Walk with Care (6 page)

CHAPTER IX

JEREMY HAD A TERRIBLE
day on Saturday. Mannister was going to Bournemouth for the week-end. Deane was still absent. There were two speeches on the stocks, and everybody in Europe seemed to have written to Bernard Mannister. The waste-paper basket overflowed. Notes had to be taken, draft replies roughed out. And in the middle of it all Mannister kept locking and unlocking the safe and delivering dissertations on the extremely confidential nature of his correspondence, the care that must be taken in dealing with it, the supreme gifts of tact and discretion required in a secretary, and the privileges attached to service in that capacity.

Jeremy said “Yes, sir,” at intervals. Every now and then the right answer was not yes, but no. As the day wore on, Jeremy became increasingly certain that sooner or later he would slip up and say yes in the wrong place.

The mid-day post brought a foreign letter of some extra-super-hyper-important kind. Mannister delivered an oration over it. Standing in an Albert Hall attitude before the safe, he declaimed a lot of rolling sentences about the Peace of Europe.

“Trying out his voice for to-night, I suppose,” was Jeremy's irreverent thought.

There was nothing wrong with the voice; there was nothing wrong with the sentiments. They were both perhaps a little too big for the library of a house in Marsh Street.

“Albert Hall!” said Jeremy to himself; and then, “Oh Lord—I wish he was catching the earlier train!”

The speech which was to be delivered at Bournemouth that evening was finished. Mannister made a feature of Saturday evening speeches. He would go down to Bournemouth in the afternoon, speak in the evening, take a well earned rest on the Sunday, and return to town on Monday for a mass meeting at the Albert Hall.

Principals may rest, but secretaries must work. The Bournemouth speech being disposed of, the Albert Hall speech must be pruned, polished and perfected. It had to be rather a special speech—short, because, where Prime Ministers jostle one another, even a Bernard Mannister must curb the flow of his oratory and compress to ten minutes the wit, eloquence and wisdom of a full length speech. The wit and wisdom were Mannister's. The task of compressing them without detracting from the eloquence with which they were presented was Jeremy Ware's. It was a perfectly damnable task. Whenever he cut anything out Mannister insisted on putting it back, and the speech as it stood took an hour to declaim. Obviously, something had to be done. Mannister's attitude became more and more that of the hierophant who defends his oracle from a sacrilegious mob. By four o'clock Jeremy began to feel as if his brains were being stewed in treacle. They had got nowhere, and Mannister had a train to catch. And then suddenly Mannister ceased to be a hierophant and became a human being—a pompous, fatuous ass of a human being, but definitely human.

“Better take a time off and come back to it. Go away and come back to it fresh. Effort prolonged beyond a certain point defeats itself—Ah! You might make a note of that! A good pithy sentence! Thought too intensely concentrated coagulates and clogs the brain.”

“Treacle!”
said Jeremy to himself. “That's pithier still, you old molasses-mill!” Aloud he said, “Thank you, sir.”

“Go out and take the air. Refresh yourself. Do not return before eight o'clock. You will dine here. James will attend to you. I would like you to stay until you have finished your task.”

“I could take it home,” said Jeremy tentatively.

He did not know why he said that. He was not in the least anxious to take work home. His room would be cold, and the light would be very bad. The Evans next door would in all probability be having a row—they had a very loud and dramatic row which ran as a serial most evenings between eight and ten. The piercing screams of Mrs Evans and the deep oaths of Mr Evans had lost their freshness for Jeremy, but he still found them disturbing when he had work on hand. The task of condensing Mannister's oratory was sufficiently formidable without these handicaps.

Mannister had assumed a Jovian frown.

“I have ordered dinner for you. I should like you to finish your work here. There are a number of references, and accuracy is essential. Look up everything, even if you already feel certain of it. I am sorry to keep you so late, but it is better than attempting to go on now. ‘The mind o'er-stretched recoils upon itself like the frayed bow.' Now where did I get that from? A good example, I believe, of the—er. … Now is it paralipsis? … No. … Paralogism? Metastasis? … No, it eludes me. It is, of course, the string that is frayed and not the bow, but the word which describes the transference of an image in this manner escapes me.” He turned away with a gesture which relinquished the escaping word. “I have my train to catch. A life of public service has its penalties. Sometimes I long for leisure. But I must hurry. Don't wait about when I have gone. Return refreshed—but not until eight o'clock.”

At eight o'clock Jeremy returned. He was served with an excellent meal in the dining-room under the eyes of six ancestral portraits, a tall young footman, and old James, who was the only servant who lived in. Jeremy felt a little hustled by the eyes. He would have liked to have a book by his plate and dawdle pleasantly through dinner.

He had coffee in the library and got down to the Albert Hall speech again. He was hunting a quotation from a speech of Abraham Lincoln's, when James gave a respectful cough at his elbow. He held the coffeetray poised, and looked extraordinarily like a thin, melancholy ant with a large flat seed or grain. His high, bald forehead had a worried look.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but Mr. Mannister said you might be staying late.”

“Might's not the word,” said Jeremy.
“Would,
James—
would.”

The worried look deepened. The poised tray swayed slightly.

“I beg your pardon, sir—you expect to be late?”

“Not so much late as early,” said Jeremy. “I shall probably go home with the milk and be taken for a roisterer. Nasty minds people have got—haven't they?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

Jeremy turned with a ponderous volume in his hand.

“James, do you know how many speeches Abraham Lincoln got off his chest? … You don't? … Nor do I, but my prophetic soul tells me that I shall probably find this blasted quotation in the last of the lot. Of course one's prophetic soul is a bit of a liar, but I wouldn't count on getting rid of me till dawn if I were you.”

James looked more like an ant than ever. The expanse of his forehead cried aloud for antennae. It had a mournful, naked air without them.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but Mr Mannister said that perhaps if you were late you wouldn't mind letting yourself out.”

Jeremy was turning pages.

“I can let myself out, but I can't lock up after me.”

“There's no need, sir—not if I set the lock. It's a special lock, sir, that Mr Mannister got put on. Once it's set, you can't open it from outside, not with its own latchkey nor nothing. I'll set it correct, and all you'll have to do is to give the door a bang, if you'd be so good, sir.”

A polite ant. Butlers are not always so polite to secretaries. Jeremy had a friendly smile for him.

“That'll be quite all right, James. Good-night.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He went away silently with his tray, and Jeremy went back to Abraham Lincoln.

An hour later he was still searching. The library contained a dictionary of quotations, but this quotation was not there. A good many of Mannister's quotations were not there. He had one of those exasperating memories which retain a general outline, but fail when they come to detail. After another half hour Jeremy began to think that this particular quotation had been born and bred in Mannister's own brain. One thing was certain, Mannister was set on having it for his speech, but had only been able to produce a mere skeleton.

In the end he tracked it down in a horrible little book entitled
Anecdotes from the Lives of the Great.
It had sharp corners, a bright blue binding, gilt-edged pages, and a general air of being a Sunday school prize. At a casual glance the contents appeared to be purely apocryphal. How like Mannister—how exactly like Mannister! If it hadn't been for the accident of seeing Mannister with the horrid little volume in his hand a week ago, Jeremy might have raked over every book in the library, and would certainly never have thought of tackling the
Anecdotes.

He took down his quotation, slammed the book viciously, and shoved it back upon its shelf. As he did so, a fragment of paper fluttered down against his foot. It must have disengaged itself when he clapped the covers to. He stooped and picked it up with a feeling of bored exasperation, and all at once he wasn't bored any longer.

He had in his hand an irregular scrap torn from a half sheet of note-paper. One side of it was blank, but from the other side his own name stared at him—Jeremy Ware. It wasn't only his name, it was his signature, and his signature three or four times repeated. There was a “Jere” and a “remy” where the torn paper narrowed to a point. And the names and the fragments of names were all in his own writing, as who should sit down in an idle moment and scrawl a half dozen careless signatures.

Jeremy turned the paper over. How had it got into the book? He had seen the book in Mannister's hand. He had often enough seen Mannister mark a book in just this way, with a scrap of paper torn from any odd piece. If the paper was lying blank side up, Mannister might have torn a piece from it and never have known what he was doing.

That brought Jeremy up with a jerk. What was there to know? An odd cold feeling touched him. It was like the feeling which suddenly haunts a man when he is not sure of where his next step will take him. There may be firm ground, or there may be bog, or there may be a dreadful nothingness.

Jeremy looked at those scrawled signatures and tried to remember writing them. They were his writing. If he had been shown any one of them, he would have accepted it without a second thought. But when had he scrawled a half dozen signatures like these?

He hadn't.

The queer cold feeling passed right through him. Quite definitely that piece of paper put the wind up him. He felt as he had felt after a particularly bad skid which landed him upside down in a hedge. He had got somewhere, but how he had got there, and where he was now that he had got there, was a giddy mystery.

In a methodical, mechanical manner he folded the paper in three so that only the blank side showed, and put it away in the pocket-book which Gilbert Denny had given him for Christmas two years before. Whether he had skidded or not, he must go on boiling down that blasted speech. It was like boiling glue; the more you boiled, the stickier it got. He went at it furiously, as if by getting a move on he could race his mind away from that bit of paper, but all the while thought kept pace with thought.

As he condensed a paragraph into a sentence, the pursuing thought clamoured at him for a reason why anyone should forge his signature—his—Jeremy Ware's. Jeremy caught himself grinning at the clamouring thought. In so far as his new banking account showed a credit instead of an overdraft, he was in funds. But does anyone bother to forge a secretary's name for twenty pounds? He got caught up on that. Why should Mannister have bothered about his having a banking account? He hadn't had one for a year, because he hadn't had anything to set against an overdraft. And then Mannister had paid him with a cheque and had crossed it. “Please, sir, I haven't got a banking account.” And an interminable jobation on the squandering habits of the Rising Generation, the Importance of Thrift, and the Steadying Influence of a Banking Account. Confessing to twenty pounds in the Savings Bank, he had been urged to make use of it to re-open an account. It had all been very pedagogic. He wasn't prepared to swear that Mannister had not addressed him as “my boy.”

The pleasing thought that Mannister might be going to forge his name for twenty pounds presented itself, and at once his mind filled with delightful pictures in the Heath Robinson manner. Mannister in morning coat, top hat and Jovian frown forging a nefarious cheque. Mannister in evening dress, with opera hat askew and dishevelled tie, rioting on the proceeds in what he himself would have described as a Haunt of Vice. Mannister in the dock, conducting his own defence, denunciatory hand outstretched, spell-binding voice at full blast.

And then, across his delighted appreciation, again that cold sensation of dread.

CHAPTER X

HE PUSHED BACK HIS
chair, stood up, and stretched himself. The clock on the mantelpiece, a funereal affair of black marble with a little cold gilding, struck twelve. He walked across to the hearth and made up the fire.

When the last of the twelve strokes had died away, the room was very silent. Marsh Street is quiet enough at all times, but to-night it might have been dead and buried. Jeremy remembered that a taxi had passed about the time that torn bit of paper had fallen against his foot. It seemed very long ago.

He went across to the window, parted the heavy velvet curtains, and threw up the sash. To his surprise a dense fog hid everything. He could not even distinguish the nearest lamp-post. It had been clear enough at eight o'clock.

He closed the sash, turned back to the room, and paused, his right hand lifted to draw the curtain back. It stayed there holding the heavy stuff, arrested by a sound in the room. It was a very faint sound.

Jeremy stood in the embrasure between the foggy window and the heavy curtain and listened. The sound was not repeated, and now he could not rightly have said what sound it was that he had heard. It might have been a sound from the street. … There was no sound from the street. There was no sound from the room. The nearest sounds came from the big thoroughfare into which Marsh Street runs. In a London thoroughfare there are always sounds, but these were a long way off.

Jeremy's hand pulled the curtain a little to one side. He looked past his own hand into the room and saw the door standing wide, as he had seen it once before in the dead of the night. That was what he had heard—the sound of the opening door.

He moved the curtain a little farther, and saw the girl. She was standing in the middle of the room quite still. She was turned away from him so that he saw the dark ripples of her hair, the lobe of her ear, and the curving line of neck and shoulder. The shoulder was bare, because the straight white garment which she wore had slipped a little. There was a sleeve that hung to her elbow, leaving the forearm and hand uncovered.

Jeremy looked and waited. He did not know how long he waited. She stood as still as if she had no breath. Nothing moved at all. Her feet were bare, one a little in advance of the other as if she had just been taking a step when the stillness fell.

After what seemed a very long time Jeremy let go of the curtain. It fell against his shoulder, and he pushed past it and came out into the room. He had no idea what would happen when he moved, and he was conscious of a certain excitement.

In the event, nothing happened. The room was silent, and the girl as still as marble. The stillness and the silence so filled the room as to give the illusion of an atmosphere denser than air. This only lasted for a moment. His own movement destroyed it. His footsteps sounded loud to his ear as he went across to the door and shut it. The click of the latch made his pulses leap. He turned round, and saw the girl looking at him.

Her eyes were brown. When he had seen her before he had not noticed their colour. He had only seen them wide and dark. Now he saw them clear as well—wide, and dark, and clear. She was looking at him, and that meant that she had moved, but for the life of him he could not tell whether she saw hirm or not. Her eyes were very beautiful, and there was no blankness in them. They saw; but whether they saw Mannister's library and Jeremy Ware was more than Jeremy could tell. She might be walking in a lovely dream, knowing and seeing only its shapes of beauty.

Jeremy stood with his back against the door and wondered.

And then she moved again. Her eyes left his face. She turned her shoulder on him and went past the writing-table, walking with a slow, measured grace as if there was some music in her mind and she kept time to it. In this lighted room Jeremy no longer asked himself what it was that he saw, but in some strange way an apparition would have moved him less. A living being is surely the greatest mystery of all, and a living being separated from the living world by the transparent, impalpable barrier of sleep and yet moving, acting, governed by some impulse we cannot trace, may well set the heart beating and quicken every pulse.

He said to himself, “It's only a girl walking in her sleep,” and wondered that he was so much moved.

He followed her across the room and stopped a yard or two from where she stood facing that part of the book-case which masked Mannister's safe. She stood there quite still again, and for about a minute nothing happened. Then she spoke. Without looking at him she spoke, and said his name.

“Jeremy Ware—”

It was the most surprising thing that had ever happened to him. She had a low, soft voice. She said his name quite distinctly.

Jeremy took a step sideways and saw her face. Her eyes looked at the books and past them. She was still in her dream. But she had said his name. She said it again now and sighed.

“Jeremy—Jeremy Ware—”

And with that, a look of trouble came. It was like seeing a shadow pass over water. Her eyes went dark. Her lips parted. She put her hands to her breast and held them there.

“Jeremy—Jeremy Ware—” she said, and the trouble was in her voice.

“What is it?” said Jeremy gently.

He was only a yard away from her. If he put out a hand it would touch her. But even as he spoke, he knew that his words would not reach her. She was in her dream, and he was here, and he couldn't reach her.

The look of trouble deepened. She said,

“The safe's open—he's left it open. Jeremy Ware—he's left it open.”

Jeremy said,
“What?”
Everything in him tingled as if from an electric shock.

She put up her hand and pushed back her hair. Her voice dropped very low.

“She said: ‘Leave it open. Put the letter there and leave it open. You can say he took it. You can say he pretended to lock it and left it open.'” The words came soft and hurried. “He left it open. He'll say the paper's gone. He'll say Jeremy Ware took it.” Her right hand dropped and went out groping. “Oh, that's wicked! I can't!
I can't!”

Her groping hand touched the shelf and clung there. A tear ran down her cheek. She said “Wicked!” again in a whispering way. And then all at once she pulled on the shelf, and the hinged section swung out, uncovering the door of the safe.

Jeremy felt that tingling shock again. Mannister had given him the key to lock the safe, and he had locked it. He could swear that he had locked it. He had locked it and given Mannister the key, and Mannister had slipped it back on his key-ring. He had certainly locked the safe. And now, before his eyes, the door stood an eighth of an inch ajar, pulled open by the outward swing of the masking book-shelf. He said,

“Why? Why?”

The girl took hold of the steel door, not as if she saw it but as if she were feeling for it, and so pulled it open.

“It's open,” she said. “The paper's gone. It's open, and the paper's gone. Jeremy didn't take it.”

She let go of the door and brushed her hand across her eyes.

“Wicked!”
she said in a weeping voice; and then, “Poor Jeremy Ware!”

Jeremy felt inclined to agree with her. His head was going round rather, but he could see one thing plainly enough. If Mannister was going to find his safe unlocked after handing Jeremy the key to lock it with, there was going to be the devil to pay for Jeremy Ware. If there were important papers missing, the payment might very easily be ruin.

He got as far as that, and caught his breath to listen, because the girl was whispering again.

“You must go. Rachel—go quickly! Rachel—take the key! Oh—” This was a long shuddering sigh.

She put her hand to her breast again. “I can't! Yes, you must! Rachel, you must—because of Jeremy Ware.” She turned her head from side to side like a creature looking for some way of escape. “I can't! I c
an't!
Oh—” Again that long quivering sigh. “Rachel, you must!”

It was like watching a play—an extraordinarily moving and affecting play. It was clear to Jeremy that she was holding a dialogue with herself—playing out loud an inward struggle between fear and some strong impulsion of pity. Her name was Rachel. Who was she, and how did she come here? How did she know that the safe was open? How did she know any of the things that she was whispering?

“I
must,”
she said, and this time the words came slow and with resolve.

All this time her left hand had been hanging down as he had first seen it except for the moment when it had been held tightly against her breast. The fingers crossed the palm, and the thumb held them there. She lifted it now and opened it. The key of the safe lay on the open palm.

Jeremy looked at the key. It was the key of the safe. It was also, past all cavil, Mannister's key. Jeremy had handled it too often not to be sure of that. There were little scratches, and there was a nick in the shaft. It was certainly Mannister's key. He had given it back to Mannister at about a quarter past three. He had been in the same room with him for another three-quarters of an hour. And Mannister was catching the four-twenty-five. It was now between midnight and the quarter, and Mannister's key caught the light on the girl's upturned palm. No, she wasn't the girl any more; she was Rachel.

He stared at the key, and if there had been any space left in his mind for wonder, he would have wondered how she came by it.

She did not look at the key. It lay on her outstretched palm and she looked past it into her dream. She began to speak again, her voice shaken and distressed.

“The paper isn't there. If I lock the safe and it isn't there, they will look for it—and when they find it they'll say that Jeremy took it. Oh, poor Jeremy Ware!”

When she said his name like that, Jeremy felt as if she had laid a finger on his heart. It was the strangest feeling. It was something like being stabbed. But there was more to it than that. There was something in her voice that hurt and thrilled him to a degree that was almost unbearable.

He brought his mind back to the paper and took a step nearer the safe. He could now see into it, and the first thing he saw was that the extra important letter which Mannister had received that very morning was no longer in its place. Mannister had left it lying conspicuously across the front of the top shelf, and it wasn't there. Everything else on the shelf was docketed, but this letter in its long blue envelope had Iain slanting a little between the Italian packet and the Geneva letters. It was the last thing he had seen as he closed the door before locking the safe.

It wasn't there.

“Poor Jeremy Ware!” said Rachel in her grieving voice.

Jeremy went down on one knee and looked into the other shelves. He lifted the docketed packets. The letter was not there. He knew very well that it wasn't there, but he had to look. And all the while Rachel stood there not half a yard away, with the key on her palm. She did not speak until he had finished. To that extent the dream overlapped the real. How strange that she should be there, and yet not there—able to find her way through the dark house, to open the safe, to speak of what was in it, and yet all the time to be out of reach in a dream. He said very earnestly,

“Where's the paper, Rachel? Do you know?”

He wondered if she was going to wake, because at the sound of his voice a shiver ran over her. The idea of her waking terrified him. She might scream or faint. It was supposed to be dangerous to wake a sleep-walker.

She shivered again and drew another of those long sighing breaths. Then, as if at least one word had penetrated her dream, she said,

“The paper—it's not there.”

“Where is it?” said Jeremy, and tried to keep his voice level.

She turned ever so little towards him.

“Put it back,” she said. “Put it back. It's no use locking the door if it isn't there. I can't put it back.
‘Rachel, you must!'
But I can't—I can't really. Oh, you know I can't. You know it's in the drawer. He said it was in the drawer—in Jeremy's drawer. They'll find it there. He said so. Oh, wicked, wicked,
wicked!
Oh, please don't let them find it!”

In his drawer! Was it possible? Without taking in all the implications of that whispered speech Jeremy found enough to move him to action. If the missing letter was in any drawer of his, now was the time to find it and put it back in the safe. His writing-table was of the common type with drawers on either side and one in the middle over the knee-hole. Only the bottom drawer on the right was locked, and that by Mannister's orders. Since Jeremy carried the key, the missing letter could hardly be there.

He pulled out the other drawers one by one and, finding only their legitimate contents, felt relief and scepticism flow in upon his mood. Yet in the end he got out his key and opened the locked drawer. It held stamps, old house accounts, and a number of other things which no one except Mannister would have dreamed of locking up. It also held the letter.

Jeremy very nearly missed it. At the bottom of the drawer was a ledger containing the items of Mannister's household expenditure for 1928. Jeremy turned it over, and the corner of a blue envelope came poking out from between the leaves.

He locked the drawer with a very sober face. Had Mannister gone mad? Or was his own brain playing tricks? Was it possible that he had put the letter there and forgotten it? A sturdy common sense asserted itself. It wasn't possible. He was perfectly fit, he was perfectly balanced. The thing was a plant, and it was up to him to find out who was behind it. Mannister perhaps. … But there was a woman in it too. Rachel's “she said” went through his mind like a flashing light.

He turned from the table, to find Rachel so close to him that, in turning, his hand touched hers. It was the hand in which he held the letter. The paper rustled. He felt that her hand was cold. And then in a moment that cold hand had taken the letter out of his. She went straight to the safe with it, laid it down upon the top shelf, and closed the steel door. All the time the key was in her left hand, held out upon the open palm. She took it now, fitted it in the lock, and turned it. The lock clicked. She withdrew the key, pushed the book-lined shelves into place, and turned towards the door.