CHAPTER XII

TOURS IN BILLINGSGATE

Respectable young ladies of gentle nurture do not as a rule haunt the obscure purlieus which lie east of London Bridge, down towards the river, at one o'clock in the morning; but then, although Susan Hawthorne might have pleaded guilty to the gentle nurture part of the clause, it is doubtful whether she would have admitted her respectability. Respectability and old Smiler, her beloved father, tutor, friend, and companion in the all-important years between fourteen and twenty, were two factors which in the eyes of the initiated were about as likely to merge successfully as oil and water. Certainly, when Adventure loomed ahead, the teaching of old Smiler took no stock of convention.

"If there's Trouble with a big T at the end of anything," was his oft-inculcated maxim, "life isn't worth living unless you're making a bee-line for it. And if, on the way, you come up against something you know you CAN'T do, and it's in the way, well--DO IT, and hell to the consequences."

A pernicious doctrine by almost any ethical standard, but one which by frequent repetition had become as much a part of Susan's life as old Hawthorne himself. Which goes to explain why she sauntered down Lower Thames Street on a certain evening on felony bent. There was no hesitation in her lissom stride--she even hummed a little tune. Nerves? You don't know her! Susan Hawthorne, who on one occasion had stuck up His Excellency the President of Olvidada at the end of a six-shooter, in his own Illustrious Palace, for six measured hours, what time she--er--persuaded him to issue divers orders anent the constitution of that misruled Republic--orders which made His Excellency shudder and gasp and fume impotently--Susan Hawthorne, I say, and nerves? Not in your sweet natural, stranger! Nothing so amateurish as taut muscles, quivering ganglions, and a disconcerting void in the gastric regions--nothing more tremulous than a faint pleasurable tingling of anticipation.

To the casual eye she was simply a weedy youth trudging towards his favourite pub. A moist and melancholy-looking cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth; her face and hands were convincingly grimed; her shoulders slouched. The corduroy trousers were artistically torn, the ill-fitting coat dusty and clumsily patched, the tweed cap pulled down over her eyes in the approved rakish manner. There were only two things about her attire to distinguish her from the original of the part she was playing, and neither of these obtruded itself. One was her shoes--light black pumps with soles as thin and flexible as rubber wafers, which made no sound as they plodded lightly over the cobbles---the second was a little instrument of blued steel which nestled against her hip, for Susan Hawthorne had spent most of her unusual adolescence in those parts of the world where, the wise go heeled and the foolish are all dead.

So Storm had decided that she wasn't to be in the Triangle picnic, had he? Well, he'd got another guess coming, she reflected grimly. Keep her out of it, when in her time she'd been through more hair-raising adventures, in company with old Smiler and Kit Arden, than she could remember in detail? Not much!

She was swift on the uptake, was this slim girl. Storm had rambled on unsuspectingly about the mysterious warehouse in Billingsgate, and Uncle Joe had spoken sombrely of the mysterious Mr. Raegenssen. The faculty of adding two and two, and unfailingly producing a tentative dozen, was hers in a marked degree, and a few discreet investigations had done the rest. Oscar Raegenssen himself, that eccentric gentleman, was the worthy burgess who numbered that curious "saw-mill" among his goods and chattels, and the coincidence required closer scrutiny. There had remained only the minor problem of the escape from the watchful eye of Terry Mannering, and from the even more intent care of the plain-clothes watch-dog whom Storm had set over her.... To one of her breed, that difficulty was exceeding small. She chuckled reminiscently as she recalled the simple ruse she had employed to circumvent it.

The Sud-Scandinavia Sawmill stood a little way back from the narrow street, occupying a whole block, and fronted by a wide stretch of pavement, not a hundred miles from Nicholson's Wharf--a gaunt sooty building from which by night and by day issued the muffled swoosh and clang of a tireless plant. A forbidden place--glancing up as she approached, she took in its massive dullness; the intangible air of secrecy; the barred and shuttered windows placed high up in the walls; the single narrow rat-hole-like entrance with its steel-mounted door. The demesne of Sud-Scandinavian Wood was going to be difficult.

But it took a lot to daunt Susan, once she had definitely embarked on an enterprise. In one lightning summary of the situation she laid hold of the fact that nothing short of dynamite could force an entrance into that building, if so be the occupants earnestly desired to prevent ingress. Dynamite, or low cunning. Dynamite being clearly out of the question, stealth became the order of the day.

All this she had grasped and docketed in the couple of dozen paces it took her to reach the place, and she never paused as she approached the small door. Under the light of the lone flare which guttered over the lintel, she studied the masonry on either side and located a bell. Her finger pressed it with a firm touch.

A while she waited, and when no response came she pressed again. Straining her ears, she caught the tread of heavy feet coming towards her. There was something threatening about their slow progress which would have alarmed most people--it was as if the janitor knew that the one outside was no regular visitor, and was suspicious. Came the gentle slither of bolts in well-oiled grooves--she counted four of them--and then the protesting snap of a big lock. The door swung back a couple of inches, and part of a scowling face appeared in the gap.

"Vat ees?"

"An urgent message. Hurry up and let me in, you fool!"

As the man perceived her slightness and the fact that she was alone, the door creaked open a further six inches.

"Hom from?"

"The Chief."

"I know no Cheef," said the man, and began to close the door again, but Susan already had her foot in the jamb.

"The Triangle, you infernal idiot," she hissed.

"Vich Triangle?"

She played her trump card. Something silvery glittered in her open palm as she thrust it towards the man's eyes--Joe Blaythwayt had begged it from Mr. Teal as a memento, and Susan had abstracted it from Uncle Joe's treasury without that formality, in preparation for just such a contingency. The charm worked. The door opened wide enough for her to pass.

"Com."

She entered, and heard the door close and the bolts snick back into place. The darkness closed down inkily, and then the shuffling of the janitor's feet stopped and a switch clicked. Over her head a frosted bulb broke into a dim radiance.

Without embarrassment she crushed out the stump of her fag on the dusty floor and took another from a gaudy packet. She knew that she was being inspected closely, but, secure in the efficiency of her disguise, this fact troubled her not at all.

At length the man seemed satisfied.

"Vid hom do you vish to spik?" he queried deferentially.

This was a development which she had not had time to reckon with, but her brain moved fast, and she covered up her slight hesitation by striking a match and lighting her cigarette before replying.

"Is Prester John here?" she asked.

She was bluffing desperately on the fragmentary and secondhand knowledge of Joe Blaythwayt, and prayed that Prester John might be absent. Even if he was there, however, she had her plan mapped out by this time, and she knew her escape was certain--which it assuredly was not if Prester John were away and she went on with her attempt as she had planned.

"I vill see," said the man, and she braced herself up to the knowledge that it was now a case of no retreat, no retreat.... "You haf not been 'ere before?"

"No. I'm always with the Chief."

"Ze Cheef, _hein_? A graate man, but he hass not enof time for ze ladies, _non_?"

He leered at her, and for a moment she dreaded that he might have penetrated her make-up. And then she realised that he took her for a lad of his own type and leanings, and she smiled. What was more, she entered her part so thoroughly and she permitted herself a coarse reply which would have sent the simple Joe, had he been there to hear, purple to the ears.

"In zat room"---he jerked his thumb--"you vill find friends. I vill present you."

"Right you are," she agreed gruffly. "Oh, listen. If John isn't here, you needn't bother to tell me. Just send him along as soon as he arrives. The Chief wants him in a hurry. If he doesn't turn up in half an hour I'll have to leave a message and go along and try to find him somewhere else."

He nodded, and turned to her as though an idea had struck him.

"Zere is somzing beeg an' secret---'ow you say?--in ze air to-night, _n'est-ce-pas_? You air ze second urgent messenger ve 'ave 'ad. Not ten meenits ago zere com a beeg man viz 'urry call for Morini, but Morini is not yet arrive, so 'e attend him."

"There is something in the wind," Susan said easily. "But the Chief doesn't like questions."

The man shook his head.

"Somtimes I 'ave fear of 'is secrets. Even ve do not know quite 'ow beeg are 'is plans. Zere is zis tunnel, now. Even zose 'oo work do not know vhy for eet ees mak'. Zere ees a new _ingénieur_ down zere now 'oo mak' inspection. Ze Cheef send 'im wizout varning--a clevaire _Espagnol_ 'e 'as recruit. _Mais que faire? 'Y'a du pèse--nous sommes ses esclaves._"

The Latin's halting speech broke into a torrent of grumbling French, accompanied by much head-shaking and gesticulation. He was still babbling on volubly as he opened the door he had indicated and waved her in.

She found herself in a broad, low-ceilinged room that looked as if it had been rigged up as a doss-house at short notice--which was the fact. Around the walls ran a double tier of bunks on which men slept or smoked or read according to temperament, while others carried on a low conversation. In the centre of the room, under the hanging oil lamp, stood a greasy table about which sat a dozen toughs gambling. The air was thick with smoke and heavy with the nauseating reek of stale beer. It seemed as if no window had ever been opened upon it. Few of the men spared her a second glance. The alert silence which had succeeded her entry dissolved into a murmur of talk.

She crossed the room to a row of barrels which seemed to do duty for chairs, and sat down, blinking through the smoke which wreathed before her eyes from the dangling fag-end in her mouth. Her hand came in contact with a bottle. She picked it up by the neck and drained the small quantity of bitter fluid there was left in the bottom, and set it down again with a clatter, wiping her lips on the back of her hand.

After a while she strolled over to the table.

She recognised the game they were playing, and was amazed that they should know it, for thugs of that class do not as a rule patronise Monte Carlo, and yet they were undoubtedly on familiar terms with chemin-de-fer. While she watched, a burly ruffian in blue jeans swung round and caught her arm.

"Comin' in on this yer game, cuddy?" he asked.

"Don't know it," she answered, playing her part smoothly.

"Come on!" he insisted boisterously. "Yer c'n learn, same as I 'ad to. It ain't much of a game, but there's dam' few Britishers 'ere an' it soots these bloomin' furriners."

She understood then that the cosmopolitan crowd who provided the majority of the gathering in the room were the cause of the departure from the time-honoured gambles of the Englishman, and to save trouble she took the place the patriotic tough made for her.

It was getting her no farther in her quest, however, except that it gave her time to deduce that the French janitor had not found Prester John. In a few minutes the gamblers were deep in a hated wrangle about the destination of certain stakes, and, taking advantage of the diversion, she slipped from the bench and sidled unostentatiously to the door.

The passage outside was in darkness, but in a moment a thin pencil of light flicked out from her hand, roving across the walls. The man who had admitted her had not entered the doss-room, so she gathered that other rooms were similarly equipped. It would be necessary to proceed warily. Directly across the corridor her torch revealed a door like the one through which she had just passed, and, stealing forward, she heard through it a subdued hum of talk. That, at least, was a spot to avoid. Turning to her right, the beam showed that the far end of the passage twisted abruptly to the left, and she crept towards the bend, using the flashlight sparingly.

Round the corner the corridor widened out into a spacious hall. To one side a flight of stone stairs ran upwards; opposite these, another flight ran down into blackness. On each side were two doors, and a fifth door faced her--an incongruously elegant portal of polished oak adorned with grotesque carvings and half masked by rich velvet hangings. The soles of her supple shoes made no more than a soft slithering sound on the concrete floor as she moved forward. At the end she paused undecidedly. That fifth door was intriguing; intriguing also, after the janitor's vague references to a tunnel, was the flight of stairs that disappeared in the direction of the vaults. Susan solved the problem in a reckless way that would have earned the admiration of Smiler: she took a coin from her pocket and held it between her palms.

"Heads the stairs, tails the door," she murmured, and opened her eyes....

Heads.

A whiff of dank, clammy air met her as she felt her way over the first step. Luckily, the stairs were concrete, as was the upward flight, and there was no danger of creaking boards or a rotten tread. Her light showed her a small landing where the direction reversed. She took the corner and continued downwards.

The cellars seemed to extend over the whole ground space of the building, most of the weight of which appeared to be taken by a number of massive pillars. She could only guess at the actual area, for little but the ceiling was visible. Every available cubic inch of space was filled from the floor with great mounds of earth, tightly packed. There must have been tons of it, piled and compressed into stacks. All the thoroughfare that remained was a narrow lane which wound between the huge dumps, and these had been buttressed up on either side of the path so that the last fraction of volume might be utilised. Down this lane danger lay, for in that insignificant width there was not much chance of avoiding anyone who happened to be coming towards her. Moreover, the path was lighted at intervals by electric bulbs fixed to the side boarding. Switching off her torch, she transferred her automatic from her hip to her jacket pocket, where it would be quicker to reach, and went on.

There was a silence in that weird cavern, which was accentuated rather than relieved by the dull rumble of the plant overhead. That the true purpose of this plant was to provide power she gathered from the insulated cables which snaked along on each side.

Presently a yawning hole, fitfully lighted by bulbs suspended from its earthen roof, confronted her. So this was the tunnel of which the Keeper of the Door had spoken. She entered it resolutely. The quality of the air had altered subtly: it had taken on a puzzling, faint, acid tang, which she could not account for until she came to the exit. She must have travelled three hundred yards before that, and then she noticed that there was only darkness in front, and the bulbs no longer hung from above. She switched on her flash again, and a moment later she left the tunnel.

A blank, tile-faced wall was before her, and she looked from right to left in surprise. She was in a second tunnel which ran almost at right angles to the one she had left, and at distances lights hung on the walls. She bent the rays of her torch downwards, and they were reflected by three parallel ribbons of gleaming metal.

And then she understood. She was in the Tube!