I TRY A FALL WITH JAMES MULLEN
Some one dressed like a woman was standing by the stove whistling
softly to himself while paring his nails with a pearl-handled knife.
“My brother Bill, sir,” said Hughes gruffly, and I thought rather
nervously, indicating me with the peaked cloth cap which he carried,
rolled scrollwise, in his hand.
I followed suit with a bow, or rather a duck, and a polite
“Good-evening, sir,” but Mullen continued his nail-pairing and
whistling without deigning to look up.
For about a quarter of a minute I stood there feeling, and perhaps
looking, rather foolish. Then Hughes said again, and this time rather
louder, “My brother, sir.”
“There, there, my good fellow, that will do! I haven’t become deaf! I
hear you,” Mullen answered, without raising his head.
He spoke very much in the manner affected by some curates. Each
syllable was carefully pronounced and fell as cleanly cut as if it had
been new pennies which his lips were coining. The aspirates, the “hear”
and “there’s,” he discharged at us as if his mouth had been a tiny
popgun, and he roared at us gently as any sucking dove with the cooing
sound in such words as “do.”
But for all his nicety of speech he had too much of what is commonly
called “side” in his manner to delude any one into the idea that he was
a gentleman.
There is in the bearing of your true aristocrat towards strangers a
certain suave and urbane _hauteur_--as of one who expects and, if need
be, will _exact_ the courtesy he is accustomed to _accord_--which the
man of no breeding thinks can be imitated by the assumption of “side.”
Without his “side” he _might_ conceivably have passed for a gentleman.
As it is, he as surely betrays himself for what he is, as the man who,
by manifesting that over-anxiety to please--which he mistakes for the
easy courtesy of well-bred intercourse--betrays his under-breeding.
Neither Hughes nor I made any reply to what Mullen had said--nor did
the latter seem to expect us to do so, for he looked critically at his
little finger, felt the nail with the tip of his thumb, put the finger
to his teeth, nibbled at it for an instant, and then began scraping the
nail edge very gingerly.
Chafed at his insolence as I was, I could not help noticing that his
hands were small, white, and beautifully shaped, with the long taper
fingers of the artist, and pink carefully-trimmed nails.
When he had quite finished, he closed the knife deliberately and put it
on a little shelf by the bunk, then darting a sudden sideways glance at
me, he inquired sharply, almost viciously, “Well, sir, and what have
you to say for yourself?”
It was the first time he had looked at me since I had entered
the cabin, and as I met his eye it seemed to me that he started
perceptibly, and that I saw a sudden dilatation of the pupil which gave
a look of consternation if not of fear to his face. The next moment he
turned from me and flashed at Hughes a look of such malignity that I
fully expected to see the look succeeded by a blow--a look which, if I
read it aright, was the portent of a terrible vengeance to the man who
had played him false.
I am almost ashamed to write what followed. Not for the first time
in my life--not for the first time in this enterprise--I acted as
only one could act who was possessed by some spirit of mischief for
his own undoing. Even to myself the impulse which comes over me at
times to play the fool--to say or do at the critical moment the one
word or thing which ought to be left unsaid or undone, is altogether
unaccountable.
This uncertainty of character, this tendency to lose my head and to
bring tumbling about my ears, by the utterance of a word, the entire
edifice which I have perhaps spent laborious months in building up,
has been my stumbling-block through life, and must inevitably stand
in the way of my ever becoming a good detective. But a good detective
I have, as the reader knows, never claimed to be. Were it so, I
should undoubtedly suppress the incident I am about to relate, for it
tells very much against myself without in any way strengthening the
probability of my story.
When the man in hiding on the “Cuban Queen” lifted his head and looked
me in the face, I knew at once that I was in the presence, if not of
James Mullen, at all events of the person with whom I had travelled
to Southend on the occasion when he had objected so forcibly to
the striking of a fusee. The bright prominent eyes, beautiful as a
woman’s, the delicately clear complexion, the straw-coloured hair, the
aquiline nose with the strange upward arching of the nostrils, the
curious knitting of the brows over the eyes, the full lips that spoke
of voluptuousness unscrupulous and cruel, the firm, finely-moulded
chin--all these there was no mistaking, in spite of his woman’s dress.
As I looked at him the scene in the stuffy smoking carriage on the
Southend railway came back to me, and when in his quick, incisive
way he asked, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?” I
stammered foolishly for a moment, and then, prompted by what spirit of
perversity and mischief I know not, answered him by another question,
which under the circumstances must have sounded like intentional
insolence.
“You’re the man wot couldn’t stand the smell of fusees?”
Had horns suddenly sprouted out on each side of my head he could not
have looked at me with more absolute amazement and dismay. For a
very few seconds he stared wide-eyed with wonder, and then a look of
comprehension and cunning crept into his eyes. They narrowed cat-like
and cruel, the muscles about the cheeks tightened, the lips parted,
showing the clenched teeth, I heard his breath coming and going like
that of a winded runner, and the next second his face flamed out with a
look of such devilish ferocity and uncontrollable fury as I pray God I
may never see on face of man again.
With a howl of hatred more horrible than that of any tiger--for no
wild beast is half so hellish in its cruelty as your human tiger--he
sprang at me, beating at my face, now with closed fist, now open-handed
and with clutching, tearing nails, kicking with his feet, biting and
snapping at my hands and throat like a dog, and screaming like a very
madman.
To this day it consoles me not a little for the lapse of
self-possession which I had just before manifested to think that I
never lost presence of mind during this onslaught. When he came at me,
my one thought was to see that he made use of no weapons. His wild-cat
clawing and scratching it was no difficult matter for any one with a
quick eye and cool head to ward off; but when I saw him clap his hand
to his hip, where, had he been wearing male clothing, a pistol or knife
might well have lain, the eye I kept upon him was, I promise you, a
keen one.
Finding no pocket at his hips reminded him no doubt of his woman’s
dress, for his hand slipped down to the side of his skirt, where it
floundered about as helplessly as a fish out of water.
A woman’s pocket is, to the degenerate male mind, a fearful and
wonderful piece of mechanism. The intention of the designer was
apparently to offer special inducements to pickpockets, and so to
construct the opening that the contents should either fall out
altogether and be lost, or should be swallowed up by dark and
mysterious depths into which no male hand dare venture to penetrate.
The only way to get at anything which happens to be wanted seems to be
to haul the entire pocket to the surface, very much as a fishing-net is
hauled from the depths of the sea, and to turn it inside out in search
of the missing article.
On the occasion in question, Mullen was in too much of a hurry to
adopt this course, and, but for the seriousness of the situation, I
could have smiled, as I held him at arm’s length, to see him diving
and fumbling among those unplumbed depths. When at last he rose, so to
speak, gasping, to the surface, his hand was clutching a pistol-barrel,
but the butt had in some way caught the lining of the dress, and in
order to extricate it he had to turn the entire pocket inside out. In
doing so, a folded paper fell, unseen by him, to the floor, and this I
determined at all costs to secure.
Before he could raise his arm to use the pistol, I laid a hand of iron
upon his. As I gripped the fingers which were grasping the butt they
scrunched sickeningly and relaxed their hold of the pistol, which I
wrenched away and tossed upon the bunk. Then I closed with him that we
might try a fall together. Twisting my heel behind his ankle I jerked
him backwards and had him off his legs in a jiffy. We fell to the
floor--he under and I above--with a crash, and as we did so my hand
closed over the paper, to secure which I had thrown him.
Crumpling it up in a ball I made as if to rise to a sitting posture,
and in doing so managed to slip it into a side pocket. The next moment
I found myself pulled over on my back by Hughes, who asked excitedly if
we were both mad that we thus courted inquiry by fighting like a couple
of wild cats. If the sound of scuffling or firing were heard to come
from the hulk an alarm would, he said, be raised, the coastguardsmen
would row out to discover the cause, and everything would be lost, as
Mullen and I would be called upon to give an account of ourselves, and
he (Hughes) would forfeit his post.
Mullen was evidently of the same opinion, for though he was livid to
the lips, and was trembling with hate and rage until his teeth chinked
in his head like a carelessly-carried tray of china, he gave no sign of
wishing to continue the contest.
Nor was I inclined to shut my eyes to the wisdom of Hughes’ counsel,
for I was already conscious of the fact that by taunting Mullen and
provoking him to blows I was doing my best to spoil my own game. There
was all the difference in the world between his presence on board the
hulk being discovered by the police as a result of a brawl, and his
being arrested on information given by me and supported by proof of his
identity.
Mullen was the first to speak. He was now no doubt convinced that he
had not acted with his customary discretion, for he had even stronger
reasons than I to wish to avoid a visit from the police. So long as it
was a question of brains he might hope to hold his own, but let him
once fall into their hands and they would hold him by the brute force
of number, whereas in me he was pitted against a single foe whom it
might not be difficult to outwit.
“I beg your pardon for what happened just now,” he said, “but before we
go any further tell me where and when I have seen you before.”
“I saw you in the Southend train once. You ’ad a row with a bloke wot
stunk the carriage out with a fusee,” I answered, doing my best to
sustain the _rôle_ I had assumed.
“Ah!” he said, looking very much relieved and with a wonderfully
pleasant smile, “that explains everything. To tell the honest truth, my
good man, I knew I had seen you before, the moment I set eyes on you,
and the fact is I thought you were a detective who has been hunting me
down for a long time, and who has played me one or two tricks too dirty
and too cowardly even for a detective to play, and for which one day I
mean to be even with him.”
He was smiling still, but the smile seemed to have shifted from his
eyes to his teeth, and the effect had ceased to be pleasant. He swung
himself round and away from me, and, with hands clasped behind him and
bent head, commenced pacing backward and forward--evidently deep in
thought--in the scanty space the cabin afforded.
Five minutes went by in silence, and then he began to mutter to himself
in a low voice, turning his head from side to side every now and then
in a quick, nervous, birdlike way, his eyes never still a moment, but
pouncing restlessly first on one object and then on another.
“What’s come to me,” he said to himself, and there was a look on his
face which I have never seen except on the face of a madman--as,
indeed, I am now fully persuaded he was. “What’s come to me that I of
all men in the world should so forget myself as to behave--and before
two louts--like a drunken, screeching, hysterical Jezebel?”
He stopped his restless pacing for a moment, and it seemed to me that
the man was writhing under his self-contempt, as if every word had been
a lash cutting ribbons of flesh from his bare back. Once more he fell
to walking to and fro and holding converse with himself.
“Is the end coming, that I can break down like this?” he asked. “No,
no, it’s this being hunted down day and night, until I get to start at
my own shadow, that has made me nervous and overwrought.
“Nervous! Overwrought! My God! who wouldn’t be so who has led the life
I’ve led these last six months--hearing in the daytime the step of the
officer who has come to arrest me in every sound, and lying wide-eyed
and awake the whole night through rather than trust myself to the
sleep which brings always the same hideous dream, from which I awake
screaming and with the cold sweat running off me like water!”
It was a magnificent piece of acting, if acting it were, and there was
a pathetic break in his voice at the last which, had he not been what
he was, would have made me pity him.
But James Mullen, _alias_ Captain Shannon, was scarcely an object for
pity, as I was soon reminded, for as he looked up my eye met his, and
he read there, I suppose, something of what was passing through my
mind. To such a man’s vanity the mere thought of being considered a
possible object for pity is unendurable. It implies a consciousness of
superiority on the part of the pitier which is resented more fiercely
than an insult or a wrong. For one moment I thought that he was about
to attack me again--not this time with tooth and nail, after the manner
of a wild cat or a hysterical woman, but with a heavy three-legged
stool which was lying upon the bunk, tossed there, I suppose, by Hughes
to be out of the way while he was clearing up.
Mullen turned the edge of a glance toward it without taking his eyes
from mine, and I saw his hand flutter up hesitatingly for a moment like
a startled bird, and then drop dead to his side, and I knew that he was
thinking how dearly, if he dared, he would love to beat the stool again
and again against my face until he had bashed every feature out of
recognition. But on this occasion he managed to keep his self-control,
and contented himself by asking me, with savage irritability, what I
was waiting for, and what I saw strange in him that I stood staring in
that way.
I replied that I was only waiting to know whether he had anything else
to say to me or my brother before the latter left the hulk.
He did not answer except to snap out, “You can go,” to Hughes, but
when, after a surly “Good night both,” that worthy had taken his
departure, Mullen turned to me again.
“Now listen. I’m a dangerous man to trifle with, and a desperate one,
and there are not many things I’d stick at to be level with the man who
played me false. But I can be a good friend to those who play me fair,
as well as a relentless enemy. Act squarely by me while you are here,
and keep your mouth shut when you leave, and you’ll never have cause
to regret it. But if you play tricks here, or blab when you’re gone,
you’ll do the worst day’s work for yourself you ever did in your life.
Do you understand?”
He waited for a reply, so I nodded and said, “Fair do is fair do,
guv’nor. That’s all right.”
“Very well,” he continued; “now we understand each other, and no more
need be said about it. I shall sleep in the hold as I’ve done before,
for if any one came out to the hulk for any reason it wouldn’t do for
them to see me. You’ll take your nap here as your brother did. So I bid
you good-night.”
“Good-night, sir,” I answered civilly, holding the door open for him.
“Now I’ll have a look at the paper that fell out of your pocket in the
tussle, my friend,” I added, as soon as he was out of hearing. “I’ve
got all the night before me; for I don’t intend to take the nap of
which you were speaking until I’ve got you safe in custody--otherwise
it might be a nap to which there would come no waking.”