Cause for Alarm Read Online Free Page A

boxes of various sorts of paper clips, sat Mr. Alfred Pelcher himself.
    He was a small, bald, cheerful man of about fifty with rimless, bi-focal spectacles and a soft, soothing manner which suggested that he had judged you to be in a very bad temper and was determined to coax you out of it. His dress—clearly the product of a compromise between the demands of a morning in the office and an afternoon’s golf—consisted of a black lounge suit jacket, a brown cardigan and a pair of grey flannel trousers. He had a habit of wrenching desperately at his collar as if it were choking him.
    When I entered the room he was fiddling busily with the curser of a two-foot slide-rule and transferring the results of his calculations to the margin of a copy of
The Times Trade and Engineering Supplement
. Without looking at me he waved the slide-rule in the air to indicate that he was nearly finished. A moment or two later he dropped the slide-rule, sprang to his feet and shook me warmly by the hand.
    “How very good of you to come all this way to see us.” He pressed me into a chair. “Do sit down. Now let me see, it’s Mr. Marlow, isn’t it? Splendid.” He waved a deprecatory hand at his marginal calculations. “Just a little problem in mechanics, Mr. Marlow. I’ve been trying to work out approximately how many foot-pounds of energy an eighteen handicap man saves on an average round by having a caddy to carry his clubs for him. It’s a tremendous figure.” He chuckled. “Do you play golf, Mr. Marlow?”
    “Unfortunately, no.”
    “A great game. The greatest of all games.” He beamed at me. “Well, well now. To business, eh? We wrote to you, didn’t we? Yes, of course.” He relapsed into his chair again and stared at me through the lower half of his spectacles for fully thirty seconds. Then he leaned forward across the table. “
Se non è in grado
,” he said deliberately, “
di accettare
questa mia proposta, me lo dica francamente. Non me l’avrò a male
.”
    I was a little taken aback, but I replied suitably: “
Prima prendere una decisione vorrei sapere sua proposta, Signore
.”
    His eyebrows went up. He snapped his fingers delightedly. He lifted the slide-rule, banged it down on the table and sat back again.
    “Mr. Marlow,” he said solemnly, “you are the first person to answer our advertisement who has read it carefully. I have seen six gentlemen before you. Three of them could speak tourist French and insisted that most Italians would understand it. One had been in Ceylon and had a smattering of Tamil. He declared, by the way, that if you shouted loud enough in English anyone would know what you were driving at. Of the other two, one spoke fluent German, while the last had been on a cruise and spent a day in Naples. You are the first to see us who can speak Italian.” He paused. Then a sudden expression of alarm clouded his features. He looked like a child who is about to be hurt. “You
are
an engineer, aren’t you, Mr. Marlow?” He plucked anxiously at his collar. “You are not, by any chance, an electrician or a chemist or a wireless expert?”
    I summarised my qualifications briefly and was about to refer him for greater detail to the letter I had written when I saw that my letter was on the table in front of him and that he was nodding happily over it while I talked. Mr. Pelcher was evidently not quite so ingenious as he appeared.
    When I had finished, he slid the letter discreetly under his blotter and emitted a loud sigh of relief. “Then
that’s
all right. I feel that we understand one another, Mr. Marlow. Now tell me”—he looked like a small boy asking a riddle—“have you had any sales experience?”
    “None at all.”
    He looked crestfallen. “I was afraid not. However, wecan’t have everything. A good engineer who can speak Italian with reasonable accuracy is something you don’t find every day. Excuse me one moment.” He lifted the telephone. “Hallo, Jenny, my dear, please ask