The Smiler With the Knife Page 9

  A hot June evening. A dinner-party in Professor Hargreaves Steele’s house at Hampstead. Their host’s bald dome, whose tufts of hair on either side gave him a faint resemblance to Mr. Pickwick, shone in the candlelight as he turned from one guest to another, now bubbling over with impish merriment like a Pooka, now dismissing some argument with incisive, almost contemptuous logic, now relapsing into a moment of abstraction when nothing of him seemed alive but his restless, agile hands that performed little tricks of prestidigitation while his mind withdrew into some abtruse speculation of its own.

  Georgia watched him, fascinated. In conversation, his intellect so dominated the company that one could feel it almost physically, as though it were one of those irresistible elemental forces, so dear to the old writers of ghost-stories, which could smash their way through padlocked doors and shoulder strong men aside like wisps of straw. Even his playfulness had something of the lion’s paw about it. Yet this weight of intellect was accompanied by no corresponding impression of character. There was no facet of character you could get a grip on and say “this is the real man,” only a series of moods. Like an elemental, Professor Steele was somehow amorphous—he changed shape so fluently that you could not pin him down to any one shape at all.

  Each man’s morality, thought Georgia, is a compromise between the strength of his character and the strength of his environment. Where you have no character to fix the ratio, you get the genius and the lunatic, to whom morality is meaningless. A genius is only a specialised lunatic with special opportunities. For this reason, Hargreaves Steele must be one of the most dangerous men in England: an elemental body that has immense momentum but no responsibility.

  It amused Georgia to watch some of the women lionising the professor. He allowed them, metaphorically, to stroke his mane, admire his teeth, even tease him a little, but, if they got too venturesome, he would knock them off their balance with one lazy, unerring sweep of his paw. Later, no doubt, they would show off the scars to their acquaintance. There were innumerable stories current of the scientist’s scarifying retorts—most of them told against themselves by the victims. One got a certain vicarious fame out of having been taken down a peg by Hargreaves Steele.

  After dinner, he invited a few of them to inspect his laboratory. Here, among the tanks and the microscopes, he became a different person. Georgia understood why his colleagues sometimes referred to him as “a charlatan” or “a bit of a mountebank.” He liked putting on a show. It was as though, entering the laboratory, he assumed the weird cloak of an ancient alchemist. His manner grew suddenly brusque, businesslike, yet he manipulated his apparatus with a certain stylised flamboyance and an inward abstraction of eye that set his audience at a distance; they might have been watching him through the thick glass of one of his own tanks. The impression of a conjuror at work was increased by the scientist’s assistant, a chubby, bristly-moustached little man who in absolute silence set out the materials for each new demonstration, moving anonymously about the laboratory as if he were an automaton controlled by wireless from the professor’s massive forehead.

  One woman, a little bored with the performance, skittishly asked, “When are you going to show us where you keep all the wretched guinea-pigs you torture, Professor Steele?”

  “Madam, in the eyes of science, you and the guinea-pig are equally suitable material for investigation. The difference is that you are more expensive to keep.”

  The woman, whose extravagant tastes had compelled her husband publicly to repudiate her debts, gave a brittle laugh. Professor Steele’s mouth quirked in a complacent smile, like an amateur comedian whose gag has brought the house down. A few minutes later, when the professor was demonstrating an electric motor, one of the male guests asked, rather self-importantly:

  “Why don’t you use the Zinkessen model? I should have thought——”

  “Because this one is better,” replied the professor abstractedly, without even looking up.

  When he had finished what Georgia called in her own mind his “set pieces,” he unexpectedly took her by the arm and, ignoring the other guests who trailed round after them or moved back to the drawing-room, led her on a little tour of inspection.

  “You’ve seen some of the effects on your travels, I dare-say, Mrs. Strangeways. Come and have a closer look at the causes.”

  Pursing his mouth, he adjusted a powerful microscope. “That’s Cholera vibrios. Active little chaps, aren’t they? Take a peep.”

  Georgia saw what looked like a number of dark worms writhing and thrashing about, changing pattern like a demented wallpaper.

  “Here are some tuberculosis bacilli. Rather dull. Most of us carry them . . . Bubonic bacillus . . . Borrelia berbera—he’s the parasite that causes African relapsing fever . . . Next, three different species of malarial parasite—Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariæ, Plasmodium falciparum . . . Anthrax—ordinary-looking little beast, isn’t he? . . . And here’s the sleeping-sickness trypanosome . . . And if you come over to this microscope, I think we’ve got—yes, we have—the head of a tsetse fly, the one that transmits sleeping-sickness in Africa.”

  When he had finished, Georgia felt a little sick. “I suppose you’re used to having all these filthy cultures about the place. I’d be getting up all hours of the night to see none of them had escaped.”

  Professor Steele’s eyes twinkled. “Twinkled” was perhaps an inadequate word for the scintillating, almost a little crazy look that came into them. He patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ll not let them out after you—not if you’re a good girl.”

  The two other guests who still remained with them laughed merrily. Old Steele was in good form to-night. But Georgia’s blood ran cold. She knew that the scientist’s words had been a threat. She had seen too much of the horrors these vile, microscopic creatures caused, too much of the E.B. and Professor Steele, to be able to take the threat lightly. Rosa Alvarez, perhaps, had been struck down from this bland, hygienic laboratory. She herself, a member of the movement now, had received her warning, delivered in innocent terms before two unconscious witnesses, like a bomb concealed in a Christmas cracker.

  It was this scene, as much as anything else, that enabled her months later, when the leader of the conspiracy, the man whom the E.B. intended to make dictator, was in her power, to treat him with as little compunction as she would have treated one of Professor Steele’s disease-carrying lice.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE EPISODE OF THE ENGLISH BANNER

  THAT SCENE IN Professor Steele’s laboratory marked a new stage in Georgia’s relations with the E.B., a stage which opened during her first visit to Alice Mayfield’s home towards the middle of May. Reviewing the whole affair a year later, she saw this visit in its true perspective. It reminded her of an occasion when, as a girl, she had been sailing on a friend’s yacht to the outer Hebrides. Barra, a sullen, black wedge, had risen over the horizon. The yacht had approached the island, nearer and nearer, till it seemed she must ram herself against those inhospitable cliffs: and then, almost in a moment, the opening of the sound appeared, at first as a narrow, angled rift in the cliffs, then a navigable channel, and they had slid through into the heart of the island, into Castle Bay where Kishmul’s Castle, toy-like on its tiny rock, lay marooned in the farthest reach of the bay.

  So it was with Georgia now. Driving hard at the outer walls of the conspiracy, until it seemed she must break herself vainly against them, she found an opening with sudden, magical ease.

  On the way down to Berkshire that Friday afternoon, she summed up the information she had received from Alison and others about the Mayfield stables. George Mayfield, a cavalry officer and celebrated amateur rider in his day, now trained for Lord Chilton Canteloe. Chilton—“Chillie,” as he was affectionately known by the millions who had profited either directly by his philanthropies or indirectly from the way his horses justified their backers’ confidence—was a millionaire, still in his early midd
le-age, but already something of a legend in the country, a figure as colourful in his way as the great Whig noblemen of the 18th century. Georgia, indeed, had suggested to her friend, half in fun, that he would be the ideal man for the E.B. to have chosen as dictator, but Alison had replied, “Oh no. Don’t go barking up that gum-tree, my sweet. Chillie’s all right. He’s a grand chap. You wait till you meet him.”

  Georgia, however, was not to meet him on this visit. He was abroad, Alice Mayfield told her when she met her at the station. And a certain rapt, yet defensive look that came into the girl’s eyes at the mention of his name suggested that here was another of Chilton Canteloe’s easy conquests. Perhaps not so easy, thought Georgia: Alice is a proud prickly creature; she’d be a handful all right.

  Five minutes’ drive brought them to the Mayfield stables. The long, rambling red-brick house, the white picket-fences, the stables behind—all looked fresh as paint against the great ridge of downland already massed with shadows from the evening sun. The air was full of sound: the muffled stamp and clatter of horses, the clink of buckets, voices buzzing from yard and paddock, and above them a remote roaring as a flight of pursuit-planes—arrowed out like wild geese—passed overhead, homing towards their aerodrome beyond that shoulder of the downs. “We’ve got three aerodromes now, within a radius of twenty miles or so,” Alice said. “Atterbourne, Hartgrove and Tewbury.”

  “Don’t the planes upset your horses?”

  “Oh, they’ve got used to them.”

  “We’ve all got used to them, I suppose. Used to the idea of the air being the element of death.”

  “You’re not a pacifist, are you?” Alice Mayfield asked sharply.

  “Dear me, no. I dislike being killed without having a chance to hit back, though.”

  “I wanted to join the Civil Air Guard, but Daddy wouldn’t let me. He thinks flying is not womanly.”

  “You should tell him to read Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, then. Particularly the nuptial flight chapter.”

  “Daddy read a book? I should laugh. The book of form’s the only one he ever opens.”

  “What’s that, my dear?” said a voice behind them. “Hello, who’ve we got here?”

  “Mrs. Strangeways. Let me introduce you. My father. Mrs. Strangeways is one of our guests for the week-end, Daddy, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Delighted,” growled Mr. Mayfield, vigorously pumping Georgia’s arm up and down. “My little girl’s talked a lot about you. Taken a fancy to you, yer know. I’m a bit deaf, so yer’ll have to shout at me. Anno Domini, yer know. Why didn’t yer bring yer husband?”

  “Daddy! You know I told you——”

  “She oughtn’t to do it, at her age.”

  Georgia glanced rather wildly at Mr. Mayfield, but he was no longer talking about her. He was pointing with his stick at an old woman carrying two buckets of water along the lane. When she came abreast of them, he roared at her:

  “Shouldn’t do it, Mrs. Elder. Do yerself an injury. How’s the rheumatism?”

  “Middling, sir. I can’t complain. ’Tis all this rainy weather we had in the winter.”

  “Get on with you! You’re good for fifty years more. Wait till yer my age. It ain’t the weather, it’s Anno Domini, that’s what it is. Feel it in me bones. The knacker’s cart round the corner. Good day to you.”

  Georgia was attracted by this rumbustious old man, in his flat-topped hard hat, yellow waistcoat, slit-tailed check coat, and jodhpurs. He was a character. But it was easy to see, too, how Alice Mayfield’s character had been distorted by him. The only daughter—she had four brothers, Georgia was to find—she had been alternately petted and harshly repressed by her father. He wished her to be a simulacrum of his dead wife, a “womanly woman,” as Alice bitterly expressed it: while she, brought up in this masculine society, worshipping her brothers and at the same time envying them their freedom, could achieve neither the license of the tomboy nor the placidity of the feminine.

  This impression was fixed firmly in Georgia’s mind next morning. Waking early in the small, white-washed bedroom, she slipped on a wrap and went over to the window. In the almost level rays of sunlight, the downs to the west were picked out with such radiant clarity that it almost seemed as if every separate grass-blade stood visible. The hills surged up with a giant sweep on either hand, like Atlantic swells holding house, stables and village tiny and becalmed in their trough. Presently, over the brow of hill on Georgia’s right, a horse and rider appeared. A chestnut horse, neck proudly arching as its rider held it on the summit in a statuary pose, the sunlight making a burning bush of the rider’s flaxen mop of hair, a beacon on that solitary upland. Yet, for all the glory of the picture she made, there was a dejected droop about Alice Mayfield’s shoulders, an air of one on the lookout for a relief that never comes. Motionless up there on the horse’s back, gazing southward, she seemed to Georgia an image of “divine discontent.”

  There was a sentry in her pose, too. Georgia remembered the ghost of Yarnold Farm, and it struck her that here also was a strategic position: a house set in the middle between three R.A.F. aerodromes. A picture came unbidden into her mind. Flights of planes dipping and turning over the Houses of Parliament, while, within, an ultimatum was being delivered. Resign, or——

  Irritably she dismissed it from her mind. That was the worst of fighting in the dark—you began to get fancies, to imagine enemies in every corner. The girl up above jerked at her rein: the horse shot forward, swiftly, smoothly, compactly as a torpedo: they were galloping along the ridge, galloping breakneck in a moment down the track towards the sleepy, dazzled village.

  “Have you brought good news from Ghent to Aix?” Georgia called out of her bedroom window five minutes later. Alice Mayfield looked up at her, cheeks flushed, white teeth shining in a smile.

  “I had a lovely ride. Did you see me up there?”

  Yes, thought Georgia, she looks as innocent as the dawn. I must stop imagining things. Yet she was there in that hot room with Señor Alvarez and his associates: she couldn’t have got there by accident.

  The meeting that evening, when Georgia was initiated into the English Banner, was no less innocent either, for all its oddity. Mr. Mayfield attended, though grumbling audibly beforehand about “all this tomfoolery of Alice’s.” Two of his sons, florid, well-set-up young men, one or two neighbouring farmers, a little overawed beneath their appearance of stolidity, a few “county” young things, larky and disrespectful, a parson, the head stable-boy, a gnarled, bow-legged, gum-chewing wisp of a man, Georgia’s two fellow-guests—a land-owner from another part of the district, and his wife, and a few R.A.F. officers, slick-haired, unobtrusive, talking their own language.

  Proceedings opened with a ceremony, conducted by Alice’s elder brother, Robert, who assumed for the occasion the robe and title of “Chief Banneret.” The ceremony had that atmosphere of crankiness, make-believe and rather seedy mysticism which is apt to come over a religion or idea in its decadence. Georgia’s chief feeling was one of embarrassed apprehension—the kind of apprehension one might feel at a séance lest the medium should misfire, or watching some pathetic old trouper in a travelling vaudeville trying to reproduce the talent of his palmy days. This part of the ceremony concluded with Georgia’s induction.

  “Do you believe in the principle of aristocracy, the rule and government of the Superior Person?” she was asked.

  “Do you believe in the hereditary line of true aristocrats?”

  “Do you believe in the privilege and responsibility of the Superior Caste?”

  And so on.

  Georgia contrived to keep a straight face, and was duly made a member of the English Banner. She was interested to note that she did not receive a disk such as Nigel had found in the locket: Sir John had evidently been right in saying that these disks were only current among the real conspirators. A sudden wave of home-sickness came over her: she wanted to be able to tell Nigel all about this absurd ceremony, to hear his explosi
ve laughter: nothing here seemed real at all.

  After the ceremony was over, the Round Table took place. This high-flown title, Georgia discovered, meant nothing more than sitting round a table and airing grievances about the Government, the servant-problem, the “crippling weight of taxation,” the Socialist Party, the iniquity of hikers, speculative builders and tradesmen, the debasement of modern art, empty churches, football-pools, chemical beer, birth-control, and other allied subjects. It was all very tedious and laughable, but at the same time one could see what admirably troubled waters the English Banner provided for the real conspirators to fish in.

  Next morning, however, Alice Mayfield took her for a ride before breakfast, and it was high up on the downland, looking over the Sunday calm of fields and villages, that Georgia was at last admitted to the secret which had evaded her so long. They had reined in their horses to admire the view, and Alice suddenly asked her what she’d thought about the meeting of the English Banner.

  “Do you want me to be polite or honest?” asked Georgia, seeing her opportunity.

  “I hate people being polite.”

  “Very well, then. I thought it was a ridiculous piece of hocus-pocus. Not the idea itself—I wouldn’t have joined if I’d thought that. But all the talk, talk, talk. So utterly peevish and feeble. Why don’t they do something about it, instead of whining all the time. ‘Aristocrats’ whining over their silly little grievances. Haven’t they any guts? Your brothers look as if they have, but they just jabbered away with the rest like a couple of croatian café-conspirators. What a pitiful spectacle we were, complaining about the way democracy is ruining the Empire, telling each other how marvellous we are—born to rule, and the rest of it, and then just sitting back on our haunches! Heaven preserve me from that kind of self-righteous, do-nothing smugness.”

  Alice Mayfield was stung, as Georgia had intended, by the contemptuous reference to her brothers.

  “We’re not so futile as you think,” she said indignantly. “Not all of us. Not Robert and Dennis. Or me. We’re helping to get things done.”