The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE CITY OF PERIL
The fog groped and felt its way along the water-front. Then it crept up to the throat of the city, like a grey hand, and strangled Broadway into an ominous quietness.
It tightened its grip, as the day grew older, leaving the cross-streets from Union Square to the Battery clotted with congested traffic. It brought on an untimely protest of blinking street-lamps, as uncannily bewildering as the mid-day cock-crowing of a solar eclipse. It caused the vague and shadowy walls of skyscrapers to blossom into countless yellow window tiers, as close-packed as the scales of a snake. Bells sounded from gloom-wrapt shipping along the saw-tooth line of the river slips, tolling the watches and falling silent and tolling again, as they might have tolled in mid-ocean, or on some lonely waterway that led to the uttermost ends of the earth.
Now and then, out of the distance, a river-ferry or a car-float tug could be heard growl ing and whimpering for room, as it wrangled over its right-of-way. Everything moved slowly through the muffled streets. Carriages crept across the sepulchral quietness with a strange and uncouth reverence, like tourists through a catacomb. Surface cars, crawling funereally forward, felt their way with gong-strokes, as blind men feel their way with stick-taps. An occasional taxicab, swinging tentatively out of a side-street, slewed and skidded in the greasy mud. Lonely drivers watched from their seats, watched like sea captains from bridge-ends when ice has invaded their sea lanes.
Under the gas-lamps, dulled to a reddish yellow, passed a thin scattering of pedestrians. A touch of desolation clung about each figure that groped its way through the short-vistaed street, as though the thoroughfare it trod were a lonely moraine and the figure itself the last man that walked a ruined world. It was the worst fog that New York had known for years; the city lay under it like a mummy swathed in grey.
Yet the gloom seemed to crown it with a new wonder, to endow it with a new dignity. That all too shallow tongue of land that is lipped by the East and North rivers took on strange and undreamt-of distances. It lay engulfed in twilight mysteries, enriched with unlooked-for possibilities. Its narrow acres of brick and stone and asphalt became something unbounded and infinite, as bewildering and wide as the open Atlantic. It seemed to harbour fantastic potentialities. It seemed to release the spirit of romance, as moonlight unfetters a lover s lips.
Yet Lingg, the wireless operator of the Laminian, became more and more alarmed at the opacity of this fog. He felt, as he burrowed mole-like across the mist-blanketed city, that he had been a fool to leave the ship. He should have listened to reason. And now he had missed his way. He was lost in the very heart of that vast and undecipherable wilderness, which had always filled him with a vague fear, even in the open sunlight, where its serrated skyline reminded him of a waiting trap-jaw. He was hopelessly at sea in the silence which surrounded him, overawed by the quietness which the turn of a street-corner might convert into some perilous ambuscade. Heilig, the engineer, had been right. He'd been a fool to come ashore.
He recalled, a little enviously, the figure of the engineer, the morose and lank and slatternly figure in ragged carpet-slippers, leaning against the ship's rail and smoking the long-stemmed German pipe with its blue china bowl. He remembered the engineer's impassive stare and his almost placid grunt of protest as he wheeled slowly round towards the solid land that he always seemed to hate.
"Where yuh off to, son?" he asked, as Lingg dropped to the splintered stringpiece of the wharf. The Laminian was chafing and fretting against that stringpiece just as his own soul had been chafing and fretting against the desolation of her empty decks.
"Ashore," Lingg answered, resolutely enough, yet against all the voices of better judgment.
"Wimmin?" demanded the laconic figure against the rail.
"No!" exploded the impatient youth.
"Then what yuh after?" persisted his gloomy interlocutor.
"What am I after?" echoed the other, having no answer ready.
"What d'yuh want with all that?" demanded the engineer, with a contemptuous pipe-wave that embraced the entire island of Manhattan.
"I guess I want to mind my own business," was the reproving answer. It was followed by a contemplative eye-blink or two from the man in the carpet-slippers. But the disgust did not go out of his face.
"No good comes o' knowin hell-holes like this," he at last averred, with a slow and sagacious side-wag of his head. He spat into the slip water; it was a rite of his infinite contempt.
"I'm not going beyond Broadway," the half-repentant Lingg stopped to explain, marvelling at that strange and lonely seaman's fixed distrust of solid land. He did not think it worth while to enlarge on how sick he was of the ship stink and the quietness, of the fumes of rotting fruit, of the heavy musk-smell of harbour water, and the febrile rattle and clatter of donkey engines.
"Yuh'll find bad enough b'tween here and Broadway," avowed the placid misanthrope at the ship's rail, contemplating his pipe-smoke as though it were incense rising before the epitomised wisdom of all the ages.
But Lingg was not altogether looking for the bad. He had been remembering how one of the junior officers of the Pretoria, when in port, spent his two riotous days riding up and down in the Fifth Avenue 'buses, the delirious 'buses, which he described as "bee-hives of swarming beauty," where he was ignored and elbowed and walked over by "the finest women who ever wore feathers," to his hungering heart's content. And Lingg, too, was hungering for some glimpse of life beyond that of a dirty fore-deck; for a sight of faces less satyr-like than that of a brandy-steeped sea captain. He wanted to see light and colour and movement. The unpurged emotional tracts of youth ached for some undiscerned adventure. But above all he was swayed by a wordless, yet none the less compelling hunger to behold the faces of women and girls. Some subliminal sex-hunger, after so many empty days at sea, made him long for that vague upper world which seemed embodied in this very word, Girls. He wanted to see them, good or bad, with painted faces or pure. It scarcely mattered, so long as he could look at them. They would all be goddesses to him, Olympian beings who breathed some diviner air, trailing clouds of mystery after their most casual footsteps. He did not ask to walk or speak with them. Their lowliest skirt-swish would seem only too like the ruffle of angel wings. He merely wanted to brush against them, indeterminately, in the city's crowded places, to watch their coming and going, to hear their occasional voices, to let his eyes dwell on their faces as a seaman looks at passing land-lights. For Lingg was still young, clean-living and clean-thoughted beyond the ways of the sailor. Heilig's assistant on the Laminian had more than once spoken of him as "Mealy-mouth."
And then, amazingly enough, came the girl herself, without sign or warning.
Where she fluttered or fell from he scarcely knew. It was somewhere in one of the quieter side-streets, and they were standing face to face, almost, when he looked up and saw her. Had he seen a mermaid over the ship's rail it could not have startled him more. There was no evading the situation; there was no chance of being mistaken. It was Adventure, in answer to his prayer. It was Romance, as he had asked. And he had never so much as clapped eyes on her before. Nor was her face a painted face. There was no betraying cupid-bow streak of carmine on the softly smiling lips. There was no barbaric black gum on the undrooping eye lashes, no tell-tale blue paint on the eyelids. There were no disquieting blandishments, no sidelong and predatory glances, no ensnaring simulation of tender levity. His startled eyes could detect no granite savagery under the velvet of her unconcern. She seemed merely Woman incarnate to him, the sort of woman he had sometimes dreamt about on tropic nights when the Southern Cross swung low to the sky line.
"You are Gustav Lingg," she said quietly, and as plain as day, while his wide eyes still studied every tint and shadow and line of her untroubled face. On that face he seemed to see nothing but a gentle yet determined abstraction.
"Y—yes," he stammered, vacuously, as though her statement had been a question. A faint tingle of something that was neither fear nor delight went needling up and down his back bone.
"I want to talk to you," the woman said, quite gravely. "I must talk to you—alone."
He knew that she had turned and joined him as he moved wonderingly forward, with his staring eyes still on her. Then the futility, the hopelessness, the impossibility of it all suddenly came home to him. He was conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Courage sank away from him, confidence sucked out of him, like water out of an unplugged bath-bowl.
If she had only stood before him less alluring, less Olympian in her loveliness, he might have been less bewildered. If she had been the Other Kind, openly and unequivocally, he might have grown less afraid of her.
But he felt and knew it was a mistake, a foolish and colossal mistake. A vague and slowly mounting fear took the place of his earlier astonishment. The city itself had already intimidated him. He remembered the engineer's opprobrious summing-up of its perils. There was something amiss, terribly amiss.
He raised his hat from his head awkwardly, muttering he scarcely knew what, as he heard her voice again. He backed away from her as she essayed to draw nearer, and stumbled, almost drunkenly, while she stood regarding him in open wonder. Then he turned and fled from her, fled from her, abashed and tingling, fled from her blindly, like a field-mouse from a coiled blacksnake.
He did not stop until he had rounded a street-corner. He felt, as he did so, that he was demeaning his manhood before some possible high adventure. He vaguely suspected that one of life's vast occasions had slipped away from him unrecognised. But he was still afraid, foolishly afraid. He was glad to dip deeper and deeper into the city, as though it were a cleansing bath that might wash away his lubberly awkwardness. He was glad when the fog crept into the streets and helped to obliterate him and his shame. He was glad to wander unknown and unrecognised about the grey-draped solitude that engulfed him.
He knew that the woman had not followed him. But all that afternoon he wandered and tarried and walked about with the feeling that he was not alone. He kept looking over his shoulder from time to time, pondering some wordless yet persistent sense of disquiet. He felt as though he were being shadowed. He could not shake off the impression that some vague figure or two was guardedly dogging his footsteps.
This sense of being shadowed grew stronger as night came on. It made him doubly anxious to get back to his ship, to know the security of his bald, little, white-painted cabin. It caused him to reiterate to himself the engineer's morose dictum that the city was not to be trusted. He had hungered for the Unexpected; he had been restless for his emprising hour or two on land. But this, he muttered to himself, was the kind of night that took all the curl out of Romance. He was not worthy of the venture. He was better suited to the quietness of a ship s cabin. He disliked the thought of the two pacing shadows that seemed to be following him through the fog. He wanted the Laminian's dirty fore-deck once more under his feet.
He designedly kept out of all danger zones, to make security doubly sure. A thick-voiced man with a black muffler about his throat had trailed after him to demand if he had no old clothes to dispose of. But he did not so much as stop to answer. A stranger in a Stetson hat, still later, caught companionably at his arm and implored him to drink with him. But he freed himself sharply and kept on his way. A figure or two blocked his path ominously, but he skirted them, as a careful pilot skirts his channel-buoys. He did not care to run risks. He felt that he was still in the land of the enemy. He kept to the open, blindly and doggedly. He knew but one goal, and that goal lay beyond the Laminian's odorous gangplank. He fought his devious way towards it, like a spawning sock-eye fighting its way to a river source.
He hurried along the fog-wrapt cañons, still haunted by the impression of some unknown figure dogging his steps. He felt, as night and the fog deepened together, that the city was nothing more than a many-channeled river-bed, and that he waded along its bottom, breathing a new element, too thick for air, too etherealised for water. He saw streets that were new to him, streets where the misted globes of electric lights became an undulating double row of white tulips. Then he stumbled into Broadway. But it was a Broadway with the soft pedal on. Its roar of sound was so muffled he scarcely knew it. Then he came to a square where the scattered lamp-globes looked like bubbles of gold caught in tree-branches. Under these tree-branches he saw loungers on benches, mysterious and motionless figures, like broken rows of statuary, sleeping men in the final and casual attitudes of death. Above these figures he could see wet maple-leaves, hanging as still and lifeless as though they had been stencilled from sheets of green copper. His eyes fell on floating street-signs, blurs of coloured electrics cut off from the in visible walls which backed them. He caught glimpses of the softened bulbs of automatic signs, like moving gold-fish seen through frosted glass. Then he saw more lights, serried lights, subdued into balloons of misty pearl. They threaded the façade of some gigantic hotel, like jewel-strings about the throat of a barbaric woman. But he could not remember the place. And again he floundered on towards the water-front, disquieted with vague and foolish thoughts, as much oppressed by the orderly streets as though he were escaping from some sea-worn harbour slum of vice and outlawry. He still wanted his cabin, as a long-harried chipmunk wants its tree-hole.
He was well out of it, he told himself reassuringly, though he still kept wondering why the woman had stopped him. He remembered details of her dress, the sense of assurance and well-being in her mere figure poise, the open way in which her eyes had met his. He began to wonder why he had lacked the audacity to respond to that clear challenge of fate. He demanded of himself why he had run away from the very thing he had been seeking.
He knew, as the growl of the ferry-whistles grew louder, that he was nearing the river. He felt as ungainly as a tortoise scuffling back to its water-edge of escape, but his confidence began to return to him as he found himself nearer and nearer his brink of delivery. He could perceive the ridiculous figure he had cut. He could even realise that he had defeated his own ends. He was conscious of a growing overtone of discontent, a peevish resentment against his own white-livered irresolution. And he would go aboard, and the next day be out at sea, with the mystery of it all still unanswered.
He strode on through the fog. It was not until he came to a narrow street-crossing between two blank-windowed warehouses that he saw his way obstructed. But he noticed, as he came to a sudden stop, that his path was barred by a cab with an open door. It blocked the crossing, very much as a Neapolitan corricolo manœuvres for a fare by cutting across a pedestrian's path.
The youth drew up and peered in through that door, with a slightly quickened pulse, wondering why the impassive figure on the box should be thus blocking his way.
Then he saw that the cab was not empty.
Leaning quietly forward from the seat was an intent and waiting figure—a woman's figure. It was the woman from whom he had so ignominiously fled.
He felt, this time, no horripilating tingle of shock. His fund of wonder seemed to be exhausted. He stood staring at her, almost abstractedly, with the mild and resigned bewilderment of a man who has seen lightning strike twice in the same spot.
"Quick!" said the woman, with an almost imperious movement of her gloved hand.
"What?" asked Lingg, inadequately, irrelevantly.
"I wanted to warn you," the woman whispered, as she moved back on the cab seat, obviously to make room for him. "I must warn you—but not here."
"Of what?" asked Lingg. He saw that she was quite alone in the cab.
"Come!" she commanded, ignoring his question.
He stepped into the hooded gloom like a coerced schoolboy. He was not afraid, he assured himself. It was merely that he was unwilling to be made the blind tool of forces he could not comprehend.
"Of what?" he repeated, noticing that the cab moved forward the moment the door had slammed shut.
"Not to sail on the Laminian," said the woman at his side. He could detect a subtle perfume about her presence, a flowery and effeminising perfume which made him think of New England village gardens. An older man would have thought of boudoirs.
"Why not?" he asked. The woman could see that he was not as impressed as he might be.
"It will not be safe."
"It never is, on those third-class boats."
He insisted on being literal or nothing.
"But there are dangers ahead of you dangers you don't and can't understand."
"I don't see how I can help that," said the youth of little imagination. "When the Company puts me on a ship or gives me a station anywheres, I've got to stick to it."
"Then you don't believe me?"
"It's not a matter of believing. It's more a matter of not understanding you."
A change seemed to creep over her, a lightening and relaxing change, such as would come to the New England garden he had thought of when it passed from shadow to sunlight.
"Would you like to understand me?" she asked, turning her eyes full on his somewhat abashed young face. He blushed and tingled under the directness of her gaze.
"How could I?" he succeeded in stammering out.
"Won't you stay and try?" she murmured, pregnantly.
The prospect did not exactly appal him. It merely puzzled him now as something beyond the reach of his delimited imagination. The curl hadn't been taken out of Romance, after all, he told himself. He could see the brooding spirit of her, incarnate before his very eyes, coifed and gowned like a goddess. But the very radiance of the vision made him doubly afraid of her.
"I'm afraid I'll have to get back," was his hesitating rejoinder.
"Back where?"
"To my ship," he faltered.
"But you mustn't!" she murmured, with a solicitous hand on his still tingling arm.
"I've got to get back," he persisted, reaching and fumbling for the door.
"But not yet—not here," she begged him.
"I must," he declared, trying to stand on his feet under the cramping cab-hood, and tugging at the door-handle.
"Only listen to me for a moment," the woman was saying, almost pleadingly.
He allowed her to draw him gently back into the seat beside her. But disquiet had again taken possession of him.
"Am I so terrible?" she asked, with her hand still on his arm. Her voice was low and quiet; her half-smiling lips were parted a little, giving a touch of languid abandon to her otherwise intent and earnest face. And here was the very thing he had been so restlessly in search of; but now that it was before him, within his grasp, he was wordlessly afraid of it.
"N—no, you're not terrible," he jerkily reassured her, as though the words had to be paid out like links of a rusted cable.
"You're not afraid of me?" she inquired, with a disarming soft intimacy of tone that sent the blood once more rioting through his veins. He did not answer. He merely gazed at her in in articulate and tingling wonder.
"You're not, are you?" she persisted, stooping forward and turning her body about in the cab seat so that her face was directly before him, within a foot of his own.
"No," he managed to say.
He noticed that she almost closed her eyes.
"Then kiss me," he heard her low voice murmuring, with her parted red lips lifting and creeping audaciously up to his, her hand already on his shoulder.
He drew back, white and stunned. It was beyond reason. It was so beyond reason that it brought a hundred unkenneled suspicions yelping and snapping about him. Things that once seemed accidental and trivial took on a new significance. He could carpenter inconsequentialities into dim and towering structures of intrigue. He was afraid of himself and his surroundings.
The woman must have seen this the very moment she locked her arms about his reluctant neck, for her face changed and hardened. Even before he saw that change, though, he was crowding and struggling and pulling away from her.
The entire situation was so unlooked-for, so startling, that no new turn of it could add to his sense of surprise. He was conscious of the fact that she was crying out, while she still clung to him, and that the cab had come to a sudden stop. He noticed a figure at the door and a man's huge hand dart in towards him as it swung open. And still again he heard her shriek of simulated fear. It might even have been anger—he was not sure; he could not fathom it all. But he felt, dimly, that he was being tricked into some thing beyond his understanding; that the whole thing was some sort of trap. He resented being clawed at; he resented the way in which the man at the cab door was dragging and pulling him to the street. There was no longer any doubt as to that intruder's immediate intention.
The wireless operator's one passion was to escape, to fight his way back to freedom. He remembered his ship and his waiting station, and how Heilig, the engineer, would have the laugh on him.
He was fighting like a terrier by this time, striking out blindly, in a frenzy of sheer panic. He was stung by the injustice of it all, and kept calling and shouting for help as he fought, fortified by the memory that his hands were clean, that he had done nothing amiss.
He was dazed and bruised, but he still fought and shouted, imagining it was his opponent's mad intention to kill him. He saw the shifting figures of men appear through the fog, and stand about in a circle, impassively watching his struggles. But still he fought and shouted.
His cries brought a patrolman with a night-stick in his hand. He could see the circle disrupted and scattered. He could hear the relieving sound of the falling club on the body of the brute above him, and sharp oaths and grunts, and then cries and counter-cries.
Then a fourth figure pushed peremptorily in through the re-formed circle of onlookers, a figure not in uniform, but quick-acting and authoritative. This newcomer seemed to pull the entangled and struggling trio apart in one breath, as a child separates a puzzle-picture. He flung back the clubbing patrolman. He swept aside the still fighting second figure. He dragged the fallen operator to his feet, with a sharp question or two at the other man, who was blowing his nose on a handkerchief maculated with blood. Then he called out to the waiting cab-driver: "To the police station, straight!" and all but carried the dazed operator back into the waiting carriage.
He turned at the step, before following the operator into that cab, and spoke a crisp word or two to the still blinking patrolman. Then he lurched angrily and impatiently into the cab and slammed the door shut as they went clattering and swinging away through the heavy fog.
He left the patrolman gazing after him through the gloom, his idle night-stick dangling from his wrist like a bird's broken wing.
"Can you beat it!" gasped the astounded officer to the other man busy prodding and feeling his own body, very much as a housewife might explore a market-fowl.
"You'd beat it, all right!" retorted the other, disgustedly, with seismic-like rumblings of the chest. "You hare-brained bulls'd beat anything!"
"But what's this all about, anyway?" demanded the bewildered officer, shouldering out through the crowd with the other man at his heels.
"God only knows," was that other man's retort, morosely brushing his battered hat with the palm of his hand.
"But who is he?"
"Who's who?"
"The guy who flashed that Central Office shield."
"One o' Wilkie's men."
"Wilkie?"
"Chief Wilkie, of the Washington Bureau; and we've made a nice mess o' this little coup o' his between us!"
"Then where's the rib figurin in it?" asked the still perplexed officer.
"The rib?"
"The woman with the Fifth Avenue make-up."
"Oh, that s Cherry Purcelle—she's the come-on for the Washington Bureau people."
"Bureau—what Bureau?" asked the officer, still in the dark.
"The Secret Service Bureau, you pin-head!" The man speaking had just discovered a rib abrasion that made him wince with pain.
"Then why t'ell didn't you put me wise? I might've fanned the bean-boxes off some o' you folks!"
"You make me sick!" said the disgusted one, still preoccupiedly feeling about a bruised shoulder. "What'd you suppose it's called Secret Service for, if you've got to advertise it on every street-corner?"
The officer was slow to comprehend the situation.
"But I thought Wilkie only muckraked round after counterfeiters."
"He does any old thing his Uncle Sam sets him at."
"Then what're they holdin up that quiet-lookin young feller for? What're they runnin' him in for, anyway?"
"Mebbe they don't want him to sail to-morrow."
"But why shouldn't he sail to-morrow? Has he done anything?"
"Oh, cut it out!—cut it out! and get me to the nearest drugstore. I hate dirty work like this!"
"Then why're you doin' it?"
The other man did not answer, and the question was repeated.
"War's war!" was all he said. And he emitted the laconism as though he had no love for the subject from which it sprang.
"You may as well put me wise," suggested the still waiting officer.
"I said this was Secret Service, didn't I?" grunted the other. "Where'd you say that drug-store was?"