WHAT SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES REVEALED
In a very depressed frame of mind, Desmond turned into the library. As
he crossed the hall, he noticed how cheerless the house was. Again
there came to him that odor of mustiness—of all smells the most eerie
and drear—which he had noticed on his arrival. Somehow, as long as
Nur-el-Din had been there, he had not remarked the appalling loneliness
of the place.
A big log fire was blazing cheerfully in the grate, throwing out a
bright glow into the room which, despite the early hour, was already
wreathed in shadows. Wearily Desmond pulled a big armchair up to the
blaze and sat down. He told himself that he must devote every minute of
his spare time to going over in his mind the particulars he had
memorized of Mr. Bellward’s habits and acquaintanceships. He took the
list of Bellward’s friends from his pocket-book.
But this afternoon he found it difficult to concentrate his attention.
His gaze kept wandering back to the fire, in whose glowing depths he
fancied he could see a perfect oval face with pleading eyes and
dazzling teeth looking appealingly at him.
Nur-el-Din! What an entrancing creature she was! What passion lurked in
those black eyes of hers, in her moods, swiftly changing from gusts of
fierce imperiousness to gentle airs of feminine charm! What a frail
little thing she was to have fought her way alone up the ladder from
the lowest rung to the very top! She must have character and grit,
Desmond decided, for he was a young man who adored efficiency: to him
efficiency spelled success.
But a spy needs grit, he reflected, and Nur-el-Din had many qualities
which would enable her to win the confidence of men. Hadn’t she
half-captivated him, the would-be spy-catcher, already?
Desmond laughed ruefully to himself. Indeed, he mused, things looked
that way. What would the Chief say if he could see his prize young man,
his white-headed boy, sitting sentimentalizing by the fire over a woman
who was, by her own confession, practically an accredited German agent?
Desmond thrust his chin out and shook himself together. He would put
the feminine side of Nur-el-Din out of his head. He must think of her
henceforth only as a member of the band that was spotting targets for
those sneaking, callous brutes of U-boat commanders.
He went back to the study of the list of Mr. Bellward’s friends. But he
found it impossible to focus his mind upon it. Do what he would, he
could not rid himself of the sensation that he had failed at the very
outset of his mission. He was, indeed, he told himself, the veriest
tyro at the game. Here he had had under his hand in turn Nur-el-Din and
Mortimer (who, he made no doubt, was the leader of the gang which was
so sorely troubling the Chief), and he had let both get away without
eliciting from either even as much as their address. By the use of a
little tact, he had counted on penetrating something of the mystery
enveloping the dancer and her relationship with the gang; for he
thought he divined that Nur-el-Din was inclined to make him her
confidant. With the information thus procured, he had hoped to get on
to the track of the leader of the band.
But that ugly brute; Mortimer, with his goggle eyes, had spoiled
everything. His appearance had taken Desmond completely by surprise: to
tell the truth, it had thrown our young man rather off his guard. “If
only I might have had a little longer acquaintance with my part,” he
reflected bitterly as he sat by the fire, “I should have been better
able to deal with that pompous ass!”
Afterwards, when thinking over the opening events of this extraordinary
episode of his career, Desmond rather wondered why he had not followed
Mortimer out of the house that afternoon and tracked him down to his
hiding place. But, as a matter of fact, the idea did not occur to him
at the time. His orders were positive not to leave the house, and he
never even thought of breaking them—at any rate, not then.
His orders, also, it is true, were to report to headquarters any
communication that might be made to him; but these instructions, at
least as far as Nur-el-Din’s and Mortimer’s visits were concerned, he
resolved to ignore.
For one thing, he felt angry with the Chief who, he argued rather
irrationally, ought to have foreseen and prevented Mortimer thus taking
him by surprise. The Chief liked secrets—well, for a change, he should
be kept in the dark and the laugh would be on Desmond’s side. For a few
minutes after Mortimer’s departure, Desmond had felt strongly inclined
to go to the telephone which stood on the desk in the library and ring
up Mr. Elias, as he should have done, but he resisted this impulse.
Now, thinking things over in the firelight, he was glad he had
refrained. He would ferret out for himself the exact part that
Nur-el-Din and Mortimer were playing in this band of spies. Nothing
definite had come of his interviews with them as yet. It would be time
enough to communicate with Headquarters when he had something positive
to report.
Then Desmond thrust the paper he had been studying back in his
pocket-book and jumped up. He felt that the inaction was stifling him.
He determined to go for a walk round the garden. That, at least, was in
the spirit of his orders.
Remembering that he was supposed to be suffering from a chill he donned
a heavy Ulster of Bellward’s which was hanging in the hall and wound a
muffler round his neck. Then cramming a soft cap on his head (he noted
with satisfaction that Bellward’s hats fitted him remarkably well) he
opened the front door and stepped outside.
The rain had stopped, but the whole atmosphere reeked of moisture.
Angry-looking, dirty-brown clouds chased each other across the lowering
sky, and there was a constant sound of water, trickling and gurgling
and splashing, in his ears.
An untidy-looking lawn with a few unkempt and overgrown rhododendron
bushes dotted here and there ran its length in front of the house and
terminated in an iron railing which separated the grounds from a little
wood. A badly water-logged drive, green with grass in places, ran past
the lawn in a couple of short bends to the front gate. On the other
side the drive was bordered by what had once been a kitchen garden but
was now a howling wilderness of dead leaves, mud and gravel with
withered bushes and half a dozen black, bare and dripping apple trees
set about at intervals. At the side of the house the kitchen garden
stopped and was joined by a flower garden—at least so Desmond judged it
to have been by a half ruined pergola which he had noticed from the
drawing-room windows. Through the garden ran the mill-race which poured
out of the grounds through a field and under a little bridge spanning
the road outside.
Desmond followed the drive as far as the front gate. The surrounding
country was as flat as a pancake, and in almost every field lay great
glistening patches of water where the land had been flooded by the
incessant rain. The road on which the house was built ran away on the
left to the mist-shrouded horizon without another building of any kind
in sight. Desmond surmised that Morstead Fen lay in the direction in
which he was looking. To the right, Desmond caught a glimpse of a
ghostly spire sticking out of some trees and guessed that this was
Wentfield Church. In front of him the distant roar of a passing train
showed where the Great Eastern Railway line lay.
More depressed than ever by the utter desolation of the scene, Desmond
turned to retrace his steps to the house. Noticing a path traversing
the kitchen garden, he followed it. It led to the back of the house, to
the door of a kind of lean-to shed. The latch yielded on being pressed
and Desmond entered the place.
He found himself in a fair-sized shed, very well and solidly built of
pitch-pine, with a glazed window looking out on the garden, a table and
a couple of chairs, and a large cupboard which occupied the whole of
one side of the wall of the house against which the shed was built. In
a corner of the shed stood a very good-looking Douglas motor-cycle, and
on a nail on the wall hung a set of motor-cyclist’s overalls. A few
petrol cans, some full, some empty, stood against the wall.
Desmond examined the machine. It was in excellent condition,
beautifully clean, the tank half full of spirits. A little dry sand on
the tires showed that it had been used fairly recently.
“Old man Bellward’s motor-bike that he goes to the station on,” Desmond
noted mentally. “But what’s in the big cupboard, I wonder? Tools, I
expect!”
Then he caught sight of a deep drawer in the table. It was half-open
and he saw that it contained various tools and spare parts, neatly
arranged, each one in its appointed place.
He went over to the cupboard and tried it. It was locked. Desmond had
little respect for Mr. Bellward’s property so he went over to the tool
drawer and selected a stout chisel with which to burst the lock of the
cupboard. But the cupboard was of oak, very solidly built, and he tried
in vain to get a purchase for his implement. He leant his left hand
against the edge of the cupboard whilst with his right he jabbed
valiantly with the chisel.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. The whole cupboard noiselessly
swung outwards while Desmond, falling forward, caught his forehead a
resounding bang against the edge of the recess in which it moved. He
picked himself up in a very savage frame of mind—a severe blow on the
head is not the ideal cure for hypochondria—but the flow of
objurgatives froze on his lips. For he found himself looking into Mr.
Bellward’s library.
He stepped into the room to see how the cupboard looked from the other
side. He found that a whole section of bookshelves had swung back with
the cupboard, in other words that the cupboard in the toolshed and the
section of bookshelves were apparently all of one piece.
He carefully examined the walls on either side of the recess in the
library to see how the mechanism worked. The bookshelves were open,
made of mahogany, the sides elaborately carved with leaves and flowers.
Desmond ran his hand down the perpendicular section immediately on the
right of the recess. About halfway down—to be exact, it was in line
with the fifth shelf from the floor—his fingers encountered a little
knob which gave under pressure—the heart of a flower which released the
section of bookshelves. Going back to the shed, Desmond examined the
place against which his hand had rested as he sought to force the lock
of the cupboard. As he expected, he found a similar catch let into the
surface of the oak, but so cunningly inlaid that it could scarce be
detected with the naked eye.
Before proceeding further with his investigations, Desmond softly
turned the lock of the library door. He also shot forward a bolt he
found on the inside of the door of the shed. He did not want to be
interrupted by the housekeeper or the odd man.
Then he went back to the library and pulled the cupboard to behind him.
It moved quite easily into place. He wanted to have a look at the
bookshelves; for he was curious to know whether the cupboard was
actually all of one piece with the section of bookshelves as it seemed
to be. He was prepared to find that the books were merely library
dummies, but no! He tried half a dozen shelves at random, and every
book he pulled out was real.
Desmond was not easily baffled, and he determined to scrutinize every
shelf, of this particular section in turn. With the aid of one of those
step-ladders folding into a chair which you sometimes see in libraries,
he examined the topmost shelves but without result. He took down in
turn Macaulay’s History of England, a handsome edition of the works of
Swift, and a set of Moliere without getting any nearer the end of his
quest.
The fourth shelf from the top was devoted to a library edition of
Shakespeare, large books bound in red morocco. Desmond, who, by this
time was getting cramp in the arms from stretching upwards and had made
his hands black with dust, pulled out a couple of volumes at hazard
from the set and found them real books like the rest.
“Oh, damn!” he exclaimed, and had half a mind to abandon the search and
have a go with hammer and chisel at the cupboard in the shed. By this
time it was almost dusk in the library, and Desmond, before abandoning
the search, struck a match to have a final rapid glance over the
shelves. The light showed him a curious flatness about the backs of the
last six volumes of Shakespeare. He dropped the match and laid hold of
a volume of the Comedies. It resisted. He tugged. Still it would not
come. Exerting all his strength, he pulled, the gilt-lettered backs of
the last six volumes came away in his hands in one piece and he crashed
off the ladder to the ground.
This time he did not swear. He picked himself up quickly, lit the lamp
on the table by the window, and brought it over to the bookcase. Where
Shakespeare’s Comedies had stood was now a gaping void with a small key
stuck in a lock, above a brass handle. Desmond mounted on the steps
again and eagerly turned the key. Then he grasped the handle and
pulled, the section of bookshelves swung back like a door, and he found
himself face to face with a great stack of petrol cans. They lay in
orderly piles stretching from the floor to the top of the bookshelves
near the railing, several tiers deep. At a rough computation there must
have been several hundred cans in the recess. And they were all full.
In a flash Desmond realized what his discovery signified. The
motor-cycle in the shed without was the connecting link between
Bellward and the man with whom he was co-operating in the organization.
Under pretext of reading late in his library Bellward would send old
Martha to bed, and once the house was quiet, sally forth by his secret
exit and meet his confederate. Even when he was supposed to be sleeping
in London he could still use the Mill House for a rendezvous, entering
and leaving by the secret door, and no one a bit the wiser. In that
desolate part of Essex, the roads are practically deserted after dark.
Bellward could come and go much as he pleased on his motor-cycle. Were
he stopped, he always had the excuse ready that he was going to—or
returning from the station. The few petrol cans that Desmond had seen
openly displayed in the shed without seemed to show that Bellward
received a small quantity of spirit from the Petrol Board to take him
to and from the railway.
The cache, so elaborately concealed, however, pointed to long journeys.
Did Bellward undertake these trips to fetch news or to transmit it? And
who was his confederate? Whom did he go to meet? Not Mortimer; for he
had only corresponded with Bellward. Nor was it Nur-el-Din; for she had
never met Bellward, either.
Who was it, then?