Afoot Thwaite led as confidently as he had driven the car. It was the
stillest, pitchiest night I ever experienced, without light, air, sound
or smell to guide anyone: through that fog Thwaite sped like a man
moving about his own bedroom, never for a second at a loss.
“Here’s the place,” he said at the wall, and guided my hand to feel the
ring-bolt in the grass at its foot. Rivvin made a back for him and I
scrambled up on the two. Tip-toe on Thwaite’s shoulders I could just
finger the coping.
“Stand on my head, you fool!” he whispered.
I clutched the coping. Once astraddle of it I let down one end of the
silk ladder.
“Fast!” breathed Thwaite from below.
I drew it taut and went down. The first sweep of my fingers in the
grass found the other ring-bolt. I made the ladder fast and gave it the
signal twitches. Rivvin came over first, then Thwaite. Through the park
he led evenly. When he halted he caught me by the elbow and asked:
“Can you see any lights?”
“Not a light,” I told him.
“Same here,” he said, “there are no lights. Every window is dark. We’re
in luck.”
He led again for a while. Stopping he said only:
“Here’s where you shin up. Cut every wire, but don’t waste time cutting
any twice.”
The details of his directions were exact. I found every handhold and
foothold as he had schooled me. But I needed all my nerve. I realized
that no heavyweight like Rivvin or Thwaite could have done it. When I
came down I was limp and tottery.
“Just one swallow!” Thwaite said, putting a flask to my lips. Then we
went on. The night was so black and the fog so thick that I saw no loom
of the building till we were against its wall.
“Here’s where you go in,” Thwaite directed.
Doubly I understood why I was with them. Neither could have squeezed
through that aperture in the stone. I barely managed it. Inside,
instead of the sliding crash I had dreaded, I landed with a mere
crunch, the coal in that bin was not anthracite. Likewise the bin under
the window was for soft-coal. I blessed my luck and felt encouraged.
The window I got open without too much work. Rivvin and Thwaite slid
in. We crunched downhill four or five steps and stood on a firm floor.
Rivvin flashed his electric candle boldly round. We were between a
suite of trim coal-bins and a battery of serried furnaces. There was
no door at either end of the open space in which we stood. I had a
momentary vision of the alternate windows and coal-chutes above the
bins, of two big panels of shiny, colored tiling, of clear brick-work,
fresh-painted, jetty iron and dazzling-white brass-ringed asbestos, of
a black vacancy between two furnaces. Toward that I half heard, half
felt Rivvin turn. During the rest of our adventure he led, Thwaite
followed and I mostly tagged or groped after Thwaite, often judging
of their position or movement by that combination of senses which is
neither hearing nor touch, though partly both.
Rivvin’s torch flashed again. We were in a cement-floored, brick-walled
passage, with a door at each end and on the side facing us doors in a
bewildering row. In the darkness that came after the flash I followed
the others to the right. Well through the doorway we stood still,
breathing and listening. When Rivvin illuminated our environment we
saw about us thousands of bottles, all set aslant, neck down, in tiers
of racks that reached to the ceiling. Edging between them we made the
circuit of the cellar, but found no sign of any door save that by which
we had entered. A whispered growl from Rivvin, a nudge from Thwaite and
we went back the full length of the passage. Again we found ourselves
in a wine vault, the duplicate of that we had left, and with the same
peculiarity.
Our curiosity overcame any prudence. Rivvin, instead of flashing his
torch at intervals, kept the light steady, and we scrutinized, examined
and whispered our astonishment. As in its fellow there was not in all
this vault any spare space, the aisles were narrow, the racks reached
the girders supporting the flat arches, every rack was so full that a
holder empty of its bottle was scarcely findable. And there was not in
all that great cellar, there was not among all those tens of thousands
of bottles a magnum, or a quart or even a pint. They were all splits.
We handled a number and all had the same label. I know now what the
device was, from seeing it so often and so much larger afterwards, but
there it seemed a picture of a skirt-dancer leading an alligator by a
dog chain. There was no name of any wine or liquor on any bottle, but
each label had a red number, 17, or 45 or 328, above the picture, and
under it:
“Bottled for Hengist Eversleigh.”
“We know his name now,” Thwaite whispered.
Back in the passage Rivvin took the first door to the left. It brought
us to an easy stone stair between walls, which turned twice to the left
at broad landings.
When we trod a softer footing we stood a long time breathing cautiously
and listening.
Presently Rivvin flashed his light. It showed to our left a carpeted
stair, the dull red carpet bulging up over thick pads and held down by
brass stair-rods; the polished quartered oak of the molded door-jamb
or end of wainscot beyond it; the floor-covering of brownish-yellow
or yellowish brown linoleum or something similar, made to look like
inlaid wood; and the feet, legs and thighs of a big stocky man. The
light shone but the fraction of a second, yet it showed plain his
knee-breeches, tight stockings on his big calves, and bright buckles at
his knees and on his low shoes.
There was no loud sound, but the blurred brushy noise of a mute
struggle. I backed against a window-sill and could back no further.
All I could hear was the shuffling, rasping sounds of the fight, and
panting that became a sort of gurgle.
Again the light flashed and stayed full bright. I saw that it was
Thwaite struggling with the man, and that one of his big hands was
on Thwaite’s throat. Thwaite had him round the neck and his face was
against Thwaite’s chest. His hair was brownish. Rivvin’s slung-shot
crunched horribly on his skull. Instantly the light went out.
Thwaite, radiating heat like a stove, stood gasping close by me. I
heard no other noise after the body thudded on the floor except that on
the carpeted stair I seemed to hear light treads, as it were of a big
dog or of a frightened child, padding away upward.
“Did you hear anything?” I whispered.
Rivvin punched me.
After Thwaite was breathing naturally, he turned on his torch and
Rivvin did the same.
The dead man was oldish, over fifty I should judge, tall, large in all
his dimensions, and spare, though heavy. His clothing was a gold-laced
livery of green velvet, with green velvet knee breeches, green silk
stockings and green leather pumps. The four buckles were gold.
Thwaite startled me by speaking out loud.
“I take it, Rivvin,” he said, “this is the trusted valet. He would
have yelled if there had been anybody to call. Either we have this
building to ourselves or we have no one to deal with except Mr. Hengist
Eversleigh.”
Rivvin grunted.
“If he is here,” Thwaite went on, “he’s trying to send the alarm over
the cut wires, or he’s frightened and hiding. Let’s find him and finish
him, if he’s here, and then find his diamonds. Anyway let’s find those
diamonds.”
Rivvin grunted.
Swiftly they led from room to room and floor to floor. Not a door
resisted. We had been curious and astonished in the wine-vaults; above
we were electrified and numb. We were in a palace of wonders, among
such a profusion of valuables that even Rivvin, after the second or
third opportunity, ceased any attempt to pocket or bag anything. We
came upon nothing living, found no door locked and apparently made the
tour of the entire building.
When they halted, I halted. We were delirious with amazement, frantic
with inquisitiveness, frenzied with curiosity, incredulous, hysterical,
dazed and quivering.
Thwaite spoke in the dark.
“I’m going to see this place plain, all over it, if I die for it.”
They flashed their torches. We were right beside the body of the
murdered footman. Rivvin and Thwaite did not seem to mind the corpse.
They waved their torches until one fell on an electric-light button.
“Hope those wires are underground,” Thwaite remarked. He pushed the
button and the electric lights came on full and strong. We were
apparently at the foot of the back stairs, in a sort of lobby, an
expanded passage-way out of which opened several doors.
We all three regarded the knobs of those doors. As we had half seen
by flash-light on every door everywhere each door had two knobs, one
like any door-knob, the other about half way between it and the floor.
Rivvin opened one which proved to lead into a broom closet. He tried
the knobs, Thwaite and I watching too. The lock and latch were at the
upper knob, but controlled by either knob indifferently. They tried
another door, but my eyes would roam to the dead body.
Rivvin and Thwaite paid no more attention to it than if it had not been
there. I had never seen but one killed man before and neither wanted to
be reminded of that one nor relished the sight of this one. I stared
down the blackness of the stone stair up which we had come or glanced
into the dimness of the padded stairway.
Then Rivvin, feeling inside the open door, found the button and turned
on the lights. It was a biggish dining-room, the four corners cut off
by inset glass-framed shelved closets, full of china and glassware. The
furniture was oak.
“Servants dining-room,” Thwaite commented.
Turning on the lights in each we went through a series of rooms; a
sort of sitting-room, with card-tables and checker-boards; a library
walled with bookcases and open book-shelves, its two stout oak tables
littered with magazines and newspapers; a billiard room with three
tables, a billiard-table, a pool-table and one for bagatelle; a sort of
lounging room, all leather-covered sofas and deep armchairs; an entry
with hat-hooks and umbrella-stands, the outer door dark oak with a
great deal of stained glass set in and around it.
“All servants’ rooms,” Thwaite commented. “Every bit of the furniture
is natural man-size. Let’s go on.”
Back we went along a passage and into a big kitchen beyond the
dining-room.
“Never mind the pantries till we come down again,” Thwaite commanded.
“Let’s go upstairs. We’ll do the banqueting-hall after those bedrooms,
and the writing rooms and study last. I want a real sight of those
pictures.”
They passed the dead flunkey as if he had not been there at all.
On the floor above Thwaite touched Rivvins’ elbow.
“I forgot these,” he said.
We inspected a medium-sized sitting-room with a round center-table, an
armchair drawn up by it, and in the armchair a magazine and a sort of
wadded smoking-jacket. Next this room was a bedroom and a bathroom.
“Mr. Footman’s quarters,” Thwaite remarked, staring unconcernedly at a
photograph of a dumpy young woman and two small children, set on the
bureau. “All man-size furniture here, too.”
Rivvin nodded.
Up the second flight of that back-stair we went again. It ended in a
squarish hallway or lobby or room with nothing in it but two settees.
It had two doors.
Rivvin pushed one open, felt up and down for the electric button and
found it.
We all three gasped; we almost shouted. We had had glimpses of this
gallery before, but the flood of light from a thousand bulbs under
inverted trough-reflectors dazzled us; the pictures fairly petrified us.
The glare terrified me.
“Surely we are crazy,” I objected, “to make all this illumination. It’s
certain to give the alarm.”
“Alarm nothing,” Thwaite snapped. “Haven’t I watched these buildings
night after night. I told you he is never disturbed at any hour, lights
or no lights.”
My feeble protest thus brushed away I became absorbed, like the others,
in those incredible paintings. Rivvin was merely stupidly dazed in
uncomprehending wonder, Thwaite keenly speculative, questing for a
clue to the origin of their peculiarities, I totally bewildered at the
perfection of their execution, shivering at their uncanniness.
The gallery was all of ninety feet long, nearly thirty wide and high.
Apparently it had a glass roof above the rectangle of reflectors. The
pictures covered all four walls, except the little door at either end.
None was very small and several were very large. A few were landscapes,
but all had figures in them, most were crowded with figures.
Those figures!
They were human figures, but not one had a human head. The heads were
invariably those of birds, animals or fishes, generally of animals,
some of common animals, many of creatures I had seen pictures of or had
heard of, some of imaginary creatures like dragons or griffons, more
than half of the heads either of animals I knew nothing of or which had
been invented by the painter.
Close to me when the lights blazed out was a sea picture, blurred
grayish foggy weather and a heavy groundswell; a strange other-world
open boat with fish heaped in the bottom of it and standing among them
four human figures in shining boots like rubber boots and wet, shiny,
loose coats like oilskins, only the boots and skins were red as claret,
and the four figures had hyenas’ heads. One was steering and the
others were hauling at a net. Caught in the net was a sort of merman,
but different from the pictures of mermaids. His shape was all human
except the head and hands and feet; every bit of him was covered with
fish-scales all rainbowy. He had flat broad fins in place of hands and
feet and his head was the head of a fat hog. He was thrashing about in
the net in an agony of impotent effort. Queer as the picture was it
had a compelling impression of reality, as if the scene were actually
happening before our eyes.
Next it was a picnic in a little meadow by a pond between woods with
mountains behind it higher up. Every one of the picnickers about the
white tablecloth spread on the grass had the head of a different
animal, one of a sheep, one of a camel, and the rest of animals like
deer, not one of them known to me.
Then next to that was a fight of two compound creatures shaped like
centaurs, only they had bulls’ bodies, with human torsos growing out
of them, where the necks ought to be, the arms scaly snakes with
open-mouthed, biting heads in place of hands; and instead of human
heads roosters’ heads, bills open and pecking. Under the creatures
in place of bulls’ hoofs were yellow roosters’ legs, stouter than
chickens’ legs and with short thick toes, and long sharp spurs like
game roosters’. Yet these fantastic chimeras appeared altogether alive
and their movements looked natural, yes that’s the word, natural.
Every picture was as complete a staggerer as these first three. Every
one was signed in the lower left hand corner in neat smallish letters
of bright gold paint:
“Hengist Eversleigh”
and a date.
“Mr. Hengist Eversleigh is a lunatic that’s certain,” Thwaite
commented, “but he unquestionably knows how to paint.”
There must have been more than fifty pictures in that gallery, maybe as
many as seventy-five, and every one a nightmare.
Beyond was a shorter gallery of the same width, end on to the side of
the first, and beyond that the duplicate of the first; the three taking
up three sides of the building. The fourth side was a studio, the size
of the second gallery; it had a great skylight of glass tilted sideways
all along over one whole wall. It was white-washed, very plain and
empty-looking, with two easels, a big one and a little one.
On the little one was a picture of some vegetables and five or six
little fairies, as it were, with children’s bodies and mice’s heads,
nibbling at a carrot.
On the big one was a canvas mostly blank. One side of it had a
palm-tree in splashy, thick slaps of paint and under it three big crabs
with cocoanuts in their claws. A man’s feet and legs showed beside them
and the rest was unfinished.
The three galleries had fully three hundred paintings, for the smaller
gallery contained only small canvases. Besides being impressed with the
grotesqueness of the subjects and the perfection of the drawing and
coloring, two things struck me as to the pictures collectively.
First, there was not represented in any one of all those paintings any
figure of a woman or any female shape of any kind. The beast-headed
figures were all, whether clothed or nude, figures of men. The animals,
as far as I could see, were all males.
Secondly, nearly half of the pictures were modifications, or parallels
or emulations (I could hardly say travesties or imitations), of
well-known pictures by great artists, paintings I had seen in public
galleries or knew from engravings or photographs or reproductions in
books or magazines.
There was a picture like Washington crossing the Delaware and another
like Washington saying farewell to his generals. There was a batch
of Napoleon pictures; after the paintings of Napoleon at Austerlitz,
at Friedland, giving the eagles to his regiments, on the morning of
Waterloo, coming down the steps at Fontainebleau, and on the deck of
the ship going to St. Helena. There were dozens of other pictures of
generals or kings or emperors reviewing victorious armies; two or three
of Lincoln. One that hit me hardest, obviously after some picture I
had never seen or heard of, of the ghost of Lincoln, far larger than
a life-size man, towering above the surviving notabilities of his
time on the grandstand reviewing the homecoming Federal army marching
through Washington.
In every one of these pictures, the dominant figure, whether it stood
for Lincoln, Napoleon, Washington, or some other general or ruler;
whatever uniform or regalia clothed its human shape, had the same head.
The heads of the fighting men in all these pictures were those of
dogs, all alike in any one picture, but differing from one to another;
terriers or wolf-hounds or mastiffs or what not. The heads of any men
not soldiers were those of oxen or sheep or horses or some other mild
sort of animal. The head of the dominant figure I then took to be
invented, legendary, fabulous--oh, that’s not the word I want.
“Mythological?” I suggested, the only interruption I interjected into
his entire narrative.
Yes, mythological, he returned. I thought it was a mythological
creature. The long-jawed head, like a hound’s; the little pointed
yellow beard under the chin; the black, naked ears, like a hairless
dog’s ears and yet not doggy, either; the ridge of hair on top of
the skull; the triangular shape of the whole head; the close-set,
small, beady, terribly knowing eyes; the brilliant patches of color
on either side of the muzzle; all these made a piercing impression of
individuality and yet seemed not so much actual as mythological.
It takes a great deal longer to tell what we saw on that third floor
than it took to see it. All round the galleries under the pictures were
cases of drawers, solidly built in one length like a counter and about
as high. Thwaite went down one side of the gallery and Rivvin down the
other, pulling them out and slamming them shut again. All I saw held
photographs of pictures. But Rivvin and Thwaite were taking no chances
and looked into every drawer. I had plenty of time to gaze about me
and circulated at a sort of cantering trot around the green-velvet
miniature sofas and settees placed back to back down the middle of the
floor-space. It seemed to me that Mr. Hengist Eversleigh was a great
master of figure and landscape drawing, color, light and perspective.
As we went down the duplicate staircase at the other corner from where
we came up Thwaite said:
“Now for those bedrooms.”
By the stair we found another valet’s or footman’s apartment,
sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom, just like the one by the other
stair. And there were four more between them, under the studio and over
the lounging-rooms.
On the east and west sides of the building were “the” bedrooms, twelve
apartments, six on each side; each of the twelve made up of a bedroom,
a dressing-room and a bathroom.
The beds were about three feet long, and proportionately narrow and
low. The furniture, bureaus, tables, chairs, chests-of-drawers and
the rest, harmonized with the dimensions of the beds, except the
cheval-glasses and wall-mirrors which reached the ceilings. The
bathtubs were almost pools, about nine feet by six and all of three
feet deep, each a single block of porcelain.
The shapes and sizes and styles of the furniture were duplicated
all through, but the colors varied, so that the twelve suites were
in twelve colors; black, white, gray and brown, and light and dark
yellow, red, green and blue; wall coverings, hangings, carpets and
rugs all to match in each suite. The panels of the walls had the same
picture, however, repeated over and over, two, four or six times to a
room and in every suite alike.
This picture was the design I had failed to make out on the labels of
the bottles. It was set as a medallion in each panel of the blue or
red walls, or whatever other color they were. The background of the
picture was a vague sort of palish sky and blurred, hazy clouds above
tropical-looking foliage. The chief figure was an angel, in flowing
white robes, floating on silvery-plumed wings widespread. The angel’s
face was a human face, the only human face in any picture in that
palace, the face of a grave, gentle, rather girlish young man.
The creature the angel was leading was a huge, bulky crocodile, with
a gold collar about its neck, and a gold chain from that, not to the
angel’s hand, but to a gold fetter about his wrist.
Under each picture was a verse of four lines, always the same.
“Let not your baser nature drag you down.
Utter no whimper, not one sigh or moan,
Hopeless of respite, solace, palm or crown
Live out your life unflinching and alone.”