Watch and Ward
I well remember, as I set reluctant foot upon the wooden stair, taking a
last and somewhat lingering look at the dust and dirt of the lower
chamber, as one who knew not what might happen before he saw it again.
The stain as of red rust in the lavatory basin, the gritty deposit in the
bath, the verdigris on all the taps, the foul opacity of the windows, are
among the trivialities that somehow stamped themselves upon my mind. One
of the windows was open at the top, had been so long open that the
aperture was curtained with cobwebs at each extremity, but in between I
got quite a poignant picture of the Thames as I went upstairs. It was
only a sinuous perspective of sunlit ripples twinkling between wooded
gardens and open meadows, a fisherman or two upon the tow-path, a canoe
in mid-stream, a gaunt church crowning all against the sky. But inset in
such surroundings it was like a flash from a magic-lantern in a
coal-cellar. And very loth was I to exchange that sunny peep for an
indefinite prospect of my prisoner's person at close quarters.
Yet the first stage of my vigil proved such a sinecure as to give me
some confidence for all the rest. Dan Levy opened neither his lips nor
his eyes at my approach, but lay on his back with the Red Ensign drawn
up to his chin, and the peaceful countenance of profound oblivion. I
remember taking a good look at him, and thinking that his face improved
remarkably in repose, that in death he might look fine. The forehead was
higher and broader than I had realised, the thick lips were firm enough
now, but the closing of the crafty little eyes was the greatest gain of
all. On the whole, not only a better but a stronger face than it had
been all the morning, a more formidable face by far. But the man had
fallen asleep in his bonds, and forgotten them; he would wake up abject
enough; if not, I had the means to reduce him to docility. Meanwhile, I
was in no hurry to show my power, but stole on tiptoe to the locker, and
took my seat by inches.
Levy did not move a muscle. No sound escaped him either, and somehow or
other I should have expected him to snore; indeed, it might have come as
a relief, for the silence of the tower soon got upon my nerves. It was
not a complete silence; that was (and always is) the worst of it. The
wooden stairs creaked more than once; there were little rattlings, faint
and distant, as of a dried leaf or a loose window, in the bowels of the
house; and though nothing came of any of these noises, except a fresh
period of tension on my part, they made the skin act on my forehead every
time. Then I remember a real anxiety over a blue-bottle, that must have
come in through the open window just below, for suddenly it buzzed into
my ken and looked like attacking Levy on the spot. Somehow I slew it with
less noise than the brute itself was making; and not until after that
breathless achievement did I realise how anxious I was to keep my
prisoner asleep. Yet I had the revolver, and he lay handcuffed and bound
down! It was in the next long silence that I became sensitive to another
sound which indeed I had heard at intervals already, only to dismiss it
from my mind as one of the signs of extraneous life which were bound to
penetrate even to the top of my tower. It was a slow and regular beat, as
of a sledge-hammer in a distant forge, or some sort of machinery only
audible when there was absolutely nothing else to be heard. It could
hardly be near at hand, for I could not hear it properly unless I held my
breath. Then, however, it was always there, a sound that never ceased or
altered, so that in the end I sat and listened to it and nothing else. I
was not even looking at Levy when he asked me if I knew what it was.
His voice was quiet and civil enough, but it undoubtedly made me jump,
and that brought a malicious twinkle into the little eyes that looked as
though they had been studying me at their leisure. They were perhaps less
violently bloodshot than before, the massive features calm and strong as
they had been in slumber or its artful counterfeit.
"I thought you were asleep?" I snapped, and knew better for certain
before he spoke.
"You see, that pint o' pop did me prouder than intended," he explained.
"It's made a new man o' me, you'll be sorry to 'ear."
I should have been sorrier to believe it, but I did not say so, or
anything else just then. The dull and distant beat came back to the ear.
And Levy again inquired if I knew what it was.
"Do you?" I demanded.
"Rather!" he replied, with cheerful certitude. "It's the clock, of
course."
"What clock?"
"The one on the tower, a bit lower down, facing the road."
"How do _you_ know?" I demanded, with uneasy credulity.
"My good young man," said Dan Levy, "I know the face of that clock as
well as I know the inside of this tower."
"Then you do know where you are!" I cried, in such surprise that Levy
grinned in a way that ill became a captive.
"Why," said he, "I sold the last tenant up, and nearly took the 'ouse
myself instead o' the place I got. It was what first attracted me to the
neighhour'ood."
"Why couldn't you tell us the truth before?" I demanded, but my warmth
merely broadened his grin.
"Why should I? It sometimes pays to seem more at a loss than you are."
"It won't in this case," said I through my teeth. But for all my
austerity, and all his bonds, the prisoner continued to regard me with
quiet but most disquieting amusement.
"I'm not so sure of that," he observed at length. "It rather paid, to my
way of thinking, when Raffles went off to cash my cheque, and left you to
keep an eye on me."
"Oh, did it!" said I, with pregnant emphasis, and my right hand found
comfort in my jacket pocket, on the butt of the old brute's own weapon.
"I only mean," he rejoined, in a more conciliatory voice, "that you
strike me as being more open to reason than your flash friend."
I said nothing to that.
"On the other 'and," continued Levy, still more deliberately, as though
he really was comparing us in his mind; "on the other _hand_" stooping to
pick up what he had dropped, "you don't take so many risks. Raffles takes
so many that he's bound to land you both in the jug some day, if he
hasn't done it this time. I believe he has, myself. But it's no use
hollering before you're out o' the wood."
I agreed, with more confidence than I felt.
"Yet I wonder he never thought of it," my prisoner went on as if
to himself.
"Thought of what?"
"Only the clock. He must've seen it before, if you never did; you don't
tell me this little bit o' kidnapping was a sudden idea! It's all been
thought out and the ground gone over, and the clock seen, as I say. Seen
going. Yet it never strikes our flash friend that a going clock's got to
be wound up once a week, and it might be as well to find out which day!"
"How do you know he didn't?"
"Because this 'appens to be the day!"
And Levy lay back in the bunk with the internal chuckle that I was
beginning to know so well, but had little thought to hear from him in his
present predicament. It galled me the more because I felt that Raffles
would certainly not have heard it in my place. But at least I had the
satisfaction of flatly and profanely refusing to believe the prisoner's
statement.
"That be blowed for a bluff!" was more or less what I said. "It's too
much of a coincidence to be anything else."
"The odds are only six to one against it," said Levy, indifferently. "One
of you takes them with his eyes open. It seems rather a pity that the
other should feel bound to follow him to certain ruin. But I suppose you
know your own business best."
"At all events," I boasted, "I know better than to be bluffed by the most
obvious lie I ever heard in my life. You tell me how you know about the
man coming to wind the clock, and I may listen to you."
"I know because I know the man; little Scotchman he is, nothing to run
away from--though he looks as hard as nails--what there is of him," said
Levy, in a circumstantial and impartial flow that could not but carry
some conviction. "He comes over from Kingston every Tuesday on his bike;
some time before lunch he comes, and sees to my own clocks on the same
trip. That's how I know. But you needn't believe me if you don't like."
"And where exactly does he come to wind this clock? I see nothing that
can possibly have to do with it up here."
"No," said Levy; "he comes no higher than the floor below." I seemed to
remember a kind of cupboard at the head of the spiral stair. "But that's
near enough."
"You mean that we shall hear him?"
"And he us!" added Levy, with unmistakable determination.
"Look here, Mr. Levy," said I, showing him his own revolver, "if we do
hear anybody, I shall hold this to your head, and if he does hear us I
shall blow out your beastly brains!"
The mere feeling that I was, perhaps, the last person capable of any such
deed enabled me to grind out this shocking threat in a voice worthy of
it, and with a face, I hoped, not less in keeping. It was all the more
mortifying when Dan Levy treated my tragedy as farce; in fact, if
anything could have made me as bad as my word, it would have been the
guttural laugh with which he greeted it.
"Excuse me," said he, dabbing his red eyes with the edge of the red
bunting, "but the thought of your letting that thing off in order to
preserve silence--why, it's as droll as your whole attempt to play the
cold-blooded villain--_you_!"
"I shall play him to some purpose," I hissed, "if you drive me to it. I
laid you out last night, remember, and for two pins I'll do the same
thing again this morning. So now you know."
"That wasn't in cold blood," said Levy, rolling his head from side to
side; "that was when the lot of us were brawling in our cups. I don't
count that. You're in a false position, my dear sir. I don't mean last
night or this morning--though I can see that you're no brigand or
blackmailer at bottom--and I shouldn't wonder if you never forgave
Raffles for letting you in for this partic'lar part of this partic'lar
job. But that isn't what I mean. You've got in with a villain, but you
ain't one yourself; that's where you're in the false position. He's
the magsman, you're only the swell. _I_ can see that. But the judge
won't. You'll both get served the same, and in your case it'll be a
thousand shames!"
He had propped himself on one elbow, and was speaking eagerly,
persuasively, with almost a fatherly solicitude; yet I felt that both his
words and their effect on me were being weighed and measured with
meticulous discretion. And I encouraged him with a countenance as
deliberately rueful and depressed, to an end which had only occurred to
me with the significance of his altered tone.
"I can't help it," I muttered. "I must go through with the whole
thing now."
"Why must you?" demanded Levy. "You've been led into a job that's none of
your business, on be'alf of folks who're no friends of yours, and the
job's developed into a serious crime, and the crime's going to be found
out before you're an hour older. Why go through with it to certain quod?"
"There's nothing else for it," I answered, with a sulky resignation,
though my pulse was quick with eagerness for what I felt was coming.
And then it came.
"Why not get out of the whole thing," suggested Levy, boldly, "before
it's too late?"
"How can I?" said I, to lead him on with a more explicit proposition.
"By first releasing me, and then clearing out yourself!"
I looked at him as though this was certainly an idea, as though I were
actually considering it in spite of myself and Raffles; and his eagerness
fed upon my apparent indecision. He held up his fettered hands, begging
and cajoling me to remove his handcuffs, and I, instead of telling him it
was not in my power to do so until Raffles returned, pretended to
hesitate on quite different grounds.
"It's all very well," I said, "but are you going to make it worth
my while?"
"Certainly!" cried he. "Give me my chequebook out of my own pocket, where
you were good enough to stow it before that blackguard left, and I'll
write you one cheque for a hundred now, and another for another hundred
before I leave this tower."
"You really will?" I temporised.
"I swear it!" he asseverated; and I still believe he might have kept his
word about that. But now I knew where he _had_ been lying to me, and now
was the time to let him know I knew it.
"Two hundred pounds," said I, "for the liberty you are bound to get for
nothing, as you yourself have pointed out, when the man turns up to wind
the clock? A couple of hundred to save less than a couple of hours?"
Levy changed colour as he saw his mistake, and his eyes flashed with
sudden fury; otherwise his self-command was only less admirable than his
presence of mind.
"It wasn't to save time," said he; "it was to save my face in the
neighbourhood. The well-known money-lender found bound and handcuffed in
an empty house! It means the first laugh at my expense, whoever has the
last laugh. But you're quite right; it wasn't worth two hundred golden
sovereigns. Let them laugh! At any rate you and your flash friend'll be
laughing on the wrong side of your mouths before the day's out. So that's
all there is to it, and you'd better start screwing up your courage if
you want to do me in! I did mean to give you another chance in life--but
by God I wouldn't now if you were to go down on your knees for one!"
Considering that he was bound and I was free, that I was armed and he
defenceless, there was perhaps more humour than the prisoner saw in his
picture of me upon my knees to him. Not that I saw it all at once myself.
I was too busy wondering whether there could be anything in his
clock-winding story after all. Certainly it was inconsistent with the big
bribe offered for his immediate freedom; but it was with something more
than mere adroitness that the money-lender had reconciled the two things.
In his place I should have been no less anxious to keep my humiliating
experience a secret from the world; with his means I could conceive
myself prepared to pay as dearly for such secrecy. On the other hand, if
his idea was to stop the huge cheque already given to Raffles, then there
was indeed no time to be lost, and the only wonder was that Levy should
have waited so long before making overtures to me.
Raffles had now been gone a very long time, as it seemed to me, but my
watch had run down, and the clock on the tower did not strike. Why they
kept it going at all was a mystery to me; but now that Dan Levy was lying
still again, with set teeth and inexorable eyes, I heard it beating out
the seconds more than ever like a distant sledgehammer, and sixty of
these I counted up into a minute of such portentous duration that what
had seemed many hours to me might easily have been less than one. I only
knew that the sun, which had begun by pouring in at one port-hole and out
at the other, which had bathed the prisoner in his bunk about the time of
his trial by Raffles, now crowned me with fire if I sat upon the locker,
and made its varnish sticky if I did not. The atmosphere of the place was
fast becoming unendurable in its unwholesome heat and sour stagnation. I
sat in my shirt-sleeves at the top of the stairs, where one got such air
as entered by the open window below. Levy had kicked off his covering of
scarlet bunting, with a sudden oath which must have been the only sound
within the tower for an hour at least; all the rest of the time he lay
with fettered fists clenched upon his breast, with fierce eyes fixed upon
the top of the bunk, and something about the whole man that I was forced
to watch, something indomitable and intensely alert, a curious suggestion
of smouldering fires on the point of leaping into flame.
I feared this man in my heart of hearts. I may as well admit it frankly.
It was not that he was twice my size, for I had the like advantage in
point of years; it was not that I had any reason to distrust the
strength of his bonds or the efficacy of the weapon in my possession. It
was a question of personality, not of material advantage or
disadvantage, or of physical fear at all. It was simply the spirit of
the man that dominated mine. I felt that my mere flesh and blood would
at any moment give a good account of his, as well they might with the
odds that were on my side. Yet that did not lessen the sense of subtle
and essential inferiority, which grew upon my nerves with almost every
minute of that endless morning, and made me long for the relief of
physical contest even on equal terms. I could have set the old ruffian
free, and thrown his revolver out of the window, and then said to him,
"Come on! Your weight against my age, and may the devil take the worse
man!" Instead, I must sit glaring at him to mask my qualms. And after
much thinking about the kind of conflict that could never be, in the end
came one of a less heroic but not less desperate type, before there was
time to think at all.
Levy had raised his head, ever so little, but yet enough for my
vigilance. I saw him listening. I listened too. And down below in the
core of the tower I heard, or thought I heard, a step like a feather, and
then after some moments another. But I had spent those moments in gazing
instinctively down the stair; it was the least rattle of the handcuffs
that brought my eyes like lightning back to the bunk; and there was Levy
with hollow palms about his mouth, and his mouth wide open for the roar
that my own palms stifled in his throat.
Indeed, I had leapt upon him once more like a fiend, and for an instant I
enjoyed a shameful advantage; it can hardly have lasted longer. The brute
first bit me through the hand, so that I carry his mark to this day;
then, with his own hands, he took me by the throat, and I thought that my
last moments were come. He squeezed so hard that I thought my windpipe
must burst, thought my eyes must leave their sockets. It was the grip of
a gorilla, and it was accompanied by a spate of curses and the grin of a
devil incarnate. All my dreams of equal combat had not prepared me for
superhuman power on his part, such utter impotence on mine. I tried to
wrench myself from his murderous clasp, and was nearly felled by the top
of the bunk. I hurled myself out sideways, and out he came after me,
tearing down the peg to which his handcuffs were tethered; that only gave
him the better grip upon my throat, and he never relaxed it for an
instant, scrambling to his feet when I staggered to mine, for by them
alone was he fast now to the banisters.
Meanwhile I was feeling in an empty pocket for his revolver, which had
fallen out as we struggled on the floor. I saw it there now with my
starting eyeballs, kicked about by our shuffling feet. I tried to make a
dive for it, but Levy had seen it also, and he kicked it through the
banisters without relaxing his murderous hold. I could have sworn
afterwards that I heard the weapon fall with a clatter on the wooden
stairs. But what I still remember hearing most distinctly (and feeling
hot upon my face) is the stertorous breathing that was unbroken by a
single syllable after the first few seconds.
It was a brutal encounter, not short and sharp like the one over-night,
but horribly protracted. Nor was all the brutality by any means on one
side; neither will I pretend that I was getting much more than my deserts
in the defeat that threatened to end in my extinction. Not for an instant
had my enemy loosened his deadly clutch, and now he had me penned against
the banisters, and my one hope was that they would give way before our
united weight, and precipitate us both into the room below. That would be
better than being slowly throttled, even if it were only a better death.
Other chance there was none, and I was actually trying to fling myself
over, beating the air with both hands wildly, when one of them closed
upon the butt of the revolver that I thought had been kicked into the
room below!
I was too far gone to realise that a miracle had happened--to be so much
as puzzled by it then. But I was not too far gone to use that revolver,
and to use it as I would have done on cool reflection. I thrust it under
my opponent's armpit, and I fired through into space. The report was
deafening. It did its work. Levy let go of me, and staggered back as
though I had really shot him. And that instant I was brandishing his
weapon in his face.
"You tried to shoot me! You tried to shoot me!" he gasped twice over
through a livid mask.
"No, I didn't!" I panted. "I tried to frighten you, and I jolly well
succeeded! But I'll shoot you like a dog if you don't get back to your
kennel and lie down."
He sat and gasped upon the side of the bunk. There was no more fight in
him. His very lips were blue. I put the pistol back in my pocket, and
retracted my threat in a sudden panic.
"There! It's your own fault if you so much as see it again," I promised
him, in a breathless disorder only second to his own.
"But you jolly nearly strangled me. And now we're a pretty pair!"
His hands grasped the edge of the bunk, and he leant his weight on them,
breathing very hard. It might have been an attack of asthma, or it might
have been a more serious seizure, but it was a case for stimulants if
ever I saw one, and in the nick of time I remembered the flask that
Raffles had left with me. It was the work of a very few seconds to pour
out a goodly ration, and of but another for Daniel Levy to toss off the
raw spirit like water. He was begging for more before I had helped
myself. And more I gave him in the end; for it was no small relief to me
to watch the leaden hue disappearing from the flabby face, and the
laboured breathing gradually subside, even if it meant a renewal of our
desperate hostilities.
But all that was at an end; the man was shaken to the core by his
perfectly legitimate attempt at my destruction. He looked dreadfully old
and hideous as he got bodily back into the bunk of his own accord. There,
when I had yielded to his further importunities, and the flask was empty,
he fell at length into a sleep as genuine as the last was not; and I was
still watching over the poor devil, keeping the flies off him, and
sometimes fanning him with a flag, less perhaps from humane motives than
to keep him quiet as long as possible, when Raffles returned to light up
the tableau like a sinister sunbeam.
Raffles had had his own adventures in town, and I soon had reason to feel
thankful that I had not gone up instead of him. It seemed he had foreseen
from the first the possibility of trouble at the bank over a large and
absolutely open cheque. So he had gone first to the Chelsea studio in
which he played the painter who never painted but kept a whole wardrobe
of disguises for the models he never hired. Thence he had issued on this
occasion in the living image of a well-known military man about town who
was also well known to be a client of Dan Levy's. Raffles said the
cashier stared at him, but the cheque was cashed without a word. The
unfortunate part of it was that in returning to his cab he had
encountered an acquaintance both of his own and of the spendthrift
soldier, and had been greeted evidently in the latter capacity.
"It was a jolly difficult little moment, Bunny. I had to say there was
some mistake, and I had to remember to say it in a manner equally unlike
my own and the other beggar's! But all's well that ends well; and if
you'll do exactly what I tell you I think we may flatter ourselves that a
happy issue is at last in sight."
"What am I to do now?" I asked with some misgiving.
"Clear out of this, Bunny, and wait for me in town. You've done jolly
well, old fellow, and so have I in my own department of the game.
Everything's in order, down to those fifteen hundred guineas which are
now concealed about my person in as hard cash as I can carry. I've seen
old Garland and given him back his promissory note myself, with Levy's
undertaking about the mortgage. It was a pretty trying interview, as you
can understand; but I couldn't help wondering what the poor old boy would
say if he dreamt what sort of pressure I've been applying on his behalf!
Well, it's all over now except our several exits from the surreptitious
stage. I can't make mine without our sleeping partner, but you would
really simplify matters, Bunny, by not waiting for us."
There was a good deal to be said for such a course, though it went not a
little against my grain. Raffles had changed his clothes and had a bath
in town, to say nothing of his luncheon. I was by this time indescribably
dirty and dishevelled, besides feeling fairly famished now that mental
relief allowed a thought for one's lower man. Raffles had foreseen my
plight, and had actually prepared a way of escape for me by the front
door in broad daylight. I need not recapitulate the elaborate story he
had told the caretaking gardener across the road; but he had borrowed the
gardener's keys as a probable purchaser of the property, who had to meet
his builder and a business friend at the house during the course of the
afternoon. I was to be the builder, and in that capacity to give the
gardener an ingenious message calculated to leave Raffles and Levy in
uninterrupted possession until my return. And of course I was never to
return at all.
The whole thing seemed to me a super-subtle means to a far simpler end
than the one we had achieved by stealth in the dead of the previous
night. But it was Raffles all over and I ultimately acquiesced, on the
understanding that we were to meet again in the Albany at seven o'clock,
preparatory to dining somewhere in final celebration of the whole affair.
But much was to happen before seven o'clock, and it began happening. I
shook the dust of that derelict tower from my feet; for one of them trod
on something at the darkest point of the descent; and the thing went
tinkling down ahead on its own account, until it lay shimmering in the
light on a lower landing, where I picked it up.
Now I had not said much to Raffles about my hitherto inexplicable
experience with the revolver, when I thought it had gone through the
banisters, but found it afterwards in my hand. Raffles said it would not
have gone through, that I must have been all but over the banisters
myself when I grasped the butt as it protruded through them on the level
of the floor. This he said (like many another thing) as though it made an
end of the matter. But it was not the end of the matter in my own mind;
and now I could have told him what the explanation was, or at least to
what conclusion I had jumped. I had half a mind to climb all the way up
again on purpose to put him in the wrong upon the point. Then I
remembered how anxious he had seemed to get rid of me, and for other
reasons also I decided to let him wait a bit for his surprise.
Meanwhile my own plans were altered, and when I had delivered my
egregious message to the gardener across the road, I sought the nearest
shops on my way to the nearest station; and at one of the shops I got me
a clean collar, at another a tooth-brush; and all I did at the station
was to utilise my purchases in the course of such scanty toilet as the
lavatory accommodation would permit.
A few minutes later I was inquiring my way to a house which it took me
another twenty or twenty-five to find.