Part 12

In these days of easy travelling and tourist facilities it need scarcely be explained that Lansdowne Passage is a narrow path between two high walls; and that this path is carved between the princely domains of Devonshire House and Lansdowne House. Men speak of a time when, midway through the passage, they had every now and then to pass under a light wooden bridge which had overnight been thrown from the top of one high wall to the other, and how it seemed to them pleasant to think that perhaps the Marquess of Lansdowne was going to step across to visit the Duke of Devonshire that day. But nothing like that happens nowadays, for Devonshire House emptily awaits its destiny and Lansdowne House is held in fief by a distinguished stranger. But there is still something feudal about Lansdowne Passage, for it is a private right-of-way, and on one day every year Lord Lansdowne sends his men to lock and bolt the doors at each end of the passage, as it is his right to do, for the only way a man has of showing that a passage is his passage is by keeping every one else out of it for one day every year, the date to be left to his discretion. Through Lansdowne Passage, on 364 days of the year, the pedestrian (or two pedestrians abreast, but not more than two, for you can’t have everything) can walk direct from Curzon Street to Berkeley Street, and thus save himself an endless amount of walking round by Piccadilly or Berkeley Square. Mention must also be made of an old man who, on 364 days of the year, wanders about the passage with a broom, or sometimes leans the broom against the wall and sits down on the upturned end of a narrow wooden box, which he brings with him every morning for that purpose; but he doesn’t really have very much time for sitting on his box, for all autumn he sweeps away at the leaves, happily without effect, and for the rest of the year you cannot drop a piece of paper, orange-peel, or cigarette-end without having it swept away at once; and all the year round he gives you greeting as you pass, in a friendly way.

Now, one night in May, a year after the world was said to be at peace, George Tarlyon had reason to be walking in a westerly direction from Dover Street; down Hay Hill he went, and down the covered stairway from Berkeley Street into Lansdowne Passage. The hour was very late, the night pleasantly dark and cool, and the stillness of a sleeping city broken only by the cameo noises of the narrow hours. His steps rang gaily between the high walls of the passage, echoes carelessly tossing themselves from one wall to the other, round and about and every way, and he was almost half-way through before he realised that he was sharing the passage with another: a woman just ahead of him, walking slowly in his direction, but scarcely walking, loitering against the wall, a self-effacing woman of the night. George Tarlyon passed her, and about her face he was not at all curious. A word followed him, a shy word, but he strode on, two steps, three steps--and then another word followed him, louder, and he swung round, not very amiably.

Now the words which women of the night cast into the night as a lure for passing men are few, and their expression limited; and many had been cast to George Tarlyon in passing but never had he chosen one, for that kind of thing did not amuse him, and he was quite popular enough in his own circle. But “My dear!” this woman had cried at his back, softly, not at all insinuatingly: a ladylike voice, without glitter or suggestion, just appealing; and it somehow caught the drum of George Tarlyon’s ear, the gentle “my dear,” and he swung round to it.

“Well?” asked George Tarlyon, not very amiably. But he made a gesture towards his hat, which is more than most men do on the casual occasion.

She softly came towards him, and stood a long way below him, for she was a short, slight woman: of about middle years, and of the middle sort, plain featured and dressed unnoticeably: very quiet and ladylike she was. From one hand hung a bag, just a little larger than those called hand-bags, and full-looking, as might be that of a sempstress or governess who is absent from her home all day. The little lady smiled, without lure....

“Well?” asked George Tarlyon again, not very amiably.

“It’s only,” said the little lady, “that I am afraid to walk alone through this passage, and would be very grateful if you would allow me to walk with you as far as the Curzon Street end.” Very quiet and ladylike she was.

“Why, of course,” said George Tarlyon, politely enough, and more or less dismissed the thing with a swing round. But the little lady walked as slowly with him as she had without him, and he had to accommodate his step to hers.

“But if you’re afraid,” George Tarlyon just thought to ask, “aren’t you even more afraid of addressing a stranger, who might do a little lady some harm in a lonely place like this?”

The little lady smiled gently.

“I saw your face as you passed,” she said. “You might be dangerous to a lady in a drawing-room but not in Lansdowne Passage. Unlike some men I know....”

They were walking very slowly, and still had almost half of the passage to go, but George Tarlyon did not say, “Hurry up, little lady,” thinking she was a pathetic little thing, more than usually pathetic of her kind. But he was not interested in her, and it was only out of politeness that he asked:

“Have you had trouble with one or two, then?”

“With one,” she told him softly. She was so small, and he so tall, that her voice seemed to float up to him from somewhere about his knees. He scarcely listened to it. To tell the truth, he was rather tired. “With one,” she repeated. “That is why I am afraid of walking through here by myself at night. It happened many years ago, but every detail is still very clear to me.”

“He must have frightened you a good deal,” said George Tarlyon. Not that he was interested.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said the little lady gently. “But it was certainly the most important thing that has ever happened in my life. You see, sir, I had to get three pounds that night. I had already made two pounds, for that is all I have ever dared to ask, though sometimes the kinder gentlemen have given me more, but that night I had to make three pounds more, for five pounds a week was the rent of my rooms and already overdue some time....” The gentle voice ran on, floating up to him from somewhere about his knee, and he scarcely listened. They were quite near the Curzon Street end now, and the words floated upwards quicker....

“Just about where you passed me, I spoke to him--in the passage here. He was a short man, and not a gentleman, but I needed three pounds badly and nowadays you never know who has money and who hasn’t, do you? But as soon as he answered and looked at me I knew I had made a mistake, but there’s no use being rude, and so I walked on with him. He said something about the coolness of the weather, but although I kept my eyes in front of me, not liking the look of him, you see, I knew very well that he was taking me in sideways. There’s no use being silly, I told myself, but I did wish I hadn’t got my two pounds in my bag or that some one else would come into the passage, though there’s generally little chance of that at this hour of night, unless it’s a policeman to smoke a cigarette. And so I hurried on as quick as I could to get to Curzon Street, and we weren’t more than half-way through this passage then, but he got hold of my arm and stopped me quick enough. I didn’t look at his eyes, for I’d seen them once, you see, but I heard him asking for money, as I knew he would. And then he got hold of my bag by the strap, but I held on tight, saying there was naught in it but powder and a handkerchief, but still not looking at his eyes for I knew their kind well enough. But he held on, and said he would give me some cocaine, ‘snow’ he called it, if I let him have money, and with his other hand he fumbled in his pocket. ‘I’ll scream,’ I said, and at that he let go of my bag quick enough, so I could hurry on to Curzon Street. He dropped back then, but I was in such a state to get to Curzon Street that I couldn’t hear him behind me for the beating of my heart. But behind me he must have been, for I’d just got to within a yard--why, we’re at the spot now, I _have_ been slow in telling!--when from behind his hand clapped me over the mouth, and I heard him breathing very hoarse at my neck, and then a sharp funny pain in the shoulder-blade took me. As sharp as a knife, they say, but this was a knife, and ever so sharp in the shoulder-blade it was--but it didn’t hurt so much as feel funny, if you understand, and everything was so mixed up--his breathing, and the funny feeling in the shoulder-blade, and somewhere a clock striking once, but I went off before it struck again, for it must have been on three o’clock. I never thought death would be like that.”

And George Tarlyon looked for the little lady and he saw only the wall, and George Tarlyon ran headlong out of Lansdowne Passage, and as he ran he heard a clock strike the last two notes of three o’clock.

XIV: THE SMELL IN THE LIBRARY

I

One night we were at a party, George Tarlyon and I, and there were also present some other people. It was not, however, a good party, and we left it before eleven o’clock. I cannot remember now how it was that one had gone there so early, but anyway it is of no significance. As we passed out, a misguided fellow said it would get better later on, but I extracted him from Tarlyon’s teeth, and so out into the street. A long string of cars stretched from the door towards Park Lane, and here and there chauffeurs stood in sombre groups, and we wondered if they thought they were missing anything. The heat of the crowded rooms had put us in a fever, the night air penetrated our flimsy evening-coats, and we shivered and murmured. From the open windows of the house we had left there followed us down the length of Green Street that asinine blare which is the punishment of England for having lost America; and George Tarlyon muttered that there ought to be a law to prevent people from giving fat-headed parties full of crashing bores and plain women, the joints of whose knees cracked in trying any dance which their mothers had not danced before them. I tried to soothe him and myself by saying that parties were not what they were and there it was; but he would not be soothed, for he had been given a glass of cider-cup in mistake for champagne, and he who touches cider-cup in the watches of the night may neither forget nor forgive.

We walked up Park Lane aimlessly, for we knew not what to do nor whither to go. We were further elated by the fact that we could sum up only one cigarette between us.

I suggested that one might do worse than go to bed, but Tarlyon said it was too early for that. “It is never too early,” I said morosely, “to go to bed.”

“Pah!” said Tarlyon, and so we walked down Park Lane.

Now it is frequently said that Park Lane is full of Jews, but very few met our eyes, and they might quite well have been Gentiles. There are many illusions prevalent in the provinces about life in the great metropolis of London: such as (_a_) that it is gay: (_b_) that it is wicked: (_c_) that boys will be boys: (_d_) that there is plenty to do when it rains: (_e_) that you have only to go for a walk to see many “well-dressed women in costly furs”; but the one which has even less foundation in fact than any of these is that, life in a great city being what it is, there is never an hour of the twenty-four when the great streets are not, to a student of life, full of matter for observation. But, as George Tarlyon said, you might be a student of life until you burst and still find no matter for observation--though here we were in Park Lane and the hour not yet eleven!

“The whole thing is a ramp,” we said. “Now take this matter about the Jews. We have been distinctly given to understand that this Lane is full of Jews--but what do we see? Two ’buses and a policeman. But that leads us to an interesting speculation: can a policeman be a Jew? Has such a thing as a Jewish policeman ever been seen or heard of? And if not, what is it that prevents a policeman from being a Jew? Is the religious feeling among policemen stronger than that among Privy Councillors?”

“Let’s ask him,” I suggested. The policeman was decorating the corner of Upper Brook Street. Tarlyon asked him, and the policeman said that Vine Street was not so far off as all that, while as for Marlborough Street, it was even nearer. He wasn’t there to be accosted, he wasn’t, said the policeman wickedly.

“Ho!” said Tarlyon. “And have you been arresting any more respectable old clergymen in Hyde Park for talking to women without an introduction from a bishop? Blast me but I wouldn’t dream of entering Hyde Park nowadays, not at night anyway, without a battalion of chaps fringed with torpedo-netting.”

“Good-night, constable,” I said hurriedly.

“Good-night, sir,” said he--a discreet man.

“Pah!” said Tarlyon.

We walked up Park Lane.

And suddenly Tarlyon gripped my arm, and waved his stick and whispered--

“Look at that! Ralph, just look at that!”

Ten yards or so ahead of us loomed the back of a giant. He was striding on with huge steps, a black cloak was flung about him, and he wore no hat. Maybe it was the cloak, swaying this way and that, and one end flapping over a shoulder, that made the man seem taller than he really was--but it was a colossal back.

“It’s reminiscent,” Tarlyon murmured. “I can’t help a feeling about that back--it’s reminiscent.”

“It’s reminiscent,” I whispered, “of a back I once lent money to. One hundred pounds it was....”

We quickened our pace. The huge figure passed under the light of a lamp, and the light fell on his bare head, and his hair flamed up like fire.

The huge figure, the arrogant walk, the flaming ginger hair....

“Red Antony!” I murmured.

“And we thought he was dead!” muttered Tarlyon--as though Red Antony could have died without the noise of his death-rattle confounding the thunder of the guns that killed many better men! Could a man who lived so noisily die as other men? And yet, because the lean years of peace had passed without sight or sign of him, we had believed the rumour that had had it that Sir Antony Poole had risen to be sergeant in a Canadian storm battalion and had then died; which had seemed natural in a kind of way, for the worst German shot couldn’t, one thought, have consistently missed six-foot-four under a crown of flaming hair.

If there was a man who did not know, or know of, Antony Poole in the careless years before the war, then there must have been something the matter with his eyes or ears. For Red Antony was a famous sight in every crowded place in London, and achieved considerable nonentity as the noisiest and worst-tempered rascal since Fighting Fitzgerald of the Regency. He crashed, did Antony, in furious idiocy from row to row and roguery to roguery, so that the day inevitably came when no decent man or woman would be seen speaking to the man. Oh, a calamitous pair, the brothers Poole! For one night his brother, the Great Sir Roger, brilliant and sardonic Roger, dark and successful Roger, good sportsman and lovable fellow--one night our Roger put a bullet through his head, and at the inquest the amazed world heard that he had done this unbelievable thing because the police were hammering at the door with a warrant for his arrest on a charge of fraud. This we, his friends, did not believe. The police may have been hammering at the door, we said, but the police are notoriously promiscuous about the doors they hammer at. “Fraud be damned in connection with Roger Poole!”--that is what we said. Why, he was fine, that Roger--_fine_! Thus we mourned him, once the wealthiest and wittiest of our company, and we defended his memory against the few who dared impugn it. But the disappearance of the red giant who was now Sir Antony Poole we did not mourn, for from the day of the inquest, at which he broke down and wept like a stricken child, he had not been seen in London until this night in Park Lane.

II

“Go quietly,” Tarlyon restrained me. “We’ll teach Red Antony to walk up Park Lane without a hat.”

Gently we approached, one on each side of the colossal back.

“Oi!” we cried.

A wrench, and he faced us. We are tall, but we were as children beneath him.

“Oi to you!” snarled Antony. “Who the blazes are you, anyway?” And the great red expanse which was given to Antony for a face surveyed us intolerantly. Never what you might call an easy-tempered man, Red Antony.

“We be friends,” said Tarlyon sombrely.

“That’s uncommonly original of you,” drawled Antony. “I didn’t know I had any.” And he pretended not to recognise us--for Antony must always act, always play cussed.

“You haven’t,” Tarlyon grinned. “But mine was just a manner of speaking.” He knew his man; and there passed over Red Antony’s face that earthquake and tornado which was given him for a smile and a laugh.

“Hell! Always the same Tarlyon! How are you, George?”

“Monstrous,” says George.

“But there is no sensation in matter,” boomed Red Antony, crushing his hand.

“And this,” said Tarlyon, waving his other towards me, “and this, Sir Antony, is your old friend Ralph Wyndham Trevor, whom you may quite have forgotten, since you owe him a hundred pounds.”

Another earthquake across that vast red expanse, so that I feared for the sleep of those mythical Jews....

“Dear old Trevor--fancy having kept you waiting all this time! Here you are, man, here you are.” And from somewhere inside his cloak he jerked a pocket-book into my hand and crushed it against my palm. “You can keep the change, old boy, as you’re younger than I am and look as though you need it. Always take vegetables with your meat, Trevor.”

“I hate to take money from an impoverished baronet,” I got in, just to goad him.

“Impoverished nothing!” he boomed, and swung on Tarlyon, who backed a step. “D’you remember, George, that Roger always said I had a _flair_ for making money----”

“But he added,” Tarlyon said, “that you hadn’t got the brain of a louse to back that _flair_ up with.”

Boomed Antony: “I have studied the ways of lice for five years on end and must inform you, George, that my brain, though moth-eaten, is certainly superior. I have made mints of money. I am fat with money. I roll in money....” He was working himself up into that state of chronic excitement in which he might twist the lamp-post. Breakable or twistable things had always a fascination for Red Antony.

“There, there!” I soothed him. “And we thought the little man was dead!”

“There, there!” said George. “Did he make money, now! And we thought he was lying in some forgotten foreign field with a German bullet in his heart.”

Bother the man! He simply had to make a noise each time he opened his mouth. The policeman who had talked Vine Street to us approached.

“Dead! Me dead!” And the sweep of his arm flung wide his cloak, and indeed he looked a mighty man of wrath. “As though a Prooshian bullet could kill me!”

“You are no doubt reserved for a more terrible end,” said Tarlyon.

Blessed if the man didn’t wilt! That roaring red giant--he wilted.

“Don’t say that, George,” he begged hoarsely. “It’s a fool remark to make, that. You didn’t mean it, did you?” And he put the question seriously! We gaped at him.

“He was only being funny,” I explained. “He tries his best....”

“I wish you well, Antony,” said Tarlyon, out of his surprise.

“God, I need it!” Antony growled surprisingly.

And then I laughed--remembering Red Antony’s old way of acting cussed, just to surprise and annoy. He’d do anything to make a fool of some one, that man, even if he had to make a fool of himself in doing it. But as I laughed, Antony looked at me with furious, haggard eyes, and I stopped laughing.

I saw Tarlyon looking at him queerly. He knew Antony much better than I did, for many and many a year ago he was a junior subaltern in the mess when Antony threw a bottle at the head of an extremely superior officer. The bottle was full, the aim was true, and Antony was cashiered with all due pomp and dishonour. But, through all his subsequent follies, Tarlyon had liked him. One couldn’t, of course, defend Antony; but the very few who had once liked Red Antony always, somehow, went on liking him. There was something about the man, a sort of tremendous gallantry, an air of shameless bravado, a thunder of individuality, which might have made him a simple and lovable giant--but for a grain of rotten subtlety somewhere in him. Fine timber worm-eaten, Tarlyon said. Not, of course, said Tarlyon, that himself was anything to write home about.

“What’s the matter, old Antony?” Tarlyon asked kindly. “You’ve changed enormously....”

Now I had noticed no particular change, except, perhaps, that handsome Antony looked his forty years and more; but Tarlyon knew him better.

“How have I changed?” snapped Antony. He hated kindness; he thought he was being pitied.

“You look a bit worn, old boy, that’s all,” said George lightly.

“If it comes to that, you aren’t the man you were, what with war, wine, and women!”

“Talking of wine,” I thought to say, “one always understood that you’d die of drink, Antony. That’s probably what George meant when he said you looked worn.”

I wished I had kept my mouth shut. His eyes blazed over me ... but he restrained himself; and Antony’s “restraint” was a portentous business--it made a noise like a fast car with the brakes jammed on.

“Drink!” he said sharply. “I drink nothing to speak of nowadays. There’s an end to all things....” Now the lion’s bedside manner is a significant thing, and even more significant is it when the lion in the fulness of his strength sways a little, just a little; and what would make Red Antony sway just a little would be enough to put another man under the table, and no dishonour to the strength of his head, either.

“I do not wish,” said Antony reasonably, “that you should think me irresponsible through excess of stimulant. The things that are happening to me are not happening through drink, and you must bear that in mind. I am saner than a sane man, though I can hear and see and smell things that a sane man would die of....”

Tarlyon looked at me meaningly. Antony seemed to have forgotten us. Tarlyon took his arm.

“We can’t stay here all night,” he said. “Let us now leave Park Lane in a body and go to my house....”

Antony woke up; he threw back his head and howled: “Taxi!”

“All right, sir, all right,” said the policeman gently. “You don’t need to shout like that.” That was a brave policeman.

“I insist on shouting,” boomed Antony. “Taxi!”

And, thankfully, a taxi appeared from Mount Street, for Red Antony and the police never did mix well. He once arrested two policemen for loitering and took them to Vine Street....

Antony flung open the door. A clock began the lengthy job of striking eleven o’clock.

“We will go to _my_ house,” said Antony. “I have a charming house, and an appointment to keep in it. Jump in.” We jumped in, and we heard him give the driver the address of a house in Regent’s Park. How often had we not directed taxis to that house! Tarlyon whistled.

“So you’ve got Roger’s old house!” he murmured.

Antony did not answer. The taxi staggered northwards as best it could.

“I don’t see,” snapped Antony at last, “why you should gape about it. Getting back to England four months ago, I found the house empty, and took it. It seems natural enough.”

“I never said it wasn’t,” Tarlyon murmured. But he thought it wasn’t, and so did I. A brother, on coming back to civilisation after many years’ absence, does not immediately leap into the house in which his elder brother blew his brains out--anyway, I wouldn’t.