I TAKE A PARTNER
That meeting with Lumley scared me badly, but it also clinched my
resolution. The most pacific fellow on earth can be gingered into
pugnacity. I had now more than my friendship for Tommy and my
sympathy with Pitt-Heron to urge me on. A man had tried to bully me,
and that roused all the worst stubbornness of my soul. I was
determined to see the game through at any cost.
But I must have an ally if my nerves were to hold out, and my mind
turned at once to Tommy's friend Chapman. I thought with comfort of
the bluff independence of the Labour member. So that night at the
House I hunted him out in the smoking-room.
He had been having a row with the young bloods of my party that
afternoon and received me ungraciously.
"I'm about sick of you fellows," he growled. (I shall not attempt to
reproduce Chapman's accent. He spoke rich Yorkshire with a touch of
the drawl of the western dales.) "They went and spoiled the best
speech, though I say it as shouldn't, which this old place has heard
for a twelvemonth. I've been workin' for days at it in the Library.
I was tellin' them how much more bread cost under Protection, and the
Jew Hilderstein started a laugh because I said kilometres for
kilogrammes. It was just a slip o' the tongue, for I had it right in
my notes, and besides there furrin' words don't matter a curse. Then
that young lord as sits for East Claygate gets up and goes out as I
was gettin' into my peroration, and he drops his topper and knocks
off old Higgins's spectacles, and all the idiots laughed. After that
I gave it them hot and strong, and got called to order. And then
Wattles, him as used to be as good a socialist as me, replied for the
Government and his blamed Board and said that the Board thought this
and the Board thought that, and was damned if the Board would stir
its stumps. Well I mind the day when I was hanging on to the Board's
coat-tails in Hyde Park to keep it from talking treason."
It took me a long time to get Chapman settled down and anchored to a
drink.
"I want you," I said, "to tell me about Routh--you know the fellow I
mean--the ex-Union-Leader."
At that he fairly blazed up.
"There you are, you Tories," he shouted, causing a pale Liberal
member on the next sofa to make a hurried exit. "You can't fight
fair. You hate the Unions, and you rake up any rotten old prejudice
to discredit them. You can find out about Routh for yourself, for
I'm damned if I help you."
I saw I could do nothing with Chapman unless I made a clean breast of
it, so for the second time that day I told the whole story.
I couldn't have wished for a better audience. He got wildly excited
before I was half through with it. No doubt of the correctness of my
evidence ever entered his head, for, like most of his party, he hated
anarchism worse than capitalism, and the notion of a highly
capitalised, highly scientific, highly undemocratic anarchism fairly
revolted his soul. Besides, he adored Tommy Deloraine. Routh, he
told me, had been a young engineer of a superior type, with a job in
a big shop at Sheffield. He had professed advanced political views,
and, although he had strictly no business to be there, had taken a
large part in Trade Union work, and was treasurer of one big branch.
Chapman had met him often at conferences and on platforms, and had
been impressed by the fertility and ingenuity of his mind and the
boldness of his purpose. He was the leader of the left wing of the
movement, and had that gift of half-scientific, half-philosophic
jargon which is dear at all times to the hearts of the half-baked. A
seat in Parliament had been repeatedly offered him, but he had always
declined; wisely, Chapman thought, for he judged him the type which
is more effective behind the scenes.
But with all his ability he had not been popular. "He was a
cold-blooded, sneering devil," as Chapman put it, "a sort of Parnell.
He tyrannised over his followers, and he was the rudest brute I ever
met."
Then followed the catastrophe, in which it became apparent that he
had speculated with the funds of his Union and had lost a large sum.
Chapman, however, was suspicious of these losses, and was inclined to
suspect that he had the money all the time in a safe place. A year
or two earlier the Unions, greatly to the disgust of old-fashioned
folk, had been given certain extra-legal privileges, and this man
Routh had been one of the chief advocates of the Unions' claims. Now
he had the cool effrontery to turn the tables on them and use those
very privileges to justify his action and escape prosecution.
There was nothing to be done. Some of the fellows, said Chapman,
swore to wring his neck, but he did not give them the chance. He had
disappeared from England, and was generally believed to be living in
some foreign capital.
"What I would give to be even with the swine!" cried my friend,
clenching and unclenching his big fist. "But we're up against no
small thing in Josiah Routh. There isn't a crime on earth he'd stick
at, and he's as clever as the old Devil, his master."
"If that's how you feel, I can trust you to back me up," I said.
"And the first thing I want you to do is to come and stay at my flat.
God knows what may happen next, and two men are better than one. I
tell you frankly, I'm nervous, and I would like to have you with me."
Chapman had no objection. I accompanied him to his Bloomsbury
lodgings, where he packed a bag, and we returned to the Down Street
flat. The sight of his burly figure and sagacious face was a relief
to me in the mysterious darkness where I now found myself walking.
Thus begun my housekeeping with Chapman--one of the queerest episodes
in my life. He was the best fellow in the world, but I found that I
had misjudged his character. To see him in the House, you would have
thought him a piece of granite, with his Yorkshire bluntness and
hard, downright, north-country sense. He had all that somewhere
inside him, but he was also as romantic as a boy. The new situation
delighted him. He was quite clear that it was another case of the
strife between Capital and Labour--Tommy and I standing for Labour,
though he used to refer to Tommy in public as a "gilded popinjay,"
and only a month before had described me in the House as a "viperous
lackey of Capitalism." It was the best kind of strife, in which you
had not to meet your adversary with long-winded speeches but might
any moment get a chance to pummel him with your fists.
He made me ache with laughter. The spying business used to rouse him
to fury. I don't think he was tracked as I was, but he chose to
fancy he was, and was guilty of assault and battery on one butcher's
boy, two cabbies, and a gentleman who turned out to be a bookmaker's
assistant. This side of him got to be an infernal nuisance, and I
had many rows with him. Among other things, he chose to suspect my
man Waters of treachery--Waters, who was the son of a gardener at
home, and hadn't wits enough to put up an umbrella when it rained.
"You're not taking this business rightly," he maintained one night.
"What's the good of waiting for these devils to down you? Let's go
out and down them." And he announced his intention, from which no
words of mine could dissuade him, of keeping watch on Mr. Andrew
Lumley at the Albany.
His resolution led to a complete disregard of his Parliamentary
duties. Deputations of constituents waited for him in vain. Of
course he never got a sight of Lumley. All that happened was that he
was very nearly given in charge more than once for molesting
peaceable citizens in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly and Regent
Street.
One night, on my way home from the Temple, I saw in the bills of the
evening papers the announcement of the arrest of a Labour Member. It
was Chapman, sure enough. At first, I feared that he had got himself
into serious trouble, and was much relieved to find him in the flat
in a state of blazing anger. It seemed that he had found somebody
whom he thought was Lumley, for he only knew him from my
descriptions. The man was in a shop in Jermyn Street, with a car
waiting outside, and Chapman had--politely, as he swore--asked the
chauffeur his master's name. The chauffeur had replied abusively,
upon which Chapman had hauled him from the driver's seat and shaken
him till his teeth rattled. The owner came out, and Chapman was
arrested and taken off to the nearest police-court. He had been
compelled to apologise and had been fined five pounds and costs.
By the mercy of Heaven, the chauffeur's master was a money-lender of
evil repute, so the affair did Chapman no harm. But I was forced to
talk to him seriously. I knew it was no use explaining that for him
to spy on the Power-House was like an elephant stalking a gazelle.
The only way was to appeal to his incurable romanticism.
"Don't you see," I told him, "that you are playing Lumley's game? He
will trap you sooner or later into some escapade which will land you
in jail, and where will I be then? That is what he and his friends
are out for. We have got to meet cunning with cunning, and lie low
till we get our chance."
He allowed himself to be convinced, and handed over to me the pistol
he had bought, which had been the terror of my life.
"All right," he said, "I'll keep quiet. But you promise to let me
into the big scrap when it comes off."
I promised. Chapman's notion of the grand finale was a Homeric
combat in which he would get his fill of fisticuffs.
He was an anxiety, but all the same he was an enormous comfort. His
imperturbable cheerfulness and his racy talk were the tonics I
wanted. He had plenty of wisdom, too. My nerves were getting bad
those days, and, whereas I had rarely touched the things before, I
now found myself smoking cigarettes from morning till night. I am
pretty abstemious, as you know, but I discovered, to my horror, that
I was drinking far too many whiskeys-and-sodas. Chapman knocked me
off all that and got me back to a pipe and a modest nightcap.
He did more, for he undertook to put me in training. His notion was
that we should win in the end by superior muscles. He was a square,
thick-set fellow, who had been a good middle-weight boxer. I could
box a bit myself, but I improved mightily under his tuition. We got
some gloves, and used to hammer each other for half an hour every
morning. Then might have been seen the shameful spectacle of a
rising barrister with a swollen lip and a black eye arguing in court,
and proceeding of an evening to his country's legislature, where he
was confronted from the opposite benches by the sight of a Leader of
the People in the same vulgar condition.
In those days I wanted all the relief I could get, for it was a
beastly time. I knew I was in grave danger, so I made my will and
went through the other doleful performances consequent on the
expectation of a speedy decease. You see, I had nothing to grip on,
no clear job to tackle, only to wait on the off-chance, with an
atmosphere of suspicion thickening around me. The spying went
on--there was no mistake about that--but I soon ceased to mind it,
though I did my best to give my watchers little satisfaction. There
was a hint of bullying about the spying. It is disconcerting at
night to have a man bump against you and look you greedily in the
face.
I did not go again to Scotland Yard, but one night I ran across
Macgillivray in the club.
He had something of profound interest to tell me. I had asked about
the phrase, the "Power-House." Well, he had come across it in the
letter of a German friend, a private letter, in which the writer gave
the results of his inquiries into a curious affair which a year
before had excited Europe.
I have forgotten the details, but it had something to do with the
Slav States of Austria and an Italian Students' Union, and it
threatened at one time to be dangerous. Macgillivray's correspondent
said that in some documents which were seized he found constant
allusion to a thing called the _Krafthaus_, evidently the
headquarters-staff of the plot. And this same word, _Krafthaus_, had
appeared elsewhere--in a sonnet of a poet-anarchist who shot himself
in the slums of Antwerp, in the last ravings of more than one
criminal, in the extraordinary testament of Professor M----, of Jena,
who, at the age of thirty-seven, took his life after writing a
strange, mystical message to his fellow citizens.
Macgillivray's correspondent concluded by saying that, in his
opinion, if this _Krafthaus_ could be found, the key would be
discovered to the most dangerous secret organisation in the world.
He added that he had some reason to believe that the motive power of
the concern was English.
"Macgillivray," I said, "you have known me for some time, and I fancy
you think me a sober and discreet person. Well, I believe I am on
the edge of discovering the secret of your _Krafthaus_. I want you
to promise me that if in the next week I send you an urgent message
you will act on it, however fantastic it seems. I can't tell you
more. I ask you to take me on trust, and believe that for anything I
do I have tremendous reasons."
He knit his shaggy grey eyebrows and looked curiously at me. "Yes,
I'll go bail for your sanity. It's a good deal to promise, but if
you make an appeal to me I will see that it is met."
Next day I had news from Felix. Tuke and the man called Saronov had
been identified. If you are making inquiries about anybody it is
fairly easy to find those who are seeking for the same person, and
the Russian police, in tracking Tommy and Pitt-Heron, had easily come
on the two gentlemen who were following the same trail. The two had
gone by Samarkand, evidently intending to strike into the hills by a
shorter route than the main road from Bokhara. The frontier posts
had been warned, and the stalkers had become the stalked.
That was one solid achievement, at any rate. I had saved Pitt-Heron
from the worst danger, for first I had sent him Tommy, and now I had
put the police on guard against his enemies. I had not the slightest
doubt that enemies they were. Charles knew too much, and Tuke was
the man appointed to reason with him, to bring him back, if possible;
or, if not---- As Chapman had said, the ex-Union leader was not the
man to stick at trifles.
It was a broiling June, the London season was at its height, and I
had never been so busy in the Courts before. But that crowded and
garish world was little more than a dream to me. I went through my
daily tasks, dined out, went to the play, had consultations, talked
to my fellows, but all the while I had the feeling that I was
watching somebody else perform the same functions. I believe I did
my work well, and I know I was twice complimented by the Court of
Appeal.
But my real interests were far away. Always I saw two men in the hot
glens of the Oxus, with the fine dust of the _loess_ rising in yellow
clouds behind them. One of these men had a drawn and anxious face,
and both rode hard. They passed by the closes of apricot and cherry
and the green, watered gardens, and soon the Oxus ceased to flow wide
among rushes and water-lilies and became a turbid hill-stream.
By-and-by the roadside changed, and the horses of the travellers trod
on mountain turf, crushing the irises and marigolds and thyme. I
could feel the free air blowing from the roof of the world, and see
far ahead the snowy saddle of the pass which led to India.
Far behind the riders I saw two others, and they chose a different
way, now over waterless plateaux, now in rugged _nullahs_. They rode
the faster and their route was the shorter. Sooner or later they
must catch up the first riders, and I knew, though how I could not
tell, that death would attend the meeting.
I, and only I, sitting in London, four thousand miles away, could
prevent disaster. The dream haunted me at night, and often, walking
in the Strand or sitting at a dinner-table, I have found my eyes
fixed clearly on the shining upland with the thin white mountains at
the back of it, and the four dots, which were men, hurrying fast on
their business.
One night I met Lumley. It was at a big political dinner given by
the chief of my party in the House of Lords--fifty or sixty guests,
and a blaze of stars and decorations. I sat near the bottom of the
table, and he was near the top, sitting between a famous General and
an ex-Viceroy of India. I asked my right-hand neighbour who he was,
but he could not tell me. The same question to my left-hand
neighbour brought an answer:
"It is old Lumley. Have you never met him? He doesn't go out much,
but he gives a man's dinner now and then which are the best in
London. No. He's not a politician, though he favours our side, and
I expect has given a lot to our funds. I can't think why they don't
make him a Peer. He's enormously rich and very generous, and the
most learned old fellow in Britain. My Chief"--my neighbour was an
Under-Secretary--"knows him, and told me once that if you wanted any
out-of-the-way bit of knowledge you could get it by asking Lumley. I
expect he pulls the strings more than anybody living. But he
scarcely ever goes out, and it's a feather in our host's cap to have
got him to-night. You never see his name in the papers, either. He
probably pays the Press to keep him out, like some of those
millionaire fellows in America."
I watched him through dinner. He was the centre of the talk at his
end of the table. I could see the blue ribbon bulging out on Lord
Morecambe's breast as he leaned forward to question him. He was
wearing some foreign orders, including the Legion of Honour, and I
could hear in the pause of conversation echoes of his soft, rich
voice. I could see him beaming through his glasses on his
neighbours, and now and then he would take them off and look mildly
at a speaker. I wondered why nobody realised, as I did, what was in
his light wild eyes.
The dinner, I believe, was excellent and the company was good, but
down at my end I could eat little, and I did not want to talk. Here
in this pleasant room, with servants moving softly about and a mellow
light on the silver from the shaded candles, I felt the man was
buttressed and defended beyond my reach. A kind of despairing hatred
gripped me when I looked his way. For I was always conscious of that
other picture--the Asian desert, Pitt-Heron's hunted face, and the
grim figure of Tuke on his trail. That, and the great secret wheels
of what was too inhuman to be called crime moving throughout the
globe under this man's hand.
There was a party afterwards, but I did not stay. No more did
Lumley, and for a second I brushed against him in the hall at the
foot of the big staircase.
He smiled on me affectionately.
"Have you been dining here? I did not notice you."
"You had better things to think of," I said. "By the way, you gave
me good advice some weeks ago. It may interest you to hear that I
have taken it."
"I am so glad," he said softly. "You are a very discreet young man."
But his eyes told me that he knew I lied.