CHAPTER XXIXI TRY A FALL WITH JAMES MULLEN
Some one dressed like a woman was standing by the stove whistling softly to himself while paring his nails with a pearl-handled knife.
“My brother Bill, sir,” said Hughes gruffly, and I thought rather nervously, indicating me with the peaked cloth cap which he carried, rolled scrollwise, in his hand.
I followed suit with a bow, or rather a duck, and a polite “Good-evening, sir,” but Mullen continued his nail-pairing and whistling without deigning to look up.
For about a quarter of a minute I stood there feeling, and perhaps looking, rather foolish. Then Hughes said again, and this time rather louder, “My brother, sir.”
“There, there, my good fellow, that will do! I haven’t become deaf! I hear you,” Mullen answered, without raising his head.
He spoke very much in the manner affected by some curates. Each syllable was carefully pronounced and fell as cleanly cut as if it had been new pennies which his lips were coining. The aspirates, the “hear” and “there’s,” he discharged at us as if his mouth had been a tiny popgun, and he roared at us gently as any sucking dove with the cooing sound in such words as “do.”
But for all his nicety of speech he had too much of what is commonly called “side” in his manner to delude any one into the idea that he was a gentleman.
There is in the bearing of your true aristocrat towards strangers a certain suave and urbanehauteur—as of one who expects and, if need be, willexactthe courtesy he is accustomed toaccord—which the man of no breeding thinks can be imitated by the assumption of “side.”
Without his “side” hemightconceivably have passed for a gentleman. As it is, he as surely betrays himself for what he is, as the man who, by manifesting that over-anxiety to please—which he mistakes for the easy courtesy of well-bred intercourse—betrays his under-breeding.
Neither Hughes nor I made any reply to what Mullen had said—nor did the latter seem to expect us to do so, for he looked critically at his little finger, felt the nail with the tip of his thumb, put the finger to his teeth, nibbled at it for an instant, and then began scraping the nail edge very gingerly.
Chafed at his insolence as I was, I could not help noticing that his hands were small, white, and beautifully shaped, with the long taper fingers of the artist, and pink carefully-trimmed nails.
When he had quite finished, he closed the knife deliberately and put it on a little shelf by the bunk, then darting a sudden sideways glance at me, he inquired sharply, almost viciously, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?”
It was the first time he had looked at me since I had entered the cabin, and as I met his eye it seemed to me that he started perceptibly, and that I saw a sudden dilatation of the pupil which gave a look of consternation if not of fear to his face. The next moment he turned from me and flashed at Hughes a look of such malignity that I fully expected to see the looksucceeded by a blow—a look which, if I read it aright, was the portent of a terrible vengeance to the man who had played him false.
I am almost ashamed to write what followed. Not for the first time in my life—not for the first time in this enterprise—I acted as only one could act who was possessed by some spirit of mischief for his own undoing. Even to myself the impulse which comes over me at times to play the fool—to say or do at the critical moment the one word or thing which ought to be left unsaid or undone, is altogether unaccountable.
This uncertainty of character, this tendency to lose my head and to bring tumbling about my ears, by the utterance of a word, the entire edifice which I have perhaps spent laborious months in building up, has been my stumbling-block through life, and must inevitably stand in the way of my ever becoming a good detective. But a good detective I have, as the reader knows, never claimed to be. Were it so, I should undoubtedly suppress the incident I am about to relate, for it tells very much against myself without in any way strengthening the probability of my story.
When the man in hiding on the “Cuban Queen” lifted his head and looked me in the face, I knew at once that I was in the presence, if not of James Mullen, at all events of the person with whom I had travelled to Southend on the occasion when he had objected so forcibly to the striking of a fusee. The bright prominent eyes, beautiful as a woman’s, the delicately clear complexion, the straw-coloured hair, the aquiline nose with the strange upward arching of the nostrils, the curious knitting of the brows over the eyes, the full lips that spoke of voluptuousness unscrupulous and cruel, the firm, finely-moulded chin—all these there was no mistaking, in spite of his woman’s dress. As I looked at him the scene in the stuffy smoking carriage on the Southend railway came back to me, and when in his quick, incisive way he asked, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?” I stammered foolishly for a moment, and then, prompted by what spirit of perversity and mischief I know not, answered him by another question, which under the circumstances must have sounded like intentional insolence.
“You’re the man wot couldn’t stand the smell of fusees?”
Had horns suddenly sprouted out on each side of my head he could not have looked at me with more absolute amazement and dismay. For a very few seconds he stared wide-eyed with wonder, and then a look of comprehension and cunning crept into his eyes. They narrowed cat-like and cruel, the muscles about the cheeks tightened, the lips parted, showing the clenched teeth, I heard his breath coming and going like that of a winded runner, and the next second his face flamed out with a look of such devilish ferocity and uncontrollable fury as I pray God I may never see on face of man again.
With a howl of hatred more horrible than that of any tiger—for no wild beast is half so hellish in its cruelty as your human tiger—he sprang at me, beating at my face, now with closed fist, now open-handed and with clutching, tearing nails, kicking with his feet, biting and snapping at my hands and throat like a dog, and screaming like a very madman.
To this day it consoles me not a little for the lapse of self-possession which I had just before manifested to think that I never lost presence of mind during this onslaught. When he came at me, my one thought was to see that he madeuse of no weapons. His wild-cat clawing and scratching it was no difficult matter for any one with a quick eye and cool head to ward off; but when I saw him clap his hand to his hip, where, had he been wearing male clothing, a pistol or knife might well have lain, the eye I kept upon him was, I promise you, a keen one.
Finding no pocket at his hips reminded him no doubt of his woman’s dress, for his hand slipped down to the side of his skirt, where it floundered about as helplessly as a fish out of water.
A woman’s pocket is, to the degenerate male mind, a fearful and wonderful piece of mechanism. The intention of the designer was apparently to offer special inducements to pickpockets, and so to construct the opening that the contents should either fall out altogether and be lost, or should be swallowed up by dark and mysterious depths into which no male hand dare venture to penetrate. The only way to get at anything which happens to be wanted seems to be to haul the entire pocket to the surface, very much as a fishing-net is hauled from the depths of the sea, and to turn it inside out in search of the missing article.
On the occasion in question, Mullen was in too much of a hurry to adopt this course, and, but for the seriousness of the situation, I could have smiled, as I held him at arm’s length, to see him diving and fumbling among those unplumbed depths. When at last he rose, so to speak, gasping, to the surface, his hand was clutching a pistol-barrel, but the butt had in some way caught the lining of the dress, and in order to extricate it he had to turn the entire pocket inside out. In doing so, a folded paper fell, unseen by him, to the floor, and this I determined at all costs to secure.
Before he could raise his arm to use the pistol, I laid a hand of iron upon his. As I gripped the fingers which were grasping the butt they scrunched sickeningly and relaxed their hold of the pistol, which I wrenched away and tossed upon the bunk. Then I closed with him that we might try a fall together. Twisting my heel behind his ankle I jerked him backwards and had him off his legs in a jiffy. We fell to the floor—he under and I above—with a crash, and as we did so my hand closed over the paper, to secure which I had thrown him.
Crumpling it up in a ball I made as if to riseto a sitting posture, and in doing so managed to slip it into a side pocket. The next moment I found myself pulled over on my back by Hughes, who asked excitedly if we were both mad that we thus courted inquiry by fighting like a couple of wild cats. If the sound of scuffling or firing were heard to come from the hulk an alarm would, he said, be raised, the coastguardsmen would row out to discover the cause, and everything would be lost, as Mullen and I would be called upon to give an account of ourselves, and he (Hughes) would forfeit his post.
Mullen was evidently of the same opinion, for though he was livid to the lips, and was trembling with hate and rage until his teeth chinked in his head like a carelessly-carried tray of china, he gave no sign of wishing to continue the contest.
Nor was I inclined to shut my eyes to the wisdom of Hughes’ counsel, for I was already conscious of the fact that by taunting Mullen and provoking him to blows I was doing my best to spoil my own game. There was all the difference in the world between his presence on board the hulk being discovered by the police as a result of a brawl, and his being arrested oninformation given by me and supported by proof of his identity.
Mullen was the first to speak. He was now no doubt convinced that he had not acted with his customary discretion, for he had even stronger reasons than I to wish to avoid a visit from the police. So long as it was a question of brains he might hope to hold his own, but let him once fall into their hands and they would hold him by the brute force of number, whereas in me he was pitted against a single foe whom it might not be difficult to outwit.
“I beg your pardon for what happened just now,” he said, “but before we go any further tell me where and when I have seen you before.”
“I saw you in the Southend train once. You ’ad a row with a bloke wot stunk the carriage out with a fusee,” I answered, doing my best to sustain therôleI had assumed.
“Ah!” he said, looking very much relieved and with a wonderfully pleasant smile, “that explains everything. To tell the honest truth, my good man, I knew I had seen you before, the moment I set eyes on you, and the fact is I thought you were a detective who has beenhunting me down for a long time, and who has played me one or two tricks too dirty and too cowardly even for a detective to play, and for which one day I mean to be even with him.”
He was smiling still, but the smile seemed to have shifted from his eyes to his teeth, and the effect had ceased to be pleasant. He swung himself round and away from me, and, with hands clasped behind him and bent head, commenced pacing backward and forward—evidently deep in thought—in the scanty space the cabin afforded.
Five minutes went by in silence, and then he began to mutter to himself in a low voice, turning his head from side to side every now and then in a quick, nervous, birdlike way, his eyes never still a moment, but pouncing restlessly first on one object and then on another.
“What’s come to me,” he said to himself, and there was a look on his face which I have never seen except on the face of a madman—as, indeed, I am now fully persuaded he was. “What’s come to me that I of all men in the world should so forget myself as to behave—and before two louts—like a drunken, screeching, hysterical Jezebel?”
He stopped his restless pacing for a moment, and it seemed to me that the man was writhing under his self-contempt, as if every word had been a lash cutting ribbons of flesh from his bare back. Once more he fell to walking to and fro and holding converse with himself.
“Is the end coming, that I can break down like this?” he asked. “No, no, it’s this being hunted down day and night, until I get to start at my own shadow, that has made me nervous and overwrought.
“Nervous! Overwrought! My God! who wouldn’t be so who has led the life I’ve led these last six months—hearing in the daytime the step of the officer who has come to arrest me in every sound, and lying wide-eyed and awake the whole night through rather than trust myself to the sleep which brings always the same hideous dream, from which I awake screaming and with the cold sweat running off me like water!”
It was a magnificent piece of acting, if acting it were, and there was a pathetic break in his voice at the last which, had he not been what he was, would have made me pity him.
But James Mullen,aliasCaptain Shannon,was scarcely an object for pity, as I was soon reminded, for as he looked up my eye met his, and he read there, I suppose, something of what was passing through my mind. To such a man’s vanity the mere thought of being considered a possible object for pity is unendurable. It implies a consciousness of superiority on the part of the pitier which is resented more fiercely than an insult or a wrong. For one moment I thought that he was about to attack me again—not this time with tooth and nail, after the manner of a wild cat or a hysterical woman, but with a heavy three-legged stool which was lying upon the bunk, tossed there, I suppose, by Hughes to be out of the way while he was clearing up.
Mullen turned the edge of a glance toward it without taking his eyes from mine, and I saw his hand flutter up hesitatingly for a moment like a startled bird, and then drop dead to his side, and I knew that he was thinking how dearly, if he dared, he would love to beat the stool again and again against my face until he had bashed every feature out of recognition. But on this occasion he managed to keep his self-control, and contented himself by askingme, with savage irritability, what I was waiting for, and what I saw strange in him that I stood staring in that way.
I replied that I was only waiting to know whether he had anything else to say to me or my brother before the latter left the hulk.
He did not answer except to snap out, “You can go,” to Hughes, but when, after a surly “Good night both,” that worthy had taken his departure, Mullen turned to me again.
“Now listen. I’m a dangerous man to trifle with, and a desperate one, and there are not many things I’d stick at to be level with the man who played me false. But I can be a good friend to those who play me fair, as well as a relentless enemy. Act squarely by me while you are here, and keep your mouth shut when you leave, and you’ll never have cause to regret it. But if you play tricks here, or blab when you’re gone, you’ll do the worst day’s work for yourself you ever did in your life. Do you understand?”
He waited for a reply, so I nodded and said, “Fair do is fair do, guv’nor. That’s all right.”
“Very well,” he continued; “now we understand each other, and no more need be saidabout it. I shall sleep in the hold as I’ve done before, for if any one came out to the hulk for any reason it wouldn’t do for them to see me. You’ll take your nap here as your brother did. So I bid you good-night.”
“Good-night, sir,” I answered civilly, holding the door open for him.
“Now I’ll have a look at the paper that fell out of your pocket in the tussle, my friend,” I added, as soon as he was out of hearing. “I’ve got all the night before me; for I don’t intend to take the nap of which you were speaking until I’ve got you safe in custody—otherwise it might be a nap to which there would come no waking.”