Prelude For War

forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.

'Papers?' he got out hoarsely. 'What papers? What were they about?'

'I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were ter­ribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them.'

The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.

'You didn't read them?' he echoed weakly. 'Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once.'

'But that wouldn't be any good,' she said miserably. 'You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about.'

The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.

'You haven't got them?' he bleated shrilly. 'Then who has got them?'

'Nobody. At least—it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row—the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he sud­denly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day.'

'How do you mean, you dumped it?' squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. 'You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?'

'That's just what I don't know,' she said. 'Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere.'

Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.

'Then you. must have a ticket for it,' he pointed out with heart-rending logic. 'Why don't you look for the ticket?'

'But I can't,' she said plaintively. 'It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things.'

'But——' said Fairweather.

The word 'but' is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathema­tician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fal­lacy in his proof that two and two make four—all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word 'but.'

'I wondered if it might be a good scheme to get Mr Templar to help me,' Valerie went on. 'I mean, he seems to have quite a crush on me, so he'd probably be glad to do it if I was nice to him, and he must have had loads of experience at ferreting about and detecting things.'