The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance (snow like ashes txt) 📕

rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans,

struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras never sleeps.

 

The misty air swam luminous with the light of electric signs as with the

radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in

Kirkwood’s ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast,

resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to devour. To devour—

 

Stranded!…

 

Distracted, he searched pocket after pocket, locating his watch, cigar-and

cigarette-cases, matchbox, penknife—all the minutiae of pocket-hardware

affected by civilized man; with old letters, a card-case, a square envelope

containing his steamer ticket; but no sovereign purse. His small-change

pocket held less than three shillings—two and eight, to be exact—and a

brass key, which he failed to recognize as one of his belongings.

 

And that was all. At sometime during the night he had lost (or been

cunningly bereft of?) that little purse of chamois-skin containing the

three golden sovereigns which he had been husbanding to pay his steamer

expenses, and which, if only he had them now, would stand between him and

starvation and a night in the streets.

 

And, searching his heart, he found it brimming with gratitude to Mulready,

for having relieved him of the necessity of settling with the cabby.

 

“Vagabond?” said Kirkwood musingly. “Vagabond?” He repeated the word softly

a number of times, to get the exact flavor of it, and found it little to

his taste. And yet…

 

He thrust both hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly

into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding

his lower lip.

 

If Brentwick were only in town—But he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, within the

week.

 

“No good waiting here,” he concluded. Composing his face, he re�ntered the

station. There were his trunks, of course. He couldn’t leave them standing

on the station platform for ever.

 

He found the luggage-room and interviewed a mechanically courteous

attendant, who, as the result of profound deliberation, advised him to try

his luck at the lost-luggage room, across the station. He accepted the

advice; it was a foregone conclusion that his effects had not been conveyed

to the Tilbury dock; they could not have been loaded into the luggage van

without his personal supervision. Still, anything was liable to happen when

his unlucky star was in the ascendant.

 

He found them in the lost-luggage room.

 

A clerk helped him identify the articles and ultimately clucked with a

perfunctory note: “Sixpence each, please.”

 

“I—ah—pardon?”

 

“Sixpence each, the fixed charge, sir. For every twenty-four hours or

fraction thereof, sixpence per parcel.”

 

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Kirkwood sweetly. “I will call to-morrow.”

 

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

 

“Five times sixpence is two-and-six,” Kirkwood computed, making his way

hastily out of the station, lest a worse thing befall him. “No, bless your

heart!—not while two and eight represents the sum total of my fortune.”

 

He wandered out into the night; he could not linger round the station till

dawn; and what profit to him if he did? Even were he to ransom his trunks,

one can scarcely change one’s clothing in a public waiting-room.

 

Somewhere in the distance a great clock chimed a single stroke, freighted

sore with melancholy. It knelled the passing of the half-hour after

midnight; a witching hour, when every public shuts up tight, and gentlemen

in top-hats and evening dress are doomed to pace the pave till day (barring

they have homes or visible means of support)—till day, when pawnshops open

and such personal effects as watches and hammered silver cigar-cases may be

hypothecated.

 

Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care

the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied;

Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.

 

“Ah, you thought you would forget me?” chuckled the fleshless lips by his

ear. “But no, my boy; I’m with you now, for ever and a day. ‘Misery loves

company,’ and it wouldn’t be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity,

would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation.

Here’s a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? _What

are you going to do?_”

 

But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him,

walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear.

None the less the sense of Care’s solicitous query struck like a pain into

his consciousness. What was he to do?

 

An hour passed.

 

Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity

goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets

achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down

with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened;

solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes;

policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as

lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its

perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked

hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more

volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one’s attire with

myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.

 

Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.

 

Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.

 

The world was very still….

 

And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly,

now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not

to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with

dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose

atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words,

Frognall Street.

 

Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped

stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly

impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him

with measured stride, pausing new and again to try a door or flash

his bull’s-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man

responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number

9!

 

Oddly enough, the shock of recognition brought him to his

senses,—temporarily. He was even able to indulge himself in a quiet,

sobering grin at his own folly. He passed the policeman with a nod and a

cool word in response to the man’s good-natured, “Good-night, sir.” Number

9 was on the other side of the street; and he favored its blank and dreary

elevation with a prolonged and frank stare—that profited him nothing, by

the way. For a crazy notion popped incontinently into his head, and would

not be cast forth.

 

At the corner he swerved and crossed, still possessed of his devil of

inspiration. It would be unfair to him to say that he did not struggle to

resist it, for he did, because it was fairly and egregiously asinine; yet

struggling, his feet trod the path to which it tempted him.

 

“Why,” he expostulated feebly, “I might’s well turn back and beat that

bobby over the head with my cane!…”

 

But at the moment his hand was in his change pocket, feeling over that same

brass door-key which earlier he had been unable to account for, and he was

informing himself how very easy it would have been for the sovereign purse

to have dropped from his waistcoat pocket while he was sliding on his ear

down the dark staircase. To recover it meant, at the least, shelter for

the night, followed by a decent, comfortable and sustaining morning meal.

Fortified by both he could redeem his luggage, change to clothing more

suitable for daylight traveling, pawn his valuables, and enter into

negotiations with the steamship company for permission to exchange his

passage, with a sum to boot, for transportation on another liner. A most

feasible project! A temptation all but irresistible!

 

But then—the risk…. Supposing (for the sake of argument) the customary

night-watchman to have taken up a transient residence in Number 9;

supposing the police to have entered with him and found the stunned man on

the second floor: would the watchman not be vigilant for another nocturnal

marauder? would not the police now, more than ever, be keeping a wary eye

on that house of suspicious happenings?

 

Decidedly, to re�nter it would be to incur a deadly risk. And yet,

undoubtedly, beyond question! his sovereign purse was waiting for him

somewhere on the second flight of stairs; while as his means of clandestine

entry lay warm in his fingers—the key to the dark entry, which he had by

force of habit pocketed after locking the door.

 

He came to the Hog-in-the-Pound. Its windows were dim with low-turned

gas-lights. Down the covered alleyway, Quadrant Mews slept in a dusk but

fitfully relieved by a lamp or two round which the friendly mist clung

close and thick.

 

There would be none to see….

 

Skulking, throat swollen with fear, heart beating like a snare-drum,

Kirkwood took his chance. Buttoning his overcoat collar up to his chin

and cursing the fact that his hat must stand out like a chimney-pot on a

detached house, he sped on tiptoe down the cobbled way and close beneath

the house-walls of Quadrant Mews. But, half-way in, he stopped, confounded

by an unforeseen difficulty. How was he to identify the narrow entry of

Number 9, whose counterparts doubtless communicated with the mews from

every residence on four sides of the city block?

 

The low inner tenements were yet high enough to hide the rear elevations of

Frognall Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had

made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner.

If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that

he would blunder into the servant’s quarters of some inhabited house,

and—be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while the

bobby was summoned.

 

Be that as it might—he almost lost his head when he realized this—escape

was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two

men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of

clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over

something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They

were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.

 

But—which passage should he choose?

 

He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble

time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to

save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice,

maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account

of himself, “like a goo’ feller.” Another tempted him with offers of drink

and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive

lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with

resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away

from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like

ravening animals.

 

For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and

from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash

went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance

to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the

unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.

 

Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him,

Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in