The pause lengthened. Mr. Petre rose. His host rose with him. “A thousand thanks,” he said, “Mr. Petre. We shall only be too pleased. Too pleased.” He nodded, made the slightest possible inclination of his head, and Mr. Petre bowed and was gone. He was conducted back with great ceremony through the deeply-carpeted corridor, past the three engravings of the Mother Bank in 1815, 1852 and Present Day; and as he would have gone hurriedly out past the counter, was gently detained while his courteous, his even obsequious, guardian handed him an oblong check book, which he thrust hurriedly into his pocket as he disappeared.
So ended the first episode in a great career.
When Mr. Petre got back to his room in the hotel he first of all bolted the door—he could hardly have told you why; it was through an odd feeling that he was about to do something that would make him ridiculous if he were caught at it. Then he pulled out the check book from his pocket and looked at it closely and curiously inside and out. He sat down at the table and opened the check book, holding it down flat with either hand and gazing at the first form and its counterfoil.
As he did so a perfect familiarity returned, though no personal memory whatsoever: only that same odd feeling of ill ease which had suddenly struck him when he came into the bank, and which was renewed in him at the aspect of this banking thing. Whatever he had been, banks or banking had in some way bothered him. He sighed, and then more cheerfully considered that after all even this dim sensation was a kind of clew. He mused. Perhaps he had been—perhaps he was—a very great banker somewhere or other, but a banker who had got into trouble: what kind of trouble? The question cast him down again. Then his spirits rose as he recalled the way he had been treated. Whoever he was, the trouble either was not very great or had not yet come out. It suddenly struck him as he thus pondered over the simplicity of the affair that he had been a fool not to cast out feelers. A few very discreet allusions, a few apparently innocent questions cautiously framed, might have led him to know more. He would rather, far rather, have died (such was the odd effect of his misfortune) than let a human being guess it even in the most distant fashion. But if he led them on...? He would think about it.... He would frame a few phrases and be ready to bring them out at the right moment. Then he turned to the open check book again.
Yes, it was perfectly familiar. That was where you signed, and those little blank spaces beyond the perforations on the left were the counterfoils where you marked how much you had signed for, and there was the place for a date; but he was worried for a moment as to whether the figures came above the writing or below it; then the image of the check he had just paid in came to his mind. Of course, that was what had brought it all back to him. He felt confident. He could go ahead, so far as that little detail of his new life was concerned, and there was an ample balance. He wrote down the main sum, £73,729 16s. 3d. on the inside of the cover. Then he turned to his desk and considered the questions he should frame, the leading questions which might gradually get men without their knowing it to tell him who he was.
He put down a little list of what he already knew. He had been in the States, he had been there some little time at least, and perhaps for a lifetime. If he was an American citizen, at any rate he knew London well. Perhaps if he went back to the States he would discover there what he was; it might all return to him in the familiar sounds and sights and smells. But it was a big effort to make for finding out something that might be discovered much more easily or that might return to him at any moment. He had in the States befriended a certain Mr. Cyril, now dead. A Mr. Leonard Cyril. Plenty of people must have known this Mr. Cyril, for by his widow the man was rich and her acquaintance nobby. If he went about it quite carefully, in some company where his name was not known, he might hear what kind of man this Mr. Petre was who had thus befriended Mr. Leonard Cyril, a man so wealthy that his very widow rolled in it—to judge by her house and guests. Then there was the other main clew, he had been in a train arriving at a certain hour at Paddington. Now that he had collected his wits it would be a simple matter to find out where that train had started from. Yes, there were quite a number of clews. It ought not to take long. He turned to the Bradshaw. A train from Cardiff came into Paddington at one. He did not know that his own train, the boat train from Plymouth, had been half an hour late. He noted that Cardiff train and its stops. He had come from Cardiff or beyond, or joined at Swindon. It wasn’t much of a help but it limited the field.
Then his mind passed again to those questions he had to frame. But it must be done with tact. He saw himself again in Mrs. Cyril’s house trying to shepherd her words into his fold. He might begin in a tone of gentle and respectful condolence: “When I met Mr. Cyril....” and then hope that she would interrupt with, “Ah, yes! How good you were to him in New York”—or Topeka, or wherever the damned place was. But then again, she might meet him with a counter question, and say, “Oh, do tell me, please, how Miriam is?” Then he would get it between wind and water, and if he had shuddered a moment ago, now he trembled. It was not so easy as it looked.
A brilliant thought leaped into his brain. And as it leaped his guardian Dæmon laughed.
He rang the bell, he unbolted the door. He asked if they had in the hotel any American books of reference. They had a New York telephone book, and a very strange, short, fat volume in which were the names of the American great who still survived in this sad world to the end of November, 1952. For there was a brutal note on the title-page, “The Editor cannot guarantee that none of the names mentioned in this annual, which went through the press at the end of November last, may not since have died.” There was no John K. Petre. He was ashamed to ask for more books of this library. He went down to the ground floor and consulted the London Directory. There was no John K. Petre. He made a note that he would look, as a last and desperate chance, at the New York Directory, and would guarantee it to say if he had ever lived in New York. They had one—of two years before. There was no John K. Petre.