St. Ives had always felt at home in Captain Powers’ shop, although he would have been in a hard way to say just how. His own home — the home of his childhood — hadn’t resembled it in the slightest. His parents had prided themselves in being modern, and would brook no tobacco or liquor. His father had written a treatise on palsy, linking the disease to the consumption of meat, and for three years no meat crossed the threshold. It was a poison, an abomination, carrion — like eating broiled dirt, said his father. And tobacco: his father would shudder at the mention of the word. St. Ives could remember him standing atop a crate beneath a leafless oak, he couldn’t say just where — St. James’ Park, perhaps — shouting at an indifferent crowd about the evils of general intemperance.
His theories had declined from the scientific to the mystical and then into gibberish, and now he wrote papers still, sometimes in verse, from the confines of a comfortable, barred cellar in north Kent. St. Ives had decided by the time he was twelve that intemperance in the pleasures of the senses was, in the main, less ruinous than was intemperance along more abstract lines. Nothing, it seemed to him, was worth losing your sense of proportion and humor over, least of all a steak pie, a pint of ale, and a pipe of latakia.
All of which explained, perhaps, why the Captain’s shop struck him so absolutely agreeably. From one angle it was admittedly close and dim, and there was no profit examining the upholstery on the several stuffed chairs and settee that were wedged together toward the rear of the shop. The springs which here and there protruded from rents in the upholstery and which carried on them tufts of horsehair and cotton wadding had, in their day, quite possibly been crowning examples of their type. And the Oriental carpets scattered about might have been worthy of a temple floor fifty or sixty years earlier.
Great pots of tobacco stood atop groaning shelves, now and then separated by a row of books, all tilted and stacked and quite apparently having nothing at all to do with tobacco, but being, it seemed to St. Ives, their own excuse — a very satisfactory thing. Everything worth anything, he told himself, was its own excuse. Three or four lids were askew on the tobacco canisters, which leaked an almost steamy perfume into the still air of the room.
William Keeble hunched over one, dangling his long fingers in at the mouth of the jar and pulling out a tangle of tobacco that glowed golden and black in the gaslight. He wiggled it into the bowl of his pipe, then peered in at it as if in wonder, working it over from as many angles as possible before setting it aflame. There was much in the gesturing to attract a man of science, and for a moment the poet within St. Ives grappled with the physicist, both of them clamoring for the floor.
St. Ives’ study at Heidelberg under Helmholtz had brought him into contact for the first time with an opthalmoscope, and he could remember having peered through the wonderful instrument into the eye of an artistic fellow student, a man given to long walks in the forest and to gazing at idyllic landscapes. Just as the operation began, the man had seen through an unshuttered window the drooping branches of a flowering pear, and a little tidepool of gadgetry that ornamented the interior of his eye, suddenly enlivened at the sight, danced like leaves in a brief wind. For a frozen moment after St. Ives removed the instrument and before a blink sliced the picture neatly off, the pear blossoms and a sketch of cloud drift beyond were reflected in the lens of the man’s eye. The conclusions St. Ives had drawn tended, he had to admit, toward the poetic, and were faintly at odds with the methods of scientific empiricism. But it was that suggestion of beauty and mystery which attracted him so overwhelmingly to the study of pure science and which — who could say? — compelled him to wander down the crooked avenues that might at last lead him to the stars.
The Captain’s tobacco canisters — no two of them alike, and gathered from distant parts of the globe — reminded him, open as they were, of a candy shop. The feeling was altogether appropriate and accurate. His own pipe had gone dead. Here was the opportunity of having a go at some new mixture. He rose and peeked into a Delft jar containing “Old Bohemia.”
“You won’t be disappointed in that,” came a voice from the door, and St. Ives looked up to see Theophilus Godall pulling off a greatcoat on the threshold. The street door slammed behind him, jerked shut by the wind. St. Ives nodded and tilted his head at the tobacco canister as if inviting Godall’s commentary. There was something about the man, St. Ives decided, that gave him an air of worldliness and undefined expertise — something in the shape of his aquiline nose or in the forthrightness of his carriage.
“That was originally mixed by a queen of the royal house of Bohemia, who smoked a pipe at precisely midnight each evening, then drank off a draught of brandy and hot water in a swallow and retired. It has medicinal qualities that can’t be disputed.” St. Ives could see no way out of smoking a bowl. He began to regret his inability to do justice to the rest of the queen’s example, then saw, out of the corner of his eye, Captain Powers emerge from the rear of his shop carrying a tray and bottles. Godall smiled cheerfully and shrugged.
Behind the Captain, cap in hand, plodded Bill Kraken, his hair a wonder of wind-whipped happenstance. Jack Owlesby bent in through the door behind Godall, bringing the number of people in the room to seven, including St. Ives’ man Hasbro, who sat reading a copy of the
The Captain stumped across to his Morris chair and sat down, waving haphazardly at the collection ofbottles and glasses on the tray.
“Thank you, sir,” said Kraken, bending over a bottle of Laphroaig. “I’ll have a nip, sir, since you ask.” He poured an inch of it into a glass, tossing it off with a grimace. He seemed to St. Ives to be in a bad way — pale, disheveled. Hunted was the word for it. St. Ives regarded him narrowly. Kraken’s hand shook until, with a visible lurch, he shuddered from top to bottom, the liquor taking hold and supplying a steadying influence. Perhaps his pallid and quaking demeanor was a product of the absence of alcohol rather than of the presence of guilt or fear.
The Captain tapped on the countertop with his pipe bowl and the room fell silent. “I was inclined to believe, just like yourselves, that last Saturday night’s intruder was a garret thief, but that’s not the case.”
“No?” asked St. Ives, startled by the abrupt revelation. He’d had such a suspicion himself. There was too much deviltry afoot for it all to be random — too many faces in windows, too many repeated names, too many common threads of mystery for him to suppose that they weren’t part of some vast, complicated weft.
“That’s right,” said the Captain, putting a match to his pipe. He paused theatrically, squinting roundabout. “He was back this afternoon.”
Keeble nodded. It had been the same man. Keeble couldn’t have forgotten the back of the man’s head, which is all of him he’d seen this time again. Winnifred had been at the museum, cataloguing books on lepidoptery. Jack and Dorothy, thank God, had been away at the flower market buying hothouse begonias. Keeble had been asleep an hour. He’d been dabbling at the engine, and had put the whole works — the plans, the little cayman device, notes — in a hole in the floor that no one, not another living soul, could sniff out. Then he’d given up the ghost at noon and welcomed the arrival of blinking Morpheus. A crash had brought him out of it. The casement window again. He was sure of it. Footfalls sounded. The cook, who was coming in through the back door with a chicken, was confronted by the thief, and slammed him in the face with the plucked bird before snatching at a carving knife. Keeble had rushed out in his nightshirt and, once again, pursued the man into the street. But dignity demanded he give up the chase. A man in a nightshirt, after all. It wasn’t to be thought of. And his foot — it was barely healed from the last encounter.
“What was he after?” asked Godall, breaking into Keeble’s narration. “You’re certain it wasn’t valuables?”
“He ran past any number of them,” said Keeble, pouring himself a third glass of port. “He could have filled his pockets between the attic and the front door.”
“So nothing was taken?” St. Ives put in.
“On the contrary. He stole the plans for a roof-mounted sausage cooker. I’d intended to try it out in the next electrical storm. There’s something about a lightning storm that puts me immediately in mind of sausages. I can’t explain it.”
Godall, incredulous, plucked his pipe out of his mouth and squinted. “You’re telling us he broke into the house to steal the plans for this fabulous sausage machine?”
“Not a bit of it. I rather believe he was after something else. He’d been at the floor with a prybar. He’d seen me slip the plans into the cache. I’m certain of it. But he couldn’t get at them. I’ve a theory that he balanced the casement open with a stick so as to be able to shove out in a nonce. But the stick slipped, the casement banged home and latched, and in a panic he snatched up the nearest set of plans and ran for it, thinking to be out the back
