The Smiler With the Knife Read online

  Chilton Canteloe emphasised that, by this means, all the derelict agricultural land could be brought into cultivation again, thus helping to diminish the danger of starvation in the event of war. Moreover, each co-operative would have its own deep-shelter against air-raids, and could send out “Defence Workers” to construct such shelters in the big towns. These two points, the latter especially, were given great prominence in the Press accounts, for they concerned matters over which the public had been growing more and more restive during recent years.

  Until the scheme was properly on its feet, it would be subsidised by a loan, in which Lord Canteloe was prepared to sink £1,000,000 himself. The interest would accrue from a certain percentage of the co-operative commodities which would be set aside and launched upon the home or foreign markets. As to this loan—and now Georgia began to see light—it should be a Government loan: but, if the Government was unwilling to adopt the scheme, Chilton offered to run it himself. He already had the support of a number of influential persons who were present there to-night. This was no Utopian plan, he concluded, no lunatic philanthropy, but a scheme which had been worked out by experts and approved by hard-headed business men. Great ills demanded heroic remedies. No man’s personal interests or prejudices should be allowed to outweigh the terrible fact that two million of our countrymen were being condemned to a living death.

  Georgia turned to the leading articles. They were for the most part cautious and non-committal. A scheme backed by such weight of authority could not be dismissed with a little editorial persiflage. At the same time, it was evident that Chilton’s speech had not been given to the papers in time for their experts to make a thorough examination before the paper went to press. His scheme, therefore, had a day’s start to impress public opinion: it was a jump ahead of any expert criticism: and a day’s start, Georgia knew, will work wonders. The timing of Chilton’s stroke roused her to unwilling admiration. Political genius is often a matter of perfect timing, and she realised, as never before, what Sir John and herself and all the rest of them were up against. Her musings were interrupted by the arrival of Alison Grove, looking like a butterfly dishevelled by an unseasonable gale.

  “Well, the lid’s off now, my dear,” she said. “I don’t believe even John Strangeways knew this was going to break.”

  “Do you think Chilton is at all sincere over it? It can’t just be a gigantic piece of spoof. His backers——”

  “The people backing the scheme are mainly high-ups in the E.B., you can bet your pants on it, my girl. This scheme only need be coherent enough to hold water for a few weeks, while it’s making its impact on public opinion. The man in the street doesn’t give two damns for expert verdicts. Suppose the present Government refuses to consider the scheme, shows up all its weak points: the man in the street won’t bother about that, he’ll say to himself, “Here at last is someone making constructive proposals on the three subjects that’ve been most on my mind—the unemployed, food in war-time, real security from air-raids. And, as usual, the Government turns it down. To hell with governments! Why can’t we have Chillie running the country?”

  “Yes, that’s true. He’s certainly got wonderful tactical skill. Reading his speech, I found a sort of disillusionment and discontent with parliamentary government even creeping over myself. It’s very skilful, the way he injects a note of scepticism, a good-humoured but weary contempt for the muddle Parliament has made of everything.”

  “Believe me, if there was any doubt before, there’s none now. He’s the most popular man in Britain to-day. You can’t imagine the sensation this has made in Fleet Street. And all the way along here I kept being bumped into by people with their eyes glued to their newspapers. If ever the E.B. are allowed to make their coup, there’s not going to be much difficulty in putting over their dictator now.”

  “Yes. He’ll have the better part of the two million unemployed at his back, for one thing. And there’s nothing Nazi-ish about it to arouse their suspicions, either. No talk of labour camps and so on.”

  “That’s his genius. The leopard that changed his spots. It doesn’t look like Fascism: it doesn’t sound like Fascism: it doesn’t smell like Fascism. But——” Alison shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s odd, his coming out into the open like this so soon after I began to get proof that he’s the man behind the E.B.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, my dear. Spoof or no spoof, his scheme has taken longer to work out than that. You’re just a nice little woman to him. Or perhaps a nasty little nuisance. Depends how much he’s found out. Blast Lady Rissington and her mirror! ”

  “It makes me feel like Micky Mouse trying to ride a whale.”

  “Even a whale’s got its weak spot. It’s your job now to find it.”

  Alison crossed her pretty legs, and went on, “Yes, Chillie’s got the politicians in a cleft stick. The present Government daren’t ignore his scheme since he’s threatened to run it himself if they do, and that puts them in a false position. The Opposition can’t use it as a stick to beat the Government with, because—although there’s a certain flavour of Socialism about it—it’s been put forward by a group of capitalists. He’s taken the wind out of every one’s sails.”

  Georgia walked over to the window, stared out unseeing at the opposite houses, the trees in the square now limp and dusty after the summer months. It was a familiar scene, but to-day the ordinariness of it did not comfort her. She thought of Nigel, who had gone to live with a friend at Oxford: they had lived here together and been happy, but now she felt like an exile for whom the unreality of the present clouds even the past happiness. Shaken by a spasm of intolerable longing, she turned away. On with the motley, she thought: on with the make-believe. It can’t last for ever. Either they’ll find me out, and Hargreaves Steele’s filthy bacilli will do the rest; or else we’ll beat them, and I can become an ordinary person again. Oh, Nigel, if only we could have been doing this together!

  CHAPTER XI

  THE EPISODE OF THE CLOCK-GOLF COURSE

  GEORGIA’S FIRST SIGHT of Chilton Ashwell was on an August evening. She had travelled up to the Midlands by train. At the main-line station she was met by a chauffeur, who tucked her solicitously into the Rolls Royce and drove fast through the mining district from which a part of Lord Canteloe’s wealth was derived. They were model villages, having sprung up out of a new coal-field during the last twenty years, the groups of red-brick houses arranged in crescents, their gardens blazing with flowers. There was nothing here to remind one of all that lay beneath, except the black-faced miners, tin-helmeted, their cans slung over their shoulders, bicycling home from the day shift, and the pervasive, indescribable tang which burning slag-heaps left in the air.

  After a drive of eight miles, the car turned off through the park gates and whirred up an avenue of beeches that rose, smooth and metallic like organ pipes, into the evening sky. An occasional pheasant, alarmed by their approach, rocketed screeching away. Rabbits lolloped leisurely across the drive in front of them. Then the drive curved, the screen of trees and bracken fell away a little, and Georgia saw the west front of Chilton Ashwell, all its windows glowing like opals in the late sun. The grey, Palladian façade looked infinitely peaceful: its elegance had an ethereal quality, as though this house still lay in the dreaming mind of its creator, and might vanish into thin air at a touch. On the lake swans sailed with their dreamlike motion, arched their necks superbly. The stone-balustraded terrace, the formal gardens had the swept air of a place from which men have long since departed, where only history remains. You could not imagine this house in any other setting, or that green park-land opening to reveal any other house.

  Yes, thought Georgia, Chilton Ashwell is everything he claimed for it. But I must not let myself be lulled into oblivion by all this. He shan’t try his stately-homes-of-England stuff on me. Walking up the broad, shallow steps, already half under the spell of this house, she forced herself to remember that here, in the heart of England, Engla
nd’s ruin was being planned.

  She was shown into a high-ceilinged, homely room, where a number of the party were congregated. Chilton Canteloe’s face lighted up when she appeared. In flannels, his hair rumpled, he looked more boyish than ever: he strode across the room with his stooping, bear-like gait, and took both her hands for a moment.

  “How nice to see you. And you got here quite safely? Do you want some tea?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve had it. I do think your house is perfect.” Georgia glanced round, a little bemused by all these conflicting sensations. Most of the men, she noticed, were in flannels. “Have you all been morris-dancing?” she asked.

  Chilton threw back his head, and roared with laughter. “Morris-dancing! What a tortuous mind you have! Never content with the obvious. We’ve been playing cricket.”

  “It’s all one to Georgia,” said a familiar voice. “She doesn’t know the difference.”

  “Peter! I never knew you’d be here. Have they thrown you out of your county side?”

  “We’ve no fixture to-day. So Lord Canteloe asked me to play for his team against one of the local pits. Eh, they’re terrors, your miners. Ah’ve been boomped all over,” said Peter Braithwaite, throwing a Nottingham twang into his voice.

  “We don’t dope our wicket here,” said Chilton grinning. “Shows you up properly, Peter, my lad, when you’ve got to play on a piece of honest turf.”

  The friendly banter was so English, Georgia thought bitterly: like the whole atmosphere of Chilton Ashwell which, in spite of its owner’s millions, achieved that paradoxical English blend of the idyllic and the cosy. At dinner, too, when they were talking about Chilton’s plan for the unemployed, and Georgia—acting her part—remarked that perhaps his recent travels in Germany and Italy had helped him to formulate it, Chilton replied passionately that he hoped we should never model ourselves on continental methods, the English spirit was a thing apart and must always create its own forms.

  Studying his magnetic, brown, gold-flecked eyes, which could turn so easily from playfulness to an almost tigerish fury of concentration, Georgia was inclined to think he really meant it. His belief in himself was so implicit that he could never doubt, at the moment, the truth of his own words. He was a self-deceiver on the heroic scale, and of that stuff dictators are made. If a man is only vulnerable at the point where his self-confidence leaves off, Georgia asked herself, where is Chilton’s weak spot?

  To-night more than ever she realised how invulnerable he was. Among the guests there were two women at least whose beauty was worth a king’s ransom—the dazzling, blonde, patrician-featured Lady Rissington, and Mrs. Mainwaring with her loveliness that glowed in the candle-lit room like a ruby or a smouldering coal. It was plain that he had only to lift a finger and they would follow him anywhere. Yet his manner towards them was affectionate, teasing, whimsical, without either the Puritan’s stiff reserve or the libertine’s aggressiveness; they might have been his kid sisters just out of the schoolroom: and, oh my, don’t they know it, Georgia thought with secret amusement, watching their subtle or undisguised efforts to capture his attention.

  She was the more surprised when after dinner they began dancing to the radio gramophone and Chilton sought her out first, leaving the two professional charmers to bite their thumbs together. He danced perfectly, absorbed in the steps, the usual clumsiness of his gait altogether gone. I am now not merely in the lion’s den, but in his very jaws, Georgia said to herself: it gave her a feeling of temerity and faint astonishment. Well, he’s only a man, after all. He feels like a man, his fingers are warm on my back, so snap out of it, my girl.

  When their dance was over, he took her out on to the terrace. The park was stretched out before them, its smooth contours seeming to stir in the universal rhythm of sleep. Below, the lake glimmered, and riding swans were like drowned ghosts of moonlight. The music throbbed out again behind them.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Georgia, turning to meet his eyes.

  “How am I looking at you?”

  “As if I was a new kind of equation your teacher had chalked up on the blackboard.”

  “Perhaps you are, Georgia. I can’t quite place you.”

  “Do you always have to place people?”

  “When they might be dangerous to me—yes.”

  Georgia’s voice was cool, interested, not in the least betraying how his words had shaken her. “How could I be dangerous to you?”

  “If you don’t know that, nobody does.”

  A silence fell, broken by the flurried squawk of a moorhen among the reeds below. There was something formidable about Chilton’s silence, his refusal to press her at all. She felt his enigmatic power circled about her, mingling with the spell of house and moonlit park.

  “This is a very odd conversation, considering we’ve only met once before,” she said at last.

  “We’re neither of us ordinary people,” he replied indifferently. “Do you suppose we should talk about the weather?”

  “It’s a safe subject, especially when you’re with a dangerous person.” She underlined the word. Two could play at the game of cryptic remarks.

  “I don’t play for safety. Nor do you, judging by accounts.”

  “There’s not much risk for a traveller to-day. Only dirt and fatigue. I never minded them much.”

  “Travelling. Oh yes,” said Chilton politely. He linked his hands behind his neck. “But were we talking about travel?”

  Georgia made no reply. Her silence stood up to him like an ice barrier. His voice deepened. “I believe you’ve no idea what an electrifying creature you are. You make the Mainwarings and Rissingtons of this world look like dumb celluloid close-ups. A woman like you could——”

  He broke off, put his hand under her elbow and took her back into the house. No, thought Georgia, it’s absurd. Fantastically absurd. Yet perhaps this is the way to do it—the only way I could do it. It must be the resistance in me that attracts him: he’s so used to women crumpling up at his feet: he senses this resistance; but how far does he suspect its real cause? Did he mean I was dangerous to the man, or to the future dictator?

  She had no opportunity that night for talking to Peter Braithwaite alone. Next morning, though, when Chilton was in conference with his secretary and his agent, Peter asked her to have a round of clock-golf with him.

  “I can’t play clock-golf,” she said.

  “That’s all right. I play it like a master. You’d be surprised.”

  The lawn lay between waist-high hedges of beech. At the far end stood a miniature marble temple, built by some 18th century Canteloe who liked to admire his panorama from a classical vantage-point, abandoned now to spiders and golf-clubs.

  “A good place to talk,” said Peter cheerfully. “You can see any one approaching, quite a long way off. And one can always hide behind that marble oddment if they start shooting.”

  “Are you expecting to get shot? I thought you’d come here to play cricket!”

  “Oh, I’m doing a bit of that on the side. Alison told me you’d begun to play the big fish.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “After the things I’ve come across these last months, I’d not have been surprised to hear that Canteloe was the Grand Lama of Tibet in disguise,” said Peter, hitting his ball negligently over the hillocky turf to the lip of the hole. Georgia followed suit, with pronounced ill-success.

  “I wish there weren’t all these horrid little bumps in the grass,” she complained. “It’s not fair.”

  “As a matter of fact, clock-golf is usually played on a level surface, not a sort of championship golf green like this. I suppose Canteloe wanted to make it more difficult. He fancies himself as a games-player. A gardener told me that his Lordship laid this out himself not long ago. Beats me how he gets time for all this, what with planning for the unemployed, organising a revolution and being groomed for Britain’s dictator.”

  “Don’t stop playing, Peter, and be care
ful what you say. There’s someone watching us out of a window in the east wing, with field-glasses.”

  “Field-glasses? What does he think we are? A couple of long-tailed tits?”

  “There’s such a thing as lip-reading, Peter. Keep your back to the house if you’re going to throw off any more slander about our host.”

  They played the remaining holes. The young cricketer was quite accustomed to being watched by people with field-glasses: he kept running his ball up to the pin, his slender wrists moving neatly, lazily.

  “It’s a very lopsided sort of clock, isn’t it?” said Georgia. The little numbered discs from which they played did not, as usual in this game, form a circle, but were dotted irregularly about the lawn.

  “Canteloe is a very lopsided sort of man,” Peter replied.

  After they had finished the game and Georgia had declined another, they went to sit in the marble summerhouse. Two caryatids, blank-eyed, supported the door. You could see Chilton Ashwell and its rolling park-land all laid out below, scorching now in the summer heat. A herd of deer, motionless and painted as wooden toys, was congregated among the shadowing oaks away to their left.

  “Canteloe seems to have taken a fancy to you,” said Peter at last.

  “I can’t quite make out whether he’s a bit suspicious of me, or whether it’s—well, natural interest. The latter, let’s hope. It might come in very useful.”

  “Don’t, Georgia,” the cricketer exclaimed with unusual intensity. “You mustn’t let it come to that. It didn’t matter so much with me. I’m just a chap who can hit a cricket-ball hard. But you’re different. You’re really worth something.”

  “My dear Peter, what are you——”

  “I can’t get Rosa Alvarez out of my head.” He shivered in the dry, lizard-like chill of the summer-house. “It was bad enough leading her up the garden path. Well, she asked for it, I suppose. She was a stupid, greedy, frightened woman, if you like, and I was the young hero in a Secret Service play, risking worse than death for his Country’s sake. All right. Let it go. But I killed that woman. I’m responsible for whatever filthy thing it was that Alvarez and the E.B. did to her. Yes, I know, all in a good cause. But a good cause doesn’t make a dirty trick clean. Sounds silly, but I feel as if I’ll have to expiate Rosa’s death somehow.”