Part 14

Parkinson stood on the broad base of the pump and tried to drive down the handle. It scarcely moved.

“Harder,” urged Carrados, interpreting every detail of sound with perfect accuracy.

Parkinson set his teeth and lunged again. Again he seemed to come up against a solid wall of resistance.

“Keep trying; something must give,” said his master encouragingly. “Here, let me----” He threw his weight into the balance and for a moment they hung like a group poised before action. Then, somewhere, something did give and the sheathing plunger “drew.”

“Now like blazes till the bath is empty. Then you can tell the others to stop hammering.” Parkinson, looking round to acquiesce, found himself alone, for with silent step and quickened senses Carrados was already passing down the dark flights of the broad stone stairway.

It was perhaps three minutes later when an excited gentleman in the state of disrobement that is tacitly regarded as falling upon the _punctum cæcum_ in times of fire, flood and nocturnal emergency shot out of the door of No. 7 and bounding up the intervening flights of steps pounded with the knocker on the door of No. 9. As someone did not appear with the instantaneity of a jack-in-the-box, he proceeded to repeat the summons, interspersing it with an occasional “I say!” shouted through the letter-box.

The light above the door made it unconvincing to affect that no one was at home. The gentleman at the door trumpeted the fact through his channel of communication and demanded instant attention. So immersed was he with his own grievance, in fact, that he failed to notice the approach of someone on the other side, and the sudden opening of the door, when it did take place, surprised him on his knees at his neighbour’s doorstep, a large and consequential-looking personage as revealed in the light from the hall, wearing the silk hat that he had instinctively snatched up, but with his braces hanging down.

“Mr Tupworthy of No. 7, isn’t it?” quickly interposed the new man before his visitor could speak. “But why this--homage? Permit me to raise you, sir.”

“Confound it all,” snorted Mr Tupworthy indignantly, “you’re flooding my flat. The water’s coming through my bathroom ceiling in bucketfuls. The plaster’ll fall next. Can’t you stop it? Has a pipe burst or something?”

“Something, I imagine,” replied No. 9 with serene detachment. “At all events it appears to be over now.”

“So I should hope,” was the irate retort. “It’s bad enough as it is. I shall go round to the office and complain. I’ll tell you what it is, Mr Belting: these mansions are becoming a pandemonium, sir, a veritable pandemonium.”

“Capital idea; we’ll go together and complain: two will be more effective,” suggested Mr Belting. “But not to-night, Mr Tupworthy. We should not find anyone there. The office will be closed. Say to-morrow----”

“I had no intention of anything so preposterous as going there to-night. I am in no condition to go. If I don’t get my feet into hot water at once I shall be laid up with a severe cold. Doubtless you haven’t noticed it, but I am wet through to the skin, saturated, sir.”

Mr Belting shook his head sagely.

“Always a mistake to try to stop water coming through the ceiling,” he remarked. “It will come, you know. Finds its own level and all that.”

“I did not try to stop it--at least not voluntarily. A temporary emergency necessitated a slight rearrangement of our accommodation. I--I tell you this in confidence--I was sleeping in the bathroom.”

At the revelation of so notable a catastrophe Mr Belting actually seemed to stagger. Possibly his eyes filled with tears; certainly he had to turn and wipe away his emotion before he could proceed.

“Not--not right under it?” he whispered.

“I imagine so,” replied Mr Tupworthy. “I do not conceive that I could have been placed more centrally. I received the full cataract in the region of the ear. Well, if I may rely on you that it has stopped, I will terminate our interview for the present.”

“Good-night,” responded the still tremulous Belting. “Good-night--or good-morning, to be exact.” He waited with the door open to light the first flight of stairs for Mr Tupworthy’s descent. Before the door was closed another figure stepped down quietly from the obscurity of the steps leading upwards.

“Mr Belting, I believe?” said the stranger. “My name is Carrados. I have been looking over the flat above. Can you spare me a few minutes?”

“What, Mr Max Carrados?”

“The same,” smiled the owner of the name.

“Come in, Mr Carrados,” exclaimed Belting, not only without embarrassment, but with positive affection in his voice. “Come in by all means. I’ve heard of you more than once. Delighted to meet you. This way. I know--I know.” He put a hand on his guest’s arm and insisted on steering his course until he deposited him in an easy-chair before a fire. “This looks like being a great night. What will you have?”

Carrados put the suggestion aside and raised a corner of the situation.

“I’m afraid that I don’t come altogether as a friend,” he hinted.

“It’s no good,” replied his host. “I can’t regard you in any other light after this. You heard Tupworthy? But you haven’t seen the man, Mr Carrados. I know--I’ve heard--but no wealth of the imagination can ever really quite reconstruct Tupworthy, the shoddy magnifico, in his immense porcine complacency, his monumental self-importance. And sleeping right underneath! Gods, but we have lived to-night! Why--why ever did you stop?”

“You associate me with this business?”

“Associate you! My dear Mr Carrados, I give you the full glorious credit for the one entirely successful piece of low comedy humour in real life that I have ever encountered. Indeed, in a legal and pecuniary sense, I hold you absolutely responsible.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Carrados, beginning to laugh quietly. Then he continued: “I think that I shall come through that all right. I shall refer you to Mr Carlyle, the private inquiry agent, and he will doubtless pass you on to your landlord, for whom he is acting, and I imagine that he in turn will throw all the responsibility on the ingenious gentleman who has put them to so much trouble. Can you guess the result of my investigation in the flat above?”

“Guess, Mr Carrados? I don’t need to guess: I _know_. You don’t suppose I thought for a moment that such transparent devices as two intercepted pipes and an automatic gas-lighter would impose on a man of intelligence? They were only contrived to mystify the credulous imagination of clerks and porters.”

“You admit it, then?”

“Admit! Good gracious, of course I admit it, Mr Carrados. What’s the use of denying it?”

“Precisely. I am glad you see that. And yet you seem far from being a mere practical joker. Does your confidence extend to the length of letting me into your object?”

“Between ourselves,” replied Mr Belting, “I haven’t the least objection. But I wish that you would have--say a cup of coffee. Mrs Belting is still up, I believe. She would be charmed to have the opportunity----No? Well, just as you like. Now, my object? You must understand, Mr Carrados, that I am a man of sufficient leisure and adequate means for the small position we maintain. But I am not unoccupied--not idle. On the contrary, I am always busy. I don’t approve of any man passing his time aimlessly. I have a number of interests in life--hobbies, if you like. You should appreciate that, as you are a private criminologist. I am--among other things which don’t concern us now--a private retributionist. On every side people are becoming far too careless and negligent. An era of irresponsibility has set in. Nobody troubles to keep his word, to carry out literally his undertakings. In my small way I try to set that right by showing them the logical development of their ways. I am, in fact, the sworn enemy of anything approaching sloppiness. You smile at that?”

“It is a point of view,” replied Carrados. “I was wondering how the phrase at this moment would convey itself, say, to Mr Tupworthy’s ear.”

Mr Belting doubled up.

“But don’t remind me of Tupworthy or I can’t get on,” he said. “In my method I follow the system of Herbert Spencer towards children. Of course you are familiar with his treatise on ‘Education’? If a rough boy persists, after warnings, in tearing or soiling all his clothes, don’t scold him for what, after all, is only a natural and healthy instinct overdone. But equally, of course, don’t punish yourself by buying him other clothes. When the time comes for the children to be taken to an entertainment little Tommy cannot go with them. It would not be seemly, and he is too ashamed, to go in rags. He begins to see the force of practical logic. Very well. If a tradesman promises--promises explicitly--delivery of his goods by a certain time and he fails, he finds that he is then unable to leave them. I pay on delivery, by the way. If a man undertakes to make me an article like another--I am painstaking, Mr Carrados: I point out at the time how exactly like I want it--and it is (as it generally is) on completion something quite different, I decline to be easy-going and to be put off with it. I take the simplest and most obvious instances; I could multiply indefinitely. It is, of course, frequently inconvenient to me, but it establishes a standard.”

“I see that you are a dangerous man, Mr Belting,” remarked Carrados. “If most men were like you our national character would be undermined. People would have to behave properly.”

“If most men were like me we should constitute an intolerable nuisance,” replied Belting seriously. “A necessary reaction towards sloppiness would set in and find me at its head. I am always with minorities.”

“And the case in point?”

“The present trouble centres round the kitchen sink. It is cracked and leaks. A trivial cause for so elaborate an outcome, you may say, but you will doubtless remember that two men quarrelling once at a spring as to who should use it first involved half Europe in a war, and the whole tragedy of _Lear_ sprang from a silly business round a word. I hadn’t noticed the sink when we took this flat, but the landlord had solemnly sworn to do everything that was necessary. Is a new sink necessary to replace a cracked one? Obviously. Well, you know what landlords are: possibly you are one yourself. They promise you heaven until you have signed the agreement and then they tell you to go to hell. Suggested that we’d probably broken the sink ourselves and would certainly be looked to to replace it. An excellent servant caught a cold standing in the drip and left. Was I to be driven into paying for a new sink myself? Very well, I thought, if the reasonable complaint of one tenant is nothing to you, see how you like the unreasonable complaints of fifty. The method served a useful purpose too. When Mrs Belting heard that old tale about the tragedy at No. 11 she was terribly upset; vowed that she couldn’t stay alone in here at night on any consideration.

“‘My dear,’ I said, ‘don’t worry yourself about ghosts. I’ll make as good a one as ever lived, and then when you see how it takes other people in, just remember next time you hear of another that someone’s pulling the string.’ And I really don’t think that she’ll ever be afraid of ghosts again.”

“Thank you,” said Carrados, rising. “Altogether I have spent a very entertaining evening, Mr Belting. I hope your retaliatory method won’t get you into serious trouble this time.”

“Why should it?” demanded Belting quickly.

“Oh, well, tenants are complaining, the property is being depreciated. The landlord may think that he has legal redress against you.”

“But surely I am at liberty to light the gas or use the bath in my own flat when and how I like?”

A curious look had come into Mr Belting’s smiling face; a curious note must have sounded in his voice. Carrados was warned and, being warned, guessed.

“You are a wonderful man,” he said with upraised hand. “I capitulate. Tell me how it is, won’t you?”

“I knew the man at 11. His tenancy isn’t really up till March, but he got an appointment in the north and had to go. His two unexpired months weren’t worth troubling about, so I got him to sublet the flat to me--all quite regularly--for a nominal consideration, and not to mention it.”

“But he gave up the keys?”

“No. He left them in the door and the porter took them away. Very unwarrantable of him; surely I can keep my keys where I like? However, as I had another.... Really, Mr Carrados, you hardly imagine that unless I had an absolute right to be there I should penetrate into a flat, tamper with the gas and water, knock the place about, tramp up and down----”

“I go,” said Carrados, “to get our people out in haste. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Mr Carrados. It’s been a great privilege to meet you. Sorry I can’t persuade you....”

VI

The Missing Actress Sensation

First nights are not what they were, even within the memory of playgoers who would be startled to hear anyone else refer to them as “elderly.” But there are yet occasions of exception, and the production of _Call a Spade----_ at the Argosy Theatre was marked by at least one feature of note. The play itself was “sound,” though not epoch-making. The performance of the leading lady was satisfactory and exactly what was to be expected from her. The leading gentleman was equally effective in a part which--as eight out of twelve dramatic critics happily phrased it on the morrow--“fitted him like a glove”; and on the same preponderance of opinion the character actor “contrived to extract every ounce of humour from the material at his disposal.” In other words, _Call a Spade----_ might so far be relied upon to run an attenuating course for about fifty nights and then to be discreetly dropped, “pending the continuance of its triumphal progress at another West End house--should a suitable habitation become available.”

But a very different note came into the reviews when the writers passed to the achievement of another member of the company--a young actress described on the programme as Miss Una Roscastle. Miss Roscastle was unknown to London critics and London audiences. She had come from Dublin with no very great dramatic reputation, but it is to be presumed that the quite secondary part which she had been given on her first metropolitan appearance was peculiarly suited to her talent. No one was more surprised than the author at the remarkable characterisation that “Mary Ryan” assumed in Miss Roscastle’s hands. He was the more surprised because he had failed to notice anything of the kind at rehearsals. Dimly he suspected that the young lady had got more out of the part than he had ever put into it, and while outwardly loud in his expression of delight, he was secretly uncertain whether to be pleased or annoyed. The leading lady also went out of her way to congratulate the young neophyte effusively on her triumph--and then slapped her unfortunate dresser on very insufficient provocation; but the lessee manager spoke of his latest acquisition with a curious air of restraint. At the end of the second act Miss Roscastle took four calls. After that she was only required for the first few minutes of the last act, and many among the audience noted with surprise that she did not appear with the company at the fall of the curtain--she had, in fact, already left the house. All the same the success of the piece constituted a personal triumph for herself. Thenceforth, instead of, “Oh yes, you might do worse than book seats at the Argosy,” the people who had been, said, “Now don’t forget; you positively _must_ see Miss Roscastle in _Call a Spade----_,” and as the Press had said very much the same, the difference to the box-office was something, but to the actress it was everything. Miss Roscastle, indeed, had achieved that rare distinction of “waking to find herself famous.” Nothing could have seemed more assured and roseate than her professional future.

About a week later Max Carrados was interrupted one afternoon in the middle of composing an article on Sicilian numismatics by a telephone call from Mr Carlyle. The blind man smiled as he returned his friend’s greeting, for Louis Carlyle’s voice was wonderfully suggestive in its phases of the varying aspects of the speaker himself, and at that moment it conveyed a portrait of Mr Carlyle in his very best early-morning business manner--spruce and debonair, a little obtuse to things beyond his experience and impervious to criticism, but self-confident, trenchant and within his limits capable. In its crisp yet benign complacency Carrados could almost have sworn to resplendent patent boots, the current shade in suède gloves and a carefully selected picotee.

“If you are doing nothing better to-night, Max,” continued the inquiry agent, “would you join me at the Argosy Theatre? I have a box, and we might go on to the Savoy afterwards. Now don’t say you are engaged, there’s a good fellow,” he urged. “You haven’t given me the chance of playing host for a month or more.”

“The fact is,” confessed Carrados, “I was there for the first night only a week ago.”

“How unfortunate,” exclaimed the other. “But don’t you think that you could put up with it again?”

“I am sure I can,” agreed Carrados. “Yes, I will join you there with pleasure.”

“Delightful,” crowed Mr Carlyle. “Let us say----” The essential details were settled in a trice, but the “call” had not yet expired and the sociable gentleman still held the wire. “Were you interested in Miss Roscastle, Max?”

“Decidedly.”

“That is fortunate. My choice of a theatre is not unconnected with a case I have on hand. I may be able to tell you something about the lady.”

“Possibly we shall not be alone?” suggested Carrados.

“Well, no; not absolutely,” admitted Carlyle. “Charming young fellow, though. I’m sure you’ll like him, Max. Trevor Enniscorthy, a younger son of old Lord Sleys.”

“Conventional rotter, between ourselves?” inquired Max.

“Not a bit of it,” declared Mr Carlyle loyally. “A young fellow of five and twenty is none the worse for being enamoured of a fascinating creature who happens to be on the stage. He is----Oh, very well. Good-bye, Max. Eight-fifteen, remember.”

They were all punctual. In fact, “If Mr Enniscorthy could have got me along we should have been here before the doors opened,” declared Mr Carlyle when the blind man joined them. “Now why are there no programmes about here, I wonder?”

“I hardly fancy they anticipate their box-holders arriving twenty minutes before the curtain rises,” suggested Carrados.

“There are some,” exclaimed Mr Enniscorthy, dashing out as an attendant crossed the circle. He was back in a moment, and standing in the obscurity of the box eagerly tore open the programme. “Still in,” he muttered, coming forward and throwing the paper down for the others to refer to. “Oh, excuse my impatience,” he apologised, colouring. “I am rather----” He left them to supply the rest.

“Mr Enniscorthy has given me permission to explain his position, Max,” began Mr Carlyle, but the young man abruptly cut short the proposition stated in this vein of deference.

“I’d rather put it that if Mr Carrados would help me with his advice I should be most awfully grateful,” he said in a very clear, rather highly pitched voice. “I suppose it’s inevitable to feel no end of an ass over this sort of thing, but I’m desperately in earnest and I _must_ go through with it.”

“Admirable!” beamed Mr Carlyle’s inextinguishable eye, and he murmured: “Very natural, I am sure,” in the voice of a man who has just been told to go up higher.

“Perhaps you know that there is a Miss Roscastle put down as appearing in this piece?” went on Enniscorthy. “Well, I knew Miss Roscastle rather well in Ireland. I came to London because----I followed her here.”

“Engaged?” dropped quietly from Carrados’s lips.

“I cannot say that we were actually engaged,” was the admission, “but it--well, you know how these things stand. At all events she knew what I felt towards her and she did not discourage my hopes.”

“Did your people know of this, Mr Enniscorthy?”

“I had not spoken to my father or to my stepmother, but they might easily have heard something of it,” replied the young man. “Miss Roscastle, although she did not go about much, was received by the very best people in Dublin. Of course for many things I did not like her being on the stage; in fact I detested it, but she had taken the step before I knew her, and how could I object? Then she got the offer of this London engagement. She was ambitious to get on in her profession, and took it. In a very short time I found it impossible to exist there without seeing her, so I made an excuse to get away and followed.”

“Let me see,” put in Mr Carlyle ingenuously; “I forget the exact dates.”

“Miss Roscastle came on Monday, October the 4th,” said Enniscorthy. “The piece opened on the following Thursday week--the 14th. I left Kingstown by the early boat yesterday. At this end we were nearly an hour late, and after going to my hotel, changing and dining, I had just time to come on here and bag the last stall. I thought that I would send a note round after the first act and ask Una to give me a few minutes afterwards. But it never came to that. Instead I got a very large surprise. ‘Mary Ryan’ came on, and I looked--and looked again. I didn’t need glasses, but I got a pair out of the automatic box in front of me and had another level stare. Well, it wasn’t Miss Roscastle. This girl was like her. I suppose to most people they would be wonderfully alike, and her voice--although it wasn’t really Irish--yes, her voice was similar. But to me there were miles of difference. I saw at once that she was an understudy, although ‘Miss Una Roscastle’ was still down in the programme, and I began to quake at the thought of something having happened to her.

“I slipped out into the corridor--I had an end seat--and got hold of a programme girl.

“‘Do you know why Miss Roscastle is out of the cast to-night?’ I asked her. ‘Is she indisposed?’

“She took the programme out of my hand and pointed to a name in it.

“‘She’s in all right,’ she replied--stupidly, I thought. ‘There’s her name.’

“‘Yes, she is on the programme,’ I replied, ‘but not on the stage. Look through the glass there. That is not Miss Roscastle.’

“She glanced through the glazed door and then turned away as though she suspected me of chaffing her.

“‘It’s the only Miss Roscastle I’ve ever seen here,’ she said as she went.

“I wandered about and interrogated one or two other attendants. They all gave me the same answer. I began to get frightened.

“‘They must be misled by the resemblance,’ I assured myself. ‘It really is wonderful.’ I went back to my seat and then remembered that I had got no further with my original inquiry, which was to find out whether Una was ill or not. I couldn’t remain. I kept my eyes fixed on ‘Mary Ryan’ every time she was on the stage, and every time I became more and more convinced. Finally I got up again and going round sent in my card to the manager.”

“Stokesey?” asked Carrados.

“Yes. I didn’t know who was technically the right man, but he, at any rate, had engaged Miss Roscastle. He saw me at once.

“‘I have come across from Dublin to see Miss Roscastle,’ I told him, ‘and I am very disappointed to find her out of the cast. Can you tell me why she is away?’

“‘Surely you are mistaken,’ he replied, opening a programme that lay before him. ‘Do you know Miss Roscastle by sight?’

“‘Very well indeed,’ I retorted. ‘Better than your staff do. The “Mary Ryan” to-night is not Miss Roscastle.’

“‘I will inquire,’ he said, walking to the door. ‘Please wait a minute.’

“He was rigidly courteous, but instinct was telling me all the time that it was sheer bluff. He had nothing to inquire. In a moment he was back again.