CHAPTER XIV

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.