The Man in the Queue

out as stars before the sun. Only with Gollan she was powerless⁠—he was a sun as potent as herself, if not more so⁠—and so she suffered him. But with her leading man⁠—good-looking, amiable, and a very fine singer⁠—she had no difficulty. They had said, he remembered now, that it was impossible to find a leading man good enough for her. That was why. He did not doubt it now. There was something uncanny about the clearness with which he suddenly read her mind, untouched by the glamour that surrounded him. Only he and she in all that intoxicated crowd were aloof, were poised above emotion and looking on. He watched her play with that unhappy wretch as coldly and deliberately as he would have played a trout in the Test. Smiling and sweet, she took what would have been a triumph from his hands, and tacked it on to her own dazzling outfit. And no one noticed that the triumph had gone astray. If they thought at all, they thought that the leading man was not up to the mark tonight⁠—but, of course, it was difficult to get one good enough for her. And after having absorbed his worth she would at the end of a turn with a Machiavellian acuteness drag him forward by the hand to share the applause, so that everyone in the building thought, Well, he didn’t deserve much of it! and his inferiority was accentuated and remembered. Oh, yes, it was subtle. This play within a play became for Grant the absorbing entertainment of the evening. He was seeing the real Ray Marcable, and the sight was incredibly strange. So rapt was he that the final curtain found him still at the back of the circle, deafened by the cheers and feeling strangely cold. Again and again, and yet again, the curtain rose on the glittering stage, and the stream of presents and flowers began to flow over the footlights. Then the speeches came; first Gollan, clutching a large square bottle of whisky and trying to be funny, but not succeeding because his voice would not stay steady. Grant guessed that in his mind was a picture of the heartbreaking years of squalid rooms in squalid towns, twice-nightly performances, and the awful ever-present fear of the bird. Gollan had sung long for his supper; it was no wonder that the feast choked him. Then the producer. Then Ray Marcable.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her clear, slow voice, “two years ago, when none of you knew me, you were kind to me. You overwhelmed me then. Tonight you have overwhelmed me again. I can only say thank you.”

Very neat, thought Grant, as they cheered her to the echo. Quite in the part. And he turned away. He knew what was coming⁠—speeches by everyone down to the callboy, and he had heard enough. He went down through the crimson and buff vestibule and out into the night with a queer constriction in his chest. If he had not in his thirty-five years cast overboard all such impedimenta as illusion, one would have said that he was disillusioned. He had quite liked Ray Marcable.

VII

Things Move

“It’s not a Christian life at all,” said Mrs. Field as she put the inevitable bacon and eggs in front of him. Mrs. Field had tried to cure Grant of the bacon-and-eggs habit by providing wonderful breakfasts with recipes culled from her daily paper, and kidneys and other “favours” wrested from Mr. Tomkins at the threat of withdrawing her custom, but Grant had defeated her⁠—as he defeated most people in time. He still had bacon and eggs, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It was now eight o’clock on Sunday morning, which was the fact that had called forth Mrs. Field’s remark. “Unchristian” in Mrs. Field’s vocabulary meant not any lack of conformity but an absence of comfort and respectability. The fact that he was having breakfast before eight on a Sunday morning shocked her infinitely more than the fact that his day was to be spent in the most mundane of work. She grieved over him.

“It’s a wonder to me that the King doesn’t give you inspectors decorations oftener than he does. What other man in London is having breakfast at this hour when he needn’t!”

“In that case I think inspectors’ landladies should be included in the decoration. Mrs. Field, O.B.E.⁠—for being an inspector’s landlady.”

“Oh, the honour’s enough for me without the decoration,” she said.

“I’d like to think of a good rejoinder to that, but I never could say graceful things at breakfast. It takes a woman to be witty at eight in the morning.”

“You’d be surprised really at the standing it gives me, you being an inspector at Scotland Yard.”

“Does it really?”

“It does; but don’t you be afraid. I keep my mouth shut. Nothing ever comes out through me. There’s lots would like to know what the inspector thought, or who came to see the inspector, but I just sit and let them hint. You don’t have to see a hint unless you like.”

“It is very noble of you, Mrs. Field, to achieve a reputation for obtuseness for my sake.”

Mrs. Field blinked and recovered herself. “It’s my duty, if it wasn’t my pleasure,” she said, and made a graceful exit.

As he was going away after breakfast she surveyed the untouched toast sorrowfully. “Well, see that you have a good meal in the middle of the day. You can’t think to any advantage on an empty stomach.”

“But you can’t run to any advantage on a full one!”

“You’ll never have to run very far after anyone in London. There’s always someone to head them off.”

Grant was smiling to himself as he went down the sunny road to the bus-stop at this simplification of the work of the C.I.D. But there was no heading off the people who claimed to have seen the wanted man. Nearly half London appeared to have set eyes on him⁠—his back as