CHAPTER XXXVII
It was unwisely said. Traherne signaled an “Easy-all” with his eyes and brows, Lucilla laid her hand on Crespin’s.
Watkins flung round on him viciously. “I advise you to keep a civil tongue in yer ’ead, Major,” he snarled roughly. “Don’t forget that I ’ave you in the ’ollow of my ’and.”
“True, Watkins,” Traherne said quickly, “and the hollow of your hand is a very disagreeable place to be in.” He said it flatteringly—and Watkins took it so, and grinned again. “That’s why we’re willing to pay well to get out of it. Come, now, what shall we say?”
“Well, what about a little first instalment?” the cockney insinuated oilily. “You ain’t quite on your uppers, are you, now? You could come down with something, be it ever so humble?”
Dr. Traherne pulled out his pocketbook instantly, and counted his notes. “I have three hundred rupees and five ten-pound notes,” he said, laying them on the table.
Watkins sniffed. Then he turned to Crespin.
“And you, Major?” he demanded, brusquely.
Crespin already had counted his store. This was no time to haggle. He indulged his right leg, and himself, in a slight kicking motion, and then went to the table, and tossed his money down with Traherne’s. “Two hundred and fifty rupees,” he said; “oh, and some loose change.”
“Oh, never mind the chicken-feed!” Watkins said grandly. “And the lady?” he turned and eyed her as he spoke.
“I gave my last rupee to your wife, Watkins,” Mrs. Crespin replied.
Watkins nodded condescendingly. “Well,” he said consideringly, “that’s about a hundred and twenty to go on with.”
“There,” Traherne told him, placing a hand on the heap of notes, “that’s your first instalment.” Watkins eyed it haughtily. “Now, what about the balance? Shall we say a thousand pounds apiece?”
“A thousand apiece!” Watkins cried. “Three thousand pounds! You’re joking, Dr. Traherne! Wot would three thousand pounds be to me in England! W’y, I’d ’ave to take to valeting again. No, no, sir! If I’m to do this job, I must ’ave enough to make a gentleman of me.” He said it perfectly gravely. He meant it.
They stared at him in blank amazement Then, almost in unison they broke into irrepressible laughter. In peril of their lives, on terrible tenterhooks of sickening suspense, they laughed wildly—a hysterical outlet for pent-up emotions very different, it was in part, but too it was pure appreciation of the funniest thing they ever had heard. Antony Crespin shook with laughter, and swayed from side to side. Traherne tittered. The quick note of Lucilla’s mirth rang through the room like a delicate, musical bell.
Watkins was greatly offended—but too he was a little puzzled. “Well,” he said with a contemptuous scowl—no use showing too much “huff,” he reflected, for he intended to pocket that three hundred and twenty, and Crespin and Traherne were against him two to one—“you are the queerest lot as ever I come across. Your lives is ’anging by a ’air, and yet you can larf!”
“It’s your own fault, Watkins,” Lucilla Crespin gurgled, completely hysterical now. “Why will you be so funny?” A screaming note sharpened her laugh, and she broke into tears, and huddling down on the couch she buried her face on it, her body shaken with sobs.
Traherne got back to business. They were wasting too much time, he told himself sternly.
“I’m afraid what you ask is beyond our means, Watkins,” he said—careful not to say it too significantly—“But I double my bid—two thousand apiece.”
“You’ll ’ave to double it again, sir, and a little more,” Watkins said smugly. “You write me out an I.O.U. for fifteen thousand pounds, and I’ll see wot can be done.”
“Well,” Crespin blurted angrily, “you are the most consummate—”
Watkins interrupted him insolently. “If your lives ain’t worth five thousand apiece to you,” he said contemptuously, “there’s nothing doing. For my place here is worth fifteen thousand to me. And there’s all the risk too—I’m not charging you nothing for that.”
“We appreciate your generosity, Watkins,” Dr. Traherne stated. “Fifteen thousand be it!” The suspense must be cut! Time pressed hideously. Human nerves knew a limit. And after all—
“Now you’re talking,” Watkins remarked patronizingly.
With no more waste of words or of look, Basil Traherne bent over the table, and wrote and signed. He handed the I.O.U. to Watkins. Watkins scrutinized it, and threw it down on the writing-table. “That’s right, sir,” he said briskly, “but the Major must sign it too.”
Antony Crespin said something brief but terrible under his breath as he went to the writing table. But he signed it at once, not troubling to read, and threw down the pen. “There you are, damn you!” he told Watkins with a jerk of his head.
Watkins bowed.
“Now,” Traherne insisted, “get to work quick, and call up Amil-Serai—”
“Right you are, sir,” the man replied nonchalantly, and when he had pocketed the I.O.U. he strolled over to the wireless-room and began in a leisurely way to unlock the door.
“Isn’t there some special call you must send out to get Amil-Serai?” Crespin asked him.
“Oh, yes, sir, I know it,” Watkins said—his tone was respectful enough, his smile was not. He threw the folding-doors quite open, maddeningly deliberate in all he did, went in and took his seat at the wireless instrument, picked up the “receivers,” put it on his head, adjusted it, and began to tap-tap the wireless keys.
Crespin whispered to Dr. Traherne sharply: “That’s not a service call!”
But neither of them had at all confidently expected it would be, and Traherne merely nodded grimly.
There was a pause. The room ached with the silence—it was so intense—the three waiting there so wrought, so desperate, determined.
Watkins, in the wireless room, sat “listening in,” his cat-like head bent over the instruments, his face smooth and blank.
“Right!” he said suddenly. “Got them, sir. Now the message.”
He began to work the key, and as it fell at his fingers’ tips, Crespin spelt out to Traherne slowly, softly, word by word the message Watkins was sending. “‘The—white—goats—are—ready—for—’ No, but the black sheep is! Come on!”
Traherne did, almost before the two words were out. Without one shimmer of sound they moved. As they passed her, Lucilla Crespin, with a death-like, quivering face, but a hand that never trembled, held out her scarf. Traherne took it—he already held his own handkerchief ready. The woman pressed her hand to her mouth, to prison in the scream that was choking her.
Watkins wired methodically on.
Close behind him stole the two men—and death.
They swooped upon him without so much as noising the air.
Traherne jabbed the gag in. They tied the scarf—tight—mercilessly tighter—still tighter. He lurched. He tried to squirm. He was powerless—helpless. He attempted to cry—it trailed off into a strangled gurgle. That gurgle was Watkins’ death-rattle. He caught at the edge of the wireless set, clutching it so desperately that blood clotted and purpled under his well-kept finger-nails. Crespin wrenched his hands away, twisted his arms behind him, tied the wrists with his strong, silk handkerchief. They made the gag fast. They tightened it more. They pinioned him well. They pinioned him not too kindly. They swung him up in their knotted arms—Traherne’s face writhed. Crespin was smiling. He struggled desperately. But Watkins knew. They carried him out of the wireless-room. He’d never listen-in again. He had sent his last message. He was off for the Last Orderly Room. Lucilla Crespin sobbed as they passed her, sobbed and clung to the mantelpiece. They reached the window. His head fell back, hanging from his limp neck like some hideous, distorted, unclean growth. Over the cruel, swathing gag she saw his tortured pig-like eyes strain. She turned away.
For a moment they rested on the balustrade.
“Must we—?” Traherne said huskily.
“Nothing else for it”—Crespin almost chuckled—“one, two, three!”
They lifted. They threw.
Compelled, against her will, Lucilla Crespin had followed them—stood watching, petrified. “One, two,—three!” She gave a gasping, shuddering, sick cry. “One—two—three!” Watkins, the Londoner—once of the Dorsets—had reached the Orderly Room—a mass of mangled pulp, down there in the Orderly Room, a sheer drop of a hundred feet long, he lay facing His Colonel.
They turned away from the balcony—they stumbled back into the room, Traherne like a drunken man, Crespin erect and soldierly. He crossed the room with a springy, soldier’s tread, and poured out a glass of whiskey.
“At least,” he said quietly, as he lifted it to his lips, “we haven’t taken it lying down.” He bent his mouth to the liquor—then—he put the untouched glass down with a cry of intense excitement “Hold on! Don’t speak!” They kept the silence they dared not break. His eyes flamed, and leapt “I have it!” he cried. . . . “Yes, by God, I have it! I’ve remembered the call!”