The Great Wash Read online

  George Oaks was in the kitchen, eating the carcass of a cold pheasant. “Well,” I said, “and what do you make of all this?” He took me by the sleeve—the marks of his greasy fingers are there to this day—and said: “Albert, I told you as soon as I saw Monty Cello that I felt a pricking in my thumbs. This is the best night’s work you ever did in your life. The God willing, you shall have a story to tell your grandchildren such as no man will ever have told before. Go and rest now, Albert. I’ll sleep a bit down here.”

  “Why not go to bed, George?”

  “For the present I think I’ll take the couch by the fireplace. More later. First rest, rest!”

  Mrs. Rose, the housekeeper, came in at eight o’clock. I heard her voice, as from an immense distance, saying: “Why, Mis-ter Oaks! What are you doing on the set-tee?”

  “Composing my beating mind,” said George Oaks.

  “Well, you seem to be doing all right at it. Give me them chicken bones, there’s a good soul. Why don’t you go to bed properly?”

  “Because I am in travail with my skeleton. Here I am, and here I remain. If you wish to sweep, sweep around me, and tread softly, because you tread on my dream. Mr. Kemp will sleep late, and so will the other gentleman from Hollywood, so you had better be careful. Away, thistledown. For lunch, bake us a pie.”

  Mrs. Rose giggled. In my mind a picture formed, of George Oaks guarding the fireplace. Then I slid into a dreamless sleep.

  The bell of St. Wilfred’s was striking one o’clock when I was awakened by a rhythmic tremulous squealing of rickety woodwork, and I knew that the electric motor which was supposed to pump water into the house had broken down again, and that someone was drawing from the old well. I went downstairs in my dressing-gown. George Oaks was offering Mrs. Rose a dead snail which he had just fished out of a full water-bucket, saying: “The French eat snails. Come on, frou-frou, have a bite. Snails are good for the chest, they help to cut the phlegm. Applied to the small of the back, they are guaranteed to make you shimmy like a Cairo dancing girl. And you can use the shell for an eye-bath when empty; or put it to your ear and hear the mysterious voice of the sea! And how much am I asking for this valuable snail? One guinea? No! Half a guinea? No! Three-and-sixpence, including stamp? No! One kiss, fifi, one butterfly kiss, my little pomegranate, in exchange for this medicinal snail, rich, ripe and rare!” Mrs. Rose, shaking with laughter, struck him on the head with a little aluminium saucepan. “You will have to marry me now, my proud beauty,” said George Oaks.

  “Oh, stop your nonsense. Now be a dear, do ’a done, Mr. Oaks,” said Mrs. Rose, who weighed two hundred pounds, and had nine grandchildren.

  Then he saw me and said: “Albert, the pump is kaput, the motor is burned out. Meanwhile it takes manpower. And if I were you, I’d do something about this well. The water is too low, and it’s getting foul. Water level must be a good thirty-five feet down.”

  “And the rope’s all wore out,” said Mrs. Rose. “Shall I bring your coffee to the summer-house, Mr. Kemp?”

  “Yes, please do,” I said, “and take some up to the gentleman in the front bedroom.”

  When we were seated in the summer-house, I asked: “Well, George—what about it?”

  “You mean, what about Monty Cello?”

  “Among other things . . .”

  “I’ve been thinking about him. I’m afraid Monty has had it. He’s bitten off far more than he can chew, the silly little cow. If he were just an ordinary gangster on the run I’d say ‘Albert, let him go and take his chance’. But what he has got himself mixed up in has made him extraordinary. As things stand now, he’d be comparatively safe in the hands of the police: he’d have at least a fighting chance for his life; which he certainly wouldn’t have if Chatterton laid hands on him. So I’m afraid, Albert, that you’ll have to violate the laws of hospitality and turn Monty over to the police. Later on I’ll ring Chief Inspector Halfacre, and get him to send a couple of men down. As matters stand, I think Monty is too big a bird to trust to old Constable Hobson. I’m sorry, Albert, but you have no alternative.”

  “Oh, look here!” I said. “I don’t like this one little bit. Couldn’t we just send him on his way and let him chance his luck? The police would be certain to catch up with him eventually, especially if he got as far as Vienna. They’re pretty hot on forged passports over there, in times like these, I understand. I should feel an absolute swine if I turned my house into a police trap.”

  “Brother Albert, you must assume that England is still at war, and that you happen to find a very dangerous enemy under your roof. It is necessary for you to waive the rules so that Britannia may rule the waves, old fellow. You must hand Monty Cello over to the police, and at once.”

  “But, George,” I said, “is Monty Cello an enemy now? He’s placed himself at our mercy. As I see it, Chatterton and Kadmeel are the real enemy now, and Monty Cello is on our side.”

  “All the more reason, then, why Monty Cello must be put in safekeeping, don’t you see? All the more reason why we daren’t risk letting him fall into Chatterton’s hands. It’s a dead cert that Chatterton knows he is here—as I told you last night, the porter will have told him that Monty left in a hurry with you and me. And it’s a horse to a hen that he’ll be down tomorrow for a long week-end with Sir Peter Oversmith. He’ll drop over to say hello, and mark my words, he’ll find some way of getting Monty alone—I can see him hypnotising that unhappy hoodlum as a snake hypnotises a rabbit—he’ll simply paralyse him with fright. And then there’ll be all kinds of threats and promises, especially promises, until Chatterton gets those papers back. After which, Monty will disappear, this time for good. No, we had better explain all this to poor little Monty and tell him that we’ll do our best to help him . . . we’ll cook up a story about his having given up those papers of his own free will in England, being in bodily fear of Chatterton’s agents on the one hand, and the Law on the other hand in America. Whatever we decide to do, Monty must be locked up safely, and Kurt Brevis’s papers must go to the proper authorities.”

  “Seriously, George, do you really think that those papers are of any value? It was pretty clearly established that Kurt Brevis actually was off his rocker, wasn’t it?”

  “No, it wasn’t. Mark my words, Albert, no man is easier to fool than a psychiatrist. He can no more predict a pattern of human behaviour than you or I can predict the patterns that will form in a kaleidoscope. It isn’t a science, yet. But in order to proceed scientifically, your psychiatrist must take for granted as scientific truths a whole lot of theories, generalisations and half truths—must convince himself that shadow is substance. That’s why so many psychiatrists have nervous breakdowns, and have to put themselves in the hands of other psychiatrists, who in their turn go mad. It is quite easy for a man with a little more than average cunning to convince a whole Board of psychiatrists that he is schizophrenic, paranoiac, or anything you like. And Kurt Brevis was a very clever, a very cunning man, Albert. His every move was motivated by hard reason. Simply: we didn’t give him what he wanted, so he went to Kadmeel; Kadmeel didn’t give him what he wanted, so he made tracks for Russia—always against incredible odds. If that man was mad, he wasn’t mad in any ordinary sense of the term. He was no more mad than Benedict Arnold. He simply wanted to be valued in hard cash, according to his own valuation of himself.”

  I said: “But what the devil does Kadmeel want with atomic energy scientists in that plant of his in Canada?”

  “I don’t quite know,” said George Oaks, gnawing at a thumb-nail. “It might be that he needs some kind of atomic energy for some purely industrial process. I say, it might be.”

  “Oh come now!” I said. “Are you going to tell me that a man like Kadmeel would organise a whole underworld of killers and kidnappers just for that? Come off it, George!”

  George Oaks looked up at the sky and said: “Oh
Lord, listen to him! And this man writes thrillers—makes fortunes out of them! . . . Listen, donkey, I ask you to consider your multi-millionaire—any multi-millionaire. How does he get to be a multi-millionaire, starting from nothing? By subtle planning and bold and ruthless execution of deep-laid schemes. He must be a man with an absolute disregard for his fellow-men. By the time he has made his first ten million he must have arrived at a condition of mind in which humanity in general is nothing but a kind of blurred mass which, from time to time, makes a plaintive noise against which he must stop his ears. He must lock himself away from the common man if he is to know an hour’s peace. He doesn’t dare walk in the street without a bodyguard to stand between him and the common man, who might upset his peace of mind by asking him for the price of a cup of coffee, or by throwing a bomb at him. If he wants to take the air, he must do so on a walled estate, or a private beach; a harassed, ulcerated, disenchanted old misery; his own guard and his own prisoner, a one-man concentration camp. What is it to him if his executives employ spies to steal secrets, lawyers to swindle inventors, or gangsters as private policemen? Your multi-millionaire has to manufacture for himself a special, personalised conscience. Otherwise, he couldn’t possibly get to be a multi-millionaire, could he? . . . And Kadmeel is a very special kind of multi-millionaire—a multi-millionaire of the third generation, a very dangerous man. Money means very little to the Third Viscount Kadmeel. He wants Power for its own sake.”

  “Look,” I said, “try just for a minute to keep to the point. You start talking about his wanting to use atomic energy for some kind of industrial process, and then——”

  “—Calm, calm, Albert! I only said that that was what he might have wanted Kurt Brevis for. I don’t imagine for one moment that Kadmeel had any such reason in mind when he got him out of that sanatorium.”

  “Then to come back to my point—exactly what is Kadmeel after?” I asked.

  George Oaks said: “My guess is so wild, Albert, so unbelievably fantastic, that I’m not going to tell you until I’ve thought it over a little more, after we’ve found out what Kurt Brevis’s papers are all about. Meanwhile, go and put some trousers on and we’ll walk up the road to the Piebald Horse and buy some beer for lunch. I’ll make my phone call from there, I think; I’d just as soon not call from the house. Better hurry, it’s nearly closing time.”

  “No hurry,” I said. “They’ll let me have the beer any time, if I go round the back way.”

  The tone of my voice must have expressed something of my discomfort, for George Oaks patted my knee and said: “On my honour, Albert, I believe it’s the only thing to do.”

  Then Mrs. Rose came out, chuckling, with our coffee. She said: “I took some breakfast up to the gentleman, Mr. Kemp. He said: ‘Hello Baby’ . . . He said I was to tell you he never slept better in years. He said he’d be right down. . . . Baby! Me! The cheek of it!”

  “Oh God!” I said.

  “Calm, Albert, calm.”

  Monty Cello came down a few minutes later, wearing a yellow silk dressing-gown over burnt-tangerine pyjamas. His thick white toes protruded from brown morocco sandals. I could not bring myself to look at his face. “Say, this is good air you got out here,” he said, breathing deeply. “. . . Say, where d’you get those roses? Jeez, they smell good!” I borrowed Oaks’s pocket knife, cut a red rose, and gave it to him. He said: “Thanks a lot, Al,” and inhaled voluptuously. “This is the life! What would a place like this cost? When I get kind of straightened out, I’d like to have a place like this. . . . Fifty, sixty thousand bucks, maybe?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Monty Cello stopped suddenly, and pointed. “Do my eyes deceive me?” he asked. I followed his finger: he had noticed the ruins of an ancient, scandalous-looking out-house, the door of which, pierced with a diamond-shaped aperture, hung askew on one broken hinge. “A genuine Chic Sale!” he said. For some reason, this delighted him.

  George Oaks said: “Make Albert an offer. He’ll sell. You can have it taken to pieces and shipped home, like Hearst does——”

  “—Oh, shut up!” I said. “It isn’t on my land, anyway.”

  “What’s the matter, Al? Don’t you feel so good?” asked Monty Cello.

  “He’s like this in the morning,” said George Oaks; for the first time since I had known him, he seemed to have nothing much to say. “. . . Mrs. Rose is baking a pie, Monty, a steak-and-kidney pie, and Albert and I are going over to the Piebald Horse for a gallon of old ale. You go and get dressed, Albert, and Monty and I will have a drink out here while we’re waiting.”

  I dressed very slowly. My hands were shaking. It was quarter past two when I went downstairs again. Monty Cello and Oaks were making conversation over glasses of whisky and soda. The raven had flown over from the public-house and Oaks, teasing it with a bright new sixpence, was saying: “That bird has more money put by than I’ll ever have. Here, Monty, throw it to him, and see what he does with it.” Monty Cello took the coin and threw it to the raven, who snapped it up and flapped away.

  “Even a bird’ll take a pay-off,” he said, laughing comfortably. “Gee, I feel good today. . . . George, you’re all right. You too, Al. Thanks a whole lot. Everything’ll come out right, won’t it, George?”

  “In the end,” said Oaks, emptying his glass. “Well, Albert and I’ll be off now. Make yourself comfortable, and we’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “Take your time, I’m happy here,” said Monty Cello. “I’ll finish this drink and go get dressed.”

  “You didn’t tell him, then,” I said, when Oaks and I were on the road.

  “Albert, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t. I was leading up to it, when that damned bird came over and said ‘Hello Jack’. He gave it a bit of toast, Albert. In broad daylight, it amused him; but how frightened he would have been last night, eh?”

  “In short, George, you didn’t have the nerve to tell him?”

  George Oaks waved this question aside, and said: “The hell of it is, he looked so happy. He’s got it into his head that you and I are the salt of the earth. ‘All right’—that means trustworthy, true . . . I’d been telling him about Mrs. Rose’s steak-and-kidney pies, and how well they go down with a glass of old ale. . . . Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to spoil his lunch, Albert. Halfacre’s men can’t possibly get here before five o’clock, unless he deals with the business through the police station at Brighthaven, which I don’t think he will, seeing that it’s I who call him. He knows me, Albert—he knows I don’t make trunk-calls to the Yard for nothing. And you ought to know me too, by now. On my honour, if I don’t tell you everything that’s in my mind at the moment, it’s only because it’s not properly crystallised. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we have no alternative, Albert. So, calm!”

  Not without bitterness, I said: “You started all this. Who’s going to finish it? So now you want to spring it on Monty Cello as a big surprise. A killer, a desperate gunman: you propose to hand him over to a couple of unarmed plain-clothes men in my house. Well, if he pulls a gun and lets you and me have it first, I shan’t blame him.”

  “He won’t pull any guns, I promise you.”

  Mr. Titmouse, the landlord of the Piebald Horse, let us in by the back door, laying a thick forefinger against his lips, and beckoned us into the little Snuggery that used to be a highwayman’s hiding-place. To this day Titmouse keeps in working order a little sliding shutter that conceals a spy-hole through which anyone in the Snuggery may watch, unseen, the comings and goings in the Saloon Bar, the Private Bar, and the Public Bar. There is also a trap-door, through which one may jump into the cellar; and in the cellar another door opening on a flight of stairs that leads to an upper room where a secret panel covers a sinister closet, cunningly ventilated. Here, in old Titmouse’s grandfather’s time, a landlady of the Piebald Horse hid the smuggler Jem Vol
es from the King’s excisemen, while, in a secret stable, her stepson disguised the smuggler’s bay mare by painting white stockings on her forelegs and white splashes on her muzzle and breast. But the landlady’s husband, who was bedridden with the gout, became jealous of Jem Voles, and peached on him, so that there was pistol-play on the narrow stairs, and the smuggler, hotly pursued, and being more of a seaman than a horseman, fell at the Stumbling Stones in Scratcher’s Meadow and broke his back. The landlady was transported for life; her husband was found dead in his bed with a cut throat. He is still supposed to thrash about with a lolling head after midnight on the fourteenth of March; but Titmouse, who sleeps in the same old bedroom with the secret closet, sleeps sound. He too, in his way, fights the good fight against H. M. Customs and Excise, and the Inland Revenue.

  He said: “I put a gallon of the Special Old just outside the lavatory door, Mr. Kemp. Good afternoon to you, Mr. Oaks, sir. I put aside a little drop o’ whisky against you come.”

  “Bring it, bring it, brother Titmouse,” said George Oaks. “In the meantime, can I go upstairs and use your telephone?”

  “Surely, Mr. Oaks. You know where it is. . . . Mr. Oaks, you’re a knowledgeable man: tell me something. Liddle Childs reckons the telephone interferes with the television. Do it, now? If so I’ll ’ave it cut off—I never use the telephone much ’cept to phone in a few bets.”

  “It doesn’t interfere,” said Oaks, going upstairs.

  Thoroughly miserable now, I sat and stared at a steel engraving of Belshazzar’s Feast until Titmouse came back with a bottle, a siphon, and glasses. He said: “That’s a vallyble picture, Mr. Kemp. The man on the left in the nightshirt-like, he’s the Prophet Dan’l, the one they took and cast into the lion’s den. Did you hear the one about the Prophet Dan’l, sir? Well, the King of Babylon threw’m into the lion’s den, you see, and left ’m there all night. Next morning the King comes downstairs after breakfast and there’s Dan’l standing there just like ’e was the evening before. So the King says: ‘What, you still here, Dan’l?’ Dan’l says: ‘Why yes, Your Majesty. I been here all night.’ The King says: ‘Well, Dan’l, I hope you had a nice restful night of it.’ ‘Why, no,’ says Dan’l, ‘I don’t like to complain, sir, but to tell you the honest truth, I was a bit bothered wi’ these here lions.’ So the King says: ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Dan’l, but you must ha’ brought ’em wi’ you.’ ”