The Man in the Brown Suit/Chapter 28
(Extract from the diary of Sir Eustace Pedler)
AS I remarked once before, I am essentially a man of peace. I yearn for a quiet life—and that's just the one thing I don't seem able to have. I am always in the middle of storms and alarms. The relief of getting away from Pagett with his incessant nosing out of intrigues was enormous, and Miss Pettigrew is certainly a useful creature. Although there is nothing of the houri about her, one or two of her accomplishments are invaluable. It is true that I had a touch of liver at Bulawayo and behaved like a bear in consequence, but I had had a disturbed night in the train. At 3 A.M. an exquisitely dressed young man looking like a musical-comedy hero of the Wild West entered my compartment and asked where I was going. Disregarding my first murmur of "Tea—and for God's sake don't put sugar in it," he repeated his question, laying stress on the fact that he was not a waiter but an Immigration officer. I finally succeeded in satisfying him that I was suffering from no infectious disease, that I was visiting Rhodesia from the purest of motives, and further gratified him with my full Christian names and my place of birth. I then endeavoured to snatch a little sleep, but some officious ass aroused me at 5.30 with a cup of liquid sugar which he called tea. I don't think I threw it at him, but I know that that was what I wanted to do. He brought me unsugared tea, stone cold, at 6, and I then fell asleep utterly exhausted, to awaken just outside Bulawayo and be landed with a beastly wooden giraffe, all legs and neck!
But for these small contretemps, all had been going smoothly. And then fresh calamity befell.
It was the night of our arrival at the Falls. I was dictating to Miss Pettigrew in my sitting-room, when suddenly Mrs. Blair burst in without a word of excuse and wearing most compromising attire.
"Where's Anne?" she cried.
A nice question to ask. As though I were responsible for the girl. What did she expect Miss Pettigrew to think? That I was in the habit of producing Anne Beddingfeld from my pocket at midnight or thereabouts? Very compromising for a man in my position.
"I presume," I said coldly, "that she is in her bed."
I cleared my throat and glanced at Miss Pettigrew, to show that I was ready to resume dictating. I hoped Mrs. Blair would take the hint. She did nothing of the kind. Instead she sank into a chair and waved a slippered foot in an agitated manner.
"She's not in her room. I've been there. I had a dream—a terrible dream—that she was in some awful danger, and I got up and went to her room, just to reassure myself, you know. She wasn't there and her bed hadn't been slept in."
She looked at me appealingly.
"What shall I do, Sir Eustace?"
Repressing the desire to reply, "Go to bed, and don't worry over nothing. An able-bodied young woman like Anne Beddingfeld is perfectly well able to take care of herself," I frowned judicially.
"What does Race say about it?"
Why should Race have it all his own way? Let him have some of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of female society.
"I can't find him anywhere."
She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed and sat down in a chair.
"I don't quite see the reason for your agitation," I said patiently.
"My dream"
"That curry we had for dinner!"
"Oh, Sir Eustace!"
The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.
"After all," I continued persuasively, "why shouldn't Anne Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the whole hotel aroused about it?"
"You think they've just gone out for a stroll together? But it's after midnight!"
"One does these foolish things when one is young," I murmured, "though Race is certainly old enough to know better."
"Do you really think so?"
"I dare say they've run away to make a match of it," I continued soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there to run away to?
I don't know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any rate, I had been partly right—he had been out for a stroll, but he hadn't taken Anne with him. However, I had been quite wrong in my way of dealing with the situation. I was soon shown that. Race had the whole hotel turned upside-down in three minutes. I've never seen a man more upset.
The thing is very extraordinary. Where did the girl go? She walked out of the hotel, fully dressed, about ten minutes past eleven, and she was never seen again. The idea of suicide seems impossible. She was one of those energetic young women who are in love with life, and have not the faintest intention of quitting it. There was no train either way until midday on the morrow, so she can't have left the place. Then where the devil is she?
Race is almost beside himself, poor fellow. He has left no stone unturned. All the D.C.'s, or whatever they call themselves, for hundreds of miles round have been pressed into the service. The native trackers have run about on all fours. Everything that can be done is being done—but no sign of Anne Beddingfeld. The accepted theory is that she walked in her sleep. There are signs on the path near the bridge which seem to show that the girl walked deliberately off the edge. If so, of course, she must have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Unfortunately, most of the footprints were obliterated by a party of tourists who chose to walk that way early on the Monday morning.
I don't know that it's a very satisfactory theory. In my young days, I always was told that sleep-walkers couldn't hurt themselves—that their own sixth sense took care of them. I don't think the theory satisfies Mrs. Blair either.
I can't make that woman out. Her whole attitude towards Race has changed. She watches him now like a cat a mouse, and she makes obvious efforts to bring herself to be civil to him. And they used to be such friends. Altogether she is unlike herself, nervous, hysterical, starting and jumping at the least sound. I am beginning to think that it is high time I went to Jo'burg.
A rumour came along yesterday of a mysterious island somewhere up the river, with a man and girl on it. Race got very excited. It turned out to be all a mare's-nest, however. The man had been there for years, and is well known to the manager of the hotel. He totes parties up and down the river in the season and points out crocodiles and a stray hippopotamus or so to them. I believe that he keeps a tame one which is trained to bite pieces out of the boat on occasions. Then he fends it off with a boat-hook, and the party feel they have really got to the back of beyond at last. How long the girl has been there is not definitely known, but it seems pretty clear that she can't be Anne, and there is a certain delicacy in interfering in other people's affairs. If I were this young fellow, I should certainly kick Race off the island if he came asking questions about my love affairs.
Later.
It is definitely settled that I go to Jo'burg to-morrow. Race urges me to do so. Things are getting unpleasant there, by all I hear, but I might as well go before they get worse. I dare say I shall be shot by a striker, anyway. Mrs. Blair was to have accompanied me, but at the last minute she changed her mind and decided to stay on at the Falls. It seems as though she couldn't bear to take her eyes off Race. She came to me to-night and said, with some hesitation, that she had a favour to ask. Would I take charge of her souvenirs for her?
"Not the animals?" I asked, in lively alarm. I always felt that I should get stuck with those beastly animals sooner or later.
In the end we effected a compromise. I took charge of two small wooden boxes for her which contained fragile articles. The animals are to be packed by the local store in vast crates and sent to Cape Town by rail, where Pagett will see to their being stored.
The people who are packing them say that they are of a particularly awkward shape (!), and that special cases will have to be made. I pointed out to Mrs. Blair that by the time she has got them home those animals will have cost her easily a pound apiece!
Pagett is straining at the leash to rejoin me in Jo'burg. I shall make an excuse of Mrs. Blair's cases to keep him in Cape Town. I have written him that he must receive the cases and see to their safe disposal, as they contain rare curios of immense value.
So all is settled, and I and Miss Pettigrew go off into the blue together. And any one who has seen Miss Pettigrew will admit that it is perfectly respectable.