Salome and the Head/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE FALSE MOUSTACHE
Mr. Templar was not the only man in London with the wit to combine the three ideas—money, detectives, Salome; but in no other case did the equation work out to anything at all resembling the desired result, because no one else had the idea of substituting for the most interesting term of the equation another less charming but more amenable. In other words, while the other mathematicians sought Salome—by means of money and detectives—Templar, quite early in the game, addressed his researches, not to Salome, but to Pan the flute-player. He felt, quite unreasonably and quite certainly, that if he found Pan he would find the nymph.
The first report was that Pan lived at a house near Portland Place, the ground floor of which was occupied by Mosenthal and Mosenthal, house agents. The second, that he spent his week-ends, as well as certain weeks, at an old house near the river Medway—its name, The Wood House.
Templar pigeon-holed this information, dismissed his detective, and bought a false moustache. He was warming to the game. The spirit of the chase fired his blood. He could not believe, now that he came to think of it, that it was impossible to trace two women in a motor-car in London. So he chartered a taxi-cab, with a driver whose manners and speech were at least as good as his own. (Are half the drivers of London taxi-cabs young men from the universities? The question justifies itself on three-fifths of the occasions on which one rides in the public motors. Or perhaps it is the County Council Schools?) He explained what he wanted at quite needless length, and the chauffeur of the taxi-cab understood at least twice as much as there was to understand.
So that when the Eagle and the Dragon and Salome (all bundled up, Salome was) entered their motor at the stage door, and it glided away, the unobtrusive taxi-cab glided after it, and, as snake might glide after snake in the dark labyrinths of the jungle, so serpentined in pursuit through London’s lit streets. The chase, delayed for a moment at the door of a West End house-agent, where a lame man got out of the motor and let himself in with a latch-key, ended in a West End mews.
The motor ran itself between the waiting open doors of a coach-house—garage is the correct jargon, I am told—and. . . stayed there. The chauffeur put out the staring eyes of the motor, and proceeded with calm deliberation to strike a match and light a gas-jet and do something, something which made a metallic sound, to his infernal machinery. Templar, his coat collar turned up, and wearing, with incredible self-consciousness, the false moustache, left his taxi-cab in the street and went up the mews to lounge opposite the garage door. The gas-light shone full into the motor brougham. It was empty.
But it couldn’t be empty! Two women and a lot of bundles might conceivably contrive to get out of a growler going at the snail’s pace possible only to those decaying vehicles—but to get out of a going—a rapidly going motor—in crowded London streets, unobserved! It was impossible.
Yet it was possible. For it had been done. The motor was empty. There was no one there.
“And what do you want?” the electric brougham’s driver was asking; and Templar, disclaiming with hurried politeness all possible wants, hastened back to his motor.
“Follow the chauffeur,” he said. “Wait till he comes out, and then follow him.” And the chauffeur was run to earth in Lloyd Square, King’s Cross.
Templar, inexperienced detective that he was, sprang from his docile taxi-cab and addressed the chauffeur at the moment when latch-key met key-hole.
“I say,” he said, and then found that there was nothing more that he could say.
“What do you say?” said the chauffeur in a tone that made the immediate saying of something a matter of life or death.
“I say——” Templar had never felt so inadequate. “I say—I’m not asking out of idle curiosity.”
“I’m glad of that,” said the chauffeur, arrested on the half turn, his key paralysed in the lock.
“I say—” said Templar again, and never had he felt such a fool. “That lady you were driving tonight——”
“Oh, go to hell!” said the chauffeur, turning his convalescent key. “You make the seventy-second since she came on the boards. Go to hell—you and your false moustache.”
With that he took a step forward into darkness, and the door slammed in Templar’s disconcerted face.
“I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said the taxi-cab chauffeur, “that you haven’t had better luck.”
“Oh— go to hell,” quoted Templar on the pavement.
“Certainly, sir,” said the chauffeur; “any particular number?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Templar, when he had laughed.
“Il n’y a pas de quoi,” said the driver of the taxi-cab, with an accent almost too perfect. “Sixty-four Curzon Street? Yes, sir.”
When Templar stood on the pavement, feeling in his pocket for the silver demanded by the bald-faced taximeter dial, the chauffeur looked at him, raised his eyebrows, and said:
“If I might venture a suggestion, sir?”
“Fire ahead.”
“I’ve seen the lady dance. Excuse my saying so: it’s no go.”
“Confound you!” said Templar.
“Not at all,” said the chauffeur blandly. “I am only speaking as one man to another. She’s straight.”
“Damn you!” said Templar.
“By all means,” said the chauffeur. “Am I to understand——?”
Templar chinked silver.
“Thank you, sir. I suppose I’m not mistaken. It isn’t possible that you’re pursuing the lady pour le bon motif?”
“I knew her when she was a child,” Templar was surprised to find himself saying.
The man detached one of the lamps of his cab and flashed its light suddenly on Templar’s face.
“Right,” he said, satisfied by what the light showed him. “Then I’ll tell you something. That moustache is false as lover’s vows. It simply asks to be plucked off. It tempts the hand like a peach. You’ll find crape hair and spirit gum more convincing, as well as more secure. And I’ll tell you something else.”
“Well,” said Templar, furtively tearing off the too profuse disguise.
“You’re not the only one that knew her when she was a child. There’s another.”
“Who’s the other?” Templar flashed back at him.
“Black—oily. I’d sooner you found her than he. So I’ll give you a tip. Where does she go for week-ends? And the week off she takes in every three? That’s all.—No, thank you, sir, if it’s all the same to you. Just the bare fare, please.—And if I were you I’d follow that trail. Never mind where she lodges in London. Try her country address—if you can get it. She goes for her week off next Saturday.”
“You seem to know a great deal about her,” said Templar weakly.
“I’ve seen her dance. And I’ve driven her three times, when she first came to London—once was to Charing Cross,” said the chauffeur. “If I wasn’t a poor devil that hasn’t a chance left, I wouldn’t give you the chance I’m giving you now.”
“You’ve been drinking,” said Templar.
“Of course I have,” said the chauffeur contemptuously. “What else do you expect? But I can drive straight all the same. No doubt to-morrow, when I’ve not been drinking, I shall wish I’d cut my tongue out before I’d told you what I have told you. But at present you appear to me to be honest. Illusive effect of mixed liquors, no doubt. Good night, sir; thank you.”
He went to the front of the machine, and agitated its vitals.
“But I say,” said Templar, “tell me how you know——”
“How I know she’s straight? I’m not a Yahoo——”
“No—no, no. How you know about her country house?”
“Common sense—common barn-door sense. And the oily one doesn’t know—yet. Good night, sir. Yes, I know I shall be sorry for this in the morning.”
Templar was sorry already—as a man is sorry who has made a fool of himself, to no purpose. To no purpose? Not wholly. The suggestion of the country house stayed and stuck. He had no chance of finding her country house. But he did know the country house of Pan. Pan was a bumpkin—a Cockney bumpkin, if such a thing could be. He would be amenable, malleable. The nymph in the forest had twisted him round her little finger. Mr. Templar, as yet, knew no difference between his little finger and the little finger of Salome.
The upshot of it all was that he took train for Yalding on the Friday. He had spent a week in researches: and four evenings of that week he had, from his stall, seen her dance her forest dance to Pan’s piping. But he had not seen her dance the Salome dance. The idea of it revolted him—seemed vulgar, common, profane.
He had called on Mr. Mosenthal, the house-agent, on a pretence which he hoped was not altogether transparent, of wanting a flat of four rooms with kitchen and bathroom, hot and cold water laid on, in an old house in a good neighbourhood, for £30 a year. He saw Mr. Mosenthal’s clerk, and made cautious inquiries as to the tenants of the house. He was told that the first floor was let to the well-known tailor Mr. X., that Miss Gertrude Steinhart, a palmist, had the second floor, that a typewriting office had the basement, while the attics were used as ware-rooms by Mr. X.
“Which floor does the lame gentleman live on?” Templar asked.
“Lame gentleman? There’s nobody lame here,” said the clerk, with the proper pride of one who stands up to life on two straight if slender legs. “A lame gentleman who plays the flute? Oh, no, sir—that wouldn’t be at all the class of tenant Mr. Mosenthal would entertain the idea of for a moment. You must have got the wrong number, sir. What name did you say?”
Templar said it didn’t matter at all, thank you, and got away.
“What was that gentleman’s name?” asked Mr. Mosenthal, coming out of a door with his name on it.
“Templar, sir—64, Curzon Street, Doubleyou.”
“What’s the rent of that flat of ours at the corner?”
“Eighty-five, sir.”
“Offer it him for fifty if he calls again. Make it ninety-five to anyone else. And keep your mouth shut.”
“Certainly, sir,” said the clerk blandly. He, too, was of The People, and Moses Mosenthal had his race’s instinct as to the man who can be trusted.
Templar, on the pavement of Oxford Street, told himself what a callow innocent he had been to be taken in by such an obvious trick. Of course the man had just dodged into that door—with some old latch-key that happened to fit—no doubt he’d played that game before—waited till the watchful taxi-cab had slithered away, and then limped home to his lodgings. But how had the women got out of the car? And when?
He had found food for reflection as he walked back to Curzon Street and packed his bag for Yalding.
In the train he reflected still further. ‘He had been away for eight years: he had come home determined to enjoy himself. In Africa his mind had played joyously with visions of Edmund Templar (in the faultless evening dress of an English gentleman, for all the world like a Labour member described by a yellow journal) frequenting theatres, music-halls and places where they eat, revolving in centres of electric-lighted gaiety, himself the gayest of the gay. He had meant to be interested in everything, to enjoy everything that there was—every single thing: the lights, the food, the music, the feminine charm so long absent from his life, “all,” in fact, as Mr. Kipling so justly puts it, “all that ever went with evening dress”; and so far he had enjoyed nothing but the sight of her dancing, had been interested in nothing but his flat-footed attempts to play the detective, to find out what she desired to conceal.
He stopped this last thought: he did not want it. He unfolded his Pall Mall and began to read—first the Notes, then other things, till he pulled himself up in the middle of an article on markets, the final impression left on his mind being that wheat was “firm,” oil “low,” and that pork had “opened languid and declining.” Then he gave it up and watched the changing green of wood and hedge and pasture, and washed his tired eyes in the waters of beauty, owning to himself that the Kentish country was not so bad. Not like the New Forest, of course, but still, not so bad.
If you go to Yalding you may stay at the George, and be comfortable in a little village that owns a haunted churchyard, a fine church, and one of the most beautiful bridges in Europe. Or you may stay at the Anchor, and be comfortable on the very lip of the river. Templar chose the Anchor, because he felt that there, sooner or later, he would see, in a boat, the beautiful face and fine hands of Pan. When people take old houses near rivers, it is safe to assume that they do it because they love boating.
But he walked up to Yalding and leaned on the bridge and looked down into the mysterious shadowy depths that by daylight are green water-meadows; saw two white owls fly out from the church tower; heard the church clock strike nine; had a drink at the George and a pleasant word with the George’s good landlord; and went back over the broad deserted green space, tree-bordered, which Yalding calls the Leas, to that other bridge which is almost as beautiful as Yalding’s, and so to bed in a little bungalow close to the water, and there fell asleep with the sound of the weir soothing him like a lullaby.
In the fresh quiet night the light and noise of London seemed very far away, and it was while he leaned on the Yalding Bridge and looked down into the water-meadows that he had to face again the thought which in the train he had smothered with the Pall Mall Gazette. He began, in fact, to feel ashamed of himself. All that he had done was so silly—so amateurish, so unworthy of a thoroughly seasoned railway engineer and man of the world. Also, it was rather caddish—what? To be trying to hunt down a girl who didn’t want to be hunted. And to what end? He did not answer that question. Nor did he allow himself to be asked it twice.
A soft air blew from the hills, rustling the sedge beside the invisible river; the mists that had floated between earth and sky drifted away like blown foam; the quiet stars came out. Alone in that spacious night, so calm, so clean, Mr. Edmund Templar felt small, and rather dirty. He felt that he was not the sort of man he should care to be asked to meet. A meaner man might have felt all this, and have been sorry to feel it. Templar was, on the whole, not sorry. If he was really this sort of man it was as well to know it now—and to take steps. No—he was not sorry. But he was not glad.