Color Scheme

Chapter VII Torpedo

“It appears,” said Dikon later that evening, “that Mr. Falls is a sort of amateur of anatomy and that Ackrington is his god. I am convinced that the revelation came only just in time to avert bloodshed. As it is the doctor seems prepared to suffer the adulation of his rather affected disciple.”

“When is Falls going to appear?” asked Gaunt. “Why didn’t he dine?”

“I understand he took old Ackrington’s advice, had a prolonged stew in the most powerful of the mud baths, and retired sweating to bed. Ackrington suspects a wrong diagnosis and is going to prod his lumbar region.”

“A terrifying experience. He tried it on my leg. Dikon, have you ever seen anything like the transformation in that child? She was almost beautiful with the dress in her hands. She will be quite beautiful when she wears it. How can we engineer a visit to the hairdresser before to-morrow evening? With any normal girl it would be automatic, but with Barbara Claire! I’m determined she shall dazzle the native audience. Isn’t it a fantastic notion? Metamorphosis at a Maori concert!”

“Yes,” said Dikon.

“Of course, if you’re going to be cantankerous.”

“I am not, I assure you, sir,” said Dikon, and forced himself to add: “You have given her an enormous amount of pleasure.”

“And she suspects nothing.” Gaunt looked sharply at his secretary, seemed to hesitate, and then took him by the arm. “Do you know what I’m going to do? A little experiment in psychology. I ‘m going to wait until she has worn her new things and everybody has told her how nice she looks, until she has been stroked and stimulated and enriched by good clothes, and then, swearing her to secrecy first, I shall tell her where they came from. What do you think she will do?”

“Break her heart and give them up?”

“Not she. My dear chap, I shall be much too charming and tactful. It is a little test I have set myself. You wait, my boy, you wait.” Dikon was silent. “Well, don’t you think it’ll work?” Gaunt demanded.

“Yes, sir. On consideration, I’m afraid I do.”

“What d’you mean, afraid? We’re not going to have this absurd argument all over again I hope. Damn it, Dikon, you’re no better than a croaking old woman. Why the devil I put up with you I don’t know.”

“Perhaps because I try to give an honest answer to an awkward question, sir.”

“I don’t propose to make a pass at the girl, if that’s what’s worrying you. You’ve allowed yourself to become melodrama-minded, my friend. All this chat of spies and mortgages and sacrificial marriage has blunted your aesthetic judgment. You insist upon regarding a charming episode as a seduction scene on a robust scale. I repeat I have no evil designs upon Barbara Claire. I am not a second Questing.”

“You’d be less of a potential danger if you were,” Dikon blurted out. “The little fool’s not besotted on Questing. Don’t you see, sir, that if you go on like this the resemblance to King Cophetua will become so marked that she won’t know the difference and will half expect the sequel. She’s gone all haywire over you as it is.”

“Nonsense,” said Gaunt. But he stroked the back of his head and small complacent dints appeared at the corners of his mouth. “She can’t possibly imagine that my attentions are anything but avuncular.”

“She won’t know what to imagine,” said Dikon. “She’s in a foreign country.”

“Where the alpine ranges appear to be entirely composed of mole-hills.”

“Where, at any rate, she is altogether too much i’ the sun. She’s dazzled.”

“I’m afraid,” said Gaunt, “that you are dressing up a very old emotion in a series of classy, and, if I may say so, rather priggish phrases. My good ass, you’ve fallen for the girl yourself.” Dikon was silent, and in a moment Gaunt came behind him and shook him boisterously by the shoulders. “You’ll recover,” he said. “Think it over and you’ll find I’m right. In the meantime I promise you need have no qualms. I shall treat her like porcelain. But I refuse to be deprived of my mission. She shall awake and sing.”

With this unconvincing reassurance Dikon had to be content. They said good night and he went to bed.

At twenty minutes past twelve on that same night a ship was torpedoed in the Tasman Sea six miles north-west of Harpoon Inlet. She was the same ship that Simon, from his eyrie of Friday night, had watched loading in the harbour. Later, they were to learn that she was the Hokianga, outward bound from New Zealand with a cargo of bullion for the United States of America. It was a very still night, warm, with a light breeze off the sea, and many Harpoon people said afterwards that they heard the explosion. The news was brought to Wai-ata-tapu the following morning by Huia, who rushed in with her eyes rolling and poured it out. Most of the crew was saved, she said, and had been landed at Harpoon. The Hokianga had not yet gone to the bottom, and from the Peak it was possible, through field-glasses, to see her bows pointed despairingly at the skies.

Simon plunged into Dikon’s room, full of angry triumph, and doubly convinced of Questing’s guilt. He was all for leaping on his bicycle and pedalling furiously into Harpoon. In his own words he proposed to stir up the dead-beats at the police station, and the local army headquarters. “If I’d gone yesterday like I wanted to, it wouldn’t have happened. By cripey, I’ve let him get away with it. That was your big idea, Bell, and I hope you’re tickled to death the way it’s worked out.” Dikon tried to point out that even if the authorities at Harpoon were less somnolent than Simon represented them to be, they would scarcely have been able in twelve hours to prevent the activities of an enemy submarine.

“They might have stopped the ship,” cried Simon.

“On your story that you saw lights on the Peak? Yes, I know there was a definite sequence and that it was repeated. I myself believe you’re onto something, but you won’t move authority as easily as that.”

“To hell with authority!” poor Simon roared out. “I’ll go and knock Questing’s bloody block off for him.”

“Not again,” said Dikon sedately. “You really can’t continue in your battery of Questing. You know I still think you should speak to Dr. Ackrington, who, you say yourself, already suspects him.”

In the end Simon, who seemed, in spite of his aggressiveness, to place some kind of reliance on Dikon’s advice, agreed to keep away from Questing, and to tell his story to his uncle. When, however, he went to find Dr. Ackrington, it was only to discover he had already driven away in his car saying that he would probably return before lunch.

“Isn’t it a fair nark!” Simon grumbled. “What’s he think he’s doing? Precious time being wasted. To hell with him anyway, I’ll think something up for myself. Don’t you go talking, now. We don’t want everyone to know.”

“I’ll keep it under my hat,” said Dikon. “Gaunt knows, of course. I told you — ”

“Oh, hell!” said Simon disgustedly.

Gaunt came out and told Dikon he wanted to be driven to the Peak. He offered a seat in the car to anyone who would like it. “I’ve asked your sister,” he said to Simon. “Why don’t you come too?” Simon consented ungraciously. They borrowed the Colonel’s field-glasses, and set out.

It was the first time Dikon had been to Rangi’s Peak. After crossing the railway line, the road ran out to the coast and thence along a narrow neck of land, at the end of which rose the great truncated cone. So symmetrical was its form that even at close quarters the mountain seemed to be the expression of some grossly simple impulse — the impulse, one would have said, of a primordial cubist. The road ended abruptly at a gate in a barbed-wire fence. A notice, headed Native Reserve, set out a number of prohibitions. Dikon saw that it was forbidden to remove any objects found on the Peak.

They were not the first arrivals. Several cars were parked outside the fence.

“You have to walk from here,” said Simon, and glanced disparagingly at Gaunt’s shoes.

“Oh, God! Is it far?”

“You might think so.”

Barbara cut in quickly. “Not very. It’s a good path and we can turn back if you don’t think it’s worth it.”

“So we can. Come on,” said Gaunt with an air of boyish hardihood, and Simon led the way, following the outside of the barbed-wire fence. They were moving round the flank of the Peak. The turf was springy under their feet, the air fresh with a tang in it. Some way behind them the song of a lark, a detached pin-prick of sound, tinkled above the peninsula. Soon his voice faded into thin air and was lost in the mewing of a flight of gulls who came flapping in from seawards. “I never hear those creatures,” said Gaunt, “without thinking of a B.B.C. serial.” He looked up the sloping flank of the mountain, to where its crater stood black against the brilliant sky. “And that’s where they buried their dead?”

Barbara pointed to the natural planes of ascent in the structure of the mountain. “It looks as if they had made a road up to the top,” she said, “but I don’t think they did. It’s as though the hill had been shaped for the purpose, isn’t it? They believe it was, you know. Of course they haven’t used it for ages and ages. At least, that’s what we’re told. There are stories of a secret burial up there after the pakehas came.”

“Do they never come here, nowadays?”

“Hardly at all. It’s tapu. Some of the younger ones who don’t mind so much wander about the lower slopes, but they don’t go into the bush and I’m sure they never climb to the top. Do they, Sim?”

“Too much like hard work,” Simon grunted.

“No, it’s not that, really. It’s because of the sort of place it is.”

Simon gave Dikon a gloomily significant glance. “Yeh,” he said. “Do what you like up there and nobody’s going to ask questions.”

“You refer to the infamous Questing,” said Gaunt lightly. Simon glared at him and Dikon said hurriedly: “I told you I had spoken to Mr. Gaunt of our little theory.”

“That’s right,” Simon said angrily. “So now we’ve got to gas about it in front of everybody.”

“If you mean me,” said Barbara, whom even the mention of Questing could not embarrass that morning, “I know all about what he’s supposed to do on the Peak.”

Simon stopped short. “You!” he said. “What do you know?” Barbara didn’t answer immediately, and he said roughly: “Come on. What do you know?”

“Well, only what they’re all saying about Maori curios.”

“Oh,” said Simon. “That.” Dikon spared a moment to hope that if Simon did well in the Air Force they would not make the mistake of entrusting him with secret instructions.

“And I know Uncle James thinks it’s something worse, and…” She broke off and looked from one to another of the three men. Dikon blinked, Gaunt whistled, and Simon looked inescapably portentous. “Sim!” cried Barbara. “You’re not thinking… about this … the ship? Oh, but it couldn’t possibly… ”

“Here, you keep out of this, Barbie,” said Simon in a great hurry. “Uncle James talks a lot of hooey. You want to forget it. Come on.”

The track, curving always to the right, now mounted the crest of a low hill. The seaward horizon marched up to meet them. In three strides their whole range of vision was filled with blue. Harpoon Inlet lay behind on their left; on their right Rangi’s Peak rose from the sea in a sharp cliff. The fence followed the top of this cliff, leaving a narrow path between itself and the actual verge.

“If you want to see anything,” said Simon, “you’ll have to get up there. Do you mind heights?”

“Speaking for myself,” said Gaunt, “they inspire me with vertigo, nausea, and a strongly marked impulse towards felo-de-se. However, having come so far I refuse to turn back. That fence looks tolerably strong. I shall cling to it.” He smiled at Barbara. “If you should happen to notice the mad glint of suicide in my eye,” he said, “I wish you’d fling your arms round me and thus restore me to my nobler self.”

“But what about your leg, sir?” said Dikon. “How’s it holding out?”

“Never you mind about my leg. You go ahead with Claire. We’ll take it in our own time.”

Dikon, having gathered from sundry pieces of distressingly obvious pantomime on Simon’s part that this suggestion met with his approval, followed him at a gruelling pace up the track. The ocean spread out blandly before them as they mounted. Dikon, unused to such exercise, very rapidly acquired a pain in the chest, a stitch, and a thudding heart. Sweat gathered behind his spectacles. The smooth soles of his shoes slipped on the dry grass, and Simon’s hobnailed boots threw dust into his face.

“If we kick it in,” said Simon presently, “we can get up to the place where I reckon I saw the signalling on Thursday night.”

“Oh.”

“The others won’t come any farther than this.”

They had climbed to a place where the track widened and ran out to a short headland. Here they found a group of some ten or twelve men who squatted on the dry turf, chewed ends of grass and stared out to sea. Two youths greeted Simon. Dikon recognized one of them as Eru Saul.

“What d’you know?” Simon asked.

“She’s out there,” said Eru. “Going down quick, now. You can pick her up through the glasses.”

They had left the Colonel’s glasses with Gaunt, but Eru lent them his. Dikon had some difficulty in focussing them but eventually the hazy blue field clarified and in a moment or two he found a tiny black triangle. It looked appallingly insignificant.

“They’ve been out to see if they could salvage anything,” said Eru, “but not a chance. She’s packed up all right. Tough!”

“I’ll say,” said Simon. “Come on, Bell.”

Dikon returned the field-glasses, thanked Era Saul and with feelings of the liveliest distaste meekly followed Simon up the fence line which now rose precipitously before flattening out to encompass a higher shoulder of the Peak. At last they reached a very small platform, no more than a shelf in the seaward face of the mountain. Dikon was profoundly relieved to see Simon, who was well ahead, come to a halt and squat on his heels.

“What I reckon,” said Simon as Dikon crawled up beside him, “he must have worked it from here.”

Dry-mouthed and still very short-winded, Dikon prepared to fling himself down on the ledge.

“Here!” said Simon. “Better cut that out. Stay where you are. We don’t want it mucked up. Pity it rained yesterday.”

“And what do you expect to find, may I ask?” asked Dikon acidly. Physical discomfort did not increase his tolerance for Simon’s high-handedness. “Are you by any chance building on footprints? My poor fellow, let me tell you that footprints exist only on sandy beaches and in the minds of detective fiction-mongers. All that twittering about bent blades of grass and imprints slightly defaced by rain! In my opinion they do not occur.”

“Don’t they?” returned Simon combatively. “Somebody’s been up this track ahead of us. Didn’t you pick that?”

“How could I ‘pick’ anything when you did nothing but kick dust in my glasses? Show me a footprint and I’ll believe in it. Not before.”

“Good-oh, then. There. What’s that?”

“You’ve just made it with your own flat foot,” said Dikon crossly.

“What if I have? It’s a print, isn’t it? Goes to show.”

“Possibly.” Dikon wiped his glasses and peered round. “What are those things?” he said. “Over by the bank. Dents in the ground?”

He pointed and Simon gave a raucous cry of triumph. “What did I tell you. Prints!” He removed his boots and crossed to the bank. “You better take a look,” he said. Dikon removed his shoes. He had a blister on each heel and was glad to do so. He joined Simon.

“Yes,” he said. “The footprints after all, and I can tell you exactly how they would be described by the know-alls. ‘Several confused impressions of the Booted Foot, two being more clearly defined and making an angle of approximately thirty degrees the one with the other. Distance between inside margins of heel, half an inch. Distance between position of outside margin of big toes, approximately ten inches. This latter pair of impressions was found in damp clay but had been protected from recent rain by a bank which overhung them at a height of approximately three feet.’ There’s great virtue in the word ‘approximately.’ ”

“Good-ow!” said Simon on a more enthusiastic inflection than he usually gave to this odious expression. “Nice work. Go on.”

“Nails in the soles and heels. Toes more deeply indented than heels. Right foot, four nails in heel; six in sole. Left foot, three in heel, six in sole. Ergo, he lost a nail.”

“How much, he lost a nail?”

“Ergo. I’m being affected.”

“Huh! Yeh, well, what sort of chap is he? Does he act like Questing? Stands with his heels close together and his toes apart. Puts more weight on his toes than his heels. Say what you like, you can deduce quite a bit if you use your nut.”

“As, for instance, he must be a dwarf.”

“Eye?”

“The bank overhangs the prints at a height of three feet. How could he stand?”

“Aw heck!”

“Would squatting fill the bill? The other prints show where he scuffled round trying to settle.”

“That’s right. O.K., he squatted. For a good long time.”

“With his weight forward on his toes,” Dikon suggested. He had begun to feel mildly stimulated. “The clay was damp at the time. Yesterday’s rain was easterly and hasn’t got in under the bank. On Thursday night there was a light rain from the sea.”

“Don’t I know it? I was away out there, don’t forget.”

Dikon looked out to his left. The shoulder of the hill hid Harpoon and the harbour, but Simon’s rock was just visible, a shapeless spot down in the blue. “If you stand on the edge you can just see the other boulders leading out to it,” said Simon.

“Thanks, I’ll take your word for them.”

“Gee, can’t you see the sand spit under the water clearly from up here? That’s what it’ll be like from the air. Coastal patrol work. Cripey, I wish they’d get on with it and pull me in.”

Simon stood on the lip of the shelf and Dikon looked at him. His chin was up. A light breeze whipped his hair back from his forehead. His shoulders were squared. Human beings gain prestige when they are seen at a great height against a simple background of sea and sky. Simon lost his uncouthness and became a significant figure. Dikon took off his glasses and wiped them. The young Simon was blurred.

“I envy you,” said Dikon.

“Me? What for?”

“You have the right of entry to danger. You’ll move out towards it. I’m one of the sort that sit pretty and wait. Blind as a bat, you know.”

“Tough luck. Still, they reckon this is everyone’s war, don’t they?”

“They do.”

“Lend a hand to catch this joker Questing. There’s a job for you.”

“Quite so,” said Dikon, who already regretted his digression. “What have we decided? That Questing climbed up here on Thursday night, wearing hobnailed boots. That he signalled to a U-boat information about a ship loading at Harpoon and sailing the following night? By the way, can you visualize Questing in hobnailed boots?”

“He’s been mucking about on the Peak for the last three months. He must have learnt sense.”

“Perhaps they are hobnailed shoes. Was there moonlight on Thursday night?”

“Not after the rain came up, but he was here by then. There was, before that.”

“They’ll have to look at all his shoes. Should we perhaps try to make a sort of record of these prints? Glare at them until they leave an indelible impression on our minds and we can take oaths about them hereafter? Or shall I try to make a sketch of them?”

“That’s an idea. If they knew their business they’d take casts. I’ve read about that.”

“Who precisely are they?” asked Dikon, taking out his notebook and beginning to sketch. “The police? The army? Have we got anything approaching a secret service in New Zealand? What’s the matter!” he added angrily. Simon had uttered a loud exclamation and Dikon’s pencil skidded across his sketch.

“There’s some bloke out here from Scotland Yard. A big pot. There was something about him in the papers a week or two back. They reckoned he’d come here to investigate fifth-columnists, and Uncle James said they ought to be put in jail for giving away official secrets. By cripey, he’s the joker we ought to get hold of. Go to the top if you want to get things done.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s the catch,” said Simon. “I’ve forgotten.”

Barbara and Gaunt did not go up the hill after all. They watched Simon and Dikon clinging to the fence and slipping on the short grass and friable soil.

“I have decided that my leg jibs at the prospect,” said Gaunt. “Don’t you think it would be much pleasanter to go a little way towards the sea and smoke a cigarette? This morbid desire to look at sinking ships! Isn’t it kinder to let her go down alone? I feel that it would be rather like watching the public execution of a good friend. And we know the crew is safe. Don’t you agree?”

Barbara agreed, thinking that he was talking to her as if she herself were a good friend. It was the first time they had been alone together.

They found a place near to the sea. Gaunt flung himself down with an air of boyish enthusiasm which would have intensely annoyed his secretary. Barbara knelt, sitting back on her heels, the light wind blowing full in her face.

“Do you mind if I tell you you should always do your hair like that?” said Gaunt.

“Like this?” She raised her hand to her head. The wind flattened her cotton dress. It might have been drenched in rain, so closely did it cling to her. She turned her head quickly, and Gaunt, as quickly, looked again at her hair. “Yes. Straight off your face and brushed fiercely back. No frizz or nonsense. Terribly simple.”

“Orders?” said Barbara. It was so miraculously easy to talk to him.

“Please.”

“I’m afraid I’ll look very bony.”

“But that’s how you should look when you have good bones. Do you know that soon after we met I told Dikon I thought you had — But I’m making you self-conscious, and that’s bad manners, isn’t it? I’m afraid,” said Gaunt with a sort of aftermath of the Rochester manner, “that I’m accustomed to say pretty much what I think. Do you mind?”

“No,” said Barbara, suddenly at a loss.

It was years, Gaunt thought, since he had met a young woman who was simply shy. Nervous, or deliberately coy young women, yes; but not a girl who blushed with pleasure and was too well-mannered to turn away her head. If only she would always behave like this she would be charming. He was taking exactly the right line with her. He began to talk to her about himself.

Barbara was enchanted. He spoke so intimately, as if she were somebody with a special gift of understanding. He told her all sorts of things. How, as a boy in school, he had been set to read the “Eve of Crispian” speech from Henry V, and had started in the accepted wooden style which he now imitated comically for her amusement. Then, so he told her, something had happened to him. The heady phrases began to ring through his voice. To the astonishment of his English master (here followed a neat mimicry of the English master) and, strange to say, the enthralment of his classmates, he gave the speech something of its due. “There were mistakes, of course. I had no technique beyond an instinctive knowledge of certain values. But — ” he tapped the breast pocket of his coat — “it was there. I knew then that I must become a Shakespearean actor. I heard the lines as if someone else spoke them: —

Gulls mewed overhead and the sea thudded and dragged at the coast, a thrilling accompaniment, Barbara thought, to the lovely words.

“Isn’t there any more?” she asked greedily.

“Little ignoramus! There’s a lot more.” He took her hand. “You are my Cousin Westmoreland. Listen, my fair cousin.” And he gave her the whole speech. It was impossible for him to be anything but touched and delighted by her eagerness, by the tears of excitement that stood in her eyes when he ended. He still held her hand. Dikon, limping over the brow of the hill ahead of Simon, was just in time to see him lightly kiss it.

Dikon drove back with Simon, completely mum, beside him in the front seat. Gaunt and Barbara, after a few desultory questions about the wreck, were also silent, a circumstance that Dikon mistrusted, and with some reason, for Barbara was lost in enchantment. One glance at her face had been all too enlightening. “Besotted,” Dikon muttered to himself. “What has he been up to? Telling her the story of his life, I don’t doubt, with all the trimmings. Acting his socks off. Kissing her hand. By heaven, if the place had a second floor, before we knew where we were he’d be treating her to the balcony scene. Romeo with fibrositis! The truth is, he’s reached the age when a girl’s ignorance and adulation can make a fool of a man. It’s revolting.” But although he allowed himself to fume inwardly, he would have resented and denied such imputations against Gaunt from any outsider, for not the least of his troubles lay in his sense of divided allegiance. He reflected that, Barbara apart, he liked his employer too much to enjoy the spectacle of him making a fool of himself.

When they returned to the house they found Mr. Septimus Falls and Mr. Questing sitting in deck-chairs side by side on the verandah, a singular association. Dikon had implored Simon to show no signs of particular animosity when he encountered Questing, but was nevertheless very much relieved when Simon grunted a word of thanks to Gaunt and walked off in the direction of his cabin. Barbara, with a radiant face, ran straight past Questing into the house. Gaunt, before leaving the car, leant forward and said: “I haven’t been so delightfully entertained for years. She’s a darling and she shall certainly be told who sent the dress.”

Dikon drove the car round to the garage.

When he returned he found that Questing, having introduced Septimus Falls to Gaunt, had adopted the manner of a sort of referee or ring-master. “I’ve been telling this gentleman all the morning, Mr. Gaunt, that you and he must get together. ‘Here’s our celebrated guest,’ I said, ‘with nobody to provide him with the correct cultural stimulus until you came along.’ It seems this gentleman is a great student of the drama, Mr. Gaunt.”

“Really?” said Gaunt, and contrived to suggest distaste of Questing without positively insulting Falls.

Falls made a deprecating and slightly precious gesture. “Mr. Questing is too generous,” he said. “The merest tyro, I assure you, sir. Calliope rather than Thalia commands me.”

“Oh, yes?”

“There you are!” cried Mr. Questing admiringly. “And I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Mr. Falls has been telling me that he’s a great fan of yours, Mr. Gaunt.”

His victims laughed unhappily and Falls, with an air of making the best of a bad business, said: “That, at least, is true. I don’t believe I’ve missed a London production of yours for ten years or more.”

“Splendid,” said Gaunt more cordially. “You’ve met my secretary, haven’t you? Let’s sit down for pity’s sake.” They sat down. Mr. Falls hitched his chair a little nearer to Gaunt’s.

“I’ve often thought I should like to ask you to confirm or refute a pet theory of mine,” he said. “It concerns Horatio’s very palpable lie in reference to the liquidation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It seems to me that in view of your brilliant reading of Hamlet’s account of the affair — ”

“Yes, yes. I know what you’re at. ‘He never gave commandment for their death.’ Pure whitewash. What else?”

“I have always thought the line refers to Claudius. Your Horatio — ”

“No, no. To Hamlet. Obviously to Hamlet.”

“Of course the comparison is absurd, but I was going to ask you if you had ever seen Gustav Gründgen’s treatment — ”

“Gründgen’s? But that’s Hitler’s tame actor, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Falls made a little movement, gave a little yelp, and clapped his hand to the small of his back. “This odious complaint!” he lamented. “Yes, that is the fellow. A ridiculous performer. You never saw anything like the Hamlet. Madder and madder and madder does he grow, and they think he’s marvellous. I witnessed it. Before the war, of course. Naturally.”

“Naturally!” said Questing with a loud laugh.

“But we were speaking of the play. I have always considered — ” And Mr. Falls was off on an extremely knowledgeable discussion of the minor puzzles of the play. Six years’ association with Shakespearean productions had not killed Dikon’s passion for Hamlet and he listened with interest. Falls was a good talker if an affected one. He had all sorts of mannerisms, nervous movements of his hands that accorded ill with his face, which was tranquil and remarkably comely. He had taken out a pipe, but, instead of lighting it, emphasized the points in his argument by knocking it out against the leg of his deck-chair. “To make three acts where in the text there are five!” he said excitedly, and the dottle from his pipe flew about Mrs. Claire’s clean verandah as he illustrated his theme with appropriate and angry raps on the chair leg: “Three, mind you, three, three! In God’s name, why not leave the play as he wrote it?”

“But we do play it in its entirety, sometimes.”

“My dear sir, I know you do. I am enormously grateful as all Shakespeareans must be. Do forgive me. I am riding my hobby-horse to death, and before you of all people. Arrogant presumption!”

“Not a bit of it,” said Gaunt cheerfully. “I’ve been off my native diet long enough to have developed an inordinate appetite for it. But I must say I fail to see your point about the acts. Since we must abridge…”

Barbara looked out of the dining-room door, saw Questing still there, and hesitated. Without pausing in his argument, Gaunt put out his hand, inviting her to join them. She sat beside Dikon on the step. “This will be good for you, my child,” said Gaunt in parenthesis, and she glowed ardently. “What on earth has happened to her?” Dikon wondered. “That’s the same dress, better than the others because it’s simpler, but the same. She’s brushed her hair back since we came in, and that’s an improvement, of course, but what’s happened to her? I haven’t heard a hoot from the girl for days, and she’s stopped pulling faces.” Gaunt had begun to talk about the more difficult plays, of Troilus and Cressida, of Henry VI, and finally of Measure for Measure. Falls, still beating his irritating tattoo, followed him eagerly.

“Of course he was an agnostic,” he cried — “the most famous of the soliloquies proves it. If further proof is needed this play provides it.”

“You mean Claudio? I played him once as a very young actor. Yes, that speech! It’s death without flattery, isn’t it? It strikes cold.

Gaunt’s voice flattened out to a horrid monotone and his audience stirred uneasily. Mrs. Claire came to one of the windows and listened with a doubtful smile. Falls’s pipe dropped from his hand and he leant forward. The door of Dr. Ackrington’s room opened and he stood there, attentive. “Do go on,” said Mr. Falls. The icy sentences went forward.

Mr. Questing, always polite, tiptoed across the verandah, and retrieved the pipe. Falls seemed not to hear him. Questing stood with the pipe in his hand, his head on one side, and an expression of proprietary admiration on his face.

A shadow fell across the pumice. Smith, unshaven and looking very much the worse for wear, appeared from the direction of the cabin, followed by Simon. They stopped dead. Smith passed a shaky hand across his face and pulled at his under lip. Simon, after a disgusted stare at Gaunt, watched Questing.

Gaunt drew to the close of the short and terrifying speech. Dikon reflected that perhaps he was the only living actor who could get away with Shakespeare at high noon on the verandah of a thermal spa. That he had not embarrassed his listeners but had made some of them coldly uneasy was very apparent. He had forced them to think of death.

Questing, after clearing his throat, broke into loud applause, tapping Mr. Falls’s pipe enthusiastically against the verandah post. “Well, well, well,” cried Mr. Questing. “If that wasn’t an intellectual treat! Quite a treat, Mr. Falls, wasn’t it?”

“My pipe, I believe,” said Mr. Falls, politely, and took it. “Thank you.” He turned to Gaunt. “Of course you may lay the agnosticism of those lines at the door of character and set against them a hundred others that are orthodox enough, but my own opinion — ”

“As You Like It has always been my favourite,” said Mrs. Claire from the window. “Such a pretty play. All those lovely woodland scenes. Dear Rosalind!”

Dr. Ackrington advanced from his doorway. “With all this modern taste for psychopathological balderdash,” he said, “I wonder you get anyone to listen to the plays.”

“On the contrary,” said Gaunt stuffily, “there is a renaissance.”

Huia came out — clanging her inevitable bell. The Colonel appeared from his study looking vaguely miserable.

“Is that lunch?” he asked. “What have you been talking about? Sounded as if someone was making a stump speech or somethin’.”

Barbara whispered hurriedly in her father’s ear.

“Eh? I can’t hear you,” he complained. “What?” He stared at Gaunt. “Out of a play, was it? Good Lord.” He seemed to be faintly disgusted, but presently an expression of complacency stole over his face. “We used to do quite a bit of theatrical poodle-fakin’ when I was a subaltern in India,” he said. “They put me into one of their plays once. Damn’ good thing. D’you know it? It’s called Charley’s Aunt.” iv

Throughout lunch it was obvious to Dikon that Simon was big with some new theory. Indeed, so eloquent were his glances that neither Questing nor anybody else, Dikon thought, could possibly mistake their meaning. Dikon himself was in a state of mind so confused that he seemed to be living in the middle of a rather bad dream. Anxiety about Barbara, based on an emotion which he refused to define, a disturbing change in his own attitude towards his employer, and an ever-increasing weight of apprehension which the war bred in all New Zealanders at that time — all these elements mingled in a vague cloud of uneasiness and alarm. And then there was Questing. In spite of Simon’s discoveries, in spite, even, of the witness of the torpedoed ship, Dikon still found it difficult to cast Questing for the rôle of spy. Indeed, he was still enough of a New Zealander to doubt the existence of enemy agents in his country at all, still inclined to think that they existed only as bugaboos in the minds of tiresome old ladies and club men. And yet… mentally he ticked off the points against Questing. Had he tried to bring about Smith’s destruction, and if so, why? Why did he pretend that he had been to Pohutukawa Bay, when, as Dr. Ackrington had proved by his pitfall, he hadn’t been near the place? If he visited the Peak only to hunt for curios, why should he have six times flashed his signal of three, five, and three, from a place where obviously no curios could be buried? He couldn’t help looking at Questing, at his smooth rather naïve face, his business man’s clothes, his not altogether convincing air of commercial acumen. Were these the outward casings of a potential murderer, who was quietly betraying his country? Irrelevantly, Dikon thought: “This war is changing the values of my generation. There are all sorts of things that we have thought funny that we shall never think funny again.” For perhaps the first time he contemplated coldly and deliberately a possible invasion of New Zealand. As he thought, the picture clarified. An emotion long dormant, rooted in the very soil of his native country, roused in him, and he recognized it as anger. He realized, finally, that he could no longer go on as he was. Somehow, no matter how uselessly, he, like Simon, must go forward to danger.

It was with this new determination in his mind that he visited Simon in his cabin after lunch. “Did you guess I wanted to see you?” asked Simon. “I didn’t like to drop the hint over there. He might have spotted it.”

“My dear old thing, the air was electric with your hints. What’s occurred?”

“We’ve got him,” said Simon. “Didn’t you pick it? Before lunch? Him and his pipe?”

Dikon gaped at him.

“Missed it, did you?” said Simon complacently. “And there you were sitting where you might have touched him. What beats me is why he did it. D’you reckon he’s got it so much on his mind he’s acting kind of automatically?”

“If I had the faintest idea what you were talking about, I might attempt to answer you.”

“Aren’t you conscious yet? I was sitting in here trying to dope things out when I heard it. I snooped round to the corner. All through the hooey Gaunt and Falls were spilling about Shakespeare or someone. It was the same in every detail.”

“For pity’s sake, what was the same in every detail?”

“The tapping. A long one repeated three times. Dah, dah, dah. Then five short dits. Then three shorts. Then the whole works repeated. The flashes from the cliff all over again. So what have you?”

They stared at each other. “It just doesn’t make sense,” said Dikon. “Why? Why? Why?”

“Search me.”

“Coincidence?”

“The odds against coincidence are long enough to make you dizzy. No, I reckon I’m right. It’s habit. He’s had to memorize it and he’s gone over and over it in his mind before he shot the works on Thursday night…”

“Hold on. Hold on. Whose habit?”

“Aw hell,” said Simon disgustedly. “You’re dopey. Who the heck are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about two different people,” said Dikon excitedly. “Questing had picked up that pipe just before you came on the scene. It wasn’t Questing who tapped out your blasted signal. It was Mr. Septimus Falls.”