The Dark Star

“I read the note you have shoved under his door,” said Golden Beard. “That iss why we are here, Karl and I.”

Neeland remembered the wax in the keyhole then. He turned his eyes on Ilse Dumont, curiously, less certain of her treachery now.

Meanwhile, Golden Beard continued busily unwinding things from his apparently too stout person, and presently disengaged three life-belts.

One of these he adjusted to his own person, then, putting on his voluminous overcoat, took the pistol from Ali Baba, who, in turn, adjusted one of the remaining life-belts to his body.

Neeland, deeply perplexed and uncomfortable, watched these operations in silence, trying to divine some reason for them.

“Now, then!” said Golden Beard to the girl; and his voice sounded cold and incisive in the silence.

“This is not the way to do it,” she said in a low tone. “I gave him my word of honour.”

“You will be good enough to buckle on that belt,” returned Golden Beard, staring at her.

Slowly she bent over, picked up the life-belt, and, looping the silk rope over her arm, began to put on the belt. Golden Beard, impatient, presently came to her assistance; then he unhooked from the wall a cloak and threw it over her shoulders.

“Now, Karl!” he said. “Shoot him dead if he stirs!” And he snatched a sheet from the bed, tore it into strips, walked over to Neeland, and deftly tied him hand and foot and gagged him.

Then Golden Beard and Ali Baba, between them, lifted the young man and seated him on the iron bed and tied him fast to it.

“Go out on deck!” said Golden Beard to Ilse Dumont.

“Let me stay–”

“No! You have acted like a fool. Go to the lower deck where is our accustomed rendezvous.”

“I wish to remain, Johann. I shall not interfere–”

“Go to the lower deck, I tell you, and be ready to tie that rope ladder!”

Ali Baba, down on his knees, had pulled out a steamer trunk from under the bed, opened it, and was lifting out three big steel cylinders.

These he laid on the bed in a row beside the tied man; and Golden Beard, still facing Ilse Dumont, turned his head to look.

The instant his head was turned the girl snatched a pistol from the brace of weapons on the washstand and thrust it under her cloak. Neither Golden Beard nor Ali Baba noticed the incident; the latter was busy connecting the three cylinders with coils of wire; the former, deeply interested, followed the operation for a moment or two, then walking over to the trunk, he lifted from it a curious little clock with two dials and set it on the railed shelf of glass above the washstand.

“Karl, haf you ship’s time?”

Ali Baba paused to fish out his watch, and the two compared timepieces. Then Golden Beard wound the clock, set the hands of one dial at the time indicated by their watches; set the hands of the other dial at 2:13; and Ali Baba, carrying a reel of copper wire from the bed to the washstand, fastened one end of it to the mechanism of the clock.

Golden Beard turned sharply on Ilse Dumont:

“I said go on deck! Did you not understand?”

The girl replied steadily:

“I understood that we had abandoned this idea for a better one.”

“There iss no better one!”

“There is! Of what advantage would it be to blow up the captain’s cabin and the bridge when it is not certain that the papers will be destroyed?”

“Listen once!” returned Golden Beard, wagging his finger in her face:

“Cabin and bridge are directly above us and there remains not a splinter large like a pin! I know. I know my bombs! I know–”

The soft voice of Ali Baba interrupted, and his shallow, lightish eyes peered around at them:

“Eet ees veree excellent plan, Johann. We do not require these papers; eet ees to destroy them we are mooch anxious” – he bent a deathly stare on Neeland – “and this yoong gentleman who may again annoy us.” He nodded confidently to himself and continued to connect the wires. “Yes, yes,” he murmured absently, “eet ees veree good plan – veree good plan to blow him into leetle pieces so beeg as a pin.”

“It is a clumsy plan!” said the girl, desperately. “There is no need for wanton killing like this, when we can–”

“Killing?” repeated Golden Beard. “That makes nothing. This English captain he iss of the naval reserve. Und this young man” – nodding coolly toward Neeland – “knows too much already. That iss not wanton killing. Also! You talk too much. Do you hear? We are due to drop anchor about 2:30. God knows there will be enough rushing to and fro at 2:13.

“Go on deck, I say, and fasten that rope ladder! Weishelm’s fishing smack will be watching; und if we do not swim for it we are caught on board! Und that iss the end of it all for us!”

“Johann,” she began tremulously, “listen to me–”

“Nein! Nein! What for a Frauenzimmer haff we here!” retorted Golden Beard, losing his patience and catching her by the arm. “Go out und fix for us our ladder und keep it coiled on the rail und lean ofer it like you was looking at those stars once!”

He forced her toward the door; she turned, struggling, to confront him:

“Then for God’s sake, give this man a chance! Don’t leave him tied here to be blown to atoms! Give him a chance – anything except this! Throw him out of the port, there!” She pointed at the closed port, evaded Golden Beard, sprang upon the sofa, unscrewed the glass cover, and swung it open.

The port was too small even to admit the passage of her own body; she realised it; Golden Beard laughed and turned to examine the result of Ali Baba’s wiring.

For a second the girl gazed wildly around her, as though seeking some help in her terrible dilemma, then she snatched up a bit of the torn sheeting, tied it to the screw of the porthole cover, and flung the end out where it fluttered in the darkness.

As she sprang to the floor Golden Beard swung round in renewed anger at her for still loitering.

“Sacreminton!” he exclaimed. “It is time you do your part! Go to your post then! We remain here until five minutes is left us. Then we join you.”

The girl nodded, turned to the door.

“Wait! You understand the plan?”

“Yes.”

“You understand that you do not go overboard until we arrive, no matter what happens?”

“Yes.”

He stood looking at her for a moment, then with a shrug he went over and patted her shoulder.

“That’s my brave girl! I also do not desire to kill anybody. But when the Fatherland is in danger, then killing signifies nothing – is of no consequence – pouf! – no lives are of importance then – not even our own!” He laughed in a fashion almost kindly and clapped her lightly once more on her shoulder: “Go, my child. The Fatherland is in danger!”

She went, not looking back. He closed and locked the door behind her and calmly turned to aid Ali Baba who was still fussing with the wires. Presently, however, he mounted the bed where Neeland sat tied and gagged; pulled from his pockets an auger with its bit, a screw-eye, and block and tackle; and, standing on the bed, began to bore a hole in the ceiling.

In a few moments he had fastened the screw-eye, rigged his block, made a sling for his bombs out of a blanket, and had hoisted the three cylinders up flat against the ceiling from whence the connecting wires sagged over the foot of the bedstead to the alarm clock on the washstand.

To give the clock more room on the glass shelf, Ali Baba removed the toilet accessories and set them on the washstand; but he had no room for a large jug of water, and, casting about for a place to set it, noticed a railed bracket over the head of the bed, and placed it there.

Then, apparently satisfied with his labours, he sat down Turk fashion on the sofa, lighted a cigarette, selected a bonbon from the box beside him, and calmly regaled himself.

Presently Golden Beard tied the cord which held up the sling in which the bombs were slung against the ceiling. He fastened it tightly to the iron frame of the bed, stepped back to view the effect, then leisurely pulled out and filled his porcelain pipe, and seated himself on the sofa beside Ali Baba.

Neither spoke; twice Golden Beard drew his watch from his waistcoat pocket and compared it carefully with the dial of the alarm clock on the washstand shelf. The third time he did this he tapped Ali Baba on the shoulder, rose, knocked out his pipe and flung it out of the open port.

Together they walked over to Neeland, examined the gag and ligatures as impersonally as though the prisoner were not there, nodded their satisfaction, turned off the electric light, and, letting themselves out, locked the door on the outside.

It lacked five minutes of the time indicated on the alarm dial.

CHAPTER XXII

TWO THIRTEEN

To Neeland, the entire affair had seemed as though it were some rather obvious screen-picture at which he was looking – some photo-play too crudely staged, and in which he himself was no more concerned than any casual spectator.

Until now, Neeland had not been scared; Ali Baba and his automatic pistol were only part of this unreality; his appearance on the scene had been fantastically classical; he entered when his cue was given by Scheherazade – this oily, hawk-nosed Eurasian with his pale eyes set too closely and his moustache hiding under his nose à la Enver Pasha – a faultless make-up, an entry properly timed and prepared. And then, always well-timed for dramatic effect, Golden Beard had appeared. Everything was en règle, every unity nicely preserved. Scheherazade had protested; and her protest sounded genuine. Also entirely convincing was the binding and gagging of himself at the point of an automatic pistol; and, as for the rest of the business, it was practically all action and little dialogue – an achievement really in these days of dissertation.

All, as he looked on at it over the bandage which closed his mouth, had seemed unreal, impersonal, even when his forced attitude had caused him inconvenience and finally pain.

But now, with the light extinguished and the closing of the door behind Golden Beard and Ali Baba, he experienced a shock which began to awaken him to the almost incredible and instant reality of things.

It actually began to look as though these story-book conspirators – these hirelings of a foreign government who had not been convincing because they were too obvious, too well done – actually intended to expose him to serious injury.

In spite of their sinister intentions in regard to him, in spite of their attempts to harm him, he had not, so far, been able to take them seriously or even to reconcile them and their behaviour with the commonplaces of the twentieth century in which he lived.

But now, in the darkness, with the clock on the washstand shelf ticking steadily, he began to take the matter very seriously. The gag in his mouth hurt him cruelly; the bands of linen that held it in began to stifle him so that his breath came in quick gasps through his nostrils; sweat started at the roots of his hair; his heart leaped, beat madly, stood still, and leaped again; and he threw himself against the strips that held him and twisted and writhed with all his strength.

Suddenly fear pierced him like a poignard; for a moment panic seized him and chaos reigned in his bursting brain. He swayed and strained convulsively; he strove to hurl all the inward and inert reserve of strength against the bonds that held him.

After what seemed an age of terrible effort he found himself breathing fast and heavily as though his lungs would burst through his straining, dilating nostrils, seated exactly as he had been without a band loosened, and the icy sweat pouring over his twitching face.

He heard himself trying to shout – heard the imprisoned groan shattered in his own throat, dying there within him.

Suddenly a key rattled; the door was torn open; the light switched on. Golden Beard stood there, his blue eyes glaring furious inquiry. He gave one glance around the room, caught sight of the clock, recoiled, shut off the light again, and slammed and locked the door.

But in that instant Neeland’s starting eyes had seen the clock. The fixed hands on one of the dials still pointed to 2:13; the moving hands on the other lacked three minutes of that hour.

And, seated there in the pitch darkness, he suddenly realised that he had only three minutes more of life on earth.

All panic was gone; his mind was quite clear. He heard every tick of the clock and knew what each one meant.

Also he heard a sudden sound across the room, as though outside the port something was rustling against the ship’s side.

Suddenly there came a click and the room sprang into full light; an arm, entering the open port from the darkness outside, let go the electric button, was withdrawn, only to reappear immediately clutching an automatic pistol. And the next instant the arm and the head of Ilse Dumont were thrust through the port into the room.

Her face was pale as death as her eyes fell on the dial of the clock. With a gasp she stretched out her arm and fired straight at the clock, shattering both dials and knocking the timepiece into the washbasin below.

For a moment she struggled to force her other shoulder and her body through the port, but it was too narrow. Then she called across to the bound figure seated on the bed and staring at her with eyes that fairly started from their sockets:

“Mr. Neeland, can’t you move? Try! Try to break loose–”

Her voice died away in a whisper as a flash of bluish flame broke out close to the ceiling overhead, where the three bombs were slung.

“Oh, God!” she faltered. “The fuses are afire!”

For an instant her brain reeled; she instinctively recoiled as though to fling herself out into the darkness. Then, in a second, her extended arm grew rigid, slanted upward; the pistol exploded once, twice, the third time; the lighted bombs in their sling, released by the severed rope, fell to the bed, the fuses sputtering and fizzling.

Instantly the girl fired again at the big jug of water on the bracket over the head of the bed; a deluge drenched the bed underneath; two fuses were out; one still snapped and glimmered and sent up little jets and rings of vapour; but as the water soaked into the match the cinder slowly died until the last spark fell from the charred wet end and went out on the drenched blanket.

She waited a little longer, then with an indescribable look at the helpless man below, she withdrew her head, pushed herself free, hung to the invisible rope ladder for a moment, swaying against the open port. His eyes were fastened on her where she dangled there against the darkness betwixt sky and sea, oscillating with the movement of the ship, her pendant figure now gilded by the light from the room, now phantom dim as she swung outward.

As the roll of the ship brought her head to the level of the port once more, she held up her pistol, shook it, and laughed at him:

“Now do you believe that I can shoot?” she called out. “Answer me some time when that mocking tongue of yours is free!”

Then, climbing slowly upward into darkness, the light, falling now across her body, now athwart her skirt, gilded at last the heels of her shoes; suddenly she was gone; then stars glittered through the meshes of the shadowy, twitching ladder which still barred the open port. And finally the ladder was pulled upward out of sight.

He waited. After a little while – an interminable interval to him – he heard somebody stealthily trying the handle of the door; then came a pause, silence, followed by a metallic noise as though the lock were being explored or picked.

For a while the scraping, metallic sounds continued steadily, then abruptly ceased as though the unseen meddler had been interrupted.

A voice – evidently the voice of the lock-picker – pitched to a cautious key, was heard in protest as though objecting to some intentions evident in the new arrival. Whispered expostulations continued for a while, then the voices became quarrelsome and louder; and somebody suddenly rapped on the door.

Then a thick, soft voice that he recognised with a chill, grew angrily audible:

“I say to you, steward, that I forbid you to entaire that room. I forbid you to disturb thees yoong lady. Do you know who I am?”

“I don’t care who you are–”

“I have authority. I shall employ it. You shall lose your berth! Thees yoong lady within thees room ees my fiancée! I forbid you to enter forcibly–”

“Haven’t I knocked? Wot’s spilin’ you? I am doing my duty. Back away from this ’ere door, I tell you!”

“You spik thees-a-way, so impolite–”

“Get out o’ my way! Blime d’you think I’ll stand ’ere jawin’ any longer?”

“I am membaire of Parliament–”

And the defiant voice of Jim’s own little cockney steward retorted, interrupting:

“Ahr, stow it! Don’t I tell you as how a lydy telephones me just now that my young gentleman is in there? Get away from that door, you blighter, or I’ll bash your beak in!”

The door trembled under a sudden and terrific kick; the wordy quarrel ceased; hurried steps retreated along the corridor; a pass key rattled in the lock, and the door was flung wide open:

“Mr. Neeland, sir – oh, my Gawd, wot ever ’ave they gone and done, sir, to find you ’ere in such a ’orrid state!”

But the little cockney lost no time; fingers and pen-knife flew; Neeland, his arms free, tore the bandage from his mouth and spat out the wad of cloth.

“I’ll do the rest,” he gasped, forcing the words from his bruised and distorted lips; “follow that man who was outside talking to you! Find him if you can. He had been planning to blow up this ship!”

“That man, sir!”

“Yes! Did you know him?”

“Yes, sir; but I darsn’t let on to him I knew him – what with ’earing that you was in here–”

“You did know him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Neeland, sir, that there cove is wot he says he is, a member of Parliament, and his name is Wilson–”

“You’re mad! He’s an Eurasian, a spy; his name is Karl Breslau – I heard it from the others – and he tried to blow up the captain’s cabin and the bridge with those three bombs lying there on the bed!”

“My God, sir – what you tell me may be so, but what I say is true, sir; that gentleman you heard talking outside the door to me is Charles Wilson, member of Parliament, representing Glebe and Wotherness; and I knew it w’en I ’anded ’im the ’ot stuff! – ’strewth I did, sir – and took my chance you’d ’elp me out if I got in too rotten with the company!”

Neeland said:

“Certainly you may count on me. You’re a brick!” He continued to rub and slap and pinch his arms and legs to restore the circulation, and finally ventured to rise to his shaky feet. The steward offered an arm; together they hobbled to the door, summoned another steward, placed him in charge of the room, and went on in quest of Captain West, to whom an immediate report was now imperative.

CHAPTER XXIII

ON HIS WAY

The sun hung well above the river mists and threw long, cherry-red beams across the choppy channel where clotted jets of steam and smoke from tug and steamer drifted with the fog; and still the captain of the Volhynia and young Neeland sat together in low-voiced conference in the captain’s cabin; and a sailor, armed with cutlass and pistol, stood outside the locked and bolted door.

Off the port bow, Liverpool spread as far as the eye could see through the shredded fog; to starboard, off Birkenhead, through a haze of pearl and lavender, the tall phantom of an old-time battleship loomed. She was probably one of Nelson’s ships, now only an apparition; but to Neeland, as he caught sight of her dimly revealed, still dominating the water, the old ship seemed like a menacing ghost, never to be laid until the sceptre of sea power fell from an enervated empire and the glory of Great Britain departed for all time. And in his Yankee heart he hoped devoutly that such disaster to the world might never come upon it.

Few passengers were yet astir; the tender had not yet come alongside; the monstrous city beyond had not awakened.

But a boat manned by Liverpool police lay off the Volhynia’s port; Neeland’s steamer trunk was already in it; and now the captain accompanied him to the ladder, where a sailor took his suitcase and the olive-wood box and ran down the landing stairs like a monkey.

“Good luck,” said the captain of the Volhynia. “And keep it in your mind every minute that those two men and that woman probably are at this moment aboard some German fishing craft, and headed for France.

“Remember, too, that they are merely units in a vast system; that they are certain to communicate with other units; that between you and Paris are people who will be notified to watch for you, follow you, rob you.”

Neeland nodded thoughtfully.

The captain said again:

“Good luck! I wish you were free to turn over that box to us. But if you’ve given your word to deliver it in person, the whole matter involves, naturally, a point of honour.”

“Yes. I have no discretion in the matter, you see.” He laughed. “You’re thinking, Captain West, that I haven’t much discretion anyway.”

“I don’t think you have very much,” admitted the captain, smiling and shaking the hand which Neeland offered. “Well, this is merely one symptom of a very serious business, Mr. Neeland. That an attempt should actually have been made to murder you and to blow me to pieces in my cabin is a slight indication of what a cataclysmic explosion may shatter the peace of the entire world at any moment now… Good-bye. And I warn you very solemnly to take this affair as a deadly serious one and not as a lark.”

They exchanged a firm clasp; then Neeland descended and entered the boat; the Inspector of Police took the tiller; the policemen bent to the oars, and the boat shot away through a mist which was turning to a golden vapour.

It was within a few boat-lengths of the landing stairs that Neeland, turning for a last look into the steaming golden glory behind him, saw the most splendid sight of his life. And that sight was the British Empire assuming sovereignty.

For there, before his eyes, militant, magnificent, the British fleet was taking the sea, gliding out to accept its fealty, moving majestically in mass after mass of steel under flowing torrents of smoke, with the phantom battle flags whipping aloft in the blinding smother of mist and sun and the fawning cut-water hurrying too, as though even every littlest wave were mobilised and hastening seaward in the service of its mistress, Ruler of all Waters, untroubled by a man-made Kiel.

And now there was no more time to be lost; no more stops until he arrived in Paris. A taxicab rushed him and his luggage across the almost empty city; a train, hours earlier than the regular steamer train, carried him to London where, as he drove through the crowded, sunlit streets, in a hansom cab, he could see news-venders holding up strips of paper on which was printed in great, black letters:

THE BRITISH FLEET SAILSSPY IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONSCHARLES WILSON, M. P., ACCUSEDMISSING MEMBER SUPPOSED TO BE KARL BRESLAU,INTERNATIONAL SPY

And he noticed knots of people pausing to buy the latest editions of the papers offered.

But Neeland had no time to see much more of London than that – glimpses of stately grey buildings and green trees; of monuments and palaces where soldiers in red tunics stood guard; the crush of traffic in the city; trim, efficient police, their helmets strapped to their heads, disentangling the streams of vehicles, halting, directing everything with calm and undisturbed precision; a squadron of cavalry in brilliant uniforms leisurely emerging from some park between iron railings under stately trees; then the crowded confusion of a railroad station, but not the usual incidents of booking and departure, because he was to travel by a fast goods train under telegraphed authority of the British Government.

And that is about all that Neeland saw of the mightiest city in the world on the eve of the greatest conflict among the human races that the earth has ever witnessed, or ever shall, D. V.

The flying goods train that took him to the Channel port whence a freight packet was departing, offered him the luxury of a leather padded armchair in a sealed and grated mail van.

Nobody disturbed him; nobody questioned him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional stolidity of official John Bull.