The Grand Babylon Hote

by Arnold Bennett

  'Well, Miss Spencer,' she greeted the former Baroness Zerlinski, 'I guess you didn't expect to see me. You left our hotel very suddenly this afternoon, and you left it very suddenly a few days ago; and so I've just called to make a few inquiries.'

  To do the lady justice, Miss Spencer bore the surprising ordeal very well.

  She did not flinch; she betrayed no emotion. The sole sign of perturbation was in her hurried breathing.

  'You have ceased to be the Baroness Zerlinski,' Nella continued. 'May I sit down?'

  'Certainly, sit down,' said Miss Spencer, copying the girl's tone. 'You are a fairly smart young woman, that I will say. What do you want? Weren't my books all straight?'

  'Your books were all straight. I haven't come about your books. I have come about the murder of Reginald Dimmock, the disappearance of his corpse, and the disappearance of Prince Eugen of Posen. I thought you might be able to help me in some investigations which I am making.'

  Miss Spencer's eyes gleamed, and she stood up and moved swiftly to the mantelpiece.

  'You may be a Yankee, but you're a fool,' she said.

  She took hold of the bell-rope.

  'Don't ring that bell if you value your life,' said Nella.

  'If what?' Miss Spencer remarked.

  'If you value your life,' said Nella calmly, and with the words she pulled from her pocket a very neat and dainty little revolver.

  9. Two Women And The Revolver

  'YOU - you're only doing that to frighten me,' stammered Miss Spencer, in a low, quavering voice.

  'Am I?' Nella replied, as firmly as she could, though her hand shook violently with excitement, could Miss Spencer but have observed it. 'Am I? You said just now that I might be a Yankee girl, but I was a fool. Well, I am a Yankee girl, as you call it; and in my country, if they don't teach revolver-shooting in boarding-schools, there are at least a lot of girls who can handle a revolver. I happen to be one of them. I tell you that if you ring that bell you will suffer.'

  Most of this was simple bluff on Nella's part, and she trembled lest Miss Spencer should perceive that it was simple bluff. Happily for her, Miss Spencer belonged to that order of women who have every sort of courage except physical courage.

  Miss Spencer could have withstood successfully any moral trial, but persuade her that her skin was in danger, and she would succumb. Nella at once divined this useful fact, and proceeded accordingly, hiding the strangeness of her own sensations as well as she could.

  'You had better sit down now,' said Nella, 'and I will ask you a few questions.'

  And Miss Spencer obediently sat down, rather white, and trying to screw her lips into a formal smile.

  'Why did you leave the Grand Babylon that night?' Nella began her examination, putting on a stern, barrister-like expression.

  'I had orders to, Miss Racksole.'

  'Whose orders?'

  'Well, I'm - I'm - the fact is, I'm a married woman, and it was my husband's orders.'

  'Who is your husband? 'Tom Jackson - Jules, you know, head waiter at the Grand Babylon.'

  'So Jules's real name is Tom Jackson? Why did he want you to leave without giving notice?'

  'I'm sure I don't know, Miss Racksole. I swear I don't know. He's my husband, and, of course, I do what he tells me, as you will some day do what your husband tells you. Please heaven you'll get a better husband than mine!'

  Miss Spencer showed a sign of tears.

  Nella fingered the revolver, and put it at full cock. 'Well,' she repeated, 'why did he want you to leave?' She was tremendously surprised at her own coolness, and somewhat pleased with it, too.

  'I can't tell you, I can't tell you.'

  'You've just got to,' Nella said, in a terrible, remorseless tone.

  'He - he wished me to come over here to Ostend. Something had gone wrong.

  Oh! he's a fearful man, is Tom. If I told you, he'd - '

  'Had something gone wrong in the hotel, or over here?'

  'Both.'

  'Was it about Prince Eugen of Posen?'

  'I don't know - that is, yes, I think so.'

  'What has your husband to do with Prince Eugen?'

  'I believe he has some - some sort of business with him, some money business.'

  'And was Mr Dimmock in this business? 'I fancy so, Miss Racksole. I'm telling you all I know, that I swear.'

  'Did your husband and Mr Dimmock have a quarrel that night in Room 111?'

  'They had some difficulty.'

  'And the result of that was that you came to Ostend instantly?'

  'Yes; I suppose so.'

  'And what were you to do in Ostend? What were your instructions from this husband of yours?'

  Miss Spencer's head dropped on her arms on the table which separated her from Nella, and she appeared to sob violently.

  'Have pity on me,' she murmured, 'I can't tell you any more.'

  'Why?'

  'He'd kill me if he knew.'

  'You're wandering from the subject,' observed Nella coldly. 'This is the last time I shall warn you. Let me tell you plainly I've got the best reasons for being desperate, and if anything happens to you I shall say I did it in sell-defence. Now, what were you to do in Ostend?'

  'I shall die for this anyhow,' whined Miss Spencer, and then, with a sort of fierce despair, 'I had to keep watch on Prince Eugen.'

  'Where? In this house?'

  Miss Spencer nodded, and, looking up, Nella could see the traces of tears in her face.

  'Then Prince Eugen was a prisoner? Some one had captured him at the instigation of Jules?'

  'Yes, if you must have it.'

  'Why was it necessary for you specially to come to Ostend?'

  'Oh! Tom trusts me. You see, I know Ostend. Before I took that place at the Grand Babylon I had travelled over Europe, and Tom knew that I knew a thing or two.'

  'Why did you take the place at the Grand Babylon?'

  'Because Tom told me to. He said I should be useful to him there.'

  'Is your husband an Anarchist, or something of that kind, Miss Spencer?'

  'I don't know. I'd tell you in a minute if I knew. But he's one of those that keep themselves to themselves.'

  'Do you know if he has ever committed a murder? 'Never!' said Miss Spencer, with righteous repudiation of the mere idea.

  'But Mr Dimmock was murdered. He was poisoned. If he had not been poisoned why was his body stolen? It must have been stolen to prevent inquiry, to hide traces. Tell me about that.'

  'I take my dying oath,' said Miss Spencer, standing up a little way from the table,

  'I take my dying oath I didn't know Mr Dimmock was dead till I saw it in the newspaper.'

  'You swear you had no suspicion of it?'

  'I swear I hadn't.'

  Nella was inclined to believe the statement. The woman and the girl looked at each other in the tawdry, frowsy, lamp-lit room. Miss Spencer nervously patted her yellow hair into shape, as if gradually recovering her composure and equanimity. The whole affair seemed like a dream to Nella, a disturbing, sinister nightmare. She was a little uncertain what to say. She felt that she had not yet got hold of any very definite information. 'Where is Prince Eugen now?' she asked at length.

  'I don't know, miss.'

  'He isn't in this house?'

  'No, miss.'

  'Ah! We will see presently.'

  'They took him away, Miss Racksole.'

  'Who took him away? Some of your husband's friends?'

  'Some of his - acquaintances.'

  'Then there is a gang of you?'

  'A gang of us - a gang! I don't know what you mean,' Miss Spencer quavered.

  'Oh, but you must know,' smiled Nella calmly. 'You can't possibly be so innocent as all that, Mrs Tom Jackson. You can't play games with me. You've just got to remember that I'm what you call a Yankee girl. There's one thing that I mean to find out, within the next five minutes, and that is - how your charming husband kidnapped Prince Eugen, and why he kidnapped him. Let us be
gin with the second question. You have evaded it once.'

  Miss Spencer looked into Nella's face, and then her eyes dropped, and her fingers worked nervously with the tablecloth.

  'How can I tell you,' she said, 'when I don't know? You've got the whip-hand of me, and you're tormenting me for your own pleasure.' She wore an expression of persecuted innocence.

  'Did Mr Tom Jackson want to get some money out of Prince Eugen?'

  'Money! Not he! Tom's never short of money.'

  'But I mean a lot of money - tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?'

  'Tom never wanted money from anyone,' said Miss Spencer doggedly.

  'Then had he some reason for wishing to prevent Prince Eugen from coming to London?'

  'Perhaps he had. I don't know. If you kill me, I don't know.' Nella stopped to reflect. Then she raised the revolver. It was a mechanical, unintentional sort of action, and certainly she had no intention of using the weapon, but, strange to say, Miss Spencer again cowered before it. Even at that moment Nella wondered that a woman like Miss Spencer could be so simple as to think the revolver would actually be used. Having absolutely no physical cowardice herself, Nella had the greatest difficulty in imagining that other people could be at the mercy of a bodily fear. Still, she saw her advantage, and used it relentlessly, and with as much theatrical gesture as she could command. She raised the revolver till it was level with Miss Spencer's face, and suddenly a new, queer feeling took hold of her.

  She knew that she would indeed use that revolver now, if the miserable woman before her drove her too far. She felt afraid - afraid of herself; she was in the grasp of a savage, primeval instinct. In a flash she saw Miss Spencer dead at her feet - the police - a court of justice - the scaffold. It was horrible.

  'Speak,' she said hoarsely, and Miss Spencer's face went whiter.

  'Tom did say,' the woman whispered rapidly, awesomely, 'that if Prince Eugen got to London it would upset his scheme.'

  'What scheme? What scheme? Answer me.'

  'Heaven help me, I don't know.' Miss Spencer sank into a chair. 'He said Mr Dimmock had turned tail, and he should have to settle him and then Rocco - '

  'Rocco! What about Rocco?' Nella could scarcely hear herself. Her grip of the revolver tightened.

  Miss Spencer's eyes opened wider; she gazed at Nella with a glassy stare.

  'Don't ask me. It's death!' Her eyes were fixed as if in horror.

  'It is,' said Nella, and the sound of her voice seemed to her to issue from the lips of some third person.

  'It's death,' repeated Miss Spencer, and gradually her head and shoulders sank back, and hung loosely over the chair. Nella was conscious of a sudden revulsion. The woman had surely fainted. Dropping the revolver she ran round the table. She was herself again - feminine, sympathetic, the old Nella. She felt immensely relieved that this had happened. But at the same instant Miss Spencer sprang up from the chair like a cat, seized the revolver, and with a wild movement of the arm flung it against the window. It crashed through the glass, exploding as it went, and there was a tense silence.

  'I told you that you were a fool,' remarked Miss Spencer slowly, 'coming here like a sort of female Jack Sheppard, and trying to get the best of me.

  We are on equal terms now. You frightened me, but I knew I was a cleverer woman than you, and that in the end, if I kept on long enough, I should win.

  Now it will be my turn.'

  Dumbfounded, and overcome with a miserable sense of the truth of Miss Spencer's words, Nella stood still. The idea of her colossal foolishness swept through her like a flood. She felt almost ashamed. But even at this juncture she had no fear. She faced the woman bravely, her mind leaping about in search of some plan. She could think of nothing but a bribe - an enormous bribe.

  'I admit you've won,' she said, 'but I've not finished yet. Just listen.'

  Miss Spencer folded her arms, and glanced at the door, smiling bitterly.

  'You know my father is a millionaire; perhaps you know that he is one of the richest men in the world. If I give you my word of honour not to reveal anything that you've told me, what will you take to let me go free?'

  'What sum do you suggest?' asked Miss Spencer carelessly.

  'Twenty thousand pounds,' said Nella promptly. She had begun to regard the affair as a business operation.

  Miss Spencer's lip curled.

  'A hundred thousand.'

  Again Miss Spencer's lip curled.

  'Well, say a million. I can rely on my father, and so may you.'

  'You think you are worth a million to him?'

  'I do,' said Nella.

  'And you think we could trust you to see that it was paid?'

  'Of course you could.'

  'And we should not suffer afterwards in any way?'

  'I would give you my word, and my father's word.'

  'Bah!' exclaimed Miss Spencer: 'how do you know I wouldn't let you go free for nothing? You are only a rash, silly girl.'

  'I know you wouldn't. I can read your face too well.'

  'You are right,' Miss Spencer replied slowly. 'I wouldn't. I wouldn't let you go for all the dollars in America.'

  Nella felt cold down the spine, and sat down again in her chair. A draught of air from the broken window blew on her cheek. Steps sounded in the passage; the door opened, but Nella did not turn round. She could not move her eyes from Miss Spencer's. There was a noise of rushing water in her ears. She lost consciousness, and slipped limply to the ground.

  10. At Sea

  IT seemed to Nella that she was being rocked gently in a vast cradle, which swayed to and fro with a motion at once slow and incredibly gentle. This sensation continued for some time, and there was added to it the sound of a quick, quiet, muffled beat. Soft, exhilarating breezes wafted her forward in spite of herself, and yet she remained in a delicious calm. She wondered if her mother was kneeling by her side, whispering some lullaby in her childish ears. Then strange colours swam before her eyes, her eyelids wavered, and at last she awoke. For a few moments her gaze travelled to and fro in a vain search for some clue to her surroundings. was aware of nothing except sense of repose and a feeling of relief that some mighty and fatal struggle was over; she cared not whether she had conquered or suffered defeat in the struggle of her soul with some other soul; it was finished, done with, and the consciousness of its conclusion satisfied and contented her. Gradually her brain, recovering from its obsession, began to grasp the phenomena of her surroundings, and she saw that she was on a yacht, and that the yacht was moving. The motion of the cradle was the smooth rolling of the vessel; the beat was the beat of its screw; the strange colours were the cloud tints thrown by the sun as it rose over a distant and receding shore in the wake of the yacht; her mother's lullaby was the crooned song of the man at the wheel. Nella all through her life had had many experiences of yachting. From the waters of the River Hudson to those bluer tides of the Mediterranean Sea, she had yachted in all seasons and all weathers.

  She loved the water, and now it seemed deliciously right and proper that she should be on the water again. She raised her head to look round, and then let it sink back:

  she was fatigued, enervated; she desired only solitude and calm; she had no care, no anxiety, no responsibility: a hundred years might have passed since her meeting with Miss Spencer, and the memory of that meeting appeared to have faded into the remotest background of her mind.

  It was a small yacht, and her practised eye at once told that it belonged to the highest aristocracy of pleasure craft. As she reclined in the deck-chair (it did not occur to her at that moment to speculate as to the identity of the person who had led her therein) she examined all visible details of the vessel. The deck was as white and smooth as her own hand, and the seams ran along its length like blue veins. All the brass-work, from the band round the slender funnel to the concave surface of the binnacle, shone like gold.

  The tapered masts stretched upwards at a rakish angle, and the rigging seemed like spun
silk. No sails were set; the yacht was under steam, and doing about seven or eight knots. She judged that it was a boat of a hundred tons or so, probably Clyde-built, and not more than two or three years old.

  No one was to be seen on deck except the man at the wheel: this man wore a blue jersey; but there was neither name nor initial on the jersey, nor was there a name on the white life-buoys lashed to the main rigging, nor on the polished dinghy which hung on the starboard davits. She called to the man, and called again, in a feeble voice, but the steerer took no notice of her, and continued his quiet song as though nothing else existed in the universe save the yacht, the sea, the sun, and himself.

  Then her eyes swept the outline of the land from which they were hastening, and she could just distinguish a lighthouse and a great white irregular dome, which she recognized as the Kursaal at Ostend, that gorgeous rival of the gaming palace at Monte Carlo. So she was leaving Ostend. The rays of the sun fell on her caressingly, like a restorative. All around the water was changing from wonderful greys and dark blues to still more wonderful pinks and translucent unearthly greens; the magic kaleidoscope of dawn was going forward in its accustomed way, regardless of the vicissitudes of mortals.

  Here and there in the distance she descried a sail - the brown sail of some Ostend fishing-boat returning home after a night's trawling. Then the beat of paddles caught her ear, and a steamer blundered past, wallowing clumsily among the waves like a tortoise. It was the Swallow from London. She could see some of its passengers leaning curiously over the aft-rail. A girl in a mackintosh signalled to her, and mechanically she answered the salute with her arm. The officer of the bridge of the Swallow hailed the yacht, but the man at the wheel offered no reply. In another minute the Swallow was nothing but a blot in the distance.

  Nella tried to sit straight in the deck-chair, but she found herself unable to do so.

  Throwing off the rug which covered her, she discovered that she had been tied to the chair by means of a piece of broad webbing. Instantly she was alert, awake, angry; she knew that her perils were not over; she felt that possibly they had scarcely yet begun. Her lazy contentment, her dreamy sense of peace and repose, vanished utterly, and she steeled herself to meet the dangers of a grave and difficult situation.