Edgar Wallace: The Joker

‘Very,’ said Jim shortly.

‘Women do not interest me greatly’—the Splendid Harlow picked a tiny thread of cotton from his immaculate coat and dropped it on the floor. ‘They think along lines which I find it difficult to follow. They are emotional, too—swayed by momentary fears and scruples…’

The sound of voices in the passage, one high-pitched and complaining:

‘…what with the fog and everything, miss, it’s lucky I’m here at all…’

A shabby figure passed the open door, followed by Aileen.

‘I suppose you don’t know Ingle, Mr Harlow?’ Jim was examining the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘A long-firm swindler; clever, but with a kink even in his kinkiness! Believes in revolution and all that sort of thing…blood and guillotines and tumbrils; the whole box of tricks—’

Something made him look round.

Mr Stratford Harlow was standing in the centre of the room, gripping the edge of a small table to keep him upright.

His face was white and haggard and drawn; and in his pale eyes was a look of horror such as Jim Carlton had never seen in the face of a man. Elk sprang forward and caught him as he swayed and led him to a big settee. Into this Stratford Harlow sank and leaning forward, covered his face with his hands.

‘Oh, my God!’ he said as he rocked slowly from side to side and fell in a heap on the ground.

The colossus had fainted.

CHAPTER 5

‘A LITTLE heart trouble,’ said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the glass of water. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, Miss Rivers. I haven’t had an attack in years.’

He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.

‘Phew!’ He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily to his feet.

Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his knees and looked up.

‘You’d better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,’ he said.

Stratford Harlow shook his head.

‘That is quite unnecessary—quite,’ he said. ‘I have my car at the door and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a drug!’ he smiled.

Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.

‘Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?’ was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this multi-millionaire to such a venue.

They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate saw nothing remarkable in his visit.

The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled mind.

Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.

Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. ‘Thank you, Harry, thank you.’

He shook the attendant’s hand and left something that crinkled in the hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.

To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.

There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even by her charitable relatives, as ‘strange’. The boy was never sent to school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life, she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of her conversation for years afterwards.

The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins, to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her relatives for seven years. She then went to Scarborough for three years and thence to Bournemouth. Regularly every month she wrote to her two sisters and her bachelor brother in New York; and the terminology of the letters did not vary by so much as a comma:

“Miss Mercy Harlow presents her compliments and begs to state that The Boy is in Good Health and is receiving adequate tuition in the essential subjects together with a sound instruction in the tenets of the Protestant Faith.”

She had engaged a tutor, a bearded young man from Oxford University (she deigned to mention this fact to her brother, with whom she had not quarrelled), whose name was Marling. There came to the ears of Aunt Alice a story which called into question the fitness of Mr Marling to mould the plastic mind of youth. A mild scandal at Oxford. Miss Alice felt it her duty to write, and after a long interval had a reply:

“Miss Mercy Harlow begs to thank Miss Alice Harlow for her communication and in reply begs to state that she has conducted a very thorough and searching enquiry into the charges preferred against Mr Saul Marling (B.A. Oxon) and is satisfied that Mr Marling acted in the most honourable manner, and has done nothing with which he may reproach himself or which renders him unfit to direct the studies of The Boy.”

This happened a year before Miss Mercy’s death. When nature took its toll and she passed to her Maker, Miss Alice hastened to Bournemouth and in a small and secluded cottage near Christchurch found a big and solemn young man of twenty-three, dressed a little gawkily in black. He was tearless; and indeed, his aunt suspected, almost cheerful, at the prospect of being freed from Miss Mercy’s drastic management.

The bearded tutor had left (Mrs Edwins, the maid, tearfully explained) a fortnight before the passing of Miss Mercy.

‘And if he hadn’t gone,’ said Miss Alice with tight lips, ‘I should have made short work of him. The Boy has been suppressed! He hasn’t a word to say for himself!’

A council was held, including the family lawyer, who was making his first acquaintance with Stratford. It was agreed that The Boy should have a flat in Park Lane and the companionship of an elder man who combined a knowledge of the world with a leaning towards piety. Such was found in the Rev. John Barthurst, M.A., an ex-naval chaplain.

Miss Edwins was pensioned off and the beginning of Stratford’s independent life was celebrated with a dinner and a visit to Charley’s Aunt, through which roaring farce he sat with a stony face.

The tutelage lasted the best part of a year; and then the quiet young man suddenly came to life, dismissed his worldly and pious companion with a cheque for a thousand pounds, summoned Mrs Edwins to be his housekeeper; and bought and reconstructed the Duke of Greenhart’s house in Park Lane.