by D. J. Taylor
“If you give it to Jeames here, he will see that His Lordship gets it.”
Mr. Pardew, having been relieved of his burden, very shortly afterwards found himself once more upon the steps of the club. He was by this time quite furious. The Earl of——refuse to see him! Who did the Earl of——think he was? Was his money not as good as the Earl’s, seeing that a goodly proportion of the Earl’s was got from other people? Such was the extent of Mr. Pardew’s rage that for a moment he almost raised his stick and beat against the door of the club with it. Indeed he might have done so had he not noticed that a policeman standing on the street corner to which the steps of the club descended was regarding him with more than usual interest. And so Mr. Pardew put away his stick, contenting himself with a sardonic glance at the club’s bow window, behind which three fat gentlemen were staring benignly out. Mr. Pardew knew one of these gentlemen—knew, too, how much he owed—and the recognition fuelled his contempt. The Earl of——! The Earl of——should be damned, and Mr. Pardew stand on the edge of the fiery pit cheering on his judges.
Thoroughly exasperated, he made his way down the steps of the club and into St. James’s Street, aware as he did so, yet not perhaps connecting the two, that the events of the previous five minutes had made the subject of his former brooding clearer in his mind. He continued up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly, where he waited irresolutely for a moment, staring into the doorways of the great shops, into Messrs. Manton, in whose window lay a pair of pistols with which he would quite happily have shot the Earl of——had that gentleman been to hand, and Fubsby’s the confectioner, where a demure young woman presided over a gigantic bridal cake, but coming to no speedy conclusion as to what he ought to do with himself for the remainder of the afternoon. There was his house in Kensington, but Mr. Pardew did not often present himself at his house in Kensington. There was his office, but Mr. Pardew had forsworn his office for the day. There was his club, but all clubs, whether his own or anyone else’s, were anathema to Mr. Pardew in his present mood. “D——n it!” he said to himself, passing a window where a couple of gentlemen in evening dress leaned forward and looked as if they might be about to engage him in conversation but that they were tailor’s dummies, “I shall go and see Jemima, indeed I shall!”
There was a cab rank twenty yards away, but Mr. Pardew had had enough of cabs. Instead, picking his way carefully over the greasy pavement and avoiding a pertinacious crossing-sweeper in search of a penny by almost jumping over his broom, he proceeded to Piccadilly Circus and stepped onto an omnibus. Seated on the lower deck, next to an old lady with a goose in a basket and behind a couple of men discussing the prospects of the Tutbury Pet in the next great sporting contest, Mr. Pardew found himself comparatively at ease. The subjects on which he had brooded on his way along the Strand came back to him, but they did so in a manner that enabled him to deal with them to his satisfaction. And in this way he mulled over certain of the pieces of information conveyed to him by Pearce until he had arranged them into a structure of which he could approve. “I could do that,” he said to himself occasionally, or “But then that would not do at all.” On these occasions his lips moved silently and he shook his stick, and the old lady wondered at him, grasped her basket more tightly to her and edged up nervously into her corner. The sporting gentlemen got up and went away, leaving a newspaper behind them, and Mr. Pardew, picking it up and cursorily examining it, saw that it contained news of a daring burglary recently committed in the metropolis, the burglars now apprehended through the agency of Captain McTurk, and read on with intense interest. If there was one name that Mr. Pardew hated and feared, would not allow to be breathed inside his head while he meditated his schemes, it was that of Captain McTurk, and yet the deliberations of the past few minutes had given him courage, and he fancied that, if the occasion permitted it, he could deal even with Captain McTurk.
By the time he approached St. John’s Wood, Mr. Pardew’s mood was altogether placid. There was a little row of genteel shops in the street abutting the row of laburnum-shrouded villas, and he strode into one of them and made several little purchases and had them packed up nice and neat in a paper bag. On his reaching the house, the glimpse of a female face through the window of the drawing room told him that some entertainment was in progress, and opening the front door with his key, he stepped into the parlour, beckoning the servant girl, who had bobbed her head into the hall, to follow.
“Who is it that your mistress has with her?”
“Indeed, sir, it’s her sister,” replied the girl, who shared Mr. Pardew’s views about the people in Islington.
“Would you tell her that I would like to speak to her immediately?”
The girl did as she was bidden. Mr. Pardew went and stood in the corner of the room, beneath a very fanciful etching of a young lady on a swing, looked at the etching and at his boots, found pleasure in neither, opened the pianoforte and touched a note or two with just enough force to make them resonate and then straightened himself and clasped his hands behind his back. Near at hand he heard the sound of a door closing sharply, a rustle of silks in the passage and then Jemima was standing before him, somewhat flustered and with her complexion even more pink and white than ever.
“Upon my word, Richard, I did not expect you, indeed I did not. You said Thursday forenoon, I am sure of it.”
“What is that…person doing in the house?”
“Indeed, Richard, it is very hard if a woman cannot see her own sister.”
“I suppose she wants money. Isn’t that the case of it?”
“No more than a trifle. It is not her fault. They have shut the factory where Ned was working, and there is rent owing.”
“An idle, good-for-nothing scapegrace.”
“It may be as you say”—Jemima’s voice as she said this was studiously respectful—“but would you have me sit by and have my own flesh and blood starve?”
Mr. Pardew shrugged his shoulders and jingled his money in his pockets. This was not a question that he could decently answer, and he knew it. In fact it would not have disturbed him in the least to learn that Mrs. Robey—this was the name of Jemima’s sister—had starved to death, but gentlemen are generally shy of saying such things.
“Will you not come and have some tea, Richard?”
“No, I will not. The girl may bring me some here if she likes.”
Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Pardew found that his ill humour was ebbing away. It occurred to him that, with the problem on which he had expended so much mental energy settled to his satisfaction, he could afford to be polite even to Mrs. Robey. He would not unbend sufficiently to see Mrs. Robey, but he would be…polite.
“See here, Jemima,” he said. “I have had a great deal to trouble me today, and these things turn a man sour. I mean no harm to your sister, indeed I do not. You had better give her these two sovereigns”—he extracted the money from a little heap that he brought out of his trouser pocket—“with my compliments and ask that she will take herself off.”
Wondering a little at such largesse, Jemima took the sovereigns in her outstretched hand and retired into the passage. Presently there came the sound of a door closing, and gazing from the parlour window—having first chosen a vantage point from which he could not be seen—Mr. Pardew saw a stout, red-faced woman in a black coat and bonnet making her way hastily towards the gate. Once she was out of sight, the nervousness that had affected him since the beginning of the day began to recede. He looked around the parlour and its furnishings and remembered that he had paid for them. He recalled the morning’s interview with Mr. Crabbe and fancied that once again he had got the better of the old lawyer. He thought of Jemima and told himself that should events fall out as he proposed, there were certain things he might do for her: a house, perhaps, up the river in Richmond, far away from the base intimacies of Islington; a carriage in which she might be driven of an afternoon with himself beside her. In this way, standing on the parlour carpet with his hands in his
pockets, Mr. Pardew built up numberless airy castles round whose battlements he stalked, until a soft step interrupted his reverie.
“Gracious, Richard, you have been a very long time.”
“Eh? Well, perhaps I have been. I shall come now, at any rate.”
Whatever resentment might have been bred up in Jemima’s pink and white bosom by Mr. Pardew’s remarks about her sister had been softened by receipt of the two sovereigns. Leading her lord and master to the drawing room, she administered tea and certain of the delicacies he had brought home in the paper bag with a humility that Mr. Pardew found very agreeable. Beyond the window the rain had ceased to fall and a weak sun was shining across the mottled grass and the laburnums, and Mr. Pardew rather thought that he liked it. In this way he passed a very pleasant half hour drinking his tea, staring at Mr. Etty’s cupids and supposing that the day had turned out largely to his advantage.
“What was it that you had to trouble you today?” Jemima wondered meekly as the servant girl came in to clear away the tea things.
“To trouble me? I don’t know that there was so very much. There is a gentleman—the Earl of——in fact—whom I was compelled to go and see at his club to remind him that he owed me money.”
“Gracious! And you told him so to his face?”
“Well…I left a letter there for him, which is much the same thing.”
“I should think that it was,” replied Jemima, who loved talk of this kind.
“His Lordship spends too much on horses, that is my opinion of it. By the by,” Mr. Pardew persisted, whose benevolence knew no bounds, “how should you like to go to the Derby this year?”
“I should like it very much.”
And so they sat and talked some more about your young fashionable sprigs of aristocracy and their weakness for the turf—Mr. Pardew meditating once more on the decision he had reached, Jemima thinking of the Derby and what she might wear and what might be the outcome of things—and eventually had supper over the fire and were very comfortable together.
In the course of the next few days, when not engaged in discounting his bills or sitting in his office devising tasks for his clerk, Mr. Pardew undertook a number of useful and prudent activities. Arriving at Carter Lane early the next morning, so early as to precede Grace by a full eighty minutes, he wrote a letter, in a disguised hand and signing himself “Elias Goodfellow,” to William Tester, Esquire, of Fairfax Street, the Borough, and caused this missive to be taken off immediately by a messenger boy whom he found lurking by the side door of an inn twenty yards farther down the lane. If Bob Grace, arriving at his customary hour of ten, wondered at his master’s presence behind his desk, he did not say so but contented himself with whistling under his breath and laying out fresh sheets of blotting paper in a very significant manner. “Upon my soul, Grace, you are very cheerful this morning,” Mr. Pardew observed at one point. “Indeed I am, sir, as cheerful as may be,” Grace told him, even going so far as to buff the bleary window with a piece of rag he produced from a basket.
All this took place quite early in the morning. Subsequently, having left his clerk in charge, Mr. Pardew betook himself to Clerkenwell and to a little alley in the vicinity of Amwell Street, where lodged a gentleman named Mr. File. Mr. File was a demure little man of about sixty with a bald head and a very powerful pair of spectacles who some ten years before had been greatly celebrated in the City of London as a locksmith. It was said at the time that Messrs. Chubb, by whom he was employed, could do nothing without him, and that the safes of half a dozen of the great banking houses had been secured by his agency alone. A champion cracksman, arraigned at the Old Bailey, confessed that Mr. File’s skill had altogether defeated him and was chided for this failing by the prosecuting barristers. And yet somehow Mr. File’s reputation had not thrived in the wake of these accomplishments. It was rumoured that the company he kept was not of a kind that Messrs. Chubb, or indeed the City police force, would have liked had they known of it. Towards the end of the year in which the champion cracksman had stood at the dock of the Old Bailey and testified to Mr. File’s ingenuity, there was a robbery at Messrs. Collingwood, the City tallow dealers, in which a quantity of bullion was got out of a safe and spirited away into thin air, the doors of Messrs. Collingwood’s establishment remaining bolted throughout, and it was said by those who knew about these things that Mr. File had something to do with it. Naturally, Mr. File had protested this libel, which appeared in an evening newspaper, but it was noticeable that no action was brought and that very soon after, Mr. File’s employers decided that they would dispense with his services. Thereafter Mr. File retired into private life, in which capacity Mr. Pardew, who had perhaps had some earlier dealings with him, sought him out and talked to him for upwards of an hour. Their conversation concluded with Mr. Pardew shaking his head and enquiring of Mr. File if he thought it could be done and Mr. File nodding his and remarking that he thought that, given fair weather, if not with odds so great as Lombard Street to a china orange, it possibly might.
Two days later, Mr. Pardew could be found at London Bridge Station, very spruce in a green travelling cape with a bag under his arm and looking for all the world like a man who intends to avail himself of the amenity of the boat train. In this capacity he could be seen, by anyone who cared to look, prowling in a very interested manner up and down the station concourse, examining the timetables and generally immersing himself in the life of the place. A wagon came rattling up from the City as he stood there, and Mr. Pardew looked on with apparent nonchalance as a couple of policemen came forward under the stationmaster’s eye and superintended the transfer of a large crate, bound around with red and black tape, into that gentleman’s office. In short, there was nothing that Mr. Pardew did not see. He peered into the gentlemen’s cloakrooms and satisfied himself of their salubrity. He went and had his boots shined by the bootblack, took a cup of coffee in the refreshment rooms and purchased a newspaper at the bookstall. Then, when perhaps half an hour had passed, he proceeded to the ticket office and, emerging from it some few minutes later, stepped onto the Dover train. Here, seated in a third-class compartment, he took quite a lively interest in his surroundings: in the attentions of the guard who moved up and down the train, in the number of stations through which they passed and the time it took to pass them. At Redhill, through which the Dover train in those days passed, he got up from his seat and took a little saunter, walking as far as the guard’s van, into which he surreptitiously peeped, assuring himself that it contained a safe, and then wandering back, passing the guard as he did so, that official very courteously holding a connecting door between two carriages open for him as he went by.
Arriving at Folkestone, where a spring breeze had got up, causing him to press the collar of his cape more tightly around him, Mr. Pardew, in common with those of his fellow passengers who alighted from the train, made his way to the harbour pier. He did not, however, purchase a ticket at the shipping office. Instead he amused himself by observing preparations for the departure of the Boulogne steamer, noting as he did so the location of the railway office and the behaviour of the railway superintendent, who several times emerged from it to conduct some piece of business before returning to the room and locking the door behind him. For an hour Mr. Pardew stood on the pier amidst the crowds of people watching the steamer make ready. At length there was a crunch of iron wheels and a vehicle rolled up to the harbour from which was lowered the safe that Mr. Pardew believed he had seen in the guard’s van. And Mr. Pardew marked down in his mind the manner in which it was picked up, set down and examined before being deposited out of sight in the ship’s hold. The wind picked up and drops of rain blew in from the grey clouds massing beyond the arm of the sea, and Mr. Pardew walked to the end of the pier and stood looking at the waves with keen satisfaction as the ship’s bell rang and the gangways were gathered up and the idlers and the venerable gentlemen in oilskin suits stood back from the pier rail and went in search of some fresh diversion. The shi
p passed by, its prow dipping into the waves and then rising again, with the gulls wheeling in its wake and black smoke disgorging into the shifting air above, and Mr. Pardew, seeing all these things, went off to eat his dinner in the Folkestone Harbour Hotel, where he pecked up a beefsteak, drank off a pint of porter and was as comfortable as a man can be who finds himself in a seaside hotel out of season when the wind is up.
XIII
“NOT IN EARNEST!”
Upon my word, Mother, I think you have been very imprudent!”
“Imprudent! I suppose that is one way of looking at it.”
“You will not mind my saying that it is the only way of looking at it. To arrive at a gentleman’s house in the middle of nowhere, unannounced, in absolute defiance of his wishes and the advice of his lawyers—well!”
“Gracious, John. You talk as if I had wished to walk off with his plate or—or had asked to see the deeds to the house.”
Neither of the participants in this exchange, who were Mr. John Carstairs and his mother, took part in it with the least enthusiasm or with the merest semblance of personal ease. Just at this moment they were both in the back parlour: John Carstairs seated at the table behind his breakfast cup; Mrs. Carstairs standing in an uncertain attitude by the mantelpiece. A parlourmaid, half in and half out of the doorway, completed the scene.
“All I can say, Mother, is that I should like to know what you meant by it.”
“Meant by it! I simply determined—there is no need to leave the room, Jane—that as you would do nothing about the matter, I should do something.”
“After I had expressly gone to discuss it with Mr. Crabbe!”
“And got a very unsatisfactory answer for your pains.”
The presence of the parlourmaid leaning over the table to retrieve the breakfast things now preventing any harsher expostulation, mother and son fell silent and looked at one another again. Each was crosser with the other than at any time in their previous dealings: Mrs. Carstairs because she believed that her son had been weak; John Carstairs because he believed that his mother had wantonly meddled in affairs that were quite outside her proper sphere. Each, though, was quietly resolved to conciliate the other: John Carstairs because he hated all disputes and disagreements, whether with his mother or anyone else; Mrs. Carstairs because she was aware that a united front with her son offered the only means of settling the business to her satisfaction.