Comes a Stranger (2 page)

As a result there had arrived a letter from this old friend of Olive's, asking her and Bobby to spend a week at Wynton Lodge, Miss Kayne's residence in the village of Wynton, near Mayfield, a town of some size. Wynton Lodge was, too, the home of the famous Kayne library Miss Kayne's father had built up through many ardent years, till now it had a world-wide reputation. Olive had accepted the invitation, glad to renew an old friendship, but Bobby's duties at Scotland Yard had only permitted him to run down this afternoon on his new motor cycle for which he had just finished paying, and now was wondering for much he could sell it again, since, in view of his engagement, pots and pans, curtains and carpets, were all becoming of more importance than motor cycles.

So far it had proved rather a boring visit. Of course, Miss Kayne was an important person, as the owner of the celebrated library that held all sorts of bookish treasures. But then Bobby did not know much about books, nor was he overwhelmingly interested in them. He was wondering now what to say next. He wished Miss Kayne would make some remark, and with something of a start he realized how closely she was watching him from small, malignant eyes, deep hidden like knives in ambush behind huge rolls of fat. It was almost as though she expected him to take her remark seriously. It was almost as though she challenged and defied either him or the impersonal authority of the law that sometimes he represented. Then he supposed that perhaps she was annoyed because he had not yet seen the point of her joke about the ‘perfect murder', and had made no suitable response. Or perhaps she didn't like detectives, or perhaps she just simply didn't like him, or, more probably and naturally, merely thought it was a pity a girl like Olive should be throwing herself away on a detective-sergeant of police.

He wished Olive would come back. She had gone to see if they might visit the famous library. He let his gaze wander out of the window to rest on the tall, blank wall of the annexe built out from the main body of the house, like a thrusting arm, wherein the great Kayne collection of books was contained. There were no windows, it was just a great blank wall, like that of a gaol or a fortress to guard some secret prisoner.

Silly, of course. What secret prisoner could a famous library hold? But why should a library be built like a gaol?

Suddenly he became aware that Miss Kayne was shaking with a hidden, silent mirth. Her laughter seemed to run all over her huge body, and yet it found no outlet in sound.

Even her chair, an enormous construction in solid oak, shook with it, and her cushions that were about her like a sea. There she sat and rumbled with an inner merriment, but a merriment in which her small, bright, deep sunken eyes had no share, for in them as they peeped out at Bobby he thought he recognized a secret, hidden hate. She said:—

“That's the library building you're looking at, the Kayne library.”

Was it the library she hated, he wondered? Or something that the library stood for? Or was he himself, for some reason, the object of her anger?

“I was wondering,” he said slowly, “why there are no windows.”

“South wall,” she explained. “When my father built it he wanted no windows on that wall because he thought direct sunlight might be bad for the books, their bindings especially.”

“I see,” said Bobby.

“There are windows on the other wall, the north wall and at the west end,” she told him. “They all have steel shutters, though.”

“Steel?”

“Protection against burglars,” she explained. “Some of the books are very valuable. Against burglars—and fire.”

Her mirth had ceased now, but she pronounced this last word with a strange and puzzling accent, lingering on it as though she loved its sound and yet dreaded it as well. A strange old woman, Bobby thought, and with a certain disquiet his mind returned to that declaration of hers about the perfect murder she said she had once committed. Nonsense, of course, and yet those small, malignant eyes of hers were still watching him, he saw, like enemies in ambush.

 “We must take every possible precaution against fire,” she said again, and again her small, clear voice lingered on the final word.

“Oh yes, of course,” agreed Bobby, who knew, for it was common knowledge, that there were many valuable treasures in the Kayne library.

There was the
Glastonbury Second Psalter
, for instance, snatched from under the very nose of the British Museum authorities hesitant on an authenticity now triumphantly established, so that the thousand pounds for which it had been purchased had increased tenfold. Or those so precious fragmentary pages of the
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
, printed by Caxton. Till their discovery by Mr. Broast, the Kayne Library custodian, in the South of France, it had not been known that Caxton had ever printed the Mandeville
Travels
, even though the guess had often been hazarded that so popular a work was almost certain to have passed through his press. The discovery of these fragmentary pages—a score of them, twelve consecutive—the sole relics of an edition that otherwise had vanished utterly, provided therefore a first class sensation, and the eight odd pages had been sold for enormous sums, mostly in America. The other pages, the consecutive ones, remained in the library, all offers, no matter how extravagant, being sternly refused. No wonder, then, that precautions like steel shutters were employed against theft and fire. Only it was odd how strangely that thin, remote voice of Miss Kayne's lingered upon this last word, as though it held for her some dreadful and unnamed attraction.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said unexpectedly, as though she had guessed something of what was passing through his mind. He had the idea indeed that there was little those small, bright eyes of hers did not see, and little, too, of what they saw that when they saw they did not hate. In quite a different tone she said: “Well, when are you and Olive going to get married?”

“We haven't settled anything yet,” he answered.

“Money, I suppose,” she said. “It's all money in this world. Money. Are detectives well paid?”

“Not detective-sergeants in the Metropolitan police,” Bobby answered ruefully.

“Olive has a business of her own?”

“Her hat shop, you mean? I don't think it does much more than pay the rent. Bad debts, for one thing.”

“Collect 'em,” said Miss Kayne.

“Can't, sometimes, when there's no money. And Olive says it's often worse when there is money. Apparently when you've a five figure income ordinary bills are beneath your notice, and if you're asked to settle, then you take offence, and there may be a bill paid, but a customer lost.”

The old woman nodded, nodded at least as far as the folds of fat around her neck permitted her to move her head.

“Olive told me about that,” she said in her tiny, distant voice, that sounded almost as if she were speaking over a telephone. “She said you ought to be promoted soon, and then it would be all right.”

Bobby shook his head doubtfully.

“Goodness knows when that will be,” he said. “Things aren't too comfortable in the London police just now.”

Bobby hesitated. He knew very well that Olive had accepted Miss Kayne's invitation not only for old friendship's sake but also because she thought Miss Kayne, as a rich and influential woman, acquainted with many important people, might be able to help Bobby to that official recognition Olive felt it was so unfair he had not yet been granted. More likely to do harm than good, Bobby thought privately.

But Miss Kayne might as well know how things were. He went on.

“It's this business Lord Trenchard started of bringing in an officer class. Every policeman used to feel he had as good a chance as anyone else in the force. Now he feels that the first thing he'll be asked when he goes before a promotion board is what his father did. Just like a new boy at school. ‘What's your father do?' Then the kid's classed, for good. Like that with us, too, now. ‘What was your father?' is the first thing the Promotion Board wants to know. If you say your father was a doctor or a parson, well, they purr and you get through. If you say he was a navvy or a farm labourer, they look down their noses and the odds are you don't.”

“That doesn't affect you, does it?” Miss Kayne asked. “You're the officer class, too.”

“Oh, I fall between two stools,” Bobby explained. “I'm not one of the Hendon lot and I don't much want to be, so I'm out there. At the same time the old style policeman classes me with them, so I'm out there, too. Lord Trenchard thought the police only existed to protect society, and he only saw society as a society of the rich, so he thought he had to bring in chaps from the rich classes to keep the police loyal. They were loyal, but loyal to the community, not to a class. The Trenchard result is that for the first time the police are split with class feeling—some of them feel they are only there as servants of rich people, and the rest don't like it, and none of them know quite where they are.”

The door opened then and Bobby forgot everything else as Olive came in. She gave him a quick, smiling, hesitating glance, a little as though she were wondering still who it was to whom she had now trusted herself, and her future, and why she had done so, and whether it had been quite wise, and what would he do with her? For indeed a half of her gloried in the surrender she had made and a half of her was afraid. All very well to talk about sex equality, but the eternities remained, and what a woman gave, she gave, and could never have again. But what a man took, he took and could go on taking, so where was your equality? And then she was Bobby looking at her and at that no thought was left in her any more only a great wish that she had more to give and ever more. Neither of them noticed how the small hidden gaze of the old, fat woman, immobile in her huge arm-chair, went darkly from one of them to the other, and then back, nor, if they had, would it have been easy for them, or anyone, to guess what meaning lay hidden in those remote and secret eyes.

“Does Mr. Broast say it'll be all right?” she asked suddenly.

“Oh yes, he was quite nice about it,” Olive answered. “Miss Perkins says he's in a good temper today, in spite of its being Inspection.”

“You saw him yourself?” Miss Kayne insisted, a little uneasily, as though she were afraid of any misunderstanding—though, after all, Bobby reflected, the library was hers, and Mr. Broast only a salaried employee.

“Oh yes,” Olive answered. “Miss Perkins said he was in the cellar, and I had better go and ask him, and so I did.”

Was it then necessary, Bobby wondered, for Miss Kayne to ask her librarian's permission before she sent her guests to view her treasures?

“The cellars? What was he doing in the cellars? Was he alone?” Miss Kayne asked, her voice suddenly a note higher.

“Oh no, Sir William and Mr. Nat were there, too. They were looking at an old printing press. Mr. Broast was explaining something.”

Miss Kayne made no further comment. She seemed, as it were, to withdraw herself into the lethargy of her gross, enormous body. Olive touched Bobby on the arm and they went out together, Miss Kayne apparently hardly conscious of their withdrawal.

Outside, Bobby said to Olive:

“Well, you did tell me Mr. Broast ran the whole show pretty well on his own, but I didn't know you meant it was like that.”

“It might belong to him,” Olive agreed; “Miss Kayne never interferes.” She added: “You would almost think she hates the library and everything connected with it.”

Indeed this was the impression Bobby himself had been conscious of, as if Miss Kayne felt towards that wonderful collection of books a little as Frankenstein felt towards the monster of his creation. Perhaps she felt that her life, her father's life, had been made too much a mere accessory to the creation of the library. Under her father's careful and somewhat complicated will, she was the owner for life, but only for life, and old Mr. Kayne, very much afraid his daughter might marry someone who would prefer its very considerable value in money, had taken great pains to make sure that the library should be kept together in perpetuity.

The will, however, gave her very wide powers of administration, though these were, in fact, exercised almost at his own discretion by Mr. Broast. Within the four walls of his domain his word alone had authority. It was he to whom application had to be made for permission to examine or consult any of the treasures in his charge; he who decided such purchases and sales as seemed desirable or necessary.

For the library had been built up by old Mr. Kayne, a comparatively poor man, through a system of extraordinarily successful dealing in books. When he had started to collect, rarities were easier to find, both in Great Britain and on the continent, than is the case today, and he had been one of the first to realize that there was a fresh and eager—and wealthy—market in the United States. His discovery of a printed form of Indulgence issued to some local magnate who had contributed towards the expenses of the war against the Turk, and that had almost certainly, from the similarity of type and paper and for other technical reasons, been drawn off as a kind of trial, or test, previous to the printing of the great Gutenberg or 42-line Bible, had been a first-class sensation. It had also been extremely profitable, for the name written in on the printed form happened to be that of an extremely wealthy American business man who had in consequence been prepared to pay a fancy price for a document he claimed, on the strength of this resemblance of names, had been issued to an ancestor. There was too, the discovery of those few famous leaves proving that Caxton had, in fact, printed an edition of the
Travels of John Mandeville
.

In this way, buying precious things cheap, securing for them a judicious publicity, and then selling them at a greatly increased figure to purchase others more precious still, old Mr. Kayne had not only succeeded in building up what was perhaps the finest collection of books in private hands, but in making, as it were, the library pay for itself and for a cost of maintenance that was naturally considerable. It was a method still followed by the present custodian, Mr. Broast, who since the death of his employer, under whom he had worked for many years, had not only been retained in charge by Miss Kayne, but was allowed by her to exercise almost entirely his own discretion in all matters of business and administration.