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Page 38
In the morning following Aline's visit to Joan Valentine, Ashe
sat in his room, the Morning Post on the table before him. The
heady influence of Joan had not yet ceased to work within him;
and he proposed, in pursuance of his promise to her, to go
carefully through the columns of advertisements, however
pessimistic he might feel concerning the utility of that action.
His first glance assured him that the vast fortunes of the
philanthropists, whose acquaintance he had already made in print,
were not yet exhausted. Brian MacNeill still dangled his gold
before the public; so did Angus Bruce; so did Duncan Macfarlane
and Wallace Mackintosh and Donald MacNab. They still had the
money and they still wanted to give it away.
Ashe was reading listlessly down the column when, from the mass
of advertisements, one of an unusual sort detached itself.
WANTED: Young Man of good appearance, who is poor and
reckless, to undertake a delicate and dangerous enterprise.
Good pay for the right man. Apply between the hours of ten
and twelve at offices of Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole,
3, Denvers Street, Strand.
And as he read it, half past ten struck on the little clock on
his mantelpiece. It was probably this fact that decided Ashe. If
he had been compelled to postpone his visit to the offices of
Messrs. Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole until the afternoon, it is
possible that barriers of laziness might have reared themselves
in the path of adventure; for Ashe, an adventurer at heart, was
also uncommonly lazy. As it was, however, he could make an
immediate start.
Pausing but to put on his shoes, and having satisfied himself by
a glance in the mirror that his appearance was reasonably good,
he seized his hat, shot out of the narrow mouth of Arundell Street
like a shell, and scrambled into a taxicab, with the feeling
that--short of murder--they could not make it too delicate and
dangerous for him.
He was conscious of strange thrills. This, he told himself, was
the only possible mode of life with spring in the air. He had
always been partial to those historical novels in which the
characters are perpetually vaulting on chargers and riding across
country on perilous errands. This leaping into taxicabs to answer
stimulating advertisements in the Morning Post was very much the
same sort of thing. It was with fine fervor animating him that he
entered the gloomy offices of Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole. His
brain was afire and he felt ready for anything.
"I have come in ans--" he began, to the diminutive office boy,
who seemed to be the nearest thing visible to a Mainprice or a
Boole.
"Siddown. Gottatakeyerturn," said the office boy; and for the
first time Ashe perceived that the ante-room in which he stood
was crowded to overflowing.
This, in the circumstances, was something of a damper. He had
pictured himself, during his ride in the cab, striding into the
office and saying. "The delicate and dangerous enterprise. Lead
me to it!" He had not realized until now that he was not the only
man in London who read the advertisement columns of the Morning
Post, and for an instant his heart sank at the sight of all this
competition. A second and more comprehensive glance at his rivals
gave him confidence.
The Wanted column of the morning paper is a sort of dredger,
which churns up strange creatures from the mud of London's
underworld. Only in response to the dredger's operations do they
come to the surface in such numbers as to be noticeable, for as a
rule they are of a solitary habit and shun company; but when they
do come they bring with them something of the horror of the
depths.
It is the saddest spectacle in the world--that of the crowd
collected by a Wanted advertisement. They are so palpably not
wanted by anyone for any purpose whatsoever; yet every time they
gather together with a sort of hopeful hopelessness. What they
were originally--the units of these collections--Heaven knows.
Fate has battered out of them every trace of individuality. Each
now is exactly like his neighbor--no worse; no better.
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