as it sounds. Look at Dick there.’
I switched him on to other subjects, and we got his opinion on the modern stage. Archie had been doing a course of plays and had very strong views on the drama. Something had got to happen, he said, or he fell asleep in the first act, and something very rarely happened, so he was left to slumber peacefully till he was awakened and turned out by the attendants. He liked plays with shooting in them, and knockabout farce—anything indeed with a noise in it. But he had struck a vein of serious drama which he had found soporific. One piece in especial, which showed the difficulties of a lady of fifty who fell in love with her stepson, he seriously reprobated.
‘Rotten,’ he complained. ‘What did it matter to anyone what the old cat did? But I assure you, everybody round me was gloatin’ over it. A fellow said to me it was a masterpiece of tragic irony. What’s irony, Dick? I thought it was the tone your commandin’ officer adopted, when you had made an ass of yourself, and he showed it by complimentin’ you on your intelligence… Oh, by the way, you remember the girl in green we saw at that dancin’ place? Well, I saw her at the show at least I’m pretty sure it was her—in a box with the black-bearded fellow. She didn’t seem to be takin’ much of it in. Wonder who she is and what she was doin’ there? Russian, d’you think? I believe the silly play was translated from the Russian. I want to see that girl dance again.’
The next week was absolutely blank, except for my own perpetual worrying. Medina kept me close to him, and I had to relinquish any idea of going down to Fosse for an occasional night. I longed badly for the place and for a sight of Peter John, and Mary’s letters didn’t comfort me, for they were getting scrappier arid scrappier. My hope was that Medina would act on Kharama’s advice, and in order to establish his power over his victims bring them into the open and exercise it in the environment to which they had been accustomed. That wouldn’t help me with the little boy, but it might give me a line on Miss Victor. I rather hoped that at some ball I would see him insisting on some strange woman dancing with him, or telling her to go home; or something, and then I would have cause to suspect. But no such luck. He never spoke to a woman in my presence who wasn’t somebody perfectly well known; I began to think that he had rejected the Indian’s advice as too dangerous.
Kharama, more by token, was back in town, and Medina took me to see him again. The fellow had left Claridge’s and was living in a little house in Eaton Place, and away from the glitter of a big hotel he looked even more sinister and damnable. We went there one evening after dinner, and found him squatting on the usual couch in a room lit by one lamp and fairly stinking with odd scents. He seemed to have shed his occidental dress, for he wore flowing robes, and I could see his beastly bare feet under the skirts of them, when he moved to rearrange a curtain.
They took no more notice of me than if I had been a grand-father’s clock, and to my disgust they conducted the whole conversation in some Eastern tongue. I gathered nothing from it, except a deduction as to Medina’s state of mind. There was an unmistakable hint of nervousness in his voice. He seemed to be asking urgent questions, and the Indian was replying calmly and soothingly. By and by Medina’s voice became quieter, and suddenly I realised that the two were speaking of me. Kharama’s heavy eyes were raised for a second in my direction, and Medina turned ever so little towards me. The Indian asked some question about me, and Medina replied carelessly with a shrug of his shoulders and a slight laugh. The laugh rasped my temper. He was evidently saying that I was packed up arid sealed and safe on the shelf.
That visit didn’t make me feel happier, and next day, when I had a holiday from Medina’s company, I had nothing better to do than to wander about London and think dismal thoughts. Yet, as luck would have it, that aimless walk had its consequences. It was a Sunday, and on the edge of Battersea Park I encountered a forlorn little company of Salvationists conducting a service in the rain. I stopped to listen—I always do—for I am the eternal average man who is bound to halt at every street show, whether it be a motor accident or a Punch and Judy; I listened to the tail end of an address from a fat man who looked like a reformed publican, and a few words from an earnest lady in spectacles. Then they sang a hymn to a trombone accompaniment, and lo and behold, it was my old friend, which I had last whistled in Tom Greenslade’s bedroom at Fosse. ‘There is rest for the weary,’ they sang:
‘On the other side of Jordan,
In the green fields of Eden,
Where the Tree of Life is blooming,
There is rest for you.’
I joined heartily in the singing, and contributed two half-crowns to the collecting box, for somehow the thing seemed to be a good omen.
I had been rather neglecting that item in the puzzle, and that evening and during the night I kept turning it over till my brain was nearly addled.
Where the sower casts his seed in
Furrows of the fields of Eden.
That was the version in the rhyme, and in Tom Greenslade’s recollection the equivalent was a curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. Surely the two must correspond, though I couldn’t just see how. The other two items had panned out so well that it was reasonable to suppose that the third might do the same. I could see no light, and I finally dropped off to sleep with that blessed ‘fields of Eden’ twittering about my head.
I awoke with the same obsession, but other phrases had added themselves to it. One was the ‘playing-fields of Eton,’ about which some fellow had said something, and for a moment I wondered if I hadn’t got hold of the right trail. Eton was a school for which Peter John’s name was down, and therefore it had to do with boys, and might have to do with David Warcliff. But after breakfast I gave up that line, for it led nowhere. The word was ‘Eden,’ to rhyme with ‘seed in.’ There were other fields haunting me—names like Tothill Fields and Bunhill Fields. These were places in London, and that was what I wanted. The Directory showed no name like that of ‘Fields of Eden,’ but was it not possible that there had once in old days been a place called by that odd title?
I spent the morning in the Club Library, which was a very good one, reading up Old London. I read all about Vauxhall Gardens and Ranelagh and Cremorne, and a dozen other ancient haunts of pleasure, but I found nothing to my purpose. Then I remembered that Bullivant—Lord Artinswell—had had for one of his hobbies the study of bygone London, so I telephoned to him and invited myself to lunch.
He was very pleased to see me, and it somehow comforted me to find myself again in the house in Queen Anne’s Gate where I had spent some of the most critical moments of my life.
‘You’ve taken on the work I wrote to you about,’ he said. ‘I knew you would. How are you getting on?’
‘So-so. It’s a big job and there’s very little time. I want to ask you a question. You’re an authority on Old London. Tell me, did you ever come across in your researches the name of the “Fields of Eden”?’
He shook his head. ‘Not that I remember. What part of London?’
‘I fancy it would be somewhere north of Oxford Street.’
He considered. ‘No. What is your idea? A name of some private gardens or place of amusement?’
‘Yes. Just like Cremorne or Vauxhall.’
‘I don’t think so, but we’ll look it up. I’ve a good collection of old maps and plans, and some antique directories.’
So after luncheon we repaired to his library and set to work. The maps showed nothing, nor did the books at first. We were searching too far back, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
