THE REDLIKE RAY
The next morning she had a letter: “Since I am very perplexed, please,
dear, relieve me. I must see you to-morrow night at nine for five
minutes ... the Piccadilly Fountain....”
But she did not go. As he waited there at nine, an unknown nurse came,
asked “Mr Reeks?”, handed him an envelope.
“From his sweetheart,” thought Oyone in her motor-car by Swan and Edgar.
And, “Love affair” muttered one of two detectives under the Monico—for
ever since the mystery of the air-boats’ destruction, the Chief
Commissioner had had the Prince’s every step shadowed for his
protection.
“Dear,” she had written, “I cannot meet you, not ever, I’m
afraid. I think I see you wince, dear, in reading this, but it
is not that I am really cruel, but that I cannot in all cases
trust myself; and I seem to see that it is better for me to
go from England, not to come back. Always remember that our
marriage was entirely my fault, for you were only a boy, but a
girl should know better; and now that I abandon you, it will
not be very binding on you. But you will not altogether forget
Eulalia, ever? I will keep the ring where I have always kept
it, in the warm.”
It took the Prince minutes to peruse this, and no muscle of his
face moved, though he stood so long motionless, that Oyone thought:
“Something has stunned him.”
However, he lifted his hand quite coolly to a cab, got in in his long
cloak, and started eastward, this being his monthly doss-house night;
and behind him the detectives; and behind them Oyone, who said to
herself: “That cab is following his: they are detectives.”
When his cab passed Aldgate, one of the detectives exclaimed, “God’s
name, where _is_ he going?” and their eyes widened in alarm when
he alighted at an alley marked at the corner “Duval, _late_ Dorset
Street,” for the name “Dorset” had become so associated with filth and
infamy and one “Jack-the-Ripper,” that an attempt had been made to
change its name—in vain.
Whoever entered it was suspect—_ipso facto_. In the glances that ogled
you out of the glooms was the question: “What’s _his_ little game?”
Half-way down it, on a lamp, was marked “Noted House for Single Men”;
and in, though married, stepped the Prince.
Having now thrown off his cloak, he got at a wicket a 4d. ticket,
passed in his marine-garb into a “kitchen,” where some singing was
going on, and there sat out of the way in shadow behind a corner of the
fireplace, bent down with heaviness.
This den was essentially black somehow, dingy, dismal, though two
gas-jets struggled against its blackness—spacious enough, but low,
stuffy, windowless, filled with men, many naked to the waist (shirts
drying!), and occupied with blackened benches and blackened blocks
meant for tables, and tobacco smells, fishy stenches, fumes of cooking.
Some of the group round the great blaze, _habitués_, the Prince
knew—little Tim, the Jew, and “Alexis the Sexton,” and Burrows, the
tramp-poet in his velveteen jacket and knickerbockers, whose booklet of
poems “the press” had praised. He, especially, was now in a state of
exaltation over the North Sea Battle, ever and afresh singing a snatch
of the Alhambra battle-ballad that within three days was being sold by
millions in the streets, and sung by every ragamuffin through England;
and when the fire-group left off, away yonder at the wash-basins the
thing might begin again in the voice of a saw in labour-pains.
One Tookey remarked: “Aye, ’e knows ’ow to give it ’em ’ot all right,
thank God for that”—a man sodden to flabbiness, who lived by day before
the doors of the _Duke of Beaufort_—year after year—dull in a universe
no huger than two streets.
And “Beer?” suggested Burrows, who had a quart-bottle, to “Alexis the
Sexton,” a big and fiercely bearded being; but Alexis, brooding over
the blaze, brushed the bottle away without answer.
Whereat Burrows drank himself, and now let out of his lungs:
“They breathed, ‘We are near!’
And they leered, with a ‘Hush!
We are near!’ But just here
Did the _Asahel_ gush
Live _As_-id to germs on the Germans,
On the Russians like _hel_ to a rush.”
But now stamped “Alexis the Sexton,” his hands quivering near his ears,
as he shouted: “Shut up that blasted howling!”—the utterance all the
more foreign for the idiomatic correctness: for he knew every language.
“Moy loife,” said little Tim, the Jew, who was proud of being English,
“can’t anybody sing? Go back to Odessa and throw bombs, if London don’t
suit you.”
Alexis deigned no answer; and Burrows irrelevantly put forth both arm
and voice, some others joining at the third word:
“For her skipper was Ted,
And Teddy’s a bear,
When he’s sore on the head,
And is out on the tear:
And a bear that is likewise a lion
The Muscovy Bear couldn’t bear.”
The Prince, brooding in his obscurity, was thinking: “They love
England, these men.... But _why_? the singular beings! It’s no
privilege to be an Englishman—just the opposite, since they’d be much
happier in Samoa, where there’s no aristocracy, or in France, where the
aristocracy’s heads have been cut off. But they _do_, they choose to,
in their great patience: I put that to their credit.”
But now afresh upon his reflections crashed the caterwaul of all the
cats:
“And the Eagle he blinked,
And ‘_Blitzwetter!_’ he cried,
And ‘Al-Ass!’ as she kicked,
And ‘Ah-Hell!’ as he died:
‘Though her bray is the bray of the donkey,
There’s more Hel than As in her side.’”
After which Burrows, smacking his lips with an “Ah!” rose to stroll a
little, his fists expanding the pockets of his opulent knickerbockers,
and, having sauntered toward the Prince, brought a paw down upon the
bowed back, calling out: “What, Jack, down on your luck again? And
what’s wrong with the arm?”
“Don’t worry, mate,” muttered the Prince, “I’m not in the mood.”
“A drink?”
“No, go to hell.”
“_Asa_hel, perhaps, friend?”
No answer, Burrows looked down on the back a little, then, spinning,
stamped with the outcry: “Now put some lungs into it!” and started to
chortle:
“‘Her forward-gun’s stern
As vit’rol!’ they yell;
‘And her stern-gun in turn
Is forward as well:
The forwarder’s name must be Asid,
And the sterner one’s name must be Hel!’”
At this “Alexis the Sexton” leapt upright, colossal, confronting the
crowd of choristers with clenched fists and scowling frown, afresh
interrupted in his profound reflections. But no one took any notice,
and on drawled the wawling in every tone of rawness:
“Then, with bluster and buzz,
The _Blunderbus_ bowed,
‘Are you come, Max, Coz?
Of your visit I’m proud:
Forgive, if in kissing you welcome,
I blunder in bussing too loud.’”
Now that thick lip of Alexis, who still stood scowling, bent downward,
and he stopped the song with the bellow: “You crowd of fowls! Sitting
here singing of your masters—yes? You see not, then, that now is your
chance while they are busy? But you not even think of it! You serfs by
birth! You timid mice! If you were to make to them a millionth piece of
the wrong that they make to you, they would ravage Britain to one mass
of ashes—if they could. And you can, but will not——”
“Which only shows that we are the better men of the two!” called out
Tookey, the loafer.
“_You?_” said Alexis the Sexton with a lip of bitterness: “_you_ better
than somebody—yes? Never, never, a dog was born of she-dog that was not
a better being than things like you! I tell you——”
“Oh, stow it,” somebody put in, “we don’t want no shindy here.”
“No, you tame——”
“Howl it, boys!” howled Burrows, bringing down the bottle from his
mouth, and out anew broke the row:
“He has saved us from harm
With his dreadful flails,
With his stretched-out arm
He has saved us from bales:
Let’s leap to our feet as we scream it:
‘God bless the Prince of Wales!’”
And they did leap, nearly everyone, whereupon Alexis the Sexton,
finding himself standing in the throng of standers, suddenly sat down.
The gabbling of the two gloomy gas-lights, hanging on a thin =T=-tubing
from a beam in the ceiling, filled some moments’ stillness, while the
Prince said to himself: “All right, you are not asked for any love, but
you choose to give it; and I choose to give you mine. Only wait till I
get a _good_ chance to show it, and then I will—without mercy to your
merciless enemies.”
A moment more, and with a pang, new and sharp, he was thinking:
“_Gone!_”
And he set to peruse anew that letter of Eulalia—he could in his
obscurity, since already he knew it by heart: but in the midst started!
his ear cocked—to listen to Alexis the Sexton.
Alexis was now saying to those round him: “They have it their own way
for the moment, the rich—yes? but they have one horrible enemy, who
no will fail to overthrow them. Who is their enemy? A few poor heroes
throwing some bombs, yes? They are nothing. But their enemy is a still
little man in an aparterment prying into a microscope—Edison and
Diessel were their enemies, Chinnery was their enemy, Darwin and Watt
and Faraday were their enemies, God’s light is their enemy. How will
they feel if you go and tell to them, ‘Somewhere I have a little box
that will strike blind ten thousand of you every twenty seconds’? They
will feel a little bit chilly—yes? Maybe it is invented already—who
knows?”
It was at this that the Prince hurried Eulalia’s letter into his
pocket. “A _little box_”—the name “_Chinnery_”—this made him ask
himself: “_Can it be possible_ that this man has the Redlike Ray?” The
jeopardy to civilisation of such a thing for even one day more was
clear enough.
He bent his ear to hear more with an intense interest; but just then
the plaguey _Asahel_ song started again, whereat Alexis the Sexton with
an “_Ach Gott!_” cast his arms aloft, got up, and walked out. Swift and
still the Prince slipped out after him.
The Russian sauntered out of Dorset Street into Commercial Street
northward, his hands in the pockets of clothes that hung loose on
his huge bulk, the Prince, meanwhile, all eyes for a policeman,
not dreaming that those two men near the Dorset Street corner were
detectives (though Alexis knew), while yonder in shadow eight hundred
yards northward stood Oyone’s motor-brougham, she standing before its
door. She had not been able to see the Prince enter that noted house
for single men, because of the detectives’ presence, and had been
wondering; till now she saw him far off, coming.
As for the Russian, accustomed to be shadowed, he had the
circumspection of Argus—eyes in the back of his head!—and knew that he
was being tracked by the marine. Why? “What’s _his_ game?” he asked
himself in some language. Had not he, Alexis, been mouthy to blab about
the “striking blind”? His heart smote him.
Now, that big body could be pretty nimble; so with a quick twist he
doubled back, landed a sudden blow, envenomed and heavy as a club, upon
the Prince’s breast, and was gone with all his long legs northward.
Seeing which thing, the two detectives flew, shrilling whistles, Alexis
flew, and fleeter than the three flew the Prince’s twinkling feet,
wrestling with space. But he had been knocked spinning, so that the
Russian had had quite a longish start, and while the Prince was still
two hundred yards from him, and the detectives perhaps four hundred,
the Japanese, who had seen everything, rushed a little way toward the
Russian, as he approached, to hiss at him: “Jump into my motor, and
you’ll escape.”
Alexis, ever shy of traps and “the rich,” did not stop; but he had
instantly realised that she was non-English, saw that the Prince was
winning upon him, so in an impulse, when he had run some steps past the
car, resolving to risk it, he doubled back, darted into the car; Oyone
was in before him; and before ever its number could be noted, the motor
was shooting away, booming music of the jews’-harp.
It spurted round the first corner, so by the time the two detectives
could get into their taxicab and give chase, the car was nowhere; and
a third detective who had come from the further end of Dorset Street,
groaned to himself: “God! I’ve lost track of Alexis the Sexton, and
to-morrow is the ceremony at St Paul’s.”
Meantime, the Russian and the Japanese within the motor-car stared at
each other, mutually startled and alarmed to find themselves there face
to face: for in moments of rush and pressure something that is not
exactly we acts instead of us, and _her_ invitation had been as much
an impulse as _his_ acceptance—in her sub-consciousness no doubt being
a sense that he could give her information as to the Prince, and that
since he was the Prince’s enemy, he must be her friend.
So there was embarrassment, until the Russian bowed to say: “Well, I am
much obliged!—supposing that your intention is friendly.”
“What else can it be?” asked that light hard voice, without
inflections, as if a bird should speak.
“What, madam, may I demand, was your motiff?”
“I saw you pursued—I am good-hearted—those two behind were detectives!”
“Ah,” he thought at once, “she’s no _ingénue_—knows things—some game in
hand.”
“Why,” Oyone asked, “did you—strike him?”
“May I demand, madam, what is your motiff for demanding it?”
“Curiosity. You are very cautious! What are you?”
“Well, you demand that of a man? _What he is?_ What answer expect you a
man could make to such a demand?”
Her eyes dwelt on him, she saying to herself: “Accustomed to skulking—a
life under the eye of the police.” She said aloud: “There is no
need—since I do not care. I should say you are a Russian——”
He started! “I may be! And you, madam?”
“My nation? I am Irish.”
“I doubt it,” meditated Alexis: “more likely Magyar or Slovene.”
“And you are also very likely an Anarchist,” said Oyone.
Violently started Alexis off his seat! and with grinding teeth, glaring
at her with his great eyes that ever had the exaggerated expressiveness
of eyes in pantomime or the cinematograph, he hissed at her: “I _am_ an
Anarchist! I am p-r-r-oud of it!”
“Well, you need not eat me”—her eyes dwelling, dwelling, on him, while
a whole web suddenly wove itself in her subtle Oriental brain, that
doomed this man to death on the next day, unless he did her bidding.
She added: “I am an Anarchist, too.”
“You? a rich?”
“In principle, that is.”
“Word of honour, madam?”
“Since I was a child.”
Out popped the Russian’s confraternal paw, on which the girl deposited
her glove with a chuckle in her shoulder.
“Besides,” she said, “you are a handsome fellow, and I not such an ugly
girl that you should wish to gobble me up.”
“That is even the reason!” he gallantly answered, ogling now, asking
himself: “_Is_ she an _ingénue_? and I in luck’s way?”
The car was passing beneath the shadow of Holborn Viaduct, whence it
drove north to Regent’s Park, and there round and round the Outer
Circle, deserted now, under a moon that illumined thick mist.
“But the man you struck, why did he follow you?” the girl asked.
“Believe me, I know nothing of his motiff,” Alexis answered.
“Nor his name?”
“‘Jack’ one has called him in the doss-house.”
“Why _does_ he go there?” she wondered; and aloud: “Jack is not his
name. I am going to tell you his name, just to see you start up.”
“She is no _ingénue_!” Alexis reflected afresh—“has special knowledge,
special motiffs!”
“That man was—no, why should I tell?—yes, I will—_the Prince of Wales_.
Ha! ha! You needn’t——”
His great eyes glared like eyes goggled in concave mirrors! Then
suddenly: “It is the truth—I was stoo_peed_ not to see it!” And now, to
her astonishment, he caught off his cap to mutter with bent head: “Now,
God bless him!”
“Well!” she went on in her light way—“an Anarchist.”
“But yes! For what can his motiff be but to see himself the condition
of the people whom he must some time ‘govern’—as they say. I say again,
God bless the man!”
“He is really an honest fool whom they hunt as a criminal,” the
Japanese thought; adding aloud: “But principles: principles are no
respecter of persons.”
“It is true,” said he.
“When he goes to this doss-house, how long does he stay?” she asked.
“He _sleeps_ there! And you know not what that signifies, I think!
Those vermin who hate an open window, fester fifteen, twenty—I call it
herolike! grandiose! No, I regret at the actual moment to have struck
this man.”
“But principles,” said she.
“It is true,” said he: “you are a true Anarchist, or else,” he added to
himself, “a Government spy.”
“You could stab him there in his sleep; no one would know,” she said
low; but a grumble answered her: “One does not do that, madam”; and she
then thought: “_I_ could disguise myself as a man, and sleep there,
if necessary.” She said aloud: “But the Royal Family pass through the
Strand to St Paul’s to-morrow to ‘_return thanks_’ for the victory: are
you going to let such a chance pass?”
On which he afresh had the thought: “She _is_ very likely a spy set to
pump me.” “Forgive me, madam,” he said to her, “but you speak with the
inexperience of a child. It could not be done. In the first place, have
I not struck the Prince of Wales? Is it not probable that I shall be
arrested to-night the moment I return to my lodgings? And, quite apart
from that, will not every step of mine be known till the ceremony of
to-morrow is over?”
“Then, do not return: sleep in my house: no one will know.”
The Russian, looking down upon her upturned smile, suddenly cried
out: “Most charmed! The thing itself that suits me! But as for the
procession to-morrow—no, not for me: it could scarce be done; and I
have a far vaster work to make for the world.”
Oyone bent to smell the roses at her breast, meditating; then said:
“You know best. But I am glad I met you—we think so exactly the same
things! The house is over there in those trees; I will give you some
supper, and treat you well; and to-morrow you may come with me to see
the procession.”
“Charmed!” cried Alexis the Sexton, “if only I may leave my revolver at
your dwelling: for I must not be in the crowd armed.”
“Of course,” said she.
“Well, you are very amiable!” he cried, with a new start: “I seem to be
in luck’s way! It is an adventure!”
“I am like that,” she said lightly. “I have a good heart while I can,
and when I cannot I can be very cruel.” She cried in Chinese: “Drive
home!”
And so it was that the next morning there was consternation all in the
police-force at the question which had arisen: “_Where is Alexis the
Sexton?_”—a poignant question on any day of a royal procession, but on
this day its anxiety was wildly heightened by the Prince’s statement
that this man probably had in his possession that dreadful Redlike Ray,
for which the police had been seeking for weeks.
Hence every ten minutes telephone messages were passing between
Scotland Yard, the City, and the Embankment; and at ten o’clock the
postponement of the ceremony was suggested, every den in London having
then been ransacked, the Russian’s lodgings, all his haunts, his
associates’ haunts—no trace of him or of the ray.
But postponement was now found to be too difficult, so the _route_ was
more than usually betrooped; and all were warned to keep quick and
seeing peepers.
Yet at eleven in the forenoon Alexis was there in the Strand crowd, big
and brown, but as undistinguished as one grain amid the myriads of the
seashore.
He had come up Essex Street from the Embankment with the Japanese, and
just there, at the corner, they stood, a little east of St Clement
Danes, she pressed against the door-rail of _The Freeman’s Journal_,
a little behind, and left of him. Pale, weak in the knees she stood
there, in her muff (unknown to him) his revolver.
When some closed wagonettes passed, taking members of the Palace Staff
to St Paul’s, she almost jumped upon the Russian’s back, to see; and
now she was seen: for a little away on one of the rows of seats reared
round St Clement Danes sat Eulalia, who had to leave England at two
o’clock, so had got a ticket for a last glimpse of her lad; and her
eyes, straying down upon the crowd opposite, chanced to rest upon the
Japanese face.
She started, asking herself: “Is that she?”—peeped and peered—but it
was hard to tell definitely; and just then the ocean’s roar arose,
approached, the procession coming.
The tongues of London bells were telling that it was a day of gladness,
and flags, arches, a profusion of festoons, strewed the route with hues.
Yonder by the Griffin the Lord Mayor in scarlet and ermine waited with
his Pearl Sword to present to the King, surrounded with Councilmen in
their mazarine gowns, Aldermen in scarlet, Sword-Bearer, Mace-Bearer,
Marshal; a band started the National Anthem; at word-of-command the
soldiers in their great-coats sprang to attention, presented.
Eulalia could not see westward, but knew pretty well the position
of the Prince from the quality of the wave of roaring that rose and
rolled as he rolled—something of suddenness in it, a yell that leapt,
he in the second carriage, separated from King and Queen by a body
of aides-de-camp, equerries, Silver Stick, adjutants, and the second
division of escort: and he was said to look sullen or dull.
Nor did the Queen look herself to those who knew—a boding in her that
day. There behind four bays she sat with King’s sister and King, who
lifted hand to a hat of plumes that drooped, Red Indian in suggestion,
and in her rear a train of state-postilion landaus—some Ministers,
Agents-general, Mistress of the Robes, Lord Chamberlain to the Queen;
and when the first division of escort had dashed past St Clement, it
halted beyond the Griffin; and now the King is there, and the Prince in
sight behind the King’s Riders and escort; and now all the procession
has halted, because of the Lord Mayor and his Civic Sword.
The instant it halted, while each eye was tied to the gaud, through the
storm of cheering a gun-shot was, as it were, felt, rather than heard;
and it was instantly followed by another.
The first passed through the Prince of Wales’ neck, the second through
the heart of Alexis the Sexton.
The Japanese had, so to say, _clambered_ up the Russian’s back, to
shoot: and there is this to be said to her credit, that she had no
practice in handling fire-arms, that she was excessively agitated, that
she aimed within one tick, and that the Prince’s carriage on that side
was protected by a squadron commander: so that virtue was in her. And
in the very act of dropping from the Anarchist’s back the cat put a
bullet into him, and dropped his revolver at his feet.
Some of the people near declared afterwards that they never heard any
shot at all!
But they felt, they saw, they screamed; and fiercelier than they stood
Eulalia screaming.
The Prince, quite near under her feet, was aware of that poignant
voice, as he failed and fainted.