THE phrase “intoxicated with pleasure,” too common in our literature, would most inexactly describe the condition of George Mulross Demaine as he left the Prime Minister’s room upon that Monday midnight. In the first place he was not and never had been intoxicated, and even when he exceeded (as in youth he frequently had) in the matter of wine, spirits, liqueurs and fancy liquids, the effect of such excess had rather been atrophy than intoxication. Nor had he ever felt what poets finely call the “sting of joy.”
But he was pleased: he was very pleased. Thoughts that in another more volatile and less substantial brain might have crowded, appeared slowly separated one from another and in a solemn procession. They comforted rather than exhilarated him.
First of all there was the ￡5000 a year: that was something.
He ruminated on that about as far as Cleopatra’s Needle; there, as he leant upon the parapet of the[142] Embankment and looked down into the water, a second thought rose upon the horizon of his mind: the ￡5000 a year would be his, not Sudie’s.
In the first stage of this nightly ramble he had barged into two men: one a poor man who had made the accident the excuse for the delivery of money; the second a rich one who cursed him abominably, but George was in too equable a mood to mind. Now, as he left Cleopatra’s Needle behind him and strolled still farther eastward, ruminating upon the fact that the ￡5000 a year would be his and not Sudie’s, he had the misfortune to cannon against yet a third, to whom he apologised: but it was a post, not a man.
He looked at it with those slow, sensible eyes of his for perhaps thirty seconds, and saw in large red letters under the electric light “Motors to the right of this post.”
He repeated the phrase mechanically as was often his wont upon reading anything, and it set up a new train of thought. Post.... The post offered him was not permanent ... but he considered the careers of his friends and he could remember none, neither Ted nor Johnny nor old Bill Curliss, nor Fittleworth nor Glegg, who from the moment they had received such promotion had not gone forward.
It always meant something, even when one was out of office, and then who knows? One might be in office again. A Party may be in office twice[143] running! Stranger things had happened. And then, even if they went out of office, Ole Man Benson would have brought something off by that time.
Look at it how he would, heaven was smiling on him, and he in return, and as though in gratitude, smiled at the gaunt front of Blackfriars Station, opposite which he had now arrived.
Between him and it there lay the street, and he was naturally too cautious to attempt to cross until he had gazed carefully to the front and right. But at midnight there is no pressure of traffic in the City of London, and when he had allowed a belated dray and a steam roller to pass him at their leisure he hurriedly crossed over with a vague intention of taking the train.
Like many men of the governing classes, whose mental activities are naturally divorced from the petty details of London life, and who are independent of that daily round which makes the less fortunate only too familiar with our means of communication, George Mulross Demaine was not quite certain where the Underground went to, nor what part of London precisely it served. But he had been taught from childhood that it was circular in form, and that round it like Old Ocean[3] in a perpetual race, went along streams of trains. Enter it where you would, and you might leave it somewhere upon its periphery.
[144]He knew that St. James’s Park Station was at his very door. He asked for and obtained a ticket with that promptitude which distinguishes the service of our premier Metropolitan line, left the change for sixpence by an oversight on the ledge of the ticket window, and then, as Fate would have it, turned to the left-hand stairs.
The official whose duty it was to examine and to cut designs upon the tickets presented to him by the public, was that evening (under the guidance of Fate) most negligent.
He should surely have seen that he was dealing with an Obvious Gentleman and should gently have directed him to the opposing platform. As it was he did no more than half puncture the cardboard without so much as glancing at it, and George Mulross Demaine (in whom now yet another pleasing thought had arisen—that there were such things as Cabinet pensions—) sauntered down on to the platform.
A train roared in; he stumbled into it just in time to save his coat from the shutting of the gate, and sat contentedly until he should hear the conductor shout “St. James’s Park!” But this cue word which would have aroused him to action, he was destined not to hear.
The Mansion House went by, and Cannon Street, but yet another pleasing thought having arisen in his mind he noted them not.
A shout of “Monument” startled him, for he had[145] heard in a general way of the Monument, and it was nowhere near his home. When he came to Mark Lane he was seriously alarmed, and at the cry of Aldgate East, his mind was made up. He got out.
He asked with the utmost courtesy of the man who took the tickets what he should do to get to St. James’s Park, and the man who took the tickets replied with less courtesy but with great rapidity that he had better turn sharp to the right and that on his right again he would find Aldgate Station, whence there was still a service of trains, late as was the hour.
Alas, for the various locutions of various ranks in our society! he did turn sharp to the right; he went right round the corner into Middlesex Street, and to the right again into Wentworth Street, but not a station could be seen. The summer night was of a glimmering sort of darkness. It was hot, and many of the local families were still seated upon their steps, speaking to each other in a dialect of the Lithuanian Ghetto which George Mulross erroneously took for an accent native to the London poor.
He stepped up to one and asked whether he were yet near the station. The voluble reply “Shriska beth haumelshee! Chragso! Yeh!” illumined him not at all, and as he moved off uncertainly up the street, a roar of harsh laughter tended to upset his nerves.
He could not bear this raking fire: he turned,[146] most imprudently, up a narrow court which was in total darkness; and, then at first to his surprise but almost immediately afterwards to his grave chagrin, he felt a voluminous and exceedingly foul cotton sheet drawn sharply round his throat, twisted, the slack of it thrown over his head, and one end crammed into his mouth for a gag; almost at the same moment his wrists were jerked behind him, a rope whose hardness must have been due to tar was hitched round them with surely excessive violence, putting him to grievous pain, his feet were lifted from under him, he felt several hands grasping his head and shoulders at random, a couple of them seizing his ankles; he was reversed, and in the attitude described at the Home Office as “The Frogs’ March” he felt himself carried for some few yards, and at last reversed again and placed face upwards upon a narrow and hard surface.
Through the filthy cotton which still enveloped his face, the disgusting stains of which were dimly apparent to him, he saw the glimmer of a light, and he heard round him language the accent and many of the words of which were so unfamiliar to him that he could make nothing of it. He was incommoded beyond words.
Whatever his defects, George Mulross Demaine was not lacking in physical courage; he begged them in a mumble through the gag that covered his mouth, to let him go. There was no direct reply, but only a good deal of whispering, which so far as[147] he could make it out—and much of it was foreign—related to his person rather than to his request.
An attempt to move betrayed the fact that some heavy body was seated upon his shins; another attempt to raise the upper half of his body was met by so sharp a reminder upon the side of his head that he thought it better for the moment to lie still.
What followed was an examination of his clothes and their contents, which showed his new neighbours to be unacquainted with the sartorial habits of the wealthy. The two slits in his cape were taken for pockets and their emptiness provoked among other comments the shrill curse of a woman. His trouser pockets, wherein it was fondly hoped that metal might lie hid, and wherein he would rather have died than have put anything, similarly drew blank, and to their disgust, of the two little lines on the waistcoat one was a sham and the other contained nothing but a spare stud. However, this contained a small precious stone, and was the immediate object of a pretty severe scuffle.
He was next reversed yet a third time without dignity, and in a manner the violence of which was most wounding: but in his tail pocket was nothing but a large new silk handkerchief which went (apparently by custom, for there was no discussion) to the captain of the tribe.
Purse there was none, a thing that bewildered them; not even a portmonnaie, until, to their mingled astonishment and joy, some one acuter than the rest[148] discovered in a mass of seals at his watch chain, a little globular receptacle which opened with a spring, and revealed no less than four sovereigns.
It was a poor haul, but the clothes remained. Not for long. They were all removed, and that not with roughness but, he was glad to note, tenderly: less perhaps from the respect they bore him than from a consideration of the value of the cloth. The precise man?uvre whereby the difficulty of the ankles and the wrists was eliminated, I leave to those of my readers who are better acquainted with such problems than I. There are several well-known methods, I understand, whereby a man may have his trousers and his coat removed and yet his hands and feet preserved in custody.
His boots (they were astonished to note) were elastic-sided. They were under the impression that among the wealthy buttoned boots alone were tolerated at the evening meal and thenceforward until such hours as the wealthy seek repose. But they were good mess boots, and take it all in all, his clothing, every single article of which was soon folded and put into its bundle, made the best part of their booty.
Then there was a considerable movement of feet, a murmur of voices purposely low; there seemed to be one person left, agile and rapid in movement ... perhaps two: at any rate after these or this one had held him for some thirty seconds, during which he had the sense and prudence to lie still, there was a[149] sharp sliding of feet, the quick but almost noiseless shutting of a door, and he found that he was free.
His first act was to disembarrass himself of his stinking head-gear, but his captors had laid their trap with science, and it was precisely this which was destined to give them the leisure for their escape. The sheet was tied to his head by a series of small hard knots which took him, between them, quite a quarter of an hour to undo.
At last he was free. He tore the filthy thing from his head and the bunch of it from his mouth with the same gesture, overcame a strong desire to vomit, and looked round him.
He found himself seated upon a sort of narrow bench attached by iron clamps to the wall of a small and exceedingly noisome room, which even at that moment he had the wit to think that he would certainly have dealt with by the local inspector when he should have assumed what he had heard called the reins of office.
But for the moment other considerations occupied him to the exclusion of the condition of the room. A dirty paraffin lamp with no shade stood on the rickety table; the one window was blinded by a large old wooden shutter barred down against it; on the cracked, distempered walls, stained with a generation of grease and smoke, hung a paper upon which a few figures had been scrawled roughly in pencil, and most of them scratched out again, and here and there the same pencil or others had inscribed the[150] surface of the plaster with sentiments and illustrations most uncongenial to his breeding.
The next thing that met his eye was a peculiarly repulsive pair of breeches, an old green-black torn overcoat, and a pair of workmen’s boots, cracked, grey with weather, laceless and apparently as stiff as wood. He had no choice: his first business was to find aid. He must put these on, break his way out of this den as best he could, and summon the Police.
He had never had his feet in such things as those boots before; it was like shuffling in boxes. He hated to feel the clammy grease of the trousers and coat against his skin.
He left the lamp burning and made for the door. To his astonishment the latch was open. To his further astonishment it gave into an open passage like a tunnel, with no door but a plain arch opening into the court beyond. He shuffled out. He was glad that it was not yet day. Fortunately it was not cold.
He turned, he knew not whither, following the streets aimlessly, but more or less in one direction, until he saw in a blotted silhouette against the darkness of the walls, the glad and familiar form of a policeman. It was like coming home! It was like making a known harbour light after three days of lost reckonings and a gale.
He went up to the man and began in that pleasant but not condescending tone in which he had ever addressed members of the force:
[151]“Policeman, can you tell me....”
He got no further. The agile though weighty custodian of order, with the low and determined remark, “I know yer!” had seized him by the shoulders, whirled him round and away, so that he fell, bruised and a little dazed, against the steps of a house.
George was angered. He had already risen with some remark on his lips about taking a number when he saw his antagonist make a sharp gesture—there was a shrill whistle, immediately afterwards an answering whistle from perhaps a hundred yards away, and George Mulross Demaine,—blame him if you will,—kicked off the impossible boots, and ran for it.
They let him run, and it is not for us to criticise. He left their district at any rate.
He had run for but a few moments in his absurd and horrible greatcoat and on his naked feet, until he saw down the end of an alley a great gate, a light to one side of it, and beyond it an empty space of glimmering nightly sky. Ignorant of where he was or what he did, but determined upon safety, he looked round and to his horror saw the form of yet another policeman pacing slowly towards the place where he was crouching.
That determined him. With an agility that none of his acquaintances, not even his wife, would have believed to be in him, he slunk quite close to earth in the shadow of the great gate and entered the open space beyond.
[152]Such a space he had never seen. Under the very faint light which was now beginning to show over the east of heaven, he guessed that he was upon the river, for he saw masts against the sky and that peculiar pale glint of water which, even at night, may be distinguished between the hulls of ships. All he sought was shadow, and the great wharves of the docks—for he had blundered into the docks—give ample opportunity.
He heard a measured step pacing slowly towards him. He crept along the edge of the quay into a sort of narrow lane that lay between a row of high barrels and the bulwarks of a big steamship which just showed above the stone. He flattened himself against the high barrels which, had he been better acquainted with the details of commerce, he would have known to contain fishbone manure.
The measured tread came nearer; it passed, it reached a certain point in the distance, it turned and passed again. It reached yet another extreme of its beat, turned and re-passed.... And all the while the light was growing: and as it grew the nervous agony of George Mulross grew with it, but more rapidly.
He could now just see the figure of the watchman near the gate, he could distinguish part of the nearer rigging; in half an hour he would be visible to whatever eyes were watching for vagabonds. He knew what that meant; further humiliation, perhaps further dangers. There was not a gentleman for miles,—and[153] with that thought the heart of this most unfortunate of gentlemen beat slow.
The reader has been sufficiently told that Mr. Demaine, however solid the quality of his brain, was not a man of rapid decision. But agony and peril are sharp spurs, and as the conception of a gentleman floated through his mind he suddenly remembered that ships had captains.
Upon their exact functions he was hazy; he would know it better no doubt when he had undertaken his functions in the Court of Dowry (the blessed thought warmed him for a moment even in that dreadful dawn!); anyhow, the word “captain” meant something ... it wasn’t like a captain in the army of course ... but then there were captains and captains ... of course the Royal Navy was superior to the Merchant Service ... but it was all the same kind of thing—only upper and lower, like a barrister and a solicitor.... For instance there was the Naval Reserve.... And he remembered a captain upon an Atlantic liner who was a splendid great fellow, and he was sure could tell any one at once. And the captain of Billy’s schooner was better than that because he understood about motor engines.
He had just come to the point of remembering that on the P. and O. it was rather a grand thing to dine with the captain, when his mind arrived at its conclusion. He would slip over the side of the big ship, and when the proper time came he would reveal himself to the captain for what he was. The captain[154] would show him every courtesy, he would give him a change of clothes, ready-made but decent, he would know where there was a telephone, he would have authority to speak to the watchman and the rest, he would send for a taxi, and George’s troubles would be over....
George prepared to slip over the side.
Now to slip over the side in a book is one thing, but to do it on a real ship is another. The bulwarks were high and greasy and salt and slimy. Demaine was weakened by a night of terrors, and he came down on the hard iron deck of the tramp with a noise resembling distant thunder, and in a manner that hurt him very much indeed.
It was a new misadventure and one that had to be repaired. He heard voices and bolted for a large coil of rope which lay beneath the shadow of the turtle-deck. Here the stench, though somewhat different in quality from that of the fishbone manure, was not less noisome, and carried with it a reminiscence of Channel passages which weakened the very soul within George Mulross Demaine. But the sensation was soon swamped in one much more poignant; this was aroused in him by the approach of two inharmonious voices, one of which was borne towards him perpetually clamouring:
“Yes ah deed!”
While the other repeated as a sort of antiphon:
“Noa ee diddun, tha silly fule!”
When this dialogue was exhausted the first voice[155] in a lower and much more determined tone hissed: “Ah’ll ave im aowt!” and a large stave which might, for all Demaine knew, be a marlingspike or some other horrid instrument, bega............