CHAPTER IX

THE WEB OF THE SPIDER

Bersonin walked on, fighting desperately with his ghastly spasm of merriment.

It was a nervous affection which had haunted him for years. It dated from a time when, in South America, in an acute crisis of desperate personal hazard, he had laughed the first peal of that strange laughter of which he was to be ever after afraid. Since then it had seized him many times, unexpectedly and in moments of strong excitement, to shake him like a lath. It had given him a morbid hatred of laughter in others. Recently he had thought that he was overcoming the weakness--for in two years past he had had no such seizure--and the recurrence to-night shocked and disconcerted him. He, the man of brain and attainment, to be held captive by a ridiculous hysteria, like a nerve-racked anæmic girl! The cold sweat stood on his forehead.

Before long the paroxysms ceased and he grew calmer. The quiet road had merged into a busier thoroughfare. He walked on slowly till his command was regained. West of the outer moat of the Imperial Grounds, he turned up a pleasant lane-like street and presently entered his own gate. The house, into which he let himself with a latch-key, was a rambling, modern, two-story structure of yellow stucco. The lower floor was practically unused, since its tenant lived alone and did not entertain. The upper floor, besides the hall, contained a small bedroom, a bath and dressing-room and a large, barely-furnished laboratory. The latter was lined on two sides with glass-covered shelves which gave glimpses of rows of books, of steel shells, metal and crystal retorts and crucibles, the delicate paraphernalia of organic chemistry and complicated instruments whose use no one knew save himself--a fit setting for the great student, the peer of Offenbach in Munich and of Bayer in Vienna. Against the wall leaned a drafting-board, on which, pinned down by thumb-tacks, was a sketch-plan of a revolving turret. From a bracket in a corner--the single airy touch of delicacy in a chamber almost sordid in its appointments--swung a bamboo cage with a brown _hiwa_, or Japanese finch, a downy puff of feathers with its head under its wing.

In the upper hall Bersonin's Japanese head-boy had been sitting at a small desk writing. Bersonin entered the laboratory, opened a safe let into a wall, and put into it something which he took from his pocket. Then he donned a dressing-gown the boy brought, and threw himself into a huge leather chair.

"Make me some coffee, Ishida," he said.

The servant did so silently and deftly, using a small brass _samovar_ which occupied a table of its own. With the coffee he brought his master a box of brown Havana cigars.

For an hour Bersonin sat smoking in the silent room--one cigar after another, deep in thought, his yellow eyes staring at nothing. Into his countenance deep lines had etched themselves, giving to his coldly repellant look an expression of malignant force and intention. With his pallid face, his stirless attitude, his great white fingers clutching the arms of the chair, he suggested some enormous, sprawling batrachian awaiting its more active prey.

All at once there came a chirp from the cage in the corner and its tiny occupant, waked by the electric-light, burst into song as clear and joyous as though before its free wing lay all the meads of Eden. A look more human, soft and almost companionable, came into its master's massive face. Bersonin rose and, whistling, opened the cage door and held out an enormous forefinger. The little creature stepped on it, and, held to his cheek, it rubbed its feathered head against it. For a moment he crooned and whistled to it, then held his finger to the cage and it obediently resumed its perch and its melody. The expert took a dark cloth from a hook and threw it over the cage and the song ceased.

Bersonin went to the door of the room and fastened it, then unlocked a desk and spread some papers on the table. One was a chart, drawn to the minutest scale, of the harbor of Yokohama. On it had been marked a group of projectile-shaped spots suggesting a flotilla of vessels at anchor. For a long time he worked absorbedly, setting down figures, measuring with infinite pains, computing angles--always with reference to a small square in the map's inner margin, marked in red. He covered many sheets of paper with his calculations. Finally he took another paper from the safe and compared the two. He lifted his head with a look of satisfaction.

Just then he thought he heard a slight noise from the hall. Swiftly and noiselessly as a great cat he crossed to the door and opened it.

Ishida sat in his place scratching laboriously with a foreign pen.

Bersonin's glance of suspicion altered. "What are you working at so industriously, Ishida?" he asked.

The Japanese boy displayed the sheet with pride.

It was an ode to the coming Squadron. Bersonin read it:

"Welcome, foreign men-of-war! Young and age, Man and woman, None but you welcome! And how our reaches know you but to satisfy, Nor the Babylon nor the Parisian you to treat, Be it ever so humble, Yet a tidbit with our heart! What may not be accomplishment Rising-Sun?

"_By H. Ishida, with best compliment._"

Bersonin laid it down with a word of approbation. "Well done," he said. "You will be a famous English scholar before long." He went into the dressing-room, but an instant later recollected the papers on the table. The servant was in the laboratory when his master hastily reentered; he was methodically removing the coffee tray.

Alone once more, Ishida reseated himself at his small desk. He tore the poem carefully to small bits and put them into the waste-paper basket. Then, rubbing the cake of India-ink on its stone tablet, he drew a mass of Japanese writing toward him and, with brush held vertically between thumb and forefinger, began to trace long, delicate characters at the top of the first sheet, thus:

[Japanese: Ouryuu no fusetsusuirai ni oyobosu eikyou hidarino toori kinji]

In the Japanese phrase this might literally be translated as follows:

cross-current of, laying water thunder on, work-effect left hand respectively

Which in conventional English is to say:

A STUDY OF CROSS-CURRENTS IN THEIR EFFECT ON SUBMARINE MINES SUBMITTED WITH DEFERENCE

This finished, he sealed it in an envelope, took a book from the breast of his _kimono_ and began to read. Its cover bore the words: "Second English Primer, in words of Two Syllables." Its inner pages, however, belied the legend. It was Mahan's _Influence of Sea-Power on History_.

Yet Lieutenant Ishida of the Japanese Imperial Navy, one time student in Monterey, California, now in Special Secret-Service, read abstractedly. He was wondering why Doctor Bersonin should have in his possession a technical naval chart and what was the meaning of certain curious markings he had made on it.