"Not at all, sir. I was only answering your questions. After Canifest's visit, my father made a gesture of sending me here to carry a sort of thank-you-for-the-favors-of-your-noblecountryman letter to your Home Office: that's all. There's nothing to it. I had hoped to be back home in time for Christmas."
"Christmas? Nonsense!" roared H. M., sitting up straight. He glared. "Nephew, spend it with us. Certainly."
"As a matter of fact, I'd already had an invitation. To a place in Surrey. And I'll admit that there are reasons why I want to accept."
"Oh, ah," observed H. M. sourly. "Girl?"
"No. Curiosity-maybe. I don't know." He shifted again. "It's true that some very funny things have been happening. There's been an attempted murder. And a lot of strange people have been scrambled together, including Canifest and Marcia Tait. It's all friendly and social, but well, damn it, it worries me, sir."
"Wait," said H. M. Wheezing and growling to himself, he hoisted his bulk out of the chair, and switched on a goosenecked reading lamp at the desk. A pool of green-shaded light revealed disarranged papers of official stamp sprayed over with tobacco-ash and rumpled where H. M. had put his feet on' the desk. Over the white-marble mantelpiece Bennett could see the thin, Mephistophelian portrait of Fouche. From a tall iron safe H. M. took a bottle, a syphon, and two glasses. Wherever he went, his lumbering progress seemed to upset things. In a nearsighted batlike waddling between desk and safe, he contrived to knock over a set of chessmen with which he had evidently been working out a problem, and a table of lead soldiers arranged for the solution of a puzzle in military tactics. He picked-nothing up. It was litter. It was also the paraphernalia of his weird, childlike, deadly brain. After measuring the drinks he said, "Honk, honk" with the utmost solemnity, drained his glass at a gulp, and sat back in wooden moroseness.
"Now, then," said H. M., folding his hands. 'I'm goin' to listen to you. Mind, I got work. The folks down the way he inclined his head sideways in a gesture that evidently meant another building, called New Scotland Yard, a short distance down the Embankment "they're still on hot bricks about that fella at Hampstead, the one who's got the heliograph on the hill. Let 'em wonder. Never mind. You're my nephew, and besides, son, you mentioned a woman I'm rather curious about. Well?'
"Marcia Tait?"
"Marcia Tait," agreed H. M., with a somewhat lecherous wink. "Haah. Movies. Sex plus-plus-plus. Always go to see her films." An evil glee stole over his broad face. "My wife don't like it. Why do thin women always get ferocious when you say a good word for the broad charms, hey? I admit she's plump; why not. - Funny things about Marcia Tait. I knew her father, the old general; knew him well. Had a shootin' box near me before the war. Couple of weeks ago I went to see her in that film about Lucrezia Borgia, the one that ran for months at the Leicester Square. Well, and who did I meet comin' out but old Sandival and Lady same? Lady same was snortin' into her sables. She was gettin' a bit rough on The Tait. I begged a ride home in their car. I hadda point out that Lady S. had better not walk out socially with old Tait's daughter. Accordin' to rules old Tait's daughter would go in to dinner before Lady S. Ho ho. She was nasty about it. " H. M. scowled again, and paused with his hand on the whisky-bottle. "Look here, son," he added, peering sharply across the desk; "you're not tangled up with Marcia Tait, are you?"
"Not," said Bennett, "in the way you mean, sir. I know her. She's in London."
"Do you good if you were," growled H. M. But his hand moved again, and the soda-syphon hissed. "Teach you some thing. No spirit in young 'uns nowadays. Bah. Well, go on. What's she doing over here?'
H. M.'s small, impassive eyes were disconcerting in their stare.
"If you know the background," Bennett went on, "you may know that she was on the stage first in London."
"A flop," said H. M. quietly. His eyes narrowed.
"Yes. I gather that the critics were pretty rough, and gently intimated that she couldn't act. So she went to Hollywood. By some sort of miracle a director named Rainger got hold of her; they trained her and groomed her and kept her dark for six months; and then they touched off their skyrocket. In six months she became what she is now. It was all Rainger's work, and a press agent's: fellow named Emery. But, so far as I can read it, she's got only one ambition, and that's to make London eat its own words. She's over here to take the lead in a new play."
"Go on," said H. M. "Another queen, hey? She's been playin' nothing but queens. Revenge. H'm. Who's producing it?"
"That's the whole story. It's independent. She's taken great pleasure in sneering hard at a couple of producers who offered terms. She won't touch 'em, because they refused to back her a second time when she failed in the Old days. Lot of wild talk. It isn't doing her much good, Emery tells me. What's more, she walked out of the studio in the middle of a contract. Emergy and Rainger are raving but they came along.”
He stared at the pool of light. on the desk, remembering another weird light. That was the last night in New York, at the Cavalla Club. He was dancing with Louise. He was looking over her shoulder through a smoky gloom, with the grotesque shadows of dancers grown big and weaving against faint gleams, towards the table where Marcia Tait sat. There were scarlet hangings behind her, twisted with gilt tassels. She wore white, and had one shoulder with a swashbuckling air against a pillar. She was drunk but composed. He saw her teeth as she laughed, brilliant against the faintly swarthy skin. On one side of her sat Emery, very drunk and gesticulating; on the other side of her the tubby Rainger, who always seemed to need a shave and drank nothing, lifting his shoulders slightly as he examined a cigar. It was hot in the smoky room, and a heavy drum pounded slowly behind the bandmusic. He could hear fans whir. Through the humped shadows of dancers he saw Tait lift a thin glass; Emery's gesticulations spilled it suddenly across her breast, but she only laughed at it. It was John Bohun who leaned out of the gloom, swiftly, with a handkerchief..
"The latest," Bennett went on, looking up from the hypnotic glow, "is that the Cinearts people have given her a month to get back on the lot. She won't — or says she won't. The answer, she says, will be this."
He lifted his cigar and traced letters in the air as though he were writing a poster.
"JOHN BOHUN presents
MARCIA TAIT and JERVIS WILLARD
in
'THE PRIVATE LIFE OF CHARLES THE SECOND,'
a Play by
MAURICE BOHUN"
H. M frowned. He pushed the shell-rimmed spectacles up and down his broad nose.
"Good!" he said abstractedly. "Good! That'd suit her style of beauty, son. You know. Big heavy lidded eyes, swarthy skin, small neck, full lips: exactly like one of those Restoration doxies in the Stuart room at the National Portrait Gallery. Hah! Wonder nobody's thought of it before. I say, son, go round and browse through the Gallery sometime. You'll get a lot of surprises. The woman they call Bloody Mary is a baby-faced blonde, whereas Mary Queen of Scots is nearly the ugliest wench in the lot. H'm." Again he moved his glasses. "But that's interestin' about Tait: She's got nerve. She's not only courting hostility, but she's challenging competition. Do you know who Jervis Willard is? He's the best characteractor in England. And an independent producer has snaffled off Willard to play opposite her. She must think she can-"
"She does, sir, said Bennett.
"H'm. Now what about this Bohun-Bohun combination, keeping it in the family? And how does it affect Canifest?"
"That," said Bennett, "is where the story begins, and the cross-currents too. These Bohuns are brothers; and they both seem to be contradictions. I haven't met Maurice — he's the elder-and this part of it is gossip. But it seems to strike everybody who knows him, except John, as hilariously funny that he should be the author of this play. It would be strange, Marcia says, if he wrote any play: except possibly in five acts and heroic blank verse. But a light, bawdy, quick-repartee farce of the smart school. "