RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
Ladbroke (Lionel Day) Black (1877-1940) was an English writer and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Urquhart. His life and career are summarised in the following entry in Steve Holland's Bear Alley blog:
Black, born in Burley-in-Wharfdale, Yorkshire, on 21 June 1877, was educated in Ireland and at Cambridge where he earned a B.A. He became assistant editor of The Phoenix in 1897 before moving to London in 1899 where he joined The Morning Herald as assistant editor in 1900. He later became assistant editor of the Echo in 1901, joint editor of Today, 1904-05, and special writer on the Weekly Dispatch, 1905-11. After a forgettable first novel, "A Muddied Oaf" (1902), co-written with Francis Rutter, Black collaborated on the collection "The Mantle of the Emperor" (1906) with Robert Lynd, later literary editor of the News Chronicle. He then produced a series of novels in collaboration with [Thomas] Meech under the name Paul Urquhart, beginning with "The Eagles" (1906). Black also wrote for various magazines and newspapers, sometimes using the pen-name Lionel Day. His books ranged from romances to Sexton Blake detective yarns. His recreations included sports (boxing and rugby), reading and long walks. He lived in Wendover, Bucks, for many years and was Chairman of the Mid-Bucks Liberal Party in 1922-24. He died on 27 July 1940, aged 63, survived by his wife (Margaret, née Ambrose), two sons and two daughters."
HAROLD SMITHSON was the great joke of the office, especially after the war broke out. They would ask him when he was I going to enlist, and facetiously speculate on the insomnia the Kaiser would probably suffer from when he learnt the news that so redoubtable a champion had joined the ranks of the Allies. Jimmy Dorrell, the third clerk, was particularly facetious on the subject.
And Harold Smithson said nothing. His clothes were shabby, in stature he was under-sized, and he wore spectacles. It was true there was something in his face, had anyone taken the trouble to study it, which was prepossessing. It was a strong face in spite of the patient sweetness of its expression, and his brown eyes, when they were not masked by the lens of his glasses, had the quality of a poet.
But then nobody did study Harold Smithson. They glanced at his small figure, his mean clothes, his narrow chest, sampled perhaps his timid, hesitating manner—and dismissed him. He was distinctly of the stuff that butts are made of.
And yet in the body of Harold Smithson there burnt the soul of a hero. He told nobody, of course, for he had no intimates, being inclined indeed to worship from a long way off those he loved, instead of making them his friends, but as soon as the war broke out he tried to enlist.
He tried everywhere, and everywhere he was met with contumely. The doctors passed scoffing remarks on his nude figure, and told him to run away and not waste their time. Big recruiting-sergeants glowered at him. Once, indeed, when he had been turned down for about the twentieth time, a kindly officer who was passing through the room caught sight of his twitching face and the tears that had gathered in the half-blinded eyes, and moved by one of those generous instincts that come to his mind took him aside, and patted him on the shoulder.
'Never mind, my lad,' he said. 'You've shown the right spirit in trying. You've set an example. I wish there were more like you. But we can't all fight—and you can do your duty at home.'
That had put great heart into Harold Smithson. He recognised at last that the honour of fighting in the ranks of his countrymen could never be his, and he set about seeking how he could do his duty at home.
And his opportunity came soon. He had read in a newspaper that those who were unable to fight might do a great public service by taking over the work of those who could. In his simplicity he spoke to Mr. Mackintosh, his employer, on that subject.
Now, as it chanced, Mr. Mackintosh was a man with a veritable pin-point of a soul. He had buried his ideals, if he had ever had any, long ago in his ledgers. It was from no patriotic consideration that he weighed Smithson's suggestion. He worked it out as a sum in arithmetic, and acted on the result. Business, of course, had fallen off, but to dismiss any of his employees would bring down upon him the censure of his customers. That would be bad business.
But here he saw a way out of the difficulty. He could get rid of two clerks, advertise the fact widely that he was paying them half salaries, and keeping their places open for them while they were at the war, and get Smithson to do their work as well as his own for exactly he same remuneration that he was at present receiving. He would save by this means, he calculated, something like two hundred a year.
To arrive at such a conclusion and to act were for Mr. Mackintosh one and the same thing. He summoned Jimmy Dorrell and another clerk to his private office, pointed out to them that he felt he could no longer stand in their way, that it was every man's duty to fight for his country, and that they could go out and enlist there and then with the certainty that they would receive half their salaries while they were with the colours, and would be able to return to their places when the War was over. It was very cleverly done, for it left the two clerks no alternative but to go, and one of them at least had no wish to do anything of the kind.
Nature had cast Jimmy Dorrell's figure in the heroic mould. He was six foot, well set up, with a chest worthy of a guardsman. No one could sing patriotic songs with such a rich fervour as he; none could talk about the war with such a grim, set face or suggest so admirably the bulldog valour that fights against overwhelming odds, and never recognises defeat.
And yet Jimmy Dorrell was a coward. He hated the thought of service in the ranks, but he had to go. For the first few minutes the dramatic possibilities of the situation carried him through. He came back into the clerks' office with his lips close-set, and a little pallor in his cheeks which enhanced rather than detracted from the effect of his pose.
'Well, good-bye, boys,' he said ostentatiously, closing his ledger. 'I'm off to take a hand in the game.'
They crowded round him, patting him on the back, and congratulating him, telling him what a fine fellow he was, and urging him to give the Germans what for.
Harold Smithson watched him from the other end of the room with a glow of enthusiasm in his cheeks and a certain dimness about his glasses. He did not join in the congratulations, but when Dorrell, with a swaggering stride, walked out of the office, he slipped quietly after him, and caught him up in the passage.
'I say, Dorrell,' he whispered, 'just one moment. I should very much like to shake your hand before you go.'
The hero extended his hand with a half-contemptuous, half- patronising air. 'Thanks, Smithson,' he said.
'And—I should like to tell you something, Dorrell,' Smithson went on timidly. 'I'll look after Marjory, while you're away and see that so harm comes to her.'
Jimmy Dorrell laughed the frank, deep-chested laugh that had won him the title of 'good fellow' on so many occasions. 'Very kind of you, old chap,' he said, 'but Marjory would look better after you after her. I'm afraid you're not much use as a protector; but thanks all the same.'
He made great fun of this little conversation when he saw Marjory Parsons that evening.
'Fancy that absurd little dot-and-carry-one chap talking about looking after you. Marjory. I should like to have punched him for his impudence; but then, I really think he meant well.'
And Marjory smiled—a non-committal, inscrutable smile—which suggested to Jimmy Dorrell's conceit-encrusted mind that she fully appreciated the joke.
HAROLD SMITHSON did the work of three men at the office without a murmur. He was there at eight o'clock in the morning and took some of the books back with him, principally because by this means he was enabled to meet Marjory as she left her work and accompany her home.
Smithson worshipped the very ground on which Marjory walked. He thought there was no such sweet, no such beautiful woman in the world. And it was worship unalloyed by any considerations of self. He never thought of her at any time, even in his wildest dreams, as ever belonging to himself. She had been created by Providence as the only fit and proper mate for such a hero as Jimmy Dorrell.
This, to Smithson, seemed an obvious and incontrovertible fact. What Marjory thought did not transpire. She seemed to bear, rather than to enjoy, his delicately tendered chaperonage. She sat by his side on the tram and listened while he talked—and his talk was always about Jimmy Dorrell.
Sometimes those blue eyes of hers, when he was not looking, would steal a glance partly of wonder at his flushed, enthusiastic face. Otherwise, her attitude towards him was like everybody else's—an attitude of contemptuous good nature. She endured him.
There came an evening when Marjory Parsons did not make her appearance on the pavement outside her office at the usual time. Harold Smithson, after waiting some time, summoned up enough courage to enquire of the caretaker where Miss Parsons was.
'She ain't come to-day,' the old woman snapped. 'I heard one of them young ladies say she was ill; that's all I know about it.'
That news sent Harold Smithson back to the suburb in which he lived in a perfect sweat of anxiety. Somehow he felt he was responsible to Jimmy Dorrell for Marjory's illness. Whether he could be reasonably held to have failed in his promise by not sheltering her from hostile germs, he did not pause to consider.
He went straight to the little red brick house in which she lived with her mother, and with his heart in his mouth prepared to hear the worst. And it was quite as bad as his gloomy forebodings had suggested. Mrs. Parsons, who interviewed him in the drawing-room, took the line that somebody was deliberately responsible for what had happened.
'It's no use complaining, of course—but there it is. Pleurisy, the doctor says. Probably a month's illness. She must have caught a chill. It's riding on the top of those trams, as I've always told her.' She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief as if she was the sufferer and not her daughter.
'And how are we to get on, I should like to know. The bit of money I have only just pays the rent. Of course Marjory's salary's stopped. And we've no money saved. And there is all that private work that has come in—there's three big manuscripts to be typed—she'd only just managed to get those authors to employ her. Of course, she'll lose that connection. We shall be sold up. It really is too bad."
To Harold Smithson it seemed that there was a very proper note of accusation in her voice. He ought not to have allowed her to ride on top of a tram; he ought to have seen that she was properly wrapped up; it could only be attributed to his carelessness that Marjory had caught a chill and that all these terrible disasters had befallen Mrs. Persons.
'I—I am awfully sorry,' be stammered, and then, suddenly inspired by a bright idea, he added, 'If you'd let me, I could type those manuscripts. I've got a machine of my own, you know. Of course I couldn't do it as well as Miss Parsons, but perhaps the authors wouldn't know, and anyway it would keep together the connection, and you would have that money to go on with.'
For some time Mrs. Parsons was not quite satisfied in her own mind as to whether Smithson intended to keep the money he earned or not.
When this was made clear she adopted an almost hostile attitude, finding some difficulty in accepting favour.
'Well, you may if you like,' she said, 'but you must promise to be very careful of the manuscripts. It's very important work, of course, and I don't really know what Marjory would say if she knew I handed it over to somebody else. You must promise to be very careful—on that understanding I may as well let you do as you suggest. It is really too bad that all this should fall on me at such a moment.'
Five minutes later Harold Smithson went back to his lodgings with the manuscripts under his arm. That night he finished his books by ten o'clock, and, then, taking the cover off his machine he typed until far in the morning, by which time the keys had become so blurred that he went to bed.
For a whole fortnight he stuck heroically to his task. He felt in some way that he was being of service, and as his fingers played over the keys he built fanciful pictures in his mind of the enemy he was indirectly helping to kill away in the trenches the other side of the Channel. He at least had released two men for the war—one of them a man among men, the man who had won Marjory's heart.
He found time every day to write to Marjory, and his letters, like his conversation, were full of Jimmy Dorrell. He picked up pieces of gossip from the office concerning his hero, and elaborated them innocently.
And at last—it was the very day upon which he completed his typing—he told her with a kind of breathless exultation that Dorrell's regiment had been ordered to France. Their hero at last was to have an opportunity of winning the laurels they knew he would win to lay at his lady's feet.
He left this letter by hand, as it was necessary for him to have an interview with Mrs. Parsons. He had just received the money for the work he had done, and this had to be given over to Mrs. Parsons.
Marjory's mother was very particular in checking the amount, and for some time carried on a querulous argument as to whether one of the authors had not paid a shilling too little.
Harold Smithson came away from that interview, having paid the shilling in dispute out of his own pocket, in a somewhat depressed mood. He tried to shake off this feeling by a long walk, and it was already dark when he turned up the flight of stone steps that led to the front door of his lodgings. As he did so somebody darted forward and put his hand upon his shoulder.
'Smithson, old chap,' said the familiar voice of Jimmy Dorrell, 'would you let me come and stay with you to-night?'
Smithson looked up with a start. 'Why, of course, he stammered, 'but I thought you had crossed the Channel to France.'
In the darkness the other's face was visible only as a white mask. 'Take me inside,' he whispered. 'Quick man; they may nab me unless. I'll tell you everything there.'
IN the little sitting-room, when the lamp had been lit, Dorrell made a request for food.
'I haven't had anything to eat for twenty-four hours,' he said, and laughed like an hysterical child.
Smithson regarded him with great concern. He was evidently in a pitiable state. His khaki was torn and muddy and soaked with the rain; his face was unshaven, and there was a haggard look about his cheeks. But Smithson was glad—glad and flattered—that his hero should select him as the person to assist him in his evident straits.
'I'll get you something at once, Dorrell,' he exclaimed, and dashing out of the room had a hurried interview with his landlady before running off to the neighbouring shops.
Within ten minutes of his return a fire had been lit in the grate and Dorrell was sitting down to a prime cut of beefsteak, a bottle of beer, and a variety of etceteras which Smithson's hospitable mind had suggested. There was a whisky and soda to follow when he had eaten, and with this in his hand and his feet on the mantelpiece Jimmy Dorrell began to blossom out into the Dorrell of old.
'And now,' Smithson said, wiping his glasses, and glancing benignly at his guest. 'Now, Dorrell you shall tell me all that has happened.
The other made a grimace.
'Nothing's happened,' he said thickly.
'It was awfully good of you to think of running up to see me before leaving for the front,' Smithson remarked. 'You don't know what a pleasure it is to me to have you here.'
He rubbed his hands together with a gesture of delight and then, as the other made no comment, he went on:
'Marjory's getting on all right. I didn't tell you, because I thought it might bother you, and there was nothing really serious, but she hasn't been well during the last few weeks—has had to keep to her bed. She was down to-day for the first time—a little thin perhaps, her mother says, but getting on nicely. You'll certainly be able to see her tomorrow.'
Again Dorrell laughed, and, gulping down his whisky and soda, held his glass out for more.
'You're a good old stick, Smithson,' he said. 'I'm awfully obliged to you for giving me a hiding-place.'
He paused a moment or two, and then, looking up from a contemplation of his muddy boots on the mantelpiece, glanced at his host for the first time full in tie face. 'You couldn't do with me for a day or so, I suppose? he said.
'Why, of course,' replied Smithson, with a flush of pleasure. 'My landlady's making up another bed in my room, and you can occupy it for as long as you like.'
He had put on his glasses now and burned his beaming eyes to Dowell's face. Something in the other's expression—some haunting terror—a look as of a hunted animal—made him start.
'Dorrell,' he exclaimed, 'is anything the matter?'
'Yes, everything's the matter,' he answered breathlessly. 'I'm sick of life—sick of everything.'
'But you are going out to fight the enemy, Dorrell!'
'Am I?' retorted the other savagely. 'I enlisted for home service in the Territorials. They got me to volunteer for the front by a trick. Lined us up against a brick wall, that old beast of a colonel did, and told all those who wished to remain at home to take one step to the rear. Of course, we couldn't. And then he made us a long rotten speech, thanking us for what he called out patriotic sense of duty.'
Smithson was staring at him in amazement.
'Then you didn't want to go to the front?'
'Haven't I told you?' Dorrell answered savagely. 'That is exactly what happened.'
Smithson felt as if all the foundations of his world were crumbling beneath his feet. But he clung desperately to his idealised conception of this man. After all there might be private treasons for his not wishing to leave the country.
'It does sound rather like sharp piece of work,' he admitted. 'But I suppose there is no way out of it. When does your regiment go?'
'It's gone,' the other answered, his face flushing.
Smithson jumped to his feet.
'Do you mean to say you've deserted?' he gasped.
They seemed suddenly to exchange places. Insignificant-looking little figure though he was, Smithson was the dominant personality of the two.
Dorrell sat there white-faced and ashamed, cowering before the other's fixed gaze.
'Yes, I've deserted. Don't be hard on me, Smithson. I—I couldn't have gone to the front. I ran away yesterday morning before they left, and I've been hiding and skulking about ever since. You'll stand by me, won't you, Smithson?—for the sake of old times. You won't hand me over to the authorities?'
Smithson was silent for several seconds. He was thinking furiously. Which way did his duty lie? Clearly he ought to inform the police of this deserter. But there was Marjory—Marjory would break her heart if she knew. She loved this man.
'All right,' he said, and there was a note of contempt in his voice. 'You can stay here until the hue and cry has blown over.'
He had begun to walk up and down the floor of the tiny, room, but he paused presently in front of Dorrell.
'I didn't think it of you, Dorrell,' he said. 'I didn't think it of you.'
TO say that Jimmy Dorrell was profoundly miserable for the next fortnight would be to express but feebly the state of his mind. He had fled for refuge to Smithson's lodgings in preference to any of his other friends and acquaintances, because Smithson was the sort of man, he felt, who could be induced to do anything.
And Smithson, he had discovered, was not at all this sort of man. He gave him a bed, it is true, and food and a hiding-place, but beyond that he refused to go.
Dorrell had proposed to exchange his uniform for a suit of ordinary clothes, to grow a beard and moustache, and so disguised go into the world again.
But Smithson wouldn't hear of it. He wasn't going to harbour any deserter, he said. The law would not look upon him as being guilty of this offence as long as Dorrell wore his uniform. If he countenanced anything of the kind, it could obviously be brought up against him that he knew Dorrell to be a deserter and was helping him to break his oath. On this point he was adamant.
The result was that Dorrell had to keep indoors the whole day long, stealing out after nightfall for a breath of fresh air. And there were other matters which increase his dejection. Smithson kept a tight hand on the whisky bottle. He was unable to find any remedy for his sufferings in that direction. And there was the question of money. He was penniless, and Smithson—stingy, stuck- up little prig that he was—declined even to make him an allowance.
As the days wore on he began seriously to think of giving himself up, and exchanging for the comparative freedom of a trench half full of water this life of imprisonment. And that was a matter of fact, the very result that Smithson was anxious to bring about. Jimmy Dorrell had fallen completely from the high place he had occupied in his esteem. The idol was shattered. He saw now clearly that this man was by nature a blustering bully— and what was worse, a coward. But he hoped that it might be possible to reform him—not for his own sake so much as for the sake of Marjory.
If he could induce Dorrell by this form of pressure to go out and do his duty, Marjory need never know what had happened, and consequently would not suffer. He continued to write to Marjory in the old strain.
His letters were full of Jimmy Dorrell, but instead of his statements being slightly embroidered facts, they were now pure fiction. He put into his letters some of those pictures that floated up before his eyes when he had been typing her manuscript for her. And they sounded most convincing.
Jimmy Dorrell was always the hero. But he did not visit Mrs. Parsons or her daughter. He felt that as an imitator of Machiavelli he was better with his pen than with his tongue, and so he left the little red brick house where Marjory lived severely alone.
He heard by letter that she was completely recovered, and was looking out for some more work, and hoped he would come to see her. But, true to his resolve, he took no notice of this invitation. She would want to talk of Dorrell, and that would be a task beyond his diplomatic skill. And he made other alterations in his habits.
An evening spent with Dorrell was unbearable, and so instead of bringing his books home from the office, as had been, his wont, he stayed behind, getting back when Dorrell was safely in bed.
Saturday afternoons were a difficulty, but he solved this problem by never returning from the city until four in the afternoon, and then, making the excuse that he had a visit to pay, hurrying out as soon as he had changed his clothes.
It was on the third Saturday of his visitor's stay that Smithson first fully realised the legal dangers he was running. At the corner of his road he was stopped by two burly-looking men in plain clothes, but with an undisguisable military, air about them, who asked him certain questions.
'You haven't seen a young soldier about here from the ——?' have you?' one man asked.
'A friend of ours,' the other went on. 'He's on leave and he asked us to look him up if we were in this neighbourhood. We can't remember the exact address, but it is somewhere about here.'
Smithson felt that he was turning pale, but he nerved himself with an effort.
'I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid I can't help you,' he said.
'Never seen no soldier about here, I suppose. A tallish chap— about six foot?'
He proceeded to give a very fair list of Jimmy Dorrell's points.
Smithson's uneasiness increased. 'I'm afraid I can't help you,' he repeated, and then, muttering good afternoon and saying something incoherent about being afraid he would be late for his appointment, he ran down the street. It was a long street and his lodgings were right at the other end.
When he got there and let himself in with his latchkey, he could see the two men marching shoulder to shoulder steadily down the pavement. He felt that Dorrell would be caught unless he escaped instantly. Taking two steps at a time he ran up the stairs. The door of his sitting-room was open, but as he was about to give it a push, the sound of voices from within the room made him pause.
'What's Smithson?' Dorrell was saying with a snarl. 'A little, rotten, undersized clerk. You'll be telling me next, Marjory, that you're in love with him.'
Smithson went white to the lips and his whole body trembled. Had he wished to he could not have entered the room at that moment.
'You to talk like that,' answered Marjory's sweet voice, raised to a tone of angry scorn. 'You, a great skulking coward who ran away from a fight. Why, Mr. Smithson's worth fifty of you.'
Jimmy Dorrell muttered something contemptuous under his breath that Smithson could not hear.
'I don't care what you say,' Marjory went on. 'Why did you ever think that I loved you? I never told you I did. You amused me—that was all. I always knew the sort of man you were.'
'Oh, so Smithson's your sort, is he, after all?' Dorrell exclaimed and laughed.
'Yes. He's a man—a real man. I don't mind your laughter and your sneers. I know what he is. He's doing his own work and your work down at the office so that you might go out and fight, and when I was ill he kept all my connection together for me— all for your sake—so that you shouldn't be worried about me. As if I cared whether you were worried or not! And you ran away! it's like you—like the sort of man you are—all padding and pretence—to say horrid things about the man who has befriended you and given you a hiding place.'
She paused a moment as if to gather breath.
'If you want to know, I do love him! There! I've told you and I'm not ashamed. He's the best and bravest and sweetest man I ever met, and I'd marry him tomorrow and think I was the luckiest girl in the world if he'd ask me.'
Something seemed to take hold of Smithson's throat. He choked, and the sound seemed to loosen the spell that was upon him. He staggered into the room, his face flushed, and his big brown eyes lit up with wonder and happiness.
'Marjory!' he stammered. 'I couldn't help hearing—is it true what you said just now?'
She turned swiftly, and her face, that had been pale with anger and doom, changed instantly.
'Didn't you know?' she answered.
'Marjory—my sweetest Marjory,' he gasped, I can't believe it. I—I didn't think anybody could love me.'
'I do,' she said simply. And at that, with a certain timid wonder, he took her in his arms and kissed her.
'Oh, Marjory!' was all he could say.
It was several seconds before they woke from this happiness to a sense of their surroundings. When they did so they found that Dorrell had gone. Downstairs they could hear the banging of the front door. Smithson ran hastily to the window.
'He will be caught,' he cried; 'the police are outside.'
'Doesn't he deserve to be caught, dearest?' Marjory said.
Smithson's head was out of the window now, and even as he looked down into the street he saw Dorrell walk straight into the arms of the two detectives. There were a few words, and then the men marched him away, one on either side.
'They've got him,' he said, withdrawing his head. Marjory Field out her arms to him.
'I don't care,' she exclaimed. 'Haven't I got you?'
And to that question there was only on possible answer.