The Three Just Men

I

The Firm of Oberzohn

“£520 p.a. Wanted at once, Laboratory Secretary (lady). Young; no previous experience required, but must have passed recognized examination which included physics and inorganic (elementary) chemistry. Preference will be given to one whose family has some record in the world of science. Apply by letter, Box 9754, Daily Megaphone. If applicant is asked to interview advertiser, fare will be paid from any station within a hundred and fifty miles of London.”

A good friend sent one of the issues containing this advertisement to Heavytree Farm and circled the announcement with a blue pencil.

Mirabelle Leicester found the newspaper on the hall settee when she came in from feeding the chickens, and thought that it had been sent by the Alington land agent who was so constantly calling her attention to the advertisers who wished to buy cheap farms. It was a practice of his. She had the feeling that he resented her presence in the country, and was anxious to replace her with a proprietor less poverty-stricken.

Splitting the wrapper with a dusty thumb, she turned naturally to the advertisement pages, having the agent in mind. Her eyes went rapidly down the “Wanted to Buy” column. There were several “gentlemen requiring small farm in good district,” but none that made any appeal to her, and she was wondering why the parsimonious man had spent tuppence-ha’penny on postage and paper when the circled paragraph caught her eye.

“Glory!” said Mirabelle, her red lips parted in excited wonder.

Aunt Alma looked up from her press-cutting book, startled as Mirabelle dashed in.

“Me!” she said dramatically, and pointed a finger at the advertisement. “I am young—I have no experience—I have my higher certificate—and daddy was something in the world of science. And, Alma, we are exactly a hundred and forty miles from London town!”

“Dear me!” said Aunt Alma, a lady whose gaunt and terrifying appearance was the terror of tradesmen and farm hands, though a milder woman never knitted stockings.

“Isn’t it wonderful? This solves all our problems. We’ll leave the farm to Mark, open the flat in Bloomsbury … we can afford one or even two theatres a week …”

Alma read the announcement for the second time.

“It seems good,” she said with conventional caution, “though I don’t like the idea of your working, my dear. Your dear father …”

“Would have whisked me up to town and I should have had the job by tonight,” said Mirabelle definitely.

But Alma wasn’t sure. London was full of pitfalls and villainy untold lurked in its alleys and dark passages. She herself never went to London except under protest.

“I was there years ago when those horrible Four Just Men were about, my dear,” she said, and Mirabelle, who loved her, listened to the oft-told story. “They terrorized London. One couldn’t go out at night with the certainty that one would come back again alive … and to think that they have had a free pardon! It is simply encouraging crime.”

“My dear,” said Mirabelle (and this was her inevitable rejoinder), “they weren’t criminals at all. They were very rich men who gave up their lives to punishing those whom the law let slip through its greasy old fingers. And they were pardoned for the intelligence work they did in the war—one worked for three months in the German War Office—and there aren’t four at all: there are only three. I’d love to meet them—they must be dears!”

When Aunt Alma made a grimace, she was hideous. Mirabelle averted her eyes.

“Anyway, they are not in London now, darling,” she said, “and you will be able to sleep soundly at nights.”

“What about the snake?” asked Miss Alma Goddard ominously.

Now if there was one thing which no person contemplating a visit to London wished to be reminded about, it was the snake.

Six million people rose from their beds every morning, opened their newspapers and looked for news of the snake. Eighteen daily newspapers never passed a day without telling their readers that the scare was childish and a shocking commentary on the neurotic tendencies of the age; they also published, at regular intervals, intimate particulars of the black mamba, its habits and its peculiar deadliness, and maintained quite a large staff of earnest reporters to “work up the story.”

The black mamba, most deadly of all the African snakes, had escaped from the Zoo one cold and foggy night in March. And there should have been the end of him—a three-line paragraph, followed the next day by another three-line paragraph detailing how the snake was found dead on the frozen ground—no mamba could live under a temperature of 75° Fahrenheit. But the second paragraph never appeared. On the 2nd of April a policeman found a man huddled up in a doorway in Orme Place. He proved to be a well known and apparently wealthy stockbroker, named Emmett. He was dead. In his swollen face were found two tiny punctured wounds, and the eminent scientist who was called into consultation gave his opinion that the man had died from snakebite: an especially deadly snake. The night was chilly; the man had been to a theatre alone. His chauffeur stated that he had left his master in the best of spirits on the doorstep. The key found in the dead man’s hand showed that he was struck before the car had turned. When his affairs were investigated he was found to be hopelessly insolvent. Huge sums drawn from his bank six months before had disappeared.

London had scarcely recovered from this shocking surprise when the snake struck again. This time in the crowded street, and choosing a humble victim, though by no means a blameless one. An ex-convict named Sirk, a homeless down-and-out, was seen to fall by a park-keeper near the Achilles statue in Hyde Park. By the time the keeper reached him he was dead. There was no sign of a snake—nobody was near him. This time the snake had made his mark on the wrist—two little punctured wounds near together.

A month later the third man fell a victim. He was a clerk of the Bank of England, a reputable man who was seen to fall forward in a subway train, and, on being removed to hospital, was discovered to have died—again from snakebite.

So that the snake became a daily figure of fear, and its sinister fame spread even so far afield as Heavytree Farm.

“Stuff!” said Mirabelle, yet with a shiver. “Alma, I wish you wouldn’t keep these horrors in your scrapbook.”

“They are Life,” said Alma soberly, and then: “When will you take up your appointment?” she asked, and the girl laughed.

“We will make a beginning right away—by applying for the job,” she said practically. “And you needn’t start packing your boxes for a very long time!”

An hour later she intercepted the village postman and handed him a letter.

And that was the beginning of the adventure which involved so many lives and fortunes, which brought the Three Just Men to the verge of dissolution, and one day was to turn the heart of London into a battlefield.

Two days after the letter was dispatched came the answer, typewritten, surprisingly personal, and in places curiously worded. There was an excuse for that, for the heading on the notepaper was

Oberzohn & Smitts

Merchants and Exporters

On the third day Mirabelle Leicester stepped down from a bus in the City Road and entered the unimposing door of Romance, and an inquisitive chauffeur who saw her enter followed and overtook her in the lobby.

“Excuse me, madame—are you Mrs. Carter?”

Mirabelle did not look like Mrs. Anybody.

“No,” she said, and gave her name.

“But you’re the lady from Hereford … you live with your mother at Telford Park … ?”

The man was so agitated that she was not annoyed by his insistence. Evidently he had instructions to meet a stranger and was fearful of missing her.

“You have made a mistake—I live at Heavytree Farm, Daynham—with my aunt.”

“Is she called Carter?”

She laughed.

“Miss Alma Goddard—now are you satisfied?”

“Then you’re not the lady, miss; I’m waiting to pick her up.”

The chauffeur withdrew apologetically.

The girl waited in the ornate anteroom for ten minutes before the pale youth with the stiff, upstanding hair and the huge rimless spectacles returned. His face was large, expressionless, unhealthy. Mirabelle had noted as a curious circumstance that every man she had seen in the office was of the same type. Big heavy men who gave the impression that they had been called away from some very urgent work to deal with the triviality of her inquiries. They were speechless men who glared solemnly at her through thick lenses and nodded or shook their heads according to the requirements of the moment. She expected to meet foreigners in the offices of Oberzohn & Smitts; Germans, she imagined, and was surprised later to discover that both principals and staff were in the main Swedish.

The pale youth, true to the traditions of the house, said nothing: he beckoned her with a little jerk of his head, and she went into a larger room, where half a dozen men were sitting at half a dozen desks and writing furiously, their noses glued short-sightedly to the books and papers which engaged their attention. Nobody looked up as she passed through the waist-high gate which separated the caller from the staff. Hanging upon the wall between two windows was a map of Africa with great green patches. In one corner of the room were stacked a dozen massive ivory tusks, each bearing a hanging label. There was the model of a steamship in a case on a window-ledge, and on another a crudely carved wooden idol of native origin.

The youth stopped before a heavy rosewood door and knocked. When a deep voice answered, he pushed open the door and stood aside to let her pass. It was a gigantic room—that was the word which occurred to her as most fitting, and the vast space of it was emphasized by the almost complete lack of furniture. A very small ebony writing-table, two very small chairs and a long and narrow black cupboard fitted into a recess were all the furnishings she could see. The high walls were covered with a golden paper. Four bright-red rafters ran across the black ceiling—the floor was completely covered with a deep purple carpet. It seemed that there was a rolled map above the fireplace—a long thin cord came down from the cornice and ended in a tassel within reach.

The room, with its lack of appointments, was so unexpected a vision that the girl stood staring from walls to roof, until she observed her guide making urgent signs, and then she advanced towards the man who stood with his back to the tiny fire that burnt in the silver fireplace.

He was tall and grey; her first impression was of an enormously high forehead. The sallow face was long, and nearer at hand, she saw, covered by innumerable lines and furrows. She judged him to be about fifty until he spoke, and then she realized that he was much older.

“Miss Mirabelle Leicester?”

His English was not altogether perfect; the delivery was queerly deliberate and he lisped slightly.

“Pray be seated. I am Dr. Eruc Oberzohn. I am not German. I admire the Germans, but I am Swedish. You are convinced?”

She laughed, and when Mirabelle Leicester laughed, less susceptible men than Dr. Eruc Oberzohn had forgotten all other business. She was not very tall—her slimness and her symmetrical figure made her appear so. She had in her face and in her clear grey eyes something of the countryside; she belonged to the orchards where the apple-blossom lay like heavy snow upon the bare branches; to the cold brooks that ran noisily under hawthorn hedges. The April sunlight was in her eyes and the springy velvet of meadows everlastingly under her feet.

To Dr. Oberzohn she was a girl in a blue tailor-made costume. He saw that she wore a little hat with a straight brim that framed her face just above the lift of her curved eyebrows. A German would have seen these things, being a hopeless sentimentalist. The doctor was not German; he loathed their sentimentality.

“Will you be seated? You have a scientific training?”

Mirabelle shook her head.

“I haven’t,” she confessed ruefully, “but I’ve passed in the subjects you mentioned in your advertisement.”

“But your father—he was a scientist?”

She nodded gravely.

“But not a great scientist,” he stated. “England and America do not produce such men. Ah, tell me not of your Kelvins, Edisons, and Newtons! They were incomplete, dull men, ponderous men—the fire was not there.”

She was somewhat taken aback, but she was amused as well. His calm dismissal of men who were honoured in the scientific world was so obviously sincere.

“Now talk to me of yourself.” He seated himself in the hard, straight-backed chair by the little desk.

“I’m afraid there is very little I can tell you, Dr. Oberzohn. I live with my aunt at Heavytree Farm in Gloucester, and we have a flat in Doughty Court. My aunt and I have a small income—and I think that is all.”

“Go on, please,” he commanded. “Tell me of your sensations when you had my letter—I desire to know your mind. That is how I form all opinions; that is how I made my immense fortune. By the analysis of the mind.”

She had expected many tests; an examination in elementary science; a typewriting test possibly (she dreaded this most); but she never for one moment dreamt that the flowery letter asking her to call at the City Road offices of Oberzohn & Smitts would lead to an experiment in psychoanalysis.

“I can only tell you that I was surprised,” she said, and the tightening line of her mouth would have told him a great deal if he were the student of human nature he claimed to be. “Naturally the salary appeals to me—ten pounds a week is such a high rate of pay that I cannot think I am qualified—”

“You are qualified.” His harsh voice grew more strident as he impressed this upon her. “I need a laboratory secretary. You are qualified”—he hesitated, and then went on—“by reason of distinguished parentage. Also”—he hesitated again for a fraction of a second—“also because of general education. Your duties shall commence soon!” He waved a long, thin hand to the door in the corner of the room. “You will take your position at once,” he said.

The long face, the grotesquely high forehead, the bulbous nose and wide, crooked mouth all seemed to work together when he spoke. At one moment the forehead was full of pleats and furrows—at the next, comparatively smooth. The point of his nose dipped up and down at every word, only his small, deep-set eyes remained steadfast, unwinking. She had seen eyes like those before, brown and pathetic. Of what did they remind her? His last words brought her to the verge of panic.

“Oh, I could not possibly start today,” she said in trepidation.

“Today, or it shall be never,” he said with an air of finality.

She had to face a crisis. The salary was more than desirable; it was necessary. The farm scarcely paid its way, for Alma was not the best of managers. And the income grew more and more attenuated. Last year the company in which her meagre fortune was invested had passed a dividend and she had to give up her Swiss holiday.

“I’ll start now.” She had to set her teeth to make this resolve.

“Very good; that is my wish.”

He was still addressing her as though she were a public meeting. Rising from his chair, he opened the little door and she went into a smaller room. She had seen laboratories, but none quite so beautifully fitted as this—shelf upon shelf of white porcelain jars, of cut-glass bottles, their contents engraved in frosted letters; a bench that ran the length of the room, on which apparatus of every kind was arranged in order. In the centre of the room ran a long, glass-topped table, and here, in dustproof glass, were delicate instruments, ranging from scales which she knew could be influenced by a grain of dust, to electrical machines, so complicated that her heart sank at the sight of them.

“What must I do?” she asked dismally.

Everything was so beautifully new; she was sure she would drop one of those lovely jars … all the science of the school laboratory had suddenly drained out of her mind, leaving it a blank.

“You will do.” Remarkably enough, the doctor for the moment seemed as much at a loss as the girl. “First—quantities. In every jar or bottle there is a quantity. How much? Who knows? The last secretary was careless, stupid. She kept no book. Sometimes I go for something—it is not there! All gone. That is very regrettable.”

“You wish me to take stock?” she asked, her hopes reviving at the simplicity of her task.

There were measures and scales enough. The latter stood in a line like a platoon of soldiers ranged according to their size. Everything was very new, very neat. There was a smell of drying enamel in the room as though the place had been newly painted.

“That is all,” said the long-faced man. He put his hand in the pocket of his frock-coat and took out a large wallet. From this he withdrew two crisp notes.

“Ten pounds,” he said briefly. “We pay already in advance. There is one more thing I desire to know,” he said. “It is of the aunt. She is in London?”

Mirabelle shook her head.

“No, she is in the country. I expected to go back this afternoon, and if I was—successful, we were coming to town tomorrow.”

He pursed his thickish lips; she gazed fascinated at his long forehead rippled in thought.

“It will be a nervous matter for her if you stay in London tonight—no?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“No. I will stay at the flat; I have often stayed there alone, but even that will not be necessary. I will wire asking her to come up by the first train.”

“Wait.” He raised a pompous hand and darted back to his room. He returned with a packet of telegraph forms. “Write your telegram,” he commanded. “A clerk shall dispatch it at once.”

Gratefully she took the blanks and wrote her news and request.

“Thank you,” she said.

Mr. Oberzohn bowed, went to the door, bowed again, and the door closed behind him.

Fortunately for her peace of mind, Mirabelle Leicester had no occasion to consult her employer or attempt to open the door. Had she done so, she would have discovered that it was locked. As for the telegram she had written, that was a curl of black ash in his fire.