The Day of Uniting/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
The news took Jimmy's breath away.
“Me?” he said incredulously. “Are you sure, Jerry?”
Gerald had come into his bedroom with a bundle of letters in his hand and, sitting on the edge of the bed, had read one of these.
“But I don't know the prime minister,” protested Jimmy. 'The only cabinet minister I know is Stope-Kendrick, and him only slightly.”
Gerald van Roon looked uncomfortable.
“Well, the truth is, Jimmy,” he said, “I asked for this invitation for you. I thought you would like it.”
Jimmy laughed.
“You silly old owl,” he said. “Of course, I like it. I'll be charmed to lunch with the prime minister. I shall have something to boast about to my dissolute friends. What is the occasion?”
“He is giving a lunch to Maggerson. Maggerson and he are very great friends,” explained Gerald, pacing up and down the room. “In fact, if John Chapelle hadn't gone in for politics he would have been a very passable scientist. They were at school together, Chapelle and Maggerson, and I should imagine it is a sort of luncheon party in his honor. Maggerson has been nine months in the United States and in Mexico, and apparently he has been going in for biological study. He's an extraordinary all-round man. I've got a letter here from Schaffer. Do you read German?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I would scorn to” he began, and then remembered that there was a little girl who did speak and read German and, therefore, a knowledge of the German language was a very admirable accomplishment and not to be scoffed at. “Who is Schaffer?” he asked.
“I suppose if you didn't know Maggerson you couldn't be expected to know Schaffer,” said Gerald patiently. “Schaffer, of Leipzig, is also, curiously enough, a great mathematician and a great biologist. He tells me in this letter that Maggerson is bringing from Mexico a new species of plant that he thinks solves one of the greatest problems which has ever confronted science, namely the link between the organic and the inorganic.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jimmy politely. “The missing link”
Gerald made a gesture of despair.
“I think there is nothing quite so pathetic as your attempt to be interested in intelligent subjects,” he said. “Anyway, this plant has extraordinary properties and he has brought a specimen for Schaffer, and old Schaffer is wild with excitement. What I can't understand is this,” and he began reading rapidly in German.
“Splendid!” said Jimmy, when he had finished. “What is it, a poem?”
To his surprise Gerald seemed oblivious of the fact that his cousin did not understand the language. He walked to the window and looked out, shook his head, and turned to Jimmy.
“Extraordinary,” he said, “amazing! And, of course, it is impossible!”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Jimmy. “Monstrous—I don't know what it is all about, but I'm sure Schaffer is wrong.”
“Anyway Maggerson will be able to tell us.”
“So long as he tells you and doesn't tell me,” said Jimmy, flinging his legs out of bed. “And Jerry, old boy, I've got to confess to you that I'm not interested in vegetables, even organic vegetables, and if I met Schaffer in the street, I shouldn't know him, and if I knew him, I shouldn't take my hat off to him; and I'm going to be bored to death, but I'll go to the lunch for the same reason as I would go to an execution or a wedding—for the thrill and sensation of it.”
Jimmy could not remember having in his life entered that primmest of prim thoroughfares, Downing Street. The premier's house impressed him as being ridiculously small and unimposing. His first impression of the interior was of the big, cheerless hall from whence led two passages. But the drawing-room was bright and homelike, and the prime minister, a thin, esthetic-looking man with a mane of white hair, was not half as stiff and formal as Jimmy had expected.
“You're the unscientific James Blake, aren't you?” he said with a smile which put a hundred little creases into the corners of his eyes.
“I think I'm the most unscientific Blake that has ever happened, sir,” said Jimmy.
“You seem to survive the atmosphere very well,” smiled the prime minister. “How do you do, Van Roon? You have not seen Maggerson since he has been back?”
“No, sir,” said Jerry. He nodded to a little man with a gray-lined face.
“Do you know everybody here?” asked the prime minister.
“No, sir,” confessed Jimmy. “The fact is, I only know the fellows one meets at Ciro's and the embassy.”
“Y don't think you'll meet anybody here who is a member,” said the prime minister dryly. “You should know Lord Harry Weltman.”
A tall, hard-looking man offered his hand and Jimmy experienced a little shiver of excitement, for the minister of defense was nat only the richest man in the country, but was reputedly the real master of the cabinet.
“And Stope-Kendrick I think you have met.”
The grave, little man came forward and Jimmy, remembering how they had met, grinned within himself. Stope-Kendrick was the home secretary, and Jimmy and he had met under exciting circumstances. Stope-Kendrick had driven his car from a concealed lane, on to the main road, and Jimmy, careering along at fifty miles an hour in his Rolls had neatly sliced a wheel from that gentleman's car.
Other men came in and were introduced. A large, genial cleric, with a stout, rubicund face, proved to be the Lord Bishop of Fleet, and Jimmy guessed that the common interests these men had was the love of science and especially of mathematics. Jimmy met a famous banker and a famous sailor who came over from the admiralty in a hurry, with his necktie twisted under his ear. But Maggerson did not come. One o'clock struck and ten minutes passed and a quarter of an hour and the premier was getting restless.
“He's such an absent-minded beggar,” Jimmy heard him say, “that he's as likely as not to turn into the British Museum and forget all about this lunch, or he may be wandering up and down Whitehall trying to locate Downing Street with a penny map. Maggerson would never ask a policeman—he's infinitely too clever to do a simple thing like that.”
“Do you think”—it was Stope-Kendrick who spoke—“that we ought to send a messenger to look for him?”
“I telephoned to his house half an hour ago and his housekeeper said that she could get no reply from his rooms, so he had probably left.”
“I'll go, sir,” said Jimmy, feeling the least important member of the party. The fact that he had never met or seen Mr. Maggerson-and was the last person in the world who should be sent in search of him seemed immaterial. Jimmy was being crushed under a sense of his unimportance and was glad to make his escape.
He went through the hall down the steps into Downing Street and was halfway toward Whitehall when a man turned the corner at a run and came pounding toward him. Jimmy instantly recognized him from the sketchy description which Van Roon had drawn on their way to town. He was a big, heavy, stout man with long hair and a large, womanish face, but what made Jimmy stop and stare open-mouthed at the apparition was his extraordinary attire. He was wearing an old brown velvet smoking coat, beneath which the jacket of his pajamas showed. A pair of soiled gray trousers were buckled round the waist with a belt, and two gaudy carpet slippers completed his attire.
His hair was untidy, floating as he ran. The pajamas jacket was open at the neck and showed a woolen undershirt. He was breathing heavily as though he had run a considerable distance, and the fact that he had attracted attention in the street was evident when in pursuit of him came two policemen and a small crowd of curious onlookers,
“Mr. Maggerson?” gasped Jimmy.
“Out of my way!” he roared, and thrusting the young man aside, dashed up the steps of No. 10 Downing Street, pushed the door open, and flew across the hall with Jimmy in pursuit.
He evidently knew his way. He flung wide the door of the drawing-room and staggered in. A dead silence greeted his arrival. Jimmy, in the doorway, saw the prime minister's face lengthen in his astonishment and then Maggerson spoke in a strangled voice.
“Chapelle!” he gasped. “My God! Chapelle, you must do something—something—you must stop. The Terror”
And then he collapsed into the arms of Lord Harry Weltman.