Cosmo said he had no wife.
'Surely?'
'I'm a bachelor.'
'Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. Excuse me a moment,' murmured Mr Saxby, applying himself to the sock again. 'I'm just turning the heel. Do you knit?'
'No.'
'Sleep does. It knits up the ravelled sleave of care.'
In the Demosthenes Club, where he lunched every day, there was considerable speculation as to whether old Saxby was as pronounced an old lunatic as he appeared to be or merely for some whimsical purpose of his own playing a part. The truth probably came midway between these two contending views. As a boy he had always been inclined to let his mind wander – 'needs to concentrate', his school reports had said – and on entering the family business he had cultivated this tendency because he found it brought results. It disconcerts a publisher, talking terms with an agent, when the agent stares fixedly at him for some moments and then asks him if he plays the harp. He becomes nervous, says fifteen per cent when he meant to say ten, and forgets to mention subsidiary rights altogether.
On Cosmo the Saxby manner acted as an irritant. Though meek in the presence of his Uncle Raymond, he had his pride, and resented being treated as if he were some negligible form of insect life that had strayed out from the woodwork. He coughed sharply, and Mr Saxby's head came up with a startled jerk. It was evident that he had supposed himself alone.
'Goodness, you made me jump!' he said. 'Who are you?'
'My name, as I have already told you, is Wisdom.'
'How did you get in?' asked Mr Saxby with a show of interest.
'I was shown in.'
'And stayed in. I see, Tennyson was right. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers. Take a chair.'
'I have.'
'Take another,' said Mr Saxby hospitably. 'Is there,' he asked, struck by a sudden thought, 'something I can do for you?'
'I came about that serial.'
Mr Saxby frowned. A subject had been brought up on which he held strong views.
'When I was a young man,' he said severely, 'there were no cereals. We ate good wholesome porridge for breakfast and throve on it. Then along came these Americans with their Cute Crispies and Crunchy Whoopsies and so forth, and what's the result? Dyspepsia is rife. England riddled with it.'
'The serial in the paper.'
'Putting the beastly stuff in paper makes no difference,' said Mr Saxby, and returned to his sock.
Cosmo swallowed once or twice. The intellectual pressure of the conversation was making him feel a little light-headed.
'I came,' he said, speaking slowly and carefully, 'about that serial story of mine in the Daily Gazette.'
Mr Saxby gave a little cry of triumph.
'I've turned the heel! I beg your pardon? What did you say?'
'I came ... about that serial story of mine... in the Daily Gazette.'
'You want my opinion of it? I would give it gladly, were it not for the fact that I never read serial stories in newspapers. Years ago I promised my mother I wouldn't, and to that promise I have faithfully adhered. Foolishly sentimental, you will say, pointing out that my mother, who has long been in heaven, would never know, but there it is. One has these rules to live by. And now,' said Mr Saxby, putting his sock away in a drawer and rising, 'I fear I must leave you. I have found your conversation very interesting, most interesting, but at this hour I always take a brisk constitutional. It settles my lunch and allows the digestive processes to work smoothly. If more people took brisk constitutionals after meals, there wouldn't be half the deaths there are, if any.'
He left the room, to return a moment later and regard Cosmo with a vague, benevolent eye.
'Do you play leap-frog?' he asked.
Cosmo, speaking rather shortly, said that he did not.
'You should. Neglect no opportunity to play leap-frog. It is the best of all games and will never become professionalized. Well, goodbye, my dear fellow, so glad to have met you. Look in again, and next time bring your wife.'
For some moments after the old gentleman had shuffled out, the dizzy feeling, as of being in some strange nightmare world, which came upon so many people after a tête-à-tête with Howard Saxby, had Cosmo strongly in its grip, and he sat motionless, breathing jerkily from between parted lips. Then torpor gave place to indignation. As Roget would have put it in his excellent Thesaurus, he was angry, wroth, irate, ireful, up in arms, flushed with passion and in high dudgeon, and he intended to make his presence felt. He rose, and pressed the bell on Mr Saxby's desk, keeping his thumb on it so forcefully that the girl who answered the summons did so in something of the manner of an athlete completing a four-minute mile, thinking that at last old Mr Saxby must have had the seizure the office force had been anticipating for years.
'I want to see somebody,' said Cosmo.
Wilting beneath his eye, which was blazing like a searchlight, the underling panted a little, and said:
'Yes, sir.' Then, for one likes to know these things, 'Who?'
'Anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone!'
'Yes, sir,' said the underling, and withdrew. She went to the second door down the passage, and knocked. Roget would have described her as upset, disconcerted, thrown off her centre and rattled (colloq), and employees of the Edgar Saxby literary agency when thus afflicted always sought out Barbara Crowe, knowing that they could rely on her for sympathy and constructive counsel.
'Come in,' called a musical voice, a voice like a good brand of Burgundy made audible. 'Why, hullo, Marlene, you look agitated. What's the matter?'
'There's a gentleman in old Mr Saxby's room who says he wants to see someone.'
'Can't he see old Mr Saxby?'
'He isn't there, Mrs Crowe.'
'Hell's bells!' said Barbara. She knew old Mr Saxby's habits. 'Left the poor gentleman flat, has he? All right, I'll go and soothe him.'
She spoke confidently, and her confidence was justified, for at the very first sight of her Cosmo's righteous indignation sensibly diminished. A moment before, he would gladly have put the entire personnel of the Edgar Saxby literary agency to the sword, but now he was inclined to make an exception in favour of this member of it. Here, he could see at a glance, was a nice change from the sock-knitting old museum piece whose peculiar methods of conducting a business talk had turned his thoughts in the direction of mayhem.
It is probable that almost anyone, even one of the Jukes family with two heads, would have looked good to Cosmo after old Mr Saxby, but in sealing Barbara Crowe with the stamp of his approval he was perfectly justified. Lord Ickenham, speaking of this woman to Pongo, had used the adjective 'lovely'. While not quite that, she was undeniably attractive. Brown eyes, brown hair, just the right sort of nose and a wide, humorous mouth that smiled readily and was smiling now. Her personality, too, had a distinct appeal of its own. There was about her a kindly briskness which seemed to say 'Yes, yes, you have your troubles, I can see you have, but leave everything to me.' Fierce authors who came into the Saxby offices like lions always went out like lambs after talking with Barbara Crowe.
'Good afternoon,' she said. 'Is there something I can do for you? They tell me you have been in conference with old Mr Saxby. Very rash of you. What made you ask for him?'
'He wrote to me. He said he wanted to handle my novel Cocktail Time.'
'Cocktail Time? Good heavens! Are you Cosmo Wisdom?'
'Yes.'
'I know your uncle. My name is Mrs Crowe.'
Not moving much in his Uncle Raymond's circle, Cosmo had never seen Barbara Crowe, but he knew all about her from his mother, and looking at her now he was amazed that anyone, having succeeded in becoming engaged to her, could have let her get away. It confirmed the opinion he had always held that his Uncle Raymond, though possibly possessed of a certain rude skill in legal matters, was in every other respect the world's champion fathead.
'How is he?' asked Barbara.
'Uncle Raymond? Well, I don't see very much of
him, but somebody who met him two weeks ago said he seemed worried.'
'Worried?'
'A bit on the jumpy side.'
A cloud passed over Barbara's cheerful face. As Lord Ickenham had indicated, she had by no means thrust Sir Raymond Bastable from her thoughts.
'He will overwork. He isn't ill?'
'Oh, no. Just... nervous,' said Cosmo, finding the mot juste.
There was a momentary silence. Then Barbara reminded herself that she was a conscientious literary agent and this young man not merely the nephew of the man whom for all his fatheadedness she still loved but an author, and an author plainly in need of having his hand held.
'But you didn't come here to talk about your uncle, did you? You came to discuss business of some sort. I don't suppose you got far with old Mr Saxby? No, I thought not. Was he knitting?'
Cosmo winced. Her question had touched an exposed nerve.
'Yes,' he said coldly. A sock.'
'How was it coming along?'
'I understood him to say that he had turned the heel.'
'Good. Always the testing part. Once past the heel, you're home. But except for learning that the sock was going well, you did not get much satisfaction out of him, I imagine. Not many of our clients do. Old Mr Saxby likes to come here still and potter about, though supposed to have retired at about the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he is not what you would call an active cog in the machine. Our only authors who ever see him now are those who mistakenly ask for Howard Saxby. I suppose you did?'
'Yes. That was the name on the letter I got.'
'It should have been signed H.S., junior. Young Mr Howard Saxby is old Mr Howard Saxby's son. He runs things here, with as much assistance as I am able to give him. He's away today, so I am your only resource. What did you come about?'
'That serial in the Daily Gazette.'
'Oh, yes. A cheque for that was sent to you more than a week ago. Didn't you get it?'
'I've – er – been away.'
'Oh, I see. Well, it's waiting for you at your rooms. And we're hoping to have more good news for you at any moment. The movie end.'
It had never occurred to Cosmo that there was a movie end.
'You think the book might sell to the pictures?'
'Our man in Hollywood seems sure it will. He's been sending significant cables almost daily. The last one, which arrived yesterday, said... Yes?'
The girl Marlene had entered, bearing a russet envelope. She looked nervously at Cosmo, and sidled out. Barbara Crowe opened the envelope, and uttered an exclamation.
'Well, of all the coincidences!'
'Eh?'
'That you should have been here when this came and just when I was starting to tell you about the movie prospects. It's from our man in Hollywood, and... better sit down. Oh, you are sitting down. Well, hold on to your chair. He says he has now had a firm offer for the picture rights of Cocktail Time from the Superba-Llewellyn studio. Would it interest you to hear what it is?'
It would, Cosmo intimated, interest him exceedingly.
A hundred and five thousand dollars,' said Barbara.
CHAPTER 13
It was a stunned and dizzy Cosmo Wisdom who some quarter of an hour later tottered from the premises of the Saxby literary agency, hailed a cab and tottered into it. He was feeling very much as his Uncle Raymond had felt on that faraway afternoon at Oxford when he had taken the Welsh forward to his bosom. But whereas Sir Raymond's emotions on that occasion had been of a sombre nature, those of Cosmo, as he drove to Budge Street, Chelsea, can best be described by the adjective ecstatic. It is not easy to drive in a taxi cab of the 1947 vintage and feel that you are floating on a pink cloud high up in the empyrean, but he did it. And this in spite of the fact that his head was still hurting him quite a good deal.
At the moment when Barbara opened the cable from the man in Hollywood, he had been tilting his chair back, and the convulsive spasm which had resulted when she talked figures had caused him to take a nasty toss, bumping his occipital bone with considerable force on the side of old Mr Saxby's desk. But, placed right end up again with a civil 'Upsy-daisy', he had speedily forgotten physical discomfort in the rapture and what Roget would have called oblectation (rare) of listening to her subsequent remarks.
For this offer from the Superba-Llewellyn studio was, it appeared, not an end but a beginning. The man in Hollywood, she assured him, would not rest on his laurels with a complacent 'That's that.' He was, like so many men-in-Hollywood, a live wire who, once started, went from strength to strength. There would now, she said, come the bumping-up process – the mentioning to a rival studio that S-L were offering a hundred and five thousand dollars, the extracting from the rival studio of a bid of a hundred and fifty thousand, the trotting back to the Superba-Llewellyn with this information and...
'Well, you get the idea,' said Barbara.
Cosmo did indeed get the idea, and nearly injured his occipital bone again when this woman, a ministering angel if ever he saw one, went on to speak of one of the agency's clients whose latest work the man in Hollywood had just bumped up to three hundred and fifty thousand. True, he was feeling as he drove to Budge Street, he could not count on Cocktail Time bringing in quite as much as that, but even two hundred thousand would be well worth having. It is evidence of the heady effect which these chats about Hollywood have on authors that he had now begun to look on Superba-Llewellyn's original offer with a sort of amused contempt. Why this parsimony, he was wondering. Money was made to spend. Had no one ever told the Superba-Llewellyn studio that you can't take it with you?
But in every ointment there is a fly, in every good thing a catch of some sort. Elated though he was, Cosmo could not but remember that he had written a letter – in his own personal handwriting and signed with his own name – specifically disclaiming the authorship of Cocktail Time, and that this letter was in the possession of Lord Ickenham. For the moment, that blot on the peerage was withholding its contents from the public, but who could say how long he would continue to do so? Somehow, by some means, he must get the fatal paper into his hands and burn it, thus destroying the only evidence that existed that the book was the work of another.
It was not too difficult to sketch out a tentative plan to this end. From Oily, in the course of his narrative at Simpson's, he had learned that Lord Ickenham was staying at Hammer Hall, where paying guests were taken in. His first move must obviously be to become one of these paying guests. A vital document like that letter would presumably be hidden somewhere in the old buster's room, for where else in a country house could anyone hide anything? Once on the spot, he would sooner or later find an opportunity of searching that room. In the stories which were his favourite reading people were always searching rooms, generally with excellent results.
It was with his spirits high again that he entered No. 11 Budge Street. In the hall he encountered his landlady, a Mrs Keating, a gloomy woman whom two weeks of daily visits from Oily had rendered gloomier. Oily often had that effect on people.
'Why, hullo!' she said, plainly surprised at this return to the fold. 'Where you been all this time?'
'Away,' said Cosmo, wondering how often he was going to have to answer this question. 'Staying with friends.'
'You didn't take any luggage.'
'They lent me everything.'
'You're looking thinner.'
Cosmo admitted that he had lost a little weight.
'Tuberculosis, I should say,' said Mrs Keating, brightening a little. 'That's what Keating died of. There's a lot of letters in there for you, and there's been a fellow calling asking for you every day these last two weeks. Carmichael or some such name.'
'Carlisle. I've seen him.'
'Seemed to think I've nothing to do but answer the bell. You be wanting dinner tonight?'
'No, I'm going away again. I just looked in to pack.'
'Odd some folks don't seem able to stay put for two minutes on end. It's this modern restless sp
irit. Gadding about. I've lived here twenty years and never been further than the King's Road, except to Kensal Green, when Keating was laid to his rest. Wasted away to a shadow, he did, and it wasn't two months before we were wearing our blacks. Tuberculosis it was, same as you've got. Where you going this time?'
'Dovetail Hammer in Berkshire. Forward my letters to Hammer Hall.'
'More work,' said Mrs Keating, and went off to the kitchen to attend to whatever it was on the stove that was making the house smell as if a meal were being prepared for a pack of hounds.
Quite a considerable mail awaited Cosmo in his sitting-room. The table was piled with letters. Most of them had been forwarded from Alfred Tomkins, Ltd, and he read them with enjoyment – an author is always glad to hear from the fans – but the one that pleased him most was the one from the Edgar Saxby literary agency containing that cheque. It was one of those fat, substantial cheques, and he enclosed it in an envelope addressed to his bank. After which, feeling that things were making a good start, he went to his bedroom and began packing. He had filled a large suitcase and was standing on the front steps with it, waiting for a taxi, when Oily arrived – without, he was relieved to see, Sweetie, the bottle addict.
The indications of impending departure which met his eye surprised Oily.
'Where are you going?' he asked.
It was a change from being asked where he had been, but Cosmo made his customary answer.
'Away. Thought I'd have a couple of days at Bournemouth.'
'Why Bournemouth?'
'Why not Bournemouth?' said Cosmo rather cleverly, and Oily appeared to see the justice of this.
'Well, I'm glad I caught you,' he said, having expressed the opinion that his young friend might just as well bury himself alive. Oily was the metropolitan type, never at his ease outside big cities. 'What have you done with the letter?'
Cosmo, rehearsing this scene in the privacy of his bedroom, had decided to be nonchalant. It was nonchalantly that he now replied:
'Oh, the letter? I was going to tell you about that. I've changed my mind. I'm not going to write it.'