The Square Emerald · Chapter 12 (1/4)

XII

Peter Dawlish found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work, and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to time and allowed his thoughts to wander; and inevitably they wandered towards that grey building on the Thames Embankment, and a room somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed himself for the folly of dreams.

Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon his work, he let his mind go roving westwards to the bleak moor and those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked, heavy-footed, towards the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the vault-like cells with their gaily coloured blankets; to the stretch of bog-land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment, and substantially past. Much better than letting your fancies go straying towards the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter.

He had reached the S’s in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a bookmaker of dubious probity; but, so far as he was concerned, he had been paid something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.

Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been sinking for months, and had never been conscious of his son’s shame. That had been Peter’s one comfort, until he received his mother’s letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the dock with the bitterness of death in his heart⁠—beside that knowledge of his father’s last act, the seven years’ sentence was as nothing.

At six o’clock, Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this course.

He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amidst a medley of hawkers’ stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne since the visitation of the police.

He went upstairs, lit the oil-lamp, and, putting a paper bag full of biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down to his task. Eight o’clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of motorcar brakes as it stopped before the door, and, going to the window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to distinguish the visitor, but his heart leapt at the thought that it might be Leslie Maughan, and he opened the door and waited. This time he heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s voice, and after a while she called up to him sourly.

“A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish.”

“Will you ask her to come up, please?”

He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was slower and heavier than Leslie’s. And then there came through the open doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see⁠—his mother.

Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table.

“Fine work for the son of a gentleman!” she said in a hard voice.

“I’ve known worse,” he replied coolly.

She closed the door behind her, as though she knew something of Mrs. Inglethorne’s irrepressible curiosity.

“I never expected I should see you again,” she said, declining with a gesture the chair he pushed forward to her; “but having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that I ought to do something for you. I am buying and stocking a small farm for you in Western Canada, and I am making you a small allowance to enable you to live, even if the farm fails, as it probably will. You will leave for Quebec on Saturday week; I have booked a second-class passage for you.” And, when he was about to speak: “I don’t want you to thank me. I shall feel happier when you have left the country. You have brought everlasting disgrace upon your father’s name, and I do not wish to be reminded constantly of the fact.”

Here she stopped.

“You were altogether wrong when you thought I was about to thank you,” he said quietly. “In the first place, I have no intention of accepting your charity, and in the second place, I have no aptitude for farming either in Canada or in England.”

“I have booked your passage,” she said, with an air of finality.

“Then there will be a vacant bed going cheap on the Atlantic Ocean!” replied Peter with a half-smile.

She looked round the room contemptuously, and again her eyes went to the table.

“So you’d rather do this waster’s work?”

“Waster’s work, I agree,” he nodded; “but infinitely more intellectual than mending boots or washing convicts’ laundry⁠—my last occupation. I expect nothing from you, mother. For some reason which I have never quite understood, you have hated me ever since I was a child. I have no wish to reproach you with being ‘unnatural.’ You have been under the thumb of Anita Bellini ever since I can remember.”

“How dare you!” Her voice was vibrant with anger. “ ‘Under the thumb!’ What do you mean?”

“I only know that Anita Bellini has withered every good feeling in every good woman who has been brought into contact with her. I only know that she is evil⁠—what hold she has over you, God knows. It has been sufficiently strong to rob me of the one gift which is every man’s right⁠—a mother’s love. I dare say that sounds a piece of sickly sentimentality, but it is a big thing⁠—a very big thing.”

“You have had what you deserved,” she interrupted brusquely. “And I did not come here to discuss my duty. If you prefer to go to Australia instead of Canada⁠—”

“I prefer Lambeth to either place at the moment,” he said coldly.

She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.

“You have made your bed and you must lie on it. I have done all that is humanly possible, more than could be expected, remembering how you have humiliated me and made my name⁠—”

“My father’s name,” he corrected.

He got under her guard there, and to his wonder the comment to which irritation drove him produced a remarkable effect. Her face flushed; the hard mouth grew harder.

“Your father’s name is my name,” she said harshly.

Her eyes were blazing; he had never seen her so moved.

“I will give you twenty thousand pounds to leave the country,” she said. “That is my final offer.”

He shook his head.

“I shall never want money from you,” he said, and, walking to the door, opened it, and she left the room without another glance at him.

Why had she come? He wasted half an hour of precious time puzzling over this extraordinary action on her part. He had spoken no more than the truth when he had said that from his childhood she had displayed an antagonism towards him which, in maturity, had puzzled him more than any other experience in his life. Antagonistic? She hated him! And, curiously enough, his father had known of her feeling, and though he had never made any direct reference to the enmity, had gone out of his way to make up for the affection the mother denied him. It was his father with whom he had corresponded throughout the days of the war; his father who had met him when he came home from France on leave; his father who had come day after day to the hospital to sit by the bedside of his wounded son; and when Peter had been discharged from the army, it was Donald who had found him the secretaryship, and had planned for him a great career in the world of politics. It was a puzzle beyond unravelment. Peter took up his pen again and tried, by a concentration of his exigent present, to forget the bitter past.

It was twelve o’clock when he put down his pen and rubbed his cramped hands. Throwing up the window to let out the smoke, he munched a biscuit and meditated; and then his face brightened, and his thoughts went unresistingly towards Leslie Maughan. Then through the open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk. It paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the key. Mrs. Inglethorne often went out at night, and as often returned with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her muttering came up to him from the passage.

It was the first time he had seen or heard her that day. Usually, she did not go out at nights, but stayed at home to receive the curious callers who came at odd moments. They always knocked once with the knocker, and once with the flat of their hands, and generally they carried a parcel or package, big or small. There was a whispered colloquy in the passage, the chink of money, or, more rarely, the rustle of Treasury notes, and they went out again⁠—without their parcels. This, Peter had seen and had not seen. Prison had taught him the wisdom of blindness, and he had not spoken to Mrs. Inglethorne of the furtive men and women who came slinking down Severall Street at those hours when the police patrol was well out of the way.

Leslie Maughan! He smiled a little at the thought of her, more at his own madness. What barriers separated them⁠—barriers more real, more invincible, than the difference between Scotland Yard and Dartmoor Prison! It was worse than madness to think about her⁠—

The scream that brought him to his feet was shrill and charged with fear and mortal agony. In two strides he was at the door and had pulled it open.

Now he heard it plainly⁠—the whistle and fall of a whip, the terrified, frantic cries for mercy. He ran down the stairs in the dark and tapped at Mrs. Inglethorne’s door. From inside the room came a deep, heartbreaking sound of sobbing.

“Who’s that?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne defiantly. “Go away and mind your own business!”

“Open the door, or I’ll break it open!” cried Peter in a cold fury.

“I’ll send for the police if you interfere with me!” yelled the woman.

His answer was to throw his weight against the flimsy door. The catch broke with a snap, and he was in the foul bedroom. Elizabeth lay cowering on a filthy camp bed, clad only in a coarse nightdress. Her head was pillowed in the crook of her arm, and convulsive sobs shook the thin shoulders. Her face aflame, Mrs. Inglethorne stood at the foot of a big brass bedstead, one hand holding herself steady, the other grasping an old dog-whip.

“I’ll learn her to go talking about me!” she said thickly. “After all I’ve done for her!”

There was another child there, a girl who was apparently the same age as Elizabeth. She, however, enjoyed the luxury of Mrs. Inglethorne’s ample bed, and was so used to this exhibition of the woman’s wrath that she was asleep.

“Where is your coat, Elizabeth?” asked Peter gently.

The child looked up, her eyes swollen, her face red, and cast one fearful glance at her mother.

“Whatcher goin’ to do?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne unsteadily.

“She will sleep in my room for the night,” replied Peter. “Tomorrow I will make other arrangements for her, and if you give any trouble I shall send for the police.”

Mrs. Inglethorne was amused in her way.

“Send for the police!” she scoffed. “I like that! An old lag sending for the police! And they’ll come, won’t they?”

“I think so,” said Peter quietly. “They will come, if only to discover why you never use the back room upstairs as a bedroom; why it is always kept locked, except after your visitors’ calls.”

The smile died from the woman’s face.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Peter went on, “you can ‘fence’ till the cows come home. But I’m not going to have you beating this child while I’m in the house. And when I’m out of it, and out of it for good, I’ll see that she is well looked after.”

The woman’s face was mottled with fear.

“ ‘Fence’!” she spluttered. “I don’t know what you mean by that low word! If you mean I receive stolen property, then you’re a liar!”

“Let me call the police and settle the matter,” said Peter.

The threat sobered her.

“I don’t want any police in my house. The kid annoyed me, and it’s a hard thing if a mother can’t cane her own children without being interfered with. If she wants to sleep upstairs she can, but she’d be better off down here, Mr. Dawlish. You haven’t got any accommodation for a little gel.”

Which was true.

“All right, get into bed, Elizabeth.” He covered her up with the pitifully thin bedclothes, and, without apology, took Mrs. Inglethorne’s heavy coat that lay over the bedrail and put it on top. “Sleep well,” he smiled, and patted her cheek.

She was safe for the night. What happened in the morning depended entirely on the view which Leslie Maughan took of a scheme that was beginning to take definite shape.

Mrs. Inglethorne was a fence, a buyer of stolen property. He had lived too long in association with the worst criminals of England to have any doubt upon the point, and, squinting through the keyhole one day in his curiosity, he had seen enough to remove the last remnants of doubt that remained.

He went to bed, determined to interview Leslie at the earliest opportunity, and it was not only on Elizabeth’s account that the thought pleased him.

When he arrived at the flat in Charing Cross Road next morning, Lucretia did not recognize him, and scowled fearfully at the suggestion that he should be admitted. She looked at his shabby attire and shook her head.

“It’s no good your trying to see Miss Maughan. You’d better call on her at Scotland Yard. She’s very busy now.”

“Who is it, Lucretia?”

Leslie was leaning over the rails of the landing; she could not see the visitor, but she could hear the uncompromising note in Lucretia’s voice.

“A young man wants to see you, miss. What’s your name again? Dawlish.”

“Oh, is that you, Peter Dawlish? Come up, will you?”

Peter ran up the stairs, followed by the muttered protests of the maid.

“You’re in time for breakfast. How are the envelopes going?”

“They’re melting!” he said.

He was conscious of a certain indefinable change in her tone. It was not that she was more serious, but there seemed some listlessness about her, as though she were tired. It was almost an effort to talk. She looked weary, he saw, when they passed from the dark landing, and he commented on this.

“I’ve been up half the night,” she said, “wandering about in a very cold garden, watching an elderly lady searching the ground with an electric lamp. That sounds mysterious, doesn’t it?”

She pointed to a chair and Peter sat down.

“It sounds almost romantic. Where was this?”

“At Wimbledon.” She waved the matter out of discussion. “Well,” she asked, “what brings you to West Central London at this unholy hour?”

Her grave eyes were fixed on his; there was something of reproach in them, something of hurt. He was puzzled; he felt that he had fallen short in her estimation, that she was disappointed with him for some reason. So strong was this impression that he grew uncomfortable under her gaze, and as though she were aware of this, she dropped her eyes to the table and began slowly to stir her coffee.

“I’ve come on a fool errand, with a wild and impossible suggestion.”

And then he told her of what had happened overnight, of the merciless flogging which Mrs. Inglethorne had administered.

“The woman is a fence,” he said, “not in a very big way. I think she specializes in furs and silk lengths.”