CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION TO STORM

Probably Susan Hawthorne got a lot of her courage and independence from her father, old Smiler Hawthorne, who in his time had been nearly everything and nearly everywhere--a tall, grizzled man who was generally broke but always unbeatable. Anyway, wherever she got it from, she needed it all; for old Hawthorne crossed the Divide one night with the same reckless optimism as he had gone through life. He left her his name and thirty pounds, the rest of his fortune having disappeared only a week before, together with the promoter of a company whose sole asset was a diamond field wherein no diamonds were.

And Susan Hawthorne faced a blank future with a smile that was reminiscent of old Smiler's cheeriest effort, which you only saw when things were very black and the proposition to be tackled was exceeding tough. He was that sort of man, and she was his daughter.

She felt very much alone in the world. She had lost touch with her own friends in the accompanying of her father in his happy-go-lucky aimless globe-trotting; and most of the friends he had picked up himself--and they were legion--were scattered in odd corners of the earth. In any case, she was not one to look for charity. Wherefore she went to Lord Hannassay, because he seemed to be the only friend of her father's who was in England.

She went with some trepidation, and was not unpleasantly surprised, and more than a little nervous, when she found that he was not so inaccessible as his name and position seemed to indicate.

"I remember you--sixteen, weren't you?--queer kid--all eyes and legs. And your father?"

He had a curiously disjointed manner of speaking, conveying the impression that his thoughts moved faster than his mouth could frame them.

"My father died a month ago," she said.

His grim face softened for a moment.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Your father was one of the few men I have ever really liked."

After a while she broached the subject of her visit. It was not a task she relished, for she was desperately afraid he would misunderstand.

His face remained inscrutable, but the blue eyes searched her face.

The fingers of his right hand drummed on the table. She learnt afterwards that this was a trick of his when he was embarrassed.

"What can you do?" he asked. "Shorthand--book-keeping--type-writing--anything?"

"Nothing, I'm afraid." She had realised all along the hopeless inadequacy of her qualifications, and felt unnecessarily small and foolish. "But I could learn."

"There are hundreds of girls who have learnt--still looking for jobs," he said. His finger-tips played an intricate tattoo. "Listen--you're afraid I'll offer you money. Feel insulted if I do--probably walk out in a rage. Still, I wish you'd let me. I've got heaps. I like money--I'd like more--and I don't often give it away. But you're different. I'd have done it for your father, any day--why not for you?"

Strangely enough, she was not annoyed. His nervousness was so amusing. He was obviously as scared of making a _faux pas_ as she was of his making one, and he didn't know how to do it without seeming to.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm looking for work, not outdoor relief."

"I know all about that," he said peevishly. "You wouldn't have minded taking it from your father."

"That's different," she said, and he was not foolish enough to attempt to argue the point further.

He turned over some papers, picked up a pencil, and played with it. There was an unusual quality about these little mannerisms of his: they were never jerky and inconsequent, like the fidgeting of a different kind of man. He seemed to employ material objects to assist his thoughts.

"I want a typist," he said at length. "You can get reasonably proficient in a fortnight if you work hard. No need for much speed, anyhow--no dictation. Copying letters, etcetera. You can have the job if you'll be my guest here while you're learning. That's not charity--you'd accept an invitation like that even if you weren't broke. Use the house how you like--I'm going to Geneva. League of Nations conferences--all rot. However ... housekeeper's always here. Your reputation's all right. But while I'm away--no wild parties, mind!"

He issued the order with such a comical seriousness that she all but laughed aloud.

"I'll try to reform," she promised gravely.

The time passed quickly for her. The work was easy and interesting, the hours short. Once or twice it occurred to her that her job was simply a disguise for the charity she dreaded, but her hint of this suspicion was received with such pained surprise that, not unwillingly, she banished the idea. Hannassay came and went, always courteous and correct. She grew to like him, for he thought she detected the sentimentalist masquerading in self-defence as the tyrant.

After a month she began to consider herself an authority on affairs of State, for Lord Hannassay held a high post in the Home Office. It took her nearly three months more to realise that she knew practically nothing.

She was returning from the Home Office one afternoon after delivering some papers when she discovered that she was not as friendless as she had thought, and the discovery was a cheerful surprise. She was walking back along Piccadilly when she nearly collided with a tall young man in a grey flannel suit.

He raised his hat absently, apologised, and was about to pass on when suddenly they stopped dead and stared at one another.

"Je-rusalem!" exclaimed the young man.

He linked his arm in hers in the most natural way in the world, and steered her out of the press towards the portals of the Leroy.

"It's just four," he remarked, "and therefore tea-time. I've not seen you for years, Susan--millions of years!"

They found a table and sat down on either side of it, inspecting one another. Then they both smiled.

"Christopher Arden," she said, "you'll do!"

"And you, by Jeremy! Susan, what do you mean by it? I've written you regularly for the last three years, and you haven't answered a line."

"I might have," she answered demurely, "if you'd put your address on your letters."

His jaw dropped.

"Didn't I?" he demanded.

"Oh, yes!" She smiled. "You put 'Morocco' and 'South Pacific' and 'Nassau' and that sort of thing. Only I didn't think you were notorious enough for that alone to find you."

He grinned.

"Sorry!" he apologised. "Tell me all about this and that."

She told him, and his brown hand went across the table and touched her fingers lightly.

He said nothing--that wouldn't have been Kit Arden, known as Storm wherever soldiers of fortune were gathered together. He hadn't altered. He had always had a manner which mocked the expression of words; and yet his unspoken sympathy meant more to the girl than any amount of fluent condolences. She found his old irresistible spell, that had captured her imagination even when he was a dashing youngster of twenty-four and she a girl of seventeen, as potent as it had always been.

Physically he was the same as ever, save that his fair hair had oddly greyed a little at the temples--a curious contrast to the unlined boyishness of his face. But that was the keynote of his appearance, those contrasts. His slim yet broad-shouldered figure, the forceful mouth that could smile with such an infectious gaiety, the square jaw and the artist's hands, the Saxon hair and gun-metal grey eyes. Storm, who was Storm--so perfectly did the name fit him that it was impossible to think of him as anything else--Storm, the reckless, daredevil trouble-hunter with the heart of a crusader....

"And where've you been?"

"Oh, here and there," he said. "I put in a bit of time with the Riffi--they made me a Kaid or a Pasha or whatever a Riff makes you when he loves you like a brother. Then that blew over, so I beat it to the Pacific and went pearling. Had a merry scrap with a Jap patrol, fishing on forbidden ground. That was nearly the end of my career! Then that got dull, so I toddled over to the Bahamas and set up as a bootlegger. Respectability's tame! A short life and a beery one--that's me! And then you can bury me under the foundation-stone of a brewery. Stevenson's verse 'll do for my epitaph--fine! You know it?

"Here he lies where he longed to be, Home is the bootlegger, home from the sea, And the moonshiner home from the still..."

"You haven't changed a bit," she laughed

"Nor you--you're just as lovely as ever--more so! Your eyes, now. I love brown eyes----"

She stopped him with a solemnly upraised hand.

"What are you doing now?" she asked.

"Divers things, and, on the whole, nothing much," he said vaguely. "London's paralytic! I'm just wondering whether it'd be worth while going back to Paluna--you remember, I ran a one-man revolution there and made myself President about three years back. Being President of a South American Republic is some game, believe uncle!"

He was, as a matter of fact, doing rather more than divers things. When he left he returned to Scotland Yard and made his way to the office of the Assistant Commissioner.

"You can take it from me, Bill," he informed that gentleman, "that Hannassay's new typist's all right. I've known her for years---her father took me out of the workhouse and educated me. Incidentally, he started me on my adventurous career. I tell you, anyone who was brought up by Smiler Hawthorne and after that went in for stockbroking or market gardening or anything else respectable and dull would have been a blistering Robot!"

"I'm glad to hear it," said Bill Kennedy drily. "I'd already gathered that you weren't a Robot, laddie, from the fact that you took an hour and a half to find out about her when you'd known her for years. Now you can push off, because I work sometimes. See you later."

Storm went to his own room, and shortly after Inspector Teal arrived to make his report. "Well, Teal?" he prompted briskly.

"Nothing," said Mr. Teal sleepily. "The process of reformation continues. I looked up Lew Mecklen and Gat Morini this morning, and they greeted me like a long-lost brother--which isn't like Lew and the gentle Gat. They've been over for a month now, and they haven't made a joke yet. Birdie Sands has been out six weeks, and we haven't had a thing on him. And Prester John hasn't cracked a crib for two months--and I know he was hard up two months ago. Mr. Arden, when a lot of old lags all start reforming at once my nose itches!"

"Uh-huh," said Storm thoughtfully. "And they're only a few."

"With more coming into the fold every day," supplemented Mr. Teal.

He was a big slow-moving man, red-faced and sleepy-eyed, beginning to pay the price of his youthful robustness as muscle turned to fat and easy living irresistibly increased his circumference. He was invariably tired and invariably bored--it was an affectation of his of which he was intensely proud.

Storm stared out of the window.

"When I got into this job," he said, "I had ideas. I thought Special Branch dealt with active crooks--not the boys who'd turned good. This is more subtle than I'd like it to be."

Inspector Teal said nothing.

Rousing himself slightly with what seemed a terrific effort, he reached into a pocket and extracted a small packet therefrom. From this packet he removed a smaller packet, and from the smaller packet he detached the pink wrapper.

"If it wasn't so absurd," said Storm, "I'd tell you the only explanation I can see that fits."

Mr. Teal conveyed a wafer of chewing gum to his mouth and champed meditatively.

"Mr. Arden," he murmured drowsily, "if I hadn't heard things that make me want to offer that same theory, I'd say it was absurd. But I stood Prester John a drink this afternoon, and I picked his pocket. I ought to have been a criminal really--people wouldn't suspect me, because I look so innocent. Anyway, I found something interesting. Look at this."

From his waistcoat pocket he took something that glittered and laid it on Storm's desk.

It was a little silver triangle. In the centre a similar triangle was picked out in black enamel, and in the centre of this a silver alpha had been picked out in the enamel.

Storm looked at it closely, turned it over and inspected the back, and laid it down.

"What's this got to do with anything--if anything?" he demanded, and Mr. Teal shook his head. "That's what I want to know."

The bell under Storm's desk rang discordantly, and he picked up the receiver.

"Hullo... Speaking."

He listened for a moment, and then spoke insistently.

"Struth! No, I don't know anything about it--yet. Look here, Mr. Blaythwayt, will you wrap that letter up exactly as it came, envelope and all, and send it round at once by special messenger? ... Yes, New Scotland Yard.... Right-thanks!"

"I know that man Blaythwayt," said Mr. Teal, as Storm replaced the receiver. "He's manager--"

"Shut up!" snarled Storm. "I'm thinking."

He swung over to the window and stood looking down for some moments. Then, abruptly, he came back to his desk and pressed a bell.

To the man who answered the summons he gave the trinket that Teal had brought him.

"Go down to Records," he commanded, "and ask 'em for anything they've got in which anything like this figured."

It was only ten minutes before the man returned, bearing with him a small bundle of papers. Storm lighted a cigarette and went through them carefully, and at the end he looked steadily across at Inspector Teal.

"Listen," he said. "Just over three months ago a man was found dead by the railway between Priory and Kearsney--that's on the Dover-London line. There were no marks of violence, and since he had a ticket from Dover to Victoria it was supposed that he'd simply fallen out of the train. He was identified as Henri Francois Joubert, a Frenchman domiciled in England, who'd made his fortune on the Stock Exchange--jobbing, you know--about thirty years ago. There'd be no records of the case if it hadn't been for one curious thing. In one of his pockets was this!"

He tapped a photograph with his forefinger, and Mr. Teal peered at it with his habitual indifference.

It was a picture of a visiting card. In the centre had been sketched a design similar to that on the silver triangle of Prester John, and underneath was roughly scrawled, "_February, 1899_."

"Mr. Blaythwayt," said Storm, "has just received through the post a similar card, and all that's written under the triangle is _Harchester_. What do you know about Harchester, Teal?"

"One of the biggest and best public schools," said Mr. Teal. "Joe Blaythwayt was educated there."

Storm leaned back in his chair and exhaled a thin streamer of smoke. Then he looked at Inspector Teal and smiled. Storm's smile was the most attractive thing about him. It flickered about his lips for a moment as though he didn't want to give it a chance, and then it broke out--irrepressibly boyish. It bubbled over with mischief.

Head back and a little to one side, eyes dancing, Storm smiled.

"Absurd be catlicked!" Storm said. "Teal, this is going to be Big!"