Suddenly the terrible meaning of his position began to dawn upon him. The vault closed--with Khodkine outside--and the combination of numbers that opened it unknown to anyone but himself--Unless Tanya--! He put his ear to the steel door and listened. He thought he heard footsteps in the passage-way outside and shouted her name. Silence. The darkness seemed to be closing in on him, like the silence, heavy--oppressive--burdened with meaning.
A tomb! And unless Tanya contrived to find a way to come to his rescue, likely to be his own. And yet how could Tanya----? He dared not follow his thought to its conclusion. Khodkine would find her there in the darkness and ... Surely he would find her, for she would be coming back to the vault for him. Picard--Stepan! Would they know what to do? And even if they knew what had happened, how would they be able to release him? One by one he thought of the various possibilities and at the last was obliged to dismiss them all. He was caught--like a bear in a trap, and like the bear, raged to and fro for a while, knocking himself and breaking his knuckles against the shelves in the darkness, and cursing his own stupidity, and the wits of Monsieur Khodkine, which after, all had proved cleverer than his own. Khodkine had won--Khodkine, whom not five minutes ago he had been laughing at for his stupidity! Was it only five minutes or was it an hour ago?...
This wouldn't do. No time to be getting "rattled" now. Bad business. Dark as the devil, too, but not hopeless. Nothing was entirely hopeless unless one thought it so. Something might happen. But what? Short of an earthquake that would tear the mound and vault to pieces, there seemed little chance of anything happening except Tanya--and Khodkine would see about her. Rowland was forced to admit that this was a beautiful vengeance for Khodkine to discover, one quite fitting the Boche idea of the eternal fitness of things. To imprison a man, to starve him, to let him beat out his brains in madness against a steel wall, to smother him--
Rowland frowned into the darkness and whistled thinly. To smother him! The phrase seemed to have a new significance, the more terrible because of its simplicity. Suffocation, slow but certain, as he struggled for the exhausted oxygen. A matter of hours. The acid fumes of rifle and pistol smoke still hung in the air--already he seemed to feel that breathing had become difficult....
Imagination! He breathed quite easily and well. What time was it? Something after two, perhaps. He didn't know. What he did know was that he was tired as the devil standing up and that he wanted to sit down somewhere, and have a smoke. He felt in his pockets. Cigarettes of the luckless Ivanitch--and a box of matches. He struck a match and lighted a cigarette. The skull on the shelf grinned at him. "Silly beggar, to grin on and on for a thousand years. Happier though." He always grinned when he could. It helped a lot. But he didn't seem to feel like grinning now.
A thought came to him, and striking another match, he found the electric torch upon the steel floor,--smashed this time beyond hope of use. He threw it away from him in disgust and sat down on the hard steel floor, his hands clasped over his knees, gazing at the light of the cigarette. It was a singularly cheerful spot of light in the denseness of the obscurity....
Fool that he was--smoking here, poisoning the little oxygen that was left to him! Angrily he extinguished the cigarette upon the floor--and then clasped his knees with his aching fingers and sat uncomfortably waiting--waiting for what? A miracle? Could anything be expected of Tanya? And even if she succeeded in eluding Khodkine, how could he hope that she would know the numbers of the combination? He was sure that she had not even committed them to memory. And if she succeeded in reaching Shestov or Barthou and telling them of his predicament, it would take a long while to break into the vault, at the end of which he, Rowland, would be dead of suffocation.
He got to his feet, steadying himself by holding to the shelves. In the darkness it seemed less easy to coordinate the movements of his muscles.... Suffocation must be something like being "gassed"--only less painful. He had seen fellows in the hospitals struggling for their breath and remembered how they looked--livid--green. This was different but it wasn't going to be pleasant. The pounding of his pulses seemed to echo in the still chamber. He moved slowly to one end of the room and reached upward. The ceiling was low, he could touch it easily with his fingers. Stupid to build a vault with a ceiling as low as that.
What time was it? Four o'clock--five? It seemed as though he had lost all notion of the passage of time. Was it daylight outside? He walked around slowly, peering into the corners, seeking a glimpse of daylight which would mean a breath of air for his lungs and a respite at least until starvation came. Everywhere--blackness. The steel of the vault was continuous. Kirylo Ivanitch had planned well.
Poor old Ivanitch. Good sort of a well-meaning lunatic! He was sorry for Ivanitch ... but it hadn't been Rowland's fault. If Ivanitch had only been Khodkine!