AFTER THE EXPLOSION
My next recollection was that of opening my eyes to find myself lying
at night in my room at Buckingham Street. I made an effort to sit up
in bed, but my head had suddenly become curiously heavy--so heavy that
the effort to raise it was almost too much for me, and I was glad to
fall back upon the pillow, where I lay a moment feeling more faint and
feeble than I had ever felt before. Then there glided gently into the
room--into my bachelor room--a pleasant-looking young woman in a gray
dress with white collar and cuffs.
“What’s happened, nurse?” I said, recognising at once what she
was--which was more than could be said of my voice, for it had become
so thin and piping that its unfamiliarity startled me.
“Oh, nothing has happened of any consequence,” she replied smilingly,
“except that you have not been very well. But you’re mending now, and
another day or two will see you quite yourself.”
“What’s been the matter with me?” I asked.
“You got a blow on the head by the fall of a chimney,” she replied.
“But I can’t let you talk now. Mr. Grant is coming in to sleep here
to-night, as I’ve promised to take a turn sitting up with a patient who
is very ill. You can ask Mr. Grant to tell you anything you wish to
know in the morning, but now you must go to sleep.”
That something _had_ happened, notwithstanding her assurance to the
contrary, I felt sure; but what that something was I did not know, nor
did I very much care, for I felt dull and silly, and more than inclined
to follow her advice.
This I must in the end have done, for when next I opened my eyes it
was broad daylight, and Grant was standing in his shirt sleeves before
the looking-glass, shaving. My head was clearer now, and I was able to
recall what had taken place up to the moment when I had lost my senses
after the explosion at the General Post Office.
“Have they got him, Grant?” I inquired.
He jumped like a “kicking” rifle.
“Good Lord! old man, how you startled me! You’ve made me slash myself
horribly. Got whom?” he said.
“Mullen,” I answered.
“Mullen? Oh, then you do know all about it? No, they haven’t. But how
are you feeling?”
“Like a boiled owl. How long have I been ill?”
“Three weeks. You got knocked on the head by a chimney-pot or
something, and had a touch of concussion of the brain.”
“Was there much damage done?”
“Damage? I believe you. The top of Cheapside pretty near blown away,
and the General Post Office half wrecked.”
“How did I get here?”
“In fine state, my boy--on a stretcher. They were taking you to the
hospital when I came along--which I did as soon as I heard about the
explosion--but I said I knew you, and told them who you were, and had
you brought here instead. And a bad time you’ve had of it, I can tell
you. But now you mustn’t talk any more.”
“Oh, I’m all right! Tell me, were there many people killed?”
“A good many in the Post Office, but not many outside. You see, being
Saturday, most of the places were empty, except for caretakers. And now
go to sleep.”
“One more question only. Does any one know I was after Mullen when it
happened?”
“No, they thought you were passing by chance. You see I told them who
you were, but I couldn’t tell them what had happened, as I didn’t
know, and you couldn’t speak for yourself, so I thought I’d better say
nothing until you were well enough to tell your own story.”
“And Mullen got clean away?”
“Look here, old man, this won’t do, you know. The doctor said you
weren’t to be allowed to talk more than could be helped.”
“Answer me that, then, and I’ll ask no more for the present.”
“Yes, the ruffian got clean away, and no one knows to this day how he
did it. Do you?”
“Yes. I saw him do it.”
“The deuce you did! But there, you shall tell me all about it
to-morrow. Have a drop of beef-tea and then go to bye-bye.”
Which I did.
My powers of recuperation are great, and a few days saw me
comparatively well in body, though by no means easy in mind. Up to
this point my search for Captain Shannon had seemed to me a somewhat
public-spirited and deserving enterprise. To bring such a scoundrel to
justice would be doing a service to the country and to humanity; and
in the wild scene of excitement which I knew would follow the news of
his arrest I liked to picture myself as receiving the thanks of the
community, and in fact being regarded very much as the hero of the hour.
But while I had been lying in my room, idle in body but abnormally
active in brain, the matter had presented itself to me in a very
different light, and I was by no means sure that, were the facts made
public, I should not be looked upon as a knave rather than as a hero.
I had to ask myself seriously whether the course I had taken could be
justified at all, and whether, by withholding from the authorities the
suspicion I entertained about the man with the red beard, and by taking
upon myself the responsibility of keeping, unaided, an eye upon his
movements, I was not morally answerable for the lives which had been
lost in the last terrible outrage he had effected.
It was quite possible that, had I gone to the authorities _before_ the
event and informed them of my unsupported suspicion, I should have
been laughed at for my pains. But were I to come forward _after_ the
event and admit that before the outrage occurred, and while yet there
was time to prevent it, I had suspected the man with the brown bag to
be James Mullen, and yet had withheld my suspicions from the police, I
might be looked upon as less of a fool than a scoundrel.
My motives for having kept silent would be open to the worst
interpretation, and I should be everywhere denounced as an enemy of
society whose criminal vanity had made him think himself capable of
coping single-handed with the greatest artist in crime of the century,
and whose yet more criminal greed and anxiety to secure the entire
reward for himself had led him to withhold from the proper authorities
information by means of which the capture of the arch-murderer might
have been effected and the last dreadful outrage prevented.
Knowing, as I did, how uncontrollable was the feeling of the populace
in regard to the outrage, I could not disguise from myself that a
man who made such a confession as I had to make, would--should he be
recognised in the streets--run a very good chance of being mobbed, if
not lynched.
An infuriated mob is not given to make nice distinctions, and so long
as it has a scapegoat on which to wreak vengeance it does not wait to
inquire too particularly into the question of the scapegoat’s innocence
or guilt.
Let the object of its wrath be not forthcoming, and let some evil or
foolish person raise the cry that this or that luckless passer-by is
the offender’s relative or friend, or even that he has been seen coming
from the offender’s house, or is of the same nationality, and in nine
cases out of ten the mob will “go” for the luckless wight _en masse_.
I have made a study of that wild beast which we call “a mob”--the one
wild beast which civilisation has given us in exchange for the many she
has driven away--and knowing something of the creature and its habits,
I must confess that I would rather fall into the jaws of the wild beast
of the jungle, than into the clutches of the wilder beast of the city
and the slum.
One day--one not very distant day--that wild beast will turn and rend
its keepers, and when once the thing has tasted human blood it will not
be beaten back into its lair with its thirst for blood unglutted.
To be mobbed or lynched in a noble cause and in support of a great
principle is not without its compensations, but there is no glory in
being subjected to physical violence and personal insult as a scoundrel
and a knave.
Worse, however, than the possibility of being mobbed was the certainty
of being held up in many quarters as an object for public odium and
private scorn, and the more I thought about it the less inclined did I
feel to face the consequences of confessing the part which I had played
in the recent tragedy. It was upon my own responsibility, I argued,
that I had entered upon the enterprise, and so long as I kept within
the law it was to myself only that I was responsible for the way in
which that enterprise was carried on. That I had failed meant nothing
more than that what had happened to those whose business and whose duty
it was to have succeeded, had happened also to me; and, after all, I
left things no worse than they were when I took the matter up.
Had it been my intention to abandon my quest I should have no choice
but to acquaint New Scotland Yard with what had come to my knowledge.
But, as a matter of fact, I was more than ever set on bringing the
miscreant, Captain Shannon, to justice--and this not merely for the
sake of reward, or because of the craving for adventure which had
first urged me to the enterprise, but because of the loathing which I
entertained for the monster whom I had with my own eyes seen at his
hellish work. Hence I was justified, I told myself, in keeping my
information to myself, and the more so for the fact that, were I to say
all I knew, the particulars would no doubt be made public, and in this
way reach the ears of Captain Shannon, thus defeating the very end for
which I had made my confession.
Into the questions whether the decision to which I came was right or
wrong, and whether the arguments, with which I sought to square my
decision with my conscience and my sense of duty, were founded on
self-interest and inclination rather than on reason, I will not here
enter.
When that decision was once made, I gave no further thought to the
rights or wrongs of the matter, but dismissing every such consideration
from my mind I concentrated all my energies upon the task of finding
Captain Shannon.
And first, I decided to pay a visit to Southend to see if the little
brown cutter was still there, and if not, to discover what had become
of it.
As one walks down the High Street from the station, the pier lies
directly in front, running out a mile and a quarter to sea on its
myriad slender feet like a giant centipede. To the right are the shady
shrubberies and sunny grass-crowned cliffs of New Southend, and to the
left, with lips stooped to the water’s edge, the Old Town straggles
away seaward, a long line of picturesque irregular buildings--some
cheerful red, others warm yellow, and a few cool gray--reminding one
not a little of some quaint French or Belgian port blinking in the
morning sunshine.
And oh! such skies! such cloud-pomp and pageantry, and, above all,
such sunrises and sunsets! Such dance and sparkle of moving water
when the tide is in, and, more beautiful still, when the tide is out,
such play of light and shadow, such wonderful wealth of colour on the
marshy flats--here a patch of royal purple or opalescent green, there a
rose-gray or pearly-pink, with little shining pools changing from blue
to silver and silver to blue with the passing of every cloud.
Southend is a pretty spot at any time, but after a month spent on a
sick bed in a stuffy London side-street, the view from the pier-hill
seemed to me exceptionally beautiful.
As I stood there drinking my fill of the sweet, strong, brackish air,
and basking in the sunshine, I was conscious of being scrutinised
quietly but very keenly by a man who was lounging near the Royal Hotel.
There was nothing in his appearance or dress--white flannel trousers
and shirt, cricketing blazer and straw hat--to distinguish him from
the hundreds of holiday makers in like attire who are to be seen in
and about Southend during the season, but I recognised him at once,
and with some alarm, as one of the cleverest officers of the detective
force, and one, moreover, who had been specially told off to effect the
capture of Mullen.
In detective stories, as in pantomimes--no doubt for the same
reason--the policeman is too often held up to scorn and ridicule as an
incompetent bungler who is more dangerous to the hearts of susceptible
servant girls than to law-breakers, and more given to deeds of prowess
in connection with the contents of the pantry than in protecting
the lives or properties of her Majesty’s subjects. The hero of the
detective story is very often a brilliant amateur, of whom the police
are secretly jealous, notwithstanding the fact that whenever they
have a difficult case they come, hat in hand, to seek his assistance.
This, after a little light banter for the benefit of the Boswell who
is to chronicle his marvellous doings--and in the course of which,
by-the-bye, the fact that the police are about to arrest the wrong man
is not unfrequently elicited--he condescends to give, the understanding
between him and them being that he shall do the work and they take the
credit.
Why the amateur detective should be the victim of a modesty which is
not always characteristic of the amateur in other professions does not
transpire, but the arrangement is extremely convenient to the policeman
and to the author, the latter probably adopting it lest inquisitive
readers should ask why, if there are such brilliant amateur detectives
as authors would have us to believe, we never hear of them in real life.
Now I should be the last man in the world to cheapen the work of my
fellow-craftsmen. I hold that there is no more unmistakable mark of a
mean mind than is evinced in the desire to extol oneself at the expense
of others, but none the less I must enter my protest against what I
cannot but consider an unwarrantable imputation upon a very deserving
body of men.
Detectives and policemen, taken as a whole, are by no means the
bunglers and boobies that they are made out to be in the pantomimes and
in the pages of detective stories. I do not say that they are all born
geniuses in the detection of crime, for genius is no commoner among
detectives than it is among bakers, bankers, clergymen, novelists,
barristers, or cooks. But what I do say is that the rank and file of
them are painstaking and intelligent men, who do their duty to the
public conscientiously and efficiently; and to dub them all duffers,
because now and then a detective is caught napping, is as unjust as
to pronounce all clergymen fools because a silly sermon is sometimes
preached from a pulpit.
I had managed to get ahead of the police in the investigation I was
conducting, not because of the shining abilities with which I was
endowed, for as the reader knows I had bungled matters sadly on more
than one occasion, but because Fate had thrown a clue in my way at the
start. But I have never underrated the acuteness and astuteness of the
representatives of the Criminal Department from New Scotland Yard, and
it did not greatly surprise me to find, when I commenced operations
again at Southend, that though the little brown cutter was still lying
off the same spot, she was being closely watched by men whom I knew to
be detectives.
Whether they had discovered the relationship between Mullen and the
owner of the “Odd Trick,” and in following up the clue had traced the
boat to Southend, or whether they were in possession of information
unknown to me which led them to believe the fugitive had been hiding in
the neighbourhood, I could not say; but that they were there to effect
the capture of Mullen, should he return to the cutter, I made no doubt.
Mullen, however, was apparently too wary a bird to come back to the
nest until he had satisfied himself that no net had been spread there
to catch him, for that he had got wind of what was going on at Southend
seemed probable from the fact that he never put in an appearance there
again. Nor would it have profited me personally if he had, for in that
case I could scarcely hope to forestall the police in the matter of his
arrest.
Under the circumstances it would be mere waste of time to stay in
Southend, and the question I had now to ask myself was, “Where, then,
is he likely to be?”
As crime begets crime, so question begets question, and “Where, then,
is he likely to be?” had scarcely come to the birth before it was
itself in travail with, “Why not on the ‘Cuban Queen’?”