Читать книгу: «The Secret of the League: The Story of a Social War», страница 17

"You are not very much afraid?" he asked with kindly reassurance in his voice as he looked at her hand.

"No, not now," she replied; but as she wrote she had to still the violent trembling of her right hand with the left.

"All going well here. Send messenger Hampden with report immediately after engagement," he concluded.

"I will try to sign it myself." He succeeded in sprawling a recognisable "George Salt" across the paper, and after it wrote "Finis," which happened to be the pass-word for the day.

"Your message came through; this may possibly do the same," he remarked. He turned off the radiator as orderly as though he had reached the close of a working day, and they went out together, locking the doors behind them.

"They were attacking Hanwood when you left?" she asked with the tensest interest. They had sent off the telescript, and it seemed to Irene that they had reached the end of things.

"Yes," he replied. "But all the same," he added, as a fresh outburst of cries rose from the street, and the light through the shattered window attracted a renewed fusillade of missiles, "I think that we have kept our promise to let you be in the thick of it."

She shook her head with the very faintest smile. "That seems a very long time ago. But you, how could you come? When I sent I never thought … I never dreamed – "

"It was possible to leave," he said. "My work is done. Yes," in reply to her startled glance, "it has all happened!"

"You mean – ?" she asked eagerly.

He took a paper from his pocket-book. It was, as she saw immediately, a telescript from Sir John Hampden. It had reached him at Hanwood an hour before he left.

"I have this afternoon received a deputation of Ministerialists who have the adherence of a majority in the House without taking the Opposition into account," she read. "The Parliamentary Representation Committees throughout the country are frantically insisting upon members accepting any terms, if we will give an undertaking that the normal balance of trade and labour shall be restored at once. The Cabinet is going to pieces every hour, and the situation can no longer either be faced or ignored by the Government. There will be a great scene in the House to-night. The deputation will see me again to-morrow morning with a formal decision. I have confidential assurances that a complete acceptance is a foregone conclusion. The arrival of the Midland colliers to-night, if not of those from Monmouth, will precipitate matters."

Tears she could not hold back stood in her eyes as she returned to him the paper. "Then it has not been in vain," she said softly.

"No," he replied. "Nothing has been in vain."

They stood silently for a minute, looking back over life. So might two shipwrecked passengers have stood on a frail raft waiting for the end, resigned but not unhopeful of a larger destiny beyond, while the elements boiled and roared around them.

"It was very weak of me to send that message," said Irene presently; "the message that brought you. I suppose," she added, "that it was the message that brought you?"

"Yes, thank God!" he replied.

"And if it had been impossible for you to come? If it had been an utterly critical moment in every way, what would you have done?"

He laughed a little, quietly, as he looked at her. "The question did not arise, fortunately," he replied.

"No," she admitted; "only I felt a little curious to know, now that everything is over. It is, isn't it? There is nothing to be done?"

"Oh yes," he replied with indomitable cheerfulness. "There is always something to be done."

"A chance?" she whispered incredulously. "A chance of escape, you mean?"

"It is possible," he said. "At least, I will go and hear what they have to say."

"No! no!" she cried out, as a dreadful scene rose to her imagination. "You cannot understand. Don't you hear that?.. They would kill you."

"I do not suppose that I shall find myself popular," he said with a smile, "but I will take care. You – I think you must stay here."

"Cannot I come with you?" she pleaded. "See, I am armed."

He took the tiny weapon that she drew from her dress and looked at it with gentle amusement. It was a pretty thing of ivory and nickeled steel, an elaborate toy. He pressed the action and shook out the half-dozen tiny loaded caps – they were little more than that – upon his palm.

"I would rather that you did not use this upon a mob," he said, reloading it. "It would only exasperate, without disabling. As for stopping a rush – why, I doubt if one of these would stop a determined rabbit. You have better weapons than this."

"I suppose you are right. Only it gave me a little confidence. Then you shall keep it for a memento, if you will."

"No; it might hold off a single assailant, I suppose. I should value this much more, if I might have it." He touched a silk tie that she had about her neck, as he spoke; it was one that she had often worn. She held up her head for him to disengage it.

"Some day," he said, lingering a little over the simple operation, "you will understand many things, Irene."

"I think that I understand everything now," she replied with a brave glance. "Everything that is worth understanding."

He placed the folded tie in an inner pocket, and went down the stone steps without another word. The well was thick with smoke, but the fire had not yet spread beyond the lower rooms. Half-way down he encountered a barricade of light office furniture which the girl had flung across the stairs and drenched with oil. It was no obstacle in itself, but at the touch of a match it would have sprung into a conflagration that would have held the wildest mob at bay for a few precious moments. He picked his way through it, descended the remaining stairs, and unlocked the outer door. Beyond this was an iron curtain that had been lowered. A little door in it opened directly on to the half-dozen steps that led down to Seaton Street.

Salt looked through a crevice of the iron curtain, and listened long enough to learn that there was no one on the upper steps; for the upper steps, indeed, commanded no view of the windows, and the windows were the centres of all interest. Satisfied on this point, he quietly unlocked the door and stepped out.

CHAPTER XX
STOBALT OF SALAVEIRA

To the majority of those who thronged Seaton Street the effect of Salt's sudden – instantaneous, as it seemed – and unexpected appearance was to endow it with a dramatic, almost an uncanny, value. The front rows, especially those standing about the steps, fell back, and the further rows pressed forward. And because an undisciplined mob stricken by acute surprise must express its emotion outwardly – by silence if it has hitherto been noisy, and by exclamation if it has been silent – the shouts and turmoil in the street instantly dwindled away to nothing, like a breath of vapour passing from a window pane.

Salt raised his hand, and he had the tribute of unstirring silence, the silence for the moment of blank astonishment.

"My friends and enemies," he said, in a voice that had learned self-possession from the same school that Demosthenes had practised in, "you have been calling me for some time. In a few minutes I must listen to whatever you have to say, but first there is another matter that we must arrange. I take it for granted that when you began your spirited demonstration here you had no idea that there was a lady in the building. Not being accustomed to the sterner side of politics, so formidable a display rather disconcerted her, and not knowing the invariable chivalry of English working men, she hesitated to come out before. Now, as it is dark, and the streets of London are not what they once were, I want half a dozen good stout fellows to see the lady safely to her home."

"Be damned!" growled a voice among the mass. "What do you take us for?"

"Men," retorted Salt incisively; "or there would be no use in asking you."

"Yes, men, but famished, desperate, werewolf men," cried a poor, gaunt creature clad in grotesque rags, who stood near. "Men who have seen our women starve and sink before our eyes; men who have watched our children dying by a slower, crooler death than fire. An eye for an eye, tyrant! Your League has struck at our women folk through us."

"Then strike at ours through us!" cried Salt, stilling with the measured passion of his voice the rising murmurs of assent. "I am here to offer you a substitute. Do you think that no woman will mourn for me?" He sent his voice ringing over their heads like a prophetic knell. "The cause that must stoop to take the life of a defenceless woman is lost for ever."

As long as he could offer them surprises he could hold the mere mob in check, but there was among the crowd an element that was not of the crowd, a chosen sprinkling who were superior to the swaying passions of the moment.

"Not good enough," said a decently-dressed, comfortable-looking man, who had little that was famished, desperate, or wolfish in his appearance. "You're both there, and there you shall both stay, by God! Eh, comrades?" He spoke decisively, and made a movement as though he would head a rush towards the steps.

Salt dropped one hand upon the iron door with a laugh that sounded more menacing than most men's threats.

"Not so fast, Rorke," he said contemptuously; "you grasp too much. Even in your unpleasant business you can practise moderation. I am here, but there is no reason on earth why I should stay. Scarcely more than half an hour ago I was at Hanwood – where, by the way, your friends are being rather badly crumpled up – and you are all quite helpless to prevent me going again."

They guessed the means; they saw the unanswerable strength of his position, and recognised their own impotence. "Who are you, any way?" came a dozen voices.

"I am called George Salt: possibly you have heard the name before. Come, men," he cried impatiently, "what have you to think twice about? Surely it is worth while to let a harmless girl escape to make certain of that terrible person Salt."

There was a strangled scream in the vestibule behind. Unable to bear the suspense any longer, Irene had crept down the stairs in time to hear the last few sentences. For a minute she had stood transfixed at the horror of the position she realised; then, half-frenzied, she flung herself against Salt's arm and tried to beat her way past to face the mob.

"You shall not!" she cried distractedly. "I will not be saved at that price. I shall throw myself out of the window, into the fire, anywhere. Yes, I'm desperate, but I know what I am saying. Come back, and let us wait together; die together, if it is to be, but I don't go alone."

The crowd began to surge restlessly about in waves of excited motion. The interruption, in effect, had been the worst thing that could have happened. There were in the throng many who beneath their seething passion could appreciate the nobility of Salt's self-sacrifice; many who in the midst of their sullen enmity were wrung with admiration for Irene's heroic spirit, but the contagion to press forward dominated all. Salt had irretrievably lost his hold upon their reason, and with that hold he saw the last straw of his most forlorn hope floating away. In another minute he must either retreat into the burning building where he might at any time find the stairs impassable with smoke, or remain to be overwhelmed by a savage rush and beaten to the ground.

"Men," cried Irene desperately, "listen before you do something that will for ever make to-day shameful in the history of our country. Do you know whom you wish to kill? He is the greatest Englishman – "

There were angry cries from firebrands scattered here and there among the crowd, and a movement from behind, where the new contingents hurrying down the side streets pressed most heavily, flung the nearest rows upon the lower steps. Salt's revolver, which he had not shown before, drove them back again and gave him a moment's grace.

"Quick!" he cried. "My offer still holds good."

One man shouldered his way through to the front, and, seeing him, Salt allowed him to come on. He walked up the steps deliberately, with a face sad rather than revengeful, and they spoke together hurriedly under the shadow of the large-bore revolver.

"If it can be done yet, I'll be one of the posse to see to the young lady," said the volunteer. "I have no mind to wait for the other job that's coming."

"Take care of her; get her back into the hall," replied Salt. "Gently, very gently, friend."

Two more volunteers had their feet upon the steps, one, a butcher, reeking of the stalls, the other sleek and smug-faced, with the appearance of a prosperous artisan.

"I'll pick my men," cried Salt sharply, and his steady weapon emphasised his choice, one man passing on through the iron doorway, the other turning sharp from the insistent barrel to push his way back into the crowd with a bitter imprecation.

It was too much to hope that the position could be maintained. The impatient mob had only been held off momentarily from its purpose as a pack of wolves can be stayed by the fleeing traveller who throws from his sleigh article after article to entice their curiosity. Salt had nothing more to offer them. His life was already a hostage to the honour of those whom he had allowed to pass. Others were pressing on to him with vengeance-laden cries. The terrible irresistible forward surge of a soulless mob, when individuality is merged into the dull brutishness of a trampling herd, was launched.

"Capt'n Stobalt!" cried a lusty voice at his shoulder.

Salt turned instinctively. A man in sailor's dress, with the guns and star of his grade upon his sleeve, had climbed along the arch of the railings with a sailor's resourcefulness, and had reached his ear. Salt remembered him quite well, but he did not speak a word.

"Ah, sir, I thought that warn't no other voice in the world, although the smoke befogged my eyes a bit. Keep back, you gutter rats!" he roared above every other sound, rising up in his commanding position and balancing himself by a stanchion of the gate; "d'ye think you know who you're standing up before, you toggle-chested galley-sharks! Salt? Aye, he's salt enough! 'Tis Capt'n Stobalt of the old Ulysses. Stobalt of Salaveira!"

Three years before, the moment would have found Salt cold, as cold as ice, and as unresponsive, but he had learned many things since then, and sacrificed his pride and reticence on many altars.

He saw before him a phalanx of humanity startled into one common expression of awe and incredulity; he saw the hostile wave that was to overwhelm him spend itself in a sharp recoil. By a miracle the fierce lust of triumphant savagery had died out of the starved, pathetic faces now turned eagerly to him; by a miracle the gathering roar for vengeance had sunk into an expectant hush, broken by nothing but the whispered repetition of his name on ten thousand lips. He saw in a flash a hundred details of the magic of that name; he knew that if ever in his life he must throw restraint and moderation to the winds and paint his rôle in broad and lurid colours, that moment had arrived, and at the call he took his destiny between his hands.

They saw him toss his weapon through the railings into the space beneath, marked him come to the edge of the step and stand with folded arms defenceless there before them, and the very whispers died away in breathless anticipation.

"Yes," he cried with a passionate vehemence that held their breath and stirred their hearts, "I am Stobalt of Salaveira, the man who brought you victory when you were trembling in despair. I saved England for you then, but that was when men loved their country, and did not think it a disgraceful thing to draw a sword and die for her. What is that to you to-day, you who have been taught to forget what glory means; and what is England to you to-day, you whose leaders have sold her splendour for a higher wage?"

"No! No!" cried a thousand voices, frantic to appease the man for whose blood they had been howling scarcely a minute before. "You shall be our leader! We will follow you to death! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt for ever! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt and England!"

The frenzied roar of welcome, the waving hands, the hats flung high, the mingled cries caught from lip to lip went rolling up the street, kindling by a name and an imperishable memory other streets and other crowds into a tumult of mad enthusiasm. Along Pall Mall, through Trafalgar Square, into the Strand and Whitehall, north by Regent Street and the Haymarket to Piccadilly, running east and west, splitting north and south, twisting and leaping from group to group and mouth to mouth, ran the strange but stirring cry, carrying wonder and concern on its wing, but always passing with a cheer.

Seven years had passed since the day of Salaveira, and the memory of it was still enough to stir a crowd to madness. For there had been no Salaveiras since to dim its splendour. Seven years ago the name of Salaveira had brought pallor to the cheek, and the thought of what was happening there stole like an icy cramp round the heart of every Englishman. The nation had grown accustomed to accept defeat on land with the comfortable assurance that nothing could avert a final victory. Its pride was in its navy: invincible!..

The war that came had been of no one's seeking, but it came, and the nation called upon its navy to sweep the presumptuous enemy from off the seas. Then came a pause: a rumour, doubted, disbelieved, but growing stronger every hour. The English fleets, not so well placed as they might have been, "owing to political reasons that made mobilisation inadvisable while there was still a chance of peace being maintained," were unable to effect a junction immediately, and were falling back before the united power of the New Alliance. Hour after hour, day after day, night after night, crowds stood hopefully, doubtfully, incredulously, in front of the newspaper office windows, waiting for the news that never came. The fleets had not yet combined. The truth first leaked, then blazed: they were unable to combine! Desperately placed on the outer line they were falling back, ever falling back into a more appalling isolation. A coaling station had been abandoned just where its presence proved to have been vital; a few battleships had been dropped from the programme, and the loss of their weight in the chain just proved fatal.

Men did not linger much at Fleet Street windows then; they slunk to and fro singly a hundred times a day, read behind the empty bulletins with poignant intuition, and turned silently away. In the mourning Capital they led nightmare lives from which they could only awake to a more definite despair, and the first word of the hurrying newsboy's raucous shout sent a sickening wave of dread to every heart. There was everything to fear, and nothing at all to hope. Could peace be made – not a glorious, but a decent, living peace? Was – was even London safe? Kind friends abroad threw back the answers in the fewest, crudest words. England would have to sue for peace on bended knees and bringing heavy tribute in her hands. London lay helpless at the mercy of the foe to seize at any moment when it suited him.

All this time Commander Stobalt, in command of the Ulysses by the vicissitudes of unexpected war and separated from his squadron on detached service, was supposed to be in Cura Bay, a thousand miles away from Salaveira, flung there with the destroyers Limpet and Dabfish by the mere backwash of the triumphant allied fleet. According to the rules of naval warfare he ought to have been a thousand miles away; according to the report of the allies' scouts he was a thousand miles away. But miraculously one foggy night the Ulysses loomed spectrally through the shifting mist that drifted uncertainly from off the land and rammed the first leviathan that crossed her path, while the two destroyers torpedoed her next neighbour. Then, before leviathans 3 and 4 had begun to learn from each other what the matter was, the Ulysses was between them, sprinkling their decks and tops with small shell, and perforating their water-line and vital parts with large shell from a range closer than that at which any engagement had been fought out since the day when the Treasury had begun to implore the Admiralty to impress upon her admirals what a battleship really cost before they sent her into action. For the Ulysses had everything to gain and nothing but herself to lose, and when morning broke over Salaveira's untidy bay, she had gained everything, and lost so little that even the New Alliance took no pride in mentioning it in the cross account.

It was, of course, as every naval expert could have demonstrated on the war-game board, an impossible thing to do. Steam, searchlights, wireless telegraphy, quick-firing guns, and a hundred other innovations had effaced the man; and the spirit of the Elizabethan age was at a discount. What Drake would have done, or Hawkins, what would have been a sweet and pleasing adventure to Sir Richard Grenville, or another Santa Cruz to Blake, would have been in their heirs unmitigated suicide by the verdict of any orthodox court martial. Largely imbued with the Elizabethan spirit – the genius of ensuring everything that was possible, and then throwing into the scale a splendid belief in much that seemed impossible – Stobalt succeeded in doing what perhaps no one else would have succeeded in doing, merely because perhaps no one else would have tried.

"Stobalt of Salaveira! Come down and lead us!" The wild enthusiasm, the strange unusual cries, went echoing to the sky and reverberating down every street and byway. Behind barred doors men listened to the shout, and wondered; crouching in alleys, tramping the road with no further hope in life, beggars and out-casts heard the name and dimly associated it with something pleasant in the past. It met the force of special constables hastening from the west; it fell on the ears of Mr Strummery, driving by unfrequented ways towards the House. "Stobalt and England! Stobalt for us! Stobalt and the Navy!" It was like another Salaveira night with Stobalt there among them – the man who was too modest to be fêted, the man whose very features were unknown at home, Stobalt of Salaveira!

Imagine it. Measure by the fading but not yet quite forgotten memory of another time of direful humiliation and despair what Salaveira must have been. They had passed a week of fervent exaltation, a week of calm assurance, a week of rather tremulous hope, and for the last quarter a long dumb misery that conveyed no other sense of time in later years than that of formless night. They were waiting for the stroke of doom. Then at midnight came the sudden tumult from afar, sounding to those who listened in painful silence strangely unlike the note of defeat, the frantic, mingled shouts, the tearing feet in the road beneath, the wild bells pealing out, the guns and rockets to add to the delirium of the night, and the incredible burden of the intoxicating news: "Great Victory! Salaveira Relieved!! Utter Annihilation of the Blockading Fleet!!!"

The Philosopher might withdraw to solitude and moralise; the Friend of Humanity stand aside, pained that his countrymen should possess so much human nature, but to the great primitive emotional heart of the community the choice lay between going out and shouting and staying in and going mad. Never before in history had there been a victory that so irresistibly carried the nation off its feet. To the populace it had seemed from beginning to end to contain just those qualities of daredevilry and fortuitous ease that appeal to the imagination. They were quite mistaken; the conception had been desperate, but beyond that the details of the relief of Salaveira had been as methodical, as painstaking, and as far-seeing as those which had marked the civil campaign now drawing to a close.

That was why a famished, starving mob remembered Salaveira. They would have stoned a duke or burned a bishop with very little compunction, but Stobalt ranked among their immortals. They did not even seem to question the mystery of Salt's identity. As the flames began to lap out of the lower windows of Trafalgar Chambers, and it became evident that their work there was done, a stalwart bodyguard ranged themselves about his person and headed the procession. Hurriedly committing Irene to the loyal sailor's charge, Stobalt resigned himself good-humouredly to his position until he could seize an opportunity discreetly to withdraw.

Not without some form of orderliness the great concourse marched into the broader streets. Stobalt had no idea of their destination; possibly there was no preconcerted plan, but – as such things happen – a single voice raised in a pause gave the note. It did not fall on barren ground, and the next minute the countless trampling feet moved to a brisker step, and the new cry went rolling ominously ahead to add another terror to the shadowy phantasmagoria of the ill-lit streets.

"To Westminster! Down with the Government! To Westminster!"