The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (best manga ereader .TXT) đ
- Author: Louis Joseph Vance
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Mulready, the black-avised.
âI sye, âre you lookinâ for some one you know?â
âYesâyour passengers. I presume theyâre belowâ?â
âPassengers!â
A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Strykerâs eye in
pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.
âWhereâs Miss Calendar?â the young man demanded sharply. âI must see her at
once!â
The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
Kirkwoodâs perturbed countenance. âWotâre you talking about?â he demanded
brusquely.
âI must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready.â Kirkwood
paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Strykerâs inscrutable
regard.
âThatâs why I came aboard,â he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
statement; âto seeâerâCalendar.â
âWell ⊠Iâm damned!â
Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.
âWhy?â insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.
âDâyou mean to tell me you came off fromâwherever in âell you did come
fromâintendinâ to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?â
âCertainly I did. Whyâ?â
âWell!â cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
oppressively obsequious, âIâm sorry to hin-form you youâve come to the
wrong shop, sir; we donât stock no Calendars. Weâre in the âardware line,
we are. You might try next door, or I dessay youâll find what you want at
the stytionerâs, round the corner.â
A giggle from his audience stimulated him. âIf,â he continued acidly,
âIâd a-guessed you was such a damnâ fool, blimmy if I wouldnâtâve let you
drownd!â
Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.
âCalendar,â he stammered, trying to explain, âCalendar saidââ
âI carnât âelp wot Calendar said. Mebbe âe did myke an engygement with
you, anâ youâve gone and went anâ forgot the dyte. Mebbe itâs larst yearâs
calendar youâre thinkinâ of. You Johnnyâ (to a lout of a boy in the group
of seamen), âyou run anâ fetch this gentleman Whitakerâs for Nineteen-six.
Look sharp, now!â
âButâ!â With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. âAm I to
understand,â he said, as calmly as he could, âthat you deny knowing George
B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy andââ
âI donât âave to. Listen to me, young man.â For the time the fellow
discarded his clumsy facetiousness. âIâm Wilyum Stryker, Captân Stryker,
marster and âarf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says âere is law. We donât
carry no passengers. Dâye understand me?ââaggressively. âThere ainât no
pusson nymed Calendar aboard the Allytheer, anâ never was, anâ never will
be!â
âWhat name did you say?â Kirkwood inquired.
âThis ship? The Allytheer; registered from Liverpool; bound from London
to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?â
Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy
gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland the
brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the moment he
was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with
the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity
of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he could
gladly have broken down and wept for sheer vexation and disappointment.
Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun away
on the starboard tack.
Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this
position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the open
sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a brawling
waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel boats
of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly into the wind and
making heavy weather of it.
Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an
unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed.
Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, âNothink
else we can show you, sir?â he inquired.
âI presume you couldnât put me ashore?â Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. ââEre, you!â he called
to one of the crew. âTyke this awyeâtyke âim below and put âim to bed;
give âim a drink and dry âis cloâs. Mebbe âeâll be better when âe wykes up.
âE donât talk sense now, thatâs sure. If you arsk me, I sye âeâs balmy and
no âope for âim.â
XII PICARESQUE PASSAGESContradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited
passenger was not âbetterâ when, after a period of oblivious rest
indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless
resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was
purely deceptiveâthin ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated
rebellion.
Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then
gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving
to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned,
a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and
by dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his
head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of
saffron light lining the sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one
phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy
impression that his dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in
brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship Alethea.
Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to
keener perceptiveness.
Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the
crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale,
as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt
and timber in the frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had
strengthened materially during his hours of forgetfulnessâhowever many the
latter might have been.
He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He
felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodiedâso he put
it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine,
the while he gave himself over to speculative thought.
A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in
the middle of the North Sea ⊠bound for Antwerp!
âOh-h,â said Kirkwood vindictively, âhell!â
So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his
thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found
that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be
no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than
anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower of civilization
is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the
money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was
confident that the sale or pledge of his signet-ring, scarfpin, matchbox
and cigar-case, would provide him with money enough for a return to London,
by third-class, at the worst. There ⊠well, all events were on the knees
of the gods; heâd squirm out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other
matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,âwith a
sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the
woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.
The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more
violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in
a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the
melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his
hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy
emptiness of the shipâs cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made
visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in
gimbals from a deck-beam.
Kirkwoodâs clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape,
had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected
them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily,
disgruntledâin a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his
mouth.
When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his berth,
and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the thwartships
transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a
chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that
the time of day was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had slept
away some eighteen or twenty hours. That was a solid spell of a rest,
when he came to think of it, even allowing that he had been unusually and
pardonably fatigued when conducted to his berth. He felt stronger now, and
bright enoughâand enormously hungry into the bargain.
Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be water-soaked
and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch, thinking to
soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which was probably two
hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were emptyâevery one of them.
He assimilated this discovery in patience and cast an eye about the room,
to locate, if possible, the missing property. But naught of his was
visible. So he rose and began a more painstaking search.
The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its
furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the transoms
and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with a cloth of
turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by
libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of
grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companionway to the deck, four
doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the captainâs and the
mateâs quarters, the others on pseudo state-roomsâone of which he had just
vacatedâclosets large enough to contain a small bunk and naught beside.
The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken out with a rash of pictures
from illustrated papers, mostly offensive. Kirkwood was interested to read
a half-column clipping from a New York yellow journal, descriptive of the
antics of a drunken British sailor who had somehow found his way to the
bar-room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that
it had required four policemen in addition to the corps of porters to
subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound
up with the information that in police court the man had given his name as
William Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging
his entertainment to have been cheap at the price.
While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote, eight
bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch changed. A
little later the companionway door slammed open and shut, and Captain
Strykerâor Stranger; whichever you pleaseâfell down, rather than
descended, the steps.
Without attention to the American he rolled into the mateâs room and roused
that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the second-in-command was
âObbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard state-room aft. After a
brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr. âObbs appeared in the shape
of a walking pillar of oilskins capped by a souâwester, and went on deck;
Stryker, following him out of the state-room, shed his own oilers in a
clammy heap upon the floor, opened a locker from which he brought forth a
bottle and a dirty glass, and, turning toward the table, for the first time
became sensible
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