BILLY CAPPER AT PLAY
The night of July twenty-sixth. The scene is the table-cluttered
sidewalk before the Café Pytheas, where the Cours St. Louis flings its
night tide of idlers into the broader stream of the Cannebière,
Marseilles' Broadway--the white street of the great Provençal port.
Here at the crossing of these two streets summer nights are incidents
to stick in the traveler's mind long after he sees the gray walls of
the Château d'If fade below the steamer's rail. The flower girls in
their little pulpits pressing dewy violets and fragrant clusters of
rosebuds upon the strollers with persuasive eloquence; the mystical
eyes of hooded Moors who see everything as they pass, yet seem to see
so little; jostling Greeks, Levantines, burnoosed Jews from Algiers and
red-trousered Senegalese--all the color from the hot lands of the
Mediterranean is there.
But on the night of July twenty-sixth the old spirit of indolence, of
pleasure seeking, flirtation, intriguing, which was wont to make this
heart of arc-light life in Marseilles pulse languorously, was gone.
Instead, an electric tenseness was abroad, pervading, infectious.
About each sidewalk table heads were clustered close in conference, and
eloquent hands aided explosive argument. Around the news kiosk at the
Café Pytheas corner a constant stream eddied. Men snatched papers from
the pile, spread them before their faces, and blundered into their
fellow pedestrians as they walked, buried in the inky columns. Now and
again half-naked urchins came charging down the Cannebière, waving
shinplaster extras above their heads--"_L'Allemagne s'arme! La guerre
vient!_" Up from the Quai marched a dozen sailors from a torpedo boat,
arms linked so that they almost spanned the Cannebière. Their
red-tasseled caps were pushed back at cocky angles on their black
heads, and as they marched they shouted in time: "_A Berlin!
Hou--hou!_"
The black shadow of war--the first hallucinations of the great
madness--gripped Marseilles.
For Captain Woodhouse, just in from Berlin that evening, all this
swirling excitement had but an incidental interest. He sat alone by
one of the little iron tables before the Café Pytheas, sipping his
_boc_, and from time to time his eyes carelessly followed the eddying
of the swarm about the news kiosk. Always his attention would come
back, however, to center on the thin shoulders of a man sitting fifteen
or twenty feet away with a wine cooler by his side. He could not see
the face of the wine drinker; he did not want to. All he cared to do
was to keep those thin shoulders always in sight. Each time the
solicitous waiter renewed the bottle in the wine cooler Captain
Woodhouse nodded grimly, as a doctor might when he recognized the
symptoms of advancing fever in a patient.
So for two days, from Berlin across to Paris, and now on this third day
here in the Mediterranean port, Woodhouse had kept ever in sight those
thin shoulders and that trembling hand beyond the constantly crooking
elbow. Not a pleasant task; he had come to loathe and abominate the
very wrinkles in the back of that shiny coat. But a very necessary
duty it was for Captain Woodhouse to shadow Mr. Billy Capper until--the
right moment should arrive. They had come down on the same express
together from Paris. Woodhouse had observed Capper when he checked his
baggage, a single shoddy hand-bag, for _La Vendée_, the French line
ship sailing with the dawn next morning for Alexandria and Port Said
via Malta. Capper had squared his account at the Hotel Allées de
Meilhan, for the most part a bill for absinth frappés, after dinner
that night, and was now enjoying the night life of Marseilles in
anticipation, evidently, of carrying direct to the steamer with him as
his farewell from France all of the bottled laughter of her peasant
girls he could accommodate.
The harsh memories of how he had been forced to drink the bitter lees
of poverty during the lean months rode Billy Capper hard, and this
night he wanted to fill all the starved chambers of his soul with the
robust music of the grape. So he drank with a purpose and
purposefully. That he drank alone was a matter of choice with Capper;
he could have had a pair of dark eyes to glint over a goblet into his
had he wished--indeed, opportunities almost amounted to embarrassment.
But to all advances from the fair, Billy Capper returned merely an
impolite leer. He knew from beforetime that he was his one best
companion when the wine began to warm him. So he squared himself to
his pleasure with an abandoned rakishness expressed in the set of his
thin shoulders and the forward droop of his head.
Woodhouse, who watched, noted only one peculiarity in Capper's conduct:
The drinker nursed his stick, a plain, crook-handled malacca, with a
tenderness almost maternal. It never left his hands. Once when Capper
dropped it and the waiter made to prop the stick against a near-by
chair, the little spy leaped to his feet and snatched the cane away
with a growl. Thereafter he propped his chin on the handle, only
removing this guard when he had to tip his head back for another draft
of champagne.
Eleven o'clock came. Capper rose from the table and looked owlishly
about him. Woodhouse quickly turned his back to the man, and was
absorbed in the passing strollers. When he looked back again Capper
was slowly and a little unsteadily making his way around the corner
into the Cannebière. Woodhouse followed, sauntering. Capper began a
dilatory exploration of the various cafés along the white street; his
general course was toward the city's slums about the Quai. Woodhouse,
dawdling about tree boxes and dodging into shadows by black doorways,
found his quarry easy to trail. And he knew that each of Capper's
sojourns in an oasis put a period to the length of the pursuit. The
time for him to act drew appreciably nearer with every tipping of that
restless elbow.
Midnight found them down in the reek and welter of the dives and
sailors' frolic grounds. Now the trailer found his task more
difficult, inasmuch as not only his quarry but he himself was marked by
the wolves. Dances in smoke-wreathed rooms slackened when Capper
lurched in, found a seat and ordered a drink. Women with cheeks
carmined like poppies wanted to make predatory love to him; dock rats
drew aside and consulted in whispers. When Capper retreated from an
evil dive on the very edge of the Quai, Woodhouse, waiting by the
doors, saw that he was not the only shadower. Close against the dead
walls flanking the narrow pavement a slinking figure twisted and
writhed after the drunkard, now spread-eagling all over the street.
Woodhouse quickened his pace on the opposite sidewalk. The street was
one lined with warehouses, their closely shuttered windows the only
eyes. Capper dropped his stick, laboriously halted, and started to go
back for it. That instant the shadow against the walls detached itself
and darted for the victim. Woodhouse leaped to the cobbles and gained
Capper's side just as he dropped like a sack of rags under a blow from
the dock rat's fist.
"Son of a pig! This is my meat; you clear out!" The humped black
beetle of a man straddling the sprawling Capper whipped a knife from
his girdle and faced Woodhouse. Quicker than light the captain's right
arm shot out; a thud as of a maul on an empty wine butt, and the Apache
turned a half somersault, striking the cobbles with the back of his
head. Woodhouse stooped, lifted the limp Capper from the street
stones, and staggered with him to the lighted avenue of the Cannebière,
a block away. He hailed a late-cruising fiacre, propped Capper in the
seat, and took his place beside him.
"To _La Vendée_, Quai de la Fraternité!" Woodhouse ordered.
The driver, wise in the ways of the city, asked no questions, but
clucked to his crow bait. Woodhouse turned to make a quick examination
of the unconscious man by his side. He feared a stab wound; he found
nothing but a nasty cut on the head, made by brass knuckles. With the
wine helping, any sort of a blow would have put Capper out, he
reflected.
Woodhouse turned his back on the bundle of clothes and reached for the
malacca stick. Even in his coma its owner grasped it tenaciously at
midlength. Without trying to disengage the clasp, Woodhouse gripped
the wood near the crook of the handle with his left Hand while with his
right he applied torsion above. The crook turned on hidden threads and
came off in his hand. An exploring forefinger in the exposed hollow
end of the cane encountered a rolled wisp of paper. Woodhouse pocketed
this, substituted in its place a thin clean sheet torn from a card-case
memorandum, then screwed the crook on the stick down on the secret
receptacle. By the light of a match he assured himself the paper he
had taken from the cane was what he wanted.
"Larceny from the person--guilty," he murmured, with a wry smile of
distaste. "But assault--unpremeditated."
The conveyance trundled down a long spit of stone and stopped by the
side of a black hull, spotted with round eyes of light. The driver,
scenting a tip, helped Woodhouse lift Capper to the ground and prop him
against a bulkhead. A bos'n, summoned from _La Vendée_ by the cabby's
shrill whistle, heard Woodhouse's explanation with sympathy.
"Occasionally, yes, m'sieu, the passengers from Marseilles have these
regrets at parting," he gravely commented, accepting the ticket
Woodhouse had rummaged from the unconscious man's wallet and a crinkled
note from Woodhouse's. Up the gangplank, feet first, went the new
agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. The one who called himself "captain in
his majesty's signal service" returned to his hotel.
At dawn, _La Vendée_ cleared the harbor for Alexandria via Malta,
bearing a very sick Billy Capper to his destiny. Five hours later the
Castle liner, _Castle Claire_, for the Cape via Alexandria and Suez
direct, sailed out of the Old Port, among her passengers a Captain
Woodhouse.