It actually began to look as though these story-book conspirators — these hirelings of a foreign government who had not been convincing because they were too obvious, too well done — actually intended to expose him to serious injury.
In spite of their sinister intentions in regard to him, in spite of their attempts to harm him, he had not, so far, been able to take them seriously or even to reconcile them and their behaviour with the commonplaces of the twentieth century in which he lived.
But now, in the darkness, with the clock on the washstand shelf ticking steadily, he began to take the matter very seriously. The gag in his mouth hurt him cruelly; the bands of linen that held it in began to stifle him so that his breath came in quick gasps through his nostrils; sweat started at the roots of his hair; his heart leaped, beat madly, stood still, and leaped again; and he threw himself against the strips that held him and twisted and writhed with all his strength.
Suddenly fear pierced him like a poignard; for a moment panic seized him and chaos reigned in his bursting brain. He swayed and strained convulsively; he strove to hurl all the inward and inert reserve of strength against the bonds that held him.
After what seemed an age of terrible effort he found himself breathing fast and heavily as though his lungs would burst through his straining, dilating nostrils, seated exactly as he had been without a band loosened, and the icy sweat pouring over his twitching face.
He heard himself trying to shout — heard the imprisoned groan shattered in his own throat, dying there within him.
Suddenly a key rattled; the door was torn open; the light switched on. Golden Beard stood there, his blue eyes glaring furious inquiry. He gave one glance around the room, caught sight of the clock, recoiled, shut off the light again, and slammed and locked the door.
But in that instant Neeland’s starting eyes had seen the clock. The fixed hands on one of the dials still pointed to 2:13; the moving hands on the other lacked three minutes of that hour.
And, seated there in the pitch darkness, he suddenly realised that he had only three minutes more of life on earth.
All panic was gone; his mind was quite clear. He heard every tick of the clock and knew what each one meant.
Also he heard a sudden sound across the room, as though outside the port something was rustling against the ship’s side.
Suddenly there came a click and the room sprang into full light; an arm, entering the open port from the darkness outside, let go the electric button, was withdrawn, only to reappear immediately clutching an automatic pistol. And the next instant the arm and the head of Ilse Dumont were thrust through the port into the room.
Her face was pale as death as her eyes fell on the dial of the clock. With a gasp she stretched out her arm and fired straight at the clock, shattering both dials and knocking the timepiece into the washbasin below.
For a moment she struggled to force her other shoulder and her body through the port, but it was too narrow. Then she called across to the bound figure seated on the bed and staring at her with eyes that fairly started from their sockets:
“Mr. Neeland, can’t you move? Try! Try to break loose — —”
Her voice died away in a whisper as a flash of bluish flame broke out close to the ceiling overhead, where the three bombs were slung.
“Oh, God!” she faltered. “The fuses are afire!”
For an instant her brain reeled; she instinctively recoiled as though to fling herself out into the darkness. Then, in a second, her extended arm grew rigid, slanted upward; the pistol exploded once, twice, the third time; the lighted bombs in their sling, released by the severed rope, fell to the bed, the fuses sputtering and fizzling.
Instantly the girl fired again at the big jug of water on the bracket over the head of the bed; a deluge drenched the bed underneath; two fuses were out; one still snapped and glimmered and sent up little jets and rings of vapour; but as the water soaked into the match the cinder slowly died until the last spark fell from the charred wet end and went out on the drenched blanket.
She waited a little longer, then with an indescribable look at the helpless man below, she withdrew her head, pushed herself free, hung to the invisible rope ladder for a moment, swaying against the open port. His eyes were fastened on her where she dangled there against the darkness betwixt sky and sea, oscillating with the movement of the ship, her pendant figure now gilded by the light from the room, now phantom dim as she swung outward.
As the roll of the ship brought her head to the level of the port once more, she held up her pistol, shook it, and laughed at him:
“Now do you believe that I can shoot?” she called out. “Answer me some time when that mocking tongue of yours is free!”
Then, climbing slowly upward into darkness, the light, falling now across her body, now athwart her skirt, gilded at last the heels of her shoes; suddenly she was gone; then stars glittered through the meshes of the shadowy, twitching ladder which still barred the open port. And finally the ladder was pulled upward out of sight.
He waited. After a little while — an interminable interval to him — he heard somebody stealthily trying the handle of the door; then came a pause, silence, followed by a metallic noise as though the lock were being explored or picked.
For a while the scraping, metallic sounds continued steadily, then abruptly ceased as though the unseen meddler had been interrupted.
A voice — evidently the voice of the lock-picker — pitched to a cautious key, was heard in protest as though objecting to some intentions evident in the new arrival. Whispered expostulations continued for a while, then the voices became quarrelsome and louder; and somebody suddenly rapped on the door.
Then a thick, soft voice that he recognised with a chill, grew angrily audible:
“I say to you, steward, that I forbid you to entaire that room. I forbid you to disturb thees yoong lady. Do you know who I am?”
“I don’t care who you are — —”
“I have authority. I shall employ it. You shall lose your berth! Thees yoong lady within thees room ees my fiancée! I forbid you to enter forcibly — —”
“Haven’t I knocked? Wot’s spilin’ you? I am doing my duty. Back away from this ‘ere door, I tell you!”
“You spik thees-a-way, so impolite — —”
“Get out o’ my way! Blime d’you think I’ll stand ‘ere jawin’ any longer?”
“I am membaire of Parliament — —”
And the defiant voice of Jim’s own little cockney steward retorted, interrupting:
“Ahr, stow it! Don’t I tell you as how a lydy telephones me just now that my young gentleman is in there? Get away from that door, you blighter, or I’ll bash your beak in!”
The door trembled under a sudden and terrific kick; the wordy quarrel ceased; hurried steps retreated along the corridor; a pass key rattled in the lock, and the door was flung wide open:
“Mr. Neeland, sir — oh, my Gawd, wot ever ‘ave they gone and done, sir, to find you ‘ere in such a ‘orrid state!”
But the little cockney lost no time; fingers and pen-knife flew; Neeland, his arms free, tore the bandage from his mouth and spat out the wad of cloth.
“I’ll do the rest,” he gasped, forcing the words from his bruised and distorted lips; “follow that man who was outside talking to you! Find him if you can. He had been planning to blow up this ship!”
“That man, sir!”
“Yes! Did you know him?”
“Yes, sir; but I darsn’t let on to him I knew him — what with ‘earing that you was in here — —”
“You did know him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Neeland, sir, that there cove is wot he says he is, a member of Parliament, and his name is Wilson — —”
“You’re mad! He’s an Eurasian, a spy; his name is Karl Breslau — I heard it from the others — and he tried to blow up the captain’s cabin and the bridge with those three bombs lying there on the bed!”
“My God, sir — what you tell me may be so, but what I say is true, sir; that gentleman you heard talking outside the door to me is Charles Wilson, member of Parliament, representing Glebe and Wotherness; and I knew it w’en I ‘anded ‘im the ‘ot stuff!— ‘strewth I did, sir — and took my chance you’d ‘elp me out if I got in too rotten with the company!”
Neeland said:
“Certainly you may count on me. You’re a brick!” He continued to rub and slap and pinch his arms and legs to restore the circulation, and finally ventured to rise to his shaky feet. The steward offered an arm; together they hobbled to the door, summoned another steward, placed him in charge of the room, and went on in quest of Captain West, to whom an immediate report was now imperative.
CHAPTER XXIII
ON HIS WAY
The sun hung well above the river mists and threw long, cherry-red beams across the choppy channel where clotted jets of steam and smoke from tug and steamer drifted with the fog; and still the captain of the Volhynia and young Neeland sat together in low-voiced conference in the captain’s cabin; and a sailor, armed with cutlass and pistol, stood outside the locked and bolted door.
Off the port bow, Liverpool spread as far as the eye could see through the shredded fog; to starboard, off Birkenhead, through a haze of pearl and lavender, the tall phantom of an old-time battleship loomed. She was probably one of Nelson’s ships, now only an apparition; but to Neeland, as he caught sight of her dimly revealed, still dominating the water, the old ship seemed like a menacing ghost, never to be laid until the sceptre of sea power fell from an enervated empire and the glory of Great Britain departed for all time. And in his Yankee heart he hoped devoutly that such disaster to the world might never come upon it.
Few passengers were yet astir; the tender had not yet come alongside; the monstrous city beyond had not awakened.
But a boat manned by Liverpool police lay off the Volhynia’s port; Neeland’s steamer trunk was already in it; and now the captain accompanied him to the ladder, where a sailor took his suitcase and the olive-wood box and ran down the landing stairs like a monkey.
“Good luck,” said the captain of the Volhynia. “And keep it in your mind every minute that those two men and that woman probably are at this moment aboard some German fishing craft, and headed for France.
“Remember, too, that they are merely units in a vast system; that they are certain to communicate with other units; that between you and Paris are people who will be notified to watch for you, follow you, rob you.”
Neeland nodded thoughtfully.
The captain said again:
“Good luck! I wish you were free to turn over that box to us. But if you’ve given your word to deliver it in person, the whole matter involves, naturally, a point of honour.”
“Yes. I have no discretion in the matter, you see.” He laughed. “You’re thinking, Captain West, that I haven’t much discretion anyway.”
“I don’t think you have very much,” admitted the captain, smiling and shaking the hand which Neeland offered. “Well, this is merely one symptom of a very serious business, Mr. Neeland. That an attempt should actually have been made to murder you and to blow me to pieces in my cabin is a slight indication of what a cataclysmic explosion may shatter the peace of the entire world at any moment now.... Good-bye. And I warn you very solemnly to take this affair as a deadly serious one and not as a lark.”
They exchanged a firm clasp; then Neeland descended and entered the boat; the Inspector of Police took the tiller; the policemen bent to the oars, and the boat shot away through a mist which was turning to a golden vapour.
It was within a few boat-lengths of the landing stairs that Neeland, turning for a last look into the steaming golden glory behind him, saw the most splendid sight of his life. And that sight was the British Empire assuming sovereignty.
For there, before his eyes, militant, magnificent, the British fleet was taking the sea, gliding out to accept its fealty, moving majestically in mass after mass of steel under flowing torrents of smoke, with the phantom battle flags whipping aloft in the blinding smother of mist and sun and the fawning cut-water hurrying too, as though even every littlest wave were mobilised and hastening seaward in the service of its mistress, Ruler of all Waters, untroubled by a man-made Kiel.
And now there was no more time to be lost; no more stops until he arrived in Paris. A taxicab rushed him and his luggage across the almost empty city; a train, hours earlier than the regular steamer train, carried him to London where, as he drove through the crowded, sunlit streets, in a hansom cab, he could see news-venders holding up strips of paper on which was printed in great, black letters:
THE BRITISH FLEET SAILS
SPY IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
CHARLES WILSON, M. P., ACCUSED
MISSING MEMBER SUPPOSED TO BE KARL BRESLAU, INTERNATIONAL SPY
And he noticed knots of people pausing to buy the latest editions of the papers offered.
But Neeland had no time to see much more of London than that — glimpses of stately grey buildings and green trees; of monuments and palaces where soldiers in red tunics stood guard; the crush of traffic in the city; trim, efficient police, their helmets strapped to their heads, disentangling the streams of vehicles, halting, directing everything with calm and undisturbed precision; a squadron of cavalry in brilliant uniforms leisurely emerging from some park between iron railings under stately trees; then the crowded confusion of a railroad station, but not the usual incidents of booking and departure, because he was to travel by a fast goods train under telegraphed authority of the British Government.
And that is about all that Neeland saw of the mightiest city in the world on the eve of the greatest conflict among the human races that the earth has ever witnessed, or ever shall, D. V.
The flying goods train that took him to the Channel port whence a freight packet was departing, offered him the luxury of a leather padded armchair in a sealed and grated mail van.
Nobody disturbed him; nobody questioned him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional stolidity of official John Bull.
Neeland had plenty of leisure to think as he sat there in his heavy chair which vibrated but did not sway very much; and his mind was fully occupied with his reflections, for, so far, he had not had time to catalogue, index, and arrange them in proper order, so rapid and so startling had been the sequence of events since he had left his studio in New York for Paris, via Brookhollow, London, and other points east.
One thing in particular continued to perplex and astonish him: the identity of a member of Parliament, known as Charles Wilson, suddenly revealed as Karl Breslau, an international spy.
The wildest flight of fancy of an irresponsible novelist had never created such a character in penny-dreadful fiction. It remained incomprehensible, almost incredible to Neeland that such a thing could be true.
Also, the young man had plenty of food for reflection, if not for luncheon, in trying to imagine exactly how Golden Beard and Ali Baba, and that strange, illogical young girl, Ilse Dumont, had escaped from the Volhynia.
Probably, in the darkness, the fishing boat which they expected had signalled in some way or other. No doubt the precious trio had taken to the water in their life-jackets and had been picked up even before armed sailors on the Volhynia descended to their empty state-rooms and took possession of what luggage could be discovered, and of the three bombs with their charred wicks still soaking on the sopping bed.
And now the affair had finally ended, Neeland believed, in spite of Captain West’s warnings. For how could three industrious conspirators in a fishing smack off the Lizard do him any further damage?
If they had managed to relay information concerning him to their friends ashore by some set of preconcerted signals, possibly the regular steamer train to and out of London might be watched.
Thinking of this, it presently occurred to Neeland that friends in France, als
o, might be stirred up in time to offer him their marked attentions. This, no doubt, was what Captain West meant; and Neeland considered the possibility as the flying train whirled him toward the Channel.
He asked if he might smoke, and was informed that he might; and he lighted a cigarette and stretched out on his chair, a little hungry from lack of luncheon, a trifle tired from lack of sleep, but, in virtue of his vigorous and youthful years, comfortable, contented, and happy.
Never, he admitted, had he had such a good time in all his life, despite the fact that chance alone, and not his own skill and alertness and perspicacity, had saved his neck.
No, he could not congratulate himself on his cleverness and wisdom; sheer accident had saved his skin — and once the complex and unaccountable vagary of a feminine mind had saved him from annihilation so utter that it slightly sickened him to remember his position in Ilse Dumont’s stateroom as she lifted her pistol and coolly made good her boast as a dead-shot. But he forced himself to take it lightly.
“Good Lord!” he thought to himself. “Was ever a man in such a hellish position, except in melodrama? And what a movie that would have made! And what a shot that girl proved herself to be! Certainly she could have killed me there at Brookhollow! She could have riddled me before I ducked, even with that nickel-plated affair about which I was ass enough to taunt her!”
Lying in his chair, cheek on arm, he continued to ponder on what had happened, until the monotonous vibration no longer interfered with his inclination for a nap. On the contrary, the slight, rhythmic jolting soothed him and gradually induced slumber; and he slept there on the rushing train, his feet crossed and resting on the olive-wood box.
* * * * *
A hand on his arm aroused him; the sea wind blowing through the open doors of the mail-van dashed in his face like a splash of cool water as he sat up and looked around him.
As he descended from the van an officer of the freight packet greeted him by name; a sailor piled his luggage on a barrow; and Neeland walked through the vista of covered docks to the pier.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 825