Hugo by Arnold Bennett (all ebook reader txt) 📖

in Hugo's private lift, direct from the dome; the Medical and Pharmaceutical Department was on the ground-floor. Simon acted as lift-man, and slammed the grill when they emerged.

'Just open that again, Si,' Albert requested him.

'Why? What's up?'

'Just open it.'

Albert was sniffing about like a dog that is trying to decide whether there is not something extremely attractive in the immediate neighbourhood. He re-entered the lift, and nosed it curiously.

Suddenly he bent down and peered under the cushioned seat of the lift, and drew forth an object that resembled in shape a canister of disinfectant powder.

'Conf--!' he exclaimed, dropping it sharply. 'It's hot. What in the name of--'

He kicked the object out of the lift on to the tessellated floor of a passage which led to the Fish and Game Department.

'I bet you I can hold it,' said Simon boastfully.

And, at the expense of his fingers, he picked it up, and successfully carried it into the Fish and Game Department, where a solitary light (which burnt night and day) threw a dim radiance over vast surfaces of white marble dominated by silver taps. The fish and game were below in the refrigerators. Simon let the cylinder fall on to a slab; Albert turned a tap, and immediately the cylinder was surrounded by clouds of steam. The phenomenon was like some alchemical and mysterious operation. And the steam, as it rose and spread abroad in the immense, pale interior, might have been the fumes of a fatal philtre distilled by a mediaeval sorcerer.

'I hope it won't blow up!' Simon ejaculated.

'Not it!' said Albert. 'Let's have a look at it now.'

Albert had a mechanical bent, and, with the aid of a tool, he soon discovered that the cylinder was divided into two parts. In the lower part was burning charcoal. In the upper, carefully closed, was paraffin. The division between the two compartments consisted of some sort of soldering lead, which the heat of the charcoal had gradually been melting.

'So when this stuff had melted,' he explained to Simon, 'the paraffin would run into the charcoal, and there would be a magnificent flare-up.'

They looked at one another, amazed, astounded, speechless.

And each knew that on the tip of the other's tongue, unuttered, was the word 'Ravengar.'

'But why was it put in the lift?' asked Simon.

'Because,' said Albert promptly, 'a lift-well is the finest possible place for a fire. There's a natural draught, and a free chance for every floor. Poof! And a flame's up nine stories in no time. And a really good mahogany lift would burn gorgeously, and give everything a good start.'

'There are fifteen lifts in this place,' Simon muttered.

'I know,' said Albert.

He approached a little glass square in the wall, broke it, pulled a knob, and looked at his watch.

'We'll test the Fire Brigade Department,' he remarked; and then, as he heard a man running down the adjacent corridor, 'Seven seconds. Not bad.'

In another seven minutes nine cylinders, which had been found in nine different lifts, were sizzling beside Albert's original discovery. The other five lifts appeared to have been omitted from this colossal scheme for providing London with a pyrotechnic display such as London had probably never had since the year 1666. The night fire staff, which consisted of some fifty men, had laid hose on to every hydrant, and were taking instructions from their chief for the incessant patrol of the galleries.

'See here,' said Albert, 'we'd better go on with what we started of now.'

'Had we?' Simon questioned somewhat dubiously.

'Of course,' said Albert. 'If that is Ravengar in the photo, and if we can find out anything to-night, and if Ravengar's in this business'--he jerked his elbow towards the cylinders--'we shall be so much to the good. Besides, it won't take us a minute.'

So they went forward, through twilit chambers and passages filled with sheeted objects, past miles of counters inhabited by thousands of chairs, through doors whose openings resounded strangely in the vast nocturnal silence of Hugo's, till they came to the Medical and Pharmaceutical Department. And the Medical and Pharmaceutical Department, in its night-garb, and illuminated by a single jet at either end of it, seemed to take on a kind of ghostly and scented elegance; it seemed to be a lunar palace of bizarre perfumes and crystal magics.

The two young men halted, and listened, and they could catch the distant footfall of the patrols echoing in some far-off corridor. That reassured them. They ceased to fancy the smell of burning and to be victimized by the illusion that a little tongue of flame darted out behind them.

Albert gained access to the accountant's cupboard, and pulled out a number of books, over which they pored side by side.

'Here you are!' exclaimed Simon presently. 'Receipts. January 9.'

And Albert read: 'No. 6,766, Mrs. Poidevin, 37, Prince's Gate; vinolia. No. 6,767, Dr. Woolrich, 23, Horseferry Road; chloroform! Can't make out the quantity, but it must be a lot, I should think; the price is eighteen and ninepence.'

'Dr. Woolrich, 23, Horseferry Road?' Simon repeated mechanically. 'Chloroform?'

'That's it,' said Albert. 'You may bet your boots. Let's look him up in the Medical Directory, if they've got one here. Yes, they're sure to have one.'

But there was no Dr. Woolrich in the Medical Directory.

Once more the brothers stared at each other. Was or was not Ravengar alive? Were they or were they not on his track?

'Listen, Si,' said Albert. 'I'll drive right down to 23, Horseferry Road, and have a look round. Eh? What do you say?'

'I think I'll come, too,' Simon replied.

In six minutes Albert pulled up the hansom at the end of the street, and they walked slowly towards No. 23, but on the opposite side of the road.

'That's it,' said Simon, pointing. 'What are you going to do now? Inquire there?'

At the same moment a window opened behind them, in the house immediately facing No. 23; they both heard a hissing sound, evidently designed to attract their attention, and they both turned their heads.

From a first-story window Hugo was gesticulating at them.


CHAPTER XXVI


SECOND TRIUMPH OF SIMON

'Come up at once,' Hugo whispered. 'Door opposite top of stairs.'

And he threw down on to the pavement a latchkey.

'What do you think of yourself now, Si?' Albert asked his brother, as they entered the house. 'You've let yourself in for something at last.'

They found Hugo in an ordinary bedsitting-room. He was wearing his hat and his overcoat, and staring out of the open window. It was a cold night, but he did not seem to feel the icy draught which blew into the apartment. The whole of his attention appeared to be concentrated on No. 23. He did not at first even turn to look at the brothers when they came in. They explained themselves.

'I will tell you why I am here, and what has occurred to me,' said Hugo, playing, perhaps rather nervously, with the knife and cheese-plate which still lay on the small table by the window. 'Then we can decide what to do. I've hired this room.'

No doubt existed in his mind that Simon had happened upon the track of the veritable living Ravengar. It could not be a coincidence that a man so strongly resembling Ravengar, a man posing as a doctor, and buying nearly a sovereign's worth of chloroform, should be occupying rooms in the same house as Camilla. The tremendous revelation of Ravengar's genius for stratagem and intrigue afforded by the recital of the two brothers came upon Hugo with a dazing shock. This man, whom he knew from Camilla's own story to be curiously deficient in ordinary human sentiments, had arranged a sham suicide for the benefit of the general public. He had let Hugo into the secret of that deception, but only to cheat him with another deception, and a more monstrous one. The brain that could conceive the fiction of suicide in the vault--a fiction which, while lulling Hugo into a false security as regards Camilla's safety, at the same time poisoned his happiness--such a brain might be capable of unimagined horrors. Sane or mad, the mere existence of that brain was a menace before which Hugo trembled. He realized that Ravengar had been consummately acting during the latter part of their interview on the first day of the sale, and again consummately acting when he spoke to Hugo on the telephone. Ravengar had, beyond doubt, deliberately set himself to lure Camilla back to England, and he had succeeded. Beyond doubt, all her movements had been spied and marked, and Ravengar had been in a position to complete his arrangements--whatever his arrangements were--at leisure and with absolute freedom. She had taken a room in Horseferry Road, and he had followed.... What was the sequel to be?

That she was in his power at that moment Hugo could not question.

And the chloroform?

At that moment Ravengar had meant that the Hugo building should have been a funeral pyre--a spectacle to petrify the Metropolis. And it seemed to Hugo that if Ravengar was mad, as he must be, he could only have designed the spectacle as something final, as at once a last revenge and an accompaniment to the supreme sacrifice of Camilla.

'We must get into that house immediately,' said Hugo, when he had finished his own narrative. 'The question is how?'

'I've got a card of Inspector Wilbraham's, of the Yard, in my pocket,' Albert suggested. 'We might use that, and make out that this purchase of chloroform under a false name had got to be explained to the Yard instantly.'

Albert had recently become rather intimate with Scotland Yard. Inspector Wilbraham had even called on him in reference to Bentley's death and the disappearance of Brown; and Albert was duly proud.

'We will try that,' said Hugo. 'Have you any handcuffs?'

'No, sir.'

'Go and obtain a couple of pairs. You can be back in twenty minutes. Bring also my revolver.'

Hugo and Simon were left alone. Hugo spoke no word.

'I'll put the room to rights, sir,' said Simon, after a pause. He could bear the inaction no longer.

Hugo nodded absently, and Simon collected the ruins of the vile repast which his master had consumed, and put them outside on a tray on the landing.

'There's a light now in the first story!' exclaimed Hugo. 'I hope that boy won't be long.'

And then Albert arrived with the revolver and the handcuffs. He had been supernaturally quick.

They descended and crossed the road.

'You understand,' Hugo instructed them. 'Let us have no mistake about getting in. Immediately the door is opened, in we all go. We can talk inside.'

'Supposing Albert and me went down to the area-door,' Simon ventured, 'instead of the front-door. We might get in easier that way. It's always easier to deal with servant-girls and persons of that sort in kitchens. Then we could come upstairs and let you in at the front-door. Three detectives seem rather a lot to be entering all at once. And, besides, you don't look like a detective, sir.'

'What do I look like?' Hugo asked coldly.

'You look too much like a gentleman, sir. It's the hat, sir,' he added.

Simon had certainly surpassed himself that day. He had begun by surpassing himself at early morning, and he had kept it up.