THE MAN WITH THE SWORD
"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the
stooping figure.
The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was
drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.
He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't
say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of
them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.
In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a
horror of losing him.
"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.
And all the while---- But we are coming, Betty! Coming....
The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of
police-stations. They settled which would be the one.
"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I will give you all I have if
you'll drive fast."
The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned
out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my
eyes away from the only clue.
Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out
of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He
ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on
at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt
corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked
up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.
The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.
And Betty wasn't there.
Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured
man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come
I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."
The young man said he was the inspector.
Among us we told him.
The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible,
alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of
the inspector. This man was human.
"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"
I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An
inspector's post was the station.
But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for
with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the
telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound
some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.
He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of
yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already,
there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be
believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a
stump of blunt lead-pencil.
"_Don't_ wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."
But he, too, made little of the need for haste. He, too, made much of
what I had noticed as we left Victoria--the homely woman and the
policeman watching as we drove away.
"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"
"No doubt--and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector
spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the
trains. They're at the docks when ships come in."
It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the
policeman knew," she said--"if he so much as suspected, why did he not
stop the motor?"
The inspector shook his head.
"Why didn't he arrest the woman?"
"He is not allowed," said the inspector.
I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came
over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too
ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking
kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover
the house----
"When? When?"
And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it.
"'_Watch it!_'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean
stand outside and wait!--while all the time inside----"
They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain
circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house....
And was the warrant ready?
Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then
the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be
advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases."
Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these
cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?"
"Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the
gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the
left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords,
the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's
uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume--the sort of
dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levee.
"When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked.
"Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard."
"Scotland!" I cried.
They told me Scotland Yard was in London.
Then we'll go to Scotland Yard!
He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "He _might_ be there in the
morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases!
The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person
very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty
hands over my face and wept aloud.
Betty--Betty--who will help us?
* * * * *
I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should
have as much help (_now_, when help was any good)--as much help from the
sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve
and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand.
Who was there in all the world who really cared?
A vision of my mother rose to stab at me.
No other friend? Eric!--as far away as heaven.
The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The
electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were
gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply
streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames
that shrivelled up my flesh.
Torment! Torment!
Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty
beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister--calling out for
me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell!
Torment! Torment!
I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a
crash.
The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She
has lost her mind," one said.
But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More
pictures, and still more.
Well, well--Betty would die soon!
Like cool water--holy water--came the thought of death. Perhaps she was
already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead!
Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!