him. He hit out wildly—the rule is to hit first and to think afterwards—but his fists went wide, and the somebody toppled in between them. For an amazing moment he held the somebody in his arms. It was an amazing moment because the somebody wasn’t in the least like the somebody he had expected to find there. It was a rather small somebody who clung to him, limply, gasping; a somebody with a bit of hair that tickled his cheek, and a little ear, and a rather nice sense of soft warmth. Then the amazing moment passed, and the somebody shot away from him in a panic.
Ben saw her more distinctly now. He saw her eyes, bright with fear, and the flutter of her heaving breast, and her slender legs, slim and taut, beneath her short brown skirt. For an instant she stood there, poised before the grim background, ‘Old Man Murdered at Hammersmith.’ The word ‘Murdered’ leered between her knees, and ‘Hammersmith’ between her ankles. Pretty ankles, alive with grace and elasticity. Then the ankles got to work, twisted as though suddenly touched by electricity, and bore their owner round a corner.
‘’Ere! ’Arf a mo’!’ called Ben.
But the girl had vanished.
Ben decided that it was time he did a bit of vanishing. The sensation was creeping over him that unpleasant things were happening, and that invisible fingers were stretching towards him to draw him in. He knew the signs. He’d been drawn in before. He’d been drawn into cupboards and coffins and corpses, into cellars and wells and dark passages, and had been tossed about by the invisible fingers like a blinkin’ shuttlecock! Well, he wasn’t having any more of it. All he wanted was a quiet life, same as he’d heard about, and he meant to get it, if there wasn’t an old man left alive in Hammersmith!
So he departed from the corner where a poster had delayed his aimless wanderings, and shuffled along the moist streets to a coffee-stall a couple of blocks away. It wasn’t raining, but the streets were moist as though with their environment. Water was in the atmosphere, and the damp aroma of London docks.
‘Cup o’ tea,’ he said, to the stall-keeper.
The stall-keeper looked up from a coin he was holding. In the pleasant little glare of his temporary shop, and surrounded by cheering edibles, hungry folk would have described him as handsome.
‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ he asked.
‘You are,’ replied Ben.
‘Oh, am I?’ exclaimed the stall-keeper, and reached the conclusion, after a close scrutiny of his impecunious customer, that perhaps he would. We’ve all got to try and get into heaven somehow, and the ticket would be cheap for a cup of tea. ‘Well, you can share my bit o’ luck, if you like. Last customer left in too much hurry to take his change.’
He held up the coin he had been examining. It was a two-shilling piece. A new one. Then he turned his head and glanced along the road, where the last customer was vanishing into the murk.
‘One o’ them—well, jerky chaps,’ the stall-keeper went on, as he slopped tea into a thick cup. ‘Up they come like a jack-in-the-box. “Sandwich!” And they’ve hardly got their fingers on it before they’re off. I reckon when they say their prayers they jest say, “Hallo God, good-bye!”’ He chuckled at his little joke while he shoved the cup across. He always served spoons with his saucers, to prove that he knew Ritz manners, but the spoons were always drowned. ‘Couldn’t have gone quicker, not if a bobby’d been after him.’
Ben did not offer any comment at once. The tea claimed first attention. But when he had drunk half of it and the warmth began to percolate through the chills in his soul, he observed, meditatively:
‘P’r’aps one was!’
‘Well, you never know, do you?’ replied the stall-keeper, now becoming meditative himself. ‘New money and old clothes always makes me suspicious if it ain’t Christmas-time. And, then, there’s another thing. There was a nasty mark on his face. That’s right. A nasty mark. And not one he’d got in the war.’ He paused, to visualise the nasty mark. It had been on his left cheek. ‘Read about the bloke they’ve done in at Hammersmith?’
Ben frowned. Wasn’t there any way of keeping this old man from continually popping up?
‘It’s in the paper,’ said the stall-keeper.
‘Well, I ain’t read it,’ answered Ben. ‘I belongs to one o’ them inscripshun libraries.’
The stall-keeper’s head disappeared behind the expanded pages of an afternoon journal. Invisible, it announced:
‘Ah, here we are. “Old Man With His Throat Cut. Hunt in Hammersmith. Rich Recloosey.” Don’t seem no end to ’em. But they’ve got the knife, I see, and it ses here that the police are on the track of an important clue.’
‘Well, the dead bloke’s a clue, ain’t ’e?’ queried Ben, making an effort.
‘And we’re to look out for a feller six foot one, in a dark suit.’
‘And wot do we do when we finds ’im?’ inquired Ben. ‘Go hup ter ’im and hask, “Beg pardon, guv’nor, but do you ’appen to ’ave done a murder terday?” They tike us fer blinkin’ mugs, don’t they?’
But the stall-keeper wasn’t listening to Ben. He was thinking. ‘Six foot one. Six foot one. And a dark suit. Well, that’s queer—or am I barmy?’
A couple of sailors came along. They were noisy and half-drunk. Not feeling social (and you need to feel social if you are going to get any change out of half-drunks), Ben finished his tea, thanked the good-natured stall-keeper, and slipped away. In two minutes, the pleasant coffee-stall was merely a memory, and the dark, moist streets were closing in upon him again.
From beyond the dimness on his left came the depressing sound of a tram. The sound was some way off, and painted no sylvan picture. Ahead, moist vistas. On his right, a wall. A high wall. An interminable wall. Every now and then the wall was punctuated by an opening guarded by a gate or a door. The doors, being solid, revealed no glimpse of what lay beyond the wall, but through the occasional gates one got little peeps of a queer, derelict land, of unpopulated spaces, of rails that seemed to have no purpose, of large, barren buildings and of other walls. One could not see water, but one knew it was there. It hung in the greyness, and breathed up above its level. It was both depressing and invigorating—it whispered of lapping ooze and of vivid colours, of blue seas and blackened bodies. It gave you the taste of salt and the tang of wet rope. It filled your subconscious soul with a prayer for liberty and a knowledge of captivity, even the subconscious soul of a scarecrow like Ben, who had no knowledge of his soul or of what it was passing through.
‘Gawd, wot a smell!’ he thought once. ‘Tork abart dead fish!’
Yes, even his nose was shocked. Yet there was something about the smell … Ben, in almost-forgotten days, had been to sea …
Hallo! One of the doors was ajar! Hardly conscious that he did so, he slipped through. Perhaps he thought that, on the inner side of this wall, there would be fewer inquiries when he found his pitch for the night. Perhaps the water’s breath, or that queer, dead-fish smell, had led him to follow an unreasonable impulse. Or perhaps the invisible fingers from which he was endeavouring to escape had stretched out through the open door, had closed round his frail frame, and had drawn him in. A moment of sudden terror, born of he knew not what, supported the latter theory as he stood on this threshold of dockland.
‘Garn, yer idgit!’
