The man who found himself (Smith's Magazine 1920)/Chapter 1
The first installment of a two-part story—one of the most delightful and unusual things we have ever published in SMITH'S. Watch for Part II. in the May issue.
CHAPTER I.
KING CHARLES STREET lies in Westminster. You turn a corner and find yourself in Charles Street as one might turn a corner and find oneself in History. The cheap, the nasty, and the new vanish, and fine old comfortable houses of red brick, with gables and mullioned windows, take you into their keeping; tell you that Queen Anne is not dead; amuse you with pictures of sedan chairs and running footmen, and discharge you at the other end into the twentieth century from whence you came.
Simon Pettigrew lived at No. 12, where his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had lived before him—lawyers all of them and so respected, so rooted in the soil of the Courts, as to be less a family of lawyers than a minor English institution. Divorce your mind entirely from all petty matters of litigation in connection with the Pettigrews. Simon, or any of his forbears, would have appeared just as readily in their shirt sleeves in Fleet Street as in county or police court for or against the defendant. They were old family lawyers and they had a fair proportion of the old English families in their keeping—deed boxes stuffed with papers, secrets to make one's hair curl.
To the general public this great and potent firm was almost unknown, yet Pettigrew & Pettigrew had cut off heirs to furnish material for a dozen Braddon novels; had smothered numerous screaming tragedies in high life and buried them at dead of night, and all without a wrinkle on the brow of the placid old firm that drove its curricle through the reigns of the Georges, took snuff in the days of Palmerston, and in the days of Edward Rex still refused to employ the typewriter.
Simon, the last of the firm, unmarried, and without near relation, was at the time of this story turned sixty, a clean-shaven, bright-eyed, old-fashioned type of man, sedate, famed for his cellar, and a member of the Athenæum—a man you never, never would have imagined to possess such a thing as a past; never would have imagined to have been filled with that semidiabolical, semiangelical joy of life which leads to the follies of youth.
All the same, Simon, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, had raked the town vigorously more than viciously, haunted Evans' supper rooms, fallen madly in love with an actress, enjoyed life as only the young can enjoy life in the gorgeous, dazzling, deceitful country of Youth.
Driving in hansom cabs was then a pleasure; new clothes and outrageous shirts and ties a delight; actresses goddesses! Then, one day his actress turned out an actress and the following night he came out of the Cocoa Tree owing a gambling debt of a thousand pounds that he could not pay. His father paid, on his promising to turn over a new leaf, which he did. But his youth was checked, his brightness eclipsed, and arm in arm with common sense he set out on the long journey that led him at last to the high position of a joyless, loveless, desolate, wealthy solicitor of sixty—respected, very much respected; in fact, less a man than a firm. Yet there still remained to him a legacy of his youth, a very pretty wit of his own, an irresponsible turn of talk when he gave himself away, as at dinner parties.
Mudd was Simon's factotum, butler, and minister of inferior affairs. Mudd was sixty-five and a bit. He had been in the services of the Pettigrew family forty-five years and had grown up, so to say, side by side with Simon. For the last twenty years every morning Mudd had brought up his master's tea, drawn up his blinds, and set out his clothes, seven thousand times or thereabouts, allowing for holidays and illnesses. He was a clean-shaven old man with rounded shoulders and a way that had become blunt with long use. He “sirred” Simon only in the presence of guests and servants, and had an open way of speaking on matters of every-day affairs which verged on the conjugal in its occasional frankness.
This morning, the third of June, Mudd, having drawn up his master's blinds and set out his boots and shaving things, vanished and returned with his clothes, brushed and folded, and a jug of shaving water which he placed on the washstand.
“The arms will be out of this old coat if you go on wearing it much longer,” grumbled Mudd, as he placed the things on a chair. “It's been in wear nearly a year and a half. You're heavy on the left elbow; it's the desk does it.”
“I'll see,” said Simon.
He knew quite well the suggestion that lay in the tone and the words of Mudd, but a visit to his tailor's was almost on a par with a visit to his dentist's and new clothes were an abhorrence. It took him a fortnight to get used to a new coat, and as to being shabby, why, a decent shabbiness was part of his personality and, vaguely perhaps, of his pride in life. He could afford to be shabby.
Mudd, having vanished, Simon rose and began his toilet, tubbing in a tin bath—a flat, Victorian tin bath—and shaving with a razor taken from a case of seven, each marked with a day of the week. This razor was marked “Tuesday.”
Having carefully dried “Tuesday” and put it back between “Monday” and “Wednesday,” Simon closed the case with the care and precision that marked all his actions, finished dressing, and looked out of the window to see what sort of day it was.
A peep of glorious blue sky, caught across the roofs of the opposite houses, informed him, leaving him unenthusiastic, and then, having wound up his watch, he came downstairs to the Jacobean dining room where tea, toast, frizzled bacon, and a well-aired Times were awaiting him.
At a quarter to ten precisely, Mudd opened the hail door, verified the fact that the brougham was in waiting, informed his master, helped him into his overcoat—a light summer overcoat—and closed the carriage door on him.
A little after ten Simon reached Old Sergeant's Inn and entered his office.
Brownlow, the chief clerk, had just arrived and Simon, nodding to him, passed into his private room where his letters were laid out, hung up his hat and coat, and set to business.
It was a sight to watch his face as he read letter after letter, laying each in order under a marble paper weight. One might have fancied oneself watching law at work, in seclusion and unadorned with robes. He did not need glasses; his eyes were still the eyes of a young man.
Having finished his letters, he rang for his stenographer and began dictating replies, sending out now and again for Brownlow to consult upon details; then, this business finished and alone again, he sat resting for a moment, leaning back in his chair and trimming his nails with the little penknife that lay on the table. It was his custom at twelve o'clock precisely to have a glass of old brown sherry. Andrew Pettigrew had done the same in his day and had handed on the habit to his son. If a favored client were present, the client would be asked to have a glass. The bottle and two glasses were kept in the safe in the corner of the room. Ye gods! Fancy in your modern solicitor's office a wine bottle in the principal safe and the solicitor asking a client “to have a drink!” Yet the green-seal sherry, famous amidst the cognoscenti, and the safe and the atmosphere of the room and the other-day figure of Simon all were in keeping, part of a unique and Georgian whole.
The old silver-faced clock on the mantel, having placed its finger on midday, set up its silvery lisp, and Simon, rousing himself from his reverie, rose, drew a bunch of keys from his pocket, and opened the safe. Then he stood looking at what was to be seen inside.
The safe contained two deed boxes, one on top of the other. On the iron fire and burglar-proof floor and by the deed boxes stood the sherry bottle and the cut-glass satellite wineglasses, while upon the topmost deed box reposed a flat, black leather wallet.
Simon's eyes were fixed on the wallet. The thing seemed to hold him spellbound, as if he were gazing into the devilish, diamond eyes of a coiled snake. The wallet had not been there when he last closed the safe. There had been nothing in the safe but the boxes, the bottle, and the glasses, and of the safe there were but two keys, one at the bank, one in his pocket. The manager of Cumber's Bank, a bald-headed magnate with side whiskers, even if he had means of access to the safe, could not have been the author of this little trick, simply because the key at the bank was out of his reach, being safely locked away in the Pettigrew private deed chest, and the key of the Pettigrew private deed chest was on the same bunch as that now hanging from the safe door. The lock was unpickable.
The look on Simon's face was less that of surprise at the thing found than horror of the thing seen. Brownlow's head on a charger could not have affected him much more. Stretching out his hand, he took the wallet, brought it to the table, and opened it.
Yet the look on Simon's face was less that of surprise at the thing found than horror of the thing seen.
It contained bank notes—beautiful, new, crisp Bank of England notes. But the joy of the ordinary man in discovering a great, unexpected wad of bank notes was not apparent in the face of Simon, unless beads of perspiration are indications of joy. He turned to the sherry bottle, filled two glasses with a shaky hand, and drained them; then he turned again to the notes.
He sat down and, pushing the wallet aside, began to count them feverishly, as though the result of the tally were a matter of vast importance. There were four notes of a thousand; the rest were hundreds and a few tens. Ten thousand pounds, that was the total.
He put the notes back in the case, buckled it, jumped up like a released, spring, flung the wallet on top of the deed box, and closed the safe with a snap. Then he stood, hands in pockets, examining the pattern of the Turkey carpet.
At this moment a knock came at the door and a junior clerk appeared.
“What the devil do you want?” asked Simon.
The clerk stated his case. A Mr. Smith had called, craving an interview.
“Ask Mr. Brownlow to see him,” replied Simon, “but ask Mr. Brownlow to step in here first.”
In a moment Brownlow appeared.
“Brownlow,” said Simon, “look up Doctor Oppenshaw's telephone number and ask him can he give me ten minutes' interview before luncheon. Say it is most urgently important. Number 100A Harley Street is his address—and, see here, have a taxicab called. Do it right away. That's all.”
While Brownlow was away on his mission Simon put on his overcoat, put on his hat, blew his nose lustily in the red bandanna handkerchief that was part of his personality, opened the safe, and took another peep at the wallet, as if to make sure that the fairy hand that had placed it there had not spirited it away again, and was in the act of locking the safe when the senior clerk entered to say that Doctor Oppenshaw could see him at a quarter to one and that Morgan, the office boy, had procured the cab.
Brownlow, though he managed to conceal his feelings, was disturbed by the manner of his chief and by the telephone message to the doctor—by the whole affair in fact, for Simon never left the office till the stroke of one, when the brougham called to take him to Simpson's in the Strand for luncheon.
Was Simon ill? He ventured to put the question and nearly had his head snapped off. Ill! No, of course, he wasn't ill; never better in his life! What on earth put that idea into Brownlow's head?”
Then the testy one departed, in search of the taxi, and Brownlow returned to his room and his duties.