‘I didn’t come before, sir,’ Mr. Snow apologized, ‘because I heard that you had company.’
‘Company, Mr. Snow?’
‘Yes, sir, I heard you talking to someone.’
Cyril was silent; then he said:
‘You heard me talking to someone, but did you hear anyone talking to me?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ Mr. Snow’s tone registered a slight affront. ‘I heard your voice, sir, and then of course I didn’t listen any longer. I thought someone had dropped in to call on you.’
‘But wasn’t the street door locked?’
‘No, sir, nor the door downstairs, because I hadn’t done my round yet. Actually, I came in from the garden through “their” door, you know.’ The Trimbles were always ‘they’ to Mr. Snow.
‘Did you see anyone in the garden?’
‘Well, sir, I might have seen someone, some unauthorized person, I won’t say that I didn’t, but you know how dark it is, I couldn’t be sure. I switched my torch on, because you can’t be too careful, but I didn’t see what you could call a person. Were you thinking it might have been your visitor, sir?’
‘Yes—no—I——’
‘Anyhow,’ said Mr. Snow firmly, ‘I’m glad to be able to report that all is now present and correct. Good night, sir.’ Giving his little salute, Mr. Snow withdrew.
All absent and correct, yes; all present and incorrect, yes; but present and correct, no: the two ideas were mutually exclusive. Conscientious as Mr. Snow undoubtedly was, sharp as his old eyes might be, certain things were outside his range of vision, if not beyond his hearing. He might not see what there was to see, and it wouldn’t be fair, in future, to let him take the risk. Cyril waited till he was out of earshot, then took the torch he had left on the hall table, and with stealthy tread began to grope his way downstairs—an anonymous, questing figure, invisible behind his torch, his whereabouts unknown.
Was he the something his visitor had come to look for? Was he? Was he? He felt lost now: what would it feel like to be found?
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
Frederick Cross had lost his diary and without it he was, in the face of the future, helpless. He relied on it absolutely. The mere act of writing in it left as little impression in his memory as if his memory had been the sands of the seashore. He had to have the book itself. ‘Bring me my tablets!’
But no one in Smith’s Hotel, where he was staying, could bring them, and retribution had come swiftly, for this very evening he was expecting some people to dinner and he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know their names and wouldn’t recognize their faces. He just remembered he had asked them for to-night.
It would have been very much worse, of course, if it had been the other way round—if he had been dining with them. That would have been a real settler. The only hope was that they would ring him up to confirm the engagement—a very slender hope. They still might, though it was now half-past seven, and dinner was at eight.
He remembered how the invitation had come about: it had come about, as invitations often do, at a cocktail-party. His host had led him up to Mr. Blank and said: ‘I am sure you will have a lot to talk to each other about, Fred. Mr. Blank has just started as a publisher, and he is very much interested in the Jacobean Dramatists.’
Fred had written a book on the Jacobean Dramatists which no publisher had seen fit to take. With almost indecent haste he had invited Mr. Blank to dinner, and for good measure had included his wife in the invitation. Hardly had he got the words out, and given the publisher his address and the time for meeting, when they were swept away from each other. He had had no time to take in his interlocutor’s appearance; not a single feature remained in his memory, and as for the wife, he never saw her, though he understood she was at the party.
However, in a few minutes the mystery would be solved. He had nothing to do but wait, and the hotel porter would announce his guests. To ensure that this should happen he lingered in his bedroom; the porter would then have to ring him up and notify him of the guests’ arrival.
Punctually at eight o’clock the telephone bell rang and the porter’s voice said: ‘A lady and gentleman to see you, sir.’ ‘What is their name?’ Fred asked, but disappointingly the porter had rung off.
The couple were standing in the lounge, the middle lounge, for there were three: one across the passage, one divided from the middle lounge by a wall of glass. Fred Cross went up to greet his guests.
‘This is my wife, Mr. Cross,’ the man said, introducing a rather florid-looking lady, whose face broke into a smile with many lateral wrinkles. The man was tall and dark and clean-shaven, it wasn’t easy to place him; he didn’t look especially like a publisher, but then what publisher does? He didn’t look like anyone whom Fred remembered; but there was nothing remarkable in that: the party had been a blur of faces.
When they had sat down with their inevitable dry martinis and had exchanged a few platitudes about the weather (it was a coldish night in November) the man said:
‘We are particularly pleased to see you, Mr. Cross, because there is a matter in which I think we could help each other. I daresay you know what it is.’
Fred was, on the whole, a man of direct speech and inclined to come to the point straightaway; but he was used to the oblique approach of business men, and ready to adopt it.
‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘I rather think I do.’ In his mind’s eye he saw the typescript of his work on the Jacobean Dramatists, which the hands of many publishers’ readers had dog-eared. At the risk of sounding facetious he added, with a smile:
‘It’s to do with something that happened a good while ago.’
‘Yes, it is,’ the man said. He did not smile, but his wife smiled brilliantly, showing her teeth.
‘When we have talked it over,’ said the man, ‘perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming round to our place, where you may find one or two more who are interested. Joe Cossage, for instance.’ He looked at Fred Cross rather closely.
The name Joe Cossage conveyed nothing to Fred, but the field of Jacobean studies was a wide one, and he couldn’t be expected to have heard of all the gleaners in it.
‘I should be delighted,’ he said, trying to conceal his eagerness. ‘But shouldn’t we have dinner first?’
‘Dinner?’ said the man, and if Fred hadn’t been so engrossed in thinking about his book, he would have noticed the question mark and the time-lag before his guest said: ‘Dinner would be a very good idea.’
‘Of course, I haven’t got the book with me,’ Fred remarked.
‘We didn’t suppose you would have, did we, Wendy?’ the man said to his wife who flashed her smile at his unsmiling face. ‘But we should like to have a look at it, I can tell you, and so would Joe.’
‘I mean, I haven’t got it here,’ said Fred, blushing for himself and his over-eagerness to sell his wares. ‘As it happens——’ he tried to make his voice sound casual—‘as it happens I’ve got it upstairs.’
‘Whew!’ said the man, and something that might have been his soul, if he had one, seemed to appear in his face, so intense was his expression. ‘Can we wait till after dinner, Wendy?’
‘If Mr. Cross wants us to, I’m sure we can,’ his wife said.
‘Oh, yes, let’s wait till afterwards,’ said Fred, lightly. He regretted his unbusiness-like precipitancy, now that he saw that the others were anxious to see the book as he was to show it to them.
‘As long as you don’t change your mind about it,’ said the man. ‘We weren’t sure you’d want us to see it, were we, Wendy?’
‘Joe thought he’d come across with it,’ his wife said, smiling.