Beggar’s Choice (7 page)

“Murder? No! What are you thinking of?”

I laughed.

“You're not very communicative, you know. If I'm to have committed a crime, I shall want to know what it is. It seems to me that that is only reasonable. You see, there are some crimes that aren't just in my line.”

I suppose it was stupid of me to be sarcastic—it always puts a man's back up worse than anything. He got back on me all right when he said,

“You can afford to be particular?” And then after a moment, “You were Lymington's secretary, weren't you?”

I nodded. That beastly candle shone full in my face, and I was afraid I had flushed.

He leaned forward with a change of manner.

“Look here, Fairfax, are you in a position to refuse five hundred pounds? You could get away abroad and start fresh.”

“After I came out of prison?”

He waved that away. There was something familiar in the gesture. I was sure he was the man I had seen in the tobacconist's, and I was sure that that wasn't the first time I had seen him, but I couldn't place him yet. He wasn't any one I knew, but I had certainly seen him and heard his voice. He talked about his “client,” but he seemed too blundering to be a lawyer.

“You'd get off with three years if you'd any luck.”

That got my goat. Three years! I could have driven my fist into his fat face.

“I've not had much luck so far,” I said, “so I don't think I'll count on it now.”

Then it came over me that they were offering me under two hundred a year to go to prison, and it made me mad to be reckoned so cheap. I suppose he saw something in my face, for he pushed back the bench and stood up. I think his feet were cold, and seeing him afraid like that made me think that the driver was out of earshot. And then next minute I thought I was mistaken, for I heard the door behind me open softly. I looked over my shoulder and saw about an inch of black night showing between the door and the jamb. I couldn't see anything else. The door didn't move; but I thought that some one was standing there listening.

I turned back again. It didn't matter to me who listened.

“Well?” I said. “What's my crime? You haven't told me yet.”

“You agree?” said he with a show of eagerness.

“I don't agree or disagree till I know where I am.”

He sat down again.

“Well, just suppose a case. Let us suppose that a person—who we needn't name—has anticipated a sum of money which would in all probability have passed to him legally within a year or two.”

“All right,” I said, “he anticipated some money. In other words he pinched it.”

He waved again. I thought the door moved behind me.

“Do you mind telling me how?” I proceeded.

“There was a matter of a check,” said he.

“Forgery runs to more than three years,” said I—and I thought the door moved again.

I looked back, but it was still just ajar. The smell of violets came in out of the dark outside. There are no violets in a Surrey wood in September; but there had been a scent of violets in the car. I did not think that it was the driver who had opened the door. I thought that there was a woman standing there listening, and I wondered who she was.

The fat man spread out his hands.

“A first offense—it would be that, I suppose.”

“I really don't know. You haven't told me who your forger is.”

“That,” he said, “is not necessary.”

“Or how you propose to persuade a jury to accept your—substitute.”

He had an answer ready for that. I suppose he had prepared it.

“Let us put it this way. Money has been withdrawn from a certain account—let us call it Mr. A's account, and Mr. A's suspicions have become aroused. He knows that a check has been forged. He is determined to find out who forged it and to prosecute. His suspicions will inevitably lead him to the right person unless they are diverted to a substitute——” He talked like a man who has learnt a thing by heart. Every now and then he slid a paper into the light and looked at it.

“And how do you propose they should be diverted?”

“If a second check were presented—a second forgery—in circumstances which plainly indicated the—substitute, Mr. A would naturally conclude that his suspicions had been groundless, and that the two checks were the work of the same hand.”

I put my fist on the table and looked at it.

“My hand?”

He nodded and sat back with the air of having got the thing off his chest.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think not.” And I got up to go.

“Five hundred pounds,” he said, and rapped the table.

Like an echo I heard Fay say, “Five hundred pounds—I must have five hundred pounds.”

It was a relief to get the light out of my eyes. Standing, it didn't worry me. I looked over the top of the lantern, but I couldn't see his face. He had both hands on the table and was leaning over them. I saw his hat, his bulky shoulders, and his stubby hands, and I stood there, pulled this way and that. He said five hundred pounds, and Fay said five hundred pounds. He was offering it, and she was going to everlasting smash if she didn't get it. Then prison—three years of it—a perfectly damnable thought. And then … Not much use being free to starve. I was pulled this way and that.

I opened my mouth to speak. The thing I was going to say never got said. All at once I knew I couldn't do it.

I said “No,” and turned on my heel and went out.

IX

The blood was pounding in my ears, and I felt as if I had just pulled myself back on the edge of something frightful. I don't know what made me feel like that. I couldn't see or hear for a moment. I went blundering along the path and barged into a tree. At the same moment I heard my name called:

“Fairfax!”

It was the man I had been talking to, and he called a second time.

“Fairfax!”

I turned round. I had really only gone a pace or two. He was standing in the doorway holding up the lantern in front of him. As I turned, some one made a sound, a queer inarticulate sound of pain or distress. It seemed to come from the darkness behind him.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You're in too much of a hurry. Come back and talk things out.”

“No use,” I said. “I've made up my mind.”

He turned half round and set the lamp on the table so that the dark side was between the light and the door. I saw all the left-hand side of the bare room in a yellow glow. He left the hut and came forward.

“Some one else wants to talk to you,” he said. “You can come along to the car when you've finished.” And with that he went past me and disappeared round the bend.

After a moment's hesitation I went back to the hut. I was very curious to see the other person—the some one else who had sighed in the darkness, and who wanted to speak to me. I went up to the door and looked in. Half the room was light, and half was dark. In the dark half some one was standing—a woman, in what looked like a black cloak and veil. The minute I moved she snatched up the lantern and turned the light on to my face. I don't know anything that makes you feel such a perfect fool as being stared at like that by some one you can't see. She took her time over it too, and just as I was beginning to feel like smashing something, she put the light down on the edge of the table and came across with her hand out.

“How do you do, Car?” she said.

I just stood there like a stock, for I was clean knocked out of time. She had on some sort of close cap with a black veil that covered her face and went round her neck like a scarf, but the minute she opened her mouth I knew her. It was Anna Lang.

Well, I never liked Anna, and there were reasons why both of us should find it awkward to meet. I hoped she didn't know as much about the reasons as I did—I couldn't believe she'd have come here to meet me if she did. I hoped with all my heart she didn't know that Uncle John had tried to bucket me into marrying her. I wished myself a thousand miles away, and yet, extraordinary as it may seem, one bit of me was pleased to see her. For one thing, when you've lived right away from your own people and your own pals for three years, it feels good to meet one of them again—it seems to bridge the gap a bit. And for another thing, I thought perhaps she might talk about Isobel; because, of course, they're near neighbors, and it isn't as if Isobel and I had even been engaged or anything like that, so I thought she might just happen to mention her. I didn't think all these things one after another as I've written them, but they were all there in my mind at once.

I stood there, and Anna's hand dropped down.

“Don't you know me, Car?”

Her voice is one of the things that annoys me about Anna. It's what you'd call a beautiful voice if it belonged to an actress spouting high falutin' blank verse stuff in a stage garden under a stage moon; in the family circle it's a bit too much of a good thing, and has always made me want to throw something at her.

I said, “Of course I know you. How do you do?” And I'm afraid I didn't say it very nicely. I don't know why some people always rub you up, but there it is.

When I said that, she laughed. She has the sort of laugh that is called “mellow” and “liquid” in novels. Personally I hate it. When she had laughed, she said,

“I don't do very well, and I'm afraid you don't either. Don't you think we might have something to say to each other?”

I didn't honestly feel that I had anything to say to her. I said so—politely of course. I put it that I hadn't exactly been making history, and that I wasn't going to bore any one with my horribly dull career.

She laughed again.

“You needn't be polite. It doesn't really suit you. I've come here because I want to talk to you. Will you give me ten minutes of your time?”

I couldn't say no to that.

“Well, let's sit down,” she said. “One can conduct an interview standing, but one can't talk. I want to
talk.”

She stepped over the threshold and sat down on the step that ran the width of the door. I sat down too, in the opposite corner. I watched her unwind the black veil and throw it back. She did this very deliberately. Then she reached up behind her and turned the lantern so that the light shone straight between us and I could see her face and she could see mine. That's the sort of thing that riles me in Anna—she's stagey all the time. I suppose she's made that way. She used to get into a boiling rage when I told her of it—oh, about a hundred years ago when we were children and didn't mind what we said to each other.

She threw back the veil, and turned the light and looked at me, tilting her chin up a little and half closing her eyes. An artist once told her that she looked like the Blessed Damozel when she did that, and it's been her stock pose ever since. If you saw her painted like that, you'd say “How beautiful!”—and it would be quite true. But it's a trick all the same, and a trick ends in putting your back up.

I said, “You're looking very well, Anna,” and she opened her eyes a little wider and looked mournfully at me. She's got those big, dark eyes that look as if they are just going to cry.

“Do I?” she said. “You don't—poor Car!”

I would have liked to say straight out, “For the Lord's sake, don't ‘poor Car' me!” But I expect I looked it, for she said,

“Don't be angry. Can't you be friends and talk to me for ten minutes? Ten minutes isn't much out of three years. It's three years since we talked, isn't it?”

“Getting on.”

“What sort of years have they been?”

“Oh, so so.”

She put out her hand as if she were going to touch me.

“Perhaps I know more about them than you think.”

“There's nothing much to know.”

“Shall I tell you what I know? It's not very pleasant telling—is it? So I think I'll leave it alone. It's been downhill all the way, and now you've got to the place where there isn't another step at all.”

It sounds bald and brutal written down, but she said it in a sweet sad way, and at the end her voice broke into the sort of sigh which had come from the dark corner of the car.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I said.

“You and me. Do you hate me, Car?”

“I wish you wouldn't talk nonsense!”

She laughed again, sadly. An ass who wrote poetry told her that her laugh had all the tears and all the music of the world in it. Of course, after that, she made a point of laughing sadly. She's had a lot of practice, and she does it awfully well.

“Look here, Anna,” I said—and I admit that I was hot—“Look here, did you cart me all the way down from London into the middle of this wood to ask me whether I hated you?”

“Perhaps I did.”

What can you do with a woman like that? I moved as if I was going to get up.

“Car—don't! I—I do want to talk to you. I—I've risked a lot to come and talk to you like this.”

I never heard such rubbish in my life. You'd think she might know it wasn't any good talking like that to me. Anna and I are the same age, and we've known each other for the whole twenty-seven years. That's what annoys me—she ought to know better. I said so.

“What's the good of talking like that? What have you brought me down here for?”

“Bobby's been telling you.”

Bobby.… When she said that, I knew where I'd seen the fat man before. Markham—that was his name—Bobby Markham. The Bobby did it, and his bulk. About a fortnight ago I tried for the job of secretary to a man called Arbuthnot Markham who is a partner in a big firm of timber importers. As they do most of their business with South America, and as I happen to have a smattering of Spanish, I thought I might have a chance. I hadn't. And after I'd seen Arbuthnot Markham I wasn't so sorry—I didn't like him. But beggars can't be choosers.