An hour afterwards, with myself at the wheel, a huge sixty horse-power limousine, loaded with luggage and with Messrs. Danjuro and Thumbwood inside, was rolling down the Piccadilly slope.
To Penzance.
CHAPTER VIII THE HUNTING INSTINCT IS STIMULATED BY A PROCESSION
The big car rolled down Piccadilly. She was a beauty to handle, as I discovered in the first two minutes. The very latest type of electric starter, a magnificent lighting installation—every convenience was ready to my hand. I was in an extraordinary state of mind as I steered the car through the late theatre and restaurant traffic, purely mechanically and without conscious thought about it.
The predominant sensation was one of immense overwhelming relief at the prospect of action. Mere office activities, the planning of guard and patrol ships, conferences with pilots and officials, had been quite powerless to calm the terrible fever of unrest within me. It was commanding other people to do things, not doing them myself. I knew all the time that I should have been happier piloting one of the war-planes over the Atlantic. Now, at any rate, I was doing something real. I was actually setting out, in my own person, upon a definite quest. It might be all moonshine. I was well aware that many hard-headed people would have laughed at this expedition, considering the slender evidence I had. They would have talked about "circumstantial evidence," the folly of pure assumption, and so forth. "Behold this dreamer cometh!" would have been their attitude.
And although I was driving the big car up Park Lane for Oxford Street and the road to the West, I did feel as if I were in a dream. My whole life had been altered by the events of the past few days, ruined for ever it might be. To-night its stream was violently diverted from its course. Everything with which I was familiar had flashed away, and I was on the brink of the fantastic and unknown. There was not a man in London setting out upon so strange an errand, under circumstances so unprecedented, as I was this night. We slid by a huge white house, set back from the railings, and with all its windows looking out over the Park. It was the London palace that Mr. Van Adams had built for himself during the last five years, and the strangeness of my affair was intensified at the sight.
Only a few hours ago the great man had been sitting in my chambers, and introducing the enigmatic figure that sat behind me in the car. Here was a dream figure indeed! It was impossible to think of Danjuro as a human being. He was just a brain, a specialized force, devoted to one object, and probably, as Van Adams had hinted, the supreme force of its kind in existence. Already I had placed myself in his hands, and not only my personal interests, dear as those were to me, but my responsibilities to the State as well, and that was no small thing for him to have achieved in so short a space of time. The unique detachment and concentration that was sitting behind me had an almost magical effect upon one's mind and will. With such help, surely, I could not fail?
I fell to thinking of what the Japanese had already achieved, the quiet and masterly skill of his analysis, the cold audacity of his plot to keep Helzephron in London, the neatness and finish of his operations as witnessed by the periscope upon the dinner-table at the "Mille Colonnes." Surely, Helzephron, or whoever was the master-criminal, was a doomed man with Danjuro on his track?