The strange countess — Inside the Classic

-shaped scar just above her elbow. It was Lizzy’s faith that whenever the scar irritated, rain was in the offing.

“You’ll have to have that electrocuted, or whatever the word is,” said the snub-nosed girl when the other shook her head. “Sleeves are about as fashionable nowadays as crinolines.”

From the bathroom Lois heard her companion bustling about the little kitchen, and, mingled with the splutter and crackle of frying eggs, came shrilly the sound of the newest fox-trot as Lizzy whistled it unerringly.

They had shared the third floor in Charlotte Street since the day she had come to London. Lois was an orphan; she could not remember her father, who had died when she was little more than a baby, and only dimly recalled the pleasant, matronly woman who had fussed over her in the rough and humble days of her early schooling. She had passed to the care of a vague aunt who was interested in nothing except the many diseases from which she imagined she suffered. And then the aunt had died, despite her arrays of medicine bottles, or possibly because of them, and Lois had gone into her first lodging.

“Anyway, the countess will like your classy talk,” said Lizzy, as the radiant girl came into the kitchen. She had evidently been thinking over the new appointment.

“I don’t believe I talk classily!” said Lois good-humouredly.

Lizzy turned out the eggs from the frying-pan with a dexterous flick.

“I’ll bet that’s what got _him_,” she said significantly, and the girl flushed.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about this wretched young man as though he were a god,” she said shortly.

Nothing squashed Lizzy Smith. She wiped her moist forehead with the back of her hand, pitched the frying-pan into the sink and sat down in one concerted motion.

“He’s not common, like some of these pickers-up,” she said reminiscently, “he’s class, if you like! He thanked me like a lady, and never said a word that couldn’t have been printed on the front page of the _Baptist Herald_. When I turned up without you, he _was_ disappointed. And mind you, it was no compliment to me when he looked down his nose and said: ‘Didn’t you bring her?’”

“These eggs are burnt,” said Lois.

“And a gentleman,” continued the steadfast Lizzy. “Got his own car. And the hours he spends walking up and down Bedford Row just, so to speak, to get a glimpse of you, would melt a heart of stone.”

“Mine is brass,” said Lois with a smile. “And really, Elizabetta, you’re ridiculous.”

“You’re the first person that’s called me Elizabetta since I was christened,” remarked the stenographer calmly, “but even that doesn’t change the subject so far as I am concerned. Mr. Dorn----”

“This tea tastes like logwood,” interrupted the girl maliciously, and Lizzy was sufficiently human to be pained.

“Did you hear old Mackenzie last night?” she asked, and when Lois shook her head: “He was playing that dreamy bit from the _Tales of Hoggenheim_--_Hoffmann_ is it? All these Jewish names are the same to me. I can’t understand a Scotsman playing on a fiddle; I thought they only played bagpipes.”

“He plays beautifully,” said Lois. “Sometimes, but only rarely, the music comes into my dreams.”

“The middle of the night’s no time to play anything,” she said emphatically. “He may be our landlord, but we’re entitled to sleep. And he’s crazy, anyway.”

“It is a nice kind of craziness,” soothed Lois, “and he’s a dear old man.”

“There’s a time for everything,” she said vaguely, and, getting up, took a third cup and saucer from the dresser, banged it on the table, filled it with tea and splashed milk recklessly into the dark brown liquid.

“It’s your turn to take it down to him,” she said, “and you might drop a hint to him that the only kind of foreign music I like is ‘Night Time in Italy.’”

It was their practice every morning to take a cup of tea down to the old man who occupied the floor below, and who, in addition to being their landlord, had been a very good friend to the two girls. The rent they paid, remembering the central position which the house occupied and the popularity of this quarter of London with foreigners who were willing to pay almost any figure for accommodation in the Italian quarter, was microscopic.

Lois carried the cup down the stairs and knocked at one of the two doors on the next landing. There was the sound of shuffling feet on the bare floor, the door opened, and Rab Mackenzie beamed benevolently over his horn-rimmed spectacles at the fair apparition.

“Thank you, thank you very much, Miss Reddle,” he said eagerly, as he took the cup from her hand. “Will you no’ walk round? I’ve got my old fiddle back. Did I disturb you last night?”

“No, I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” said Lois, as he put the cup on the well-scrubbed top of the bare table.

The room, scrupulously clean, and furnished only with essentials, was an appropriate setting for the little old man in his baggy trousers, his scarlet slippers and black velvet coat. The clean-shaven face was lined and furrowed, but the pale blue eyes that showed beneath the shaggy eyebrows were alive.

He took up the violin which lay on the sideboard with a gentle, tender touch.

“Music is a grand profession,” he said, “if you can give your time to it. But the stage is damnable! Never go on the stage, young lady. Keep you on the right side of the footlights. Those stage people are queer, insincere folk.” He nodded emphatically and went on: “I used to sit down in the deep orchestra well and watch her little toes twisting. She was a bonny girl. Not much older than you, and haughty, like stage folks are. And how I got up my courage to ask her to wed me I never understood.” He sighed heavily. “Ah, well! I’d rather live in a fool’s paradise than no paradise at all, and for two years----”

“She was a bonny girl, but she had the criminal mind. Some lassies are like that. They’ve just no conscience and no remorse. And if you’ve no conscience and no remorse and no sense of values, why, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do from murder downwards.”

It was not the first time Lois had heard these rambling and disjointed references to a mysterious woman, these admonitions to avoid the stage, but it was the first time that he had made a reference to the criminal mind.

“Women are funny creatures, Mr. Mackenzie,” she said, humouring him.

“Aye, they are,” he said simply. “But, generally speaking, they’re superior to most men. I thank ye for the tea, Miss Reddle.”

She went upstairs to find Lizzy struggling into her coat.

“Well, did he warn you off the boards?” asked Miss Smith, as she strolled to the little mirror and dabbed her nose untidily with powder. “I’ll bet he did! I told him yesterday that I was going into a beauty chorus, and he nearly had a fit.”

“You shouldn’t tease the poor old man,” said Lois.

“He ought to have more sense,” said Lizzy scornfully. “Beauty chorus! Hasn’t he got eyes?”

They went off to the office together, walking through the Bloomsbury squares, and only once did Lois look round apprehensively for her unwelcome cavalier. Happily he was not in sight.

“About that scar on your arm,” said Lizzy, when they were crossing Theobalds Road. “I know a perfectly posh place in South Moulton Street where they take away scars. I thought of going there to have a face treatment. The managing clerk suggested it--Lois, that fellow is getting so fresh he ought to be kept on ice. And him forty-eight with a grown-up family!”

Two hours later, Mr. Oliver Shaddles picked up some documents from the table, read through with quick and skilful eyes, rubbed the grey stubble on his unshaven chin irritably, and glared out upon Bedford Row.

He turned towards the little bell-push on his table, hesitated a second, then pressed it.

“Miss Reddle!” he snapped to the clerk who answered his summons with haste.

Again he examined the sheet of foolscap, and was still reading when the door opened and Lois Reddle came in.

Lois was a little above medium height, and by reason of her slimness seemed taller than she was. She was dressed in the severe black which the firm of Shaddles & Soan imposed upon all their feminine employees. Mr. Shaddles had reached the age, if he had ever been at any other, when beauty had no significance. That Lois Reddle had a certain ethereal loveliness which was all her own might be true, but to the lawyer she was a girl clerk who received thirty-five well-grudged shillings every week of her life, minus the cost of her insurance.

“You go down to Telsbury.”

He had a minatory manner, and invariably prefaced his remarks with the accusative pronoun. “You’ll get there in an hour and a half. Take those two affidavits to the woman Desmond, and get her to sign the transfer form. The car’s there----”

“I think Mr. Dorling had it----” she began.

“The car’s there,” he said obstinately. “You’ll have a dry trip, and you ought to be thankful for the opportunity of a breath of fresh air. Here, take this,” as she was going out with the foolscap. It was a little slip of paper. “It is the Home Office order--use your senses, girl! How do you think you’ll get into the gaol without that? And tell that woman Desmond---- Anyway, off you go.”

Lois went out and closed the door behind her. The four faded, middle-aged clerks, sitting at their high desks, did not so much as look up, but the snub-nosed girl with the oily face, who had been pounding a typewriter, perked her head round.

“You’re going to Telsbury, by the so-called car?” she asked. “I thought he’d send you. That old devil’s so mean that he wouldn’t pay his fare to heaven! The juggernaut will kill somebody one of these days,” she added darkly, “you mark my words!”

Attached to the firm of Shaddles & Soan was a dilapidated motor-car that had seen its best time in pre-war days. It was housed in a near-by garage which, being a property under Mr. Shaddles’ direction as trustee, exacted no rent for the care of the machine, which he had bought for a negligible sum at the sale of a bankrupt’s effects. It was a Ford, and every member of the staff was supposed to be able to drive it. It carried Mr. Shaddles to the Courts of Justice, it took his clerks on errands, and it figured prominently in all bills of cost. It was, in many ways, a very paying scheme.

“Ain’t you glad you’re going?” asked Lizzy enviously. “Lord! If I could get out of this dusty hole! Maybe you’ll meet your fate?”

“Your fate,” said Elizabetta, unabashed. “I spotted him out of the window this morning--that fellow is certainly potty about you!”

A cold light of disfavour was in the eyes of Lois, but Lizzy was not easily squashed. “There’s nothing in that,” she said. “Why, there used to be a young man who waited for me for hours--in the rain too. It turned out that he wasn’t right in his head, either.”

Lois laughed softly as she wrapped a gaily coloured scarf about her throat and pulled on her gloves. Suddenly her smile vanished.

“I hate Telsbury; I hate all prisons. They give me the creeps. I am glad I’m leaving Mr. Shaddles.”

“Don’t call him ‘Mister,’” said the other. “It is paying him a compliment.”

The car stood at the door, as Mr. Shaddles had suggested, an ancient and ugly machine. The day was fair and warm, and once clear of the London traffic the sun shone brightly and she shook off the depression which had lain upon her like a cloud all that morning. As she sent the car spinning out of Bedford Row she glanced round instinctively for some sign of the man to whom Lizzy had made so unflattering a reference, and whose constant and unswerving devotion was one of the principal embarrassments of her life. But he was nowhere in sight, and he passed out of her mind, as, clear of London, she turned from the main road and slowed her car along one of the twisting lanes that ran parallel with the post route and gave one who loved the country and the green hedgerows a more entranced vision than the high road would have given her.

Seven miles short of Telsbury she brought the car back to the main thoroughfare, and spun, at a speed which she uneasily recognised as excessive, on to the tarred highway. Even as she came clear of the high hedges she heard the warning croak of a motor-horn, and jammed on her brakes. The little machine skidded out into the road. Too late, she released the brakes and thrust frantically at the accelerator. She saw the bonnet of a long, black car coming straight towards her, felt rather than heard the exclamation of its driver.

In that second she recognised the driver.

The girl, gripping the steering wheel of her ancient Ford, stared defiantly across a broken windscreen, but Michael Dorn did not accept the challenge. Instead, he put his gear into reverse, preparatory to withdrawing his running-board from the affectionate embrace of the other guard. He did this with a manner of gentle forbearance which was almost offensive.

“Say it!” she said. “Say something violent or vulgar! It is far better to have things out than to let bad words go jumping around inside!”

Grey eyes need black lashes to be seen at best advantage, he thought; and she had one of those thinnish noses that he admired in women. He rather liked her chin, and, since it was raised aggressively, he had a fair view of a perfect throat. It struck him as being extremely perfect in spite of the red and yellow and green silk scarf that was lightly knotted about. She was neatly if poorly dressed.

“Nothing jumps around inside me except my heart,” he said, “and, at the moment, that is slipping back from my mouth. I don’t like your necktie.”

She looked down at the offending garment and frowned.

“You have no right to run into me because you disapprove of my scarf,” she said coldly. “Will you please disengage your strange machine from mine? I hope you are insured.”

He jerked his car back, there was a sound of ripping tin, a crack and a shiver of glass, and he was free. Then:

“You came out of a side road at forty miles an hour--you’d have turned over certain, only I was there to catch you,” he said half-apologetically. “I hope you aren’t hurt?”

“I am not,” she said, “but I think my employer will be when he sees the wreckage. Anyway, your end is served, Mr. Dorn, you have made my acquaintance.”

He started and went a shade red.

“You don’t imagine that I manœuvred this collision with the idea of getting an introduction, do you?” he almost gasped, and was thunderstruck when the girl with the grave eyes nodded.

“You have been following me for months,” she said quietly. “You even took the trouble to make up to a girl in Mr. Shaddles’ office in order to arrange a meeting. I have seen you shadowing me on my way home--once you took the same ’bus--and on the only occasion I have been to a dance this year I found you in the vestibule.”

Michael Dorn fiddled with the steering wheel, momentarily speechless. She was serious now, all the banter and quiet merriment in her voice had passed. Those wonderful eyes of hers were regarding him with a certain gentle reproach that was hard to endure.

“Well, the truth is----” he began lamely, and found himself at a loss for words.

She waited for him to finish his sentence, and then:

“The truth is----” A faint smile trembled at the corner of her red mouth. “The truth is, Mr. Dorn, that it isn’t a very terrible offence for any nice man to wish to meet any girl--that I recognise. And it would be stupid in me if I pretended that I am very much annoyed. But as I told your ambassador, Miss Lizzy Smith----”

“I really do not wish to know you, and I have no doubt that she has conveyed that intelligence to you. Therefore your position is a little--what shall I say?”

“Offensive is the word you’re wanting,” he said coolly. “I’ll admit that it bears that construction.”

He got down slowly, walked to the side of her car, and stood, his hands resting on the arm of the seat.

“I want you to believe, Miss Reddle!” he said earnestly, “that nothing is farther from my wish than to annoy you. If I hadn’t been a clumsy fool you would never have known that I was----”

He stopped, at a loss for a word. It was she who supplied it, and in spite of his seriousness he laughed.

“‘Dogging’ is an ugly word. I’m trying to think of something prettier,” he said.

She liked the ghost of a smile that shone in his blue eyes, and had they parted then, without another word, she might have thought more kindly of him. But:

“Where are you off to, on this bright autumn day?” he asked, and she stiffened.

“Will you start my car, please?” she said with dignity.

He cranked up the engine and stood aside. She could not resist the temptation:

“If you follow me now you’ll have a shock,” she said. “I am going to Telsbury Prison.”

The effect on the man was startling; he stared in amazement and fear. His jaw dropped, and into his eyes came a queer look of wonder.

“Where are you going?” he asked huskily, as though he doubted the evidence of his ears.

“I am going to Telsbury Prison--please.”

She waved him out of her way. The car with the broken wind-screen went noisily along the broad high road, leaving the man to stare. And then:

“Good God!” said Michael Dorn.

The grim entrance of Telsbury Convict Establishment is mercifully hidden behind a screen of thick-growing pines. Its red walls have mellowed with age, and but for the high tower in the centre of the prison a traveller would pass it unnoticed. Hiding all the heartache that has made the word “Dartmoor” synonymous with sorrow, Telsbury has missed the fame of its fellow-prison.

Lois had already made two visits to the prison on her employer’s business. A client of the firm had prosecuted a woman who had been engaged in systematic fraud, and she had been sent down for five years. It had been necessary to secure her signature to certain deeds transferring back to their lawful owner stocks which had been fraudulently converted.

Stopping her car broadside on to the high black gates, she descended and pulled a bell. Almost immediately a grating was slipped back and two watchful eyes surveyed her. Though the gatekeeper recognised her, it was not until she had shown him the Home Office order which she carried that he turned the key in the lock and admitted her to a bare stone room, furnished with a desk, a stool, two chairs, and a table.

The warder read the order again and pressed a bell. He, his two reliefs, and the governor were the only men who came within those walls, and his sphere of operations was restricted to the room and the archway, barred with steel railings, which cut the courtyard off from the rest of the prison.

“Getting tired of coming here, miss?” he asked with a smile.

“Prisons make me very tired and very sick at heart,” said the girl.

“There are six hundred women inside here who are more tired and more sick than you will ever be, I hope, miss,” he said conventionally. “Not that I ever see any of them. I open the gate to the prison van and never catch a sight of them again, not even when they go out.”