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

hours? I don’t believe it. It’s

just interest—nothing more…. And I’ll have to have a change of clothes

before I can do anything further.”

 

He bowed gratefully to the lions, in view of their tolerant interest in his

soliloquy, and set off very suddenly round the square and up St. Martin’s

Lane, striking across town as directly as might be for St. Pancras Station.

It would undoubtedly be a long walk, but cabs were prohibited by his

straitened means, and the busses were all abed and wouldn’t be astir for

hours.

 

He strode along rapidly, finding his way more through intuition than by

observation or familiarity with London’s geography—indeed, was scarce

aware of his surroundings; for his brain was big with fine imagery, rapt in

a glowing dream of knighterrantry and chivalric deeds.

 

Thus is it ever and alway with those who in the purity of young hearts rush

in where angels fear to tread; if these, Kirkwood and his ilk, be fools,

thank God for them, for with such foolishness is life savored and made

sweet and sound! To Kirkwood the warp of the world and the woof of it was

Romance, and it wrapped him round, a magic mantle to set him apart from

all things mean and sordid and render him impregnable and invisible to the

haunting Shade of Care.

 

Which, by the same token, presently lost track of him entirely, and

wandered off to find and bedevil some other poor devil. And Kirkwood, his

eyes like his spirit elevated, saw that the clouds of night were breaking,

the skies clearing, that the East pulsed ever more strongly with the

dim golden promise of the day to come. And this he chose to take for an

omen—prematurely, it may be.

IX

AGAIN “BELOW BRIDGE”; AND BEYOND

 

Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that

upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose

the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his

haste was such that all was consummated within an hour.

 

Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at

St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to

a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged

a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his

belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting

a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a

neglig�e shirt of a deep shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long

time; finally, he had devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee

and burned his mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the

still dim glimmering of early day.

 

By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten

shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his

lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the

bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down

shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one’s jewelry. Besides

which, he had never before been called upon to consider the advisability of

raising money by pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt

as to the right course of procedure in such emergency.

 

At King’s Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited

him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic

bobby informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty,

and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven.

 

“It’s tramp it or cab it, then,” mused the young man mournfully, his

longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank—just then occupied by a solitary

hansom, driver somnolent on the box. “Officer,” he again addressed

the policeman, mindful of the English axiom: “When in doubt, ask a

bobby.”—“Officer, when’s high-tide this morning?”

 

The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb,

and rippled the pages.

 

“London Bridge, ‘igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir,” he announced

with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the

functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver

of the peace.

 

Kirkwood said something beneath his breath—a word in itself a comfortable

mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and

groaned: “O Lord, I just dassent!” With which, thanking the bureau of

information, he set off at a quick step down Grey’s Inn Road.

 

The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city—and the voice of the

milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly if a

trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and

down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening

computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be

late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it

known, was that the Alethea would not attempt to sail before the turn of

the tide.

 

For this was his mission, to find the Alethea before she sailed.

Incredible as it may appear, at five o’clock, or maybe earlier, on the

morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood,

normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of

his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully

through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn,

and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or

a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the

shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress;

according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar,

or Kirkwood’s own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself.

 

Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar

in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement

to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property

(whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely

committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam’s or her son’s):

he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would

attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, Alethea, whose

name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs.

 

Kirkwood’s initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the

haystack—the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the

hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to

the wharves of ‘long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line

the Thames, that one called Alethea; of which he was so deeply mired in

ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise

passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the

world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner,

four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine.

 

A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime

impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when

he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less

doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises

as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a

passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the Alethea….

 

London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over

its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound

asleep when at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of the Mansion

House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered

out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon

his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday’s

tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned

frequently.

 

With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby, cruising

up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir

in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of

his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when

he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse,

explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of

his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.

 

“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated

the latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to

me.”

 

The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time

being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s guidance. Once

in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as

reckless of the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight

glaring full in his tired young face.

 

He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling

from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit

of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step,

shaking his fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’ right,” he assented

surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the

sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned

discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and

a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three

shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare named being one-and-six.

 

“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and

boat,” he stipulated.

 

“Right-o. You’ll mind the ‘orse a minute, sir?”

 

Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably.

Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s head,

pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he

stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.

 

To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.

 

Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.

Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted

parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow

drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine

humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock

laborers going to their day’s work. Men of every nationality known to the

world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse’s

head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians,

Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks,

even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were

bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the

blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous

procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and

unreal in the clear morning glow.

 

The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly

out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered

waterman ambling more slowly after.

 

“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman; knows

the river like a book, he do.”

 

The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.

 

“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he asked

with the brevity of weariness.

 

“This wye, sir.”

 

At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the