The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (35 page)

Presently, as the train began to draw up into one of the big stations, Mr. Binny stood up and chinked the bits again in an unpleasant fashion in his pocket.

“Now, my lad,” he said. “Am I to ’and-cuff you, or am I to trust your word? It just lies with you. You be’ave, and you can go through ’ere like a toff; but try ’anky-panky, an’ I guess I’ll ’ave to fix you up like a bloomin’ convic’!”

The man assured him abjectly that he would not stir, or do any other thing that might annoy the Law, if only the Law would be merciful in this one case.

Said Mr. Binny:

“I’ll try you, my lad. I’ve to ’and this evidence over to my two men. If I see you move a ’and, it’ll be the last time this side o’ Holloway!”

As he finished speaking, the train drew up alongside the lighted platform, and Jem Binny lifted the grip-sack, and descended in search of his “men”—his investigations taking him directly and without pause to the exit, where, upon paying his fare—in place of a ticket—into the collector’s hand, he was allowed to pass through. He turned to the left, for he knew the place, and strode rapidly, down the empty street. Half an hour’s hard walking brought him into the suburbs, and another half-hour saw him well into the country.

Once or twice, as he went, he ruminated comfortably upon the position of the amateur cracksman, and concluded that he was enough of a softy to be likely to make no attempt to “do a bunk” until the next station, by which time even the nervous amateur would surely have discovered that he had been “done” in a brilliant and variegated fashion. Yet whether the “muff” left immediately or postponed his attempt for freedom had no longer any interest for Mr. Jem Binny. He knew that the man dare not attempt to put the police upon him, and he judged, truly enough in some ways, that the amateur would be so overjoyed to find himself free that he would bother about nothing except to get home—wherever that might be—and leave burglary to more daring spirits for the rest of his life.

Jem felt almost virtuous as this side of the case presented itself to him. He had turned one pair of erring feet from the difficult path that the successful cracksman has to tread, and, as is ever the case with virtue, he had his reward—in his fist!

Presently Jem turned in at a gate of a big pasture upon the right-hand side of the road. The gate was locked, and he passed the gripsack over, dropping it as easily as possible on the other side. Then, catching hold of the top bar, he vaulted; but miscalculated the height in the dark, caught the toe of one boot, and pitched heavily clean over the gate, wrenching and spraining his ankle badly.

“Oh, lor’!” he said. “Oh, lor’!” And fell to nursing his swelling ankle with his hands. “ ’Ow ’ll I get the express back?” was the thought that came to him during a little respite from the pain, some minutes later. “Might get a cart,” he decided, after due and anxious thought. “Must get this oof buried safe an’ smart, an’ get back onter the road again.”

The following morning the landlord of the White Lyon was much exercised by the news which the village doctor brought at an early hour. The doctor was returning from Lockwood Hall, where he had been called hurriedly to attend Sir Harry Lockwood. He had found the old knight suffering from a stroke, brought on by the improper excitement attending the discovery that his big safe had been burgled at some time during the previous night. An enormous amount of very valuable gold and silver work had been stolen, though enough had been left to suggest that the thief had taken sudden fright, and left hastily with but a portion of his intended haul. All this the doctor imparted with unprofessional gusto over a glass of gin and water, in which the fat landlord felt that the occasion demanded his accompanying him.

“That’ll put a stop proper to them fossil ’unters, an’ such like, I’m thinkin’!” remarked the landlord mournfully. “Sir ’Arry give orders last week as no strangers was to be allowed in the privit grounds. ’E’ll be very perticler now. Bad for trade, doctor. They was a dry lot, mostly like!”

The doctor nodded, and the two of them renewed, with a little more gin this time. From the neat little bed-sitting-room, which lay to the right of the bar-parlour, there came distinct the recurrent “A-haa, a-haa, a-haa! Humm!” which betokened the presence of Mr. Jem Binny. The landlord nodded, and indicated the shut door of the bed-sitting-room with his thumb.

“Remarkable nice young man, that Mr. Binny, doctor,” he said. “Got a turrible cough, like. ’E’s like that all the night long. You’ll ’ear ’im again, doctor, in a bit. ’E’s as reg’lar as a clock.”

The doctor discoursed learnedly with the stout landlord upon the peculiarities of coughs, and the landlord nodded a constant assent, as in duty bound. Meanwhile, they renewed, and the landlord grew more than ever human.

“I’d like you just to ’ark a moment at ’is door, doctor,” he said presently. “ ’E’s about doo now. P’r’aps you could ease it for ’im, doctor.”

The doctor agreed, and the two of, them, each with a steaming glass of toddy in hand, adjourned to the outside of Mr. Binny’s door. They stopped, listening, very hushed and sober, at whiles straightening momentarily to imbibe; then again to listening. It came in a little while:

“A-haa, a-haa, a-haa! Humm!”

“Ah!” said the doctor gravely. “Bronchial, without a doubt. Bronchial, Mr. Thiggs. D’you notice the wheeze in it?”

“Ay,” agreed the landlord; and they straightened their backs again, preparatory to a return to the bar-parlour.

This would have inevitably been their next action, but that, in that very moment, there raced into the White Lyon the village policeman, accompanied by a sergeant of police. They wasted no words, but ran straight to the door and hammered upon it with their fists.

“Open, in the king’s name!” roared the sergeant.

But no one hastened to oblige, whereupon the sergeant said:

“In with it!”

And they “inned” with it. But there was no Mr. Jem Binny there, neither had his bed been slept in. The two policemen made a hurried search, and rushed out again, the sergeant shouting to the landlord to see that no one entered the room until he returned.

“It’s the phonygraff!” said the landlord, twenty minutes later, to the doctor, after they had guarded the room together, aided by further refreshment.

They stared gravely at the machine, and then at one another. Afterwards they sat down and waited for a repetition of the noise. But before it came the doctor was called away, and the landlord sat on, keeping guard and waiting, like a fat, expectant child.

“It’s goin’ to do it again!” he said delightedly, as the machine gave a little preliminary clicking.

He leant forward and stared, watchful.

“A-haa, a-haa, a-haa! Humm!” said the phonograph faithfully.

“Ha, La!” roared the landlord, his fat quivering. “Dod!” he whispered huskily, as the laughter eased from him, leaving his eyes full of tears. “Dod, that’s cute—that’s cute! An’ ’e paid ’is week advance like a gentleman!”

The landlord filled his pipe and began to smoke, awaiting the inevitable music which appeared so to charm him. But far away up the line, in a field, near a gate, Jem Binny, dandy Anglo-American cracksman, sat with a badly sprained ankle and an opened gripsack, which displayed to all and any who might choose to be interested nothing more formidable than a collection of varied fossils embedded in the coating of their almost original chalk.

Mr. Binny had ceased all attempts to express himself some hours earlier. He had made his discovery when he took a glance into the grip-sack before burying it. Since that time he had largely lost interest in most things, except a curiosity as to what the other man’s “game” had been.

You see, fossils were a little below his horizon, and he had no conception that an enthusiast might venture into forbidden places in pursuit of his hobby. Neither could he conceive that, having once gotten “a lot o’ muck like that,” the getter thereof might hasten away, pursued by a guilty conscience—especially when that same conscience had been previously stirred into being troublesome by the knowledge that someone else had been there in the quarry, maybe spying upon the luckless fossil hunter.

None of these things did Mr. Binny know, nor would he have been easy to put into the right focus to see these things as the milder sinner saw them. Therefore, Mr. Jem Binny had still a certain curiosity to salt his sudden lack of interest in life. For the rest, he had to get to the station and away to the shelter of London, as by now his “patent cough-producer” would have certainly exceeded its object, and the White Lyon, and all the district around Bartol, would be, to put it mildly, unhealthy.

There had been too many little “affairs” in the neighbourhood for which he would be now considered responsible, and the safe at Lockwood Hall was to have been the last of a glorious series done “under the halibi.” Poor Binny! He never learned—and I doubt whether it would have comforted him if he had—that there had been a third factor in the history of that night, and that the safe at Lockwood Hall had been actually burgled, by a professional, evidently, who had chosen the psychic moment that should fix for ever on to the shoulders of Jem Binny a crime of which he could, for once, plead truthfully innocent—at least, in the act.

Who the third man was, who got the profits whilst the other two shared the pain of this triangular muddle, I do not know. Nor, up to the present, do the police.

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Diamond Cut Diamond
with a Vengeance

W
ell, Mr. Moss,” said Harrison at the end of the interview, “do you feel comfortable about putting cash into a big operation?”

“Certainly,” replied the Jew. “If you and Miss Gwynn will come round to my lawyer’s to-morrow at eleven, we’ll get the agreement drawn up and signed.”

“Miss Gwynn and Tony Harrison could both see that the big Jew knew what he was doing; and when he had pronounced the results of their work, a diamond of very fair colour, though small, but still a diamond by every known test, they turned naturally to each other and shook hands in silence and mutual congratulation.

Both of them were Americans, who had met in London at the same chemistry class, and in the course of time had grown so well acquainted that Mr. Cupid had finally stepped their way and linked them conclusively with an engagement ring. Money was, however, unfortunately scarce with the two of them, and at first they had looked forward to their marriage as a sacrament that lay very far in the future. Yet now, suddenly, it loomed close; for a piece of curious experimental work which they had carried out during the last six months had resulted in a success far beyond anything that they had dared to expect.

The Jew-man, as Tony called him, was a Mr. Moss, a noted dealer in precious stones. Tony had managed to interest him in the experiment, and had extracted an informal promise from him to finance a big experiment on similar lines should a diamond truly result from the first tentative attempt. And now the diamond lay there, a potent fact, in the fat palm of the Jew, whilst the young man and woman shook hands joyfully at the prospective nearness of their happiness-to-be.

On the following day, after a couple of hours spent over the discussing and signing of the necessary papers, Nell Gwynn and Tony Harrison left the Jew and his man of business, carrying their copy of the agreement, duly signed and witnessed. Yet, though everything had been done squarely, had it not been for Miss Gwynn’s quickness the two young people would certainly have put their names to one or two clauses that might have proved disastrous in the future. But she made it clear that they were going to have what they had stipulated for, and, as a result, they came away with a fair and satisfactory agreement; though the girl said she wished they could have got someone for partner in whom she could feel more confidence than in Mr. Moss. But, as Tony pointed out to her, so long as the agreement was right they could not go very far wrong.

During the next month Harrison and Miss Gwynn prepared for the big experiment. They were both chemists, and had gone considerable distances along certain lines of thought and research. But it was not until after their engagement that each had confided to the other the results of their labours, and how each had come to precisely the same conclusions on the subject of Urfur’s experiments, in which, as most of the world knows, he produced a sort of coarse diamond powder. Following this had come the attempt in which Harrison had managed to interest the Jew. In this experiment they had used an explosive to get the necessary pressure, and then kept the “pressure-box” hot for six months, slowly cooling it by infinitesimal degrees, and so produced the small diamond on the strength of which Mr. Moss had agreed to finance a big operation.

As I have said, during the next month Harrison and Nell had made their preparations, and at the end of that period Tony was installed in a small house off Cheyne Walk, with a huge “pressure-box” in a properly constructed gas furnace, with everything in train for what he called a “year’s sit-down” to tend it. Briefly, their theory was that, given a certain latitude of time, temperature of a certain exact ratio of gradations of diminishment was the surest way to success. They had broken free from Jarnock’s and Urfur’s theory of a very protracted period of time for this phase of the experiment, and believed entirely, with Mr. Laodwen, in an exact ratio of diminishing temperatures; though, of course, Laodwen was never more than a theorist, and his statement had yet to be tested.

When the explosion was made in the “pressure-box,” both Miss Gwynn and Harrison stayed in to watch the result. Luckily their calculations had been made with a sufficient margin of safety; for the pressure came on without a burst, which would possibly have wrecked the place. And after that, as I have said, Harrison settled to his year’s “sit-down” to tend the apparatus—a lime-jet furnace, the lime packed about the clay-covered, cylindrical “pressure-box,” and the jet passing through the lime.