The Duke in the Suburbs

The Duke in the Suburbs by Edgar Wallace

TO MARION CALDECOTT WITH THE AUTHOR'S HOMAGE
AUTHOR'S APOLOGY
The author, who is merely an inventor of stories, may at little cost
impress his readers with the scope of his general knowledge. For he
may place the scene of his story in Milan at the Court of the Visconti
and throw back the action half a thousand years, drawing across his
stage splendid figures slimly silked or sombrely satined, and fill their
mouths with such awesome oaths as "By Bacchus!" or "Sapristi!" and
the like. He may also, does the fine fancy seize him, take for his villain
no less a personage than Monseigneur, for hero a Florentine Count, as
bright lady of the piece, a swooning flower of the Renaissance, all pink
and white, with a bodice of plum velvet cut square at the breast, and
showing the milkwhite purity of her strong young throat.
It is indeed a more difficult matter when one is less of an inventor, than
a painstaking recorder of facts.
When our characters are conventionally attired in trousers of the latest
fashion, and ransacking mythology, the oath-makers can accept no god
worthier of witness than High Jove.
Greatest of all disabilities consider this fact: that the scene must be laid
in Brockley, S.E., a respectable suburb of London, and you realize the
apparent hopelessness of the self-imposed task of the writer who would
weave romance from such unpromising material.
It would indeed seem well--nigh hopeless to extract the exact
proportions of tragedy and farce from Kymott Crescent that go to make
your true comedy, were it not for the intervention of the Duke, of Hank,
his friend, of Mr. Roderick Nape, of Big Bill Slewer of Four Ways,

Texas, and last, but by no means least, Miss Alicia Terrill of "The
Ferns", 66 Kymott Crescent.


PART I
THE DUKE ARRIVES

CHAPTER I
The local directory is a useful institution to the stranger, but the
intimate directory of suburbia, the libellous "Who's Who", has never
and will never be printed. Set in parallel columns, it must be clear to
the meanest intelligence that, given a free hand, the directory editor
could produce a volume which, for sparkle and interest, would surpass
the finest work that author has produced, or free library put into
circulation. Thus:
KYMOTT CRESCENT
AUTHORIZED STATEMENT.
44. Mr. A. B. Wilkes. Merchant.
PRIVATE AMENDMENT.
Wilkes drinks: comes home in cabs which he can ill afford. Young
George Wilkes is a most insufferable little beast, uses scent in large
quantities. Mrs. W. has not had a new dress for years.
AUTHORIZED STATEMENT.
56. Mr. T. B. Coyter. Accountant.

PRIVATE AMENDMENT.
Coyter has three stories which he will insist upon repeating. Mrs. C.
smokes and is considered a little fast. No children: two cats, which Mrs.
C. calls "her darlings". C. lost a lot of money in a ginger beer
enterprise.
AUTHORIZED STATEMENT.
66. Mrs. Terrill.
PRIVATE AMENDMENT.
Very close, not sociable, in fact, "stuck up ". Daughter rather pretty, but
stand offish--believed to have lived in great style before Mr. T. died,
but now scraping along on £200 a year. Never give parties and seldom
go out.
AUTHORIZED STATEMENT.
74. Mr. Nape.
PRIVATE AMENDMENT.
Retired civil servant. Son Roderick supposed to be very clever; never
cuts his hair: a great brooder, reads too many trashy detective stories.
And so on ad infinitum, or rather until the portentous and grave
pronouncement "Here is Kymott Terrace" shuts off the Crescent, its
constitution and history. There are hundreds of Kymott Crescents in
London Suburbia, populated by immaculate youths of a certain set and
rigid pattern, of girls who affect open-worked blouses and short sleeves,
of deliberate old gentlemen who water their gardens and set crude traps
for the devastating caterpillar. And the young men play cricket in
snowy flannels, and the girls get hot and messy at tennis, and the old
gentle men foregather in the evening at the nearest open space to play
bowls with some labour and no little dignity. So it was with the
Crescent,

In this pretty thoroughfare with its £100 p.a. houses (detached), its tiny
carriage drives, its white muslin curtains hanging stiffly from glittering
brass bands, its window boxes of clustering geraniums and its neat
lawns, it was a tradition that no one house knew anything about its
next--door neighbour--or wanted to know. You might imagine, if you
find yourself deficient in charity, that such a praiseworthy attitude was
in the nature of a polite fiction, but you may judge for yourself.
The news that No. 64, for so long standing empty, and bearing on its
blank windows the legend "To Let--apply caretaker", had at length
found a tenant was general property on September 6. The information
that the new people