Chapter XIII

They put Luke Maddison in a private ward, and one morning they left a little temperature chart within his view, and he saw that his name was Smith.

“How long have I been Smith?” His voice was extraordinarily strong, remembering that only a few days before he had not been able to speak above a whisper.

The good-natured nurse grinned cheerfully.

“If we don’t know people’s names we call them Smith--preferably Bill,” she said. “But you’re going to be good, aren’t you, and tell us yours?”

He shook his head.

“No, I don’t think so. Smith is a very good name, borne by some very nice people. If my name had been Smith I might have been a better man,” he added whimsically.

Since they had moved him into the private ward the burly-looking policeman who had loomed out of his dreams, and seemed part of them, had been taken away. That day they thought he was dying a police magistrate had been summoned to take his deposition; but he had told nothing which was of the slightest consequence or value. Moreover, he had heard one detective say to another that he would not be of the slightest value as a witness at the inquest. So he could afford to lie and watch the hours pass, and the pale light of the sun move across the green wall, and night come and the lights.

From where he lay he could hear the distant jangle of the trams; came to know the bell of one, and marked its comings and goings. He did not think of Margaret for longer than a few seconds. Resolutely he put her out of his mind. Once he had an idea of sending for Stiles, but the appearance of the manager would have betrayed his identity, and he was anxious to save the name of the bank--or was it Margaret? Again and again he told himself that he would not raise his hand to save Margaret--but he knew that he was lying. It was for Margaret’s sake that he was content to remain Bill Smith.

They brought him newspapers, but he refused to read them. That was another reason why Bill Smith was so acceptable. If Maddison’s Bank had suspended payment, there was an extra good reason why he should never be Luke Maddison again.

He was curiously apathetic as to the state of the bank, curiously apathetic about almost everything and everybody. There was a time when he believed and hoped he was dying, and that in the final oblivion of things he would find the complete and absolute forgetfulness which his aching heart craved. But his heart was no longer aching. Presently the time would come when he would leave hospital, and then----? He was apathetic as to the prospect, too. What did anything matter? Perhaps he would sell flowers, like that jolly girl he had seen in St. James’s Street one snowy day. Or he might become a soldier; he was not too old, and he had been a member of the O.T.C. when he was at Eton. Or go abroad. He smiled faintly. “And shoot lions?” asked his own sarcastic voice.

He did not care really what happened after. It was his sixteenth or seventeenth day in bed--he was not sure which--when the sister came in.

“A friend of yours wishes to see you,” she said. “He says he knows you.”

Luke frowned.

“A friend?” he repeated. “I’m sure he’s mistaken me for somebody else.”

“No, he particularly asked for you. He said the man who was stabbed; of course, I didn’t tell him your name was Smith, because it isn’t.”

“Oh, yes, it is, sister--I’m profoundly curious; let him come in.”

Who was it? For one moment of lunacy he had pictured a penitent Margaret. He would have instantly laughed at the thought, except that laughing hurt his chest.

The man who came in he had never seen before. His shabbiness was relieved by a collar of such surprising whiteness that Luke guessed it had been bought for the occasion, as also had the violent necktie. He was a man with a very small face, sharp featured; his heavily lidded eyes glanced furtively left and right before he came stealthily to the bed.

“All right, sister.” His voice was high and husky (Luke remembered that Lewing’s voice was that way, and wondered if this was a relative).

“Is this your friend?” asked the nurse.

The man nodded.

“That’s him all right, miss.”

The nurse disappeared, and the man bent over the bed. He smelt musty and unsavoury, as though his clothes had been stored in a damp place.

“Joe says that as you didn’t squeak he’s going to make things right for you.”

“Didn’t what?” asked Luke.

“Squeak. Don’t be funny! When you come out, see him.” He slipped a dirty piece of paper under the pillow, and Luke heard a well-remembered rustle. “There’s a fiver there for you. Joe says he’ll look after you.”

“God bless him!” said Luke soberly, “for if ever there was a man who wanted looking after, it’s me!”

The day before his discharge from hospital the sister asked Luke Maddison if he would like to see a barber. He fingered his bristly face, and his smile was almost one of boyish amusement.

“No, I rather like myself,” he said. “Can I indulge in the vanity of a mirror?”

She brought a small hand glass, and he saw reflected in the polished oval a strange, untidy-looking man with long hair and a shapeless beard. The face was still pale, the nose pinched, but the eyes shone as brightly as ever.

“Good lord!” he murmured, and whistled.

“You’re not very pretty, are you?” said the good-humoured sister.

“I never was,” answered Luke cheerfully. Then suddenly he frowned. “Is that infernal policeman coming back again?”

She shook her head.

“No, he has given you up as a bad job. The inquest on that poor man was finished last week. Didn’t you read the newspaper?”

Luke hadn’t read the newspaper.

“I can’t read,” he said, but she laughed at this.

So the inquest on “that poor man” was concluded, and presumably the coroner had accepted his statement that he met Lewing by accident and was walking with him when the assault occurred. A long time later he read the newspaper account, and saw himself described as “William Smith, of no fixed abode.” The paragraph ran.

The man is still in a critical condition, and witness said that it was unlikely that he could give evidence for a month, or that he could throw any light upon the murder.

That afternoon Luke spent sitting in a chintz-covered armchair looking out across the river. Opposite were the Houses of Parliament. It was curious that he knew personally at least fifty men whose presence in that building was indicated by the Union flag on the clock tower--fifty men, any one of whom would come flying across Westminster Bridge to help him. But he did not require help.

He reviewed his position with the calm detachment of a third party. All the objectives in life had been wiped out by a terrific gunfire. He was homeless in the truest sense, for there was no place or being that stood for comfort or happiness. He was in the centre of horizons that showed no beacon light to indicate a destination. In the acid bath of his experience ambition had been burned out; the very desire for life had gone. He would have cheerfully and gratefully died.

It was curious that he seldom thought of Lewing’s death or of the knife thrust that had brought him, on the point of dissolution, to an operating room stinking of disinfectants. He had no grievance against the man who knifed him; was rather amused than otherwise to find himself unconsciously the victim of a vendetta in which he had no part.

He read again the slip of paper that the mysterious man had left with him.

Go to Mrs. Fraser, 339 Ginnett Street, Lambeth. She will look after you.

He chuckled faintly at this. So there was somebody in the world who wanted to look after him. It was rather funny.

The first time he had read this short message he had all but torn up the paper and thrown it away; until his last day in hospital he had not the slightest intention of interviewing the lady--she only came into consideration after he had exhausted all the possibilities of conduct. To go back to the office was impossible. He had a country house somewhere, but he dimly remembered having made this over to Margaret in the deed.

He could go abroad, of course, but that would cost money. He had not the slightest intention of touching again any of the strings which would lead him back to the old life. That episode had finished. There was interest and adventure somewhere in the world--who knew if it might not begin in the shabby purlieus of Ginnett Street?

He left the hospital on a sunny afternoon, and could walk out without assistance, for he had carried no baggage. He was strong enough to walk, for he had taken an appreciable amount of exercise on the terrace of the hospital; but he had lost weight and his clothes hung loosely upon him.

Ginnett Street was not discovered without difficulty, but he found it at length; an unsavoury thoroughfare in the Borough. Number 339 was a greengrocer’s shop that stood at the corner of a narrower street, in which was a gateway leading evidently to a small yard at the back of the premises. The shop was not particularly inviting; faded bills pasted on the window announced that the best household coal and firewood were procurable. The interior was dirty and dingy. Behind the counter was a shelf where, in sloping compartments, were a number of dyspeptic-looking potatoes, whilst a few weary and rusty cauliflowers were displayed for sale in the window. In one corner of the shop was a heap of coal and a weighing machine--evidently the people of Ginnett Street purchased their coal by the pound.

He pushed open the door; a cracked bell clanged, and after a while there emerged through a door leading to the shop parlour a sharp-featured woman with brassy hair, who greeted him with all the superficial unfriendliness which he discovered was the normal attitude of the small tradesman in this neighbourhood.

“I am Mrs. Fraser,” she said.

“I was told to call and see you,” he began, when she interrupted him quickly.

“Are you the man from the hospital--Smith?”

Luke smiled and nodded. She lifted the flap of the counter.

“Come in, will you?” Her tone was respectful, almost fawning. “I thought you wasn’t coming out till to-morrow.”

She led the way into a frowsy little parlour and closed the door communicating with the shop carefully.

“It’s lucky I had the room done up for you to-day,” she said. “I’m a rare one for getting things done in time. Will you come this way, Mr. What’s-your-name?”

Curiosity impelled him to follow her. At the first sight of that dingy shop he had been tempted to turn back, to find a new foothold to life; but now he went after the woman almost gaily. For that was the ineradicable weakness of Luke Maddison: a consuming curiosity as to what would happen next.

At some time or other there had been built a small annex to the house; the floors were firmer, the doors seemed heavier. She opened one of these and showed him into a room, the comfort of which was rather staggering. He expected to see something particularly uninviting, and it is possible that, had this been the case, he would have declined the lodging and gone elsewhere. But the bed was neat, the sheets spotless; the furniture, though plain, was ample, and a small fire burned in the grate. “To air the room,” she explained, almost apologetically, and led him to understand that this luxury was impermanent.

On the table were a few sheets of writing paper and a pen and ink. Their presence puzzled him, till the woman explained.

“A Certain Person thought you’d like to write to your friends, especially as you didn’t write any letters from the hospital.”

“How the devil do they know that?” he asked in astonishment.

Mrs. Fraser smiled cryptically.

“He knows everything,” she said.

Evidently He was a person to be reverenced.

“You don’t want to have anything to do with that Lewing lot any more,” she said, and all the time she was speaking her pale eyes were fixed on his searchingly. “The police broke up that crowd last week, and good luck to ’em! That Lewing would have twisted his own mother out of her insurance money!”

“A bad lad, eh?”

“If you’d done any jobs with him, as sure as death he would have shopped you--especially you being a gentleman born.”

“Let me put you right, Mrs. Fraser,” said Luke. “I was not a member of Mr. Lewing’s gang or any other gang----”

“I know. He knew that. But Lewing was always boasting about the people he could get hold of, and he was shouting the odds about you and how you could drive. Are you a driver?”

“A motor-car driver? Yes, I am a pretty good driver,” smiled Luke.

“Won races, haven’t you?” she asked in her monotonous tone.

As it happened, Luke had won a private owners’ race at Brooklands though he could not by any stretch of imagination be described as a racing motorist.

“I thought so,” she nodded. “Boasting, that was Lewing’s downfall.”

Luke remembered a little conversation he had had with the dead man.

“He’s a friend of Gunner Haynes, isn’t he?”

An extraordinary change came over the woman. She made a little grimace and blinked quickly, as though she had been confronted by a bright light.

“I don’t know anything about Mr. Haynes,” she said, obviously on the defensive. “The least said, soonest mended. We’ve never had any trouble with Mr. Haynes and we don’t want none.”

There was something in her tone that told him beyond doubt that fear was the basis of her respect for Gunner. He was “Mr.” Haynes to her; she was obviously anxious to say nothing that might be construed as disrespectful. Luke wondered why.

She bustled off soon after to get him a cup of tea, and he pulled up a chair to the table. The writing paper was a great temptation; yet to whom could he write? He did not think of Margaret.

When a mouse gets into a beehive and is killed by the outraged occupants, they find him too heavy to move, and so they cover him with wax, and he becomes part of their dwelling: a great lump that once lived but now has no significance. He had embalmed and covered Margaret in the same way. She was just an obstruction, to the circumvention of which he had grown accustomed.

But Stiles----? What would Stiles be thinking? And then for the first time there occurred a dreadful thought. Suppose Stiles thought he had committed suicide? Suppose the newspapers were full of stories of a “millionaire”--all people in his position were millionaires for newspaper purposes--and rivers were being dragged and descriptions being circulated? He turned cold at the thought.

Mrs. Fraser came back with a cup of tea which proved to be drinkable. He made a desperate effort to obtain the information he could have had by searching a newspaper file. She listened to his questions and shook her head.

“No, there’s no news. There was a murder up in Finsbury, and that fellow was hung who killed the old woman.”

“I seem to remember,” said Luke carelessly, “when I was in hospital, hearing the nurses talk about a rich man who disappeared--his bank went broke or something; there was a talk of suicide.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head.

“I never heard of it; and I should have noticed that, because my poor mother lost all her money when the Webbick Bank went broke.…”

He breathed more freely when she had gone. Possibly Stiles had refrained from communicating with the police except as a last expedient.

He drew a sheet of paper to him and dipped the pen into the ink.