The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) 📖
- Author: Louis Joseph Vance
- Performer: -
Book online «The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) 📖». Author Louis Joseph Vance
just interest—nothing more…. And I’ll have to have a change of clothes
before I can do anything further.”
He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in his
soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St. Martin’s
Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St. Pancras Station.
It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his
straitened means, and the busses were all abed and wouldn’t be astir for
hours.
He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by
observation or familiarity with London’s geography—indeed, was scarce
aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in
a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.
Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts rush
in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools,
thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored and made
sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was
Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from
all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable and invisible to the
haunting Shade of Care.
Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and
wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood, his
eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were breaking,
the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the
dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an
omen—prematurely, it may be.
IXAGAIN “BELOW BRIDGE”; AND BEYOND
Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that
upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose
the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his
haste was such that all was consummated within an hour.
Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at
St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to
a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged
a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his
belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting
a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a
neglig�e shirt of a deep shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long
time; finally, he had devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee
and burned his mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the
still dim glimmering of early day.
By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten
shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his
lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the
bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down
shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one’s jewelry. Besides
which, he had never before been called upon to consider the advisability of
raising money by pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt
as to the right course of procedure in such emergency.
At King’s Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited
him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic
bobby informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty,
and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven.
“It’s tramp it or cab it, then,” mused the young man mournfully, his
longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank—just then occupied by a solitary
hansom, driver somnolent on the box. “Officer,” he again addressed
the policeman, mindful of the English axiom: “When in doubt, ask a
bobby.”—“Officer, when’s high-tide this morning?”
The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb,
and rippled the pages.
“London Bridge, ‘igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,” he announced
with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the
functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver
of the peace.
Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a comfortable
mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and
groaned: “O Lord, I just dassent!” With which, thanking the bureau of
information, he set off at a quick step down Grey’s Inn Road.
The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of the
milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly if a
trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and
down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening
computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be
late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it
known, was that the Alethea would not attempt to sail before the turn of
the tide.
For this was his mission, to find the Alethea before she sailed.
Incredible as it may appear, at five o’clock, or maybe earlier, on the
morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,
normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of
his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully
through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn,
and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or
a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the
shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress;
according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar,
or Kirkwood’s own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself.
Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar
in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement
to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property
(whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely
committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam’s or her son’s):
he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would
attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, Alethea, whose
name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.
Kirkwood’s initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the
haystack—the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the
hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to
the wharves of ‘long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line
the Thames, that one called Alethea; of which he was so deeply mired in
ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise
passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the
world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner,
four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.
A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime
impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when
he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less
doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises
as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a
passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the Alethea….
London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over
its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound
asleep when at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of the Mansion
House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered
out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon
his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday’s
tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned
frequently.
With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby, cruising
up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir
in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of
his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when
he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse,
explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of
his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.
“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated
the latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to
me.”
The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time
being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s guidance. Once
in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as
reckless of the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight
glaring full in his tired young face.
He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling
from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit
of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step,
shaking his fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’ right,” he assented
surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the
sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned
discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and
a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three
shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare named being one-and-six.
“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and
boat,” he stipulated.
“Right-o. You’ll mind the ‘orse a minute, sir?”
Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.
Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s head,
pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he
stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.
To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.
Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.
Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted
parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow
drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine
humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock
laborers going to their day’s work. Men of every nationality known to the
world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse’s
head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians,
Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks,
even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were
bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the
blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous
procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and
unreal in the clear morning glow.
The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly
out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered
waterman ambling more slowly after.
“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman; knows
the river like a book, he do.”
The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.
“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he asked
with the brevity of weariness.
“This wye, sir.”
At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the
Comments (0)