“Who?”

“Mr. Thurston. He says he has an appointment.”

“I don’t know anything about him. Will you ask what he wants?”

A pause: “Mr. Thurston says will you see him very particular.”

“Very well, I’ll come down.”

A tall young man in a raincoat was standing in the hall. He had reddish hair and an unusually low, concave forehead. He looked as though he had come to sell some hopelessly unsuitable commodity and had already despaired of success.

“Mr. Thurston?” He took my hand in a savage grip. “You say you have an appointment with me. I am afraid I don’t remember it.”

“No, well, you see I thought we ought to have a yarn, and you know how suspicious these porter-fellows are at clubs. I knew you wouldn’t mind my stretching a point.” He spoke with a kind of fierce jauntiness. “I had to give up my club. Couldn’t run to it.”

“Perhaps you will tell me what I can do for you.”

“I used to belong to the Wimpole. I expect you know it?”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

“No? You would have liked it. I could have taken you there and introduced you to some of the chaps.”

“That, I gather, is now impossible.”

“Yes. It’s a pity. There are some good scouts there. I daresay you know the Batchelors?”

“Yes. Were you a member there, too?”

“Yes, at least not exactly, but a great pal of mine was—Jimmie Grainger. I expect you’ve often run across Jimmie?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“Funny. Jimmie knows almost everyone. You’d like him. I must bring you together.” Having failed to establish contact, Thurston seemed now to think that responsibility for the conversation devolved on me.

“Mr. Thurston,” I said, “is there anything particular you wished to say to me? Because otherwise…”

“I was coming to that,” said Thurston. “Isn’t there somewhere more private where we could go and talk?”

It was a reasonable suggestion. Two page boys sat on a bench beside us, the hall porter watched us curiously from behind his glass screen, two or three members passing through paused by the tape machine to take a closer look at my peculiar visitor. I was tolerably certain that he was not one of the enthusiasts for my work who occasionally beset me, but was either a beggar or a madman or both; at another time I should have sent him away, but that afternoon, with no prospect of other interest, I hesitated. “Be a good scout,” he urged.

There is at my club a nondescript little room of depressing aspect where members give interviews to the press, go through figures with their accountants, and in general transact business which they think would be conspicuous in the more public rooms. I took Thurston there.

“Snug little place,” he said, surveying this dismal place. “O.K. if I smoke?”

“Perfectly.”

“Have one?”

“No thank you.”

He lit a cigarette, drew a deep breath of smoke, gazed at the ceiling and, as though coming to the point, said, “Quite like the old Wimpole.”

My heart sank. “Mr. Thurston,” I said, “you have surely not troubled to come here simply in order to talk to me about your club.”

“No. But you see it’s rather awkward. Don’t exactly know how to begin. I thought I might lead up to it naturally. But I realize that your time’s valuable, Mr. Plant, so I may as well admit right out that I owe you an apology.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I’m here under false pretences. My name isn’t Thurston.”

“No?”

“No. I’d better tell you who I am, hadn’t I?”

“If you wish to.”

“Well, here goes. I’m Arthur Atwater.” The name was spoken with such an air of bravado, with such confidence of it making a stir, that I felt bewildered. It meant absolutely nothing to me. Where and how should I have heard it? Was this a fellow-writer, a distant cousin, a popular athlete? Atwater? Atwater? I repeated it to myself. No association was suggested. My visitor meanwhile seemed unconscious of how flat his revelation had fallen, and was talking away vehemently:

“Now you see why I couldn’t give my name. It’s awfully decent of you to take it like this. I might have known you were a good scout. I’ve been through Hell I can tell you ever since it happened. I haven’t slept a wink. It’s been terrible. You know how it is when one’s nerve’s gone. I shouldn’t be fit for work now even if they’d kept me on in the job. Not that I care about that. Let them keep their lousy job. I told the manager that to his face. I wasn’t brought up and educated to sell stockings. I ought to have gone abroad long ago. There’s no opportunity in England now, unless you’ve got influence or are willing to suck up to a lot of snobs. You get a fair chance out there in the colonies where one man’s as good as another and no questions asked.”

I can seldom bear to let a misstatement pass uncorrected. “Believe me, Mr. Atwater,” I said. “You have a totally mistaken view of colonial life. You will find people just as discriminating and inquisitive there as they are here.”

“Not where I’m going,” he said. “I’m clearing right out. I’m fed up. This case hanging over me and nothing to do all day except think about the accident. It was an accident too. No one can try and hang the blame on me and get away with it. I was on my proper side of the road and I hooted twice. It wasn’t a Belisha crossing. It was my road. The old man just wouldn’t budge. He saw me coming, looked straight at me, as if he was daring me to drive into him. Well, I thought I’d give him a fright. You know how it is when you’re driving all day. You get fed to the teeth with people making one get out of their way all the time. I like to wake them up now and then when there’s no copper near, and make them jump for it. It seems like an hour now, but it all happened in two seconds. I kept on, waiting for him to skip, and he kept on, strolling across the road as if he’d bought it. It wasn’t till I was right on top of him I realized he didn’t intend to move. Then it was too late to stop. I put on my brakes and tried to swerve. Even then I might have missed him if he’d stopped, but he just kept on walking right into me and the mudguard got him. That’s how it was. No one can blame it on me.”

It was just as my Uncle Andrew had described it.

“Mr. Atwater,” I said, “do I understand that you are the man who killed my father?”

“Don’t put it that way, Mr. Plant. I feel sore enough about it. He was a great artist. I read about him in the papers. It makes it worse, his having been a great artist. There’s too little beauty in the world as it is. I should have liked to be an artist myself, only the family went broke. Father took me away from school young, just when I might have got into the eleven. Since then I’ve had nothing but odd jobs. I’ve never had a real chance. I want to start again, somewhere else.”

I interrupted him, frigidly I thought. “And why, precisely, have you come to me?”

But nothing could disabuse him of the idea that I was well-disposed. “I knew I could rely on you,” he said. “And I’ll never forget it, not as long as I live. I’ve thought everything out. I’ve got a pal who went out to Rhodesia; I think it was Rhodesia. Somewhere in Africa, anyway. He’ll give me a shakedown till I get on my feet. He’s a great fellow. Won’t he be surprised when I walk in on him! All I need is my passage money—third class, I don’t care. I’m used to roughing it these days—and something to make a start with. I could do it on fifty pounds.”

“Mr. Atwater,” I said, “have I misunderstood you, or are you asking me to break the law by helping you to evade your trial and also give you a large sum of money?”

“You’ll get it back, every penny of it.”

“And our sole connection is the fact that, through pure insolence, you killed my father.”

“Oh, well, if you feel like that about it…”

“I am afraid you greatly overrate my good nature.”

“Tell you what. I’ll make you a sporting offer. You give me fifty pounds now and I’ll pay it back in a year plus another fifty pounds to any charity you care to name. How’s that?”