CHAPTER V
WE CO-OPT A FOURTH DIRECTOR
I stared at her—I shouldn't be surprised to hear that my mouth was open—amazed at the way in which Pudleigh had brought us together, trying to see the bearing of this new fact, when in burst Chelubai and Bottiger.
"I've seen Driver, and told him that Pudleigh is out of the way, and he can unload double the number of Amalgamated Fertilizers as soon—" cried Chelubai, stopped short and pulled off his hat.
"Let me introduce you to my sister—Sir Ralph Bottiger, Mr. Kearsage. Go on, Chelubai. My sister knows all about our philanthropic effort. Bottiger told her all about it," I said dryly.
"Me!" cried Bottiger.
"Yes, you. You told her in a shout, when you came round last night, that we had committed a murder—a nice way to speak of our earnest endeavor to further human progress. It's a good job only my sister heard. You might have told a stranger. Let it be a lesson to you not to talk so loud about philanthropy."
Bottiger was plunged into extreme confusion. "How—how on earth could I know?" he muttered.
"Well, well, fortunately no harm's done," I said. "What did Honest John Driver say? Bottiger told my sister so much that she may just as well hear what else is happening."
"He congratulated me on my despatch; he nearly burst with joy, and he couldn't find words enough to thank me," said Chelubai.
"That looks good—as though he'd subscribe all right," I said.
"You don't know the alphabet of finance, if you think that," said Chelubai. "I don't like his gratitude at all. I should be far more hopeful of his paying up if he'd run down our work. However, I reminded him of the subscription, and he said it would be all right."
"What will he make out of the removal of Pudleigh?" said Bottiger.
"I don't know. He might make anything between fifteen and thirty thousand pounds," said Chelubai.
"Then surely he won't stick at a couple of thousand," said Bottiger.
"A business man of Honest John Driver's ability would stick at a couple of shillings, if he thought he couldn't be made to pay it."
"Well, then," I said, "we ought to make our plan on the supposition that he won't pay for our services, and be ready to act the moment he refuses."
"That's talking," said Chelubai with approval. "But how are we to get at him?"
"I think we shall have to kidnap him, and frighten it out of him."
"How?" said Chelubai.
"The kidnapping will be difficult; but we ought to be able to work it. Once kidnapped, we will follow some approved mediæval course of treatment—pull out a tooth every four hours, for example. Let us bear in mind that Honest John Driver is also an enemy of Humanity. We need not take any nonsense from him," said I.
"We need not," said Chelubai heartily.
There was a pause, as with one consent we gave our minds to the matter of kidnapping our probably recalcitrant debtor. Then Chelubai said: "Please excuse our boring you with these business details, Miss Brand."
"After the dulness of the German school from which my sister has firmly levanted, these business details must be positively exhilarating," said I. I did not like ladling out romance to Chelubai and Bottiger. But really, in the circumstances, I did not see what else I could do.
"Well, I'm driving Bottiger down to St. Albans," said Chelubai, rising. "Will Miss Brand and you lunch with me at the Savoy at two?"
"We shall be very pleased," I said.
They took their leave and went.
"Well," I said to Angel when they had gone, "you're in the thick of it now. Already you're an accomplice after the fact in the removal of Pudleigh."
"I don't care," she said.
"I tell you what, you'd better join us outright, and take shares in the Company," I said, smiling.
"I will, if it's a matter of getting rid of wretches like Pudleigh," she said firmly.
I had spoken in jest, but she was in earnest.
"Of course we are only going to remove objectionable people, the wretches who despoil the widow and orphan, and grind down the poor," I said.
And then I saw that if she joined the Company she might be exceedingly useful to us; that at any rate her association with it would invest philanthropy with a new charm. I began to weigh carefully the reasons for and against her joining, and had made up my mind that we could easily keep her out of danger, when she interrupted me by saying:
"Whatever am I to do for clothes? That horrible landlady has taken my things to pay the rent for my room. I have nothing but what I have on."
"We'll soon have those clothes," I said. "Landladies can't play a game like that. Will you amuse yourself with a book while I go and arrange about them?"
She cast an eager eye on my book-shelves, and said, "I should like to."
I went round to the chambers in which I practise, and which I share with Harris, a barrister of the same standing as myself, and I instructed Wicks, our clerk, a youth of an astonishing savoir faire, to take a cab to the Harleyford Road, tell the landlady to send in a bill for her rent to Morton and bring back the trunks. I gave him leave to bully the landlady into hysterics, for I could not see that she deserved any consideration after her inhumanity to Angel, and I was sure that Wicks would see to it that she repented from the bottom of her heart. I saw him depart on his mission, simmering with joyful anticipation. Then I went into Fleet Street to buy the evening papers, and the first thing that caught my eye on the placards was,
Tragedy in South London.
I bought the sheet and two others of the same kidney, and came down Mitre Court into the Temple. I am afraid that my hand shook and my mouth was rather dry as I unfolded the newspaper—a thousand possibilities sprang into my mind. Chelubai, or I, might have dropped something near the scene of the removal; I remembered that we had actually thrown down the stumps of our cheroots in the lane off Stoneleigh Street—and resolved as soon as I returned to burn the box which had held them. My eye caught the column which described the South London tragedy, and ran down it swiftly. When I finished it I stared blankly round the King's Bench Walk; it told how a Clapham bricklayer had slain his lodger with a coal-hammer.
I turned again to the paper and looked through it quickly, and then again slowly. There was not a word of the operation of the Company; Albert Amsted Pudleigh might still be strutting along Oxford Street for anything that the editor had learned to the contrary. I could not understand what had happened. Had his body been spirited away, or were the police biding their time and moving quietly before announcing their discovery of it? I looked through the other papers I had bought; the Clapham bricklayer held the place of honor in each; of Albert Amsted Pudleigh there was no word.
I climbed my stairs very slowly, pondering the matter, and exceedingly disquieted. Angel was buried in "Many Inventions," and set it down with a little sigh when I came in. I told her that I had sent for her trunks, and she told me of her Vauxhall landlady. One landlady led to another, and as she told me of those she had experienced, I learned a good deal of her three months in London: how she had moved from an hotel to dear lodgings, from dear lodgings to cheap, from cheap to cheaper, all the while pawning her trinkets and then her mother's jewelry, until she had come to the end of everything in the Harleyford Boad. She had, of course, been swindled everywhere. I gathered, too, that she had suffered bitterly from the strangeness of the life after her country upbringing, and from her loneliness, how she had been oppressed by a growing terror, and at last by utter despair. She did not, of course, make an appeal to my pity by telling me these things in so many words ; but now her tone, now her look and now a phrase told me clearly enough the story of an agony. I felt that there were few, and likely to be few, actions in my life which I should remember with greater pleasure than helping knock Albert Amsted Pudleigh on the head.
I think I showed her plainly my sympathy and indignation. But she cut me short in the expression of my strong desire to wring her Vauxhall landlady's neck by saying: "But how did you know that I was Angel Pavis?"
"I am a barrister as well as a philanthropist. And I gave an opinion on your case against Pudleigh in the matter of the Quorley Granite Company."
"To think of it!" cried Angel. "I pictured you an old man in a wig—oh, ever so old!"
I explained to her that nowadays there is a growing disbelief in the monopoly of wisdom by the senile.
Presently I went round to my other chambers, and had waited less than a quarter of an hour, when Wicks drove up in triumph with two trunks on the top of a four-wheeler. I observed that he was still in a quiet simmer of joy, now of fell joy, and understood that there was, if not wailing, at any rate gnashing of teeth in Vauxhall.
I thanked him, told the cabman to drive into King's Bench Walk and got into the cab. As soon as the trunks were in the room, Angel went off joyfully to put on another gown, and at the end of half an hour appeared looking fresher and prettier than ever. Already in the reaction from her oppressed and terror-stricken condition during the past month, thanks to the restoring power of joyous youth, the traces of her privations and anxieties had almost faded from her face.
We decided that since it was a joy to her to drive in a hansom, economy compelled us to take one to the Savoy. We found Chelubai and Bottiger already seated at a table well placed for seeing people. Chelubai tossed a halfpenny paper to the floor as he rose to greet us, and when we had taken our seats, he said: "What has happened to the British Press?"
"That's what I have been asking for the last two hours," I said.
"Evidently the police are keeping the matter dark. But why?" said Chelubai.
"I can only suppose that unless a reporter chances to get hold of a matter of this kind they do keep such incidents dark—at any rate till they see their way to acting with credit," I said. "It certainly reflects no credit on them that a rising King of Finance should be knocked on the head under the palings of that most important British institution, the Oval cricket-ground."
"Perhaps they see their way to acting with more effect if they wait a day or two," said Bottiger gloomily.
"I don't see where the effect is coming in. We haven't given it a chance," I said cheerfully.
"Something may have gone wrong," said Bottiger.
"How do you mean?" said Chelubai.
"Are you sure he was quite—removed?"
"Unless the head of a rising King of Finance is as thick as his skin and we ought to have used a half-brick instead of sand, he was quite removed," I said.
"It was the best sand—silver sand," said Chelubai.
"Well, it beats me," said Bottiger, more gloomily than ever.
I took advantage of the interruption afforded by the coming of the hors d'œuvres to shift the conversation to lighter themes, and we had a very pleasant lunch. I saw that Angel enjoyed it; her appetite was good, naturally enough, and she laughed many times.
When the coffee came and we had lighted our cigars, it seemed to me that the time for philanthropic discussions had come, and I said abruptly: "My sister wants to join the Company. She has run away from school, she won't go back and she's as keen on philanthropy as I am."
"It's not woman's work!" cried Bottiger hotly.
"Surely women have been great philanthropists," said I. "Why, we agreed that domestic removal was their proper line; that they shone in it. And we never know into what branches the operations of the Company may extend; we should be prepared for all kinds of work."
"I didn't mean that at all!" said Bottiger, again hotly.
"I'm entirely opposed to the practice of a woman's working," said Chelubai.
"You carry your Englishness too far. This is mere prejudice. But really this is not a question which we can properly discuss; the correspondents of one of the daily papers settled it one way or the other, I don't know which, last silly season," said I.
"Surely you're not in earnest, Miss Brand," said Bottiger, appealing to Angel.
"Yes, I am," said Angel firmly. "You see, I've suffered from objectionable people myself, or I shouldn't be here."
"But do you think the kind of annoyances you have had to suffer from are bad enough to justify your helping to remove people?" said Chelubai, thinking doubtless that she spoke of the annoyances which had caused her to run away from her imaginary school.
"Yes, quite," said Angel.
"They are," said I, breaking in. "But this is all beside the question. Philanthropy should be disinterested. We ourselves were actuated solely by our duty to human progress in our recent philanthropic enterprise; and as soon as my sister recovers from her recent experience of objectionable people she will become a disinterested philanthropist, too. We have no right to check the altruistic expansion of her spirit."
"That's very true," said Chelubai gravely, "if Miss Brand feels like that."
"At present I feel as if I were at war with all the world except—except—Roger." She hesitated and flushed a little over my name; and I thought it sounded very nice on her tongue. "But I expect the other—the disinterestedness—would come," she added.
"I do so hold by purity of motive," said Chelubai sadly.
"You wait till I have shown my sister the Children's Hospital," I said quickly. "That will fill her with a disinterested zeal for Humanity that will burn stronger and longer than your own."
"Do you think so?" said Chelubai, and his rough-hewn, Red-Indian face brightened.
"I'm sure of it," I said with conviction.
"But—but I'm not sure that I could knock people on the head," said Angel, in a rather depressed tone.
"Oh, you'd soon get into it; it's merely a knack," I said cheeringly. "And there's another side to the matter: have we any right to reject my sister's useful help? In philanthropy, as in other expressions of human energy, beauty has its uses. For example, if it were necessary ever to prove an alibi, her evidence would have great weight with a jury."
"If you were in danger, Roger, I would swear anything to get you out of it!" cried Angel, with girlish earnestness.
"I'm sure you would," I said gratefully. "But we must strive that our perjury, if ever we are forced to commit it, shall, like our removals, be actuated only by a passionate devotion to the cause of human progress."
"Well, I would try to do it from that, too," said Angel.
"Well, then, since I'm willing to pledge myself that my sister will soon be moved by the same philanthropic motives that we are, I propose that she be allowed to join the Company on the same terms as ourselves, and that we co-opt her as a fourth director," said I.
"If you really insist, Miss Brand, I withdraw my objection and agree," said Chelubai with some mournfulness.
"Yes, I want to join the Company," said Angel firmly.
"And you, Bottiger?" said I.
"If you think it's all right, I suppose I agree too," said Bottiger, in his usual grudging way.
"The motion is carried," said I.
We drank the new director's health.