The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) đ
- Author: Louis Joseph Vance
- Performer: -
Book online «The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) đ». Author Louis Joseph Vance
struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.
The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the
radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in
Kirkwoodâs ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast,
resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devourâ
Stranded!âŠ
Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar-and
cigarette-cases, matchbox, penknifeâall the minutiae of pocket-hardware
affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope
containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change
pocket held less than three shillingsâtwo and eight, to be exactâand a
brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.
And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been
cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the
three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer
expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and
starvation and a night in the streets.
And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready,
for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.
âVagabond?â said Kirkwood musingly. âVagabond?â He repeated the word softly
a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to
his taste. And yetâŠ
He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly
into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding
his lower lip.
If Brentwick were only in townâBut he wasnât, and wouldnât be, within the
week.
âNo good waiting here,â he concluded. Composing his face, he reïżœntered the
station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldnât 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: âSixpence each, please.â
âIâahâpardon?â
âSixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or
fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel.â
âOh, thank you so much,â said Kirkwood sweetly. âI will call to-morrow.â
âVery good, sir. Thank you, sir.â
âFive times sixpence is two-and-six,â Kirkwood computed, making his way
hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. âNo, bless your
heart!ânot while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune.â
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 oneâs clothing in a public waiting-room.
Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted
sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing 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)âtill day, when pawnshops 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.
âAh, you thought you would forget me?â chuckled the fleshless lips by his
ear. âBut no, my boy; Iâm with you now, for ever and a day. âMisery loves
company,â and it wouldnât be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity,
would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.
Hereâs a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What
are you going to do?_â
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 Careâs solicitous query struck like a pain into
his consciousness. What was he to do?
An hour passed.
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 breasts, became as
lightships 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 oneâs attire with
myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.
Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
The world was very stillâŠ.
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 new and again to try a door or flash
his bullâs-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man
responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number
9!
Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his
senses,âtemporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,
sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and a
cool word in response to the manâs good-natured, âGood-night, sir.â Number
9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary
elevation with a prolonged and frank stareâthat 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.
âWhy,â he expostulated feebly, âI mightâs well turn back and beat that
bobby over the head with my cane!âŠâ
But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same
brass 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, pawn his valuables, and enter into
negotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange his
passage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most
feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!
But thenâthe riskâŠ. 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 reïżœnter 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 fingersâthe 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 seeâŠ.
Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,
Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning 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 shift 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 servantâs quarters of some inhabited house,
andâbe promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the
bobby was summoned.
Be that as it mightâhe almost lost his head when he realized thisâescape
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.
Butâwhich passage should he choose?
He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble
time-worn to glassy 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, âlike a gooâ feller.â 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 association. 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 passageway and in
Comments (0)