‘Of course,’ said Tressider, thickly.
Mr Smith finished his liqueur.
‘You are not drinking,’ he protested.
‘Look here,’ said Tressider, gulping down the remainder of his drink, ‘you seem to know a lot about me and my affairs.’
‘Oh, but that is common knowledge, surely. The doings of so rich and fortunate a little boy as Cyril Tressider are chronicled in every newspaper paragraph. Perhaps the newspapers do not know quite so much about Mr Tressider, his uncle and guardian. They may not realise quite how deeply he was involved in the Megatherium catastrophe, nor how much he has lost in one way or another on the turf. Still, they know, naturally, that he is an upright English gentleman and that both he and his wife are devoted to the boy.’
Tressider leaned his elbow on the table and, holding his head propped on his hand, tried to read Mr Smith’s countenance. He found it difficult, for Mr Smith and the room and everything about him seemed to advance and recede in the oddest manner. He thought he might be in for a dose of fever.
‘Children . . .’ Mr Smith’s voice fluted towards him from an enormous distance. ‘Accidents, naturally, will sometimes happen. No one can prevent it. Childish ailments may leave distressing after effects . . . babyish habits, however judiciously checked, may lead . . . Pardon me, I fear you are not feeling altogether the thing.’
‘I feel damned queer,’ said Tressider. ‘I – at the station today – hallucinations – I can’t understand—’
Suddenly, from the pit in which it had lurked, chained and growling, Terror leapt at him. It shook his bones and cramped his stomach. It was like a palpable enemy, suffocating and tearing him. He gripped the table. He saw Mr Smith’s huge face loom down upon him, immense, immeasurable.
‘Dear, dear!’ The voice boomed in his ear like a great silver bell. ‘You are really not well. Allow me. Just a sip of this.’
He drank, and the Terror, defeated, withdrew from him. A vast peace surged over his brain. He laughed. Everything was jolly, jolly, jolly. He wanted to sing.
Mr Smith beckoned to the barman.
‘Is the car ready?’ he asked.
Tressider stood by Mr Smith’s side. The car had gone, and they were alone before the tall green gates that towered into the summer twilight. Mile upon mile they had driven through town and country; mile upon mile, with the river rolling beside them and the scent of trees and water blown in upon the July breeze. They had been many hours upon the journey and yet the soft dusk was hardly deeper than when they had set out. For them, as for Joshua, sun and stars had stood still in their courses. That this was so, Tressider knew, for he was not drunk or dreaming. His senses had never been more acute, his perceptions more vivid. Every leaf upon the tall poplars that shivered above the gates was vivid to him with a particular beauty of sound, shape and odour. The gates, which bore in great letters the name ‘SMITH & SMITH – REMOVALS’, opened at Smith’s touch. The long avenue of poplars stretched up to a squat grey house with a pillared portico.
Many times in the weeks that followed, Tressider asked himself whether he had after all dreamed that strange adventure at the House of the Poplars. From the first whisper by the station bookstall to the journey by car down to his own home in Essex, every episode had had a nightmare quality. Yet surely, no nightmare had ever been so consecutive nor so clearly memorable in waking moments. There was the room with its pale grey walls and shining floor – a luminous pool in the soft mingling of electric light and dying daylight from the high, unshuttered windows. There were the four men – Mr Smith, of the restaurant; Mr Smyth, with his narrow yellow face disfigured by a scar like an acid burn; Mr Smythe, square and sullen, with short, strong hands and hairy knuckles; and Dr Schmidt, the giggling man with the scanty red beard and steel-rimmed spectacles. And there was the girl with the slanting golden eyes like a cat’s, he thought. They called her ‘Miss Smith’, but her name should have been Melusine.
Nor could he have dreamed the conversation, which was businesslike and brief.
‘It has long been evident to us,’ said Mr Smith, ‘that society is in need of a suitable organisation for the Removal of unnecessary persons. Private and amateur attempts at Removal are so frequently attended with subsequent inconvenience and even danger to the Remover, who, in addition, usually has to carry out his work with very makeshift materials. It is our pleasure and privilege to attend to all the disagreeable details of such Removals for our clients at a moderate – I may say, a merely nominal – expense. Provided our terms are strictly adhered to, we can guarantee our clients against all unpleasant repercussions, preserving, of course, inviolable secrecy as to the whole transaction.’
Dr Schmidt sniggered faintly.
‘In the matter of young Cyril Tressider, for example,’ went on Mr Smith, ‘I can conceive nothing more unnecessary than the existence of this wearisome child. He is an orphan; his only relations are Mr and Mrs Tressider who, however amiably disposed they may feel towards the boy, are financially embarrassed by his presence in the world. If he were to be quietly Removed, who would be the loser? Not himself, for he would be spared the sins and troubles of life on this ill-regulated planet; not his relations, for he has none but his uncle and aunt who would be better for his disappearance; not his tenants and dependants, since his good uncle would be there to take his place: I suggest, Mr Tressider, that the small sum of one thousand pounds would be profitably spent in Removing this boy to that happy land “far, far beyond the stars”, where he might play with the young-eyed cherubim (to quote our glorious poet), remote from the accidents of measles or stomach-ache to which, alas! all young children are so unhappily liable here below.’
‘A thousand?’ said Tressider, and laughed, ‘I would give five, gladly, to be rid of the youngster.’
Dr Schmidt sniggered. ‘We should not like to be rapacious,’ he said. ‘No. One thousand pounds will amply repay the very trifling trouble.’
‘How about the risk?’ said Tressider.
‘We have abolished risk,’ replied Mr Smith. ‘For us, and for our clients, the word does not exist. Tell me, the boy resides with you at your home in Essex? Yes. Is he a good little boy?’
‘Decent enough kid, as far as that goes.’
‘No bad habits?’
‘He’s a bit of a liar, like lots of kids.’
‘How so, my friend?’ asked Dr Schmidt.
‘He romances. Pretends he’s had all kinds of adventures with giants and fairies and tigers and what not. You know the kind of thing. Doesn’t seem able to tell the truth. It worries his aunt a good deal.’
‘Ah!’ Dr Schmidt seemed to take over the interview at this point. ‘The good Mrs Tressider, she does not encourage the romancing?’
‘No. She does her best. Tells Cyril that he’ll go to a bad place if he tells her stories. But it’s wonderful how the little beggar persists. Sometimes we have to spank him. But he’s damnably obstinate. There’s a bad streak in the boy somewhere. Unsound. Not English, that sort of thing.’
‘Sad,’ said Dr Schmidt, sniggering, so that the word became a long bleat. ‘Sa-a-d. It would be a pity if the poor little boy should miss the golden gates after all. That would distress me.’
‘It would be still more distressing, Schmidt, that a person with a failing of that kind should be placed in any position of importance as the owner of the Tressider estates. Honour and uprightness, coupled with a healthy lack of imagination, have made this country what it is.’
‘True,’ said Dr Schmidt. ‘How beautifully you put it, my dear Smith. No doubt, Mr Tressider, your little ward finds much scope for imaginative adventure when playing about in the deserted grounds of Crantonbury Place, situated so conveniently next door to your abode.’
‘You seem to know a lot,’ said Tressider.
‘Our organisation,’ explained Dr Schmidt, with a wave of the hand. ‘It is melancholy to see these fine old country mansions thus deserted, but one man’s loss is the gain of the little boy next door. I should encourage little Cyril to play in the grounds of Crantonbury Hall. His little limbs will grow strong running about among the over-grown bushes and the straggling garden-beds where the strawberry grows underneath the nettle. I quote your Shakespeare, my dear Smith. It is a calamity that the fountains should be silent and the great fish-pond run dry. The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud – Shakespeare again. Nevertheless, there are still many possibilities in an old garden.’
He giggled and pulled at his thin beard.
If this fantastic conversation had never taken place, how was it that Tressider could remember every word so clearly. He remembered, too, signing a paper – the ‘Removal Order’, Smith had called it – and a cheque for £1,000, payable to Smith & Smith, and post-dated October 1st.
‘We like to allow a margin,’ said Mr Smith. ‘We cannot at this moment predict to a day when the Removal will be carried out. But from now to October 1st should provide ample time. If you should change your mind before the Removal has taken place, you have only to leave word to that effect at Rapallo’s. But
after
the Removal, it would be too late to make any alterations. Indeed, in such a case, there might be – er – unpleasantness of a kind which I should not care to specify. But, between gentlemen, such a situation could not, naturally, arise. Are you likely to be absent from home at any time in the near future?’
Tressider shook his head.
‘No? Forgive me, but I think you would be well advised to spend – let us say the month of September – abroad. Or perhaps in Scotland. There is salmon, there is trout, there is grouse, there is partridge – all agreeable creatures to kill.’
Dr Schmidt sniggered again.
‘Just as you like, of course,’ went on Mr Smith. ‘But if you and perhaps your wife also—’
‘My wife wouldn’t leave Cyril.’
‘Yourself, then. A holiday from domesticity is sometimes an excellent thing.’
‘I will think about it,’ said Tressider.
He had thought often about it. He also thought frequently about the blank counterfoil in his cheque-book. That, at least, was a fact. He was thinking about it in Scotland on September 15th, as he tramped across the moors, gun on shoulder. It might be a good thing to stop that cheque.
‘Auntie Edith!’
‘Yes, Cyril.’
Mrs Tressider was a thin woman with a strong, Puritan face; a woman of narrow but fixed affections and limited outlook.
‘Auntie, I’ve had a wonderful adventure.’
Mrs Tressider pressed her pale lips together.
‘Now, Cyril. Think before hand. Don’t exaggerate, dear. You look very hot and excited.’
‘Yes, Auntie. I met a fairy—’
‘Cyril!’
‘No,
really
, Auntie, I did. She lives in Crantonbury Hall – in the old grotto. A real, live fairy. And she was all dressed in gold and lovely colours like a rainbow, red and green and blue and yellow and
all
sorts of colours. And a gold crown on her head and stars in her hair. And I wasn’t a bit frightened, Auntie, and she said—’
‘Cyril, dear—’
‘Yes, Auntie,
really
. I’m not ’zaggerating. She was ever so beautiful. And she said I was a brave boy, just like Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, and I was to marry her when I grew up, and live in Fairyland. Only I’m not big enough yet. And she had lions and tigers and leopards all round her with gold collars and diamonds on them. And she took me into her fairy palace—’
‘Cyril!’
‘And we ate fairy fruit off gold plates and she’s going to teach me the language of the birds and give me a pair of seven-league boots all for myself, so that I can go
all
over the world and be a hero.’
‘That’s a very exciting story you’ve made up, darling, but of course it’s only a story, isn’t it?’
‘No, ’
tisn’t
only a story. It’s quite true. You see if it isn’t.’
‘Darling, even in fun you mustn’t say it’s
true
. There couldn’t be lions and tigers and leopards at Crantonbury Hall.’
‘Well . . .’ the child paused. ‘Well, pr’aps I was ’zaggerating just a teeny, weeny bit. But there was two leopards.’
‘Oh, Cyril! Two leopards?’
‘Yes, with golden collars and chains. And the fairy was ever so tall and beautiful, with lovely goldeny eyes just like the leopards’. She said she was the fairy of the leopards, and they were fairies too, and after we’d had the fairy feast the leopards grew wings and she got on their backs – on one of them’s back, I mean – and flew
right
away over the roof.’
Mrs Tressider sighed.
‘I don’t think Nanny ought to tell you so many fairy tales. You know there aren’t any fairies, really.’
‘That’s all
you
know about it,’ said Cyril, rather rudely. ‘There is fairies, and I’ve seen one, and I’m to be the King of the Fairies when I’m bigger.’
‘You mustn’t contradict me like that, Cyril. And it’s
very naughty
to say what isn’t true.’