The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder Page 9

  Ras Lal owed his imprisonment to an unsuccessful attempt he had made upon two strings of pearls, the property of the lady in question, and when he learnt, on his return to freedom, that Smith Sahib had married the resplendent girl and had gone to England, he very naturally attributed the hatred and bitterness of Smith Sahib to purely personal causes, and swore vengeance.

  Now in India the business of every man is the business of his servants. The preliminary inquiries, over which an Englishman or American jewel thief would spend a small fortune, can be made at the cost of a few annas. When Ras Lal came to England he found that he had overlooked this very important fact.

  Smith Sahib and Memsahib were out of town; they were, in fact, on the high seas en route for New York when Ras Lal was arrested on the conventional charge of ‘being a suspected person’. Ras had shadowed the Smiths’ butler and, having induced him to drink, had offered him immense sums to reveal the place, receptacle, drawer, safe, box or casket wherein Mrs Smith’s jewels were kept. His excuse for asking, namely, that he had had a wager with his brother that the jewels were kept under the Memsahib’s bed, showed a lamentable lack of inventive power. The butler, an honest man, though a drinker of beer, informed the police. Ras Lal and his friend and assistant Ram were arrested, brought before a magistrate, and would have been discharged but for the fact that Mr J G Reeder saw the record of the case and was able to supply from his own files very important particulars of the dark man’s past. Therefore Mr Ras Lal was sent down for six months, and, which was more maddening, the story of his ignominious failure was, he guessed, broadcast throughout India.

  This was the thought which distracted him in his lonely cell at Wormwood Scrubbs. What would India think of him? – he would be the scorn of the bazaars, ‘the mocking point of third-rate mediocrities’, to use his own expression. And automatically he switched his hate from Smith Sahib to one Mr J G Reeder. And his hate was very real, more real because of the insignificance and unimportance of this Reeder Sahib, whom he likened to an ancient sheep, a pariah dog, and other things less translatable. And in the six months of his durance he planned desperate and earnest acts of reprisal.

  Released from prison, he decided that the moment was not ripe for a return to India. He wished to make a close study of Mr J G Reeder and his habits and, being a man with plenty of money, he could afford the time and, as it happened, could mix business with pleasure.

  Mr Tommy Fenalow found means of getting in touch with the gentleman from the Orient whilst he was in Wormwood Scrubbs, and the luxurious car that met Ras Lal at the gates of the Scrubbs when he came out of jail was both hired and occupied by Tommy, a keen business man, who had been offered by his German printer a new line of one-hundred-rupee notes that might easily develop into a most profitable sideline.

  ‘You come along and lodge at my expense, boy,’ said the sympathetic Tommy, who was very short, very stout, and had eyes that bulged like a pug dog’s. ‘You’ve been badly treated by old Reeder, and I’m going to tell you a way of getting back on him, with no risk and a ninety per cent profit. Listen, a friend of mine–’

  It was never Tommy who had snide for sale: invariably the hawker of forged notes was a mysterious ‘friend’.

  So Ras was lodged in a service flat which formed part of a block owned by Mr Fenalow, who was a very rich man indeed. Some weeks after this, Tommy crossed St James’s Street to intercept his old enemy.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Reeder.’

  Mr J G Reeder stopped and turned back.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Fenalow,’ he said, with his benevolent solicitude. ‘I am glad to see that you are out again, and I do trust that you will now find a more – er – legitimate outlet for your undoubted talents.’ Tommy went angrily red.

  ‘I haven’t been in “stir” and you know it, Reeder! It wasn’t for want of trying on your part. But you’ve got to be something more than clever to catch me – you’ve got to be lucky! Not that there’s anything to catch me over – I’ve never done a crook thing in my life, as you well know.’

  He was so annoyed that the lighter exchanges of humour he had planned slipped from his memory.

  He had an appointment with Ras Lal, and the interview was entirely satisfactory. Mr Ras Lal made his way that night to an uncomfortably situated rendezvous and there met his new friend.

  ‘This is the last place in the world old man Reeder would dream of searching,’ said Tommy enthusiastically, ‘and if he did he would find nothing. Before he could get into the building, the stuff would be put out of sight.’

  ‘It is a habitation of extreme convenience,’ said Ras Lal.

  ‘It’s yours, boy,’ replied Tommy magnificently. ‘I only keep this place to get-in and put-out. The stuff’s not here for an hour and the rest of the time the store’s empty. As I say, old man Reeder has gotta be something more than clever – he’s gotta be lucky!’

  At parting he handed his client a key, and with that necessary instrument tendered a few words of advice and warning.

  ‘Never come here till late. The police patrol passes the end of the road at ten, one o’clock and four. When are you leaving for India?’

  ‘On the twenty-third,’ said Ras, ‘by which time I shall have uttered a few reprisals on that dog Reeder.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to be in his shoes,’ said Tommy, who could afford to be sycophantic, for he had in his pocket two hundred pounds’ worth of real money which Ras had paid in advance for a vaster quantity of money which was not so real.

  It was a few days after this that Ras Lal went to the Orpheum Theatre, and it was no coincidence that he went there on the same night that Mr Reeder escorted a pretty lady to the same place of amusement.

  When Mr J G Reeder went to the theatre (and his going at all was contingent upon his receiving a complimentary ticket) he invariably chose a drama, where to the excitement of the actors’ speeches was added some amazing action such as wrecked trains, or terrific horse races in which the favourite won by a nose. Such things may seem wildly improbable to blasé dramatic critics – especially favourites winning – but Mr Reeder saw actuality in all such presentations.

  Once he was inveigled into sitting through a roaring farce, and was the only man in the house who did not laugh. He was, indeed, such a depressing influence that the leading lady sent a passionate request to the manager that ‘the miserable-looking old man in the middle of the front row’ should have his money returned and be requested to leave the theatre. Which, as Mr Reeder had come in on a free ticket, placed the manager in a very awkward predicament.

  Invariably he went unaccompanied, for he had no friends, and fifty-two years had come and gone without bringing to his life romance or the melting tenderness begot of dreams. Now Mr Reeder had become acquainted with a girl who was like no other girl with whom he had been brought into contact. Although he had saved her life, this fact did not occur to him as frequently as the recollection that he had imperilled that life before he had saved it. And he had a haunting sense of guilt for quite another reason.

  He was thinking of her one day – he spent his life thinking about people, though the majority of these were less respectable than Miss Margaret Belman. He supposed that she would marry the very good-looking young man who met her bus at the corner of the Embankment every morning and returned with her to the Lewisham High Road every night. It would be a very nice wedding, with hired cars, and the vicar performing the ceremony, and a wedding breakfast provided by the local caterer, following which bride and bridegroom would be photographed on the lawn surrounded by their jovial but unprepossessing relatives. And after this, one specially hired car would take them to Eastbourne for an expensive honeymoon. And after that all the humdrum and scrapings of life, rising through villadom to a small car of their own and afternoon tea parties.

  Mr Reeder sighed deeply. How much more satisfactory was the stage drama, where all the
trouble begins in the first act and is satisfactorily settled in the last. He fingered absently the two slips of green paper that had come to him that morning. Row A, seats 17 and 18. They had been sent by a manager who was under some obligation to him. The theatre was the Orpheum, and the play was Fire of Vengeance. It looked like being a pleasant evening.

  He took an envelope from the rack, addressed it to the box office, and had begun to write the accompanying letter returning the surplus voucher, when an idea occurred to him. He owed Miss Margaret Belman something, and the debt was on his conscience, for he had described her as his wife. This preposterous claim had been made to appease a mad woman, it is true, but it had been made. She was now holding a good position – as secretary at one of the political headquarters, for which post she had to thank Mr J G Reeder, if she only knew it.

  He took up the phone and called her number and, after the normal delay, heard her voice.

  ‘Er – Miss Belman,’ Mr Reeder coughed, ‘I have – er – two tickets for a theatre tonight. I wonder if you would care to go?’

  Her astonishment was almost audible.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Reeder. I should love to come with you.’

  Mr J G Reeder turned pale.

  ‘What I mean is, I have two tickets – I thought perhaps that your – er – your – er – that somebody else would like to go – what I mean was–’

  He heard a gentle laugh at the other end of the phone.

  ‘What you mean is that you don’t wish to take me,’ she said, and for a man of his experience he blundered badly.

  ‘I should esteem it an honour to take you,’ he said, in terror that he should offend her, ‘but the truth is, I thought–’

  ‘I’ll meet you at the theatre – which is it? Orpheum – how lovely! At seven o’clock.’

  Mr Reeder put down the instrument, feeling limp and moist. It is the truth that he had never taken a lady to any kind of social function in his life, and as there grew upon him the tremendous character of this adventure he was overwhelmed and breathless. A murderer waking from dreams of revelry to find himself in the condemned cell suffered no more poignant emotions than Mr Reeder, torn from the smooth if treacherous currents of life and drawing nearer and nearer to the horrid vortex of unusualness.

  ‘Bless me,’ said Mr Reeder, employing a strictly private expression which was reserved for his own crises.

  He employed in his private office a young woman who combined a meticulous exactness in the filing of documents with a complete absence of those attractions which turn men into gods, and in other days set the armies of Perseus moving towards the walls of Troy. She was invariably addressed by Mr Reeder as ‘Miss’. He believed her name to be ‘Oliver’. She was in truth a married lady with two children, but her nuptials had been celebrated without his knowledge.

  To the top floor of a building in Regent Street Mr Reeder repaired for instruction and guidance.

  ‘It is not – er – a practice of mine to – er – accompany ladies to the theatre, and I am rather at a loss to know what is expected of me, the more so since the young lady is – er – a stranger to me.’

  His frosty-visaged assistant sneered secretly. At Mr Reeder’s time of life, when such natural affections as were not atrophied should in decency be fossilized!

  He jotted down her suggestions.

  ‘Chocolates indeed? Where can one procure – ? Oh, yes, I remember seeing the attendants sell them. Thank you so much, Miss – er–’

  And as he went out, closing the door carefully behind him, she sneered openly.

  ‘They all go wrong at seventy,’ she said insultingly.

  Margaret hardly knew what to expect when she came into the flamboyant foyer of the Orpheum. What was the evening equivalent to the aged bowler and the tightly-buttoned black jacket of ancient design which he favoured in the hours of business? She would have passed the somewhat elegantly dressed gentleman in the well-cut dinner jacket, only he claimed her attention.

  ‘Mr Reeder!’ she gasped.

  It was indeed Mr Reeder: with not so much as a shirt stud wrong; for Mr Reeder, like many other men, dressed according to his inclination in business hours, but accepted blindly the instructions of his tailor in the matter of fancy raiment. Mr J G Reeder was never conscious of his clothing, good or bad – he was, however, very conscious of his strange responsibility.

  He took her coat (he had previously purchased programmes and a large box of chocolates, which he carried by its satin ribbon). There was a quarter of an hour to wait before the curtain went up, and Margaret felt it incumbent upon her to offer an explanation.

  ‘You spoke about “somebody” else; do you mean Roy – the man who sometimes meets me at Westminster?’

  Mr Reeder had meant that young man.

  ‘He and I were good friends,’ she said, ‘no more than that – we aren’t very good friends any more.’

  She did not say why. She might have explained in a sentence if she had said that Roy’s mother held an exalted opinion of her only son’s qualities, physical and mental, and that Roy thoroughly endorsed his mother’s judgement but she did not.

  ‘Ah!’ said Mr Reeder unhappily.

  Soon after this the orchestra drowned further conversation, for they were sitting in the first row near to the noisiest of the brass and not far removed from the shrillest of the woodwind. In odd moments, through the exciting first act, she stole a glance at her companion. She expected to find this man mildly amused or slightly bored by the absurd contrast between the realities which he knew and the theatricalities which were presented on the stage. But whenever she looked, he was absorbed in the action of the play; she could almost feel him tremble when the hero was near death; and when he was rescued on the fall of the curtain, she heard, with something like stupefaction, Mr Reeder’s quivering sigh of relief.

  ‘But surely, Mr Reeder, this bores you?’ she protested, when the lights in the auditorium went up.

  ‘This – you mean the play – bore me? Good gracious, no! I think it is very fine, remarkably fine.’

  ‘But it isn’t life, surely? The story is so wildly improbable, and the incidents – oh, yes, I’m enjoying it all; please don’t look so worried! Only I thought that you, who knew so much about criminology – is that the word? – would be rather amused.’

  Mr Reeder was looking very anxiously at her.

  ‘I’m afraid it is not the kind of play–’

  ‘Oh, but it is – I love it. But doesn’t it strike you as being far-fetched? For instance, that man being chained to a plank, and the mother agreeing to her son’s death?’

  Mr Reeder rubbed his nose thoughtfully.

  ‘The Bermondsey gang chained Harry Salter to a plank, turned it over and let him down, just opposite Billingsgate Market. I was at the execution of Tod Rowe, and he admitted it on the scaffold. And it was “Lee” Pearson’s mother who poisoned him at Teddington to get his insurance money so that she could marry again. I was at the trial and she took her sentence laughing – now what else was there in that act? Oh, yes, I remember: the villain tried to get the young lady to marry him by threatening to send her father to prison. That has been done hundreds of times – only in a worse way. There is really nothing very extravagant about a melodrama except the prices of the seats, and I usually get my tickets free!’

  She listened, at first dumbfounded and then with a gurgle of amusement.

  ‘How queer – and yet – well, frankly, I have only met melodrama once in life, and even now I cannot believe it. What happens in the next act?’

  Mr Reeder consulted his programme.

  ‘I rather believe that the young woman in the white dress is captured and removed to the harem of an Eastern potentate,’ he said precisely, and this time the girl laughed aloud.

  ‘Have you a parallel for that?’
she asked triumphantly, and Mr Reeder was compelled to admit that he knew no exact parallel, but –

  ‘It is rather a remarkable coincidence,’ he said, ‘a very remarkable coincidence!’

  She looked at her programme, wondering if she had overlooked anything so very remarkable.

  ‘There is at this moment, watching me from the front row of the dress circle – I beg you not to turn your head – one who, if he is not a potentate, is undoubtedly Eastern; but there are, in fact, two dark-complexioned gentlemen, but only one may be described as important.’

  ‘But why are they watching you?’ she asked in surprise.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Mr Reeder solemnly, ‘because I look so remarkable in a dinner jacket.’

  One of the dark-complexioned gentlemen turned to his companion at this moment.

  ‘It’s the woman he travels with every day; she lives in the same street, and is doubtless more to him than anybody in the world, Ram. See how she laughs in his face and how the old so-and-so looks at her. When men come to his great age they grow silly about women. This thing can be done tonight. I would sooner die than go back to Bombay without accomplishing my design upon this such-and-such and so-forth.’

  Ram, his chauffeur, confederate and fellow jailbird, who was cast in a less heroic mould and had, moreover, no personal vendetta, suggested in haste that the matter should be thought over.

  ‘I have cogitated every hypothesis to their logical conclusions,’ said Ras Lal in English.

  ‘But, master,’ said his companion urgently, ‘would it not be wise to leave this country and make a fortune with the new money which the fat little man can sell to us?’