by Unknown
Having decided to go, Fenn began to consider how he should do it. And here circumstances favoured him. It happened that on the evening on which his brother’s play was to be produced the headmaster was giving his once-a-term dinner to the house-prefects. This simplified matters wonderfully. The only time when his absence from the house was at all likely to be discovered would be at prayers, which took place at half-past nine. The prefects’ dinner solved this difficulty for him. Kay would not expect him to be at prayers, thinking he was over at the Head’s, while the Head, if he noticed his absence at all, would imagine that he was staying away from the dinner owing to a headache or some other malady. It seemed tempting Providence not to take advantage of such an excellent piece of luck. For the rest, detection was practically impossible. Kennedy’s advent to the house had ousted Fenn from the dormitory in which he had slept hitherto, and, there being no bed available in any of the other dormitories, he had been put into the spare room usually reserved for invalids whose invalidism was not of a sufficiently infectious kind to demand their removal to the infirmary. As for getting back into the house, he would leave the window of his study unfastened. He could easily climb on to the window-ledge, and so to bed without let or hindrance.
The distance from Kay’s to the town was a mile and a half. If he started at the hour when he should have been starting for the school house, he would arrive just in time to see the curtain go up.
Having settled these facts definitely in his mind, he got his books together and went over to school.
XV
DOWN TOWN
Fenn arrived at the theatre a quarter of an hour before the curtain rose. Going down a gloomy alley of the High Street, he found himself at the stage door, where he made inquiries of a depressed-looking man with a bad cold in the head as to the whereabouts of his brother. It seemed that he was with Mr Higgs. If he would wait, said the doorkeeper, his name should be sent up. Fenn waited, while the doorkeeper made polite conversation by describing his symptoms to him in a hoarse growl. Presently the minion who had been despatched to the upper regions with Fenn’s message returned. Would he go upstairs, third door on the left. Fenn followed the instructions, and found himself in a small room, a third of which was filled by a huge iron-bound chest, another third by a very stout man and a dressing-table, while the rest of the space was comparatively empty, being occupied by a wooden chair with three legs. On this seat his brother was trying to balance himself, giving what part of his attention was not required for this feat to listening to some story the fat man was telling him. Fenn had heard his deep voice booming as he went up the passage.
His brother did the honours.
“Glad to see you, glad to see you,” said Mr Higgs, for the fat man was none other than that celebrity. “Take a seat.”
Fenn sat down on the chest and promptly tore his trousers on a jagged piece of iron.
“These provincial dressing-rooms!” said Mr Higgs, by way of comment. “No room! Never any room! No chairs! Nothing!”
He spoke in short, quick sentences, and gasped between each. Fenn said it really didn’t matter—he was quite comfortable.
“Haven’t they done anything about it?” asked Fenn’s brother, resuming the conversation which Fenn’s entrance had interrupted. “We’ve been having a burglary here,” he explained. “Somebody got into the theatre last night through a window. I don’t know what they expected to find.”
“Why,” said Fenn, “we’ve had a burglar up our way too. Chap broke into the school house and went through the old man’s drawing-room. The school house men have been talking about nothing else ever since. I wonder if it’s the same crew.”
Mr Higgs turned in his chair, and waved a stick of grease paint impressively to emphasise his point.
“There,” he said. “There! What I’ve been saying all along. No doubt of it. Organised gang. And what are the police doing? Nothing, sir, nothing. Making inquiries. Rot! What’s the good of inquiries?”
Fenn’s brother suggested mildly that inquiries were a good beginning. You must start somehow. Mr Higgs scouted the idea.
“There ought not to be any doubt, sir. They ought to know. To KNOW,” he added, with firmness.
At this point there filtered through the closed doors the strains of the opening chorus.
“By Jove, it’s begun!” said Fenn’s brother. “Come on, Bob.”
“Where are we going to?” asked Fenn, as he followed. “The wings?”
But it seemed that the rules of Mr Higgs’ company prevented any outsider taking up his position in that desirable quarter. The only place from which it was possible to watch the performance, except by going to the front of the house, was the “flies,” situated near the roof of the building.
Fenn found all the pleasures of novelty in watching the players from this lofty position. Judged by the cold light of reason, it was not the best place from which to see a play. It was possible to gain only a very foreshortened view of the actors. But it was a change after sitting “in front”.
The piece was progressing merrily. The gifted author, at first silent and pale, began now to show signs of gratification. Now and again he chuckled as some jeu de mots hit the mark and drew a quick gust of laughter from the unseen audience. Occasionally he would nudge Fenn to draw his attention to some good bit of dialogue which was approaching. He was obviously enjoying himself.
The advent of Mr Higgs completed his satisfaction, for the audience greeted the comedian with roars of applause. As a rule Eckleton took its drama through the medium of third-rate touring companies, which came down with plays that had not managed to attract London to any great extent, and were trying to make up for failures in the metropolis by long tours in the provinces. It was seldom that an actor of the Higgs type paid the town a visit, and in a play, too, which had positively never appeared before on any stage. Eckleton appreciated the compliment.
“Listen,” said Fenn’s brother. “Isn’t that just the part for him? It’s just like he was in the dressing-room, eh? Short sentences and everything. The funny part of it is that I didn’t know the man when I wrote the play. It was all luck.”
Mr Higgs’ performance sealed the success of the piece. The house laughed at everything he said. He sang a song in his gasping way, and they laughed still more. Fenn’s brother became incoherent with delight. The verdict of Eckleton was hardly likely to affect London theatre-goers, but it was very pleasant notwithstanding. Like every playwright with his first piece, he had been haunted by the idea that his dialogue “would not act”, that, however humorous it might be to a reader, it would fall flat when spoken. There was no doubt now as to whether the lines sounded well.
At the beginning of the second act the great Higgs was not on the stage, Fenn’s brother knowing enough of the game not to bring on his big man too soon. He had not to enter for ten minutes or so. The author, who had gone down to see him during the interval, stayed in the dressing-room. Fenn, however, who wanted to see all of the piece that he could, went up to the “flies” again.
It occurred to him when he got there that he would see more if he took the seat which his brother had been occupying. It would give him much the same view of the stage, and a wider view of the audience. He thought it would be amusing to see how the audience looked from the “flies”.
Mr W. S. Gilbert once wrote a poem about a certain bishop who, while fond of amusing himself, objected to his clergy doing likewise. And the consequence was that whenever he did so amuse himself, he was always haunted by a phantom curate, who joined him in his pleasures, much to his dismay. On one occasion he stopped to watch a Punch and Judy show,
And heard, as Punch was being treated penally, That phantom curate laughing all hyaenally.
The disgust and panic of this eminent cleric was as nothing compared with that of Fenn, when, shifting to his brother’s seat, he got the first clear view he had had of the audience. In a box to the left of the dress-circle sat, “laughing all hyaenally”, the following disting
uished visitors:
Mr Mulholland of No. 7 College Buildings. Mr Raynes of No. 4 ditto, and Mr Kay.
Fenn drew back like a flash, knocking his chair over as he did so.
“Giddy, sir?” said a stage hand, pleasantly. “Bless you, lots of gents is like that when they comes up here. Can’t stand the ‘eight, they can’t. You’ll be all right in a jiffy.”
“Yes. It—it is rather high, isn’t it?” said Fenn. “Awful glare, too.”
He picked up his chair and sat down well out of sight of the box. Had they seen him? he wondered. Then common sense returned to him. They could not possibly have seen him. Apart from any other reasons, he had only been in his brother’s seat for half-a-dozen seconds. No. He was all right so far. But he would have to get back to the house, and at once. With three of the staff, including his own house-master, ranging the town, things were a trifle too warm for comfort. He wondered it had not occurred to him that, with a big attraction at the theatre, some of the staff might feel an inclination to visit it.
He did not stop to say goodbye to his brother. Descending from his perch, he hurried to the stage door.
“It’s in the toobs that I feel it, sir.” said the doorkeeper, as he let him out, resuming their conversation as if they had only just parted. Fenn hurried off without waiting to hear more.
It was drizzling outside, and there was a fog. Not a “London particular”, but quite thick enough to make it difficult to see where one was going. People and vehicles passed him, vague phantoms in the darkness. Occasionally the former collided with him. He began to wish he had not accepted his brother’s invitation. The unexpected sight of the three masters had shaken his nerve. Till then only the romantic, adventurous side of the expedition had struck him. Now the risks began to loom larger in his mind. It was all very well, he felt, to think, as he had done, that he would be expelled if found out, but that all the same he would risk it. Detection then had seemed a remote contingency. With three masters in the offing it became at least a possibility. The melancholy case of Peter Brown seemed to him now to have a more personal significance for him.
Wrapped in these reflections, he lost his way.
He did not realise this for some time. It was borne in upon him when the road he was taking suddenly came to an abrupt end in a blank wall. Instead of being, as he had fancied, in the High Street, he must have branched off into some miserable blind alley.
More than ever he wished he had not come. Eckleton was not a town that took up a great deal of room on the map of England, but it made up for small dimensions by the eccentricity with which it had been laid out. On a dark and foggy night, to one who knew little of its geography, it was a perfect maze.
Fenn had wandered some way when the sound of someone whistling a popular music-hall song came to him through the gloom. He had never heard anything more agreeable.
“I say,” he shouted at a venture, “can you tell me the way to the High Street?”
The whistler stopped in the middle of a bar, and presently Fenn saw a figure sidling towards him in what struck him as a particularly furtive manner.
“Wot’s thet, gav’nor?”
“Can you tell me where the High Street is? I’ve lost my way.”
The vague figure came closer.
“‘Igh Street? Yus; yer go—”
A hand shot out, Fenn felt a sharp wrench in the region of his waistcoat, and a moment later the stranger had vanished into the fog with the prefect’s watch and chain.
Fenn forgot his desire to return to the High Street. He forgot everything except that he wished to catch the fugitive, maltreat him, and retrieve his property. He tore in the direction whence came the patter of retreating footsteps.
There were moments when he thought he had him, when he could hear the sound of his breathing. But the fog was against him. Just as he was almost on his man’s heels, the fugitive turned sharply into a street which was moderately well lighted. Fenn turned after him. He had just time to recognise the street as his goal, the High Street, when somebody, walking unexpectedly out of the corner house, stood directly in his path. Fenn could not stop himself. He charged the man squarely, clutched him to save himself, and they fell in a heap on the pavement.
XVI
WHAT HAPPENED TO FENN
Fenn was up first. Many years’ experience of being tackled at full speed on the football field had taught him how to fall. The stranger, whose football days, if he had ever had any, were long past, had gone down with a crash, and remained on the pavement, motionless. Fenn was conscious of an ignoble impulse to fly without stopping to chat about the matter. Then he was seized with a gruesome fear that he had injured the man seriously, which vanished when the stranger sat up. His first words were hardly of the sort that one would listen to from choice. His first printable expression, which did not escape him until he had been speaking some time, was in the nature of an official bulletin.
“You’ve broken my neck,” said he.
Fenn renewed his apologies and explanations.
“Your watch!” cried the man in a high, cracked voice. “Don’t stand there talking about your watch, but help me up. What do I care about your watch? Why don’t you look where you are going to? Now then, now then, don’t hoist me as if I were a hod of bricks. That’s right. Now help me indoors, and go away.”
Fenn supported him while he walked lamely into the house. He was relieved to find that there was nothing more the matter with him than a shaking and a few bruises.
“Door on the left,” said the injured one.
Fenn led him down the passage and into a small sitting-room. The gas was lit, and as he turned it up he saw that the stranger was a man well advanced in years. He had grey hair that was almost white. His face was not a pleasant one. It was a mass of lines and wrinkles from which a physiognomist would have deduced uncomplimentary conclusions as to his character. Fenn had little skill in that way, but he felt that for some reason he disliked the man, whose eyes, which were small and extraordinarily bright, gave rather an eerie look to his face.
“Go away, go away,” he kept repeating savagely from his post on the shabby sofa on which Fenn had deposited him.
“But are you all right? Can’t I get you something?” asked the Eckletonian.
“Go away, go away,” repeated the man.
Conversation on these lines could never be really attractive. Fenn turned to go. As he closed the door and began to feel his way along the dark passage, he heard the key turn in the lock behind him. The man could not, he felt, have been very badly hurt if he were able to get across the room so quickly. The thought relieved him somewhat. Nobody likes to have the maiming even of the most complete stranger on his mind. The sensation of relief lasted possibly three seconds. Then it flashed upon him that in the excitement of the late interview he had forgotten his cap. That damaging piece of evidence lay on the table in the sitting-room, and between him and it was a locked door.
He groped his way back, and knocked. No sound came from the room.
“I say,” he cried, “you might let me have my cap. I left it on the table.”
No reply.
Fenn half thought of making a violent assault on the door. He refrained on reflecting that it would be useless. If he could break it open—which, in all probability, he could not—there would be trouble such as he had never come across in his life. He was not sure it would not be an offence for which he would be rendered liable to fine or imprisonment. At any rate, it would mean the certain detection of his visit to the town. So he gave the thing up, resolving to return on the morrow and reopen negotiations. For the present, what he had to do was to get safely back to his house. He had lost his watch, his cap with his name in it was in the hands of an evil old man who evidently bore him a grudge, and he had to run the gauntlet of three house-masters and get to bed via a study-window. Few people, even after the dullest of plays, have returned from the theatre so disgusted with everything as did Fenn. Reviewing the situation as he ran with long,
easy strides over the road that led to Kay’s, he found it devoid of any kind of comfort. Unless his mission in quest of the cap should prove successful, he was in a tight place.
It is just as well that the gift of second sight is accorded to but few. If Fenn could have known at this point that his adventures were only beginning, that what had taken place already was but as the overture to a drama, it is possible that he would have thrown up the sponge for good and all, entered Kay’s by way of the front door—after knocking up the entire household—and remarked, in answer to his house-master’s excited questions, “Enough! Enough! I am a victim of Fate, a Toad beneath the Harrow. Sack me tomorrow, if you like, but for goodness’ sake let me get quietly to bed now.”
As it was, not being able to “peep with security into futurity,” he imagined that the worst was over.
He began to revise this opinion immediately on turning in at Kay’s gate. He had hardly got half-way down the drive when the front door opened and two indistinct figures came down the steps. As they did so his foot slipped off the grass border on which he was running to deaden the noise of his steps, and grated sharply on the gravel.
“What’s that?” said a voice. The speaker was Mr Kay.
“What’s what?” replied a second voice which he recognised as Mr Mulholland’s.
“Didn’t you hear a noise?”
“‘I heard the water lapping on the crag,’” replied Mr Mulholland, poetically.
“It was over there,” persisted Mr Kay. “I am certain I heard something—positively certain, Mulholland. And after that burglary at the school house—”
He began to move towards the spot where Fenn lay crouching behind a bush. Mr Mulholland followed, mildly amused. They were a dozen yards away when Fenn, debating in his mind whether it would not be better—as it would certainly be more dignified—for him to rise and deliver himself up to justice instead of waiting to be discovered wallowing in the damp grass behind a laurel bush, was aware of something soft and furry pressing against his knuckles. A soft purring sound reached his ears.