As for your spectacular patient, I don’t know to what degree of comfort he is used, but can promise him he won’t get it, though enormous and misguided efforts will be made to accommodate him. Actually there is no reason why he shouldn’t be comfortable. Possibly his secretary and man might succeed where my unfortunate relatives may safely be relied upon to fail. I doubt if he will be more wretched than he would be anywhere else in this extraordinary country. The charges will certainly be less than elsewhere. Six guineas a week for resident patients. Possibly Gaunt would like a private sitting-room for which I imagine there would be an extra charge. Tonks of Harpoon is the visiting medical man. I need say no more. Possibly it is an oblique recommendation of the waters that all Tonks’s patients who have taken them have at least survived. There is no reason why I should not keep an eye on your man and I shall do so if you and he wish it. What you say of him modifies my previous impression that he was one of the emasculate popinjays who appear to form the nucleus of the intelligentsia at Home in these degenerate days. Bloomsbury.
My magnum opus, as you no doubt ironically call it, crawls on in spite of the concerted efforts of my immediate associates to withhold the merest necessities for undisturbed employment. I confess that the autobiographical outpourings of persons connected with the theatre seem to me to bear little relation to serious work, and where I fail, Mr. Geoffrey Gaunt may well succeed.
Again, many thanks for your letter,
Yours,
James Ackrington
P.S. I should be doing you and your patient a disservice if I failed to tell you that the place is infested by as offensive a fellow as I have ever come across. I have the gravest suspicions regarding this person.
J.A.
As Dr. Ackrington sealed and directed this letter a trace of complacency lightened the habitual austerity of his face. He rang the bell, ordered a small whisky-and-soda and with an air of relishing his employment began a second letter.
Roderick Alleyn, Esq., Chief-Inspector, C.I.D.,
c/o Central Police Station,
Auckland.
Sir,
The newspapers, with gross indiscretion, report you as having come to this country in connection with scandalous leakages of information to the enemy, notably those which led to the sinking of S.S. Hippolyte last November.
I consider it my duty to inform you of the activities of a person at present living at Wai-ata-tapu Hot Springs, Harpoon Inlet. This person, calling himself Maurice Questing and staying at the local Spa, has formed the habit of leaving the house after dark. To my positive knowledge, he ascends the mountain known as Rangi’s Peak, which is part of the native reserve and the western face of which looks out to sea. I have myself witnessed on several occasions a light flashing on the slopes of this face. You will note that Hippolyte was torpedoed at a spot some two miles out from Harpoon Inlet.
I have also to report that on being questioned as to his movements, Mr. Questing has returned evasive and even lying answers.
I conceived it my duty to report this matter to the local police authorities, who displayed a somnolence so profound as to be pathological.
I have the honour to be,
Yours faithfully,
James Ackrington M.D., F.R.C.S., F.R.C.P.
The servant brought the drink. Dr. Ackrington accused him of having substituted an inferior brand of whisky for the one ordered, but he did this with an air of routine rather than of rage. He accepted the servant’s resigned assurances with surprising mildness, merely remarking that the whisky had probably been adulterated by the makers. He then finished his drink, clapped his hat on the side of his head and went out to post his letters. The hall porter pulled open the door.
“War news a bit brighter this morning, sir,” said the porter tentatively.
“The sooner we’re all dead, the better,” Dr. Ackrington replied cheerfully. He gave a falsetto barking noise, and limped quickly down the steps.
“Was that a joke?” said the hall porter to the servant. The servant turned up his eyes.
Colonel and Mrs. Claire had lived for twelve years at Wai-ata-tapu Springs. They had come to New Zealand from India when their daughter Barbara, born ten years after their marriage, was thirteen, and their son Simon, nine years old. They had told their friends in gentle voices that they wanted to get away from the conventions of retired army life in England. They had spoken blithely, for they took an uncritical delight in such phrases, of wide-open spaces and of a small inheritance that had come to the Colonel. With most of this inheritance they had built the boarding-house they now lived in. The remaining sums had been quietly lost in a series of timid speculations. They had worked like slaves, receiving good advice with well-bred resentment and bad advice with touching gratitude. Beside these failings, they had a positive genius for collecting impossible people, and at the time when this tale opens were at the mercy of a certain incubus called Herbert Smith.
On the retirement of her distinguished and irascible brother from practice in London, Mrs. Claire had invited him to join them. He had consented to do so only as a paying guest, as he wished to enjoy complete freedom for making criticisms and complaints, an exercise he indulged with particular energy, especially in regard to his nephew Simon. His niece Barbara Claire had from the first done the work of two servants and, because she went out so little, retained the sort of English vicarage-garden atmosphere that emanated from her mother. Simon, on the contrary, had attended the Harpoon State schools, and, influenced on the one hand by the persistent family attitude of poor but proud gentility, and on the other by his schoolfellows’ suspicion of “pommy” settlers, had become truculently colonial, somewhat introverted and defiantly uncouth. A year before the outbreak of war he left school, and was now taking the preliminary Air Force training at home.
On the morning of Dr. Ackrington’s visit to Harpoon, the Claires pursued their normal occupations. At midday Colonel Claire took his lumbago to the radio-activity of the mud pool, Mrs. Claire steeped her sciatica in a hot spring, Simon went into his cabin to practise Morse code, and Barbara cooked the midday meal in a hot and primitive kitchen with Huia, the Maori help, in attendance.
“You can dish up, Huia,” said Barbara. She brushed the locks of damp hair from her eyes with the back of her forearm. “I’m afraid I seem to have used a lot of dishes. There’ll be six in the dining-room. Mr. Questing’s out for lunch.”
“Good job,” said Huia skittishly. Barbara pretended not to hear. Huia, moving with the half-languid, half-vigorous grace of the young Maori, smiled brilliantly, and began to pile stacks of plates on a tray. “He’s no good,” she said softly.