‘Well, have you been good?’ he asked, ironically.
‘Cherub,’ answered Ben.
‘And, like all cherubs, have been trying to fly to heaven?’
The old man glanced at the window. Ben said nothing. It might have been a chance shot of the old man’s. Anyhow, it didn’t matter. If you nailed windows down, you must have been born suspicious!
‘Now, to resume our conversation,’ said the old man. ‘Sit down.’
‘I’m orl right standin’,’ replied Ben.
‘Sit down!’
Ben sat down.
‘That’s right,’ nodded the old man. ‘Good servants should always obey their masters, and, of course, you won’t get this job you’re after unless you’re a good servant. Do you know my name?’
‘Eh?’
‘I asked you if you knew my name? Since somebody sent you here, I assume you were told my name. Somebody did send you here, I take it?’
‘Wotcher takin’?’
‘Somebody sent you here?’
‘Yus.’
‘And told you my name?’
‘Yus.’
‘Good! Then, at long last, we have established our point! What is my name?’
‘Lovelight, ain’t it?’
The old man’s lips quivered.
‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Try again.’
Ben thought, and remembered.
‘Lovelice,’ he corrected himself.
‘That is, perhaps, near enough,’ nodded Mr Lovelace. ‘And now for yours?’
‘That don’t matter—’
‘Forgive me, but it does.’
‘Ben.’
‘Ben what?’
‘Ben nothing. Horphen.’
‘I see. Orphan. That’s interesting. No one to take any interest in you, eh? No one to inquire about you?’
‘On’y the King.’
‘I see. Well, well! That’s two of us named. And now for the third.’
‘Eh?’
‘Yes. The man who told you of this job. The man who met you at Southampton. The man who sent me a telegram that you were coming—’
‘Wot! Did ’e?’
‘—just after, so I understand, buying you a new cap?’ Mr Lovelace took a step closer to Ben, and fixed him with gimlet eyes. ‘What about his name?’
The atmosphere in the room suddenly tightened. Ben struggled against a return of panic. When panic returned to Ben, it never had far to travel.
‘Oh—’is nime?’ muttered Ben.
Now they were coming to it.
‘Yes! Sharp!’
‘It was White, sir,’ answered Ben. ‘“Tell ’im as Mr White sent yer,” ’e ses ter me.’
‘Mr White,’ repeated the old man, softly. ‘Yes—Mr White. But—I’m interested, Ben,’ he went on, after a short pause, during which the gimlet eyes grew more and more piercing. ‘Why do you say—was?’
‘Eh?’
‘Why not is?’ And while Ben was gulping, he added, ‘Yes, Ben. Tell me this? Why did you kill Mr White?’
Ben started violently, and backed. As he backed, Mr Lovelace advanced. The bent form appeared to rear and grow bigger.
‘Kill ’im?’ gasped Ben. ‘I never killed ’im!’
‘No?’ replied Mr Lovelace, raising a hand and pointing towards Ben’s head. ‘Then where, may I inquire, is your cap?’
13
The Attraction of Pink
Twenty-four hours ago, Ben had been presented with a new cap.
He had dropped it outside an inn. He had caught it in a lane just as the wind was lifting it from his tangled head. He had deposited it unconsciously on a spike while rolling down a hill, and had found it still on the spike when, considerably later, he had crawled up the hill. He had left it in a motor car, and had had it tossed after him. Surely, in these circumstances, some special God of Headgear was preserving it for the culmination of his strange journey to the house of Mr Lovelace on Wimbledon Common!
Yet now for the first time Ben realised that he had reached the end of his journey without his cap, and as the realisation became revealed on his countenance an exceedingly unpleasant glint departed rapidly and mysteriously from Mr Lovelace’s eye. In fact, when Mr Lovelace spoke again, breaking a silence beyond Ben’s capacity to break, his voice was almost friendly.
This sudden transition to the amicable eased, but did not clarify, Ben’s bewildered mind.
‘You didn’t know, then, that you had lost your cap?’ inquired the old man.
Ben shook his capless head.
‘I see. I see. But—well, you remember when you last had it?’ continued Mr Lovelace.
‘Me cap? When did I larse ’ave it?’ muttered Ben. ‘When did I?’
‘That’s what I want to know,’ nodded the old man, encouragingly.
‘I ’ad it afore I got in the trine.’
Why all this to-do about his cap? It was Ben’s loss, not Mr Lovelace’s …
‘Oh—you got in a train,’ said Mr Lovelace. ‘Yes, naturally. And when you got out of the train?’
Ben frowned. Something was worrying him, and he didn’t know what it was. It was like a tickle that you can’t find. You scratch your chest and it hops away to your stomach. You scratch your stomach, and it runs round to your back.
‘Yes—and when you got out of the train?’ repeated Mr Lovelace, patiently.
Another thing. Why was the old man so patient all of a sudden? Did that have anything to do with the tickle?
‘It don’t matter, guv’nor,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll git another aht o’ me wages.’
That was an attempt to scratch the cap right away. It was not successful. Mr Lovelace continued to press his point.
‘It does matter, it does matter!’ he retorted with odd definiteness. ‘I can’t have my servants catching cold! And are you always asked questions three times before you answer them? This is the third time. Did you have your cap when you got out of the train?’
Ben closed his eyes, to concentrate. Then he opened them, and having seen himself leave the train with his cap on, reported, ‘Tha’s right.’
‘You did have the cap?’
‘Tha’s right.’
‘And when you got here? When you reached my gate? Did you have the cap on then?’
Ben closed his eyes again. This time he only saw a large circular space with little black things wriggling about.
‘Dunno,’ he said, opening his eyes.
‘Think, man, think!’ commanded Mr Lovelace, becoming less patient.
‘Yer carn’t think when yer carn’t,’ answered Ben.
‘But surely you can remember being at the gate!’
‘Yus. But there was a mist, weren’t there?’
‘You don’t have to see a cap to know it’s on your head, idiot!’ rasped Mr Lovelace, the patience now evaporated. ‘You feel it, don’t you?’
‘Well, if yer do,’ retorted Ben, ‘yer don’t keep on sayin’ ter yerself, nah it’s hon, nah it’s orf, nah it’s hon, nah it’s orf! Yer gits useter to it like, doncher? Once a ’eavy trunk fell on me. It ’urt the fust hour, but arter six hours I didn’t notice it and went ter sleep.’
‘I am much obliged to you for this little glimpse of personal history,’ remarked Mr Lovelace, dryly, ‘but when the trunk was removed I expect you noticed it?’
‘Yus.’
‘And so you might have noticed the removal of your cap, despite the fact that a cap is lighter than a trunk. However, you don’t appear to have noticed it. Your head is probably too thick. Well, Ben, we will continue this conversation later. You and I have quite a lot to talk about. But, for a little while, kindly excuse me.’
The interview ended with startling rapidity. Before Ben realised it, the old man was out of the room again, and the door was locked upon him.
‘’Ere, wotcher lockin’ me in for?’ he shouted, in sudden rebellion.
Evidently Mr Lovelace did not take the rebellion seriously, for he paid no attention to it.
Running to the door, Ben stuck his ear to the keyhole and listened. He thought he heard the old man moving quietly about, but he could not be certain. He thought he heard a door open somewhere, but he could not be certain. He thought he heard a door close somewhere, but he could not be certain. In this gloomy, unsatisfactory house, one could not be certain of anything.
‘Corse, I’m ’aving a luvverly time,’ he informed himself, as he removed his ear from the key-hole and substituted his eye. ‘When I leave this blinkin’ world, I’ll cry meself ill!’
The eye was even less successful than the ear. You can see through a key-hole, but not through a key.
Ben left the door, and stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Was he just going to wait there and do nothing? He was sure Molly would not have waited and done nothing! She always had an idea up her sleeve, she had. She always found a way out, she did. Sheer brain, with a pretty face round it, she was!
‘’Allo—wot’s that?’ he muttered suddenly.
Whatever it was, it was outside the window. He slipped to the sideboard (that being the nearest name he could give to the massive piece of furniture that blocked the window’s lower portion) and climbed on to it. Lummy, the mist was thick!
But you could hear the noise through it! Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards …
‘Some’un walkin’ hup and dahn,’ decided Ben. ‘’Oo is it? Wish they’d git a bit closer, so’s I could spot ’em!’
Then a dazzling idea came to him. It was so dazzling that it almost dazzled him off his perch. Was it Molly?
Gaining the top of the sideboard, he prepared to tap cautiously on the glass, but just before he could do so the pacer outside drew momentarily closer and came into view. It was Mr Lovelace, walking with head bent low.
Ben did not tap on the window. He slithered hastily to the floor, and felt slightly sick.
The door he had heard close, then, had been the frontdoor, and Mr Lovelace’s abrupt necessity had apparently been to interview the fog!
‘Wot’s ’e doin’ aht there?’ Ben wondered. ‘And all doubled-up?’
The more Ben thought of Mr Lovelace, the less he liked him. The less he liked him, the more he wanted to get away from him. But the more he wanted to get away from him, the less anxious he was to get away without Molly. Thus in his mind was completed the vicious circle.
‘I s’pose I’ll ’ave ter wite ’ere till ’e comes back from ’is little walk in the sunshine,’ he thought.
He sat down in a chair. After all, there was no sense in standing all the time, was there? He chose the chair nearest the large fireplace. There wasn’t any fire, but even the memory of a fire warms you, and the memory existed in the grate, in the form of ashes, bits of burned-out coal, and scraps of half-charred paper.
There’d been a fire there yesterday. Probably there’d be a fire there tomorrow. Today had been missed, because Ben was calling.
‘Ain’t there no servants?’ he wondered, with his eye on one of the half-burned scraps of paper. ‘And if there ain’t, why ain’t there?’ The scrap of paper couldn’t tell him. ‘Yus, why does ’e live alone ’ere? Jest ’im and the dawg, eh? Dawg wot’s goin’ mad!’ A notion came to him. ‘P’r’aps dawg’s wot’s goin’ mad sahnds like ’uman bein’s wot ain’t?’ He hoped so. It would explain that human-like moan he had heard. Even a mad dog was better than that! ‘So long as the dawg don’t come dahn ’ere,’ he added the provision, ‘I don’t want me best trahsers rooined!’
As he went on thinking, he kept on eyeing the half-burned piece of paper. Why? And why did his thoughts gradually join his eyes, and give the eyes intelligence? What had the scrap of paper to do with it all?
Perhaps it was the colour of the paper that first translated it from a mere focusing point to an object of interest. The colour was pinkish. Even in the fading white light the pinkish colour revealed itself, whispering up from its bed of ashes, ‘I’m pink—I’m pink! Look at me! Pink!’
Well, what if it was pink? Why should that provide it with significance? Why should that make it more important than, say, the poker—a nice, useful-looking poker—or any other object in the room? Lots of things were pink! Roses, cheeks, pink sweets, pink dresses, pink anything, blotting-paper, kid’s writing-paper, yes, sometimes that was pink, he’d had a pink letter once, strawberry-ices, telegrams—
‘’Strewth! Telergrams!’ muttered Ben.
Yes, but why all this excitement about a telegram?
‘’Cos ’e sed ’e’d ’ad a telergram,’ Ben replied to the question. ‘Abart me!’
Thus, with labour, Ben at last tracked his growing interest to its source.
He rose from the chair, glancing furtively towards the window as he did so. All clear there! Then he dived down towards the grate, and seized the pink paper. The charred edges crumbled as he touched them, but his hand came away with a considerable prize.
He lowered his face till it was close to the paper. He was always polite to his reading and his food, meeting them half-way. The big, protruding mantelpiece, however, cut off what light there was, and after bumping his head he turned and risked the window.
Near the window the light was better, and he made out a bit of a word. The bit was:
‘… outhampton.’
‘Sarthampton!’ he murmured. ‘There y’are! That’s where it come from. Sarthampton!’
He searched diligently for other words. For a while he found none, but this was because in his emotion he had turned the paper over and was searching the wrong side. Turning it back to the right side, he was rewarded with a consecutive string of three words and a bit. The bit started it:
‘… ool calling himself Ben …’
‘Ben’s me!’ he blinked. ‘But wot’s ’ool?’
He knew his alphabet up to F for Food, and he tried it as far as he knew.
‘A, nuffink. B, bool. Wot’s that? C, cool. That’s wot it is in ’ere. D, dool. That’s when two blokes git fightin’. E, nuffink. F, fool. Eh?’
He referred to the string of words again. He prefaced an F. His face grew dark.
‘Fool!’ he growled. ‘That’s wot it is. A Hef!’
Odd, how one often accepts big things while little things rankle! If the writer of the telegram—it was the last telegram he ever wrote—had whipped out a dagger in the taxi and held it over Ben’s face, Ben would just have opened his mouth and taken it like a lamb, but when he called Ben a fool, not to his face, like, but behind his back, like, it raised a storm of indignation. The fool decided, while he began searching for more words, that he would prove the writer wrong! Yes, and Mr Lovelace, too! And the mad dog!
He only found one more word, but it was an immensely interesting word. It was:
‘… cap.’
Cap! So that was why Mr Lovelace was out in the garden! That was why he was all doubled up! He was looking for the cap that Ben had lost—the cap Mr White had insisted on buying him—after Mr White had bumped into his back and sent his old cap flying …
Something clicked at the door. Ben whirled round, instinctively closing his fingers over the paper in his hand. Mr Lovelace stood in the doorway, regarding him.
‘Are you being a good boy?’ inquired Mr Lovelace.
Ben did not reply. He was thinking too much. Mr Lovelace seemed to be thinking, too.
‘Lost your tongue, eh?’ the old man asked, after a pause.
‘No, it’s still ’ere,’ answered Ben, making an effort, ‘but wotcher want me ter say? “Yus, Daddy”?’
Mr Lovelace smiled faintly.
‘Well, go on being good,’ he said, ‘and then perhaps I’ll give you that job. I’ll be back again, very shortly.’
‘Oh, yer ain’t back yet fer keeps, then?’ queried Ben.
‘I’ll be back—for keeps—in a minute.’
‘Then wotcher come in this time for?’
‘Just to keep an eye on you.’
‘Oh! I see! Thort I’d steal the ceilin’! Well, s’
pose I don’t tike the job?’
‘Why not?’
‘A bit lonely, like, ain’t it? If there ain’t no hother servants?’
It was a leading question, but Mr Lovelace did not avoid it.
‘There are no other servants, Ben,’ he responded. ‘You and I will be here entirely alone.’
‘Oh!’
‘Yes. To tell you the truth, I usually have some difficulty in keeping servants here.’
‘Why?’
‘They say this place is haunted.’
‘’Aunted?’
‘No. Haunted. A silly idea, isn’t it? But I shall keep you, Ben! Oh, yes—I shall keep you!’
He slipped from the room as he spoke. And, as before, he locked the door after him.
Ben stood motionless for a minute. Then he raised a hand to his forehead, in order to set it going. The piece of paper he had been concealing in the hand fell to the ground. It was now a scrunched ball, and in stooping to regain it he slipped and kicked it towards the fireplace. It rolled into the wide hearth.
Ben went after it as though it had been a Rajah’s ruby. He ducked at the big protruding mantelpiece, and came up beyond. He found his head in the lower end of the chimney, and he was surprised to discover the chimney’s roominess. He glanced upwards … and then, once more, he heard the moan.
It came from above, and there was no mistaking its source this time. It was the moan of a girl.
14
The Mysterious Caller
Technically speaking, there is only one way out of a room, and that is by the door. In emergency, however, there are alternatives, these being in order of preference, the window and the chimney. The chimney is the least popular.
But, in the present case, the chimney bristled with favourable arguments, and the first argument was that the door and the window were impracticable. The door was locked, and the window was nailed. Of course, you can always smash a window with your fist or with a poker, and a poker was here for the purpose; but the noise of breaking a window is liable to bring more than glass upon your head! It was hardly likely that Mr Lovelace would fail to hear such a noise.
Moreover, even if Ben escaped successfully into the maze of mist outside, how would that avail him? The girl’s moan had come from inside, and it was the girl he had to reach!
Ben Sees It Through Page 9