II (4)

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The first that Esdaile knew of all this was from the younger of Mollie's two maids. Monty and Audrey had arranged to dispense with the services of these two domestics, but Philip, still lingering on, had wanted the younger one at least back. She had promised to come, but had not done so, and Philip had sought her out. Thereupon she had said that she would rather not come.

"Why?" Philip had asked; but she had given no satisfactory reason.

He had then turned to the second maid, but with no better result.

After all, it didn't matter. It was very little trouble for himself and Monty to make their own breakfasts. They could take their other meals at the Chelsea Arts Club, and there would be no difficulty in getting a woman one or two days a week to clean.

Then, to his extreme astonishment, on the very day after Mollie's departure for Santon, he left Monty to a sandwich-and-coffee luncheon in the studio and came out of his house to find Lennox Street almost as full of people as it had been on the morning when the parachute had descended on the studio roof.

"What's the matter? Anything happened?" he asked the nearest loiterer at his gate; but he did not learn what had really happened till he reached the Club.

Certainly the joke, if it was a joke, appeared to be "on him." Simultaneously two grinning fellow-members thrust into his hand that morning's issue of the Roundabout. The Roundabout, I should say, is the Circus's (much inferior) rival.

It contained a photograph of Esdaile's house, with the spot where the parachute had descended marked with a cross.

It was, of course, a thousand pities. No man likes the house he lives in held up to the idle public gaze. Had the annoying thing been submitted to my own paper I could have stopped it. Had it been a big thing I might even have stopped its appearance in the Roundabout, for, while we cut one another's throats in detail, we have our understandings in larger matters. Hurriedly I scanned the rest of the paper to see whether any letterpress went with the picture. None did. There was simply the photograph, with a couple of quite innocent descriptive lines underneath.

"Seems to me rather a stumer," I said to Willett. "Is Hodgson losing his grip a bit?"

"Haven't noticed it," Willett replied. "Sound man Hodgson. Doesn't often do things without a reason. I think we might go a bit slower on actresses and mannequins. This is the crash we were talking about the other morning, isn't it?"

"Yes. A wash-out I should have said."

"Perhaps he's playing the local-interest card. He's doing that just now. I don't see why we shouldn't do more of it."

"I think we'll wait for a better story than that anyway," I replied. "Well, let's get to work——"

But all that afternoon the thing worried me. It was a trifle, perhaps, but it was a trifle on the wrong side. More, unlike some other trifles, I already saw how dangerously capable of further development it was. I have told you what the attitude of the Press was to this question of civil flying. It was one of simply awaiting events. But all the time events were fermenting, so to speak. High over our heads Olympian minds were shaping and re-shaping policies and plans, and Argus eyes were tirelessly watching for indications of the receptivity of the popular mind. Had Hodgson heard something that we had not? As you sometimes see an insignificant person's affairs, of no interest in themselves, solemnly weighed by the Lords of Appeal because of some novel and far-reaching point they raise, was something in the nature of a Test Case now being sought? Had we on the Circus been wrong in assuming that the idea was simply to catch and make an example of the careless joy-rider and the idiot who stunted over towns? Was some more important point to be raised, and had Hodgson had wind of it?

I was inclined to think not, and for the reason I have just given. Make a thing big enough, and we hang fairly well together; but take the whips off, so to speak, and we go as we please. If it had been as important as all that we should have heard of it. Willett, who is a youngster of parts, was in all probability right. Hodgson was merely catering for the local interest.

But still I was uneasy, and my uneasiness had nothing to do with the annoyance the publication of the photograph of the house in Lennox Street must cause Esdaile. I was thinking of far graver possible consequences. Even the lightest measure of Publicity is not a thing to be trifled with. Here I know what I am talking about. The merry fellows of the Chelsea Arts Club might pull Esdaile's leg about his haunted house, and want to know whether the White Lady dropped any hairpins as she passed, or if the horrible shrouded figure with the crimson-dripping hands would make a good film; but we journalists have to take these things a good deal more seriously than that. Publicity, sometimes of the most incredibly silly kind, is our meat and drink and hourly breath. All day and every day our brains are on the stretch in our endeavors to secure it. We bring our heaviest guns to bear on the elusive thing, are sure we can't possibly miss it this time, let fly, and lo! we have missed after all. Like a pithball on a fountain, it is still dancing there untouched, and any penny peashooter may bring it down when all our trained intelligence has failed.

And what would be the effects on our Case if it came down?

Well, you can see that for yourself. In obscurity lay our hope that the thing might remain what on the face of it it appeared to be. Switch the arc-lamps of the great papers on to it, with the whole power-house of dynamic government behind them, and all was over. Not an aspect of the Case would go unprobed to the very bottom, and the hungry newspapers would find themselves, not with a mere aeroplane crash that could be dismissed in a couple of lines, but with a really fine fat, first-class Murder Case that would keep them merrily going for weeks.

And I can assure you that we all wanted very badly indeed just such a Case. We wanted it for more reasons than one. We wanted it, as we always do, in the ordinary way of our business, but much more we wanted it to take people's minds off other matters. We wanted it for the same reason that made us resolutely print those pictures of girls bathing during the blackest days of the War. We wanted it because the Man in the Public-house was restless and showed a disposition to pry into affairs in which his interference is only wanted when a General Election draws near. Bathing girls were very well in their way; a really high-class line in Divorce Cases would have outstripped them easily, if I may be permitted the unintentional expression; but the man who could have given us on the Circus the first Assassination in the Air could have named his own price for it.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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