I waited....
'Look here, Blake,' he continued, after another pause. The old cough was racking him again, at intervals of minutes. 'I said a lot of things last night that I shouldn't have; eh?'
'You mean about hearingnoises. in
the room?'
'Yes.'
'Well, if they were true....'
He scowled, and grew confidential. 'Certainly they were true. But that ain't the point, my lad. Surely you can see it? Point is this. We can't have them thinking what they're bound to think, sooner or later, and that's plain downright tommyrot. That one of us - eh? H'mf. Tommyrot! And it ought to be stopped.'
'What's your own notion of a solution, Major?'
'Confound it, I'm not a detective. But I'm a plain man, and I do know this. The idea that one of us - baah!' He leaned back, made a heavy gesture, and almost sneered. 'I tell you it's somebody who sneaked in unknown to us, or it's that medium. Why, see here! Suppose one of us did want to do that blighter in: which we wouldn't, mind you. Fancy anybody taking risks like that, with a whole room full of people all around! It's all nonsense. Besides, how could anybody do a thing like that without getting all smeared up with blood? I've seen the niggers trying to knife our sentries too often; and anybody who cut old Darworth up like that would've been soaked - couldn't help it. Bah?'
Some cigar-smoke got into his eye, and he rubbed it blearily. Then he leaned forward with great intentness, his hands on his knees.
'So what I suggest, sir, is this. Put it in the proper hands. Then it'll be all right. I know him well, and so do you. I know he's devilish lazy; but we'll put it up to him as a matter of of caste, dammit! We'll say, `Look here, old boy....'
Then there occurred to me what should have occurred , long before. I sat up. 'You mean,' I said, 'H.M.? The old Chief? Mycroft?'
'I mean Henry Merrivale. Exactly. Eh?'
H.M. on a Scotland Yard case.... I thought again of that room high over Whitehall, which I had not seen since 1922. I thought of the extremely lazy, extremely garrulous and slipshod figure who sat grinning with sleepy eyes; his hands folded over his big stomach and his feet propped up on the desk. His chief taste was for lurid reading- matter; his chief complaint that people would not treat him seriously. He was a qualified barrister and a qualified physician, and he spoke atrocious grammar. He was Sir Henry Merrivale, Baronet, and had been a fighting Socialist all his life. He was vastly conceited, and had an inexhaustible fund of bawdy stories....
Looking past Featherton, I remembered the old days. They began calling, him Mycroft when he was head of the British Counter-Espionage Department., The notion of even the rawest junior calling him Sir Henry would have been fantastic. It was Johnny Ireton, in a letter from Constantinople, who started the nickname; but it failed to stick. 'The most interesting figure in the stories about the hawk-faced gentleman from Baker Street,' Johnny wrote, 'isn't Sherlock at all; it's his brother Mycroft. Do you remember him? He's the one with as big or bigger a deductive-hat than S.H.,; but is too lazy to use it; he's big and sluggish and won't move out of his chair; he's a big pot in some mysterious department of the government, with a card-index memory, and moves only in his orbit of lodgings-club-Whitehall. I think he only comes into two stories, but there's a magnificent scene in which Sherlock and Mycroft stand in the window of the Diogenes Club rattling out an exchange of deductions about a man passing by in the street both of them very casual, and poor Watson getting dizzier than he's ever been before.... I tell you, if our H.M. had a little more dignity, and would always remember to put on a necktie, and would refrain from. humming the words to questionable songs when he lumbers through rooms full of lady typists, he wouldn't make a bad Mycroft. He's got the brain, my lad; he's got the brain....'
But H.M. discouraged the, use of the nickname. In fact, he was roused to ire. He said he was not animitation of anybody, and roared about it. Since I left the service in 1922, I had seen him only three times. Twice in the smoking-room of the Diogenes Club, when I was a guest; and on both occasions he was asleep. The last was at one of Mayfair crushes, where his wife had dragged him. He had slunk away from the dancing to see whether he could get a drink of whisky; I found him prowling near the butler's pantry, and he said he was suffering. So we waylaid Colonel Lendinn and got up a poker-game at which the colonel and I lost eleven pounds sixteen shillings between us.... There had been some talk of the old days. I gathered that he was tinkering with the Military Intelligence Department. But he said - sourly, flicking the cards with a sharp crrr-ick under his big thumb-that the glamour was gone; that these were dull times for anybody with a brain; and that, because the thus-and-so's were too parsimonious to install a lift, he still had to walk up five thus-and-so’d flights of stairs to his little office overlooking the gardens along Horse Guards Avenue.
Featherton was talking again. I only half-heard him, for I was remembering the days when we were a very young crowd, and juggled with our lives twenty-four hours in a day under the impression that we were having a fine time, and thought it great sport to 'pull a. tail-feather or two from the double-eagle that was Imperial Germany. The rain still slashed monotonously, and Featherton's voice rose
'-tell you what we'll do, Blake. We'll pick up a cab and go straight round there. If we phone to say we're coming, he'll swear he's busy, eh? And go back to reading his confounded shockers. What say? Shall we go?'
The temptation was too much.
'Immediately,' I said.
It was raining hard. Our cab skidded down into Pall Mall; and five minutes later we had swung left off the stolid, barrack-windowed dignity of the Be-British Street, down a little, sylvan-looking thoroughfare which connects Whitehall with the Embankment. The War Office seemed depressed, like the dripping gardens that enclosed it behind. Away from the bustle at the front, there is a little side door close to the garden wall, which you are not supposed to know about.
Inside, I could have found my way blindfolded through the little dark entry, and up two flights of stairs past doors that showed rooms full of typists, filing-cabinets, and harsh electric lights. It was surprisingly modern in this ancient stone rookery, whose halls smelt of stone, damp, and dead cigarettes. (This, by the way, is a part of old Whitehall Palace). Nothing had changed. There was still a peeling war-poster stuck on the wall, where it had been for twelve years. The past came back with a shock, of men grown older but time stood still; of young fledglings clumping up these stairs a-whistling, with officers' swagger-stick cocked under one arm; and outside on the Embankment a barrel-organ grinding out a tune to which our feet still tap. That flattened cigarette-stump on the stairs might just have been tossed away by Johnny Ireton or Captain Bunky Knapp, if one hadn't been dead of fever in Mesopotamia and the other long disposed of by a pot-helmeted firing party outside Metz. I never realized until then how damned lucky I had been....
On the fourth flight you must pass a barrier in the person of old Carstairs. The sergeant-major looked exactly the same, leaning out of his cubicle and smoking a forbidden pipe. Our greetings were affable, though it was strange to be saluted again; I told him glibly that I had an appointment with H.M. - which he knew was a lie - and trusted to old times. He looked dubious. He said:
'Why, I dunno, sir. I daresay it's all right. Though there's a sort of bloke just gone up.' His boiled eye was contemptuous. 'A bloke from down the way, 'e said. From Scotland Yard. Ayagh!'
Featherton and I looked at each other. After thanking Carstairs, we hurried up the remaining and darkest flight of stairs. We caught sight of the bloke on the landing, just raising his hand to knock at H.M.'s door.
I said: 'Shame on you, Masters. What would the assistant commissioner say?'
Masters looked first angry, and then amused. He was back in his old stolid placidity again, where he could feel the brick walls of Whitehall: well-brushed, and heavy of motion. Any reference to his unheard-of behavior last night would probably startle him as much as it startled me to think of it.
'Ah! So it's you?' he said. 'Um. And Major Featherton, I see. Why, that's all right. I've got the assistant commissioner's permission. Now -'
In the dingy light of the landing, I could see the familiar door. It bore a severe plate which said, 'Sir Henry Merrivale.' Above this plate H.M. had long ago taken white paint and inscribed in enormous staggering letters: 'BUSY!!! NO ADMITTANCE!!! KEEP OUT!!!' and below the plate, as though with a pointed afterthought, 'This means YOU!' Masters, like everybody else, merely turned the knob and walked in.
It was still unchanged. The low-ceilinged room, with its two big windows overlooking the gardens and the Embankment, was as untidy as ever; as full of papers, pipes, pictures, and junk. Behind a broad flat desk, also
