The Little Duke
Rowe was growing up; every hour was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age. Little patches of memory returned; he could hear Mr Rennit's voice saying, "I agree with Jones," and he saw again a saucer with a sausage-roll upon it beside a telephone. Pity stirred, but immaturity fought hard; the sense of adventure struggled with common sense as though it were on the side of happiness, and common sense were allied to possible miseries, disappointments, disclosures. . .
It was immaturity which made him keep back the secret of the telephone number, the number he had so nearly made out in Cost's shop. He knew the exchange was BAT, and he knew the first three numbers were 271: only the last had escaped him. The information might be valueless -- or invaluable. Whichever it was, he hugged it to himself. Mr Prentice had had his chance and failed; now it was his turn. He wanted to boast like a boy to Anna -- "I did it."
About four-thirty in the morning they had been joined by a young man called Brothers. With his umbrella and his moustache and his black hat he had obviously modelled himself upon Mr Prentice. Perhaps in twenty years the portrait would have been adequately copied; it lacked at present the patina of age -- the cracks of sadness, disappointment, resignation. Mr Prentice wearily surrendered the picked bones of investigation to Brothers and offered Rowe a seat in the car going back to London. He pulled his hat over his eyes, sank deep into the seat and said, "We are beaten," as they splashed down a country lane with the moonlight flat on the puddles.
"What are you going to do about it?"
"Go to sleep." Perhaps to his fine palate the sentence sounded over-conscious, for without opening his eyes he added, "One must avoid self-importance, you see. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."
"What do you think they did to Jones?"
"I don't suppose we shall ever know. In time of war, so many bodies are unidentifiable. So many bodies," the said sleepily, "waiting for a convenient blitz." Suddenly, surprisingly and rather shockingly, he began to snore.
They came into London with the early workers; along the industrial roads men and women were emerging from underground; neat elderly men carrying attaché-cases and rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters. In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveller has forgotten to snuff. It was odd to think that the usual battle had been going on while they stood on the island in the pond and heard only the scrape of the spade. A notice turned them from their course, and on a rope strung across the road already flapped a few hand-written labels. "Barclay's Bank. Please inquire at. . ." "The Cornwallis Dairy. New address. . ." "Marquis's Fish Saloon. . ." On a long, quiet, empty expanse of pavement a policeman and a warden strolled in lazy proprietary conversation like gamekeepers on their estate -- a notice read, "Unexploded Bomb". This was the same route they had taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed. What a lot of activity, Rowe thought, there had been in a few hours -- the sticking up of notices, the altering of traffic, the getting to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the cheerfulness on the faces; you got the impression that this was an early hour of a national holiday. It was simply, he supposed, the effect of finding oneself alive.
Mr Prentice muttered and woke. He told the driver the address of a small hotel near Hyde Park Corner -- "if it's still there," and insisted punctiliously on arranging Rowe's room with the manager. It was only after he had waved his hand from the car -- "I'll ring you later, dear fellow" -- that Rowe realized his courtesy, of course, had an object. He had been lodged where they could reach him; he had been thrust securely into the right pigeon-hole, and would presently, when they required him, be pulled out again. If he tried to leave it would be reported at once. Mr Prentice had even lent him five pounds -- you couldn't go far on five pounds.
Rowe had a small early breakfast. The gas-main apparently had been hit, and the gas wouldn't light properly. It wasn't hardly more than a smell, the waitress told him -- not enough to boil a kettle or make toast. But there was milk and post-toasties and bread and marmalade -- quite an Arcadian meal, and afterwards he walked across the Park in the cool early sun and noticed, looking back over the long empty plain, that he was not followed. He began to whistle the only tune he knew; he felt a kind of serene excitement and well-being, for he was not a murderer. The forgotten years hardly troubled him more than they had done in the first weeks at Dr Forester's home. How good it was, he thought, to play an adult part in life again, and veered with his boy's secret into Bayswater towards a telephone-box.
He had collected at the hotel a store of pennies. He was filled with exhilaration, pressing in the first pair and dialling. A voice said briskly, "The Hygienic Baking Company at your service," and he rang off. It was only then he began to realize the difficulties ahead: he couldn't expect to know Cost's customer by a sixth sense. He dialled again and an old voice said, "Hullo." He said, "Excuse me. Who is that, please?"
"Who do you want?" the voice said obstinately -- it was so old that it had lost sexual character and you couldn't tell whether it was a man's or a woman's.
"This is Exchange," Rowe said; the idea came to him at the moment of perplexity, as though his brain had kept it in readiness all the while. "We are checking up on all subscribers since last night's raid."
"Why?"
"The automatic system has been disarranged. A bomb on the district exchange. Is that Mr Isaacs of Prince of Wales Road?"
"No, it isn't. This is Wilson."
"Ah, you see, according to our dialling you should be Mr Isaacs."
He rang off again; he wasn't any the wiser; after all, even a Hygienic Bakery might conceal Mr Cost's customer -- it was even possible that his conversation had been a genuine one. But no, that he did not believe, hearing again the sad stoical voice of the tailor, "Personally I have no hope. No hope at all." Personally -- the emphasis had lain there. He had conveyed as clearly as he dared that it was for him alone the battle was over.
He went on pressing in his pennies; reason told him that it was useless, that the only course was to let Mr Prentice into his secret -- and yet he couldn't believe that somehow over the wire some sense would not be conveyed to him, the vocal impression of a will and violence sufficient to cause so many deaths -- poor Stone asphyxiated in the sick bay, Forester and Poole shot down upon the stairs, Cost with the shears through his neck, Jones. . . The cause was surely too vast to come up the wire only as a commonplace voice saying, "Westminster Bank speaking."
Suddenly he remembered that Mr Cost had not asked for any individual. He had simply dialled a number and had begun to speak as soon as he heard a voice reply. That meant he could not be speaking to a business address -- where some employee would have to be brought to the phone.
"Hullo."
A voice took any possible question out of his mouth. "Oh, Ernest," a torrential voice said, "I knew you'd ring. You dear sympathetic thing. I suppose David's told you Minny's gone. Last night in the raid, it was awful. We heard her voice calling to us from outside, but, of course there was nothing we could do. We couldn't leave our shelter. And then a landmine dropped -- it must have been a land-mine. Three houses went, a huge hole. And this morning not a sign of Minny. David still hopes of course, but I knew at the time, Ernest, there was something elegiac in her mew. . ."