Read Online Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh - Free Book Online Page B

Legge?”
    “He said he’d be up to Illington to-night, sonny.”
    “He’ll never make it. Has he left?”
    “In his room, yet, I fancy.”
    “I’ll see,” said Will. “I’ve told Dessy she’d better stay the night.”
    “Very welcome, I’m sure. Ask Mrs. Ives to make a room ready.”
    “So I will, then,” said Will and disappeared.
    “Walking over!” said Abel. “A matter of two miles it is, from yurr to Cary Edge. Wonderful what love’ll do, gentlemen, ’bain’t it?”
    “Amazing,” said Watchman. “Is nobody else going to drink?”
     
    ii
    By eight o’clock the public tap was full and the private nearly so. Decima Moore and Will had looked in, but at the moment were closeted, upstairs with Mr. Legge who had apparently decided not to go to Illington. Miss Darragh came down in dry clothes with her curls rubbed up, and sat writing letters by the fire.
    Two of Abel’s regular cronies had come in: Dick Oates, the Ottercombe policeman, and Arthur Gill, the grocer. A little later they were joined by Mr. George Nark, an elderly bachelor-farmer whose political views chimed with those of the Left Movement and who was therefore a favourite of Will Pomeroy’s. Mr. Nark had been a great reader of the liberal literature of his youth, and had never got over the surprise and excitement that he had experienced, thirty years ago, on reading Winwood Reade, H. G. Wells, and the
Evolution of Man
. The information that he had derived from these and other serious works had, with the passage of time, become transmuted into simplified forms which, though they would have astonished the authors, completely satisfied Mr. Nark.
    The rain still came down in torrents and Mr. Nark reported that Coombe tunnel was a running stream.
    “It’s a crying shame,” he said, gathering the attention of the Private. “Bin going on for hundreds of years and no need for it. We can be flooded out three times a year and capitalistic government only laughs at us. Science would have druv a Class-A high road into the Coombe if somebody had axed it. But does a capitalistic government ax the advice of Science? Not it. It’s afraid to. And why? Because Science knows too much for it.”
    “Ah,” said Mr. Gill.
    “That’s capitalism for you,” continued Mr. Nark. “Blind-stupid, and arrogant. Patching up where it should pitch-in and start afresh. What can you expect, my sonnies, from a parcel of wage-slavers and pampered aristocrats that don’t know the smell of a day’s work? So long as they’ve got their luxuries for themselves—”
    He stopped and looked at Miss Darragh.
    “Axing your pardon, Miss,” said Mr. Nark. “In the heat of my discourse I got carried off my feet with the powerful rush of ideas and forgot your presence. This’ll be all gall and wormwood to you, doubtless.”
    “Not at all, Mr. Nark,” said Miss Darragh cheerfully. “I’m myself a poor woman and I’ve moods when I’m consumed with jealousy for anybody who’s got a lot of money.”
    This was not precisely the answer Mr. Nark, who was a prosperous farmer, desired.
    “It’s the Government,” he said, “that does every manjack of us out of our scientific rights.”
    “As far as that goes,” said P. C. Oates, “I reckon one government’s as scientific as the other. Look at sewage, for instance.”
    “Why?” demanded Mr. Nark, “should we look at sewage? What’s sewage got to do with it? We’re all animals.”
    “Ah,” said Mr. Gill, “so we are, then.”
    “Do you know, Dick Oates,” continued Mr. Nark, “that you’ve got a rudimentary tail?”
    “And if I have,
which
I don’t admit—”
    “Ask Mr. Cubitt, then. He’s an artist and no doubt, has studied the skeleton of man in its present stage of evolution. The name escapes me for the moment but we’ve all got it. Isn’t that correct, sir?”
    “Yes, yes,” said Norman Cubitt hurriedly. “Quite right, Mr. Nark.”
    “There you are,” said Mr. Nark. “Apes, every man-jack