Bodies from the Library 5, page 5
‘If you will put him into it and strap the lid down, it will be all right. I make myself ridiculous,’ he said, with a feeble attempt at a smile. ‘A big strong fellow whose stomach turns over at the sight of a cat. But it is so.’
The Ginger King resented the indignity of being imprisoned in a basket; it struggled and spat and bit as if it were the most communistic of cats, but the superintendent and the sergeant between them got it strapped down at last.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, sir,’ said Holloway. ‘I’ll send the little brute by one of my men round to your hotel—Percy Street, wasn’t it?—and then you won’t be bothered with it at all.’
But Enoch wouldn’t hear of putting the station to so much trouble.
‘Oh no, no! You are kindness itself, Superintendent. But once he is in the basket, I shall not mind him. I shall take him home at once and my wife will keep him away from me. It is all right. See, I carry him.’
Enoch Swallow certainly did carry him, but very gingerly, and with the basket held well away from his side.
‘It would be no trouble to send him along,’ the superintendent urged, but again the Syrian refused, and with the same vehemence which he had shown before. The police had its work to do. It would humiliate him to interfere with it for so small a reason.
‘I have after all not very far to go,’ and with still more effusive protestations of his gratitude, he backed out of the police station.
The superintendent returned to his office.
‘He wouldn’t let me send it home for him,’ he said. He was a very mystified man. ‘Funny! That’s what I call it. Yes, funny.’ He looked up and broke off suddenly. ‘Hallo! Where’s Monsieur Hanaud gone to?’
Both Middleton and Ricardo had been watching through the crack in the door the scene in the outer office. Neither of them had seen or heard Hanaud go. There was a second door which opened on the passage to the street, and by that second door Hanaud had slipped away.
‘I am sorry,’ said the superintendent, a little stiffly. ‘I should have liked to say goodbye to him.’
The superintendent was hurt, and Mr Ricardo hastened to reassure him.
‘It wasn’t discourtesy,’ he said staunchly. ‘Hanaud has manners. There is some reason.’
Middleton and Ricardo returned to the latter’s house in Grosvenor Square, and there, a little more than an hour afterwards, Hanaud rejoined them. To their amazement he was carrying Enoch Swallow’s basket, and from the basket he took out a contented, purring, gracious Ginger King.
‘A little milk, perhaps?’ Hanaud suggested. And having lapped up the milk, the Ginger King mounted a chair, turned in his paws under his chest and once more surveyed the world with indifferent eyes.
Hanaud explained his sudden departure.
‘I could not understand why this man who could not abide a cat refused to let the superintendent send it home for him. No, however much he shivered and puked, he would carry it home himself. I had a little thought in my mind that he didn’t mean to carry it home at all. So I slipped out into the street and waited for him and followed him. He had never seen me. It was as easy as the alphabet. He walked in a great hurry down to the Charing Cross Road and past the Trafalgar Square and along the Avenue of Northumberland. At the bottom of the Avenue of Northumberland there is—what? Yes, you have guessed him. The river Thames. “Aha,” I say to myself, “my friend Enoch, you are going to drown the Ginger King. But I, Hanaud, will not allow it. For if you are so anxious to drown him, the Ginger King has something to tell us.”
‘So I close up upon his heels. He crossed the road, he leaned over the parapet, swinging the basket carelessly in his hand as though he was thinking of some important matter and not of the Ginger King at all. He looked on this side and that, and then I slip my hand under the basket from behind, and I say in his ear:
‘“Sir, you will drop that basket, if you don’t look out.”
‘Enoch, he gave a great jump and he drop the basket, this time by accident. But my hand is under it. Then I take it by the handle, I make a bow. I hand it to him, I say “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” and lifting my hat, I walk away. But not so far. I see him black in the face with rage. But he dare not try the river again. He thinks for a little. Then he crosses the road and dashes through the Underground Station. I follow as before. But now he has seen me. He knows my dial,’ and at Middleton’s surprised expression he added, ‘my face. It is a little English idiom I use. So I keep further back, but I do not lose him. He runs up that steep street. Half-way up, he turns to the right.’
‘John Street,’ said Mr Ricardo.
‘Half-way up John Street, there is a turning to the left under a building. It is a tunnel and dark. Enoch raced into the tunnel. I follow, and just as I come to the mouth of it, the Ginger King comes flashing out like a strip of yellow lightning. You see. He could not drown him, so in the dark tunnel he turns him loose with a kick no doubt to make him go. The Ginger King is no longer, if he ever was, the pet of the sad Mrs Swallow. He is just a stray cat. Dogs will set on him, no one will find him, all the time he must run and very soon he will die.
‘But this time he does not need to run. He sees or smells a friend, Hanaud of the Sûrété, that joke, that comic—eh, my friend?’ and he dug a fist into Ricardo’s ribs which made that fastidious gentleman bend like a sapling in a wind. ‘Ah, you do not like the familiarities. But the Ginger King to the contrary. He stops, he mews, he arches his back and rubs his body against Hanaud’s leg. So I pick him up and I go on into the tunnel. It winds, and at the point where it bends I find the basket with the lid. It is logical. Enoch has dismissed the Ginger King. Therefore he wants nothing to remind him of the Ginger King. He drops the basket. I insert the Ginger King once more. He has confidence, he does not struggle. I strap down the lid. I come out of the tunnel. I am in the Strand. I look right and left and everywhere. There is no Enoch. I call a taximan.’
‘And you are here,’ said Ricardo, who thought the story had been more than sufficiently prolonged. But Hanaud shook his head.
‘No, I am not here yet. There are matters of importance in between.’
‘Very well,’ said Ricardo languidly. ‘Proceed.’
And Hanaud proceeded.
‘I put the basket on the seat and I say to the taximan, “I want”—guess what?—but you will not guess. “I want the top-dog chemist.” The taximan wraps himself round and round with clothes and we arrive at the top-dog chemist. There I get just the information which I need and now, my friend Ricardo, here I am with the Ginger King who sits with a Chinese face and will tell us nothing of what he knows.’
But he was unjust. For later on that evening, in his own good time, the Ginger King told them plenty.
They were sitting at dinner at a small mahogany table bright with silver and fine glass: Mr Ricardo between Hanaud and Middleton, and opposite to Ricardo, with his head just showing above the mahogany, the Ginger King. Suddenly one of those little chancy things upon which Hanaud had preached his sermon, happened. The electric light went out.
They sat in the darkness, their voices silenced. Outside the windows the traffic rumbled by, suddenly important. An unreasonable suspense stole into the three men, and they sat very still and aware that each was breathing as lightly as he could. Perhaps for three minutes this odd tension lasted, and then the invaluable Thomson came into the room carrying a lighted lamp. It was an old-fashioned oil affair with a round of baize cloth under the base, a funnel and an opaque globe in the heart of which glowed a red flame.
‘A fuse has blown, sir,’ he said.
‘At a most inconsiderable moment,’ Mr Ricardo replied. He had been in the middle of a story and he was not pleased.
‘I’ll replace it at once, sir.’
‘Do so, Thomson.’
Thomson set the glowing lamp in the middle of the table and withdrew. Mr Middleton leaned forward towards Ricardo.
‘You had reached the point where you tiptoed down the stairs—’
‘No, no,’ Ricardo interrupted. ‘The chain is broken. The savour of the story gone. It was a poor story, anyway.’
‘You mustn’t say that,’ cried Hanaud. ‘The story was of a thrill. The Miss Braddon at her best.’
‘Oh well, well, if you really think so,’ said Mr Ricardo, tittering modestly; and there were the three faces smiling contentedly in the light of the lamp, when suddenly Hanaud uttered a cry.
‘Look! Look!’
It was a cry so sharp that the other two men were captured by it and must look where Hanaud was looking. The Ginger King was staring at the lamp, its amber eyes as red as the flame in the globe, its body trembling. They saw it rise on to its feet and leap on to the edge of the table, where it crouched again, and rose again, its eyes never changing from their direction. Very delicately it padded between the silver ornaments across the shining mahogany. Then it sat back upon its haunches and, raising its forepaws, struck once violently at the globe of the lamp. The blow was so swift, so savage that it shocked the three men who watched. The lamp crashed upon the table with a sound of broken glass and the burning oil was running this way and that and dropping in great gouts of fire on to the carpet.
Middleton and Ricardo sprang up, a chair was overturned.
‘We’ll have the whole house on fire,’ cried Ricardo as he rang the bell in a panic; and Hanaud had just time to snatch up the cat as it dived at the green cloth on the base of the stand, before the flames caught it; and it screamed and fought and clawed like a mad thing. To get away? No, but to get back to the overturned lamp.
Already there was a smell of burning fabrics in the room. Some dried feathery grass in a vase caught a sprinkle of the burning oil and flamed up against the wallpaper. Thomson arrived with all the rugs he could hurriedly gather to smother the fire. Pails of water were brought, but a good many minutes had passed before the conflagration was extinguished, and the four men, with their clothes dishevelled, and their hands and faces begrimed, could look round upon the ruin of the room.
‘I should have guessed,’ said Hanaud remorsefully. ‘The Unicorn Company saves its twenty-five thousand pounds—yes, but Mr Ricardo’s fine dining-room will need a good deal of restoration.’
Later on that night, in a smaller room, when the electric light was burning and the three men were washed and refreshed, Hanaud made his apology.
‘I asked you, Mr Middleton, inside the burnt walls of the house in Berwick Street, whether it was lit with electric light. And you answered, “with that and with nothing else.” But I had seen a broken oil lamp amongst the litter. I suspected that lamp, but the house was empty for an hour and a half before the fire broke out. I couldn’t get over that fact. Then I smelt something, something acrid—just a whiff of it. It came from a broken bottle lying by the bath with other broken bottles and a broken glass shelf, such as a man has in his bathroom to hold his little medicines, his toothpaste, his shaving soap. I put the broken bottle in my pocket and a little of that pungent smell clung to my fingers.
‘At the police station at once the cat made friends with me. Why? I did not guess. In fact I flattered myself a little. I say, “Hanaud, animals love you.” But it was not so. The Ginger King loved my smelly fingers, that was all. Then came the strange behaviour of Enoch Swallow. Cats made him physically sick. Yet this one he must take away before it could betray him. He could not carry it under his coat—no, that was too much. But he could go out and buy a basket—and without any fear. Do you remember, how cunningly he looked around the office, and up at the ceiling, and how satisfied he was to leave the cat with us. Why? I noticed the look, but I could not understand it. It was because all the lights in the room were bulbs hanging from the ceiling. There was not a standing lamp anywhere. Afterwards I get the cat. I drive to the chemist, leaving the cat in its basket in the cab.
‘I pull out my broken bottle and I ask the chemist. ‘What is it that was in this bottle?’
‘He smells and he says at once, “Valerian.”
‘I say, “What is valerian?”
‘He answers, “Valerian has a volatile oil which when exposed to the air develops a pungent and unpleasant smell. It is used for hysteria, insomnia and nervous ailments.”
‘That does not help me, but I draw a target at a venture. I ask, “Has it anything to do with cats?”
‘The chemist, he looks at me as if I was off my rocker and he says, “It drives them mad, that’s all,” and at once I say:
‘“Give me some!”’ and Hanaud fetched out of his pocket a bottle of tincture of valerian.
‘I have this—yes. But I am still a little stupid. I do not connect the broken lamp and the valerian and the Ginger King—no, not until I see him step up with his eyes all mad and on fire on to the mahogany table. And then it is too late.
‘You see, the good Enoch practiced a little first. He smears the valerian on the base of the lamp and he teaches the cat to knock it over to get at the valerian. Then one night he shuts the cat up in some thin linen bag through which in time it can claw its freedom. He smears the base of the lamp with the valerian, lights it and goes off to the cinema.
‘The house is empty—yes. But the cat is there in the bag, and the lamp is lit and every minute the valerian at the bottom of the lamp smells more and more. And more and more the cat is maddened. Tonight there was no valerian on the lamp, but the Ginger King—he knows that that is where valerian is to be found. I shall find out when I get back to Paris whether there was any trace of a burnt cat at the fire on the Boulevard Haussmann.
‘But,’ and he turned towards Mr Middleton, ‘you will keep the Ginger King that he may repeat his performance at the Courts of Law, and you will not pay one brass bean to that honest peasant from Syria.’
A. E. W. MASON
Writer, spy, politician and actor, Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was born in South London in 1865. He attended Dulwich College where he excelled in modern languages. He also took part in the school’s theatrical productions, acting in French and German plays as well as Shakespeare, including playing Oliver in As You Like It (1883). On leaving Dulwich, Mason went up to Oxford, studying at Trinity, and he joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Among many roles, he played Heracles in 1887 in a production of Euripides’ Alcestis; in the same production the character of Death was played by Arthur Bourchier, who in 1920 would portray the French police officer Gabriel Hanaud in Mason’s adaptation of his own novel At the Villa Rose (1910).
In 1888, after graduating, Mason joined Sir Frank Benson’s repertory company but he was not with them long. He moved to the Compton Comedy Company and then Ben Greet’s Company, with both of which he toured the British Isles, fulfilling minor roles in plays like Sheridan’s A School for Scandal in 1890 and Sydney Grundy’s A Village Priest in 1891. Mason was not a particularly good actor—at an Old Playgoer’s Dinner in 1928, Sir Frank Benson commented drily that, while Mason didn’t always know his lines, those he improvised were often better than the original; at the same event Mason acknowledged his own shortcomings, noting his appearance in the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894), at which—on the opening night—Shaw had taken to the stage and panned it as a comedy rather than the tragedy he had written.
While acting, Mason produced his first play, an adaptation in 1894 of the famous French comedy Frou-Frou by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac. He also began writing short stories which appeared in provincial newspapers as well as in journals like Cassell’s Family Magazine, the English Illustrated Magazine and the Illustrated London News. Mason completed his first novel, A Romance of Wastdale (1895), and then, buoyed by its reception, The Courtship of Morrice Buckler, which he would go on to adapt for the stage in 1897, co-authoring the script with the actress Isabel Bateman with whom he had appeared in a production four years earlier.
When his theatrical career came to an end, Mason became a political agent for the Conservative Party and later joined the staff of the Church Defence Society—both undemanding jobs that allowed him to pursue his writing. It was with his ninth novel that his career as a novelist took off. The Four Feathers (1902) is a thrilling adventure set during the Mahdist War in North Africa. The book has been filmed six times, most memorably in 1939 under the direction of Zoltan Korda and with a screenplay by R. C. Sheriff, author of the classic anti-war play Journey’s End (1928).
In 1903, in the wake of the success of The Four Feathers, Mason was invited to take up a career in politics. Always up for a challenge, he accepted and, despite living in Queen Anne’s Mansions in Westminster, London, he was selected as the Liberal Party’s candidate for Coventry, a city in central England. At the General Election in 1906, he won the seat, overturning a massive majority and taking more than half the votes cast. As a politician Mason championed equality and the rights of the individual, arguing against racist exclusionary laws in South Africa and in favour of women’s suffrage at home, as well as pushing for free school meals and the provision of land for allotments, arguing that ‘the desire for a piece of land was the one sure sign of a healthy mind’.
Although Mason was a tremendous success as a member of Parliament, the pressure of maintaining two careers was enormous. He stepped down at the January 1910 election, at which the Liberal Party’s new candidate was another author, Silas K. Hocking, who lost narrowly; other than for the eight years following the December 1910 election—when another man called Mason (but no relation) was elected—the Liberal Party never again won a Coventry constituency. As always, Mason made practical use of his political experience, which he drew on for a play, Colonel Smith (1909), and a novel, The Turnstile (1912); in later years he would criticise the idleness of minor politicians who ‘haven’t a moment to spare, they do nothing with so much energy and persistence’.
