MAN BETWEEN TWO MASTERS
There was something in the situation that was more than gruesome, something that was peculiarly unnerving.
In his anticipation of this moment as he had sat almost by the bedside, Hampden had conjectured that the dying man would perhaps lift a hand or move his head uneasily with the first instinct of returning consciousness. A sigh, a groan, might escape him, incoherent words follow, then broken but rational expressions of his suffering, and entreaties that something might be done to ease the pain. Or perhaps, after realising his position, he would nerve himself to betray no unmanly weakness, and, in the words of the significant old phrase, "turning his face to the wall," endure in stoical silence to the end. It would be painful, perhaps acutely distressing, but it would not be unnatural.
There had been no groan, no sigh or broken words, no indication of weakness or suffering behind that half-closed door, nothing but the curious clock-like sound that had gone before the voice. And that voice! It was as full and strong, as vibrant and as ordinary as his own could ever be. Standing in the middle of the living-room Sir John could not deceive himself. It came from the other room where a minute before he had left the dying—yes, the almost dead—man lying with stark outline on the bed. There was no alternative: it was from those pallid lips that the words had come, it was by that still, inanimate man that they were spoken.
The suddenness of the whole incident was shocking in itself, but that was not all; the mere contrast to what he had looked for was disconcerting, but there was something more; the curious unexpected nature of the request, if request it was, was not without its element of mystery, but above and beyond all else was the thought—the thought that for a dreadful moment held his heart and soul in icy bonds—what sight when he returned to the inner room, as return at once he must, what gruesome sight would meet his eyes?
What phantoms his misgivings raised, every man may conjecture for himself. Follow, then, another step in imagination, and having given a somewhat free and ghastly fancy rein, push the chamber door cautiously and inch by inch, or fling it boldly open as you will; then pause upon the threshold, as Hampden did, in sharp surprise.
Nothing was altered, no single detail had undergone the slightest change! On the bed, rigid and very sharp beneath the single unclean sheet, lay the body of the mangled man. Not a fold of his shroud-like wrapping differed from its former line, it did not seem possible that a breath had stirred him.
Had the voice been a trick of the imagination? Hampden knew, as far as mortal man can be sure of any mortal sense, that the voice had been as real as his life itself. Then——? It occurred to him in a flash: here was the stage of under-consciousness of which Dr Stone had spoken. Of his pain, the accident, where he at that moment lay, and all his real surroundings, the sufferer knew nothing, and never would know. But out of the shock and shattering, some of the delicate machinery of the brain still kept its balance, and would continue to exercise its functions to the end.
It was an ordeal, but it had to be done. It was the purpose for which he had been summoned. Sir John moved to the bedside, nerved himself to watch the ashen face, and said slowly and distinctly: "Mr Tubes is not here. Do you wish to see him?"
There was just a perceptible pause, and then the bloodless lips replied. But not the faintest tremor of a movement stirred the body otherwise from head to foot, and in the chilling absence of expression the simile occurred to Hampden of bubbles rising from some unseen working to the surface of an inky pool.
"I have come on purpose. Let him be told that it is most important."
Hampden had to feel his way. The woman had mentioned that Flak was at least on terms of acquaintanceship with Mr Tubes. The doctor had surmised that the man had something he must say before he died. But was this the one true line, or a mere vagary of the sub-conscious state—a twist in the tortuous labyrinth that would lead to nothing?
"He is not here at present," he said. "If you will tell me what you wish to say I will write it down, so that it cannot fail to reach him."
"No. I cannot tell any one else. I must see him."
"Mr Tubes is a very busy man. You know that he is the Home Secretary. Is it of sufficient importance to telegraph for him?"
This time the answer followed on his last word with startling rapidity. Until the last phase that was the only variation in the delivery of the sentences—that sometimes there was a pause as though the working of the mind had to make a revolution before it reached the point of the mental clutch, at others it dropped into its gear at once.
"It is important enough to send a coach and four for him," was the reply.
Hampden might not be convinced of this but he was satisfied of one thing: the coherence of idea was being regularly maintained. How long would it last? It occurred to him to put the question.
"I shall have to go out either to send the telegram myself or to find some one who will take it," he explained. "Until Mr Tubes comes or sends his reply will you remain here?"
It was rather eerie to be holding conversation with the fragment of a man's brain with the man himself for all practical purposes eliminated. But he seemed to have arrived at a practical understanding with the centre of sub-consciousness.
"I will remain," was the unhesitating reply, and Hampden felt assured that the line would not be lost.
He had not definitely settled in his mind what to do when he opened the door leading on to the common stairs. A small child who had been loitering outside in a crouching position staggered back in momentary alarm at his sudden appearance. It was a ragged girl, perhaps ten or twelve years old, with cruelly unwieldy boots upon her stockingless feet, matted hair, and a precocious face full of unchildish knowledge. The inference that she had been applying either an eye or an ear to the keyhole was overwhelming.
Her fear—it was only the slum child's instinct of flight—died out when she saw the gentleman. Toffs (so ran her experience) do not hit you for nothing.
"Ee's in there yet, ain't ee?" she whispered, coming back boldly and looking up confidentially to his face. "I 'eard yer talking, but I couldn't tell what yer said. 'Ow long d'yer think 'e'll last?"
Sir John looked down at the child, the child who had never been young, in shuddering pity.
"It was me what picked 'is 'at up, but they wouldn't let me go in," she continued, as though the fact gave her a standing in the case. "Did yer see it in there?" She looked proudly at her right hand with horrid significance.
"Come in here," he said, after considering. "Can you run an errand?"
Her face reflected gloating eagerness as she entered, her attitude had just a tinge of pleasurable awe. He did not permit her to go further than the hall.
"Is it to do with 'im?" she asked keenly. "Yehs!"
"It is to go to the post office in Fleet Street," he explained. "You must go as fast as ever you can."
"I can go anywhere as well as any boy, and as fast if I take my boots off. When that there Italian knifed her man—him what took up with Shiny Sal—in the Lane a year ago, it was me what fetched the police."
He left her standing there—her face to the chink of the door before he had turned away—and went into the next room to write the message. He desired to make it neither too insistent nor too immaterial. "John Flak, of 45 Paradise Buildings, Paradise Street, Drury Lane, has met with fatal accident, and earnestly desires to see you on important business," was the form it took. He had sufficient stamps in his pocket for the payment, and to these he added another for a receipt.
"You can read?" he asked, returning to her.
"Yehs!" she replied with her curious accent of lofty scorn at so ingenuous a question. "I read all the murders and sewercides to Blind Mike every Sunday morning."
"Well, go as fast as you can to the post office in Fleet Street, and give them this paper where you see 'Telegrams' written up. Then wait for another piece of paper which they will give you, and bring it back to me. Here is sixpence for you now, and you shall have another shilling when you come back." He was making it more profitable for her to be honest than to be dishonest, which is perhaps the safest way in an emergency.
It was nearly ten o'clock when he looked at his watch on her departure; it was not ten minutes past when she returned. She was panting but exultant, and watched his face for commendation as she gave him the receipt, as a probationary imp might watch the face of the Prince of Darkness on bringing in his first human soul. One boot she had dropped in her wild career, but so far from stopping to look for it, she had thrown away the other then as useless.
Leaving the ghoul-child seated on the coal to thrill delightfully at every unknown sound, Hampden returned to the bedside. Much of the first, the absolutely cold horror of the situation, was gone. He judged it better not to allow too long an interval of silence in which that dim consciousness might slip back into the outer space of trackless darkness. Now that he knew what to expect it was not very unlike speaking to one who slept and held converse in his sleep.
"I have sent for Mr Tubes, but, making due allowance, he can scarcely get here in less than an hour," he said. "If in the meantime there is anything that you wish to tell me, to make doubly sure, it will be received as a most sacred confidence."
There was a longer pause than any before, so long that the watcher by the bedside was preparing to speak again; then the lips slowly opened, and the same full, substantial voice made reply.
"I will wait. But he must be quick—quick!"
The words seemed to disclose a fear, but there was no outward sign of failing power. Hampden ventured on another point.
"Are you in pain?" he asked.
The reply came more quickly this time, and, perhaps because he was looking for some such indication, the listener fancied that he caught the faintest stumbling, a little blurring of the outline here and there.
"No, I am in no pain. But I have a terrible anxiety that weighs me down."
There was nothing to be gained by further questioning. Sir John returned to the other room. The fire was low and the grate choked with ashes; he had begun to replenish it when a curious sound startled him. He only heard it between the raspings of the poker as he raked the ashes out, but it was not to be mistaken. It was the sharp, dry, clock-like whirring that had been the first indication of life and speech beyond the bedroom door more than an hour before.
A board creaked behind him, and he turned with an exclamation to see the dreadful child standing in the middle of the room. Barefooted, she had slipped noiselessly in from the hall at the first tremor of that unusual sound, and now, with her dilated eyes fixed fearfully on the door, her shrinking form bent forward, she slowly crept nearer step by step. Her face quivered with terror, her whole body shook, but she went on as surely as though a magnet drew her.
"What are you doing?" cried Hampden sharply. "Why did you not stay where I told you?"
She turned her face, but not her eyes, towards him. "Yer heard it, didn't yer?" she whispered. "Ain't that what they call the death-rattle what comes?"
He took her by the shoulder and swung her impatiently round. "Go back, you imp," he commanded. "Back and stay there, or you shall go out."
She crept back, looking fearfully over her shoulder all the way. Something else was happening to engage Hampden's attention. In the next room the man was speaking, speaking spontaneously, as he had done once before, but beyond all doubt the voice was weaker now. The momentary interruption of the child's presence had drowned the first part of the sentence, but Hampden caught a word that strung up every faculty he possessed—"League."
"——League will then suddenly issue a notice to all its members, putting an embargo—a boycott, if you will—on——"
The voice trailed off, and, although he sprang to the door, Sir John could not distinguish another word. But that fragment alone was sufficiently startling. To the President of the Unity League it could only have one meaning; for it was true! Some—how much?—of their plan lay open. And to how many was it known? The terrible anxiety of this poor, battered wreck, unconsciously loyal to his class in death, to give the warning before he passed away, seemed to indicate that nothing but the frayed thread of one existence stood in the League's path yet.
Was there anything to be done? That was Hampden's first thought. There was plainly one thing: to learn, if possible, before Mr Tubes's arrival, how much was known.
Nothing was changed; only the death-watch ticked again. He leaned over the bed in his eagerness, and, stilling the throbbing excitement of his blood, tried to speak in a tone of commonplace indifference.
"Yes, continue."
There was no response.
"Repeat the sentence," he commanded, concentrating his voice in his desperation, and endeavouring by mere force of will to impose its authority on the indefinite consciousness.
Just as well might he have commanded the man to get up and walk.
Had that last elusive thread that held him to mortality been broken? Hampden bent still lower. The pallid face was no more pallid than before, but before it could scarcely have been more death-like. The acutest test could not have found a trace of breath. He put together the gradual failing of the voice that little more than an hour ago had been as full and vigorous as his own, the unfinished sentence, the silence——
Suddenly he straightened himself by the bedside with a sense of guilt that struck him like a blow. What was he thinking—hoping? Who was he—Sir John Hampden, President of the Unity League? Not in that room! The man who watched by the bedside stood there even as the humblest servant of the Order of St. Martin, pledged while in that service to succour in "trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity."
It did not occur to him to debate the point. His way seemed very straight and clear. His plain duty to the dying man was to try by every means in his power to carry out his one overwhelming desire. Its successful accomplishment might aim a more formidable blow at his own ambition than almost anything else that could happen. It could not ward off the attack upon which the League was now concentrating—nothing could do that—but an intimate knowledge of the details of that scheme of retaliation might act in a hundred adverse ways. Hampden did not stop to consider what might happen on the one side and on the other. A thousand years of argument and sophistries could not alter the one great fact of his present duty. He had a very simple conscience, and he followed it.
If he could have speeded Mr Tubes's arrival he would have done so now. He went into the hall to listen. The street child was still there, sitting on the coal, as sharp-eyed and wakefully alert as ever. He had forgotten her.
"Come, little imp," he said kindly, "I ought to have packed you off long ago." It was, in point of fact, nearly eleven o'clock.
"Ain't doin' no aharm to the coal," she muttered.
"That's not the question. You ought to have been at home and in bed by this time of night."
She looked up at him sharply with a suspicion that such innocence in a grown-up man could not be unassumed.
"Ain't got no bed," she said contemptuously. "Ain't got no 'ome."
A sentence rang through his mind: "The birds of the air have nests."
"Where do you sleep?" he asked.
"Anywhere," she replied.
"And how do you live?"
"Anyhow."
The lowest depths of human poverty had not been abolished by Act of Parliament after all.
A knock at the door interrupted the reflection. The child had already heard the step and sought to efface herself in the darkest corner.
Hampden had not noticed the significance of the knock. He opened the door, prepared to admit the Home Secretary. So thoroughly had he dissociated his own personality from the issue, that he felt the keenest interest that the man should arrive before it was too late. He opened the door to admit him, and experienced an actual pang of disappointment when he saw who stood outside.
He had sent a telegram instead. Whatever the telegram said did not matter very much. Hampden instinctively guessed that he was not coming then—was not on his way. Anything less than that would be too late.
He took the orange envelope and opened it beneath the flaring gas that piped and whistled at the stairhead.
"There is no reply," he said quietly, folding the paper slowly and putting it away in his pocket-book. Were it not that the gain to Hampden of the League was so immense one might have thought, to see him at that moment, that he felt ashamed of something in life.
Members of Parliament had every department of the postal system freely at their service. The statement may not be out of place, for this was what the telegram contained:
"Deeply regret to hear of Comrade Flak's accident, and will have it fully enquired into. Was it while he was engaged at work? Cannot, however, recall any business upon which he could wish to see me. Probably a mental hallucination caused by shock. Have been terribly busy all day, and am engaged at this moment with important State papers which must be finished before I go to bed. If it is thought desirable I will, on receiving another wire, come first thing in the morning, but before deciding to take this course I beg you to consider incessant calls made on my time. Let everything possible be done for the poor fellow.
"James Tubes."
The burden of failure pressed on Hampden as he walked slowly to the bedroom. In that environment of death his own gain did not touch him at all, so completely had he succeeded in eliminating for the time every consideration except an almost fanatical sense of duty to the articles of the Order. It would be better, he felt, if the shadowy consciousness that hovered around the bed could have sunk finally into its eternal sleep, without suffering the pang of being recalled only to hear this, but something in the atmosphere of the room, a brooding tension of expectancy that seemed to quicken in the silence, warned him that this was not to be.
"A reply has been received from Mr Tubes in answer to our telegram."
"He is here?" There was no delay this time; there was an intense eagerness that for a brief minute overcame the growing weakness.
"No. He cannot come. He regrets, but he is engaged on matters of national importance."
Silence. Painful silence. In it Hampden seemed to share the cruel frustration of so great a hope deferred.
"There is this," he continued, more for the sake of making any suggestion than from a belief in its practicability; "I might go and compel him to come. If he understood the urgency——"
"It is too late.... A little time ago there was a thin white mist; now it is a solid wall of dense rolling fog. It is nearer—relentless, unevadable...."
"I can still write down what you have to say. Consider, it is the only hope."
"I cannot judge.... I had a settled conviction that no other ear.... Stay, quick; there are the notes! Incomplete, but they will put him on the track.... Swear, swear that you will place them in his hand unread."
"I swear to do as you ask me. Go on quickly."
"To-night, now. Do not ... do not let ... do not wait...."
"Yes, yes. But the notes? Where are they? How am I to know them?" The voice was growing very thin and faltering, weaker with every word. The disappointment had sapped all its failing strength at a single blow.
"The notes ... yes. You will explain.... The black wall ... how it towers!..." He was whispering inaudibly.
Hampden leaned over the dying man in a final effort.
"Flak!" he cried, "the notes on the Unity League! Where are they? Speak!"
"The envelope"—he caught a breath of sound—"... coat lining.... I must go!"
Twenty minutes later Sir John picked up his motor brougham in New Oxford Street. He had telephoned immediately on leaving Paradise Buildings for it to start out at once and wait for him near Mudie's corner. In Paradise Street he had seen a bacchanalian group surrounding "Mrs Flak," high priestess, who chanted a song in praise of home and the domestic virtues. It was at this point that he missed the ghoul-child from his side.
A south-east wind was carrying the midnight boom of the great clock at Westminster as far as Kilburn when he turned out of the High Road, and the little clocks around had taken up the chorus, like small dogs envious of the baying of a hound, as he stopped before the Home Secretary's house.
There was a light still burning in a room on the ground floor, and it was Mr Tubes himself who came to the door.
"I have to place in your hands an envelope of papers entrusted to me by a man called Flak who died in Paradise Street an hour ago," said Hampden, and with the act he brought his night of duty as a faithful servant of his Order to an end.
"Oh, that's you," said Mr Tubes, peering out into the darkness. "I had a wire about it. So the poor man is dead?"
"Yes," replied Hampden a shade drily. "The poor man is dead."
Mr Tubes fancied that he saw the lamps of a cab beyond his garden gate, and he wondered whether he was being expected to offer to pay the fare.
"Well, it's very good of you to take the trouble, though, between ourselves, I hardly imagine that the papers are likely to be of any importance," he remarked. "Now may I ask who I am indebted to?"
Hampden had already turned to go. He recognised that in the strife which he was about to precipitate, the man who stood there would be his natural antagonist, and he regretted that he could not find it in his nature to like him any better than he did.
"What I have done, I have done as a servant of the Order of St Martin," he replied. "What I am about to do," he added, "I shall do as Sir John Hampden."
And leaving Mr Tubes standing on the doorstep in vast surprise, the electric carriage turned its head-lights to the south again.
CHAPTER XII
BY TELESCRIBE
What Sir John Hampden was "about to do" he had decided in the course of the outward journey.
There was nothing in his actions, past or prospective, that struck him as illogical. He would have said, indeed, that they were the only possible outcome of the circumstance.
For the last four hours, as the nameless emissary of the Order to whose discipline he bound himself, he had merged every other feeling in his duty to the dying man and in the fulfilment of a death-bed charge.
That was over; now, as the President of the Unity
League, he was on his way to try by every means in his power to minimise the effect of what he had done; to anticipate and counteract the value of the warning he had so scrupulously conveyed.
It was a fantastic predicament. He had sat for perhaps half an hour with the unsealed envelope in his pocket, and no eye had been upon him. He had declared passionately, year after year, that class and class were now at war, that the time for courteous retaliation was long since past, that social martial law had been proclaimed. Yet as he drove back to Trafalgar Chambers he would have given a considerable sum of money—the League being not ill provided, say fifty thousand pounds—to know the extent of those notes.
When he reached the offices it was almost half-past twelve. Salt would be flying northward as fast as steam could take him, and for the next two hours at least, cut off from the possibility of any communication. The burden of decision lay on Hampden alone.
He had already made it. Within an hour he would have pledged the League to a line of policy from which there was no retreat. Before another day had passed the Government could recall the little band of secret service agents and consign their reports to the wastepaper basket. Every one would know everything. Everything? He smiled until the remembrance of that cheap frayed envelope in Mr Tubes's possession drove the smile away.
Next to his own office stood the instrument room. Here, behind double doors that deadened every sound, were ranged the telephones, the tape machines, the Fessenden-d'Arco installation, and that most modern development of wireless telegraphy which had come just in time to save the over-burdened postal system from chronic congestion, the telescribe.
Hampden had not appeared to move hurriedly, but it was just seventeen seconds after he had sent his brougham roving eastward that he stood before the telephone.
"1432 St Paul's, please."
There was a sound as of rushing water and crackling underwood. Then the wire seemed to clear itself like a swimmer rising from the sea, and a quiet, far-away voice was whispering in his ear: "Yes, I'm Lidiat."
"I am at Trafalgar Chambers," said Hampden, after giving his name. "I want you to drop anything you are on and come here. If my motor is not waiting for you at the corner of Chancery Lane, you will meet it along the Strand."
At the other end of the wire, Lidiat—the man who possessed the sixth code typewriter—looked rather blankly at his pipe, at the little silver carriage clock ticking on the mantelpiece, at the fluted white-ware coffee set, and at his crowded desk. Then, concluding that if the President of the Unity League sent a message of that kind after midnight and immediately rang off again he must have a good reason for it, he locked up his room as it stood, took up a few articles promiscuously from the rack in the hall, and walked out under the antique archway into Fleet Street.
In the meantime the Exchange was being urged to make another attempt to get on with "2743 Vincent," this time with success.
"Mr Salt is not 'ere, I repeat, sir," an indignant voice was protesting. "He is out of town."
"Yes, yes, Dobson, I know," replied "St James's." "I am Sir John Hampden. What train did your master go by?"
"Beg pardon, sir," apologised "Vincent." "Didn't recognise your voice at first, Sir John. The wires here is 'issing 'orrible to-night. He went by the 10 o'clock from the Great Central, and told me to meet the 10.40 Midland to-morrow morning."
"He did actually go by the 10 train?"
"I 'anded him the despatch case through the carriage window not five minutes before the whistle went. He was sitting with his——"
"Thank you, Dobson. That's all I wanted to know. Sorry if you had to get up. Good night," and Sir John cut off a volume of amiable verbosity as he heard the bell of his Launceston ring in the street below.
"Fellow watching your place," said Lidiat, jerking his head in the direction of a doorway nearly opposite, as Hampden admitted him. Had he himself been the object of the watcher's attention it would have been less remarkable, for had not the time and the place been London after midnight, Lidiat's appearance must have been pronounced bizarre. Reasonable enough on all other points he had a fixed conviction that it was impossible for him to work after twelve o'clock at night unless he wore a red silk skull cap, flannels, and yellow Moorish slippers. Into this æsthetic costume he had changed half an hour before Hampden rang him up, and in it, with the addition of a very short overcoat and a silk hat that displayed an inch of red beneath the brim, he now stepped from the brougham, a large, bovine-looking man, perfectly bald, and still clinging to his pipe.
Hampden laughed contemptuously as he glanced across the street.
"They have put on half a dozen private enquiry men lately," he explained. "They are used to divorce, and their sole idea of the case seems to be summed up in the one stock phrase, 'watching the house.' Possibly they expect to see us through the windows, making bombs. Why don't they watch Paris instead? Egyptian Three Per Cents. have gone up 75 francs in the last fortnight, all from there, and for no obvious reason."
Lidiat nodded weightily. "We stopped too much comment," he said. "Lift off?"
"There are only two short flights," apologised Hampden. "Yes; I saw that even the financial papers dismissed it as a 'Pied Piper rise.' Here we are."
They had not lingered as they talked, although the journalist ranked physical haste and bodily exertion—as typified by flights of stairs—among the forbidden things of life.
Hampden had brought him to the instrument room. In view of what he was asking of Lidiat, some explanation was necessary, but he put it into the narrowest possible form. It was framed not on persuasiveness but necessity.
"Salt is away, something has happened, and we have to move a week before we had calculated."
Lidiat nodded. He accepted the necessity as proved; explanation would have taken time. His training and occupation made him chary of encouraging two words when one would do, between midnight and the hour when the newspapers are "closed up" and the rotaries begin to move.
"I should like," continued Hampden, "in to-day's issue of every morning paper a leader, two six-inch items of news, one home one foreign, and a single column six-inch advertisement set in the middle of a full white page."
Lidiat had taken off his hat and overcoat and placed them neatly on a chair. It occurred to him as a fair omen that Providence had dealt kindly with him in not giving him any opportunity of changing his clothes. He now took out his watch and hung it on a projecting stud of the telephone box.
"Yes, and the minimum?" He did not think, as a lesser man with equal knowledge of Fleet Street might have done, that Hampden had gone mad. He knew that conventionally such a programme was impossible, but he had known of impossible things being done, and in any case he understood by the emphasis that this was what Hampden would have done under freer circumstances.
"That is what I leave to you. The paragraphs and comment at some length I shall look for. The provinces are out of the question, I suppose? The eight leading London dailies must be dealt with."
"You give me carte blanche, of course—financially?"
"Absolutely, absolutely. Guarantee everything to them. Let them arrange for special trains at all the termini. Let them take over all the garages, motor companies, and cab yards in London as going concerns for twelve hours. They will all be in it except The Tocsin and The Masses. We can deal with the distributing houses later. You see the three points? It is the patriotic thing to do at any cost; they can have anything they like to make up time; and it is absolutely essential."
"Yes," said Lidiat; "and the matter?"
Hampden had already taken a pencilled sheet of paper from his pocket. He had written it on his way up to Kilburn. He now handed it to the journalist.
"Between four and five o'clock that will be telescribed over the entire system," he explained. "Those who are not on the call will see it in the papers or hear from others. Every one will know before to-night."
He watched Lidiat sharply as he read the statement. Apart from the two principals, he was the first man in England to receive the confidence, and Sir John had a curiosity, not wholly idle, to see how it would strike him. But Lidiat was not, to use an obsolete phrase, "the man in the street." He absorbed the essence of the manifesto with a trained, practical grasp, and then held out his hand for the other paper, while his large, glabrous face remained merely vacant in its expression.
The next paper was a foreign telegram in cipher, and as Lidiat read the decoded version that was pinned to it, the baronet saw, or fancied that he saw, the flicker of a keener light come into his eyes and such a transient wave across his face, as might, in a man of impulse, indicate enthusiasm or appreciation.
"Are there to be any more of these—presently?" was all he said.
"I think that I might authorise you to say that there will be others to publish, as the moment seems most propitious."
"Very good. I will use the instruments now."
"There is one more point," said Hampden, writing a few short lines on a slip of paper, "that it might be desirable to make public now."
Lidiat took the paper. This was what he read:
"You are at liberty to state definitely that the membership of the Unity League now exceeds five million persons."
There was a plentiful crop of grey hairs sown between Charing Cross and Ludgate Hill in the early hours of that summer morning. With his mouth to the telephone, Lidiat stirred up the purlieus of Fleet Street and the Strand until office after office, composing room after composing room, and foundry after foundry, all along the line, began to drone and hum resentfully, like an outraged apiary in the dead of night. When he once took up the wire he never put it down again until he had swept the "London Dailies: Morning" section of Sell and Mitchell from beginning to end. Those who wished to retort and temporise after he had done with them, had to fall back upon the telescribe—which involved the disadvantage to Fleet Street of having to write and coldly transmit the indignant messages that it would fain pour hot and blistering into its tormentor's ear. For two hours and a half by the watch beneath his eye he harrowed up all the most cherished journalistic traditions of the land, and from a small, box-like room a mile away, he controlled the reins of the Fourth Estate of an Empire—a large, fat, perspiring man of persuasive authority, and conscious of unlimited capital at his back.
By the end of that time chaos had given place to order. The Scythe had shown an amenable disposition with a readiness suggesting that it possibly knew more than it had told in the past. The Ensign was won over by persuasion and the condition of the Navy, and The Mailed Fist was clubbed and bullied and cajoled with big names until it was dazed. For seven minutes Lidiat poured patriotism into the ear of The Beacon's editor, and gold into the coffers of The Beacon's manager, and then turned aside to win over The Daily News-Letter by telling it what The Daily Chronicler was doing, and the Chronicler by reporting the News-Letter's acquiescence. The Morning Post Card remained obdurate for half an hour, and only capitulated after driving down and having an interview with Hampden. The Great Daily—well, for more than a year The Great Daily had been the property and organ of the League, only no one had suspected it. The little Illustrated Hour, beset by the difficulty of half-tone blocks, and frantic at the thought of having to recast its plates and engage in the mysteries of "making ready" again after half its edition had been run off, was the last to submit. So long was it in making up its mind, that at last Lidiat sarcastically proposed an inset, and, taking the suggestion in all good faith, the Illustrated Hour startled its sober patrons by bearing on its outside page a gummed leaflet containing a leaderette and two news paragraphs.
So the list spun out. Lidiat did not touch the provinces, but sixteen London dailies, including some sporting and financial organs, marked the thoroughness of his work. At half-past three he finally hung up the receiver; and taking the brougham, rode like another Wellington over the field of his still palpitating Waterloo. His appearance, bovine and imperturbable despite the shameful incongruity of his garb when revealed in the tremulous and romantic dawn of a day and of an epoch, and further set off by the unimpeachable correctness of the equipage from which he alighted, was a thing that rankled in the minds of lingering compositors and commissionaires until their dying days.
A few minutes after his departure Hampden returned to the telephone and desired to make the curious connection "1 Telescribe."
"Who is there?" he asked, when "1 Telescribe" responded.
The man at the other end explained that he was a clerk on the main platform of "1 Telescribe"—name of Firkin, if the fact was of Metropolitan interest.
"Is Mr Woodbarrow there yet?"
It appeared, with increased respect, that Mr Woodbarrow was in his own office and could be informed of the gentleman's name.
"Please tell him that Sir John Hampden wishes to speak with him."
In two minutes another voice filtered through the wire, a voice which Hampden recognised.
"What are you running with now, Mr Woodbarrow?" he asked, when brief courtesies had been exchanged.
Mr Woodbarrow made an enquiry, and was able to report that a 5 H.P. Tangye was supplying all the power they needed at that hour. Nothing was coming through, he explained, except a few press messages from America, a little business from Australia, and some early morning news from China.
"I should be obliged if you would put on the two Westinghouses as soon as you can, and then let me know when you can clear the trunk lines for a minute. Within the next hour I want to send an 'open board' message."
There was no response to this matter-of-fact request for an appreciable five seconds, but if ever silence through a telephone receiver conveyed an impression of blank amazement at the other end, it was achieved at that moment.
"Do I rightly understand, Sir John," enquired Mr Woodbarrow at the end of those five seconds, "that you wish to repeat a message over the entire system?"
"That is quite correct."
"It will constitute a record."
"An interesting occasion, then."
"Have you calculated the fees, Sir John?"
"No, I have not had the time. You will let me know when the power is up?"
Mr Woodbarrow, only just beginning to realise fully the magnitude of the occasion and tingling with anticipation, promised to act with all possible speed, and going to his own room Sir John took up an agate pen and proceeded to write with special ink on prepared paper this encyclical despatch.
A library of books had been written on the subject of the telescribe within two years of its advent, but a general description may be outlined untechnically in a page or two. It was, for the moment, the last word of wireless telegraphy. It was efficient, it was speedy, it was cheap, and it transmitted in facsimile. It had passed the stage of being wondered at and had reached that of being used. It was universal. It was universal, that is, not in the sense that tongues are universally in heads, for instance, but, to search for a parallel, as universal as letter-boxes are now on doors, book-cases in houses, or cuffs around men's wrists. There were, in point of number, about three millions on the index book.
It was speedy because there was no call required, no intervention of a connecting office to wait for. That was purely automatic. Above the telescribe box in one's hall, study, or sitting-room, was a wooden panel studded with eight rows of small brass knobs, sixteen knobs in each row. These could be depressed or raised after the manner of an electric light stud, and a similar effect was produced: a connection was thereby made.
All the country—England and Wales—was mapped out into sixteen primary divisions, oblong districts of equal size. The top row of brass knobs corresponded with these divisions, and by pulling down any knob the operator was automatically put into communication with that part of the system, through the medium of the huge central station that reared its trellised form, like an Eiffel Tower, above the hill at Harrow, and the subsidiary stations which stood each in the middle of its division.
The second stage was reached by subdividing each primary division into sixteen oblong districts, and with these the second row of knobs corresponded. Six more times the subdividing process was repeated, and each subdivision had its corresponding row. The final division represented plots of ground so small that no house or cottage could escape location.
Pulling down the corresponding studs on the eight rows instantly and automatically established the connection. The written communication could then be transmitted, and in the twinkling of an eye it was traced on a sheet of paper in the receiving box. There was no probability of the spaces all being occupied with telescribes for some years to come. A calculation will show that there was provision for a good many thousand million boxes, but only three million were fixed and attuned at this period.
That, briefly, was the essential of the telescribe system. It was invaluable for most purposes, but not for all. Though speedier than the letter, it lacked its privacy when it reached its destination, and it also, in the eyes of many, lacked the sentimental touch, as from hand to hand, which a letter may convey. It carried no enclosures, of course, and, owing to the difficulties of ink and paper, printed matter could not be telescribed at all. It cost twice as much as a letter, but as this was spread in the proportion of three-quarters to the sender and one quarter to the receiver the additional cost was scarcely felt by either. Thus it came about that although the telescribe had diminished the volume of telegrams by ninety per cent., and had made it possible still to cope with a volume of ordinary postal correspondences which up to that time had threatened to swamp the department, it had actually superseded nothing.
At four o'clock Mr Woodbarrow called up Sir John and reported that the two great engines were running smoothly, and that for three minutes the entire system would be closed against any message except his. In other words, while the "in" circuit was open to three million boxes, the "out" circuit was closed against all except one. It was not an absolutely necessary precaution, for overlapping telescripts "stored latent" until the way was clear, but it was not an occasion on which to hesitate about taking every safeguard.
The momentous order was already written. Hampden opened the lid of a small flat box supported on the telescribe shelf by four vulcanite feet, put the paper carefully in, and closed the lid again. He had pulled down the eight rows of metal studs in anticipation of Woodbarrow's message, and there was only one more thing to do. A practical, unemotional man, and not unused, in an earlier decade, to controlling matters of national importance with energy and decision, he now stood with his hand above the fatal switch, not in any real doubt about his action, but with a kind of fascinated time-languor. A minute had already passed. To pull down the tiny lever and release it would not occupy a second. At what period of those three minutes should he do it? How long dare he leave it? He caught himself wondering whether on the last second—and with an angry exclamation at the folly he pressed the lever home.
There was no convulsion of nature; a little bell a foot away gave a single stroke, and that was all the indication that the President of the Unity League had passed the Rubicon and unmasked his battery.
This was what he had written and scattered broadcast over the land: