Mr. Pinkerton ran his fingers around inside his narrow celluloid collar, and straightened his purple string tie. If she were to send a knight packing for him, it could be compromising in the extreme. Even he could see that. He glanced surreptitiously at his bright new suitcase that the man had said could expand enormously to hold his immediate effects, and that he knew could contract enormously and still hold his entire wardrobe, and went across the room to the old oak cupboard.
As he swung the door back, a solid panel in the wall by the chimney piece flew open, and a white-faced girl practically fell into the room. Her startled eyes met the startled little Welshman’s; she put one hand up to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, and with the other reached behind her mechanically and pushed the panel shut. She then stood there as if paralyzed, her eyes as wide open as her mouth, her breath coming in sharp frightened spasms.
“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry!” she gasped. “I must have got the wrong stairs—don’t tell Madam, please, sir!”
Mr. Pinkerton stared, virtually as paralyzed as the girl. Just then—it sounded almost as if from the next room—he heard the loud bellow that he had already learned to recognize as the customary manner of speaking of Sir Lionel Atwater.
“I won’t tolerate that young scoundrel! . . .”
The girl’s eyes widened still farther in dread.
“. . . I’ll smoke him out of his stinking hole!”
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought.
“Oh, please, sir, don’t tell them, will you, sir?” the girl demanded again, in a frightened whisper.
Then, as he still stood looking at her, quite speechless, she darted across the room and out the door, just as Mrs. Humpage’s voice came from below. “Kathleen, Kathleen! Take the gentlemen some hot water! Hurry along, dear!”
From somewhere through the honeycombed walls of the old inn Mr. Pinkerton heard the thunderous blustering voice again: “Foreign scum! . . .”
Another voice spoke. It was smooth and even, and plainly intended to be pacifying.
“I’ll not be intimidated!” Sir Lionel Atwater roared. “I’ll take steps, sir! They’ll not tell me what I shall and shall not do, and I’ll be obliged if you’d mind your—”
Then quite suddenly, as if a heavy door had closed, Mr. Pinkerton could hear nothing more, except a faint low rumble indicating that Sir Lionel’s conversation was still going on.
He blinked and looked cautiously about, coughing at the sharp acrid puffs of smoke that caught themselves and hurried back into his big stone fireplace and up the chimney. Then he shook his head dismally. The Old Angel was, he knew, a very old inn, and strange things could easily happen in it. But surely, Mr. Pinkerton thought . . . He tiptoed over to the old oak panel by the chimney piece and touched it gingerly. It remained very firmly in place. He pushed it, then harder, and finally pulled at it as hard as he could. Outside of a broken fingernail, nothing happened at all. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton stood there. If he had not firmly refused the glass of stout Mrs. Humpage had pressed on him at lunch, he would have thought he had made up the whole business. But he had refused it. Furthermore, the door through which the white-faced maid had gone was still ajar. He could even hear Mrs. Humpage down below, saying sharply, “Hurry along now—don’t keep the gentlemen waiting.”
Mr. Pinkerton stepped quietly over to the door and peered out. On the narrow staircase at the opposite end of the crooked uneven hall he saw the tow-thatched potboy, Jo, not Kathleen at all, carrying up the polished copper hot-water cans. Beyond him, flattened against the wall so he could pass, was the deaf and dumb gentleman in the worn, baggy Bond Street plus-fours, who had arrived the night before, shortly after he himself had come.
Mr. Pinkerton shook his head again in great perplexity, closed his door, pushed the oak settle a little closer to the fire and sat down, staring at it. After all, he thought, not only were there his rights, as one of the King’s subjects, but he had also just taken out a two-shilling stake in the Old Angel. Furthermore, though he would not dare to admit it aloud, in a place where the walls suddenly turned out to be doors, Mr. Pinkerton was very curious indeed. Why, he wondered, had the maid Kathleen come from the garret in such mortal terror; why had she been so desperately anxious not to have Mrs. Humpage know she had come; why had the savage old voice through the suddenly opened walls added so astonishingly to her fear? Why had the walls, somewhere, closed so quickly again, shutting off even Sir Lionel Atwater’s voice? And what, Mr. Pinkerton wondered, was the old gentleman shouting about?
He blinked suddenly as the idea struck him that he had heard, somewhere, of Sir Lionel Atwater; he groped vaguely in his mind, gave it up and thought of Mrs. Humpage again. What differences were they supposed to be settling? From what he had heard in those few seconds, it did not appear likely to be an amicable settlement, what with the plethoric old chap smoking foreign scum out of their stinking holes.
Mr. Pinkerton swallowed as the idea occurred to him that he himself was Welsh, of course, not English at all. Still, it hardly seemed likely that he would be worth smoking out of any place. He looked about him at the old panelled walls, and the old oak four-poster sagging definitely in the middle, with the pair of carved cherubs with slightly lewd grins on their chubby faces in the headboard under the pink silk lampshade with no bulb in it. Whatever one might say about the room, furthermore, he reassured himself, it did not smell any worse than most damp old rooms in damp old hostels.
Then, just as the fire began to take itself seriously, Mr. Pinkerton heard the gong from below. It came instantly into his mind that if he went down quickly, perhaps he could eat his dinner and get back before the others came down.
2
The dining room in the Old Angel in Watchbell Street in Rye was everything that Mr. Pinkerton, and a great many other people, including Mrs. Humpage, thought a Tudor inn’s dining room should be. Gleaming copper bedwarmers hung on the linenfold panelling of the walls, together with enough pewter tankards and enormous platters to stock the Caledonian Market for a whole season of American tourists. Oak dressers were full of fat-bellied liquor bottles, great silver-plated venison dishes and rows of old silver skewers. There was also a goldfish tank in front of the bottle-glass casement windows overlooking the sea. And the food was extremely good too. Jo the potboy in white apron put a plate of gravy soup in front of Mr. Pinkerton as the waiters, in black coats a bit spotty and trousers that sagged at the knees, bustled about a table set for six near the goldfish tank. The gravy soup was followed with a bit of pale fish, with a pale pink dab of sauce that tasted of fish also, and that was followed, even before the deaf and dumb gentleman crept in and had his gravy soup, with a nice bit of boiled mutton and boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage. Mr. Pinkerton polished that off, with enjoyment, and was well on into his boiled pudding when he noticed an unusual scurrying among the waiters and saw the large beet-faced, white-walrus-mustached figure of Sir Lionel Atwater in heavy Harris tweeds come thumping into the room.
He was followed by a little lady with white hair, also in tweeds, a large dark-haired windblown young woman, and a thin-faced nervous young man with blond hair and a tiny blond mustache. They were in tweeds too, and none of them spoke. Mr. Pinkerton knew very well, of course, that no one ever speaks in the dining room of a country pub in England. There is something about the very atmosphere that stills the human voice so that only the most brazen exhibitionist seems to have power against it. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton had the idea that it had stilled even Sir Lionel Atwater. But he was wrong. The beet face went even redder, in a moment, and Mr. Pinkerton heard a resounding thump on the table.
“Where is that young scoundrel?”
