The Black Bag Part 17

He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly into s.p.a.ce, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding his lower lip.

If Brentwick were only in town--But he wasn't, and wouldn't be, within the week.

"No good waiting here," he concluded. Composing his face, he reentered the station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn't leave them standing on the station platform for ever.

He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when his unlucky star was in the ascendant.

He found them in the lost-luggage room.

A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a perfunctory note: "Sixpence each, please."

"I--ah--pardon?"

"Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel."

"Oh, thank you so much," said Kirkwood sweetly. "I will call to-morrow."

"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Five times sixpence is two-and-six," Kirkwood computed, making his way hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. "No, bless your heart!--not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune."

He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks, one can scarcely change one's clothing in a public waiting-room.

Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted sore with melancholy. It knelled the pa.s.sing of the half-hour after midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring they have homes or visible means of support)--till day, when p.a.w.nshops open and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be hypothecated.

Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied; Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.

"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.

Here's a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What are you going to do?_"

But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him, walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.

None the less the sense of Care's solicitous query struck like a pain into his consciousness. What was he to do?

An hour pa.s.sed.

Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened; solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, became as lights.h.i.+ps in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with myriads of tiny b.u.t.tons, bright as diamond dust.

Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.

Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.

The world was very still....

And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words, Frognall Street.

Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him with measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flash his bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man responsible for that d.a.m.nable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number 9!

Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his senses,--temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet, sobering grin at his own folly. He pa.s.sed the policeman with a nod and a cool word in response to the man's good-natured, "Good-night, sir." Number 9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary elevation with a prolonged and frank stare--that profited him nothing, by the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and would not be cast forth.

At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.

"Why," he expostulated feebly, "I might's well turn back and beat that bobby over the head with my cane!..."

But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same bra.s.s door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.

Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more suitable for daylight traveling, p.a.w.n his valuables, and enter into negotiations with the steams.h.i.+p company for permission to exchange his pa.s.sage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!

But then--the risk.... Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9; supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal marauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye on that house of suspicious happenings?

Decidedly, to reenter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet, undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine entry lay warm in his fingers--the key to the dark entry, which he had by force of habit pocketed after locking the door.

He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung close and thick.

There would be none to see....

Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum, Kirkwood took his chance. b.u.t.toning his overcoat collar up to his chin and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from every residence on four sides of the city block?

The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had made s.h.i.+ft to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner.

If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that he would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house, and--be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the bobby was summoned.

Be that as it might--he almost lost his head when he realized this--escape was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.

But--which pa.s.sage should he choose?

He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble time-worn to gla.s.sy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice, maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like ravening animals.

For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and from long a.s.sociation. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.

Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him, Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a pa.s.sageway and in sheer desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and inserted the key. It turned. So did the k.n.o.b. The door gave inward. He fell in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its panels, in a pit of everlasting night but--saved!--for the time being, at all events.

Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from his heart.

"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I sore'm run in 'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."

Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually.

Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was this by any possibility Number 9?

The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while the key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability seemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9.

In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though this were truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the G.o.ds, his very life, belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance.

In the end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes; a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view of the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange whisperings, very creepy--until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed.

He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange ground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls of the pa.s.sage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himself flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and pa.s.sed through to another apartment as dark as the first.

Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein he barked both s.h.i.+ns on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and damp plumbing--probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining floors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room with a table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured s.h.i.+ns!), he finally blundered into the bas.e.m.e.nt hallway.

By now a little calmer, he felt a.s.sured that this was really Number 9, Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.