"His lordship's eager to get back to the country," Vine was explaining. "Her ladyship hasn't been well. That is why we returned so suddenly from France."
"I see." The old man scribbled on a piece of paper and then handed the paper to Vine.
Jherek thought he detected a somewhat strained atmosphere in the hotel this morning. Everyone seemed to be looking at him with a slightly peculiar expression. He heard the clatter of a cab coming along the street and saw it appear with the green-suited boy clinging to the running board. The middle-aged man in the top hat opened the glass door. The boy picked up the bags as Snoozer crossed the lobby and joined Jherek.
"Good-bye, your lordship," said the man at the desk.
"Good-bye," said Jherek cheerfully. "Thank you."
"These bags are a weight, sir," said the boy.
"Don't be cheeky, Herbert," said the middle-aged man holding the door.
"Yes," said Jherek conversationally, "they're full of Snoozer's swag now."
Snoozer gasped as the mouth of the middle-aged man dropped open.
At that moment a red-faced man in a nightshirt came running down the stairs pulling on a velvet dressing gown that Jherek would have liked to have worn himself.
"I've been robbed!" shouted the red-faced man. "My wife's jewels. My cigarette case. Everything."
"Stop!" shouted the old man at the desk.
The middle-aged man let the door go and threw himself at Jherek. The boy dropped the bags. Jherek fell over. He had never been attacked physically before. He laughed.
The middle-aged man turned on Snoozer Vine who was desperately trying to get the bags through the door and out to the cab, a look of profound agony on his thin face. He dropped the bags when the middle-aged man tackled him.
"You can't," he yelled. "Not now!" He wriggled free, tugging something from his pocket. "Stand back!"
"A snoozer!" growled the middle-aged man. "I should have known. Don't threaten me. I'm an ex-sergeant-major." And again he dived at Snoozer.
There was a fairly loud bang.
The middle-aged man fell down. Snoozer stared at him in surprise. The surprise was mirrored on the face of the middle-aged man who now had a huge red stain on the front of his green uniform. His top hat fell off. Snoozer waved something at the man in the dressing gown and the old man in the black coat. "Pick up the bags, Jerry," he said.
Bemused, Jherek bent and lifted the two heavy bags. The boy was hovering behind one of the potted palms, his cheeks sucked in and his eyes wide. Snoozer Vine's back was to the door but Jherek noticed that the cabby had climbed down from his cab and was running down the street waving to someone whom Jherek couldn't see. He heard a whistle sound.
"Through the door," said Snoozer in a small, cold voice.
Jherek went through the door and out into the rainy street.
"Into the cab, quick," said Snoozer. Now he waved the black and silver object at the cabby and another man, dressed in a suit of dark blue and wearing a hat with a rounded crown and no brim, who were running up the street towards them. "Get back or I'll fire!"
Jherek found the whole thing extremely amusing. He had no idea what was going on but he was enjoying the drama. He looked forward to telling Mrs. Amelia Underwood about it in a few hours. He wondered why Snoozer Vine was climbing onto the box of the cab and whipping up the horse. The cab shot off down the street. Jherek heard one more bang and then they had turned a corner and were dashing along another thoroughfare which had a number of people — mainly dressed in grey overcoats and flat hats — in it. All the people turned to stare at the cab as it flew past. Jherek waved gaily to some of them.
Full of elation, for he would soon be in Bromley, he began to sing. "Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light…" he sang as he was jolted from side to side in the hurtling cab. "Like a little candle burning in the night!"
They reached the entrance to Jones's Kitchen some time later, for Snoozer Vine had decided to leave the cab a good mile or so away. Jherek, who was carrying the bags, was quite tired when they got to the house and he wondered why Snoozer's manner had changed so markedly. The man kept snarling at him and saying things like "You certainly turned good luck into bad in a hurry. I hope to Christ that feller didn't die. If he did it's as much your fault as mine."
"Die?" Jherek had said innocently. "But can't he be resurrected? Or is this too early?"
"Shut yer mouth!" Snoozer had told him. "Well, if I swing so will you. I'd 'ave left yer behind if I 'adn't known you'd blab it all out in two minutes. I ought ter do you in, too." He laughed bitterly. "Don't forget yore an accomplice, that's all."
"You said you'd get me to Bromley," Jherek reminded him gently as they went up the steps to Jones's Kitchen.
"Bromley?" Snoozer Vine sneered. "Ha! You'll be lucky if you don't wind up in Hell now!"
During the next few days Jherek began to understand, even more profoundly than before, what misery was. He found that he was growing a beard quite involuntarily and it itched terribly. He became infested with tiny insects of three or four different varieties and they bit him all over. The clothes which Snoozer Vine had originally given him were taken from him and he was given a few thin rags to wear instead. Snoozer occasionally left the room they both shared and went down to the ground floor, always returning very surly and unsteady and smelling of the stuff which the woman had offered Jherek on his first night in Jones's Kitchen. And it grew very cold. Snoozer would not allow Jherek to go downstairs and warm himself at the fire so Jherek, as he came to understand the nature of cold, came also to understand the nature of hunger and thirst. Initially he made the most if it, savouring every experience, but slowly it began to depress him. And slowly he found himself unable to respond to the novelty of it all. Slowly he was learning to know what fear was. Snoozer was teaching him that. Snoozer would hiss at him sometimes, making incomprehensible threats. Snoozer would growl and snap and strike Jherek who still had no instinct to defend himself. Indeed, the very idea of defence was alien to him. And all the people who had been so friendly when he had first arrived now either ignored him or, like Snoozer, snarled at him if he ventured out of the room. He became thin and mean and dirty. He ceased to despair and began to forget Bromley and even Mrs. Amelia Underwood. He began to forget that he had ever known any existence but the squalid, trunk-filled room above Jones's Kitchen.
And then, one morning, there came a great commotion below. Snoozer was still snoring on the bed, having come back in his usual unsteady, argumentative mood, and Jherek was sleeping in his usual place under the table. Jherek woke first, but his senses were too dulled by hunger, fatigue and misery for him to make any reaction to the noise. He heard yells, smashing sounds. Snoozer began to stir and open bleary eyes.
"What is it?" Snoozer said thickly. "If only that bloody fence would turn up. All that stuff and nobody ter touch it 'cause o' that feller dying." He swung his legs off the bed and swung a kick, automatically, at Jherek. "Christ, I wish that bloody 'ansom 'ad killed yer that first bloody night."
This was almost invariably his waking ritual. But this morning he cocked his head as it dawned on him that something was going on downstairs. He reached under his pillow and brought out his pistol. He got off the bed and went to the door. Cautiously, he opened the door, the pistol in his hand. Again he paused to listen. Loud voices. Oaths. Screams. Women's voices shouting in offended tones. A boy wailing. The deep, aggressive voices of men.
Snoozer Vine, looking little healthier than Jherek, began to pad along the passage. Jherek got up and watched from the doorway. He saw Snoozer reach the gallery just as two men, in the blue clothes he had seen on the other man as they left the hotel, rushed at him from both sides, as if they had been waiting for him. There was another shot. One of the men in blue staggered back. Snoozer broke free of the other's grasp, reached the rail of the gallery, hesitated and then leapt over it to vanish from Jherek's sight.