Chapter 30: En Route for Villabanzos
Chapter 31: Exchange Is No Robbery
Chapter 34: Confidences in a Cellar
Chapter 37: The Events on the Road
Chapter 38: The Battle in the Cellar
Chapter 39: The Fruits of Actions
‘Now, then,’ frowned the policeman, ‘where have you come from?’
The human scarecrow, of no address and with only half a name—the half he had was Ben, and the other half had been lost years ago—removed his eyes from the poster he had been staring at. The poster said, ‘Old Man Murdered at Hammersmith,’ and it was a nasty sight. But the policeman wasn’t much improvement. Policemen were blots on any landscape.
Where had he come from? Queer, how the world harped upon that unimportant question! As a rule it was an Embankment seat, or a coffee-stall, or a shop where they sold cheese, or an empty house where one could pass a night rent free. What did it matter? But the nosey-parker world seemed to think it mattered, and was always worrying him about it. Policemen in particular.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ demanded the policeman. ‘Where’ve you come from?’
‘Not ’Ammersmith,’ answered Ben.
His eyes wandered back to the poster. The policeman’s frown increased. Bent on being a nuisance, he persisted, with a tinge of sarcasm:
‘Quite sure of that?’
Faint indignation stirred within the scarecrow’s meagrely-covered breast. That was another thing about the world. Ben couldn’t do anything, but the world was always accusing him of everything!
‘Orl right, ’ave it yer own way,’ he said, with a sarcasm that far exceeded the constable’s. ‘I was walkin’ by ’im and I didn’t like ’is ’ead, so I chopped it orf.’
‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’ inquired the policeman.
‘Yus,’ retorted Ben. ‘There’s nothink like a nice little murder ter mike yer larf!’
Then the policeman decided that, unless the interview were concluded, the law stood a good chance of losing its superiority in the encounter without gaining anything in return; so, uttering a warning generality against the dangers of loitering and of back-chat, he leisurely adjusted his belt, turned, and trudged away.
Ben shivered. Despite the way in which he stuck up to them, policemen always made him shiver in his secret heart. If they never did anything to him, they always carried the threat! It wasn’t only the policeman, however, that made Ben shiver as he stood blinking in the gloaming. He had holes in his clothes, and the gloaming got through. There was a place on his knee open to three square inches of breeze. He had torn it on a nail seven weeks ago, and it occurred to him that it was about time to try and bump into someone with a needle and cotton. After seven weeks, the spot was getting cold.
But, even more than the holes and the policeman, the poster made Ben shiver. At first he had stared at the words vaguely. You know—as one does, when one is hard up for hobbies. Then the words impressed themselves upon his mind, with all their unpleasantness. This murderin’ business—it wasn’t no joke! Yet Ben had made a joke about it, as he often did about the things that scared him most. He had suggested that he had committed the murder himself, and had cut the old man’s head off! There was a nasty idea! And suppose the policeman had believed him …
‘Oi!’ he gasped.
Somebody had blundered into him. He hit out wildly—the rule is to hit first and to think afterwards—but his fists went wide, and the somebody toppled in between them. For an amazing moment he held the somebody in his arms. It was an amazing moment because the somebody wasn’t in the least like the somebody he had expected to find there. It was a rather small somebody who clung to him, limply, gasping; a somebody with a bit of hair that tickled his cheek, and a little ear, and a rather nice sense of soft warmth. Then the amazing moment passed, and the somebody shot away from him in a panic.
Ben saw her more distinctly now. He saw her eyes, bright with fear, and the flutter of her heaving breast, and her slender legs, slim and taut, beneath her short brown skirt. For an instant she stood there, poised before the grim background, ‘Old Man Murdered at Hammersmith.’ The word ‘Murdered’ leered between her knees, and ‘Hammersmith’ between her ankles. Pretty ankles, alive with grace and elasticity. Then the ankles got to work, twisted as though suddenly touched by electricity, and bore their owner round a corner.
‘’Ere! ’Arf a mo’!’ called Ben.
But the girl had vanished.
Ben decided that it was time he did a bit of vanishing. The sensation was creeping over him that unpleasant things were happening, and that invisible fingers were stretching towards him to draw him in. He knew the signs. He’d been drawn in before. He’d been drawn into cupboards and coffins and corpses, into cellars and wells and dark passages, and had been tossed about by the invisible fingers like a blinkin’ shuttlecock! Well, he wasn’t having any more of it. All he wanted was a quiet life, same as he’d heard about, and he meant to get it, if there wasn’t an old man left alive in Hammersmith!
So he departed from the corner where a poster had delayed his aimless wanderings, and shuffled along the moist streets to a coffee-stall a couple of blocks away. It wasn’t raining, but the streets were moist as though with their environment. Water was in the atmosphere, and the damp aroma of London docks.
‘Cup o’ tea,’ he said, to the stall-keeper.
The stall-keeper looked up from a coin he was holding. In the pleasant