But all that afternoon the thing worried me. It was a trifle, perhaps, but it was a trifle on the wrong side. More, unlike some other trifles, I already saw how dangerously capable of further development it was. I have told you what the attitude of the Press was to this question of civil flying. It was one of simply awaiting events. But all the time events were fermenting, so to speak. High over our heads Olympian minds were shaping and re-shaping policies and plans, and Argus eyes were tirelessly watching for indications of the receptivity of the popular mind. Had Hodgson heard something that we had not? As you sometimes see an insignificant person's affairs, of no interest in themselves, solemnly weighed by the Lords of Appeal because of some novel and far-reaching point they raise, was something in the nature of a Test Case now being sought? Had we on the Circus been wrong in assuming that the idea was simply to catch and make an example of the careless joy-rider and the idiot who stunted over towns? Was some more important point to be raised, and had Hodgson had wind of it?
I was inclined to think not, and for the reason I have just given. Make a thing big enough, and we hang fairly well together; but take the whips off, so to speak, and we go as we please. If it had been as important as all that we should have heard of it. Willett, who is a youngster of parts, was in all probability right. Hodgson was merely catering for the local interest.
But still I was uneasy, and my uneasiness had nothing to do with the annoyance the publication of the photograph of the house in Lennox Street must cause Esdaile. I was thinking of far graver possible consequences. Even the lightest measure of Publicity is not a thing to be trifled with. Here I know what I am talking about. The merry fellows of the Chelsea Arts Club might pull Esdaile's leg about his haunted house, and want to know whether the White Lady dropped any hairpins as she passed, or if the horrible shrouded figure with the crimson-dripping hands would make a good film; but we journalists have to take these things a good deal more seriously than that. Publicity, sometimes of the most incredibly silly kind, is our meat and drink and hourly breath. All day and every day our brains are on the stretch in our endeavors to secure it. We bring our heaviest guns to bear on the elusive thing, are sure we can't possibly miss it this time, let fly, and lo! we have missed after all. Like a pithball on a fountain, it is still dancing there untouched, and any penny peashooter may bring it down when all our trained intelligence has failed.
And what would be the effects on our Case if it came down?
Well, you can see that for yourself. In obscurity lay our hope that the thing might remain what on the face of it it appeared to be. Switch the arc-lamps of the great papers on to it, with the whole power-house of dynamic government behind them, and all was over. Not an aspect of the Case would go unprobed to the very bottom, and the hungry newspapers would find themselves, not with a mere aeroplane crash that could be dismissed in a couple of lines, but with a really fine fat, first-class Murder Case that would keep them merrily going for weeks.
And I can assure you that we all wanted very badly indeed just such a Case. We wanted it for more reasons than one. We wanted it, as we always do, in the ordinary way of our business, but much more we wanted it to take people's minds off other matters. We wanted it for the same reason that made us resolutely print those pictures of girls bathing during the blackest days of the War. We wanted it because the Man in the Public-house was restless and showed a disposition to pry into affairs in which his interference is only wanted when a General Election draws near. Bathing girls were very well in their way; a really high-class line in Divorce Cases would have outstripped them easily, if I may be permitted the unintentional expression; but the man who could have given us on the Circus the first Assassination in the Air could have named his own price for it.
III
The flat in which I live with the old housekeeper who looks after me is not in Chelsea at all, but a quarter of an hour's walk away, just round the corner from Queen's Gate. It is exceedingly comfortable (as indeed it should be considering the rent I am made to pay for it), I have my own furniture, and on the whole I don't ask for a much better place to work in. For, quite apart from my paper, I do work, and I don't want to give you the impression that the whole of my leisure time is given over to the investigation of what happens to my Chelsea friends.
I was, as a matter of fact, particularly busy just about that time. Day after day I was getting up at half-past six in the morning, breakfasting at my table as I worked, and continuing without interruption till it was time for luncheon and the office. Since you are probably not in the white-elephant line of business, I won't tell you which of my novels I was at work on. I will only say that I at any rate was interested in it, and, severe as was the strain of writing from seven o'clock in the morning till midday, I sometimes hated to break off. Mrs. Jardine had orders not to admit anybody whomsoever between those hours, and obeyed them to the letter.