I Shall Not Want (36 page)

“Take it easy, Mother,” he was saying. “Take it easy.”

When she was a little quieter, he spoke to her again.

“You . . . you . . . don't think there's anything in it, do you?” he asked.

“Of course not,” she said. “It's all some horrible mistake.”

The mention of it, however, set her crying again. She lay back and moaned.

“My poor darling,” he heard her saying. “The things he said about you. The awful things. It isn't true. Oh God, say that it isn't true.”

Then words left her and she simply cried.

It was not until nearly six months later that John Marco realised that Hesther was watching him.

The indications at first were scanty, but they were sufficient. Once when he went to the window of his office he saw her in broad daylight on the other side of the pavement standing in the shelter of the shop blind looking upwards towards his room; she was dressed entirely in black by now like a widow. The sight shocked him—she looked so old and lonely; shocked him, but left him callous and unmoved because he had never loved her. Then one Sunday after Chapel he happened to glance behind him and, two blocks away, he saw the same black figure, keeping close to the railings, diligently following: her way lay in the opposite direction but she was there urged on by some force within her that was stronger than mere curiosity. And on another occasion when he had been out late, walking alone by himself in the streets, he had stopped and seen her pass the shop several times slowly and lingeringly as if waiting for someone whom she knew would never come.

It was not, however, until one night as he stood outside Mr. Petter's premises in Harrow Street waiting for him to answer the bell—his visits had been resumed uninterrupted and Mary had accepted them—and saw Hesther move away from a doorway opposite that her presence alarmed him. It seemed then as though she were sinister again, as though somehow she were threatening him. But what could she do? He was free of her; it was his life that he was living now. He shook Mr. Petter's hot little hand as it was thrust out delightedly towards him and tried to forget about Hesther.

In a strange, detached fashion he had grown rather
to like this cautious prosaic chemist who had become Mary's husband. He was so simple, so dangerously easy to hurt. And his love for Mary was such a reliable, unquestioning thing. Often on evenings when John Marco was there, Mr. Petter would sit perfectly happy just looking at Mary and smiling every time she glanced in his direction. John Marco could not even find it in him to resent him: if he himself had chosen a guardian for Mary, someone who would be ready to lay down his life for her, he could not have selected better.

Mr. Petter was still, of course, as jealous as ever, still as proud of this marriage that he had made; but now that he really knew John Marco, now that he felt that he could trust him, he was generous, too. He was filled with pity for the other man's loneliness and wanted him to feel that here at least he had a home.

As a matter of fact, it was Mr. Petter's kindness—his clumsy, awkward kindness—that first reminded John Marco that he
was
lonely. On that same evening when John Marco had seen Hesther slip away without speaking to him, Mr. Petter, his day's work done, sat comfortably back with his two feet on the fender and counted his blessings.

“Friendship,” he said. “That's the grand thing in life. It must be awful to be lonely. Having a friend drop in on one or dropping in on one myself—I don't ask anything better.”

But John Marco was not listening to him. He had no friends of his who ever dropped in on him; and this house of Mr. Petter's was the only one that he went inside. On those Tuesday evenings when he called at Clarence Gardens to see old Mrs. Marco—her brain was now more nebulous and diffuse than ever—Hesther still made a point of locking herself away from him, and he spoke to no one.

Now that he came to think of it, he supposed that he was really damnably lonely: his life was without anything behind it. The reason, of course, was the business: it left him with no time to make friends. But were those seven plate glass window panes and the thirty-four assistants—the
business had been going forward steadily: its turnover was up again by nearly three thousand pounds—the shadow, or the substance? His eye rested on Mary for a moment and he wondered. If he had married her, it would all have been different, he told himself; friendship would have seemed natural then.

“Not being wanted is the real tragedy,” Mr. Petter observed at random. “Think of orphans.”

But John Marco was thinking now of Hesther: her spirit still seemed somehow to be pervading the evening. Was that why she had come here to-night, because she was lonely? Because she wasn't wanted? It was, after all, only because she had been so lonely before that she had tried so desperately to draw him into her life.

“We make our own loneliness,” John Marco said at last; and as he said it Mary glanced up for a moment from her sewing and they looked into each other's eyes.

Now that he was down in the street once more, he paused. It had been in the doorway opposite that Hesther had been standing. The doorway itself was empty now. But further down the street a four-wheel cab was standing. Against the window of the cab, a face was pressed. It was not a distinct, recognisable face; nothing that he could have named or identified. Across the width of the thoroughfare, it was simply a white smudge with two dark places which were eyes. But apparently his appearance was the signal. For the face at once withdrew; and a hand, a long hand in a black glove like a widow's, tapped on the window.

Immediately the cab began to move away and John Marco stood there looking after it, staring helplessly at that one small window at the back that was blank and non-committal and admitted nothing.

ii

It was the following day that Mr. Petter received the anonymous letter. It arrived innocently enough by the
noon delivery. But was that really so innocent? It seemed to Mr. Petter on those innumerable occasions in the future when he dragged the horrible thing out of his pocket and studied it—the message and the hand-writing, and the postmark—that the very hour at which he had received it was suspicious. The letter—it was as The Letter that he subsequently came to think of it—had been posted in Bayswater sometime between midnight and seven-thirty in the morning. It was as though the unknown writer had sat up far into the night composing it, and had then stolen out to the pillar box while the rest of London was asleep.

The text of the message was brief, unsubtle and terrifying. In the middle of a plain sheet of paper—the sort of paper on which a child might write out its exercises: it had obviously been torn from a penny copy-book—the words were inscribed in sharp, angular capitals.

“BEWARE,” it ran. “JOHN MARCO IS YOUR WIFE'S LOVER. KEEP HIM FROM THE HOUSE IF YOU RESPECT YOUR MARRIAGE.” There was no signature and no address; no date, even. The thing simply existed.

As Mr. Petter read it he felt suddenly sick; it was as though someone had come up close and had spat into his face.

But it is not what an anonymous letter says that does the harm: it is the fear of what else it might have said: What does the writer know? Who is he? Where are the proofs? What evidence is there, can there be? Why was it written? Was it sent to me by someone whom I know, or by a stranger? Is it madness? Or malice? Or——? These were the thoughts that were running wildly and at random through Mr. Petter's mind as he sat down on the stool in his dispensary, his heart jumping and faltering.

To show that letter to Mary and then burn it: that seemed the clean, the common-sense thing to do. But why make her suffer—even if they only laughed about
it together afterwards? Why publish this abomination? In any case, perhaps simply to cause anguish had been the unknown writer's intention. If that were so, his object, partially achieved already, would then be complete.

Mr. Petter therefore bravely decided to do nothing. He would burn the letter, unshown; and forget about it. Taking it cautiously from his pocket he read it through once more—for the last time. There was a naked gas-jet in front of him—it was the jet he used for melting the sealing-wax for all his parcels—and his hand moved towards it. But at the last moment he drew back. There was too deep a fascination about this thing that he was holding. It was tangible; it was evidence; it was something with which to go to the police. Without it, the whole incident would become simply like the memory of some dreadful message read in an alarming dream; it would have the new terror of being altogether uncheckable. The writer, too, would surely be delighted that all proof of his guilt had been destroyed.

Thomas Petter therefore folded the letter carefully into its original creases and stowed it safely away in a pocket of his note-book.

It was not until three full days later, during which time he had discovered that to do nothing was impossible, and he had spent whole hours of his time staring senselessly at this single sheet of paper in his hand, that he came to a decision. And once he had come to it he did not question that it was the right one.

He decided that he would take the letter along quite openly and ask Mr. Tuke for his advice.

John Margo was sitting in the handsome gilt and mahogany offices of Bulmer and Urwick, the Issuing House. The cigar which Mr. Bulmer had just given him was between his lips and the air already was thick with sweet blue clouds from Havana. But because John Marco was excited, he was drawing a trifle too hard at his cigar and was causing a little circle of red to dance before his face.

“I'm not interested simply in having the present premises rebuilt,” he was saying. “I'm interested in something very much larger—something the whole of Bayswater will come to.”

He spread out his hands as he said it, and the vision of a vast shop-front with a battery of windows rose before his eyes again. He saw his own name, JOHN MARCO, JOHN MARCO, JOHN MARCO, repeated in letters of gold—there was going to be no sentimental nonsense about keeping the old name on the frontage—all down the length of the street. The whole thing was so real to him that he could not understand why Mr. Bulmer could not see it just as clearly.

“Then how much have you got in mind?” Mr. Bulmer enquired.

He was a large man with a red carnation in his button-hole, and the points of his butterfly-collar set a trifle too wide. He had a sanguine disposition and cultivated a pleasant talent for assisting money to circulate.

“Five hundred thousand,” John Marco answered him. “A straight five hundred.”

Mr. Bulmer pursed up his lips for a moment.

“It's a lot of money for a local enterprise,” he said at length.

John Marco leant forward and blew out a cloud of the fine helpful smoke.

“I've gone into the figures carefully,” he said. “There's no point in starving ourselves before we've started.”

Mr. Bulmer began playing with the top of his inkwell.

“I could probably raise it if your results are good enough,” he said. “It all depends on the accountants.” He sat back and thrust his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat. “I prefer something I can get my teeth into,” he added.

It was a strange place, London, Mr. Bulmer reflected. If you took an office in the right quarter—close beside St. Swithin's Lane, his was—and put out a brass name plate you could get all the money you wanted simply by reaching out your hand for it. Of course you had to have something to offer in exchange. But what? How was he to know, for instance, if a vast new emporium in Bayswater would succeed or not? The answer, of course, was that he didn't know; he didn't even have to know. Once he had got all the particulars down on paper in front of him and had brooded over them he could tell whether he would be able to
sound
as if he knew; and that was all that really mattered. The rest would be up to that simple, childlike, greedy thing, the Public. The Public was always the same: it was comprised of endless numbers of diligent, respectable hard-working little men who had sweated their manhood away working year in and year out from nine o'clock in the morning till seven at night so that they could at last have two or three hundred pounds to call their own and then suddenly—whoosh!—they were prepared to make a paper boat of all their savings and see which way the wind would carry it. It was as though, sometime in the fifties, a second infancy came to them and they began to believe once more in gold mines and perpetual motion and harnessing the sun and god-knows-what besides.
A drapery stores would seem gilt edged to those people.

But John Marco was speaking again.

“This is something big,” he was saying. “Something big I tell you. There's nothing local about it. We'll show the whole of London. We'll get people out there from Oxford Street and Piccadilly. By the time we're open, the Bon Marché and the rest of them will all be smashed, finished. There'll be people going to my shop from all over the country. . . .”

His eyes were shining as he spoke and he had run his fingers through his hair, ruffling it. During those few minutes, he had felt a mysterious, outside power flowing into him: he had believed. It had been like that in those old days in the Tabernacle. And as he sat there he heard again Mr. Tuke's big voice echoing inside his brain. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,” the words came back to him. Not to want: that was the great thing: to be secure. And with wealth, everything else would become simple, too. With real wealth, great inexhaustible hoards of it, he would be powerful. And how would a little back-street chemist ever be able to stand against him then?

“With me behind it, it can't fail,” he heard himself saying, “it will be tremendous.”

But Mr. Bulmer was no longer listening. The golden-paved square-mile around Threadneedle Street was the mecca of all commercial visionaries, and his mind had grown stale to them. He got up and went over for his hat.