* * *
The next day I satisfied myself that all was going well in the office, and simply roamed about London. Already I think the dim purpose which afterwards came to such extraordinary fruit was being born in my mind. I wanted to be alone, taken quite out of my usual surroundings, and I achieved this with considerable success. I rode in tube trains and heard everyone discussing Gideon Morse, and what was already known as the "City in the Clouds."
The papers announced that thousands of people were encamped in Richmond Park gazing upwards, and seeing nothing because of a cloud veil that hung around the top of the towers. It seemed the proprietors of telescopes on tripods were doing a roaring trade at threepence a look, but the gate in the grim, prison-like walls surrounding the grounds at the foot of the tower, was never once opened all day long.
I began to realize that probably nothing new, nothing reliable that is, would transpire at present. The sensation would go its usual way. There would be songs and allusions in all the revues tonight. Punch would have a cartoon, suggesting the City in the Clouds as a place of banishment for its particular bugbear of the moment. Gossip papers would be full of beautiful, untrue stories of a romantic nature about the girl I loved. Her name would be the subject of a million jokes by a million vulgar people. Then, little by little, the excitement would die away.
All this, as a trained journalist I foresaw easily enough, but knowing what I knew -- what probably I alone of all the teeming millions in London knew -- I was forming a resolve, which hourly grew stronger, that I would never rest until I knew the worst.
I found myself in Kensington. There was a motor omnibus starting for Whitechapel Road. I climbed on the top.
"I sye," piped a little ragamuffin office boy to his friend, "why does Jewanniter live in the clouds, Willum?"
"Arsk me another."
"'Cos she's a celebrated 'airess -- see?"
"What I say," said a meagre-looking man with a bristling moustache, "is simply this. If Mr. Morse chooses to live in a certain way of life and 'as the money to carry it out, why not let him alone? Freedom for every individual is a 'progative of English life, and I expect Morse is fair furious with what they're saying about him, for I have it on the best authority that a copy of every edition of the Evening Special goes up to him in the tower lifts as soon as it is issued."
Words, words, words! Everywhere, silly, irresponsible chatter which I heeded as little as a thrush heeds a shower of rain.
Steadily, swiftly, certainly, my purpose grew.
I got down in the Whitechapel Road, that wide and unlovely thoroughfare, and feeling hungry went into a dingy little restaurant partitioned off in boxes. The tablecloth was of stained oilskin, the guests the seediest type of minor clerks, but I do remember that for ninepence I had a little beefsteak and kidney pudding to myself which was as good as anything I have ever eaten.
As I went out, I saw my neighbour of the omnibus who had spoken so eloquently of freedom, walking by with a little black bag, as in an aimless way. I hailed a taxicab from the rank opposite a London hospital and told the man to drive slowly westwards.
He did so, and when we came to the Embankment a gleam of afternoon sunshine began to enlighten what had been a leaden day. Thinking a brisk walk from Blackfriars to Westminster would help my thoughts, I dismissed the cab.
It was with an odd little thrill and flutter of the heart that far away westwards, to the left of the Houses of Parliament, I saw three ghostly lines, no thicker than lamp posts, it seemed, springing upwards from nothingness. At Cleopatra's Needle, I felt the want of a cigarette and stopped to light one.
At the moment there were few people on the pavement, though the unceasing traffic in the road roared by as usual. I lit the cigarette, put my case back in my pocket, and was about to continue my stroll when I heard someone padding up behind me with obvious purpose.
I half turned, and there again I saw the man with the big moustache.
It flashed on me, for the first time, that I was being followed, had been followed probably during the whole of my wanderings.
As I said, there was nobody immediately about, so I turned to the man and challenged him.
"You're following me, my man, why? Out with it or I'll give you in charge."
"Yer can't," he said. "This is a free country. Freedom is my 'progative as well as yerself, Sir Thomas Kirby. I've done nothing to annoy yer, have I?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "But you have been following me."
His manner changed at once. "Ever since you left Piccadilly, Sir Thomas, waiting my opportunity. I'm a private inquiry agent by profession, though this job of shadowing you has nothing to do with the office that employs me. I have a young friend in my house who's turned up sudden and mysterious. A young friend I lost sight of many weeks ago. He says you'll come to him at once if I could only get you alone and be certain that no one saw me speak to you. His instructions were to follow you about until such an opportunity as this arose, and all the time I was to be certain that no one else was following you. I have ascertained that all right."
He put his head close to mine and I felt his hot breath on my cheek. "It's young Mr. William Rolston, Sir Thomas," he said. "I'm not in his confidence, though I have long admired his abilities and predicted a great future for him. He's come to me in distress, and I'm doing what I can to 'elp 'im -- this being a day when they've no job for me at the office."
"Good Lord, why didn't you speak to me this morning, if you've been following me all day?"
He shook his head. "Wouldn't have done. Mr. Rolston's instructions was different, and he has his reasons, though I'm not in his confidence. I've done it out of admiration for his talents, and no doubt some day he'll be in a position to pay me for my work."
"Pay you, you idiot!" I could have taken him by the throat and shaken the fool. "Mr. Rolston knows very well that he can command any money he chooses. He's a member of my staff."
We were now walking along together towards Westminster.
"That's as may be," said my seedy friend, "but 'e 'adn't a brass farthing this morning, and come to that, Sir Thomas, if you'd got into another blinking taxi, you'd have snookered me!"
"Where do you live?" I asked impatiently.
"Not far from where you 'ad your lunch, Sir Thomas. 15, Imperial Mansions, Royal Road, Stepney."
"That sounds like a magnificent address," I said, as I held out my stick for a cab.
"It's a block o' workmen's buildings, reely," he replied gloomily, "and in the thick of the Chinese quarter, which makes it none too savoury. But an Englishman's house is his castle and he has the 'progative to call it what he likes."
Back east we went again, and in half an hour I was mounting interminable stone steps to a door nearly at the top of Imperial Mansions, which my guide, who during our drive had introduced himself to me as Mr. Herbert Sliddim, announced as his home. In a dingily furnished room, sitting on a plush sofa I saw the curious young man to whom I had so taken months ago. He was shabby almost to beggary. His face was pale and worn, which gave him an aspect of being much older than I had imagined him. But his irrepressible ears stood out as of yore and his eyes were not dimmed.
"Hello," I said, "glad to see you, Mr. Rolston, though you've neglected us at the office for a long time. Your arrears of salary have been mounting up."
His hand was trembling as I gripped it. "Oh, Sir Thomas," he said, "do you really mean that I am still on the staff?"
"Of course you are, my dear boy." I turned to Mr. Sliddim. "Now I wonder," I said, "if I might have a little quiet conversation with Mr. Rolston."
"By all means," he replied. "I'll wait in the courtyard."
"I shouldn't do that, Mr. Sliddim. Why not take a tour round?"
I led him out of the room into the passage which served for hall, pressed a couple of pounds into his hand and had the satisfaction of seeing him leap away down the stairs like an antelope.
"That's all right," said Rolston. "Now he'll go and get blotto.
It's the poor devil's failing. Still, he'll be happy."
I sat down, passed my cigarette case to Rolston, and waited for him to begin.
He sort of came to attention. "I was rung up, Sir Thomas, at your flat -- at least your valet was -- and told to come to the office of the Evening Special at once."
"I know, go on."
"I dressed as quickly as I could, ran down the stairs and jumped into the waiting cab. The door banged and we started off. The engines must have been running, for we went away like a flash. There was someone else sitting there. A hand clapped over my mouth and an arm round my body. I couldn't move or speak. Then the thumb of the hand did something to the big nerves behind my ear. It's an Oriental trick and I had just realized it when something wet and sweet was pressed over my mouth and nose, and I lost all consciousness.
"When I woke up I found myself in a fair-sized room, lit by a skylight high up in the roof. There was a bed, a table, a chair, and various other conveniences, and I hadn't the slightest idea where I could be. My head ached and I felt bruised all over, so I drank a glass of water, crawled back into the bed and slept. When I woke again there was an affable Chinese man sitting by my side, who spoke quite good English.
"'You will,' he said, 'be kept here for some time in durance, yes. It is an unfortunate necessity, yes.'
"I heard on all sides familiar noises. I knew in a moment what had happened. I had been taken to the works at the base of the three towers."
"All this fits in very well with what I now know, Rolston. I'll tell you everything in a minute, but I want to hear your story first."
"Very good, Sir Thomas. For over three months I've been kept a prisoner at Richmond. I wasn't badly treated. I had anything I liked to eat and drink, any books to read -- tobacco, a bath -- everything but newspapers, which were rigidly denied me. I wasn't kept entirely to my prison room. I was allowed to go out and take exercise within the domain surrounded by the great thirty-foot wall, though I was never let to roam about as I wished. There was always a big Chinese workman with a leaded cane attending me, a man that only spoke a few words of English.
"Now, Sir Thomas, please remember this. From first to last none of my jailers knew that I understood Chinese. And none of them knew or suspected that I had been among the workmen before, in order to get information for the scoop with which I came to you."
I saw the value of that at once. "Good for you, Rolston. Now please continue."
"Well, Sir Thomas, I kept my eyes and ears very wide open and I learnt a lot. Things were being prepared with a feverish activity of which the people outside had not the slightest idea. I found that round the base of the towers, in the miniature park enclosed by the high wall, there were already magnificent vegetable gardens in active being. There were huge conservatories which must have been set up when the towers were only a few hundred feet high, now full of the rarest flowers and shrubs. In my walks, I saw a miniature poultry farm, conducted on the most up-to-date methods; there was a dairy, with four or five cows. Already this part of the huge enclosure was assuming a rural aspect. It must have been planned and started nearly two years ago."
"You asked questions, I suppose?"
"Any amount, as innocently as I possibly could. I got very little out of my captors in reply. The Chinese are the most secretive people in the world. But, I heard them talking among themselves, and I was amazed at the calculated organization which had been going on without cessation from the beginning.
"It all fitted in exactly with what I told you at the Special office. It was as though Mr. Morse was planning a little private world of his own, which would be independent of everything outside."
"And about the towers themselves?"
"It will take me hours to tell you, Sir Thomas. In one quarter of the enclosure there are great dynamo sheds -- an electric installation inferior to nothing else of its kind in the world. The great lifts which rise and fall in the towers are electric. Heating, lighting, artificial daylight for the conservatories -- all are electric.
"Where I was kept," he went on, "was nearly a quarter of a mile from the engineering section, but I knew it hummed with extraordinary activity night and day. I discovered that structural buildings of light steel were pouring in from America, that an army of decorators and painters was at work; vans of priceless Oriental furniture and hangings were arriving from all parts of the world, rare flowers and shrubs also. Sir Thomas, it was as though the Universe was being searched for wonders -- all to be concentrated here.
"This went on and on till I lost count of the days, and lived in a sort of dream, kindly treated enough, allowed to see many secret things, and always with a sense that because this was so, I should never again emerge into the real world."
"I can understand that, Rolston. Every word you say interests me extremely."
"I'll come to the present, Sir Thomas. You can ask me any details that you like afterwards. A few days ago everything was speeded up to extraordinary pitch. Then, late one night, there was a great to-do, and in the morning I learned that Mr. Morse and his family had arrived, and they were up at the top. I have found out since that this was the fourteenth of September."
"The fourteenth!" I cried.
"Yes, Sir Thomas, the fourteenth. The next day, it was late in the afternoon and the sun was setting, two Chinese men came into my room, tied a handkerchief over my eyes and led me out. I was put into one of the little electric railways -- open cars which run all over the enclosure -- and taken to the base of the towers.
"I don't know which tower it was, but I was led into a lift and a long, slow ascent began. I knew I was in one of the big carrying lifts that take a long time to do the third of a mile up to the City, not one of the quick-running elevators which leap upwards from stage to stage for passengers and arrive at the top in a comparatively short space of time.
"When the lift stopped they took off the handkerchief and I found myself in a great whitewashed barn of a place which was obviously a storeroom. There were bales of stuff, huge boxes and barrels on every side.
"The men who had brought me up were just rough Chinese workmen from Hong Kong, but a door opened and a Chinese man of quite another sort came in and took me by the arm.
"You see, Sir Thomas," Rolston explained, "to the ordinary Englishman one Chinese man is just like another, but my experience in the East enables me to distinguish at once.
"The newcomer was of a very superior class, and he led me out of the storeroom, across a swaying bridge of latticed steel to a little rotunda. As we passed along, I had a glimpse of the whole of London, far, far below. The Thames was like a piece of glittering string. Everything else were simply patches of grey, green, and brown.
"We went into the cupola and a tiny lift shot us up like a bullet until it stopped with a clank and I knew I was now on the highest platform of all.
"But I could see nothing, for we simply turned down a long corridor lighted by electricity and softly carpeted, which might have been the corridor of one of the great hotels far down below in town.
"My conductor, who wore pince-nez and a suit of dark blue alpaca and who had a charming smile, stopped at a door, rapped, and pushed me in.
"I found myself in a room of considerable size. It was a library. The walls were covered with shelves of old oak, in which there were innumerable books. A Turkish carpet, two or three writing tables -- and Mr. Gideon Morse, whom I had never spoken to, but had seen driving in Hyde Park, sat there smoking a cigar.
"I might have been in the library of a country house, except for two things. There were no windows to this large and gracious room. It was lit from above, like a billiard room -- domed skylights in the roof. But the light that came down was not a light like anything I had ever seen. It lit up every detail of the magnificent and stately place, but it was new -- 'the light that never was on earth or sea.' It was just that that made me realize where I was -- two thousand three hundred feet up in the air, alone with Gideon Morse, who had snatched me out of life three m
onths before."
"I know Mr. Morse, Rolston. What impression did he make on you?"
"For a moment he stunned me, Sir Thomas. I knew I was in the presence of a superman. All I had heard about him, all the legends that surrounded his name, the fact of this stupendous sky city in which I was, the ease with which he had stretched out his hand and made me a prisoner, all combined to produce awe and fear."
"Yes, go on."
"I saw two other things -- I think I did. One was that the man's sanity is trembling in the balance. The other that if ever a human being lives and moves and has his being in deadly temporal fear, Gideon Mendoza Morse is that man."
The words rang out in that East End room with prophetic force. It was as though a brilliant light was snapped on to illumine a dark chamber in my soul.
"What did he say to you, Rolston?"
"He was kindness itself. He said he immensely regretted the necessity for secluding me so long. 'But of course I shall make it up to you. You're a young man, Mr. Rolston, only just commencing your career. A little capital would doubtless assist that career, in which I may say I have every belief. Shall we say that you leave Richmond this afternoon with compensation of five hundred pounds?'
"'A thousand would suit me better,' I said.
"He shrugged his shoulders, and suddenly smiled at me. "'Very well,' he said, 'let it be a thousand pounds.'
"'Of course without prejudice, Mr. Morse.'
"'Please explain yourself,' he said.
"'You've kidnapped me', I told him. 'You've also committed an offence against the law of England -- a criminal offence for which you will have to suffer. Perhaps you don't realize that if you built your house miles further up, even if you managed to nearly reach the moon, British justice would reach you at last.'
"He shook his head sadly.
"'To that point of view, I hardly agree, Mr. Rolston. I am quite unable to purchase British justice, but I can put such obstacles in its way that could----'
"He suddenly stopped there, lit a little brown cigarette, came up and patted me on the shoulder.
"'Child,' he said, 'you are clever, you are original, I like you. But have a sense of proportion, and remember that you have no choice in this matter. I will give you the money you want on condition that you go away and bring no action whatever against me. If not----'
"'If not, sir?'
"'Well, you will have to stay here, that's all. You won't be badly treated. You can be librarian if you like, but you will never see the outside world again.'
"'May I have a few hours to consider, sir?'
"'A month if you like,' he said, pressing a bell on his table.
"The same bland young Chinese man led me out of the library and down to the storeroom in the lift. I was blindfolded, and descended to the ground.
"There I met a man whom I had seen two or three times during the last three days, a great seven-foot American with arms like a gorilla, a thing called 'Boss Mulligan,' whom I had gathered from the conversation of my Chinese friends, had now arrived to take charge of the whole city -- a sort of head policeman and guard.
"'Sonny,' he said, 'I've had a phone down from the top in regard to you. You've been made a good offer. You grip it and be like fat in lavender. My advice to you is to wind a smile round your neck and depart with the dollars. I can see you're full of pep, and now you've got fortune before you. See that pavilion over there?'
"He pointed to where a little gaudily painted house nestled under one of the great feet of the first tower.
"'That's my mansion. You wander about for an hour or so and come there and say you agree to the boss's terms. We'll take your word for it. On the word "Yes," I'll hand you out at the gate and you can go to Paris for a trip.'
"'I'll think it over,' I said.
"'Do so, and don't be a life-everlasting, twenty-four-hours-a-day, dyed-in-the-wool damn fool.'
"It was getting dusk. I was in a new part of the enclosed park. He let me go without any watchful Chinese attendant at my heels, and I strolled off with my head bent down as if deep in thought.
"I'd got an hour, and I think I made the best use of it. I hurried along under the shadow of the towers, past shrubberies, artificial lakes, summer houses and little enclosed rose gardens until I was far away from Mr. Mulligan. Here and there I passed a patient Chinese gardener or some hurrying member of Morse's little army. But nobody stopped me or interfered with me. For the first time since my captivity I was perfectly free.
"To cut a long story short, Sir Thomas, I came to a rectangle in the great encircling wall, which at that point was thirty feet high. The parapet at the top was obviously being repaired, for there was a ladder right up, pails of mortar, bricklayers' tools, and a coil of rope for binding scaffolding. I nipped up the ladder, carrying the rope after me, fixed it at the top, slid down easily enough, and in a quarter of an hour was in Richmond station. I didn't dare go back to my old rooms, because I was sure there would be a secret hue and cry after me. I thought of my old friend, Mr. Sliddim, travelled to Whitechapel with my last pence, and here I am."
"Still a member of my staff?"
"If you please, Sir Thomas."
"Ready for anything?"
"Anything and everything."
"Then come with me to Piccadilly -- if they look for you there again, we will be prepared."