution was as chilled steel and she had got her next move all planned out. She went into the kitchen for a few moments, and coming out into the garden, perceived Hash roaming the lawn of Mon Repos.
“Hi!” she called, and into her voice managed to project a note of care-free liveliness.
“Where you been?” inquired Hash.
“I been up seeing mother.... Is Mr. Twist indoors?”
“What do you want with Mr. Twist?”
“Just wanted to give him this—something I promised him.”
This was an envelope, lilac in colour and scent, and Hash, taking it and gazing upon it as he might have gazed upon an adder nestling in his palm, made a disturbing discovery.
“There’s something inside this.”
“Of course there is. If there wasn’t, what ’ud I be giving it him for?”
Hash’s fingers kneaded the envelope restlessly.
“What you writing to him about?”
“Never mind.”
“There’s something else inside this ’ere envelope besides a letter. There’s something that sort of crinkles when you squeeze it.”
“Just a little present I promised to give him.”
A monstrous suspicion flamed in Hash Todhunter’s mind. It seemed inconceivable, and yet—— He tore open the envelope and found his suspicion fulfilled. Between his fingers there dangled a lock of tow-coloured hair.
“When you’ve finished opening other people’s letters——” said Claire.
She looked at him, hopefully at first, and then with a growing despair. For Hash’s face was wooden and expressionless.
“I’m glad,” said Hash huskily at length. “I been worried, but now I’m not worried. I been worried because I been worrying about you and me not being suited to one another and ’aving acted ’asty; but now I’m not worried, because I see there’s another feller you’re fond of, so the worry about what was to be done and everything don’t worry me no more. He’s in the kitchen,” said Hash in a gentle rumble. “I’ll give him this and explain ’ow it come to be opened in error.”
Nothing could have exceeded the dignity of his manner, but there are moments when women chafe at masculine dignity.
“Aren’t you going to knock his head off?” demanded Claire distractedly.
“Me?” said Hash, looking as nearly as he could like the picture of Saint Sebastian in the Louvre. “Me? Why should I knock the pore feller’s ’ead off? I’m glad. Because I was worried, and now I’m not worried—see what I mean?”
Before Claire’s horrified eyes and through a world that rocked and danced, he strode toward the kitchen of Mon Repos, bearing the envelope daintily between finger and thumb. He seemed calm and at peace. He looked as if he might be humming.
Inside the kitchen, however, his manner changed. Chimp Twist, glancing up from his solitaire, observed in the doorway, staring down at him, a face that seemed to his excited imagination to have been equipped with searchlights instead of eyes. Beneath these searchlights was a mouth that appeared to be gnashing its teeth. And from this mouth, in a brief interval of gnashing, proceeded dreadful words.
The first that can be printed were the words “Put ’em up!”
Mr. Twist, rising, slid like an eel to the other side of the table.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded in considerable agitation.
“I’ll show you what’s the matter,” said Hash, after another verbal interlude which no compositor would be allowed by his union to set up. “Come out from behind that table like a man and put your ’ands up!”
Mr. Twist rejected this invitation.
“I’m going to take your ’ead,” continued Hash, sketching out his plans, “and I’m going to pull it off, and then——”
What he proposed to do after this did not intrigue Chimp. He foiled a sudden dash with an inspired leap.
“Come ’ere,” said Hash coaxingly.
His mind clearing a little, he perceived that the root of the trouble, the obstacle which was standing in the way of his aims, was the table. It was a heavy table, but with a sharp heave he tilted it on its side and pushed it toward the stove. Chimp, his first line of defense thus demolished, shot into the open, and Hash was about to make another offensive movement when the dog Amy, who had been out in the garden making a connoisseur’s inspection of the dustbin, strolled in and observed with pleasure that a romp was in progress.
Amy was by nature a thoughtful dog. Most of her time, when she was not eating or sleeping, she spent in wandering about with wrinkled forehead, puzzling over the cosmos. But she could unbend. Like so many philosophers, she loved an occasional frolic, and this one appeared to be of exceptional promise.
The next moment Hash, leaping forward, found his movements impeded by what seemed like several yards of dog. It was hard for him to tell without sorting the tangle out whether she was between his legs or leaning on his shoulder. Certainly she was licking his face; but on the other hand, he had just kicked her with a good deal of violence, which seemed to indicate that she was on a lower level.
“Get out!” cried Hash.
The remark was addressed to Amy, but the advice it contained was so admirable that Chimp Twist acted on it without hesitation. In the swirl of events he had found himself with a clear path to the door, and along this path he shot without delay. And not until he had put the entire length of Burberry Road between him and his apparently insane aggressor did he pause.
Then he mopped his forehead and said, “Gee!”
It seemed to Chimp Twist that a long walk was indicated—a walk so long that by the time he reached Mon Repos again, Sam, his preserver, would have returned and would be on the spot to protect him.
Hash, meanwhile, raged, baffled. He had extricated himself from Amy and had rushed out into the road, but long ere that his victim had disappeared. He went back to try to find Amy and rebuke her, but Amy had disappeared too. In spite of her general dreaminess, there was sterling common sense in Amy. She knew when and when not to be among those present.
Hash returned to his kitchen and remained there, seething. He had been seething for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when the front doorbell rang. He climbed the stairs gloomily; and such was his disturbed frame of mind that not even the undeniable good looks of the visitor who had rung could soothe him.
“Mr. Shotter in?”
He recognised her now. It was the young party that had called on the previous evening, asking for Sam. And, as on that occasion, he seemed to see through the growing darkness the same sturdy male person hovering about in the shadows.
“No, miss, he ain’t.”
“Expecting him back soon?”
“No, miss, I ain’t. He’s gone to the theatre, to a mat-i-nay.”
“Ah,” said the lady, “is that so?” And she made a sudden, curious gesture with her parasol.
“Sorry,” said Hash, melting a little, for her eyes were very bright.
“Can’t be helped. You all alone here then?”
“Yes.”
“Tough luck.”
“Oh, I don’t mind, miss,” said Hash, pleased by her sympathy.
“Well, I won’t keep you. ’Devening.”
“’Evening, miss.”
Hash closed the door. Whistling a little, for his visitor had lightened somehow the depression which was gnawing at him, he descended the stairs and entered the kitchen.
Something which appeared at first acquaintance to be the ceiling, the upper part of the house and a ton of bricks thrown in for good measure hit Hash on the head and he subsided gently on the floor.
Soapy Molloy came to the front door and opened it. He was a little pale, and he breathed heavily.
“All right?” said his wife eagerly.
“All right.”
“Tied him up?”
“With a clothesline.”
“How about if he hollers?”
“I’ve put a duster in his mouth.”
“At-a-boy!” said Mrs. Molloy. “Then let’s get action.”
They climbed the stairs to where the cistern stood, and Mr. Molloy, removing his coat, rolled up his sleeves.
Some minutes passed, and then Mr. Molloy, red in the face and wet in the arm, made a remark.
“But it must be there!” cried his wife.
“It isn’t.”
“You haven’t looked.”
“I’ve looked everywhere. There couldn’t be a toothpick in that thing without I’d have found it.” He expelled a long breath and his face grew bleak. “Know what I think?”
“What?”
“That little oil can, Chimp, has slipped one over on us—told us the wrong place.”
The plausibility of this theory was so obvious that Mrs. Molloy made no attempt to refute it. She bit her lip in silence.
“Then let’s you and me get busy and find the right place,” she said at length, with the splendid fortitude of a great woman. “We know the stuff’s in the house somewheres, and we got the place to ourselves.”
“It’s taking a chance,” said Mr. Molloy doubtfully. “Suppose somebody was to come and find us here.”
“Well, then, all you would do would be to just simply haul off and bust them one, same as you did the hired man.”
“’M, yes,” said Mr. Molloy.