Elk 04 White Face (2 page)

She noticed that when on their way out he passed the doctor’s group Donald was patting his face with a handkerchief as though he were healing a scratch.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“A little neuralgia.” He laughed cheerily. “That is the penalty one pays for sleeping out night after night in the rain.”

He told her a story of a rainfall in Northern Rhodesia that had lasted four weeks on end.

“And all that time,” he said, “I had not so much as a tent.”

She left him at the door of the flat in Bury Street, and he was frankly disappointed, for he had expected to be asked up to her apartment. There was consolation on the way back to the hotel, certain anticipations of an interview he had arranged for the morrow. It was not with Janice.

He had material for speculation on those summer evenings, when the light of the brazen day still persisted in the western skies, and when every dive and tenement spilt the things that were so decently hidden in the cold days and nights of winter. On such nights the sweltering heat forced into the open the strangest beings, creatures which even the oldest inhabitants could not remember having seen before and the most hardened could hardly wish to see again.

The red calico curtain was strung across the window of the large room which was his surgery. It had been a boot store and a confectioner’s parlour. Loucilensky, of infamous memory, had housed his “club” in it and found the side door which led to the little yard a convenient exit for his squalid patrons.

It was a derelict property when Dr. Marford came to found his practice here. All Tidal Basin knew that the doctor was so poor that he had painted, distempered and scrubbed the place from top to bottom with his own hands. He had probably sewn his own curtains, had certainly collected from the Caledonian Market, where you may furnish a house for a few pounds, such domestic equipment as was necessary for his well-being. Tidal Basin, which favoured those cinemas which featured pictures of high life, had despised him for his poverty. A consumptive plumber had fixed the huge sink, which was an unsightly feature of one corner of the surgery, and had received, in return, free treatment and medicine until he went the dingy way of all consumptive plumbers.

Tidal Basin had known and still knew Dr. Marford as the “penny doctor.” They knew him better as the “baby doctor,” for, after he had been in Tidal Basin a year, by some miracle he succeeded in founding a free clinic, where he gave ray treatment to children. He must have had influential friends, for on top of his other activities he founded a small convalescent home at the seaside.

His work was his obsession, and not a penny of the money which came to him went to his own advantage. The drab surgery remained as shabby as it had always been—a very dreary place compared with the spick and span little palace of white enamel and glass where the children of Tidal Basin were made acquainted with artificial sunlight and the beneficent quality of strange rays.

He saw Janice Harman pass the window and went to open the door to her. It was not true that this preoccupied man was hardly aware of her loveliness. He used to sit at his desk and think about her for hours on end. What strange dreams came to disorder the tidiness of his methodical mind was known only to Dr. Marford; and now, when she told him awkwardly, a little disjointedly, of her future plans, he showed no evidence of the sudden desolation and despair that crushed him.

(“The oddest people fall in love with Janice,” said her best friend.)

“Oh!” he said, and bit his thin lip thoughtfully. “That is very unfortunate—for the clinic. What does Mr. Quigley say to all this?”

Hitherto he had felt an unreasonable antipathy to the young reporter, who had been a too frequent visitor to the clinic, and had written too much and too enthusiastically about Dr. Marford’s ventures to please a man who shrank instinctively from publicity.

“Mr. Quigley has no right to raise any objections whatever.” There was a note of defiance in her voice. “He is a very good friend—or was.”

There was an embarrassing pause.

“But isn’t any longer,” said Dr. Marford gently.

He experienced an inexplicable sense of kinship with Michael Quigley.

Her native loyalty made her modify her attitude.

“I like Michael—he is extraordinarily nice, but very domineering. He was awfully good to me the other night, and I was a beast to him. I was in the Howdah Club when that dreadful man came.”

He turned an inquiring face to her.

“Which dreadful man?”

“The robber—White Face.”

He nodded.

“Yes, I know. I read the newspapers. I was talking to Sergeant Elk about him. There is a theory that he lives in this neighbourhood, a theory for which I am afraid your young friend is responsible. Are you wise?”

He asked the question suddenly.

“About—my marriage? Is any girl wise, Dr. Marford? Suppose I’d met this man every day of my life for years, should I know him—I mean, as one knows one’s husband? Men always put on their best appearance for women, and unless one lives in the same house with them it is impossible to be absolutely sure.”

Marford nodded, fondling his bony chin.

There was a long silence, which he broke.

“I shall be sorry to lose you; you have been a most enthusiastic helper.”

Now she came to a delicate stage of the interview—delicate because she knew how sensitive he was on the point.

“I’d like to give the Institute a little present,” she said jerkily. “A thousand pounds—”

He raised his hand; his expression was genuinely pained.

“No, no, no; I couldn’t hear of it. You asked me once before if I would. No, I am satisfied that I have not paid you for the help you have given us. That is your splendid contribution to the clinic.”

She knew he would be adamant on this point and had already decided that if he refused her gift it should take the form of an anonymous donation on her wedding day. Michael, in one of his more cynical moods, had once accused her of being theatrical, and the charge was so ridiculous that she had laughed. Yet there is a touch of theatricality in every sentimentalist, and Janice Harman was not without that weakness.

Unexpectedly the doctor put out his thin hand and took hers.

“I hope you will be happy,” he said, and this was at once a benediction and a dismissal.

She crossed the road at Endley Street. At the corner stood a tall, good-looking man, with greying hair at his temples. To her surprise he was talking to a woman, talking confidentially it seemed. Presently the woman walked away and he came, smiling, to meet the girl.

“What a ghastly place, darling! I am so happy you’re leaving it.”

“Who was that woman you were speaking to?” she asked curiously.

He laughed—she loved that laugh of his.

“Woman? Oh, yes.” He looked round and nodded towards a slim figure walking ahead of them on the opposite side of the road. “It was rather odd—she thought I was her brother, and when she saw she’d made a mistake she was a little embarrassed. Rather a pretty girl.”

Her car was in a near-by garage—in the early days she had driven up to the clinic, which was at the far end of Endley Street, but the doctor had advised her against the practice—advice well justified, for in a week everything that was movable in the car had been stolen by the parents of the children she cared for.

She seated herself at the wheel, a radiant figure of youth, he thought, more beautiful than even he in his wildest imaginings had dreamed. The car came down the slope of the road; she saw the shabby figure of the doctor watching them, and waved her hand to him.

“Who was that?” he asked carelessly.

“That was Dr. Marford.”

“Your boss, eh? I’d like to have had a look at him. He’s a big noise around here.”

She laughed at this.

“There isn’t a tinier murmur in Tidal Basin,” she said. “But he’s marvellous! I sometimes think he starves himself to keep his clinic going.”

She rhapsodised all the way through the City. In Cranbourn Street they were held up by a traffic block. By this time he had gained command of the conversation and the excellences of Dr. Marford were relegated to a second place. He was talking of South Africa and his two farms, one in the wilds of Rhodesia, the other amidst the beauties of Paarl. He liked talking of the Paarl property.

“It’s going to be terribly slow for you, though there is some sort of social life at the Cape. I’m pretty well known—”

“There’s somebody who knows you,” she laughed.

He turned his head quickly, but could distinguish amongst the hurrying throng on the sidewalk no familiar face.

“Where?” he asked.

“There—that dark man.” She looked back. “He is standing by the hosiers.”

He looked round and frowned.

“Oh, yes, I know him—not very well, though; I got the better of him in a business deal, and he hasn’t forgiven me.” He uttered an exclamation. “Darling, I can’t take you to the theatre to-night: I’ve just remembered. Will you forgive me?”

She was too happy, too completely under the fascination of this exalted adventure, to resent the missed engagement. This good-looking stranger who had come from the blue, whose name she could hardly use without an unaccountable sense of shyness, was Romance—the fulfiliment of vague and delightful dreams. He was still outside the realms of reality.

She had known him for ten days; it seemed that it was a lifetime. Once or twice during the journey she was on the point of telling him of the surprise she had for him. He was a great home-lover; his self-confessed sin was that he coveted his neighbour’s land. There was a farm adjoining his at Paarl that had come into the market, could be had for a mere PS8,000. He waxed enthusiastic on the advantage of having this additional property—vine-yards and orange groves, new pastures for his cattle.

He returned to the subject as the car was crossing Piccadilly Circus.

“You’ve made me ambitious, you angel,” he said. “I’m a poor farmer and can’t lay my hands on a fortune, so the farm will have to go.”

Again she was nearly telling him. She had a friend in Cape Town, a young lawyer, a Rhodes scholar, whom she had met at Oxford. That very morning she had wired to him, asking him to buy the property.

He parted from her at the door of her flat in Bury Street, and her chauffeur, who was waiting, drove him to his modest hotel. At parting: “I hate the thought of losing that farm—if I could cable four thousand pounds to-morrow morning I could clinch the bargain.”

She smiled demurely and went up to her room to daydream of green slopes and high, sun-baked mountains where the little baboons chatter all day and night.

At ten o’clock that night, when she was undressing for bed, came a cablegram which left her white and shaking. It was in one sense remarkable that the first person she thought of to help her in her necessity was Michael Quigley; but when she reached for the telephone with a trembling hand it was to learn that Michael had left the office on a hurry call. She looked at the clock; it was by then half-past ten. She changed her mind about going to bed and began to dress quickly.

He wearied of the task very soon and vent to his desk. There was a heap of papers to go through—the accounts from the clinic showed a heavy deficit. The place ate money: there was always new apparatus to buy, new equipment to furnish. The daily report from the convalescent home in Eastbourne, which maintained the progress of a dozen small hooligans of Tidal Basin, was as cheerless; but it brought no sense of depression to Dr. Marford. He grudged nothing to these ventures of his—neither time nor exertion.

He was expecting a remittance almost any day. There was a man in Antwerp who sent him money regularly, and another in Birmingham—he pushed the papers aside, looked at his watch and went out by the side door into the yard.

It was a fairly large yard. At one end was the big shed in which old Gregory Wick’s kept his taxicab, paying a small weekly rent.

Old Gregory Wicks had been a famous driver even in the days of the festive hansom. And always he had housed his horses and his resplendent cab in Tidal Basin, where he was born and where he hoped to end his days. In his advanced middle age came the taxicab. Gregory refused to regard motor vehicles as new-fangled crazes that would soon go out of fashion. He was one of the first to sit at a driving wheel at a motor school and solve the mysteries of clutches and gears. He found his lameness no obstacle in obtaining a cab-driver’s licence—he limped from a thirty-year—old injury to his ankle.

Always he was a night bird; even in the horse cab he went clop-clopping along Piccadilly in the early hours of the morning, picking up swells from the clubs and driving them unimaginable distances to their country houses. And when the taxi came he continued his nocturnal wanderings. A silent, taciturn man, who never stood on a rank or invited the confidence of his brother drivers, he was known locally and abroad for his rigid honesty. It was he who restored to a certain Austrian baron a million kroners in hard paper cash, left in the cab by the Herr Baron in a moment of temporary aberration caused by a quarrel with a lady friend. Old Gregory had returned thousands of pounds’ worth of goods left by absent-minded riders. In the police books he was marked “Reliable; honest; very excellent record.”

You could see him and his cab on certain nights prowling along Regent Street, his long, white hair hanging over the collar of his coat, his fierce white moustache bristling from his pink, emaciated face, choosing his fares with a nice discrimination. He had no respect for any man save one. In his more than seventy-year-old arms he packed a punch that was disconcerting to the punchee.

The doctor unfastened a door and passed through into Gallows Court. That narrow and unsavoury passage was alive with children—bare-legged, unwashed and happy. Nobody offered the doctor a friendly greeting. The frowsy men and women lounging in the doorways or at the upstairs windows favoured him with incurious glances. He was part of the bricks and mortar and mud of the place, one with the brick wall which separated his yard from this human sty. He belonged there, had a right in Gallows Court, and, that being so, might pass without notice or comment.

The last house in the court was No. 9; smaller than the others; the windows were clean, and even the lower one, which was heavily shuttered, had a strip of chintz curtain. He knocked at the door—three short quick raps, a pause and a fourth. This signal had been agreed as between himself and old man Wicks; for Gregory had been annoyed by runaway knocks and by the appearance on his doorstep of unwelcome visitors. He knew the regular hour at which the milkman called and the baker, and could cope with them. Whosoever else knocked at the door during the daytime received no answer. Marford heard the shuffle of feet on uncarpeted stairs and the door was opened.

“Come in, Doctor.” Gregory’s voice was loud and hearty. He had been a shouter all his life, and age had not diminished the volume of his tone. “Don’t make a row; I expect the lodger’s asleep,” he said as he closed the door with a slam.

“He must be a very good sleeper if you don’t wake him, you noisy old man!” said Marford, with his quiet smile.

Gregory guffawed all the way up the stairs, opened the door of his room and the doctor passed in. “How are you?”

“Fit as a flea, except this other little trouble, and I’m not going to mention that. I’m doing fine. Doctor. Sit down. Where’s a chair? Here we are! What I owe to you, Doctor! If the people in Tidal Basin knew what you’ve done for me—”

“Yes, yes,” said Marford good-humouredly. “Now let me have a look at you.”

He turned the old man’s face to the light and made a careful examination.

“You’re no better and no worse. If anything you’re a little better, I should think. I’ll test your heart.”

“My heart!” said the other scornfully. “I’ve got the heart of a lion! There was an Irish family moved in here and the woman wanted to borrow a saucepan, and when I told her just what I thought of people who borrow saucepans, along came her husband—a new fellow, full of brag and bluster! I gave him one smack in the jaw and that was his finish!”

“You shouldn’t do it, Gregory. It was a stupid thing to do. I heard about it from one of my other patients.”

The old man was chuckling gleefully.

“I needn’t have done it at all,” he said. “Any of the boys round here would have put him out if I’d said the word. I dare say the lodger would, but of course I wouldn’t have wakened him up.”

“Is he here to-day?”

Gregory shook his head. “The Lord knows! I never hear him come in or go out, except sometimes. I’ve never known a quieter fellow. Reformed, eh, Doctor? I’ll bet you I know who reformed him! You’d never dream”—he lowered his voice—“that he was a man who’d spent half his life in stir—”

“You’re giving him a chance,” said Marford.

He was going, when the old man called him back. “Doctor, I want to tell you something. I made my will to-day—not exactly a will, but I wrote down what I wanted doing with my money.”

“Have you got a lot, Gregory?” asked the other good-humouredly.

“More than you think.” There was a significance in the old man’s voice. “A lot more! It’s not money that makes me do what I’m doing—it’s pride—swank!”

To most men who had known him for years, Gregory Wicks was a taciturn and uncommunicative man. Marford was one of the few who knew him. He often thought that this loquacity which Gregory displayed at home was his natural reaction to the hours of silence on the box. Night after night for nearly half a century this old cabman had placed himself under a vow of silence. Once he explained why, and the reason was so inadequate that Marford, who was not easily amused, laughed in spite of himself. Gregory had in a talkative moment allowed a client—he always called his fares “clients”—to wish a counterfeit half-crown upon him. It was a lesson never to be forgotten.

The doctor often came in to chat with the old man, to hear stories of dead and forgotten celebrities whose names were famous in the eighties and the late seventies. As he was leaving, Gregory referred again to his lodger.

“It was a good idea putting up that shutter to keep out the noise, though personally there’s nothing that would stop me sleeping. I sometimes wish he’d be a bit more lively—”

“And come up and have a little chat with you at times?” suggested Marford.

Gregory almost shuddered.

“Not that! I don’t want to chat with anybody, especially strangers. I chat with you because you’ve been God’s-brother-Bill to me, to use a vulgar expression. I don’t say I’d have starved, because I shouldn’t have done. But I’d have lost something that I’d rather die than lose.”

He came down to the door and stood looking out after the doctor, even when Marford was out of sight. The noisy children did not gibe at him, and none of these frowsy ones hurled their inevitable and unprintable jests in his direction. A wandering policeman they would have covered with derision. Only the doctor and Gregory Wicks escaped their grimy humour; the latter because of that ready fist of his, the doctor—well, you never know when the doctor will be called in, and if he’s got a grudge against you who knows what he’ll slip into your medicine? Or suppose he had to use the knife, eh? Nice so-and-so fool you’d look, lying under chloroform with your inn’ards at his mercy! Fear was a governing factor of life in Gallows Court.