Cause for Alarm Read Online Free

London.”
    That sounded fair enough. The following day I walked out of Wolverhampton station and asked to be directed to the Spartacus Works. After a bus ride and a ten-minute walk, I came to them, a dingy, sprawling collection of buildings at the end of a long and very muddy road. The view didnothing to raise my drooping spirits. Neither did my reception.
    As I approached, a decrepit looking gate-keeper appeared out of a wooden office and asked my business.
    “I want to see Mr. Pelcher.”
    He sucked his teeth and shook his head firmly. “No travellers seen except on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a waste of time to try other days.”
    “I’m not a traveller. I have an appointment with Mr. Pelcher.”
    He bridled. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve got my job to do. I can’t be expected to know everything. I’m not,” he added unnecessarily, “a ruddy crystal gazer. Here”—he grasped my arm—“over there and up the stairs.” He indicated a flight of steel stairs set against the side of a black brick building on the opposite side of the yard and retired, muttering, to his office.
    I thanked him, clanked up the stairs and pushed open a door marked “S ALES O FFICE AND E NQUIRIES . P
lease walk in
.” Beyond it was a small frosted glass window, labelled “K NOCK .” I knocked. The window slid open with a crash and a fat, pale youth with the beginnings of a moustache peered through at me.
    “I want to see Mr. Pelcher.”
    “Reps., Tuesdays and Thursdays,” said the youth severely. “There’s a notice at the gate. I don’t know what some of you chaps are coming to. It’s a waste of your time and mine. You can’t see him now.”
    “I have an appointment.”
    He shrugged. “Oh well! Name?”
    “Marlow.”
    “O.K.”
    The window slammed again and I heard him asking over a telephone for Mrs. Moshowitz. Then: “Is that Mrs. Mo? This is your little Ernest speaking from the Sales office.”There was a pause. “Now, now! Naughty, naughty,” he went on playfully. He lapsed suddenly into the lingua franca of the gangster film. “Say, listen, sister. There’s a sucker here named Marlow. He claims he has an appointment with the Big Boy. Shall I let him have it in the stomach or will the Big Boy give him the works himself?” Another pause. “All right,
all
right, keep your stays on.” He slammed down the telephone, reappeared at the door and announced that he would himself take me across to Mr. Alfred’s office.
    We descended the stairway, turned to the right along an alleyway littered with rusty scrap and climbed up another flight of stairs to a door with a Wet Paint notice hanging on the handle. My escort kicked the door open with his heel and informed the elderly and harassed-looking Jewess who glared at him indignantly across a sea of blue-prints that I was the man for Mr. Alfred.
    This I was beginning to doubt. What I had so far seen of the Spartacus Machine Tool Company had impressed me so little that I was within an ace of leaving then and there, without seeing its Managing Director or troubling about my travelling expenses. I was a fool, I told myself, to have wasted a day on such a wild goose chase. But it was too late to think about that now. I was being shown into Mr. Alfred’s room.
    It was large and very untidy. Stack upon stack of dusty files and tattered blue-prints formed a sort of dado round the green distempered wall, the upper part of which was decorated with many framed catalogue illustrations of machines and two yellowing gold-medal award certificates from Continental trade exhibitions. A coal fire smoked below a mantelpiece groaning under a pile of technical reference books, an
Almanach de Gotha
, a bronze Krishna mounted on a teak plinth and a partly concealed copy of
Etiquette for Men
. In one corner was a bag of golf-clubs. In the centre of the room, behind an enormous table strewn with labelled machine parts, correspondence trays, wooden golf tees, engineeringtrade papers and