The Bat that Flits Page 2

  “Excuse me,” he said in his rather sweet treble, “but you’re not a policeman by any chance, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not any longer,” I said, dropping my voice almost to a whisper so that he had to lean right across the table to hear what I was saying. “It was something to do with the Commissioner’s daughter. It never got into the papers.”

  I don’t think that my reply altogether satisfied him. But at least he changed the subject.

  “Been in this racket long?” he asked.

  “Only since I was unfrocked,” I answered, still in the same half-whisper.

  Everything was about all square from there onwards. He hadn’t discovered anything about me. But I had picked up quite a lot about him. I had learnt for a start that he was interested both in me and in policemen. He could have been the one who had typed the note. But after another look at him I decided against it. He didn’t look strong enough to type.

  I couldn’t see Swanton’s neighbour very well because he sat upright on his chair and didn’t sprawl about like the rest of us. Rogers, or something of the sort, the name seemed to be—the introductions had all been made in a quick mumble, English-fashion—and he was older and decidedly more formal than the rest of us. Rather like a respectable colonel already within arm’s reach of his bowler. I found out later that he was a considerably stepped-up lab. boy. He knew his stuff all right. But he had never taken his degree, and he was very sensitive about it. In consequence, he went about with a distinct air of strain as though he were travelling on the railway without a ticket.

  At the head of the table—I gathered that there was no particular seniority involved, and I came to occupy the place myself sometimes—was a plump, pink, baldish young man with very small teeth and protruding eyes, who looked rather like a baby trying to get windies up. Smith was the best that he had been able to manage by way of a surname, and he was putting in some pretty serious eating, fairly wolfing down the fish pie as though it were strawberries and cream. He was just back from the other side where he had been delivering some lectures. The real purpose of his visit, so far as I could gather from what he was saying, had been to show the North American barbarians what two millennia of European breeding can eventually do for the human race.

  On his left was one of the barbarians themselves. Ulysses Z. Mellon the name was. He was tall, dark, aquiline, and with hair en brosse like a doorstep shoe-cleaner. If he hadn’t been in the research line he looked as though he would probably have been in films. His clothes gave the impression of having just come back from the valet, and there was that indefinable air of distinction that advertisements for aftershave lotions are always trying so hard to isolate.

  Alongside young Mellon sat Bansted, also a clearly recognisable research type. He was a statistician who rather fancied himself as an administrator. He wore a toothbrush moustache and a little dolly-size bow-tie, and looked every bit as much a dare-devil as a provincial bank manager. He was really just a steady, reliable calculating machine that might have been turned out by Remington. But according to gossip he had a heart somewhere, and it was already broken. He had expected to be made the Big No. 1 White Chief of the Bodmin Station, and he was a disappointed man. Rifle shooting was his only hobby. And I gathered that once a year he showed up and did some rather spectacular work at Bisley.

  Last of all there was the lady of the party, Dr. Hilda Sargent. She wasn’t a regular diner-in, it seemed, and lived somewhere out at St. Clynt’s at the Vicarage. But to-night she had stayed on at the Institute to finish off something. She was a tall girl with red-gold hair and a good profile, and I was glad that she had stayed. By the end of dinner I had already outlined about half a dozen different ways of reforming my whole moral character so as to be able to climb up on to the red-gold girl’s plane of things. The only trouble was that it looked as though it might be a bit lonely up there.

  Because so far she didn’t appear to have noticed me.

  As soon as dinner was over I went back up to my room. It was quieter than most places for thinking in, and I wanted to sit back and go over my fellow diners one by one. But by then I had something else to think about. My advance luggage had arrived, and somebody had been through it before me. Everything was more or less as I had left it, and so far as I could see there was nothing missing. But it had definitely been tampered with. The toothpaste that I had shoved in on top of the shirts just before banging the lid shut was now where it should have been inside the little sponge-bag.

  That was queer attention number two. On the whole, life in the Bodmin Institute promised to be livelier than I had anticipated. I’d certainly never had anyone who cared so much about me before.

  Either that, or I’d been mistaken for somebody else.

  Chapter III

  1

  I woke next day with my mind fresh and unclouded. Somebody who didn’t know anything about it once said that a clear conscience is nature’s quickest route to a good night’s rest. That may have been true in the Middle Ages. Since then, Science has found a quicker one. It’s called dormital, and I had taken half a grain before turning in.

  But there was one person who was up before me. I saw him, a walking advertisement for tweeds, go striding across the lawn while I was shaving. He looked like a spaniel after its monthly condition powder.

  And it wasn’t all dormital with me either. This morning I had a special reason for waking up so promptly. I wanted to get on with things. The first thing that I wanted to do was to track down the typewriter on which the “don’t interfere” note had been hammered out. “Find the machine on which the message was typed, and you will have found the typist who typed the message,” I kept telling myself, thereby making a howler in elementary logic which would have sent the late Dr. Bradley reeling.

  All the same, admitting that the major premise was false, my deductive method from there on was pretty clear. I argued it out nursery fashion. “Where there is a Director, there is bound to be a Director’s secretary,” I reasoned. “And where there is a Director’s secretary, there is bound to be a typewriter.” It seemed simpler to start that way than to begin searching round for midget portables concealed under loose floor-boards.

  What’s more, I hit the bull’s-eye first time. The room marked “Office Private” had someone already seated at the typewriter when I came in. She was a thin-lipped, frowning sort of woman rather like a disgruntled cloak-room attendant. The only thing she had was a typewriter.

  Because it was our first meeting, I used my special voice, the plummy slightly husky one.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’m afraid you don’t know me. I’m the new man, Hudson, and you now have the advantage of me.”

  I was smiling at her by now; smiling really hard.

  “Morning.”

  The smile that bounced back was all teeth and nothing else, so I decided to cut things short.

  “I just dropped in to hand over my ration book,” I explained.

  The teeth were covered up again by now, and only a pair of very tight-looking lips remained.

  “Housekeeper second door along,” the reply came back by return. “She’ll attend to you.”

  I had got as far as the door by now, and the Director’s secretary was bashing out her stuff again as though she were riveting. Then I stopped.

  “Oh, there is just one other little thing,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder if I might use your typewriter just for a minute?” I asked. “For an envelope, you know. It’s my handwriting. You’ve no idea the trouble it gives to postmen.”

  “What address?”

  As she was speaking, the secretary had jerked her own top-and-two-carbons out of the Underwood, and slotted an Institute envelope into its place. It was pretty deft, that operation. And I remembered reading somewhere that all acquired skill is an attempt to compensate for natural deficiencies.

  The only trouble was that I could not think of any address.

  �
�The Commissioner of Police, New Scotland Yard, Whitehall, S.W.I,” I told her at last. “And mark it’ Urgent and Personal,’ please,” I added. “You see it’s about my wireless licence. Entirely slipped my memory. I so rarely listen these days.”

  I don’t believe that she even heard that last bit. But I had all I wanted. And, as soon as I got outside, I compared the typing on the envelope with the words on the little slip of paper. The letters were identical. There was the same half-blind “e” and the same guttered “m.” That hadn’t got me very much further, however. It only showed that someone else had been using the machine. The resident Gorgonette in the private office wasn’t the kind who would ever send anyone an anonymous letter.

  If she had ever received one herself, I knew that the poor thing would have been filed away under “A” before it could properly have unfolded itself.

  2

  That little Cornish hell, our common room, promised to be the best place for continuing my researches. People give themselves away more when they are relaxing.

  And I wasn’t sorry that I had something definite with which to occupy my mind. The first sight that met me when I went inside the common room was a pile of geographical magazines going back practically to Marco Polo—I found out afterwards that someone had carelessly failed to renew the subscription, and they stopped, too, around Drake and Frobisher. Apart from the magazines, there was a ping-pong table with some highly professional-looking, rubber-covered bats lying there all ready; a wireless, with last week’s Radio Times lying on top of it; and a writing-table with several sheets of notepaper and no envelopes. As a studio-set for a documentary dealing with the leisure problem of the middle classes it was practically perfect.

  The chairs, too, were of the type that is specially designed for common rooms. You don’t see them anywhere else, and there is probably a factory somewhere with a gang of imported fakirs making them. They are all the same, these chairs; smallish with a removable spring cushion, and a back that can be adjusted to three positions. There is the upright or impossible; the middle, or merely uncomfortable; and the practically flat out, or unconscious. I set mine at uncomfortable and sat down.

  The others had all come in by now. And as soon as the Phoenician flute girl had put down the coffee things with a crash that made poor Dr. Mann wonder whether the attack was coming from the east or the west, we all settled down to peaceful hive-activity.

  The buzzing that night was mostly about A-bombs. Smith was saying that the New Yorkers were in a state of complete panic, and that if a fire-cracker went off in a New York subway the blast would be felt as far away as the White House. I’ve forgotten exactly how he put it, but I know that it was very clever.

  I was only half listening, because the other half of me was watching young Mellon’s face while our friend was doing his counter-Pilgrim stuff. But Mellon had evidently encountered quite a few Dr. Smiths on this side. He was only half listening. Bent forward in his chair, he was trying to listen to the wireless as well. It was a B.B.C. variety programme that was on, and there was an expression of awed and reverent incredulity on his face. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that the films were his alternative employment. It could have been the Diplomatic Service.

  Then Kimbell made a typical Manchester contribution by saying that panic was characteristic of all unheterogeneous peoples, and promptly went back to a scrap of paper on which he had just written B—K Kt 3, or some such piece of purely inspirational gibberish.

  This was Dr. Mann’s big moment. He was apparently aching to add his crumb of mid-European confusion. According to him the Americans were suffering from an outsize in guilt complexes for having used the A-bomb at all.

  “Plees, you cannot understand how the mind works or you would never say such foolish things,” he went on, going very white round the gills while he was speaking. “In every Western religion murder and suicide are both wrong, no? Hiroshima was not only mass murder”—here his stuffy little voice rose to a bleat as he uttered the word “mass”—“it was also an intense expression of the American people’s own death wish.” He paused as much for breath as any other reason, and then shaking his peculiar pear-shaped head as he reflected on the lost opportunity: “It would have been better if the Hiroshima bomber had crashed and everyone in it had been drowned.”

  Just as he finished, there was a slight creak on the other side of me and our resident calculator and memory-man came into play. It was evident that his reaction time was a bit slow this evening. Perhaps he needed a new dry cell or something.

  “There was an outbreak of panic in New York in 1938,” he said slowly, “when the Columbia System broadcast Orson Welles’s version of The War of the Worlds. People really thought that the Martians had come. The trouble started in the Negro and Italian quarters.”

  That was the end of the message so far as Bansted was concerned. The wheels just stopped turning as suddenly as they had started. But Kimbell was quick to snatch at the point.

  “It would do,” he said approvingly. “No shared mass-unconscious.”

  This immediately brought a deprecatory snort from Rogers. It was the sort of snort that was intended to indicate that no matter how popular the mass-unconscious might become in the future, Rogers himself was determined to keep right out of it.

  “And no education,” he said firmly. “An educated mass would have recognised one of H. G. Wells’s most popular books immediately.”

  Being self-educated himself, Rogers was always very enthusiastic about education. But he seemed to have a confused idea at the back of his mind that it was H. G. Wells who had invented it. It may have had something to do with the fact that Rogers had once met H. G. at a P.E.N. Club reception. I didn’t hold this against him, but what used to irritate me about Rogers was that he would go around quoting The Outline of History quite seriously as if it were a reference work.

  Then the choir-boy, Swanton, spoke up. He was back on the original topic.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, speaking in a slow rather singsong sort of drawl as though half asleep, “it won’t help the Americans any having been the first to use the bomb. That was just what Russia needed. It provided her with a free field test under ideal conditions, and also demonstrated to the rest of Asia what Christian civilisation is like when put to the supreme test.”

  It was at this point that young Mellon said quietly that his folks were Methodists both sides of the family, and that some Middle West Methodists had written to the President in precisely the same terms. But that did not please Swanton at all. He evidently did not like being in agreement with Methodists anywhere.

  So, just to show that I was still there, I decided to butt in. I suggested—I can’t remember exactly how I put it— that the A-bomb was grotesquely overrated as a weapon of warfare simply because of all the mess that had to be cleared up afterwards. And I went on to say that any intelligent generalissimo would rather occupy a perfectly intact London, with all the inhabitants either dead or dying, than have to go over the rubble with a Geiger counter to find out whether there ever had been any Houses of Parliament or whether that was just another propaganda story.

  It was rather a lucky note to strike, and it acted as a Class I social catalyst. Everyone was perfectly ready to agree that the nuclear physicists were a lot of publicity-hogging queens, and that the bacteriologists were the salt of the earth.

  We went on, I remember, to say that bacteriologists should be treated at least as well as Russia treats her pet novelists— free motor cars, diplomatic wives, country hideouts and all the rest of it. And in that happy mood of mutual adulation, we broke off and played some rather self-consciously energetic ping-pong in which I was no good, and fat little Dr. Mann walked all over the lean American.

  All things considered, the common room had turned out pretty much as I had expected. At least I was getting to know my playmates. Dr. Mann was a humanitarian who was in favour of bomber crashes for the general good of the race. Smith had been born about two or three Georges
too late. Swanton had not seemed too downcast by the prospect of a false move on the part of Christian civilisation. And the rest might just as well have gone for a nice walk on the moors while the others were talking. Fairly average, I would have said for common-room gossip anywhere on the research side of things. And nothing firm for me to go on so far. Merely hunches.

  Then, as I was getting into bed, I came on something a bit more definite. It was another of those little typewritten messages, neatly deposited in the middle of the pillow. There was the same shining emphatic blackness about the type, only this time the wording was rather more exact. “COMPARING TYPEWRITERS ISN’T GOING TO HELP YOU ANY,” it ran. “I KNOW ABOUT YOU EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME.”

  I stood looking at it for some time. It was the last sentence I didn’t like. Because there was always the possibility that it might have been true. And after all, we can’t, every single one of us, be pure lily-white right through.

  Chapter IV

  1

  By next morning something seemed to be stirring. We heard at breakfast that the Old Man had called a special meeting for nine-thirty. And I learnt from Swanton that when that happened it usually meant that some senior Civil Servant had been having a nasty attack of panic up at the Whitehall end.

  Anyhow, I felt strong enough to face it. And, outside a gipsy orchestra, you couldn’t have seen a finer body of men than the research staff of the Bodmin Institute as we all filed into the Director’s room. There was perhaps just a suggestion of the hairdresser’s assistant about some of us because we were all wearing our white overalls. And when the demure one came in and joined us she looked like something that had drifted over from the embalming counter.