Nothing Venture (6 page)

“Oh, I'll do it,” said the driver. “I'm a man of my word I am. Four-fifteen it is, and I'll be getting along.”

Nan heard the whirr of the starter. Her knees were shaking. The taxi began to move. It slipped away, leaving her shelterless.

Robert Leonard, with his back to her, was mounting the steps of No. 29.

VIII

Nan did not know that she was going to run, but she found herself running back down the side street, past the blank wall of No. 29, and breathlessly, blindly on. When at last she stopped running, she had no breath in her and she was shaking from head to foot. She had turned the corner and was in a street she did not know.

She stood still—not thinking—getting back her breath. Then she began to walk again mechanically, her mind pulled this way and that by her clamouring thoughts. They all seemed to be shouting at once, and the one word which stood out above all the rest was “danger.”

She set to work to quiet these clamouring thoughts, to make them speak reasonably, and to weigh what they said. It was very, very difficult, because, instead of being calm and judicial, she was quivering with shock and fear. The fear was not for herself, but for Jervis.

Robert Leonard had come out of the house. He had spoken to the driver of the taxi. She tried to put together what he had said.

Someone was arriving by the four-fifteen. The driver was to hurry up or he would be late. He was to earn five hundred pounds by doing something for which he might be sent to prison. There was something about getting two months for dangerous driving.

The more Nan thought, the more an anguished fear took hold of her. For ten years she had believed that Robert Leonard had struck down Jervis Weare and left him to drown on Croyston rocks. Now she believed that there was to be another attempt upon his life. Robert Leonard had said, “He is sure to walk—he is crazy for exercise.” She was quite sure that the “he” was Jervis. The driver was to “drive dangerously.” If “he” took a taxi, he was to do the best he could. He was to risk prison, and he was to earn five hundred pounds.

An
accident
. The word sprang into her mind. It seemed to make a loud noise there. Nan felt as if someone had let off a gun close to her ear. The word deafened her. An
accident
—to Jervis. That was what they had been planning.

As the noise of the word died down, everything else died down too—fear, shock, and the clamour of her thoughts. She found herself walking quickly and thinking clearly. The train got in at four-fifteen. She must go and meet Jervis and tell him what she had heard. She looked at her watch. It was five minutes to four. No station had been mentioned, but trains from Croyston ran to Victoria. If Jervis was coming up from King's Weare, he would drive into Croyston and get a train there. Of course he
might
be coming from anywhere else.

Nan pushed that away with both hands. If he wasn't coming up from King's Weare, there was nothing that she could do. But if she had overheard this wicked plan, it must be because she was meant to warn Jervis. She felt quite sure that he was coming up from King's Weare, and that she would be in time to meet him and tell him what she had heard.

She took a bus, came into the station with two minutes to spare, and reached the barrier as the train drew up beyond it. She wasn't frightened any more. She was going to see Jervis, and everything was going to be all right.

She watched him come down the platform carrying a suit-case, and laughed in her heart for pure joy. He had come, and he had lost the haggard, sleepless look which had pulled at her heart. He looked brown and well, and profoundly bored. Whatever it was that had brought him up to town, it was not anything which roused feelings of pleasure.

He came striding up to the barrier, thrust a ticket at the collector, and went striding on. Nan ran after him, let him get clear of the crowd, and touched his arm. He turned, stared, took off his hat.

Victoria Station became a place where anything might happen. It had the true atmosphere of romantic adventure. Nan was so inspired by it that a dimple came out on either side of her smile as she said,

“You didn't expect to see me.”

“Did you expect to see me?” he asked.

Nan nodded.

“I came to meet you.”

“Did Page tell you I was coming up?”

She shook her head.

“Nobody told me.”

“Then how did you know?” said Jervis Weare.

He had come up in response to an urgent telephone call from Mr Page. An hour after the call had come through he had been stepping into the train. How could anyone else have known that he was coming up? How could Nan Forsyth know? Just then and there it took him between the eyes that she was Nan Weare.

Nan saw the dark colour rise in his face, and wondered what had brought it there. Her dimples trembled away. She said quickly,

“I'll tell you how I know. I've got things to tell you—important things.”

They were standing still, with a stream of people flowing past them. A fat man swung a bag of golf-clubs within half an inch of Nan's ear, and as she ducked and stepped aside, she heard an exclamation, and out of the stream there burst a small thin man with ginger hair and bright twinkling brown eyes. He had a Gladstone bag in one hand, a tin hat-box in the other, a camera slung from his shoulder, and an extremely ancient rucksack bound like a hump upon his back. He burst from the stream, cast the hat-box clanking upon the pavement, bumped down the Gladstone bag, and caught Jervis by one hand and the wrist of the other—the second hand being occupied with his suit-case. He pumped both arms up and down with enthusiasm.

“Well, if this isn't the best thing that ever happened? I'll tell London it is!”

Nan looked on breathlessly, and saw Jervis break into a smile.

“Fazackerley!” he cried.

The little man puffed harder.

“I'll tell the world! This is the best thing I've struck since—well, there isn't any since about it. I'd liefer have run up against you than have gotten an invitation to tea with Mussolini with
carte blanche
to print every word he said and film him whilst he said it—and I can't say more than that. So far he's eluded me. I've interviewed President Hoover, and Ramsay Macdonald, and Clemenceau, and Trotzky, and the unfortunate late Czar, and Gene Tunney, and Dean Inge, and Don Bradman, and Al Capone; but so far Mussolini has eluded me. I'm not making him my life-work, but I'd like to get him; so when I say I'd rather have run up against you—well, there it is—right from the heart—straight from the pulsating fount of the emotions!”

Jervis continued to smile.

“You'll collect a crowd, F.F.”

“What else do I live for?” said Mr Fazackerley. He turned, holding Jervis by the arm. “I've got to apologize for butting in—” His bright brown eyes darted a question at Nan; his manner intimated plainly that he awaited an introduction.

Nan wanted to run away. She wondered what Jervis would say if she did. Then she wondered what he was going to say if she didn't. There was, actually, only one bewildered moment before he said,

“Let me introduce, Mr Ferdinand Fazackerley.”

The next moment Nan's hand was being shaken by one that felt very thin and very strong, and Mr Fazackerley's high-pitched voice was saying earnestly,

“I'm very pleased to meet you—but he hasn't told me who I'm being very pleased to meet.”

Before Jervis could speak, Nan said,

“Mrs Weare.”

She said it on the impulse that would have prompted her to do anything disagreeable herself rather than leave Jervis to do it. To feel like that about it, and to proclaim herself his wife, thrust at her with such a sharply pointed pain that it was all that she could do not to cry out. The effort she made brought a flush to her cheeks.

The darting brown eyes went from her to Jervis, and back again to her flushed face. Mr Fazackerley still had his left hand on Jervis' sleeve; with his right he continued to shake Nan's hand.

“If that isn't great!” he said. “Mrs Weare, I've just got to say all over again how pleased I am. If this isn't just the greatest thing that ever happened! Where can we go and talk?”

“I've got an appointment with my solicitor,” said Jervis. “But after that—”

“You'll both dine with me. If you're engaged, just telephone them and say you're dead. What's the good of a beneficent invention like the telephone if it can't get you out of an engagement? We'll dine at the Luxe in our gladdest rags. I've a tuxedo in my trunk—I've a claw-hammer somewhere—I'll go the whole hog and buy a white tie. We've just got to celebrate!” He beamed brightly upon Nan. “If you knew what a lot I've heard about Rosamund, and how badly I've wanted to meet you—”

Mr Fazackerley stopped there, because his left hand felt the sudden jerk with which Jervis drew back, whilst to his right was communicated a tremor. Nan's hand quivered for a moment in his and then stiffened.

Mr Fazackerley released it, stepped back a pace, darted a searching glance from a pale girl to a horrified young man, and exclaimed,

“Great Wall Street! Have I dropped a brick?”

He looked so alarmed and disconcerted that Nan stopped being embarrassed.

“I'm not Rosamund,” she said quite simply. “My name's Nan. Please don't mind—it wasn't your fault a bit.”

Mr Fazackerley recovered himself. It took a good deal to disconcert him, and he possessed recuperative powers of the first order. He congratulated Jervis in a manner quite un-tinged with self-consciousness. He congratulated Nan on having married one of the best fellows in a tight place that he ever wanted to see.

“
He
won't tell you how we fought twenty brigands in Anatolia, or the story of the one-eyed commissar—but I will some day. I've no false modesty—it don't pay in my profession.”

Nan smiled at him, the smile that brought the dimples.

“What is it?” she said. “Your profession, I mean. What are you?”

“A Rolling Stone,” said Ferdinand Fazackerley with a flourish.

He picked up the tin hat-box and the Gladstone bag.

“
Lord
, F.F.!” said Jervis. “Where did you get that relic? I thought the last Gladstone bag faded out before the war.”

“It's a good little grip,” said Ferdinand, “and a real antique into the bargain. If I was to tell you that I got this grip from a man that got it from Enrico Caruso with a dossier showing it had belonged way back in Victoria's day to the late William Ewart Gladstone himself—what would you say?”

Nan saw Jervis laugh, and felt the thrill of a young mother whose child does something new. She hadn't seen him laugh before. It changed his face; it softened it. It made Nan's heart dance.

“What would you say?” said Mr Fazackerley.

“I should say you were a first-class liar, F.F.,” said Jervis.

IX

Mr Fazackerley left Nan and Jervis standing where he had found, them. He shook them both warmly by the hand, adjured them to remember that they were dining with him at the Luxe at a quarter to eight, and left them, to be instantly engulfed by a stream of outgoing passengers exactly like the one from which he had been, as it were, thrown up. An eddy caught him, and he and his rucksack, his Gladstone bag, his camera, and his bright yellow boots were absorbed.

Nan and Jervis looked at each other, and for a moment a shared glint of humour gave to each of them a sense of intimacy. To be able to laugh at the same things is one of the three indissoluble bonds. If only for a moment, it linked them.

Nan said, “What a
lamb
!”

And Jervis said, “Good old F.F.!”

And then the moment passed. The laughter went out of Nan's eyes.

“You'll explain about my not being able to dine with him—won't you?” she said.

Jervis put his head back a little; it made his chin jut out. It was an obstinate chin.

“Why can't you dine with him?”

If Nan had assumed that she
was
going dine with them, Jervis would probably have felt annoyed. Since she assumed that she was not going to make an unwanted third, he at once discovered a number of good reasons why she should do so.

“You'll have heaps to say to each other. I should be in the way.”

“Well, if you don't come, he'll think you're offended.”

Nan considered this for a moment.

“Do you want me to come?” she said when the moment was over.

Jervis relaxed, smiled quite unexpectedly, and answered,

“Well, I do—if it wouldn't bore you too much.”

“Oh, it wouldn't bore me.”

“You see,” he said, “if you don't come, he'll think it odd, or he'll think you're angry. I'm very fond of F.F. and I'd hate to have his feelings hurt that way, and—” He hesitated, then flashed her a look of something like appeal. “I—it struck me there isn't really any reason why he should think there's anything unusual about—us.”

“I'll come if you want me to,” said Nan.

Their eyes met, and Jervis felt something that he had not felt before. He could not have said quite what it was. It came, and was gone again. It was as if something had touched, very lightly touched, some sensitive spot so deep down in his consciousness that he could not tell what it was that was stirred.

Both of them came out of that moment with a faint sense of shock. Jervis caught sight of the station clock and exclaimed.

“Poor old Page will be cursing me!”

With a queer leap of the pulses Nan realized that she had forgotten, actually forgotten, why she had come to meet Jervis.

He was crossing the platform.

“I'll call for you if you will tell me your address. I don't know why I didn't ask you for it. I ought to have it.”

She said, “
Please
”; and then, “I haven't told you why I came to meet you. It's very important.”