Blindfold (3 page)

“Nine o'clock to-night?” said Miles.

Flossie nodded. He could feel the movement against his arm.

“Just about,” she said.

“You didn't stay long,” he said in a bantering voice.

She shivered again.

“Ooh—it was awful, Mr Miles!”

“What happened? Don't shiver like that—you're all right.”

“I can't help it, Mr Miles. I'm frightened to tell you.”

“Then don't tell me. But there's nothing to be frightened of.”

“That's all you know. But I got to tell someone.”

“All right then, tell me.”

“I'm going to—I
got
to.”

“Go ahead then.”

Flossie pinched his arm hard.

“There was a cook there—a fat woman—name of Green. She said I'd got to take up the old lady's Benger's, and not to go into the room on no account and the nurse would take it at the door. There's a nurse, and the cook, and the house-parlour-maid. So I took it up, and when I was coming down, the drawing-room door was open and I went in, just to have a look round as you might say. Ooh!
Mr Miles!”

“What happened?”

“I dun
no
—
reelly
. There was a curtain looped crooked in the back part of the room and I went to pull it straight, and there was a great big mirror on the wall, taller than me and a handsome gold frame all round it. I noticed it pertickler. And when I'd put the curtain straight, I turned round, and—
ooh!”

“Good gracious, Flossie—
what?”

Flossie dug her fingers into his arm.

“Ooh!”
she said again. “There wasn't any glass in the mirror any more. There was the frame, but there wasn't any glass—there was only a most awful black hole. Ooh—it
was
awful! And there was a man's head all over blood!” She caught at him with both hands and dissolved into hysterical sobs upon his shoulder.

“Oh, I say!” said Miles. “I do wish you wouldn't do that! Look here, someone will think I'm murdering you.”

Flossie choked, gulped, and said in a trembling whisper,

“I never see such eyes.”

“What—in the head? Flossie, what on earth did you have for supper?”

She stiffened indignantly.

“I never! And it wasn't that there poor unfortunate head that had the eyes I was talking about—it was the other one. Come and looked at me out of the hole in the wall he did. And how I got down the stairs I dunno, but thank Gawd I did, and grabbed my coat and up the area steps and never stopped running till my breath gave out. And I dursn't go home to Aunt, not in the middle of the night, which it would have been by the time I got there in this fog, supposing I could find my way and didn't get run over. Aunt's that
pertickler
. Ooh—I wish I hadn't told you about it!” She gulped down a sob. “I thought it'd make me feel better, but it hasn't. It's all come over me worse than ever. I didn't ought to have talked about it.” Her breath came in gasps between the words.

Miles took her by the arm and shook her a little.

“Do you know what I think?”

“N'no.”

“I think you dreamt it.”

She pulled away and sat up.

“I never!”

“Well, it sounds like it.”

“Come to that,” said Flossie in a little trembling voice of rage—“come to that, what about you? Coo!” She laughed. “You must have thought I was green to swallow your tale about being a secretary come all the way over from America to look for someone you don't know nothing about! But I got some manners, thank Gawd! I didn't laugh at you, did I—
nor
tell you you were dreaming,
nor
yet telling lies?”

Miles couldn't help laughing. He'd much rather she was angry than have her crying on his shoulder.

“Well, as it happens, I wasn't telling lies. But you needn't believe me if you don't want to.”

“Very kind, I'm
sure!”

“I'll tell you all about it if you like.”

She tried for a haughty, languid tone.

“Well—reelly—” Native curiosity came bubbling through. “You don't mean you're reelly looking for a girl and you don't know her
name?”

“I do. Wouldn't you like to hear about it? If I tell every girl I meet, perhaps I'll strike the right one. Perhaps it's you. It might be—you never can tell.”

“Ooh!” said Flossie. She edged nearer again. “Go on, Mr Miles!”

Miles went on.

“Well, I'm secretary to a man called Macintyre. He's an American, and he's got such a lot of money that he doesn't know what to do with it. There are just a few of 'em left still. He comes out somewhere near the top.”

“I'd like to have a lot of money,” said Flossie in a dreamy voice.

“It's not all jam. For one thing, he doesn't know who be's going to leave it to. That worries him a lot.”

“Hasn't he got any relations?”

Miles laughed.

“Dozens, but he hates them all like poison.
But
he once had a brother whom he didn't hate—they built up the business together. And the brother had a wife, but she quarrelled with him and ran away—just on her own, you know, not with anyone. And after she'd run away she had a baby over here in England, a girl, and she wrote to tell her husband. She'd spent all her money by then and she was pretty ill, and she wanted to come back.”

“Ooh!” said Flossie. “What happened?”

“He never opened the letter. He died last year, and old Macintyre found it unopened in his desk. There were three or four letters. None of them had been opened. They were tied up together neatly, and right on top there was one that
had
been opened. It wasn't from the wife. It said:

“Dear Sir,

Your wife died this morning. Please send money for funeral expenses and my account enclosed and oblige

Yours truly

Agnes Smith.”

“Nothing about the baby?”

“Not a word.”

“Did he send the money?”

“We don't know. We don't know what he did. Nobody knows. And I've come over here to find the baby. She'd be nineteen and a half by now.”

“Ooh!” said Flossie, still in that dreamy voice. “I'm nineteen and a half.”

“But you're not Miss Macintyre, are you?”

Flossie pounced.

“I thought you said you didn't know her name?”

“Oh, her surname's Macintyre of course. I don't know what she was christened. That's one of the things I've got to find out. There—that's my story. What do you think of it?”

Flossie sniffed.

“I think you must of dreamt it,” she said.

CHAPTER IV

Mr Gilmore might be addicted to late hours, but he did not permit them to impair his efficiency. He was something in the Foreign Office—a very efficient and confidential something. Miles Clayton, entering upon him in an extremely hungry, cold, dirty, and disgruntled condition at somewhere about ten fifteen, was immediately sucked into a vortex of energy which resulted in the almost instantaneous recovery of his luggage and the production of his lost notecase, minus the notes it had contained, but with his passport and letter of credit intact.

“Ordinary station thief. Little man—not up to handling a letter of credit. Note-case chucked away—too dangerous to keep. What about the numbers of the notes? Have you got them?”

Miles shook his head.

Mr Gilmore frowned.

“Always take the number of notes,” he said. “I do. Train yourself to memorize them.… Not in the least—perfectly easy. Let your brain behave like a blancmange, and it will. Now better go and have a wash and a shave, and some sleep. Dine with me at the Luxe at eight.”

Miles was very glad to agree. He found a more modest hotel than the Luxe to stay at, wallowed in hot water, ate largely, and plunged into a deep and dreamful sleep. He didn't dream very much as a rule—only when he was excited or tired out. He didn't know when he had dreamed like this. Looking back afterwards, he couldn't remember where one dream stopped and another began. He couldn't really remember much about them, and the bits he remembered gave him the feeling that there was a great deal more that was hiding in the corners of his mind. In one of the dreams he was crawling through a long dark passage after a head which kept on rolling away.
Not
a nice dream. And then, after some indeterminate lapse of time, there were eyes glaring at him from the darkness and he was trying to catch them in a butterfly net. Why? What an ass one was in a dream.… And then someone said
“Miss Macintyre”
in a loud booming voice that went rolling about like lumps of thunder. And in the middle of it all there was a baby in his arms, and it looked up at him with incredibly solemn eyes and said, “You don't know my name.” And after that he was running the gauntlet between two rows of girls who stretched from the Marble Arch to Waterloo bridge. One of them was Miss Macintyre, but he didn't know which. They shouted their names at him as he ran: “Joan—Alice—Una—Marion—Flossie.
Flossie
.” She said in a shuddering whisper, “There was a great black hole in the wall,” and he fell over the edge of the world into another dream.

It is a long way down over the edge of the world, but it is very quiet when you get there. There was a sound of water, and a sound of trees—soft running water, and slow waving trees.… Little Kay was there. It was years since he had thought about Kay.… He stayed in this dream for a long time very pleasantly.

Then he woke up and dressed, and went to dine with Mr Gilmore at the Luxe.

It was a very good dinner, and he was still hungry. Somewhere between the fish and the
entrée
he found himself telling Gilmore about his wild goose chase.

“How many girls do you suppose there are in England at this minute between the ages of nineteen and twenty, Gil?”

“Ask the editor of
Tit Bits
,” said Gilmore. “His line, not mine. How many halfpennies does it take to reach the moon? If you stood all the policemen in the world one on top of the other, what would be the colour of the top one's hair? Why is a mouse when it spins?”

“Do you suppose there are a million?”

“I hope not.”

“Well, half a million?”

“Why this morbid preoccupation with flappers?”

Miles shook his head.

“They've stopped flapping at nineteen and a half.”

“Anyhow, why?”

“Miss Macintyre,” said Miles. “I've been telling you all about her and you haven't been listening. Mother vanished into the blue twenty years ago—had a baby in Hampstead and died.”

“I heard all that. Your boss wants to find the girl and leave her his money. How do you propose setting about it? Where are the clues?”

“Well there are three letters from Mrs Macintyre, all written the same month, two before the baby was born and one afterwards. Knox Macintyre hadn't opened any of them. The boss read them and handed them on to me. They were rather—heart-rending. I don't know what they quarrelled about, but she wanted to make it up. That was the first letter, and she asked him to cable an answer. The next was a fortnight later. She was awfully worried because he hadn't cabled. She was ill, and she was running out of money. She didn't want to sell the jewels he had given her. She begged him to cable and come to her. The last was ten days later, just a scrawl in pencil. ‘Very ill. Do
please
come. Baby is a girl. So pretty.' Well, that was all, except a letter which he
had
opened, from the landlady: ‘Dear sir, your wife died this morning. Please send money for funeral expenses and my account enclosed and oblige yours truly, Agnes Smith.' Pretty grim, isn't it? Knox must have been a hard nut.”

Gilmore nodded.

“Any address on the letters?”

“Oh yes—72 Laburnum Vale, Hampstead.
But
when I wrote to Mrs Agnes Smith, the letter came back with
Not known
scrawled across it in blue pencil. So then the boss told me to come over and worry round.”

“Jewels—” said Gilmore meditatively. “She didn't want to have to sell her jewels.… Any idea what they were? Likely to be noticeable if and when sold?”

“Very much so, I should think. I hunted up a couple of her women friends. Their eyes fairly popped when they were describing them. Item—a rope of black pearls. Item—a wreath of emerald laurel leaves, said to have belonged to the Empress Josephine. Item—a pair of pink pearl earrings set with brilliants. Etcetera, etcetera.”

“The complete jewellers' catalogue!” said Gilmore sardonically. “Well, you hike to Hampstead, you pursue pawnbrokers, you look for Mrs Smith, who is probably dead. Net result a cable to New York: ‘Nothing doing.'”

“You're a damping blighter, Gil.”

Gilmore shrugged his shoulders. His dark, lean face expressed an amused contempt.

“Twenty years—what optimism!”

Miles laughed a little. He was the same age as Gilmore, but there might easily have been seven or eight years between them—the important years between the late twenties and the middle thirties. When Gilmore smiled, the apparent gap increased. The smile brought out the lines which marked his face. Miles Clayton's laugh made an undergraduate of him again. He had a boy's fair hair and fresh complexion. It came as a surprise when his jaw set and his grey eyes looked out from under frowning brows. The boy was gone then, and his twenty-eight years could be believed. Just now he laughed.

“Optimism? Well, you'd say so if you knew when those letters were written.”

Gilmore's eyebrows went up.

“July 1914,” said Miles. “There was just going to be a tidy-sized war, Gil, in case you've forgotten. That mixes it a bit—doesn't it?”

They had arrived at the sweet.

As Miles helped himself, Flossie Palmer was looking into the cracked mirror on her chest of drawers. The crack was high up in one corner, so it didn't really matter. She had on a very bright pink dress which killed her delicate porcelain tints, but she considered it a complete success. She had painted her lips a brilliant cerise and darkened her eyebrows with a burnt match. She and Ernie were going to the
palais de danse
, and the immediate problem was to get out of the house without being seen by Aunt. Aunt would make her wash her face, to a cert she would. She already thought the dress too bright to be quite respectable. Aunt was so pertickler.