Flowers For the Judge

1 : Damp DynamiteThe story of the little man, sometimes a stockbroker, sometimes a tea merchant, but always something in the City, who walked out of his suburban house one sunny morning and vanished like a puff of grey smoke in a cloudless sky, can be recalled by nearly everyone who lived in Greater London in the first years of the century. The details vary. Sometimes it was the inquisitive lady at Number Ten who saw him go by, and the invalid propped up in the window of Number Twelve who did not; while the letter which he was about to post was found lying pathetically upon the pavement between the two houses. Sometimes the road was bounded by two high walls, with a milkman at one end and the unfortunate gentleman’s wife on her door-step at the other. In this version the wife was kissed at the garden gate and waved at from halfway down the oddly bordered road, yet the milkman saw neither hide nor hair of his patron then or afterwards. All the stories have their own circumstantial evidence. Only the main fact and an uncomfortable impression are common to all. A man did disappear and there were reasons for supposing that he did so in no ordinary fashion. Also, of course, he never returned. Most people know of someone who lived in the next street to the hero or victim of the tale, but the ancient firm of Barnabas and Company, publishers since 1810 at the Sign of the Golden Quiver, never referred to the story because the little man had been their junior partner on that morning in May, nineteen hundred and eleven, when he bade a polite “Good morning” to his housekeeper at his front door in the Streatham Crescent, turned out into a broad suburban road and never passed the tobacconist on the corner, but vanished as neatly and unobtrusively as a raindrop in a pool. At the time there was a certain excitement in the grand Queen Anne house in the cul-de-sac at the Holborn end of Jockey’s Fields which bore the sign of the Golden Quiver, but, when it was discovered that the ledgers were still truthful and that Mr. John Widdowson, the other partner, was quite prepared to carry on while his cousin remained disintegrated or in the fourth dimension, the natural conservatism of the firm reasserted itself and the whole disturbing affair was decently forgotten. However, although a wonder may degenerate into a funny thing after the proverbial nine days and may well become nothing but an uneasy memory after twenty years, the odd disappearance of Tom Barnabas in nineteen eleven created a sort of precedent in the firm, so that in the curious paradoxical way in which the mind works no one thought very much of it when in nineteen thirty-one Paul R. Brande, one of the directors, did not show up for a couple of days. Gina Brande sat on the couch before the fire in her big sitting room in the top flat on the Sunday evening after Paul went. “Shop tea” was in progress. This function was part of the Barnabas tradition. On Sunday evenings all through the winter it was the custom of the cousins and Miss Curley to meet together to take tea and hold an inquest on the Sunday papers. Sometimes outsiders were present; perhaps a privileged author or visiting American or, on rare occasions, old Caldecott, that patriarch of agents who had known the Old Man. When Paul had brought Gina back from New York and the firm had recovered from the shock of having a woman and a foreigner on the door-step, she had taken over the responsibility of providing the fire and the meal for the gatherings from John’s aged housekeeper and the meetings had moved up from the flat below. It was typical of the two principal directors of the firm that they should have snapped up the lease of the house next door to the office, converted its unsuitability into three flats at considerable expense, and had settled down to live in the Holborn backwater, each convinced that they should or could desire no more. John Widdowson, managing director, senior cousin, and son of the Old Man’s eldest sister, took the centre flat as befitted his position, although in size it would have better suited Paul and Gina, who were quartered above. The ground floor and basement had been more or less wished upon Mike Wedgwood, the youngest cousin and junior director. Barnabas, Limited did things like that in the holy conviction that through minor discomforts their dignity and prestige were upheld. The tea party was almost at an end, and as yet no one had referred to Paul. The general feeling seemed to be that the gathering was very peaceful without his crimson-faced didacticism. Gina had folded herself on the big white sofa with its deeply buttoned back and exaggerated curves. As usual, she looked odd and lovely and unexpected amid that sober gathering. When Pavlov, the décor man, spoke of her as “the young Bernhardt,” he did her a little less than justice. Her small-boned figure, tiny hands and feet, and long modern neck would have disappeared into nothingness in the corsets and furbelows of the ’eighties. Her head was modern, too, with its wide mouth, slanting grey eyes and the small straight nose whose severity was belied by the new coxcomb coiffure which Lallé had created for her and which brought her dark chestnut hair forward into a curl faintly and charmingly reminiscent of the “bang” of the last century. She was wearing one of her own dresses. The firm, or rather John Widdowson in the person of the firm, had not countenanced his cousin’s wife continuing her career in England, and she now only designed for herself, and sometimes for Pavlov, in a strictly dignified and semi-amateur way. The narrow gown, in a heavy dark green and black silk, accentuated her foreignness and her chic, which was so extraordinarily individual. At the moment she looked a little weary. John’s weekly diatribe against the firm of Cheshunt, who flooded the book market with third-, fourth-and fifth-rate novels and advertised the figure of their mighty output with bland self-satisfaction, had seemed even a little longer and heavier than usual. Curley sat in the corner by the fire. Her plump hands were folded on her knee and her very pale blue eyes were quiet and contemplative behind her spectacles. Miss Florence Curley was easily the least distinguished-looking person in the room. Her iron-grey hair was not even tidy and her black velvet dress was of that variety of ill-cut, over-decorated and disgracefully expensive garments which are made in millions for the undiscerning. Her shoes were smart but looked uncomfortable, and she wore three rings which had obviously been her mother’s. But Curley was the firm. Even John, glancing at her from time to time, hoped devoutly that she would outlast him. Long ago she had been the Old Man’s secretary, in the days when a lady typist was still a daring innovation, and, with the tradition of female service and unswerving loyalty to the dominant male still unshattered behind her, she had wedded herself to the firm of Barnabas, Limited as to a lover. Thirty years later she loved the business as a son and a master. She knew more about its affairs than a roomful of ledgers, and understood its difficulties and cherished its triumphs with the insight of a first nurse. In the office she was accepted as a benevolent and omniscient intelligence which was one of the firm’s more important assets. Outside the firm she was feared, respected and faintly resented. Yet she looked a rather stupid, plain old woman sitting there by the fire. It was very warm in the room, and John rose to his feet. “I shall go back to it, I think, Gina,” he said. “Tooth’s new one is an odd sort of jumble, but I want to finish it. I’m having him up tomorrow.” John always spoke of “having authors up” when he meant that he had invited them to an interview. It was a traditional phrase of the Old Man’s. Miss Curley stirred. “Mr. Tooth is a very self-opinionated young man, Mr. Widdowson,” she ventured, and added, with apparent irrelevance: “I saw him lunching with Phillips of Denver’s last week. They were at school together, I think.” John, who followed her line of thought, turned round. “It’s not as good as his first book,” he said defensively. “Oh, no. It’s not,” Miss Curley agreed. “Second books never are, are they? Still, I think he’s got something in him. I shouldn’t like to see him leave us. I don’t like Denver’s.” “Quite,” said John, dry to the point of curtness. “I’ll finish it,” he added. “It may be just possible.” He moved over to the door, an impressive, interesting-looking person with his tall, slender figure, little dried-up yellow face and close-cropped white hair. On the threshold he paused and looked back. “Where is Paul? Do you know, Gina? Haven’t seen him since Thursday. Off to Paris again, I suppose.” There was a moment’s awkward pause, during which Curley smiled involuntarily. Paul, with his hustle methods, his bombast and his energy, while infuriating his cousin contrived to amuse her. John’s remark was his first direct reference to the Tourlette biography affair, and everyone in the room recalled Paul’s excited, unconvincing voice rising above the din at the September cocktail party: “I tell you, my dear fellow, I was so thrilled, so absolutely annihilated, that I just rushed off down to Croydon and got a ’plane—didn’t even remember to snatch a bag or tell Gina here—simply fled over there and bought it!” The fact that the Tourlette biography had proved of about the same interest to the British and American publics as the average first book of free verse, and that Barnabas, Limited had dropped a matter of five hundred pounds on the transaction, lent point to the comment. Gina stirred. All her movements were very slow, and she turned her head with graceful deliberation before speaking. “I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been home since Thursday.” The quiet voice with the unexpected New England accent betrayed no embarrassment or resentment at either the question or the fact. “Oh, I see.” John also did not seem surprised. “If he comes in tonight you might tell him to drop in and see me. I shall be reading all the evening. I’ve had a most extraordinary letter from Mrs. Carter. I wish Paul would learn not to enthuse to authors. It goes to their heads and then they get spiteful if a book doesn’t sell.” His voice died on a plaintive note and the door closed softly behind him. Ritchie began to laugh, a dry little cackle of which nobody took the least notice. He was out of the circle, leaning back in a chair in the shadows, a quiet, slightly melancholy or, if one felt sentimental, pathetic figure. Ritchie Barnabas, brother of the transported Tom, was the only cousin who had received no share of the business under the Old Man’s will. He had been younger in nineteen hundred and eight, of course, but not so young as Mike, who had been a baby, nor so young as Paul, who was still at school, nor even so very much younger than John himself. His own explanation of this mystery was never sought, but a clause in the will which charged the beneficiary cousins to “look after” Richard Barnabas threw some light on the Old Man’s opinion of this nephew. It was characteristic of the firm, and perhaps of publishing generally, that they fulfilled this charge by supplying Ritchie with a small room at the top of the building, a reasonable salary and the title of “The Reader.” He shared the work with some twenty or thirty clergymen, maiden ladies and indigent schoolmasters scattered all over the country, but his was the official post and he lived in a world of battered manuscripts on which he made long and scholarly reports. Like some thin and dusty ghost he was often seen on the stairs of the office, in the hall, or tramping home with long flapping strides through the network of gusty streets between the sacred cul-de-sac and his lodgings in Red Lion Square.