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Updated: August 29, 2024
To the overstrung nerves of the onlookers, the brooding eyes of the picture seemed sad and stern with menace, and charged with the lightnings of doom. It was a horrible contrast. For Wimp, alone, the painted face had fuller, more tragical meanings. The audience seemed turned to stone. They sat or stood in every variety of attitude frozen, rigid.
"When I was in my cradle, a century ago," said Wimp's grandmother-in-law, "men were hanged for stealing horses." They silenced her with snapdragon performances. Wimp was busy thinking how to get at Grodman's factotum. Grodman was busy thinking how to get at Wimp's domestic. Neither received any of the usual messages from the Christmas Bells. The next day was sloppy and uncertain.
Wimp was at his greatest in collecting circumstantial evidence; in putting two and two together to make five. He would collect together a number of dark and disconnected data and flash across them the electric light of some unifying hypothesis in a way which would have done credit to a Darwin or a Faraday.
Grodman saw it, and watched her, and fooled Wimp to the top of his bent. It was, of course, Wimp who introduced the poet's name, and he did it so casually that Grodman perceived at once that he wished to pump him. The idea that the rival bloodhound should come to him for confirmation of suspicions against his own pet jackal was too funny.
It almost hypnotised her, though, and she looked down at her new French kid boots to escape it. At Scotland Yard Denzil asked for Edward Wimp. Edward Wimp was not on view. Like kings and editors, detectives are difficult of approach unless you are a criminal, when you cannot see anything of them at all. Denzil knew of Edward Wimp, principally because of Grodman's contempt for his successor.
The great reception arranged outside was a fiasco; the evening banquet was indefinitely postponed. Wimp had won; Grodman felt like a whipped cur. "So you were right," Denzil could not help saying as he greeted Grodman a week afterwards. "I shall not live to tell the story of how you discovered the Bow murderer." "Sit down," growled Grodman; "perhaps you will after all."
"Scotland Yard." George Grodman read this letter with annoyance, and crumpling up the paper, murmured scornfully, "Edward Wimp!" "Yes, but what will become of the Beautiful?" said Denzil Cantercot. "Hang the Beautiful!" said Peter Crowl, as if he were on the committee of the Academy. "Give me the True." Denzil did nothing of the sort. He didn't happen to have it about him.
Yet, on the other hand, these were the very factors of the temptation. Wimp went in and took a seat behind Denzil. All the seats were numbered, so that everybody might have the satisfaction of occupying somebody else's. Denzil was in the special reserved places in the front row just by the central gangway; Crowl was squeezed into a corner behind a pillar near the back of the hall.
When Wimp invited Grodman to eat his Christmas plum-pudding at King's Cross, Grodman was only a little surprised. The two men were always overwhelmingly cordial when they met, in order to disguise their mutual detestation. When people really like each other, they make no concealment of their mutual contempt.
His father helped put a face on it, made it more accessible and more acceptable. But what did his father think of him? I didn't wimp out or fall in and die, anyway, he told himself. Muni had seemed guardedly approving. Hard to tell. Perhaps Muni had felt himself on trial, as well. He hadn't shown it. An architect that was interesting.
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