Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  I heard the noisy break-up of the dinner, and soon afterwards Rundel came up to my room and paid me my five guineas and expenses. I let him find me ashamed of myself and dripping with cold water from the basin. I did not want him to think I was in need of any further attention. He invited me to call on him at his College or his Chipping Camden retreat whenever I felt like it, and whether I were willing or not to answer questions about myself and my language. It is on my conscience that I grossly abused his warmth and kindness. I can only hope that he and his club were rewarded by the amusement and the speculations I provided.

  Three notes were left downstairs for Faiz Ullah: one asking if I would sing at some meeting of orientalists, one written in three outlandish scripts with a request that I would let the writer know if I could read any or all of them, and one just stating: 11.30 tomoro. Statue Pitapan.

  The rendezvous sounded like one of Bolivar’s more obscure battles. With my mind tuned to Latin America it took me a few seconds to recognize Salvador’s spelling of Peter Pan. No doubt he had found the statue in Kensington Gardens good neutral ground for the avoiding of husbands.

  In the morning I left my guitar at the Three Feathers, and tried to think myself into the part of a poor but honest Indian student. But I was continually uneasy in London streets. My ancient game-keeperish tweed coat, to which I had stuck because it inspired confidence in the country, was all wrong in town. I could not meet or ignore the eyes of passing constables as casually as I wished.

  I strolled up and down at a safe distance from Peter Pan, meditating the profound philosophies of the East. Salvador was of course quarter of an hour late, and I added another ten minutes to be sure that he was not followed. We occupied two chairs under a plane tree in the open park where no one could overhear our conversation.

  We were both less generous than the night before. For one thing, it was morning; for another, there was no humour in the situation. I begged him to get me, somehow, without compromising himself, on a boat for South America. But it was as I feared. He could do nothing for me except to put me in touch with Harry Cole.

  ‘But he’s some damned police agent,’ I protested.

  ‘I do not think so. After your first escape, this Cole came round to the Consulate and swore you were telling the truth when you said in court that you were treasure-hunting. The consul found him sympathetic. A real little Englishman with guts. He would not explain, and he wouldn’t go to the police. He just said that if any of your friends knew where you were, he wanted to be taken to you. The clerk knew him. It is a fact that he received remittances from your father.’

  ‘And you didn’t send him to the police?’

  ‘We told him he ought to go to them. Man, we’re always correct! But it was none of our business to see that he did. Besides, we have been enjoying the newspapers. An office sweepstake even, on how long you could remain at large! And one isn’t sorry to see the famous British efficiency made dust. As a nation, you are too patronizing, Claudio.’

  ‘Somebody has to set the standards,’ I protested.

  ‘But do you like them?’

  ‘I treat them,’ I answered, ‘with respect. For example, I much prefer to be ceremoniously hanged for High Treason after due process of Law than to be stuck up against a wall and shot with rifles which were not cleaned since Monday morning.’

  ‘You were always over-fastidious, Claudio,’ he retorted, ‘in everything but your morals.’

  I did not consider that a boy of fifteen—his age when we last met—was capable of forming any opinion of my morals and, still less, of my tastes. I nearly told him so. I suppose that I was so weary of making calculated use of every human contact that to speak my mind was a barely resistible pleasure. However, I pulled myself together and became eloquent upon the joyous society of my second homeland, and even its soldiery.

  ‘Don’t you see? You are one of us, Claudio, whatever your passport says,’ he responded generously. ‘That is why I am helping you. You have no idea how much trouble it cost me to get hold of this Harry Cole’s file while pretending to look for another. Here is his address!’

  He handed me a scrap of paper. Harry Cole kept an inn on the edge of the New Forest—I shall call it The Tracehorse—near Brockenhurst.

  I thanked him warmly, and he wished me luck. There was no more to be said. Each of us had so very obviously to keep his mouth tight shut about the other that we might have been meeting in a better and more understanding world where one presumes—though a bitter shock it will be for the clergy—that speech becomes unnecessary.

  I was right to distrust London. When I returned to the Three Feathers to pick up my pack and guitar, I found that the police had been making enquiries about this enigmatic Faiz Ullah who had registered as British.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ I asked the landlady—that excellent soul who had cooked the club’s quarterly dinner.

  ‘I told ’im of course you was one of Mr Rundel’s young gentlemen, and no more of a South Sea Islands Rajah than what I am.’

  Astonishing how complexities suddenly straighten themselves out into a simple path of lunacy!

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that was a wonderful dinner. And now I must go home and wash the black off my face.’

  I took a train to Brockenhurst, guitar and all, and walked through the Forest—or rather over bare heath which had once been forest—to The Tracehouse. It was a small Free House of old red brick, set back from the road at the side of a green or clearing, and looked as if it would provide a decent, unambitious living for its owner. Why my father had wanted to make a pensioner of Henry Cole, Licensed to Sell Beer, Wine, Spirits and Tobacco, I could not imagine; but the pub had that air of growing out of the soil which an exile remembers all his life. In old days I should have written him a description of it that he might enjoy by proxy his lost—yet contentedly lost—England, and told him how I wished we could both have sat with our tankards under the turning oak leaves on a golden evening. As the sign of The Tracehorse creaked in the light wind, he seemed very close to me—a dear, welcoming ghost reluctant to leave his enjoyment of earth for such austere choices as bliss or damnation.

  It was just on six, and I waited outside until Harry Cole opened the door. He was a lightly built old man, weather-twisted like a thorn on high ground. He might have been an ex-jockey, except that his knees were straight and his feet solidly planted. I followed him into the bar, and he looked at me from behind it with a closed face—disapproving in principle of the presence of Asia in the New Forest. No, he said, he couldn’t put me up, but there was a cottage a quarter of a mile down the road where they did bed-and-breakfasts. He thawed a little after he had seen me put down a double whisky, and asked what part of India I came from. I gave him my old line of being born in England to Indian parents.

  ‘Playin’ in concerts?’ he asked, nodding to the guitar.

  ‘No, just for a living.’

  ‘Ah, we ’ad a sort of German down ’ere once,’ he said. ‘Used to fiddle in the woods, ’e did, and get the birds to answer ’im.’

  His small, bloodshot, brown eyes watched me from a mesh of wrinkles. My speech puzzled him, and he was trying to find out if I hadn’t a more respectable purpose than merely playing for pennies.

  ‘They wouldn’t answer the guitar,’ I told him. ‘It’s too human.’

  I ordered another whisky and asked him what he would take.

  ‘Well, I will ’ave a small one meself with you,’ he replied in a voice that expressed his astonishment at finding himself committed to drink with so strange a visitor.

  ‘You ain’t played that for a living all your life,’ he said.

  ‘No. But I’ve played it for fun. I learned it in Ecuador.’

  He didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘Where’s that?’ he asked ‘Coast of India, ain’t it?’

  A most heartening reply! He could not help know
ing that Ecuador was in South America, though he might be vague as to its exact whereabouts. His cautiousness could only mean that he was on his guard against questions.

  ‘Mr Cole, did you ever call at the Consulate of Ecuador?’

  ‘And what if I did?’

  ‘Have you anything you would like to tell me?’

  ‘Not if you’re a rozzer, I ’aven’t.’

  ‘Suppose I was MI5? You’ll know what that is from your Sunday papers.’

  ‘Then I’d tell yer,’ he answered sturdily, ‘that ye’re wastin’ of my muckin’ income tax chasin’ after spies what isn’t.’

  ‘But if you can clear Howard-Wolferstan, why don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll clear ’im in my own time,’ he said. ‘And it’s only ’im what I’ll talk to and without any of you listening either. If you pick ’im up, you send for me.’

  ‘I have reason to suppose that Howard-Wolferstan is under your roof at this moment, Mr Cole.’

  He contemptuously hoicked up an old man’s ever ready phlegm, and then suddenly got the implication.

  ‘Well, if he is,’ he said. ‘’E’d better be upstairs than in the bar.’

  He took a quick look at the innocent evening outside his porch, and then led me up to the first floor and unlocked a cheerless, dusty bedroom which had not been used for years.

  ‘Been all alone ’ere since the missus passed away,’ he said by way of apology. ‘Sleeps in the parlour, meself. Saves trouble, like. You make yerself as comfortable as what you can, and keep the door locked, see? You and me, we’ll ’ave a little talk after closing-time.’

  He tried the window blinds and, finding that they still worked, told me that I could safely switch on the light after nightfall.

  I threw my pack and guitar on the bed, and dropped into a broken-springed arm-chair. Speculation was useless. It was enough for the moment that Harry Cole evidently had in his old bones long experience of dealing with inquisitive strangers and the Law. So I removed beard and turban and settled down to enjoy the country silence, pleasantly broken by an occasional rumble of deep voices from the bar below.

  Soon after eight there was a scratching at my door, and Cole announced himself in a throaty whisper. I did not bother to replace my oriental trappings. I was in his hands.

  He entered with a tray on which were a plate of ham, bread and cheese and a tankard of bitter. As I held the door open for him, he edged round me in a quarter circle, staring.

  ‘Cut yer beard, ’ave you?’ he asked.

  I tossed him the false one. I thought it would amuse him.

  ‘Damme, that’s just what your father would a done!’ he exclaimed. ‘Forty-five year gone, and I remember that smile of ’is like as if it was yesterday. Aye, and what I can see of your face is the spitten image of ’is except that ’e was a white man. As a matter o’ colour, I mean.’

  I could not resist telling him that I was no darker than anyone else who had lived most of his life under tropical sun, and that on my mother’s side there was Inca blood.

  ‘Inkier, was she?’ he asked. ‘Well, yer father was never one to mind that. Man or woman, ’e took ’em for what they were. So you’re the little Claudio, which ’e was that proud of! Well, ’ow time do pass for them as don’t ’ave nothing agin it.’

  Somebody punched a bell down in the bar, and he silently vanished with an encouraging sideways throw of the head, as if to assure me that it would soon be ten o’clock and closing-time.

  Eventually I heard the formula: Time, gentlemen, please! the reluctant steps on the road outside, the final shutting and bolting of the door and the clink of glass being collected into the sink. Quarter of an hour later Harry Cole brought me down to his parlour. It was, I suppose, filthy; for an old man ate in it and slept in it and had it doubtfully swept out once a week. But there was a comfortable fire in the grate and whisky was on the table. Cleanliness is so unimportant. The interludes in my life which I look back on as most enjoyable must have been watched, with an anticipatory gleam, by the eyes of uncounted mice and insects in unwashed corners.

  Harry Cole grumbled about the difficulties of running a pub alone—except for a girl who came to wash up every morning and a barman who helped him out in holiday seasons. This was all conversation. He was creating, without embarrassment, a human relationship before coming to the point.

  ‘You’re goin’ to ’ave a shock,’ he said at last.

  I replied that I had had a fairish few in the last five months.

  ‘Ah, but this un is different,’ he warned me. ‘Your name ain’t Howard-Wolferstan. It’s Tutty.’

  I received this announcement with regret but equanimity. I had no intention of changing Howard-Wolferstan for Tutty. A man’s name, after all, is that by which he is known. And I was singularly well known as Howard-Wolferstan.

  ‘Now, what I got to say is this,’ he went on. ‘Your dad and I was—well, burglars. You know, ’ouse-breakers. A mug’s game, if you ask me. Still, it was better than workin’ in a cheap jeweller’s back room and losin’ yer eyesight ’cos ’e wouldn’t pay for the lightin’, which was the trade we was apprenticed to.

  ‘I’d been brought up honest. But yer dad was an orphan, and ’e’d been in one of them ’omes since ’e was five year old. Church of England, of course. That’s where ’e got ’is lovely manners from. It was a pleasure to ’ear ’im speakin’ to the gentry and then imitatin’ of ’em, for gentry there was in them days.’

  Cole’s accent was Hampshire grafted upon cockney, with the former predominant. I find it wearisome to try to reproduce his words, for one cannot avoid a touch of the comic, whereas his whole attitude was one of warm and admiring sincerity. I could hear his love of my father coming through every burring vowel of his voice. It fired my own. Dear, joyous, respected Don Jaime, what a way he had come from so scandalous a beginning as Jim Tutty! I could see at last why he would never return to England, even for a holiday, and already guess, very vaguely, at his connection with Moreton Intrinseca.

  Harry Cole and Jim Tutty got away with quite a number of small jobs and had every reason to congratulate themselves upon their choice of profession. They were not known to the police, and they both had a gift for keeping their mouths shut. Eventually, however, they were run in. My father’s orphanage education had been more thorough and liberal than is the custom to-day, and had taught him to think for himself. At the hearing in the magistrates’ court he spotted the one weakness in the police case, and, when the pair of them came up for trial at the Old Bailey he chose from the dock an ancient warhorse of a counsel, instructed him in whispers and got himself and his partner triumphantly acquitted.

  ‘You ought to a seed the judge’s face!’ chuckled Harry Cole. ‘But ’elp yerself, lad, without waitin’ for me, ’cos there’s worse a comin’!’

  After that they were closely marked men in London, whom the police intended to shop by fair means or foul; so they decided to keep on the move in the country and to aim at a few big jobs rather than a lot of little ones. My father hit on the idea—not nearly such common practice then—of watching the society news in the papers.

  ‘None o’ them film actresses,’ Cole said. ‘It was all Jerry princes in them days.’

  They spotted that their Serene Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Dettingen-zu-Langenschwalbach were due to stay with Sir Edward and Lady Lockinge at their place near Moreton Intrinseca. I saw the house when I was prowling round the district. It is now a racing stable, and paint and woodwork are crumbling away. But in 1908 it was the latest thing in rich bankers’ country houses—all gables, red brick, white balconies and solid comfort.

  My father reckoned that as the Lockinges had not entertained minor royalty before the whole place would be in an uproar of excitement and disorganization right up to the last moment. What pickings there would be he did not know, but that sufficient impudence would take hims
elf and Cole within range he was certain. Their only assets were two bicycles, a suitcase and outfits of black coat and striped trousers which made them—or at any rate my father—appear upper servants of the utmost respectability.

  ‘’E looked that reliable,’ Cole told me, ‘that if ’e drove up in a ’ansom cab you’d a given ’im a hunderd pounds to take round to the bank for you.’

  They changed into clean, stiff linen and their professional clothes under cover of a shrubbery. Then my father, bowler hat on head, introduced himself into the house as the English valet of a visiting German colonel, and to the colonel himself as the valet who had been attached to him by order of Sir Edward Lockinge. He picked up two violin cases which belonged to the Hungarian String Band, strolled majestically out with them to the shrubbery and then got Harry Cole through the back door as baggage-master and man-of-all-work to the band. The band, of course, was led to believe—like the colonel—that Sir Edward had attached a special underling to them, and Harry was soon at work helping them to put up their music stands and the screen of potted palms.

  Having established their bona fides quite well to answer hurried questions in the general rush, they explored the house. Luck, up to a point, was with them. Their Serene Highnesses arrived soon after six p.m. Sir Edward, Lady Lockinge and their guests were all bowing and curtseying in the entrance hall, and the servants were watching discreetly from the upper windows. Sir Edward, however, had a banker’s respect for material possessions. He had stationed a private detective in Lady Lockinge’s bedroom.

  ‘Ought to a trusted ’er ladyship’s maid,’ Harry said. ‘We wouldn’t ’ave done nothin’ to ’er.’

  As it was, they found the detective, like everyone else, gazing out of the window at all the animated flunkeydom on the gravelled drive and red-carpeted steps below. They asked him if they might have a look, too, and in a matter of seconds had him rolled up in a rug, gagged and deposited under the chintz flounces of Lady Lockinge’s bed. Then they walked peacefully out of the room with Lady Lockinge’s gold toilet set, her diamond tiara and necklace to match and a few odd rings, all stuffed into a pillow-case. There was nothing to hide it but the German colonel’s full dress uniform hanging over my father’s arm. That and his majestic walk acted as a passport so long as they were among the outbuildings of the house and could possibly be going to some obscure room where leather and spurs were polished. They put the stables between themselves and the house, and then had to waste a lot of time reaching the shrubbery by short dashes or on hands and knees. I gathered that, by the time they had changed and recovered their bicycles, their nerves were shattered.