“Oh, I don’t suppose he’s so important that I must stand on the mat with my hat off,” said Derek with a laugh.
It happened that there was no traffic block and they arrived at the door a minute or so before the time. The new clerk, however, as became a new clerk, was punctual to his appointment. For as Lois and Crayle, after crossing the big outer office, entered the corridor along which the private offices were ranged, he entered the outer office from the street. They heard his voice as he asked for Lord Thewliss and the commissionaire’s reply.
“You’re expected, sir. Will you come this way?”
Lois turned and caught a glimpse of a shortish, squarely-built man with a red moustache, heavy as a dragoon’s. She dropped her handbag, picked it up quickly and without a word to Derek slipped into her own room, keeping her back to the corridor. Once there, she shut the door and stood with a face suddenly grown very white.
“He couldn’t have known me,” she reassured herself. “It’s dark in the corridor and he saw no more than my back.”
But she stood quite still and listened. She heard the solid tread of his feet as he passed, and then the door of Mark Thewliss’ room at the end of the corridor shut.
So Mr. Joseph Wyatt had come masquerading as a clerk to Mardyke and Campion’s. No doubt Derek’s attendance had been required, so that someone with especial authority might introduce Mr. Joseph Wyatt to the staff and give him the freedom of the big building. It was not in the nature of Lois to run away. She had all that confidence in her ability to meet a difficulty which marks the girl of her time. In any case, she must run into Mr. Joseph Wyatt very soon. She would meet him then this afternoon, in her own domain, and she sat down at her table with a curious little smile upon her face.
Mr. Joseph Wyatt knew who she was. Had he not made regular pilgrimages to Liverpool to make sure that the Perriton family was living its own life without plotting to cause trouble to Mark Thewliss? And she knew who he was. But she had this tremendous advantage. Mr. Wyatt wasn’t aware that she knew who he was. It would amuse her to see that self-satisfied little man twirling his ridiculous moustache upon the threshold of her room, perhaps asking her for her assistance in learning his new duties. He would without doubt be not a little surprised to discover her established there. Very likely he might be not a little suspicious. But since she knew who and what he was, there were a few simple precautions which prudence suggested she should take. For instance. She dusted the keys of her typewriting machine, and then locked the cover over it and then dusted the cover. She tidied her writing-table and carefully wiped it clean. She tore the top sheet from her blotting-pad, held it for a moment in doubt as to how she should dispose of it, looked for one second at the matchbox, for another at the grate, and finally folded it and hid it away in her handbag. Then she wiped the arms of her chair and the rail at the top. She had now finished her preparations, and hearing the door at the end of the corridor shut again, she drew on her gloves and set her own door a trifle ajar.
She heard Derek speaking:
“I’ll show you round the building now, Mr. Wyatt, and introduce you to the staff.”
Lois slipped on her coat and hat. She must not be found in any attitude of expectation; she would be going away.
In the corridor Derek’s voice was saying:
“This is my room which you are to share with me for the moment, and here is the office of Mr. Gregory, our manager.” A door-handle rattled. “Mr. Gregory, may we come in?” and the voice ceased as Mr. Gregory’s door closed upon him and the new clerk. Lois locked the drawers of her table, after making sure that she had left in them no letters which she had handled. Before she had finished the guide and his tourist were out in the corridor again.
“This is Miss Perriton’s room.”
“This one with the door open?”
Lois stood with her bunch of keys in her hand stooping at the table, her face towards the door, in an attitude of easy curiosity perfectly assumed. But her little piece of miming was wasted.
“And Miss Perriton, I understand, has nothing to do with the staff?”
“Nothing,” she heard Derek reply. “She is Lord Thewliss’ personal secretary.”
“Quite.”
And the two men passed on. Lois stood up with an odd little smile upon her face. She could not deny a sensation of relief. She was to be left outside the reach of Mr. Wyatt’s investigations. She finished locking up the drawers of her table, however, and then having given time for the new clerk and his cicerone to branch off towards the laboratory, she walked through the outer office to the street and turned into High Holborn.
Even then, however, she did not visit her dressmaker. It was growing dark. She stopped a taxi and was driven to the Church of St. James in Piccadilly. In a footpath by the side of this church stands a very busy post office. From this post office Lois dispatched a telegram, and then walked home to Grosvenor Square.
Lady Thewliss gave a small dinner-party that night at which Derek Crayle was present and after which a new violinist was to play. Derek made his way to the couch on which Lois was sitting, and in an interval of the music he asked how the dress was progressing.
“I didn’t go to the dressmaker’s at all,” Lois answered. “I want a frock of a particular pale shade of green and I mean to see by daylight that the colour is exactly right. So I shall go to-morrow morning instead. And how do you like your new room-mate?”
Derek Crayle shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s only temporarily with me,” he answered, and he smiled. “He paid you a great compliment.”
Lois sat up in her chair.
“But I haven’t met him. You didn’t bring him to my room.”
“There wasn’t any reason to,” Derek answered. “But after I had shown him round and left him to go back by himself, he forgot which was my door.”
“And went into my room, I suppose,” said Lois with a curious smile.
“Yes, I found him there. He was tremendously impressed by its tidiness.”
Lois nodded her head.
“He would be,” she remarked. “What time did he leave the office?” she asked unconcernedly, and Derek gave her the hour. It was within ten minutes or so of the time when she herself had reached Grosvenor Square. She had not been followed, then, to the post office off Piccadilly. But she could not say as much the next morning. She went to her dressmaker in Curzon Street at ten in the morning and spent the best part of an hour there. On leaving she walked up South Audley Street towards Oxford Street, meaning to cross the road to a famous store to buy some silk stockings. But she had not taken a great many steps before she had an odd impression that she was being followed. She looked about her. An errand boy was trundling along a delivery tricycle; a taxicab was patrolling in search of a fare. A woman was gazing into a shop. There was certainly no one with a dragoon’s moustache anywhere within view.
“I am ready to imagine these things,” she said, chiding herself. “I shall develop the vapours next and go into swoons.”
None the less the impression persisted. She loitered, stopping here and there at a window. But if she was being followed it was by an adept. She saw no one to confirm her in her alarm. However, Lois was no half-wit herself. She so timed her walk that she arrived at the edge of the crossing in Oxford Street just as the constable was changing his position to hold up the cross traffic and release that going east and west. Lois had just time to sprint across the road before the vans and the omnibuses, the cars and the taxis which throng Oxford Street and mask one pavement from the other, hurled themselves forward like so many deadly missiles released from so many gigantic catapults. A glance assured her that she had been the last across the road.
“Safety first,” she said gaily to herself. “That’s a very good joke,” and she disappeared into the huge store. All the red moustaches in the world might bristle and twirl as much as they pleased, not one of them would glow brightly enough to pick her out among the customers who thronged those innumerab
le aisles.
“Business first, pleasure afterwards,” she said, being in an excellent good humour. “In the way of maxims, the copybooks have nothing on me.”
She dived accordingly to the basement, and only after ten minutes sought pleasure in the buying of the diaphanous pale-hued silk stockings which were to intervene between the green of her shoes and the green of her frock when Mark Thewliss gave his ball at Upper Theign.
But the pleasure had evaporated. She thrust her hands into the stockings and spread them out without either criticism or satisfaction. She was inattentive. She took, in the end, what the saleswoman recommended. She came out by the door into Orchard Street, certainly with a little parcel dangling from a finger, and certainly too with the bitterest disappointment which had ever marred her lovely face.
“There was a hiatus,” she repeated to herself. Yes, indeed. There was a hiatus wide enough and deep enough to engulf for ever all her projects and ambitions. The tears glistened in her eyes — a rare event with Lois. Had she still been in the copybook mood, she might have said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
XXIII. THE HIATUS
MARK THEWLISS EXPLAINED the hiatus ten days later. It was the morning of the first Thursday in December. On Friday his household was to move along to Upper Theign and stay there until the New Year was in. Thursday, therefore, was the day for winding up all business which could be wound up this side of Christmas. By twelve o’clock Mark had cleared away the most pressing of his problems and sent a messenger for Derek Crayle. Derek, upon answering the summons, found Mark leaning against the mantelshelf with his back to the fire, and seated on a chair facing Mark, very correct and prim with his feet together and a perfectly impassive face, the partner of his room Mr. Joseph Wyatt.
“Shut the door, Derek, and take a pew,” said Mark. “It is high time that I explained to you who Mr. Wyatt is and what his particular duties have been in my firm.”
“Yes, I have been a little perplexed about them myself,” said Derek, as he dropped into an armchair by the side of the fire-place. “But then I’ve learnt in the last month or two that you can keep secrets up your sleeve with less appearance of mystery than any conjurer I’ve ever met.”
Mark sat down at his table, which stood endwise against the wall on the other side of the grate. He had a window behind his left shoulder so that the light fell conveniently upon his papers, and he had the fire behind him on his right hand.
“It’s gratifying to me to hear those kind words from you, Derek,” he said agreeably, “for every now and then I’ve had a suspicion that you thought me a damned old fool.”
Derek looked firmly at the head of Mardyke and Campion.
“A truce to this badinage, sir, if you please.”
Meanwhile Mr. Wyatt stared, neither amused nor surprised nor interested, into the fire. Occasionally he twisted one of the antlers of his moustache. But the gesture was meaningless. He had the look of a wax figure with an automatic movement.
“Mr. Wyatt is not a clerk at all,” Mark continued easily. “Nor was he engaged because he was an organiser with new methods. That was merely an excuse to give him a right of investigation. Mr. Wyatt is a private inquiry agent.”
“What?” Derek jumped in his chair. “A private inquiry agent.”
“Quite,” said Mr. Wyatt, and he gave both the red horns an upward twist.
“He is in the service of Dickson’s, a highly reputable firm recommended to me by my lawyers.”
“The best firm in London,” Mr. Wyatt said complacently.
Derek broke in impatiently upon these testimonials. There was a time for bouquets, but the time was not now. Derek indeed was more than a little scared.
A private inquiry agent meant more than a mistake, more than something honestly lost. There was a secret of immense value, written down on paper, hidden away somewhere — even he was not quite sure where — a secret which he had vainly implored Mark Thewliss to protect. ‘What if that had been stolen!
“I’m not doubting the status of your firm, Mr. Wyatt,” he cried. “But I should like to know what has happened.”
“Something uncommonly unpleasant,” replied Mark. But he was more uncomfortable than distressed. The injury, it seemed, was to his feelings. He was hurt rather than damaged. And Derek was a little reassured.
Mark Thewliss rose and turned to a safe with a combination lock which stood in a recess behind his desk.
“You don’t know the combination which opens this, Derek?”
“No.”
“Nor anyone except myself. And I change it once a month. Even Mr. Wyatt failed to open it.”
“That is so,” Mr. Wyatt agreed. “But those safes have been opened without the help of stethoscopes or experience.”
“How?” asked Derek.
“By chance,” answered Mr. Wyatt. “The probabilities against success are enormous, calculated mathematically. Yet it has happened, and more often than you would imagine. A lucky twist to the right, another to the left, a third to the right again, and the tumblers have fallen into their proper places and the safe door has swung open. Novices have opened such doors.”
Derek’s fear was once more whipped to activity. He watched Mark plant himself between the safe door and Wyatt and himself. Both of them could be sure by the bend at the elbow that Mark’s hand was raised to the lock. But his shoulders hid from them his movements. Mark stood back and with a pull at the knob opened the thick steel door. He thrust his arm into the safe and brought out a long sealed envelope. Then he closed the safe again and carried the envelope back to the table. He showed his audience that there was no writing upon it at all.
“This isn’t the original envelope,” he said. “The one which may have something to tell is in Mr. Wyatt’s possession. This is of no importance. So I open it;” and tearing it open as he spoke, he removed the contents and tossed it on to the fire. The contents consisted of five sheets of ivory white note-paper, and once more Derek’s alarm was quenched. For he remembered that the formula which Mark had brought out with him from his laboratory after his experiment at Upper Theign had been written out upon greyish blue sheets, and that there had been six of them. But his relief was not to last.
“You’ll remember, Derek,” Mark explained, “that on the evening after I finished my demonstration I locked myself up for an hour and a half in the library.”
“Yes.”
“During that hour and a half I copied the various processes out in their order, and burnt up into minute ashes the six sheets on which they were originally jotted down. These five sheets are the copy,” and he showed them to Derek. They were covered with minute handwriting and diagrams. “They are more compact, you see, and I enclosed them in one of these envelopes, which are specially made to hold just these sheets of paper flat.”
He took from a rack in front of him a strong squarish envelope and held it out.
“Do you see?”
“Yes.”
“Then I sealed the envelope, put it away and—”
“And went off in your yacht for a month,” Derek interrupted hotly, bethinking him of the ridiculous secret drawer in the library table at Upper Theign which stood open as often as not for all the staff and any visitor to see. He had himself protested on that very evening against the use of that drawer as a receptacle for this treasure of a formula.
“And went off in my yacht for a month,” Mark retorted equably, “taking with me the seal which I used.”
“There is no copy of it?”
“None.”
“You are sure?”
“Quite.”
Derek stared in perplexity at Mark Thewliss. The formula, the work of thirty years,
“Those hopes and fears, surprises and delays,
That long endeavour, earnest, patient, slow,
Trembling at last to its assured result” —
at dawn of a summer morning in the Berkshire hills, had been tampered with. Here was Mr. Joseph Wyatt to prove it.
Y
et Mark spoke with a level voice. There was in him none of that violent anger which theft even of some trivial thing arouses. There was no sign that he had suffered a loss. Philosophic calm was no doubt an excellent quality, but he, Derek, had no use for it. Derek Crayle had set his heart utterly on the successful exploitation of the universal formula — and not on account of the profit in money which would come from it. It was to be a resounding triumph for Mark Thewliss. Derek’s liking for Mark had grown into a form of hero-worship, mingled with a curious form of patronage. Mark was in his view a great man who wanted a young man to look after him. The formula would spread Mark’s name, give him such power in his industry as no man had ever held, and perhaps fulfil his ideas. Derek was not so sure that they were not rather fanciful. Universal peace, through universal good-humour, through cheap dyes, through the universal formula, was perhaps a fantastic way of breeding the world’s great winner. But then Mark might be right. Dreamers often were right. Derek was set on Mark’s getting his opportunity of proving that he was right, if he was right. And here was Mark himself only uncomfortable, whilst he, Derek, was boiling with exasperation!
Mark continued:
“About a month after I returned to Upper Theign, I brought the envelope up to my office here and locked it in the safe.”
“You ought to have sent it to the bank,” said Derek reproachfully.
“I know. I kept saying that myself. I said: Mark, your name’s Ask-for-Trouble William.’ But I just couldn’t send it to the bank. There! I couldn’t,” and he smiled very pleasantly across the room at his young partner, asking for his indulgence. “I wasn’t quite sure, you see, that there wasn’t some little improvement, some little simplification in the process which I could make — something which would reduce the cost of production. So I wanted the formula at hand, near to me, so that if an idea occurred to me I could get it out in a second and see if the idea worked before I forgot it.”
“And you did get it out, no doubt?” Derek asked.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 606