Тринадцать гостей / Thirteen Guests

His horseflesh was not of the Bragley breed, and Lord Aveling supplied cars for all his guests who did not bring their own. Still there were other destinations, and sometimes a passenger on the 5.56 was bound for one of them.

Of the four guests deposited on the platform on this particular evening, the last to enter the waiting Rolls was a tall, slightish man mid-way between thirty and forty. His name was Lionel Bultin, and he stood, silent and aloof, and purposely lingering, to watch a little incident.

His three companions were, as he had established in the restaurant car, Zena Wilding, the actress, and a married couple who lived an unenviable existence under the name of Chater. Bultin, a ruthless reader of character, had needed only two minutes to decide that an additional “e” slipped between the second and third letters of their name would have described the Chaters more accurately. When the husband looked straight at you he seemed to be seeing you round a corner.

The wife hardly ever looked straight at you. She was a silent creature whose moroseness appeared to form her protection against a perpetual desire to scream.

Zena Wilding, on the other hand, was lively and talkative, and while she worried vivaciously about her luggage, she never missed an opportunity to advertise her dentist. Later on, the solemn station-master paused in the important business of writing “We could do—” to recollect her dazzling teeth before concluding “—with new fire-buckets.

” And the porter actually dreamt of the teeth, earnestly filling a freight train with tooth-paste to keep them white. But the dazzling teeth made no impression on Lionel Bultin, saving as possible matter for a theatrical paragraph. He felt no personal emotion about them. He had done with personal emotion ten years ago....

In order to understand Bultin’s attitude, and the detachment with which his trained intelligence now absorbed an incident frightful with suppressed emotion, it is necessary to travel back those ten years to the day when, an eager and unsuccessful young journalist, he came to his great decision.

In a not-very-attractive bed-sitting-room he had faced his mirror frankly, and had said:

“You’re making a hash of things.