“There is, by God! Jack the Skipper!”
Cantle was rolling a cigarette imperturbably.
“Who’s—Jack the Skipper?” he drawled.
“I wish you could tell me,” cried the other. “I wish you could show
these the way to his throat!” He held out his hands. “They’d fasten!”
he whispered.
He came all of a sudden, quite quietly, and sat by his friend. “Its
been going on for three weeks now,” he said rapidly. “They call him
that about here—a sort of skit on the other—the other beast, you
know. He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster,
black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and
disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes
from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of
unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the
water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The
devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good.
It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being
left alone after dark. He frightened the little Cunningham child into
a fit, and it’s not expected to recover. Mrs. Bancock died of an
apoplexy after seeing it. And the worst of it is, a deadly
superstition’s seized the place. Its visit’s got to be supposed to
presage death, and——” He seized Cantle’s hand convulsively.
“Damn it! It’s unnatural, Ned! The river’s haunted—here, in Cockney
Datchet—in the twentieth century! You don’t believe in such
things—tell me you don’t! But Netta——”
His head sank on his breast. Cantle blew out a placid whiff of smoke.
“But—Miss Varley?” he said.
“You know—you’ve heard, at least,” said the other, “what she was. The
_thing_ suddenly stood before her, when she was alone, one night.
Well—you see what she is now.”
“I don’t see, nevertheless, why she don’t——”
“Pack and run? No more do I. Put it to her if you like. I’ve said _my_
say. But she’s in the grip—thinks she’s had her call—and there’s no
moving her. Cantle, she’s just dying where she stands.”
Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river.
He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.
“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some
fools I’ve come across in my time?”
He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most
impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for
snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window
glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on
the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of
the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a
mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased,
concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog
somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to
isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.
Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.
“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”
“Ned!”
“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit
forward.”
The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with
scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a
sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment
like a porpoise, and disappeared.
“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.
“Keep down!” whispered his friend.
“Cantle! Did you see it? Cantle! It was he!”
“Keep down!”
They paddled on, past the last of the boats, through the bridge, on as
far as the squat little bomb-ketch bulking black and menacing at the
mouth of the creek.
“Hold on!” whispered Cantle. “Run her out of sight into the reeds. We
must wade on board there.”
“There? That fellow Spindler’s boat?”
“Of course, now. That was his name.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll soon know.”
They accomplished the feat, though near mud-foundered by the way, and
scrambled, dripping, on board. The door of the cuddy yielded to their
touch. Monk was beginning to gather dim light.
“Don’t let me,” he whispered, almost sobbing. “Keep my hands off him.”
“Leave him to me,” said Cantle gravely.
Not a sound of life greeted them. They stole into the cabin and closed
the door, almost, upon themselves.
“We must yield him to-night for the sake of to-morrow,” murmured
Cantle.
“Ned! If he goes again——”
“Hush! It’s not probable he’d risk a second visit, knowing her
watched.”
The crack brightened as the moon rose: glowed into a ribbon of light.
Suddenly Cantle gripped the other’s wrist.
A stealthy puddling, sucking sound close by reached their ears. Over
the side came swarming a great shapeless fishy creature, which settled
with a sludgy wallop on the little triangle of foredeck almost at
their feet. Monk gave a soft, awful gasp, and, with the sound, Cantle
had dashed open the door and flung himself upon the monster.
“Quick!” he cried; “you’ve got matches! Light a
candle—lamp—anything! Lie still, Mr. Spindler. It’s all up. I know
you and your Marine Secret Service suit! A knife now, Monk! Out he
comes.”
He was merciless with the blade when he got it, slashing and cutting
at the oilskin suit, splitting it from top to toe. Mr. Spindler’s red
beard and extravagant face came out of it like a death’s-head out of
its chrysalis.
“There goes the proud monument of a lifetime,” said the madman. He had
made no effort to resist. The first blow at this darling of his
invention had seemed to hamstring him, morally and materially.
For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a
submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new
system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough
device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe;
but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of
it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between
practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and
vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should
comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance
to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days
in an asylum.
On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on
the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle
Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday
Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.