LITMIR.BIZ

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all for dragging you out of your love nest by the—”

      “Shut up, will you?” Another voice, almost as savage as Sir Lionel Atwater’s, cut him off angrily.

      “Oh, I’m sorry, old chap. But for God’s sake think of the rest of us in this beastly hole. And I say, if you’ve got to strike Pamela, do it when I’m not about, would you?—I’d have to take steps, as the old boy says, and I’m not up to it, not after last night.”

      Mr. Darcy Atwater ended with a groan.

      The other man gave a short laugh.

      “If it weren’t for that damned woman I’d let you have the beastly Collection, but that . . .”

      Mr. Pinkerton could not hear the rest of it, but it didn’t matter. He swallowed his last bit of boiled pudding hurriedly, shaking his head quite involuntarily. If, as he assumed, the other man outside in the lounge was Darcy Atwater’s elder brother, then that was no way for one brother to speak of another’s wife . . . for that the large dark woman called Pamela was Mrs. Darcy Atwater Mr. Pinkerton hardly needed to see the large gold wedding band on her finger to realize.

      “But I say, old fellow, let’s have a bit of peace in our time, what?”

      The younger Atwater’s voice was almost pleading, Mr. Pinkerton thought.

      “The old boy can’t go on bellowing like a prize bull and drinking like a fish without breaking a blood vessel some time, and then you can have Sally.”

      There was a muttered retort that Mr. Pinkerton missed, and the two young men came in, the older one in the lead. He was quite large, Mr. Pinkerton saw, looking surreptitiously over from his table, nearly as large again, at first sight, as Darcy Atwater; and he was blond like him, except that his blondness was stronger, so that he must have been very much what his father was at his age. Mr. Pinkerton thought further that he would be very much like his father when he was his age, though of course he mightn’t be so much the colour of a boiled lobster if he did not drink-so much.

      As they crossed the dining room, Sir Lionel Atwater looked up from his plate, poured himself an unusually large peg from the whisky bottle beside it, sent a violent splash of soda into his glass, hunched back over his plate and said not a word. Not at least until the fish came. He straightened up as his was put in front of him, sat glowering at it for a moment, and gave it a violent push.

      “It’s dead!” he bellowed. “Take it away! Bury it!”

      Mr. Pinkerton straightened his narrow purple string tie. He had thought it a very tasty bit of fish. He glanced anxiously about, hoping that Mrs. Humpage was not within earshot, or that if she was she wouldn’t bustle in and send them all packing just as Mr. Pinkerton was beginning to find all this extremely interesting.

      The potboy Jo put the deaf and dumb gentleman’s boiled pudding in front of him and came over to Mr. Pinkerton. “Something else, sir?”

      “No, thank you,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

      “No coffee, sir?”

      Since coffee cost sixpence extra, Mr. Pinkerton shook his head, got up and hurried out into the lounge. Mrs. Humpage, in the office door, closed a large red book and turned quickly, and smiled as she saw Mr. Pinkerton. She beckoned to him.

      “I was looking them up,” she whispered.

      She nodded toward the dining room.

      Mr. Pinkerton blinked.

      “Are they . . . are they in there?” he asked.

      Since it was the first time—except, of course, for the Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard—that he had ever been in the same room with an actual knight of the realm in all his meagre little life, as drab and colourless as Romney Marsh on a leaden winter day, except for the purple patch of Scotland Yard and crime united in the person of his late wife’s former lodger and his one solitary friend in all the world, he did not want Sir Lionel Atwater to turn out to be an imposter.

      “They are that, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said. She opened the big red book and pointed. Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes ran hastily over the letterpress.

      Atwater, Sir Lionel. 1. Jeffrey, heir, unmarried. 2. Darcy, m. Pamela Gwendolyn Watkins, dau. of Sir Wathen Watkins Watkins, Bart., Llangollen, Wales. Seat: Atwater House, Atwater, Bucks.

      “Oh, he’s genuine, sir,” Mrs. Humpage went on. “He’s made pots of money in City companies too, sir. His driver was telling me he was poor as a church mouse once. He went to Australia and came back with a pile, and went in the City. Now he’s director of he don’t know how many companies. The driver says he’s that near he don’t let one of ’em have a farthing. He says that’s why the young one married the Welsh lady—she’s rich in her own right.”

      “Oh,” said Mr. Pinkerton. “And the older one . . . is he married?”

      He looked down at the fine type again to cover the light of duplicity that he knew must be visible in his face. He had only tried to deceive the late Mrs. Pinkerton once, and that was when she had used Inspector Bull’s gas fire in his absence to air her own woolen chemises. He had succeeded then, but it had frightened him so much he had never dared try it again. And Mrs. Humpage was certainly quite as shrewd as Mrs. Pinkerton. Perhaps it was because she was so eaten with curiosity herself that she did not notice it.

      “That’s all the trouble, sir,” she whispered, close to Mr. Pinkerton’s ear. “That’s what they’re here for. There’s a lady . . . an American, too, sir.”

      She said it as if that in itself were enough to explain a great deal. Mr. Pinkerton looked up, blinking.

      “I hope you don’t like the Americans, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said, so acidly that for a moment Mr. Pinkerton thought the worst had finally happened.

      “Oh, no, no,” he said hurriedly. As a matter of fact he did like the Americans very much indeed. For they, in the persons of the cinema, made up for the dreary wasteland of his life when Inspector Bull was not in it. He knew a great deal about them. He had sat through “Satan in Satin” twice on successive days, and would have gone again if the lady usher hadn’t misunderstood his motives and suggested supper the second night. But under the sharp eye of Mrs. Humpage he could never admit it.

      “I hope not, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said comfortably. Then she added, as if that would finish it if the other fact hadn’t, “She’s divorced.”

      As Mr. Pinkerton knew, however, from the cinema and the picture papers that all Americans are divorced, not only once but many times, and that whole American states are set aside where divorce is all they do, except gamble and shoot gangsters, it did not really surprise him.

      “However,” said Mrs. Humpage reluctantly, “I must say she’s very nice appearing, and quiet, and keeps her clothes on, which is more than you can say for Englishwomen these days, in their shorts and things. Why, sir, if you’d see Rye on a summer’s day, it would fair make you blush, sir.”

      Mr. Pinkerton had not seen Rye on a summer’s day, but he had seen Brighton, and it had, made him blush, even though the cinema had quite prepared him for anything or so he would have thought.

      “Do you . . . know her?” he ventured.

      “Ah,” Mrs. Humpage said. “She lives here.”

      A certain triumph was in her voice, as if the lady in question, along with the Landgate, and the half-timbered Tudor houses lining the cobbled streets, and the priest hole in the smokeroom fireplace, were one of the things that made old Rye what it was.

      “She’s got a cottage, sir, just up the street. She paints—if you can call the daubs she makes on canvas painting, sir. And I expect some people do; at any rate, a gentleman from London bought the whole boiling last December and there was a piece in the London papers about her. And I must say that if you’re far enough away from them they make you feel the way you feel sometimes when you come along the street when the sun comes

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