Oppenheim Phelps was interesting. He was introduced as a historian who had made his name at fiction. It was a satisfaction, he said, to find that modern events had justified him. The reviewers had formerly treated him with patronizing airs; they had called his secret diplomacy and German plot-stuff as chimeras only when they had shown themselves to be transcripts, and not exaggerated ones at that, of what had taken place during the last few years.
Anthony Trent sat next to the English novelist and liked him. It brought him close to the war to talk to a man whose home had been bombed from air and submarine. And Phelps was also a golfer and asked Trent, when the war was over, to visit his own beloved links at Cromer.
It had grown so late when the particularly prosy member of the club had made his yawn-bringing speech, that Crosbeigh came apologetically to Trent’s side.
“I’m afraid, old man,” he began, “that it’s too late for any more speeches except the surprise one. A lot of us commute. Do you mind speaking at our next meeting instead?”
“Not a bit,” Trent said cheerfully. But he felt as all speakers do under these circumstances that his speech would have been a brilliant one. He had coined a number of epigrams as other speakers had plowed laboriously along their lingual way and now they were to be still-born.
But he soon forgot them when Crosbeigh announced the surprise speaker.
“I have been very fortunate,” Crosbeigh began, “in getting to-night a man who knows more of the ways of crooks than any living authority. Gentlemen, you all know Inspector McWalsh!”
“Well, boys,” said the Inspector, “I guess a good many of you know me by name.” He had risen to his full height and looked about him genially. He had imbibed just the right amount to bring him to this stage. Three highballs later, he would be looking for insults but he was now ripe with good humor. He had come because Conington Warren had asked him to oblige Crosbeigh. For writers on crime he had the usual contempt of the professional policeman and he was fluent in his denunciation. “You boys,” he went on, “make me smile with your modern scientific criminals, the guys what use chemistry and electricity and x-rays and so forth. I’ve been a policeman now for thirty years and I never run across any of that stuff yet.”
Inspector McWalsh poured his unsubtle scorn on such writings for ten full minutes. But he added nothing to the Scribblers’ knowledge of his subject.
It chanced that the writer he had taken as his victim was a guest at the dinner. This fictioneer pursued the latest writings on physicist and chemical research so that he might embroider his tales therewith. Personally Trent was bored by this artificial type of story; but as between writer and policeman he was always for the writer.