Part 7

"It doesn't matter at all, sir," she said, and Endicott was surprised by the utter tonelessness of her voice. He knew that she set great store upon this set of china; she had boasted of it. Yet now that it was spoilt she spoke of it with complete indifference. He turned round in his chair and watched her picking up the fragments--watched her idly until she sobbed.

"Good heavens," he cried, "I knew that you valued it, Mrs. Tyson, but--" and then he stopped. For she turned to him and he knew that there was more than the china teapot at the bottom of her trouble. Her face, white and shaking and wet with tears, was terrible to see. There was a horror upon it as though she had beheld things not allowed, and a hopeless pain in her eyes as though she was sure that the appalling vision would never pass. But all she did was to repeat her phrase.

"It doesn't matter at all, sir."

Endicott started up and laid his hand upon her shoulder.

"What has happened, Mrs. Tyson?"

"Oh, I can't tell you, sir." She knelt upon the floor and covered her face with her hands and wept as Endicott had never dreamed that a human being could weep. Fear seized upon him and held him till he shivered with the chill of it. The woman had come in by the inner door. In the hall, then, was to be found the cause of her horror. He lifted the lamp and hurried towards it, but to reach the door he had to pass the screen which Elsie had arranged on the day of their coming. And at the screen he stopped. The terror which may come to a man once in his life clutched his heart so that he choked. For behind the screen he saw the gleam of a girl's white frock.

"Elsie," he cried, "you have been all this while here--asleep." For he would not believe the thing he knew.

She was lying rather than sitting in the low basket chair in front of the little table on which the chemicals were ranged, with her back towards him, and her face buried in the padding of the chair. Endicott stretched his arm over her and set down the lamp upon the table. Then he spoke to her again chidingly and shaking her arm.

"Elsie, wake up! Don't be ridiculous!"

He slipped an arm under her waist, and lifting her, turned her towards him. The girl's head rolled upon her shoulders, and there was a look of such deadly horror upon her face that no pen could begin to describe it. Endicott caught her to his breast.

"Oh, my God," he cried hoarsely. "My poor girl! My poor girl!"

Mrs. Tyson had come up behind him.

"It was he," she whispered, "the man who was here. He killed her!" And as Endicott turned his head towards the woman, some little thing slipped from the chair on to the floor with a tiny rattle. Endicott laid her down and picked up a small, yellow, round tablet.

"No, he didn't," he said with a queer eagerness in his voice. The tablet came from a small bottle on the table at the end of his row of chemicals. It was labelled, "Intensifier" and "Poison," and the cork was out of the bottle. The bottle had been full that afternoon. There was more than one tablet missing now.

"No, she killed herself. Those tablets are cyanide of potassium. He never touched her. Look!"

Upon the boards of the floor the wet and muddy feet of the Asiatic had written the history of his movements beyond the possibility of mistake. Here he had stood in front of her--not a step nearer. Mrs. Tyson heard him whisper in her daughter's ear. "Oh, my dear, I thank God!" He sank upon his knees beside her. Mrs. Tyson went out, and, closing the door gently, left him with his dead.

She sat and waited in the kitchen, and after a while she heard him moving. He opened the door into the hall and came out and went slowly and heavily up the stairs into Elsie's room. In a little while he came down again and pushed open the kitchen door. He had aged by twenty years, but his face and his voice were calm.

"You found the lamp in the hall?" he said, in a low voice. "Beside the letters? Come! We must understand this. My mind will go unless I am quite sure."

She followed him into the living-room and saw that his dead daughter was no longer there. She stood aside whilst, with a patience which wrung her heart, Endicott worked out by the footprints of the intruder and this and that sure sign the events of those tragic minutes, until there was no doubt left.

"Elsie wrote eight letters," he said. "Seven are in the hall. Here is the eighth, addressed and stamped upon the table where she wrote."

The letters had to be sent down the valley to the inn early in the morning. So when she had finished, she had carried them into the hall--all of them, she thought--and she had taken the lamp to light her steps. Whilst she was in the hall, and whilst all this side of the house was in darkness Ahmed Ali had slipped into the room from the lane by the brook. There were the marks of his feet coming from the door.

"But was that possible?" Endicott argued. "I was on the hillside, the moon shining from behind my shoulders on to the house. There were no shadows. It was all as clear as day. I must have seen the man come along the little footpath to the door, for I was watching the house. I saw the light in this room disappear. Wait a moment! Yes. Just after the light went out I struck a match and lit my pipe."

He had held the match close to his face in the hollow of his hands, and had carefully lit the pipe; and after the match had burned out, the glare had remained for a few seconds in his eyes. It was during those seconds that the Asiatic had crossed the lane and darted in by the door.

The next step then became clear. Elsie, counting her letters in the hall, had discovered that she had left one behind, she knew where she had left it. She knew that the moonlight was pouring into the room; and, leaving the lamp in the hall, she had returned to fetch it. In the moonlit room she had come face to face with the Asiatic.

He had been close to the screen when she met him, and there he had stood. No doubt he had begun by asking her for opium. No doubt, too--perhaps through some unanswered cry of hers, perhaps because she never cried out at all, perhaps on account of a tense attitude of terror not to be mistaken even in that vaporous silvery light--somehow, at all events, he had become aware that she was alone in the house; and his words and his demands had changed. She had backed away from him against the wall, moving the screen and the chair, and upsetting a book upon the table there. That was evident from the disorder in this corner. Upon the table stood Endicott's chemicals for developing his photographs. Endicott saw the picture with a ghastly distinctness--her hand dropping for support upon the table and touching the bottles which she had arranged herself.

"Yes, she knew that that one nearest, the first she touched was the poison, and meant--what? Safety! It's awful, but it's the truth. Very probably she screamed, poor girl. But there was no one to hear her."

The noise of the river leaping from rock pool to rock pool had drowned any sound of it which might else have reached to Endicott's ears. The scream had failed. In front of her was a wild and desperate Pathan from the stokehold of a liner. Under her hand was the cyanide of potassium. Endicott could see her furtively moving the cork from the mouth of the bottle with the fingers of one hand, whilst she stood watching in horror the man smiling at her in silence.

"Don't you feel that that is just how everything happened? Aren't you sure of it?" he asked, turning to Mrs. Tyson with a dreadful appeal in his eyes. But she could answer it honestly.

"Yes, sir, that is how it all happened," and for a moment Mr. Endicott was comforted. But immediately afterwards he sat down on a chair like a tired man and his fingers played upon the table.

"It would all be over in a few seconds," he said lamentably to Mrs. Tyson. "But, oh, those seconds! They would have been terrible--terrible with pain." His voice trailed away into silence. He sat still staring at the table. Then he raised his head towards Mrs. Tyson, and his face was disfigured by a smile of torment. "Hard luck on a young girl, eh, Mrs. Tyson?" and the very banality of the sentence made it poignant. "Everything just beginning for her--the sheer fun of life. Her beauty, and young men, and friends and dancing, the whole day a burst of music--and then suddenly--quite alone--that's so horrible--quite alone, in a minute she had to----" His voice choked and the tears began to run down his face.

"But the man?" Mrs. Tyson ventured.

"Oh, the man!" cried Endicott. "I will think of him to-morrow."

He went up the stairs walking as heavily as when he had carried his daughter in his arms; and he went again into Elsie's room. Mrs. Tyson blew out the candles upon his writing-table and arranged automatically some disordered sheets of foolscap. They were notes on the great principle of the Minimum Wage.

ONE OF THEM

ONE OF THEM

At midnight on August 4th, Poldhu flung the news out to all ships, and Anthony Strange, on the _Boulotte_, took the message in the middle of the West Bay. He carried on accordingly past Weymouth, and in the morning was confronted with the wall of great breakers off St. Alban's Head. The little boat ran towards that barrier with extraordinary swiftness. Strange put her at a gap close into the shore where the waves broke lower, and with a lurch and a shudder she scooped the water in over her bows and clothed herself to her brass gunwale-top in a stinging veil of salt. Never had the _Boulotte_ behaved better than she did that morning in the welter of the Race, and Strange, rejoicing to his very finger-tips, forgot the news which was bringing all the pleasure-boats, great and small, into the harbours of the south, forgot even that sinking of the heart which had troubled him throughout the night. But it was only in the Race that he knew any comfort. He dropped his anchor in Poole Harbour by mid-day, and fled through London to a house he owned on the Berkshire Downs.

There for a few days he found life possible. It was true there were sentries under the railway bridges, but the sun rose each day over a country ripe for the harvest, and the smoke curled from the chimneys of pleasant villages; and there was no sign of war. But soon the nights became a torture. For from midnight on, at intervals of five to ten minutes, the troop-trains roared along the Thames Valley towards Avonmouth, and the reproach of each of them ceased only with the morning. Strange leaned out of his window looking down the slopes where the corn in the moonlight was like a mist. Not a light showed in the railway carriages, but the sparks danced above the funnel of the engine, and the glare of the furnace burnished the leaves of the trees. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers on the road to France. Then there came a morning when, not a hundred yards from his house, he saw a string of horses in the road and others being taken from the reaping-machines in a field. Strange returned to town and dined with a Mrs. Kenway, his best friend, and to her he unburdened his soul.

"I am ashamed ... don't know how to look people in the face.... I never thought to be so utterly unhappy. I am thirty and useless. I cumber the ground."

The look of surprise with which his friend turned to him hurt him like the cut of a whip. "Of course you can't help," it seemed to say. "The world is for the strong, this year and the next, and for how many more?"

Strange had to lie on his back for some hours each day, and he suffered off and on always. But that had been his lot since boyhood, and he had made light of his infirmity and grown used to it until this 4th of August. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that to the world he looked only rather delicate. He was tall, and not set apart from his fellows.

"Now," he said. "I wish that everybody knew. Yes, I wish that I showed that service was impossible. To think of us sitting here round a dinner-table--as we used to! Oh, I know what you'll think! I have the morbid sensitiveness of sick men. Perhaps you are right."

"I don't think it at all," she said, and she set herself to comfort him.

Strange went from the dinner-party to his club. There was the inevitable crowd, fighting the campaign differently, cutting up the conquered countries, or crying all was lost. Some of them had written to the papers, all were somehow swollen with importance as though the war was their private property. Strange began to take heart.

"They are not ashamed," he thought. "They speak to me as if they expected I should be here. Perhaps I am a fool."

A friend sat down by his side.

"Cross went yesterday," he said. "George Crawley was killed at Mons. Of course you have heard."

Strange had not heard, and there rose before his eyes suddenly a picture of George Crawley, the youngest colonel in the army, standing on the kerb in St. James's Street and with uplifted face blaspheming to the skies at one o'clock in the morning because of a whiskered degenerate dandy with a frilled shirt to whom he had just before been introduced. But his friend was continuing his catalogue.

"Chalmers is training at Grantham. He's with the new army. Linton has joined the Flying Corps. Every day someone slips quietly away. God knows how many of them will come back."

Strange got up and walked out of the club.

"I shall see you to-morrow," his friend cried after him.

"No, I am going back to my boat."

"For how long?"

"Till the war's over."

The resolution had been taken that instant. He loved the _Boulotte_ better than anything else in the world. For on board of her he was altogether a man. She was fifty-five feet long over all, fourteen feet in beam, twenty-five tons by Thames measurement, and his debt to her was enormous. He had found her in a shed in the Isle of Wight, re-coppered her, given her a new boiler, fixed her up with forced draught, and taken out for himself after a year's hard work a master's certificate. He took her over to Holland, and since her bows worked like a concertina in the heavy seaway between Dover and Dieppe he strengthened them with cross-pieces. He never ceased to tinker with her, he groused at her, and complained of her, and sneered at her, and doted on her in the true sailor's fashion. For some years past life had begun for him in the spring, when he passed Portland Bill bound westward for Fowey and Falmouth and the Scillies, and had ended in the late autumn, when he pulled the _Boulotte_ up on the mud of Wootton Creek. Now he turned to her in his distress, and made a most miserable Odyssey. He spent a month in the estuary above Salcombe, steamed across to Havre, went down through the canals to Marseilles in the autumn of 1914, and sought one of the neutral coasts of the Mediterranean. Here, where men wore buttons in their coats inscribed, "Don't speak to me of the war," he fancied that he might escape from the shame of his insufficiency. He came to a pleasant harbour, with a broad avenue of trees behind the quay, and a little ancient town behind the trees.

"I will drop my anchor here," he said, "until the war ends"; and he remained, speaking to no one but his crew, sleeping in his little cabin, and only going on shore to buy his newspapers and take his coffee. And after five weeks the miracle began to happen. He was sitting on his deck one morning reading a local newspaper. At right angles to him half a dozen steamers, moored in a line, with their sterns to the quay and their anchors out forward, were loading with fruit. He looked up from his paper, and his eyes fell upon the nearest ship, which was showing him her starboard broadside. He looked first of all carelessly, then with interest, finally he laid his paper down and walked forward. The boat had received on the lower part of her hull, up to the Plimsoll line, a brilliant fresh coat of red paint. So far, of course, there was nothing unusual, but forward, halfway between her bows and her midships, and again aft on her quarter, she had a broad perpendicular line of the same red paint standing out vividly from the black of her upper plates. Strange called to his engineer, John Shawe, and pointed to the streaks.

"What do you make of them?" he asked.

Shawe shrugged his shoulders.

"Very wasteful it do seem, sir," he said; and to a casual glance it did indeed appear as if the paint had been allowed, through some carelessness on deck, to drip down the side at those two points. Strange, however, was not satisfied. The bands of scarlet were too regular, too broad. He had himself rowed out in his dinghy past the steamer's bows.

"That will do, Harry," he said. "We can go back."

On the port bows and quarter of the steamer he had seen the same vivid streaks. Strange spoke again to John Shawe.

"Waste isn't the explanation, that's sure. You go about the town a bit, don't you? You know some of the men about the port. You might find out for me--quietly, you know--what you can about that boat"; and the phrase "quietly, you know," made all at once a different man of John Shawe. Strange at this time was really more moved by curiosity than suspicion, but he did use the phrase, and John Shawe, a big, simple, south countryman, who knew his engine and very little else, swelled at once into a being of mystery, full of brow-twisting wisdom and portentously sly.

"I understand, sir," he said in a knowing whisper. "I know my dooty. It shall be done." He put on his best brass-buttoned coat that evening, and went down the three steps of the gangway ladder with a secret air, a sleuth; but he brought back his news nevertheless.

"All those boats, sir, are chartered by a German here named Rehnke."

"But some of them are English. They are flying the red flag," cried Strange in revolt.

"It's God's truth, sir, and here's more of it. Every one of them's bound for England, consigned to English firms. One's for Manchester, two for Cardiff, one for Liverpool."

"But it's impossible. It's trading with the enemy," Strange exclaimed.

"That don't apply to the enemy in neutral countries, they say. Oh, there's a deal of dirty work going on in England. Will you come on deck?"

Strange nodded. The saloon door opened into the cockpit, and the cabin roof was the deck of the after-part of the _Boulotte_. They climbed by a little ladder out of the cockpit. It was twelve o'clock on a night of full moon.

"Look, sir," said Shawe.

The English boat had sailed that afternoon. The starboard side of its neighbour was now revealed. Strange looked through his glasses and he saw. Over the bows of that tramp steamer at midnight a man was suspended on a plank, and he was painting a broad, perpendicular, red streak.

Strange thought over his discovery lying on his back in the saloon. Distinguishing marks on a row of ships chartered by a German--there was just one explanation for them! Strange did not even whisper it to John Shawe, but he went ashore the next morning and called upon the British Consul.

His card was taken into a room where two men were speaking. At once the conversation stopped, and it was not resumed. There was not a whisper, nor the sound of any movement. Strange had a picture in his mind of two men with their heads together staring at his card and exchanging an unspoken question. Then the clerk appeared again.

"Mr. Taylor will see you with pleasure," he said.

As Strange entered the room a slim, elderly, indifferent gentleman, seated at a knee-hole table, gazed vaguely at him through his spectacles and offered him a chair.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Strange?" he asked, and since Strange hesitated, he turned towards his companion.

"This is Major Slingsby," said the Consul. "He will not be in your way."

Major Slingsby, a square, short, rubicund man of forty, with the face of a faun, bowed, and, without moving from his chair, seemed, nevertheless, to remove himself completely from the room.

"Not at all," said Strange. He had not an idea that he was in the presence of the two shrewdest men in those parts. To him they were just a couple of languid people whom it was his duty to arouse, and he told his story as vividly as he could.

"And what do you deduce from these mysterious signs?" asked the Consul.

Strange's answer was prompt.

"German submarines in the Mediterranean."

"Oh! And why not the Channel?" asked Mr. Taylor. "These steamers are on their way there."

To that question there was no reply. Strange rose. "I thought that I ought to tell you what I had noticed," he said stiffly.

"Thank you, yes. And I am very grateful," replied Taylor.

Major Slingsby, however, followed Strange out of the room.

"Will you lunch with me?" he asked, and the question sent the blood rushing into Strange's face. He swung between his instinct to hide his head from any man who was doing service and his craving to converse with a fellow-countryman. The craving won.

"I shall be very pleased," he stammered.

"Right. It is half-past twelve now. Shall we say one at the Café de Rome?"

As they sat against the wall by the window of the café Slingsby talked of ordinary matters, which any one of those in the chairs outside upon the pavement might overhear and be none the wiser. But he talked sagely, neither parading mysteries nor pretending disclosures. He let the mere facts of companionship and nationality work, and before luncheon was over Strange was won by them. He longed to confide, to justify himself before a fellow-citizen of his miserable inertness. Over the coffee, indeed, he would have begun, but Slingsby saw the torrent of confession coming.

"Do you often lunch here?" he said quickly. "I do whenever I happen to be in the town. Sit in this window for an hour and you will see all the town paraded before you like a show, its big men and little men, its plots and its intrigues. There, for instance," and he nodded towards a large, stout person with a blonde moustache, "is Rehnke--yes, that's your man. Take a good look at him."

Strange looked at the German hard. He looked also towards a youth who had been sitting for the last hour over a cup of coffee and a newspaper outside the window. Slingsby interpreted the look.

"He's all right. He's trying to listen, of course. Most foreigners do, whether they understand your language or not. And he doesn't--not a word of it. I have been watching him. However, we may as well go, for I would very much like you to show me your little boat."

Strange, eager and enthusiastic, jumped up from the table.

"Rather," he cried. "She's not big, of course, but she can keep the sea, especially since I strengthened her bows."

"Oh, you have done that, have you?" said Slingsby, as he paid the bill. "That's interesting."

They crossed the boulevard to the quay and went on board the _Boulotte_. Every inch of brass on her, from the stanchions round the deck to the engine-room telegraph, flashed, and she was varnished and white and trim like a lady fresh from her maid.

"What can you do with your forced draught?" asked Slingsby.

"Thirteen," replied Strange proudly. "With a good wind astern fourteen. Once I went out past the Needles buoy----" and off he went in a glowing account of a passage to Cherbourg at the end of a stormy September. Slingsby never once interrupted him. He followed meekly from the rudder to the bow, where he examined with some attention the famous struts and cross-pieces.

"You have got a wireless, I see," he said, looking up to the aerial, which, slackened and disconnected, dangled from the masthead.

"Yes. But it's a small affair. However, I can hear four hundred miles if the night's still. I can only send seventy."