"Better not," Hilfe said. "We can pick him up afterwards. We shan't be long," and the figure slanted out of sight as the taxi wheeled away; he was lost amongst the buses and bicycles, absorbed among all the other loitering seedy London figures, never to be seen again by anyone who knew him.
Chapter 4
AN EVENING WITH MRS BELLAIRS
"There be dragons of wrong here and everywhere,
quite as venomous as any in my Sagas."
The Little Duke
Mrs Bellairs' house was a house of character; that is to say it was old and unrenovated, standing behind its little patch of dry and weedy garden among the To Let boards on the slope of Campden Hill. A piece of statuary lay back in a thin thorny hedge like a large block of pumice stone, chipped and grey with neglect, and when you rang the bell under the early Victorian portico, you seemed to hear the sound pursuing the human inhabitants into back rooms as though what was left of life had ebbed up the passages.
The snowy-white cuffs and the snowy-white apron of the maid who opened the door came as a surprise. She was keeping up appearances as the house wasn't, though she looked nearly as old. Her face was talcumed and wrinkled and austere like a nun's. Hilfe said, "Is Mrs Bellairs at home?"
The old maid watched them with the kind of shrewdness people learn in convents. She said, "Have you an appointment? "
"Why no," Hilfe said, "we were just calling. I'm a friend of Canon Topling's."
"You see," the maid explained, "this is one of her evenings."
"Yes?"
"If you are not one of the group. . ."
An elderly man with a face of extraordinary nobility and thick white hair came up the path. "Good evening, sir," the maid said. "Will you come right in?" He was obviously one of the group, for she showed him into a room on the right and they heard her announce, "Dr Forester." Then she came back to guard the door.
Hilfe said, "Perhaps if you would take my name to Mrs Bellairs, we might join the group. Hilfe -- a friend of Canon Topling's."
"I'll ask her," the maid said dubiously.
But the result was after all favourable. Mrs Bellairs herself swam into the little jumbled hall. She wore a Liberty dress of shot silk and a toque and she held out both hands as though to welcome them simultaneously. "Any friend of Canon Topling. . ." she said.
"My name is Hilfe. Of the Free Mothers Fund. And this is Mr Rowe."
Rowe watched for a sign of recognition, but there was none. Her broad white face seemed to live in worlds beyond them.
"If you'd join our group," she said, "we welcome newcomers. So long as there's no settled hostility."
"Oh, none, none," Hilfe said.
She swayed in front of them like a figure-head into a drawing-room all orange curtain and blue cushion, as though it had been furnished once and for all in the twenties. Blue blackout globes made the room dim like an Oriental cafe. There were indications among the trays and occasional tables that it was Mrs Bellairs who had supplied the fête with some of its Benares work.
Half a dozen people were in the room, and one of them immediately attracted Rowe's attention -- a tall, broad, black-haired man; he couldn't think why, until he realized that it was his normality which stood out. "Mr Cost," Mrs Bellairs was saying, "this is. . ."
"Mr Rowe." Hilfe supplied the name, and the introductions went round with a prim formality. One wondered why Cost was here, in the company of Dr Forester with his weak mouth and his nobility; Miss Pantil, a dark young-middle-aged woman with blackheads and a hungry eye; Mr Newey -- "Mr Frederick Newey" -- Mrs Bellairs made a point of the first name -- who wore sandals and no socks and had a grey shock of hair; Mr Maude, a short-sighted young man who kept as close as he could to Mr Newey and fed him devotedly with thin bread and butter, and Collier, who obviously belonged to a different class and had worked himself in with some skill. He was patronized, but at the same time he was admired. He was a breath of the larger life and they were interested. He had been a hotel waiter and a tramp and a stoker, and he had published a book -- so Mrs Bellairs whispered to Rowe -- of the most fascinating poetry, rough but spiritual. "He uses words," Mrs Bellairs said, "that have never been used in poetry before." There seemed to be some antagonism between him and Mr Newey.
All this scene became clear to Rowe over the cups of very weak China tea which were brought round by the austere parlourmaid.
"And what," Mrs Bellairs asked, 'do you do, Mr Rowe?" She had been explaining Collier in an undertone -- calling him plain Collier because he was a Player and not a Gentleman.
"Oh," Rowe said, watching her over his tea-cup, trying to make out the meaning of her group, trying in vain to see her in a dangerous role, "I sit and think."
It seemed to be the right as well as the truthful answer. He was encircled by Mrs Bellairs' enthusiasm as though by a warm arm. "I shall call you our philosopher," she said. "We have our poet, our critic. . ."
"What is Mr Cost?"
"He is Big Business," Mrs Bellairs said. "He works in the City. I call him our mystery man. I sometimes feel he is a hostile influence."
"And Miss Pantil?"
"She has quite extraordinary powers of painting the inner world. She sees it as colours and circles, rhythmical arrangements, and sometimes oblongs."
It was fantastic to believe that Mrs Bellairs could have anything to do with crime -- or any of her group. He would have made some excuse and gone if it had not been for Hilfe. These people -- whatever Hilfe might say -- did not belong under the stone with him.
He asked vaguely, "You meet here every week?"
"Always on Wednesdays. Of course we have very little time because of the raids. Mr Newey's wife likes him to be back at Welwyn before the raids start. And perhaps that's why the results are bad. They can't be driven, you know." She smiled. "We can't promise a stranger anything."
He couldn't make out what it was all about. Hilfe seemed to have left the room with Cost. Mrs Bellairs said, "Ah, the conspirators. Mr Cost is always thinking up a test."
Rowe tried out a question tentatively. "And the results are sometimes bad?"
"So bad I could cry. . . if I knew at the time. But there are other times -- oh, you'd be surprised how good they are."
A telephone was ringing in another room. Mrs Bellairs said, "Who can that naughty person be? All my friends know they mustn't ring me on Wednesdays."
The old parlourmaid had entered. She said with distaste, "somebody is calling Mr Rowe."
Rowe said, "But I can't understand it. Nobody knows. . ."
"Would you mind," Mrs Bellairs said, "being very quick?"
Hilfe was in the hall talking earnestly to Cost. He asked, "For you?" He too was discomposed. Rowe left a track of censorious silence behind him: they watched him following the maid. He felt as though he had made a scene in church and was now being conducted away. He could hear behind him nothing but the tinkle of tea-cups being laid away.