Just as she threw away the end of her cigarette a small but aggressively new car came round the corner, passed her, and stopped by means of aggressively efficient brakes a few yards away. A young man got out. A young man dressed with notable care in a suit which continued the uniform colour-motif of his shirt, collar, and tie, and who wore footgear of that parti-coloured kind which Nelly was vulgarly accustomed to call co-respondent’s shoes. He asked, very politely, if he could be of assistance.
“You can,” said Nelly, smiling kindly at him. And while he took off his coat, dirtied his hands, endangered the trim fall of his trousers by stooping and squatting, and finally changed the tyre, she talked to him with such charm that he forgot the unpleasant nature of his work.
“Are you going far?” he asked her presently.
“Not very,” she said. “Are you?”
“To Liverpool,” said the young man. “I’ve been to Harrogate, I often go to Harrogate. It’s an amusing place, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never been there,” said Nelly.
“Oh, you should,” said the young man. “It’s really a good place to go. You can play tennis there, and dance, and do all sorts of things. I go there frequently. My home’s in Liverpool, you see, so it’s quite handy for me.”
“To dance in Harrogate?”
“Yes,” said the young man. He put on his coat, sat down beside Nelly on the running-board of the Isotta, and offered her a gold-lettered, ivory-tipped, probably Egyptian cigarette. He sat closer than was necessary, with that absurd craving for contiguity which young men so often exhibit.
“I prefer Gold Flake,” said Nelly, and took one of her two which remained.
The young man held a match for her with caressive dexterity.
“You’ve been very kind,” said Nelly. “Thank you so much.”
She stood up, but the young man caught hold of her hand and said, “Do sit down again and tell me who you are. I almost think I’ve met you somewhere, haven’t I?”
“My name is Dashenka Zogu,” said Nelly.
“I beg pardon?”
“Dashenka Zogu,” Nelly repeated. “My husband is an Albanian.”
The young man laughed nervously, and Nelly looked at him with grave and warning eyes.
“Well, I’m glad to have helped you,” he said.
“Not at all,” replied Nelly, bowing slightly.
The young man retired in some confusion to his own car, and speedily drove away.
“Sometimes they’re nice and sometimes they’re not, but they’re always useful if you know how to use them,” Nelly murmured, and thought no longer about him. She considered her own problems with more spirit, however.
So this road went to Liverpool, and Liverpool, as everyone knew, was a port from which vessels might sail to New York. Wesson, when last seen, was going in this direction. Wesson, then, in spite of the obvious shipping-list finger-post, was sailing from Liverpool? Nelly had accepted the clue (in the pamphlet which had helped to keep her right ankle tied) with such over-weighted confidence that the slightest doubt was enough to upset her assurance. With the evidence of the Liverpool road before her, the shipping-list, with its blatantly pencilled mark against Turbania, at once took on the likeness of a red herring. Of course Wesson wouldn’t leave such a thing about unless to mislead people, and equally of course her celerity in pursuit had put her on the right trail. O fortunately breaking chair and blessed, blessed promptitude!
“Helen’s herself again,” she confided to Ilkley Moor.
But I’ve got no money, she remembered. And I’m hungry, she thought. And I can’t drive into Liverpool and go to a hotel—I’m not going to ask the police for help and give them all the credit—on a Sunday evening with no recommendation but a green cotton frock, she decided. There’s a rug on the back seat, she considered, but that’s not much use.
She opened the other door and lifted up the rug which lay on the back seat. With a gasp of joy she found that under it were a raincoat and a small attaché case.
“Lady Mercy’s!” she whispered.
She opened the attaché case.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
In it were two letters and a book entitled The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Nothing else.
“Useless,” said Nelly bitterly. “Absolutely useless. Will any intelligent woman between here and Liverpool give me a meal for this? Or her husband exchange a gallon of petrol for it? I’ve never said a word against Shaw till now, but for an economic reformer his books haven’t much practical value when you put them to the test. If it were Edgar Wallace every house in the country would give me bed and breakfast for it.”
She got into the car, sat down, and moodily considered what to do. There was no hurry now, for Atlantic liners do not leave port on a Sunday night, and she could not hope to find Wesson anywhere except on the embarkation stage. And she had no money to buy a hat, a meal, a night’s lodging, or petrol; the Isotta would soon require petrol as badly as she wanted food.
She turned the leaves of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to see if Mr. Shaw said anything about barter, the exchange value of a limousine, or how to acquire petrol and a fillet steak on note-of-hand alone.
And as she turned a page there appeared like manna raining from the Socialist heaven a stiff new brown and white one pound note… for Lady Mercy had been reading the book, and to mark the place where she had wearied of instruction she had slipped in the Treasury Note; a thing she often did, being prejudiced against dog’s ears and having a sufficiency of money. Nelly, of course, was unaware of this habit—though many people who borrowed Lady Mercy’s books had been gratified by it—and thought for a moment that Mr. Shaw was inserting one pound notes into every copy of his manual to celebrate a new edition or to make it a really practical guide to Capitalism.
The idea faded, as such fancies will, but the Treasury Note remained indisputably real. And with its help Nelly began to re-model her plan of campaign.
CHAPTER XXIII
Joan and Mr. Wesson had a large and inexpensive semi-nursery, semi-farmhouse meal at a roadside house which advertised teas for tourists. Not that Mr. Wesson was mean; he was an American, and Americans are habitually lavish in their hospitality. But he was also a fugitive and he had a cautious disinclination to take Joan into a hotel where the crowd might interfere with his control of her. So Joan ate brown bread and ham and eggs and shiny buns and fresh butter and raspberry jam, and drank several cups of tea, and sighed for no richer flesh-pots, but smiled pleasantly at Mr. Wesson and began to like him although he was a criminal.
And as they drove away again on hill-roads and between hills that the westering sun made dark on one side and golden-clear on the other, she asked him questions about his manner of life, friendly and tactful questions, and enquired what it felt like to be a thief.
Mr. Wesson was a lonely man, a man condemned by his position in society to a solitude such as most of us fear and detest, and the pleasant circumstance of Joan’s company made him communicative. He was, indeed, looking forward with some dismay to the time when he should have to sever the association so violently begun, and he was quite willing to expand, explain, and confess his unusual personality.
“Strictly speaking,” he said, “I am not a thief. That is, I am not an habitual thief. I feel pretty strongly about stealing. To my mind there’s something mean about the man who makes his living out of it. I’ve known plenty of thieves of all sorts, from pickpockets to bank-robbers, and there wasn’t one of them with whom I ever felt really friendly and at home. They were narrow-minded for one thing, because they had so many grievances, and I can’t make friends with a narrow-minded man. That’s how I quarrelled with my father when I was a boy. He was as narrow as a knife looked at edgeways, and had more grievances than Job’s neck had boils. We lived in Concord, Massachusetts.”
For some time Mr. Wesson thought sentimentally of his boyhood’s home.
“I’ve never stolen anything
except when there was a good case to be made out for stealing,” he continued. “Do you play poker, Miss Benbow?”
“Not for high stakes,” said Joan.
“But the rules are the same whatever the stakes. You can’t take anything out of the pool unless you put something in. If you don’t play you can’t hope for profit. The ideal of service, which is a well-thought-of ideal in my country, is based on this fact. Now life is like a big poker game, with luck for the joker, and the thief is a man who tries to take the kitty without putting in his ante, let alone betting on his cards; without using his five talents, as the Gospel has it. Therefore by Biblical precedent as well as by own observation I believe that the thief is doomed to failure. When I steal anything, Miss Benbow, it’s because I have a good reason for it.”
“I’m sure you have,” said Joan, who was impressed by Mr. Wesson’s almost religious sincerity.
“When I forged my father’s name to a cheque— you’ll understand how strained our relations were before I was compelled to do such a thing—it was because I needed the money to get married. It’s the foolhardiest kind of thing to get married without any capital. It’s just asking for trouble. Now I had given my word of honour, to her and her mother and to her elder brother as well, to marry the girl who lived next door to us. That was in Concord, Massachusetts. She was one of the sweetest girls in town and I’ve never regretted it, though I spent the first year of my married life in gaol. My father—I’ll say this for him, though he was as narrow-minded as a silhouette—came of good Pilgrim stock and believed in an eye for an eye and rigorous imprisonment for forgery. He had no mercy.”
“A year in prison!” said Joan. “How terrible. I think I should go mad in prison. Didn’t it embitter you against everything?”
“It was a blessing in disguise. It was there that I first turned my thoughts to literature as a means of livelihood, for though I recognized the sanity and moral value of a routine life I didn’t think I could submit to it very willingly after having lived one under compulsion for a year. Authors and uncaptured criminals, Miss Benbow, are the only people free from routine. Moreover, they gave us some good books to read, for it was a well-conducted prison, and I was stimulated to do a little writing myself. I wrote a song which was sung at the annual prison concert and a hymn which was included in the prison hymnal. And after I was discharged I got a job on a newspaper.”
“As a reporter?”
“Well, I was in the advertising department at first. But that didn’t satisfy me. I wanted to write. I felt the need to create. My one ambition was to become an author. But it was not to be. It became evident in a few months that the Creator had not intended me for a dramatist, a novelist, or even a poet.”
“I suppose you found it difficult to think of plots,” said Joan. “I should love to write if only I could think of something to write about.”
“My difficulty was to forget plots,” said Mr. Wesson. “I have an abnormally retentive sub-conscious memory, and whenever I wrote I transcribed, without realizing it, something that I had read a short while before. The result was that I wrote some short stories which had already been written by a certain distinguished author, and when I sold them there were serious misunderstandings. I narrowly escaped going to prison for the second time. The distinguished author, for whom I have the warmest admiration, refused to prosecute. On a subsequent occasion another equally distinguished author was not so generous.”
“Did you go to prison for copying—I mean transcribing, some of his stories?”
“For six months,” said Mr. Wesson, “and I have never published anything since except some verses for Christmas cards, which I am glad to say are still in regular use. But I thought of a plan for putting my talent—for it is a talent—to better employment.”
By this time they had left behind them that England which is alternately garden and factory town. They had sped between green fields and through streets of red brick villas, by gently meandering rivers and past towering chimneys, now under trees, now looking at lamp-posts; and were coming at last to the hill country which gave such good battlefields to the Southern Scots and the Northern English in the days before they became liberal-minded enough to consider other nations worth picking a quarrel with. The country which had daunted the Romans lay before them, the hills which Rome had crowned with a wall to keep off the hairy-kneed, blue-painted, long-armed fighting tribes beyond. And it was growing dark, slowly but surely. The hills added to their stature. It was the time of evening when the Roman under officers visited their sentries on the Wall, saying to this one, “Well, Balbus” who according to the Latin grammar, helped to build the Wall, “got your eyes skinned to-night?” And to that one, who was a veteran, “Don’t you wish you’d stayed in Spain, Shorty?” To which Shorty would reply, “It’s so bloody cold, sergeant. I’ll have fever to-morrow, you see if I don’t.” And the sergeant probably answered, “You’ll be lucky if you don’t get worse than fever. I heard the captain say as how those blue-arsed beggars might be coming over to-night.” “Pollux!” said Shorty, “I bet they don’t.”
That was the time of night, rumour-time, darkening-time, when Joan and Mr. Wesson approached the Roman Wall. And it looked like rain.
But Mr. Wesson continued the story of his life and Joan continued to listen to him with the interest which his recital demanded; though it sounded to her a little unreal, as so many stories do while they lack the apparent verification of print.
“As I couldn’t write without getting into trouble,” said Mr. Wesson, “I decided to lecture, so I took a course in public speaking and acquired a good English accent.”
“I thought you were an Englishman at first,” said Joan.
“Is that so?” said Mr. Wesson, and cleared his throat. “The advantages of the spoken word over the written one are obvious,” he continued. “It leaves no trace. The printed word is static, defenceless, and potential evidence against you. But the spoken word is a bird of passage, very difficult to hit. The objection to lecturing, however, is that the audience isn’t interested in the words so much as in the speaker, and consequently a man of nation-wide repute who’s got nothing more vital to America than sex-life in Lapland to talk about gets a hearing and suitable emoluments, when an unknown man with a genuine message is unregarded. I spoke in my own name on two occasions, and both times the results were disappointing in the extreme. The third time I spoke the hall was full, I was applauded to the echo, and the emoluments were very gratifying. Can you guess why? No? Well, all I did was to repeat my original lecture—on More Money or Matri-Mony—and have myself billed as Mr. George Moore, the famous English author.”
“What fun,” said Joan. “Did you dress up?”
“I made some changes in my ordinary appearance,” said Mr. Wesson, “but as I had never seen Mr. Moore, or even a photograph of him, I was compelled to use my imagination, The local papers—it was in Skyburg, Minnesota, that I made my debut—said I presented a sinister and impressive figure, and my lecture was a kaleidoscope of audacious dissection. This was shortly after Mr. Moore had written The Brook Kerith, which was known to be daring. The book itself, however, had not reached Skyburg, and in the absence of specific information ‘daring’ has only one connotation. It implies, in the general consciousness, the act of unbuttoning the habiliments which have eternally shrouded the intimacies of marital and extra-marital adjustment. That was the interpretation which I assumed in my lecture, and Skyburg liked it. I delivered it eight times altogether, in small towns in Minnesota and Iowa, and I should have continued to deliver it had it not been for a woman who had made a pilgrimage to the shrines of modern literature in England and waited three days outside Mr. Moore’s London residence in order to see him face to face. Which eventually she did, and retained so vivid a memory of him that she instantly penetrated my disguise—I wore a little red beard which apparently was unjustified—and denounced me to her fellow Iowans. I had to alter my plans and my appearance with the utmost celerity.”
“I think you’re wonderful,” she said.
“That’s nothing,” boasted Mr. Wesson. “That was only my novitiate, the prelude to my vocation. Since then I have appeared as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the Bishop of London, George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Alfred Noyes, G. K. Chesterton, Sir Oliver Lodge, Walter de la Mare, and several others. I studied photographs of these eminent men, so as not to repeat my early blunder, and I exploited to the full my mobile features and a certain talent for making-up.”
Mr. Wesson stopped the car, and contorting his features in a peculiar way, said to Joan: “Imagine that my head is bald and my eyebrows very bushy. Now, who do you think I am?”
“Bernard Shaw,” Joan hazarded foolishly.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Wesson. “I was Rudyard Kipling. Now I am Bernard Shaw.” And he assumed the expression of a milk-fed satyr.
“Of course,” said Joan, “I would recognize you anywhere.”
“Naturally I require a beard to complete the resemblance, just as I needed thicker eyebrows and a shaved head to become Mr. Kipling’s double. Now who is this, do you think?”
Mr. Wesson blew and puffed out his cheeks till his face was all red and swollen, and in a rarefied, high-piping voice recited:
“‘They bred like birds in English woods,
They rooted like the rose,
When Alfred came to Athelney
To hide him from their bows.’”
“G. K. Chesterton!” said Joan.
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