The Day of Uniting

Front matter

The Day of Uniting

By Edgar Wallace Author of “Number Six and the Borgia,” “The Daffodil Enigma,” Etc.

(A Complete Novel)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

BY the side of a printer's steel table, a B young man was working busily with tweezers and awl. A page of type neatly bound about with twine was the subject of his attention, and, although his hand was shaky and he was, for reasons of expediency, working with only one of the two hundred lights which illuminated the “book room” of Ponters, he made no mistake. Once he raised his head and listened. There was no other sound than the clickety-clack of the linotypes on the floor below, where the night shift was “setting up” a Sunday newspaper, and as a background to this clatter, the low rumble of the presses in the basement.

He wiped his streaming forehead and, bending lower over the page, worked with incredible rapidity. He was a man of twenty-three or twenty-four. His face was a little puffy, and his eyes were dull. Tom Elmers liked his cups a little too well, and since that day when Delia Sennett had told him in her quiet, earnest way, that she had other plans than those he suggested with such vehemence, he had not attempted to check the craving.

Again he raised his head and listened, putting one hand up to the key of the hanging light, in readiness to switch it out, but there was no sound of footsteps on the stone corridor without and he resumed his work.

So engrossed was he, that when the interruption came he was not aware of another presence in the room, and yet he should have remembered that when Joe Sennett was on night work he invariably wore felt slippers, and should have known that the swing door was practically noiseless in operation.

Old Joe Sennett, master printer to the firm of Ponters, Limited, stood with his back to the door looking in amazement at the solitary workman. Then he came softly across the floor, and stood at the other's elbow.

“What are you doing?” asked Sennett suddenly, and the man dropped his awl with a little cry and looked round.

“I didn't hear you come in,” he gasped.

“What are you doing?” asked Sennett again, fixing those china-blue eyes of his upon the young man.

“I remembered those corrections I had to make. I didn't get them down until just before we knocked off, and they were worrying me, Mr. Sennett.”

“So you came back on Saturday night to do them?” said the other dryly. “Well, you're a model workman, Tom.”

The man gathered up his tools, and slipped them into his waistcoat pocket.

“A model workman,” repeated the other. “I'd like to know why you came back, Tom.”

“I've told you, haven't I?” growled Elmers, as he put on his coat.

Joe Sennett looked at him suspiciously.

“All right,” he said, “you can clear out now, and don't do it again. If you haven't time to finish your work, leave it.”

Near the entrance was a yellow-painted iron door marked “Private.” It was toward this that Joe went. He stopped to switch on three pilot lights that gave the room sufficient illumination to allow him to move without risk of damage and then, taking a key from his pocket, he inserted it. The light pressure he exercised was sufficient to send the door ajar. He turned in a flash.

“Have you been to this room?” he asked sternly.

“No, Mr. Sennett.”

Joe pushed open the door and switched on another light. He was in a small case room, which was also equipped with a hand press. It was the holy of holies of Ponters' vast establishment, for in that chamber two trustworthy compositors, one of whom was Joe Sennett, set up those secret documents which the government, from time to time, found it necessary to print and circulate.

“Who opened the door?”

“I don't know, Mr. Sennett.”

Joe walked into the room and looked around. Then he turned.

“If I thought it was you, Tom, do you know what I'd do with you?”

“What's the use of threatening me?” said the young man sullenly. “I've had enough trouble with you already. Delia's put you against me.”

“I don't want you to mention Delia's name to me, Tom,” said Joe Sennett sharply. He lifted a warning finger. “You're going the right way to get into bad trouble, Tom Elmers. For the sake of your father, who was a friend of mine, I'd like to save you from your own folly, but you're one of the clever kind that'll never be saved.”

“I don't want any saving, either,” growled Elmers, and the old man shook his head.

“You're keeping bad company. I saw you in High Street the other night with that man Palythorpe.”

“Well, what about it?” asked the other defiantly. “He's a gentleman, is Mr. Palythorpe. He could buy up you and me a hundred times over. And he's a newspaper proprietor, too.”

Joe chuckled in spite of his annoyance. “Mr. Palythorpe is an ex-convict who served ten years for blackmailing Mr. Chapelle's daughter. You know that. If you don't, you ought to.”

Tom shuffled uneasily. He had been somewhat disconcerted to learn that his friendship with a man of doubtful antecedents was so well known.

“He was innocent,” he said a little lamely, feeling that he must justify himself at any rate.

“Dartmoor is full of people who are innocent,” said Joe. “Now, Tom, you're not a bad boy,” he said in a more kindly voice, “but you've got to keep away from that sort of trash. He could give you a job, I dare say. He's running a paper now, isn't he? But it's not the kind of job that's going to get you anywhere, except into the cell which he has just left.”

He jerked his head in sign of dismissal, and Tom, without a word, pushed through the swing doors and disappeared.

Old Joe paced the length of the big room—it occupied the whole of a floor, and “room” was a ridiculously inadequate description—his hands behind his back, speculating upon the reason for Tom Elmers' sudden industry. His own impression was that the surprise of Elmers was simulated, and that he had heard the master printer coming and had busied himself with a page of type in order to hide his real occupation. Joe looked carefully at every case, as he passed, switching on the local lights for the purpose of his scrutiny.

Ponters were the biggest printers in the kingdom, and from their book room went forth a good proportion of the educational works which were published every year. Here men of all nations worked. French, German, Japanese, and Chinese, for the publishing business of Ponters had a world-wide clientele.

He finished his inspection and went back to what was known as the secret pressroom, and settled himself down for the night to put into print a very important memorandum which had been issued that morning by the first lord of the admiralty.

But the thought of Tom and his visit constantly intruded. It was true that Palythorpe was an undesirable acquaintance for any honest man. He had been the proprietor of a scurrilous little sheet, which enjoyed a semiprivate circulation—it was sent out to its subscribers in envelopes—and he had utilized the paper for the collection of information which might be and was extremely useful and profitable to him. The paper was called Spice, and it purported to deal in a flippant manner with the doings of high society, enjoying in consequence a circulation in certain basement kitchens of Mayfair.

Because he offered generous payment for news about the doings of society people, Mr. Palythorpe had gathered about him a staff of correspondents ranging from valets to tweeny maids who sent him, in addition to such items as were put into print, news that he could not publish, but could embody in letters written under an assumed name; and which, being addressed to the subjects of these paragraphs, might produce results which were at once lucrative and satisfactory.

Family scandals, the pitiful little tragedies which break and mar the lives of ordinary men and women, indiscreet letters left about by their careless recipients, these were the marketable commodities which gained for Mr. Palythorpe a handsome income, and might have continued, had he not made the mistake of attempting to blackmail a foolish girl, whose father was the cleverest lawyer of the day. A bad companion for the susceptible Tom Elmers.

“Palythorpe and Tom between them are going to give me trouble,” said Joe aloud.

But his prophecy was only realized in part. Mr. Palythorpe himself had small responsibility for the events which sent four men to their graves, and made the hair of Jimmy Blake go white, not in a night, but in one stormy afternoon on Salisbury Plain.

Chapter I

CHAPTER I.

To Jimmy Blake, mathematics were as the Greek of Socrates to the unlearned senator. As for the calculi, they would have filled him with awe and wonder, if he had had any idea of their functions.

When, in the days of his extreme youth, Jimmy had been asked to prove that a circle was equal in area to a triangle whose base was equal to the circumference, and whose height was equal to the radius of the circle, Jimmy magnanimously accepted his master's word that it was so, and passed on to something more human, Though by some extraordinary means he scraped through school with a certificate and emerged from Oxford with a sort of degree, his mathematical paper would have caused Archimedes to turn in his grave.

It was his fate to live in the closest contact with the scientific mind. Jimmy Blake was a rich man and by some accounted eccentric, though the beginning and end of his eccentricity was to be found in his dislike for work and his choice of Blackheath as a desirable residential quarter. He had inherited from his father a beautiful old Georgian house facing the heath, which an enterprising auctioneer would have truthfully described as “standing in extensive and parklike grounds.”

Such an agent might have gone on to rhapsodize over the old-world gardens of Blake's Priory, the comfort of the accommodation, the Adam decorations, and when he had exhausted its esthetic and sylvan charms, his utilitarian mind would probably have descended to such mundane advantages as the central heating, electric installation, and the character of the soil.

Within these grounds there had once been a veritable priory. At some period of the seventeenth century when Greenwich and Blackheath were fashionable rendezvous for the elite and fashion of Elizabeth's court, and when the stately palace by the river saw Raleigh and Leicester, and the grand gentlemen and dames of society strolling on the grassy slopes of the Royal Park, a Major Blake had acquired the property and had erected a pleasure house for himself and his friends. The house no longer existed, but the gardens he had planned still sent forth their ancient fragrance.

To Jimmy the priory was home and, though he maintained a modest flat at the back of Park Lane, he spent very little of his time there. The glories of Elizabeth's Greenwich had departed definitely and completely and were one with the Court of Jamshid. Aged pensioners shuffled along the marble halls where the bucks of the Virgin Queen had pranced and prinked and a heavy-footed Drake had stalked with news of victories on the Spanish Main. Incidentally Jimmy came from a long line of adventurers and could trace his descent from an uncle of the great Blake.

“It is a standing wonder to me, Jimmy,” said Van Roon one night, “why a man like you, with the blood of filibusters in your veins, should be content to loaf through life behind the steering wheel of a Rolls, having no other objective than the satisfaction of your unscientific curiosity.”

“No curiosity is unscientific,” said Jimmy lazily. “I'm surprised at you, Jerry! Didn't Huxley or one of those Johnnies say2”

Van Roon groaned. His was the scientific mind, against which Jimmy's intelligence was forever rubbing. Gerald van Roon was Jimmy's cousin, a brilliant genius to whom the world was a great laboratory, alternating with a small bedroom, with the furnishing of which he had never become acquainted, because he had not remained in the room long enough.

A tall, angular man with large, bony hands, a big, bulging forehead, two small, deep-set eyes which even his immense and powerful spectacles did not magnify, Gerald van Roon seemed the least suitable of companions for a man of Jimmy's tastes. He was exact, precise, orderly, had no human interests and absolutely no tastes in common with his happy-go-lucky cousin. And yet to the surprise of all who knew them, they lived together in the greatest harmony. Gerald amused Jimmy in one way and impressed him in another. The man's high principles, his almost fanatical passion for the truth which is, after all, the basic layer of the scientific mind, his childlike innocence in all worldly matters, his contempt for commerce and the rewards which commercial success brings, his extraordinary idealism—all these were very endearing qualities, which appealed strongly to the younger man.

“You're a funny devil,” said Jimmy throwing his napkin in a heap on the table. Gerald van Roon rolled his precisely and fitted the napkin ring exactly over the center of the roll. “I suppose you're going to that stink shop of yours?”

“I'm going to the laboratory,” said Gerald with a faint smile.

“Good Lord!” said Jimmy, shaking his head in wonder. “On a gorgeous day like this! Come with me to the sea, Jerry. I've got the old roller at the door, and in an hour and a half we'll be on the Sussex downs sniffing the beautiful ozone and watching the baa lambs frisk and gambol.”

“Come to my lab, and I'll make you some ozone in two seconds,” said Gerald, getting up from the table and fumbling for his pipe.

Jimmy groaned. His companion was at the door when he turned, his hand upon the handle.

“Jimmy, would you like to meet the prime minister?” he asked.

“Good Lord, no,” said Jimmy, astonished. “Why do you want me to meet the prime minister?”

“I don't really want you to meet him,” said Gerald, “but I thought you would enjoy the experience. Chapelle is very strong for science, and he is really an excellent mathematician.”

“I gathered that from his last budget,” said Jimmy grimly, for the prime minister was also chancellor of the exchequer.

He saw the puzzled look on Van Roon's face.

“A budget,” he explained politely, “is an apology made by a responsible minister in the House of Commons for the robberies he intends to commit in the ensuing year. But what about his mathematical qualities? I have no wish to meet mathematicians. Don't you think the scientific atmosphere in which I live is sufficiently thick without introducing a new brand of fog?”

“It doesn't matter,” said Gerald, opening the door. “Only he's giving a luncheon to a few interesting people.”

“Including yourself?”

“Including myself,” said Gerald gravely. “It is a luncheon party to meet Maggerson. He's coming back from America, but I suppose you know that?”

“Maggerson?” said Jimmy. “Who is Maggerson?”

If an actor were asked, “Who was Henry Irving?” or a doctor, “Who was Lister?” the questions would produce exactly the same tragic look of incredulity as dawned upon the ungainly face of Gerald van Roon.

“Who is Maggerson?” he repeated. “You're joking, Jimmy.”

“I'm not,” said Jimmy stoutly.

“You'll ask who Leibnitz was next!”

“Oh, I know all about him,” said Jimmy confidently. “He was a German socialist who was executed2”

“Leibnitz,” interrupted the other severely, “was the greatest mathematician Germany has produced. He was a contemporary of Newton and together they produced the calculus.”

“Good luck to 'em,” said Jimmy. “And when they produced it, what did they do with it? Anyway, what is a calculus? Isn't that a sort of multiplication table?”

Then Jimmy heard about Maggerson and the calculus he had discovered or invented or adopted—he was not certain which. It was the calculus which was accepted by all authorities and which had superseded Leibnitz and Newton's and Lagrange's and was known as “Maggerson's Calculus of Variation.”

“Is it a book?” asked Jimmy at last, “because, dear old thing, I'll buy it and read it up. I don't want to meet Mr. Maggerson without being able to tell him how his little story ends.”

Whereupon Gerald van Roon, realizing that he was up against an unreceptive mind, wandered from the room making gestures of despair.

There were lots of things that Jimmy had learned at school and at the university which he had contrived successfully to forget. It was his proud boast that the only definite fact about English literature which remained with him was that Chaucer drank beer at the Tabard Inn. Jimmy had drunk beer at the same inn, though it had been slightly renovated since the days of the Canterbury Pilgrims. It is equally true that he had not only forgotten all that he ever knew about mathematics, but that even the algebraical signs were as foolishly uninformative to him as they had been when he had first met them in a preparatory school.

On the road to Eastbourne he fell in with another young man who was driving a big Italia car to the common danger of the public. They met after the young man had passed him in a cloud of dust furiously hooting for passage room. They might not have come into contact with one another at all, but ahead was a police trap into which the furious driver fell.

Jimmy slowed his car when his experienced eyes detected a member of the Sussex constabulary concealed in the hedge and, coming up with the offender, he recognized in him the gilded son of John Ponter, printer to the king's most excellent majesty.

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Ferdinand. “'Lo! Yes?” this to the constable who was taking laborious particulars in a small notebook. “I live at Carlton House Mansions. Can't this thing be settled out of court, cheery old fellow?”

“It can't, sir,” said the representative of the law with some firmness. “You were going fifty-five miles an hour on that road and we've been having accidents here.”

“Am I the first accident you've had to-day?” asked Ferdie Ponter, and the constable grinned.

“Stop at the Chequers Inn. It's about a mile along the road,” yelled Ferdie as Blake went on. Jimmy waved his hand affirmatively.

At the Chequers they parked their cars and went into the stuffy little bar to drink beer.

“I shall lose my license this time,” said Ferdie gloomily.

“Better lose your license than lose your young life,” said Jimmy. “Where are you going in such a devil of a hurry, anyway?”

“I'm lunching with a little girl at Eastbourne,” said Ferdie, and then of a sudden, Jimmy struck the zinc bar against which he was leaning.

“Ferdie, your people do a tremendous lot of scientific printing, don't they?”

“I believe so,” said Ferdie. “I never go into the beastly works unless I can't help it. We've an awfully clever foreman, a man named Sennett.”

“Sennett,” repeated Jimmy thoughtfully. “Is he an oldish gentleman, rather like Mark Twain in appearance?”

“I never met Mark Twain,” confessed Ferdinand, gulping at his beer.

“I know the old boy. He comes to see Gerald with proofs of books and things.”

“That's the chap. We print and publish all Van Roon's books, and devilish dry they are,” said Ferdie. “Another tankard of nut-brown ale, good dame,” this to the brass-haired lady behind the counter.

“Ferdie, what is a calculus?”

“What?” said the puzzled Ferdinand.

“What is a calculus? I've got an idea I know,” said Jimmy, “but I can't exactly place the fellow. I'm going to meet a man who's rather a whale on the subject.”

“Calculus? I seem to remember something about it,” said Ferdinand, scratching his nose. “Isn't that the stuff they used to teach us at school? A sort of thing for calculating distances and speeds, revolutions and things? You're not going in for that sort of tommyrot, are you?”

“No, only I'm meeting this fellow Maggerson.”

“Oh, Maggerson? We print him, too,” said the honorary printer. “A wild-looking Johnny like Paderewski, though I don't think he plays the piano. As a matter of fact, we make a lot of money out of him.”

He wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief and strode out of the bar and Jimmy, paying the score, followed. And there and then might have ended his feeble interest in the calculus of Mr. Walter Maggerson, but for the fact that when he got back to Blackheath in time to change for dinner he discovered that Van Roon had two visitors. Steele, his valet, who was the information bureau of Blake's Priory, supplied the intelligence.

“Mr. van Roon's compliments, sir, and will you not dress for dinner to-night because he has two people whom he must ask to stay and they are not dressed.”

“Certainly, Moses,” said Jimmy. “Put out the suit I wear when I'm not dressed. Who are the gentlemen?”

“There's a gentleman and a lady, sir. Well, she's not exactly a lady,” he added, “a young girl, if I might describe her so.”

“If she looks like a young girl, she probably is, Moses, so there is no great danger of your overstating the case,” said Jimmy.

A few minutes later Gerald came into his dressing room.

“Do you mind if I ask two people to stay to dinner to-night, Jimmy?” he demanded.

“Of course not,” said Jimmy, a little surprised, for his cousin did not usually apologize for his invitations.

“The fact is,” Gerald hesitated, “something has gone wrong with that book of mine, and Ponters, the printers, have sent down their foreman. You remember him—old Sennett!”

“Sennett?” said Jimmy in surprise. “I was talking about him to-day. What has happened?”

“I hardly know,” said Gerald, “but apparently some scamp at the works, out of sheer mischief, has been interpolating all sorts of ridiculous sentences and statements in the scientific works which Ponters publish. They have only recently discovered this, and one of the first books that seems to have been tampered with was my book on 'The Distribution of Living Forms.'”

“What's that about?” asked Jimmy, interested. “It sounds like a textbook on beauty choruses to me.”

“Do you mind if they stay?” asked the other, ignoring the flippancy.

“Not a bit. Of course, I don't mind. What is the girl like?”

“The girl?” Jerry rubbed his chin absently. “Oh, she's—er—a girl. She has rather a perfect jaw. I was very much struck by her jaw.”

“Is she pretty? I suppose I needn't ask that if you were very much struck by her jaw,” said Jimmy.

“Pretty?” Gerald looked out of the window. “I suppose she may be considered pretty. She isn't malformed in any way.”

“You're inhuman,” said Jimmy hopelessly. “Get out before you corrupt Moses!”

“The fact is”—Gerald was obviously nervous—“I might have to keep Mr. Sennett here till quite late going through these proofs. Would you mind driving the girl home? Of course, we could telephone for a taxi, but her father is rather nervous about her, and I think somebody should accompany her.”

Jimmy smiled.

“Anything in the sacred cause of science,” he said solemnly.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II.

Jimmy Blake was twenty-seven, above medium height, lean of build and of the athletic type which keen tennis produces and which the war hardened and aged a little. There were lines in his thin, brown face which men of twenty-seven do not usually carry, but Jimmy had spent three years behind the controls of a fighting plane and the wings of the Dark Angel had brushed his cheek a dozen times and had departed. The reaction from the hard realities of war had not found expression in a way which is painfully usual. He had fled from the rigors of war to the lazy, go-as-you-please life which a wealthy man could afford. He was a wholesome, normal youth with a wholesome normal respect for his fellows, be they men or women, but he was the stuff from which confirmed bachelors are made and the prospect of spending an evening with the daughter of a master printer neither alarmed nor pleased him.

He went down to dinner when the gong sounded and found the party already at the table, which was Gerald's way. He recognized immediately the white-haired, white-mustached printer, and then he turned his eyes to the girl who sat at Gerald's right hand. And here he had his first pleasant shock. Remembering Sennett's age, he expected a woman of thirty-five and pictured her a little stout and a little awkward.

But this girl could not have been more than twenty-two. She was petite and dainty and dressed with delightful simplicity—the kind of dress that every man admires and so few women have the courage to wear. Her face was delicately molded. The eyes were a deep blue, almost violet, and when they looked up at him gravely, inquiringly, he experienced a queer and not unpleasant thrill.

“This is Mr. Blake,” introduced Gerald. “This is Miss Sennett, Jimmy. You know her father.”

Jimmy shook hands with both and sat down slowly. He could not take his eyes from the girl's face. She fascinated him, though why he could not understand, for he had met many beautiful women, women more stately and more impressive than she, and they had left him cold. She neither flushed nor grew embarrassed under a stare which she might reasonably have regarded as offensive, and Jimmy, recognizing his lapse of manners, turned his attention to the father.

“I was with young Ponter to-day,” said Jimmy.

Mr. Sennett did not seem impressed and the young man gathered that the heir to Ponters' publishing house was not regarded as an admirable member of society.

Jimmy could never recall what they talked about, Delia and he. Her name was Bedelia and she had been christened in the days when Bedelia was really a pretty name and before it had been promoted by the ragtime song writer to its present-day notoriety.

Gerald and Sennett were, of course, absorbed in the book. Old Sennett was, like most printers, a brilliantly knowledgeable man, for the printing trade represents the aristocracy of intellect. He was interesting, too, in another way. He told stories of work done in the locked room where government minutes are printed and which only he and another man occupied in the dark days of the war, when the cabinet secrets he “set” might have been sold to the enemy for fabulous sums.

Gerald and the old man went off to Van Roon's study.

“Now I'm afraid you're going to be bored,” said Jimmy as he showed her to the drawing-room. “I can't play or sing or do anything clever—I can't even give you a selection on the Maggerson calculus!”

Delia Sennett smiled.

“He's a very wonderful man, Mr. Blake,” she said, and he stared at her.

“Don't tell me you're a mathematician, too,” he gasped and she laughed. She had a sweet, low, musical laugh which was music to Jimmy's ears.

“I know nothing about it,” said Delia, “and I've been scared to death lest you were as clever as Mr. van Roon. He's a relation of yours, isn't he?”

Jimmy nodded.

“His mother was my mother's sister. She married a Dutch scientist, or, rather, a scientist with a Dutch name,” he explained. “Jerry and I have lived together in this house since we were kids and you're quite right about his being clever. You were equally discerning when you discovered I was not.”

“I didn't think you were very keen on scientific subjects,” she corrected.

“And I'm not,” said Jimmy. “Are you?”

She shook her head. He tried to keep the conversation on the personal note, but he observed she was uneasy and glanced at her watch.

“By Jove!” he said, suddenly jumping up. “I promised to see you home. Are you in any hurry?”

“I want to be home before ten,” she said, “I have a lesson to give at eight o'clock, to-morrow morning.”

She smiled at his look of astonishment.

“I am a teacher of languages,” she said; “perhaps I don't look as intelligent as that?”

He protested.

“That is why I am interested in Mr. van Roon,” she went on. “Dutch and German are my two best languages. It was awfully disappointing to discover that he was so English.”

Jimmy chuckled.

“That's where you fall down in your analysis, Miss Sennett,” he said. “Jerry talks English, but thinks Dutch! The most terrible thing he does is to make all his notes in shorthand—and in Dutch! How does that strike you for a complicated procedure?”

“Do you know Mr. Maggerson?” she asked a little while later, after he had telephoned to the garage for the car and she was making preparations to depart.

“I'm the only man in the world who doesn't,” said Jimmy. “It is queer how greatness can exist right under your nose without your being aware of the fact. Do you know him?”

She shook her head.

“Daddy knows him well,” she said.

“What is wrong with Jerry's proofs?” he asked, and for a moment she was silent. He thought she did not know, but she undeceived him.

“He has been the victim of a very mean and contemptible action directed against my father,” she said with unexpected vigor. “Father is responsible that every book which goes out of Ponters' is typographically accurate. Daddy's firm prints all the big, scientific books, including Mr. Maggerson's, and daddy has got a bad enemy, a man whom he helped and who has no reason to hate him—oh, it was mean, mean!”