Half-past six in the morning on Friday the twelfth of July. Northbourne Park Villas almost silent still in the warm morning air. Birds singing. Two streets away the clear, slow clopping of a horse and an occasional grating squeal from the iron-shod wheels of its cart. Janey out on the steps, as always at this hour, the tools of her trade beside her, broom for sweeping the steps down, rags and jar of polish for the brass of the door, pail of water and hearthstone block for scrubbing the steps at last a milky-white. And she is already kneeling at work on the topmost step, scraping the coarse block back and forth along its water-glistening length, obliterating inch by inch all the footmarks of yesterday. Making ready for the footmarks of today.
And the tears falling, to be lost on the wet stone. Falling unstoppably as she scrubs.
Then, waited-for, expected, but nonetheless cruelly startling, a sound behind her, two words quietly spoken.
“Well, girl?”
Janey swung round on one knee, heart thudding like a clock gone mad, mouth open to gulp in air.
“Oh, Val. You give me such a fright.”
“Yer knew I was goin’ ter come,” he answered, leaning well over the gate, speaking very softly, blue-grey eyes darting to and fro. And hard. Hard as stone.
“Yes, yes,” Janey found herself agreeing, whispering as well. “Yes, I knew. But I didn’t dare think what I’d got ter say. I jus’ kep’ me mind on me steps an’ the scrubbing.”
She saw his newly sunburnt face pale with anger.
“So yer didn’t go,” he said. “Yer never went down there an’ saw that plate-closet door.”
A fresh spurt of tears welled from her eyes.
“Val,” she pleaded, “I wanted ter. Or if I didn’t, I knew I had ter. An’ I was going ter, honest But I couldn’t. I couldn’t Val, there was such ructions in the ’Ouse.”
“What ructions?” came the brief brutal question.
“Robert’s been dismissed,” she answered. “The Master found the shutters undone on one o’ the library winders. An’ he ‘ad Robert up in front of ‘im, an’ created something terrible. An* Robert denied it, an’ that made it worse. The Master would’ve ‘ad ‘im out o’ the ‘ouse there an’ then, in the middle o’ the night, only Mr. Burch spoke up fer ‘im. But he’s going at any minute. Out of it before seven in the morning, Mr. Burch promised. An’ he’s packing ‘is things now, an’ still swearing ‘e didn’t never do it an’ cussing something terrible, so, Val, I couldn’t do nothing about getting into the breakfast room. They was up till gone one in the morning, an’ I’d dropped clean asleep by then. I couldn’t ‘elp it, Val. I couldn’t ‘elp meself.”
“Never mind about that. Never mind a penny.”
She sat back on her heels in pure astonishment. What did he mean? Why hadn’t he gone for her tooth and nail as she had expected?
And then she saw that the narrow handsome face which she still loved was no longer closed in anger but alight with a quick and blazing joy.
“Val?” she asked.
“Never mind you an’ that door,” he answered triumphantly. “We’ll do better nor that by far now. A footman dismissed from ‘is place an’ swearing it were unjust, a servant without a character an’ nowhere ter turn. We’ll know every bit about that plate closet afore the clock’s struck ten. Believe you me.”
The manoeuvring forward of many marching columns, the wheeling of cavalry up to positions of vantage, the slow dragging into place of the artillery: These are the necessary preliminaries of battle. They follow a prescribed pattern. But then, sometimes and swiftly, a gaping weakness in the defences ahead becomes exposed. It may have sprung from some gigantic oversight on the part of the general. Or it may have been due to some culpable omission lower in the chain of command. Or it may have been no more than the effect of chance during the heat of the engagement. But, whatever the cause, the question is, Will the advancing force be able to seize the opportunity created? Or will the sudden chance simply be looked at stupidly, with a feeling that such things ought not to happen and therefore have not happened, and thus be left unexploited? The answer depends often on the qualities and character of one man at one place.
When Val Leary, furiously listening to Janey’s blubbering excuses, had heard that Robert had been dismissed he could have let the news pass over him as so much unimportant side matter. But his honed predatory instinct, product of years of privation married to an inborn strength of will, seized at once on the significance of the chance information.
Robert would be vengeful. Robert would be feeling acutely his lack of money. Robert would be ripe for exploitation.
And all that Val had to do, when he had abruptly left Janey, was to station himself in a convenient hiding place, the nook he had watched from before where a thick-trunked sycamore grew on the pavement close to the wall of a house on the far side from No. 53 about halfway along, and there wait. He had not been in place a quarter of an hour when he saw the tall figure of Robert emerge from the area of No. 53, a large sagging wicker hamper on his shoulder. He watched just long enough to see which way he went, and then he set off himself in the opposite direction.
Smiling like a fox, he ran at a good steady pace down to the first turning, round it, along to the next street, the one parallel to Northbourne Park Villas, and up this as fast as he could go. Then he cut across, still running but up on silent toes, and he was waiting, sitting cheerfully at ease on the wall round St. Stephen’s Church, when a chap much his own age came staggering along in the early-morning quiet carrying on his shoulder a large and sagging wicker hamper.
“Give yer a hand wi’ that, mate?”
And it was done. Some friendly talk as they walked, each holding the big hamper by a handle. A drink suggested. A tale poured out. Mysterious assistance promised. The hamper taken on to the servants’ lurk in Paddington that Robert had told Mr. Burch would be his temporary stopping place. A visit set in hand to a gin shop in Newel Street, Soho.
A good general when he learns that a dangerous gap has been opened in his defences will spare nothing to take appropriate countermeasures. A bad general will persist in a course because he has ordered it, and be damned to the breach which that course has left open, however wide and evident
Mortimer Johnson was neither bad nor good. He was a human being, endowed by fate, or the chance progress over the generations of the family he sprang from, with considerable responsibilities. These he enjoyed to the full, though he was often conscious that they were responsibilities. Yet, being human, there were occasions when he abused the power that the accident of birth had placed in his hands. He let the ill temper he had inherited or acquired have vent more often, much more often, than there was any real excuse for. And in the house no one was more calculated to rouse his ill-sleeping ire than Miss Christopher, whose obsessive tentativeness seemed exactly calculated to enrage him.
Miss Christopher, one of the two people whose presence in the household at No. 53 Northbourne Park Villas Janey had not ever spoken of to Val, never having dared admit that when they had first spent time together in Kensington Gardens she had been ready to pander to a spoilt child’s insistence on having his bedtime hot milk and cinnamon prepared by no other hands than hers.
Miss Christopher, who came very seldom into contact with Robert, the footman, hardly other in fact than on those rare occasions when Robert, by chance a little early laying the breakfast table, found her in the room and sometimes noticed that one of the sugar bowls contained fewer lumps than he had put into it not long before.
Miss Christopher, whom Robert when he thought of her at all thought of simply as a creature to despise, and whom therefore he was quite unlikely to mention at the gin shop in Newel Street, venting his spleen there against the gentry of No. 53 Northbourne Park Villas.
Miss Christopher and her charge, Frederick.
Miss Christopher, standing now straight-backed, stiff, and rustling in her black, with her features held in a mask of severity, outside the tall mahogany door of the library, to which between nine and half-past every morning Mr. Mortimer Johnson was wont to retire with the Morning Post. Miss Christopher, her veined and skinny hand firmly clasping little Frederick’s child-soft wrist. And Frederick fearfully, appallingly red in the face.
“No, Frederick, you must come with me this moment and tell your father.”
“I don’t want to.”
A declaration, all will, all opposition, all belief that fury in the end always got you out of any sort of unpleasantness. But now fury has more to overcome than it has ever had yet in eight years of trial.
“Frederick, you must come,” Miss Christopher replied, forcing her voice like her features into an alien implacability. “That thoughtless act of yours in opening those shutters got Robert into very serious trouble.”
“Wasn’t thoughtless.”
Miss Christopher looked down at the set, sulky, mutinous face and sighed.
“Yes, Frederick, it was thoughtless.”
“It wasn’t. It wasn’t. I thought about it, didn’t I? I thought I heard a fire engine going along the street, and I thought I would go into the library to look at it because I knew Papa was having his dinner.”
“Yes, and you should not have done so, Frederick. You had been put to bed, and it was your duty to stay there. You know that. Well, you did wrong, and now you must tell your father.”
The small face plainly replaced fury with cunning.
“But, Miss Christopher, I told you that I did it.”
She did not loosen her grasp on that soft wrist despite the slackening of the tantrum pull which had filled her with a dreadful fear of being toppled off her feet. This time she would impose her will. This time there was injustice to another, to someone other than herself, to be taken into account.
“Yes, Frederick, you did tell me, and I am glad, truly glad, that you owned up to your wrongdoing. But now you must be yet more of a little man and admit to your father what you have done.”
“But—but he’ll beat me, Miss Christopher.”
From underneath the fury-filled creature, and from underneath the cunning one, there peeped the terror-stricken. She felt pity tug at her as hard as until a moment before she had been tugged at physically. But she forced her mind back to remembering what her duty was.
“No. Your father must be told.”
Then in an instant Frederick was back to heaving and writhing for escape. But she was determined to stand her ground and she dug her heels into the thick pile of the rug under them and leant backwards and held him. She held him long enough to feel the tugging slacken, to be able to reach across to the forbidding polished mahogany door and to knock on it. To knock more loudly and more abruptly than she would have wished to.
“What—what—Who’s there?”
The voice inside sounded startled and at once filled with irritation. Mr. Johnson, it was well known in the house, did not like to be disturbed during this quiet half hour. But her knuckles had rapped against the hard wood—and been hurt in doing so—and the voice had answered. And there was no going back now. She turned the chased brass knob and pushed the door open, dragging behind her a scuffling Frederick, suddenly and heart-ren-dingly white-faced.
“Good—good morning, Mr. Johnson,” she said, at once regretting her stupidity when she had already wished him good morning not an hour earlier at Prayers, as she always did and seldom gained acknowledgement for.
“What is it, ma’am?”
Mr. Johnson looked up at her from his paper, bringing his eyebrows furiously together. Nothing which she had entered the room to tell him, that bar of interlocked prickly hair seemed to say, could possibly justify such an intrusion.
She braced herself again.
“Sir, it is Frederick. I have brought him to you. There is something he wishes to tell you.”
“Hmph. I doubt, ma’am, whether this can conceivably be the time for childish affairs. I should already have left for the city, and I would have been gone had it not been for that disgraceful business last night.”
Miss Christopher felt flooded with a sense of her own ill-advised behaviour. She did not dare to look at the clock on the mantel, though she could have been certain that the time was not much after a quarter-past nine, well before Mr. Johnson’s habitual hour of departure. But in the wrong or in the right, what she had to force Frederick to say had to be embarked upon.
“Yes. Yes, sir,” she heard herself gabble. “But it was—It is indeed concerning the—the business last night that Frederick wishes to speak to you.”
“What? What is all this?”
Until now the Morning Post had remained most of the time up in front of Mr. Johnson’s face. But now he lowered it to his knees.
“I trust,” he said, “that Frederick has not come to plead for that man Robert. The fellow had not been allowed to spoil the boy, had he?”
Miss Christopher met the accusing glare full on.
“I—I hope I would never permit a servant to do that,” she managed to say.
“No?”
Mr. Johnson had seemed momentarily disconcerted. But he took an angry survey of his small son.
“Well, let the boy speak for himself.”
And Frederick became unable to speak. Miss Christopher felt she could see the words he ought to be saying sticking in his throat like the pieces of gristly meat that so often fell to her portion at the luncheon table and which she found so hard to swallow and yet did not like to leave untouched on her plate.
“Well, boy, have you lost your tongue?”
The words were hardly calculated to be reassuring.
“No.” A long-stretching pause. “No, Papa, I—”
Breakdown.
“Come, what nonsense is this?”
“Papa, it was me. I did it.”
Miss Christopher felt a washing spread of relief. She had taken a firm line, knowing for once that it was right. And firmness had at last brought the desired end.
But she had reckoned without Frederick’s father.
“Did it? Did it? Did what?”
He wheeled to her.
“For heaven’s sake, ma’am, have you not taught the boy how to speak?”
For a moment she felt battered into incapability of speech herself. Then she brought out the necessary words.
“Frederick, tell your father just what it was that you did.”
And at last Frederick pushed himself over the obstacle, and the words came pouring out
“The shutters. It was me. I left them open when I’d gone to watch a fire engine go by. Papa, it wasn’t Robert.”
Miss Christopher, lifted from depths to heights once more, drew herself up with a shiver of pride.
“As soon as little Frederick confessed to me, sir,” she said, “I brought him to you. I realised you would want to send out for Robert as soon as possible.”
And she was rewarded with a glare of purpling rage.
“I knew it, ma’am. You did bring the boy here to plead with me. I cannot conceive what malign spirit has entered into members of this household. First it is Burch presuming to tell me that is is my duty to keep an acknowledged thief under my roof. And now it is you, coming to me with this canting, mollycoddling, lily-livered claptrap.”
Miss Christopher dimly saw then that you do not disturb the order of the universe without provoking rage in the heavens.
“Mr. Johnson,” she said, endeavouring to hold up to this storm a tattered frail-spoked umbrella. “Sir, what Frederick told you is—It is no more than the simple truth.”
“Nonsense, woman,” came the answer in thunder. “It was Robert’s duty to close those shutters. I myself came in and found them open behind the curtains. You will please not question decisions which I have taken.”
“But—but, Mr. Johnson,” she persisted, a heedless lemming running to destruction, “Frederick has told you that it was he who opened the shutters after Robert closed them. It was a thoughtless act, but—””
Mr. Johnson leapt up from his chair.
“I will not have this,” he blared. “I have dismissed that man. And you—I suppose that you are now asking me to go down on my bended knee to the fellow and beg him to come back.”
“But, sir, if he was dismissed because of something which was no fault of his, then—”
“No fault of his? Are you telling me that I was wrong to dismiss one of my own servants?”
Miss Christopher felt herself falter. The lemming lifted for an instant its head and saw the watery deep ahead.
“I—I am not saying that you were wrong, of course, Mr. Johnson. It is—it is just that I…”
But she could say no more.
In her employer’s eye she saw a gleam of new ferocity appear.
“It is just, ma’am, that you are prey to a flood of soft-hearted poppycock. And now, if you please, I am long overdue leaving for the city. So good day to you, ma’am. Good day. And let us hear no more of this matter. Now, or at any other time. Good day.”
“Good day, sir,” said Miss Christopher.
She turned and walked across to the tall mahogany door, opened it, ushered Frederick through in front of her, and went out.
But beyond the door Frederick, who amid the thunder and the lightning had kept quiet as a rain-soaked mouse, filled out in an instant to his old indulged tyrannical self. Miss Christopher saw in his eyes the pure unalloyed scorn of childhood.
“Well,” he said, in clearly ringing tones, “you didn’t make Papa take Robert back, did you?”