Somewhat later on the same afternoon, in the drawing-room of the house opposite, Josephus Ilam was drinking tea with his mother. The aged Mrs. Ilam, who was very thin and not in the least tall—her son would have made a dozen of her—sat tremendously upright in her chair, while Josephus lolled his great bulk in angry attitudes on a sofa, near which the tea-table had been placed. Mrs. Ilam wore widow’s weeds, though it was many years since she had lost her husband, a man who had made a vast fortune out of soda-water—in the days when soda-waterwassoda-water. She had a narrow, hard face, with intensely black eyes, and intensely white hair, and when she directed those eyes upon her son, it became instantly plain that her son was at once her idol and her slave. She lived solely for this man of fifty, who had scarcely ever left her side. For her this mass of fifteen stone four was still a young child, needing watchful care and constant advice. Certainly she spoilt him; but, just as certainly, he went in awe of her. The fact that by judicious investments in hotel and public-house property he had more than doubled the fortune which his father left, did not at all improve his standing with the antique dame; it only made him in her view a clever boy with financial leanings. Moreover, every penny of the Ilam fortune was legally hers during her lifetime. Even Ilam’s share in the City of Pleasure was hers. When Carpentaria had discovered him, he had had to decide whether or not he should put more than a million pounds into the enterprise, and it was his mother who decided, who listened to everything, and then briefly told him that he would be a fool to leave the thing alone.
“Well,” she said, in her high quavering voice, as she passed him a cup of tea—the cup rattled on the saucer in her blue-veined parchment hand—“so you are not getting on with Carpentaria? I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“He won’t listen to reason about the advertisements,” said Ilam crossly, stirring his tea.
“No?”
“And he’s absolutely mad about his music. He’s spent ten hours in rehearsing these last two days. All the work, I’ve had to do myself.”
“Indeed!”
“And then, to crown his exploits, he takes me up in the balloon, mother—wastes a solid hour.”
“In the balloon!”
Ilam recounted the incident of the balloon.
“And, after all, he lets that impudent journalist go free—absolutely free!”
“Jos,” said his mother, “it’s a wonder you’re alive, my dear.”
“It’s a pity Carpentaria’s alive,” rejoined Ilam.
His mother’s burning eyes met his.
“That’s just what I’ve been thinking,” she piped calmly.
Her son’s gaze dropped.
“Since when?”
“Since you began grumbling about him, last week but one, my pet.”
“He’s no use now,” Ilam grumbled. “We’ve carried out all his ideas, and it’s simply a matter of business, and Carpentaria doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘business.’ Just think of his argument about those ads.!”
“Never mind that, Jos,” Mrs. Ilam put in.
“He’s only in the way now,” Jos proceeded gloomily.
“I suppose he wouldn’t retire,” Mrs. Ilam suggested.
“Retire? Of course he wouldn’t retire—nothing would induce him to retire. He enjoys it—he enjoys annoying me.”
“Anyway,” said the mother, “you’ll have the satisfaction of a very great success.”
She looked out of the window at the gardens.
“Yes,” growled Ilam. “And he gets half the profits. I’ve found all the money, and he hasn’t found a cent. But he gets half the profits. What for? A few ideas—nothing else. He pretends to direct, but he’ll direct nothing except his blessed band. And I reckon we shall clear a profit of ten thousand a week! Half of ten is five.”
“He only gets half the profits as long as he lives, Jos,” said Mrs. Ilam. “After that—nothing.”
“Nothing,” agreed Jos, biting cruelly into a hot scone. “But as long as he lives he’s costing me, say, five thousand a week, besides worry.”
“He mayn’t live long,” Mrs. Ilam ventured. “No, but he may live fifty-years.”
“Supposing he died very suddenly, Jos,” Mrs. Ilam pursued calmly; “he wouldn’t be the first person that was inconvenient to you who had disappeared unexpectedly.”
“Mother!” Ilam almost shouted, starting up. “But would he?” Mrs. Ilam persisted.
“No, he wouldn’t,” muttered Josephus, and his voice trembled.
Mrs. Ilam blew out the spirit-lamp under the kettle as though she was blowing out Carpentaria. “I’m off,” said Josephus nervously.
“Wait a moment, child. Ring the bell for me.” A servant entered.
“Bring me your master’s knitted waistcoat,” said Mrs. Ilam.
“But, mother, I shan’t want it.”
“Yes, you will, Jos. There’s no month more treacherous than May. You’ll put it on to please me.”
He obeyed, bent down to kiss his terrible parent, and departed.
“Think it over,” she called out after him.
Ilam stopped.
“And then, what about his sister?” he said. “Don’t mix up two quite separate things,” Mrs. Ilam responded. “Besides, she isn’t his sister.”
That night the City of Pleasure was illuminated. Eighty thousand tiny electric lamps hanging in festoons from standard to standard lighted the Central Way alone; the façades of all the places of amusement were outlined in fire; the shops glittered; and the cable-cars, as they flashed to and fro, bore the monogram I.C. in electricity on their foreheads. At eight o’clock the thoroughfare was crowded with visitors, and the stream of arrivals was stronger than ever. In the superb restaurants, at all prices (no matter what the price, they were equally superb in decoration), five thousand diners were finishing five thousand dinners, their eyes undisturbed by the presence of advertisements on the walls. The theatre, the music-hall, the circus, the menagerie, the concerts, and the rest of the entertainments, were filling up. In the Amusements Park people shot down railways into water, slid down smooth slopes into mattresses, circled in great wheels, floated in the latest novelties of merry-go-rounds, ascended in the balloon, and practised all the other devices for frittering away eternity, just as though night had not fallen. In the vast court of the Exposition Palace a band was swelling the strains of the newest waltzes to three storeys of loungers and sitters at café-tables, while within the interior of the building men and women wandered about examining the multifarious attractions of the Woman’s Exhibition.
But the chief joy was the Oriental Gardens, wherein a multitude of over fifty thousand persons had gathered together. The Oriental Gardens were illuminated, but in a different manner from the Central Way. Chinese lanterns were suspended everywhere in the budding trees, giving the illusion of magic precocious flowers that had blossomed there in a single hour, in all the tints of the rainbow and many others entirely foreign to the rainbow. The bandstand alone was picked out in electricity. It blazed in the centre of the gardens like a giant’s crown, and, although yet empty, it formed the main object of attention. Overhead stretched a dark-blue sky, silvered with stars, and the wind had a warm and caressing quality which encouraged sightseers to expose themselves to it to such an extent that the fifteen cafés of the Oriental Gardens, some sheltered, some quite open, but each a centre of light and laughter, were every one crowded with guests. The four thousand chairs surrounding the bandstand were occupied, and also the six thousand other chairs dispersed in various parts of the gardens. The murmur of conversation, the rustle of dresses, the tinkle of glasses, the rumour of uncountable footsteps, rose on the air. The faces of pretty women could be observed obscurely in the delicious gloom, and the glowing scarlet of cigars bobbed mysteriously about like aspecies of restless glow-worm.
And everybody was conscious of the sensation of the extraordinary and amazing success of the great show. The evening papers had carried the news of the wonderful thing to each suburb of London. These papers gave from hour to hour the number of the persons who had passed the turnstiles, and calculated the number of tons of shillings that Ilam and Carpentaria would have to bank on Monday morning. But the principal thing that struck the evening papers was the complete readiness of the City of Pleasure. No detail of it was unfinished, and all agreed that this phenomenon stood unique in the history of the art of amusing immense crowds. All felt that a new era of amusement enterprise had been ushered in by Ilam and Carpentaria, that everything was changed, and that in the future an enlightened and excessively exacting public would not be satisfied with what had pleased it in the past. And the owners of the old-fashioned resorts trembled in their shoes, and hated Ilam and Carpentaria, while the myriad patrons of Ilam and Carpentaria on that first day flattered themselves that they had personally assisted at the birth of the grand innovation, and thought how they would say to their grandchildren: “Yes, I was present at the opening of the City of Pleasure, and a marvellous affair it was,” and so on, in the manner of grandparents.
All were expecting Carpentaria, the lion of the show.
His band was due to perform from eight o’clock to ten, and special bills, posted on the sides of the gilded bandstand and in the cafés, announced: “Carpentaria’s band will play the Balloon Lullaby, the latest composition of Carpentaria, composed this afternoon.”
At ten minutes before eight the members of the band, sixty in number, and clad in the imperial purple uniform, marched in Indian file across the gardens to the stand. At a distance of ten paces from the end of the procession came Carpentaria, preceded by a small page bearing his baton on a cushion of purple velvet. Carpentaria always did things with overwhelming style and solemnity. Superior persons laughed at the style and solemnity, but the vast majority did not laugh; they cheered; they appreciated. Whether they were right or wrong, the indubitable fact is that these things came naturally to Carpentaria; they were the expression of his exceedingly theatrical soul, the devices of a man who believes in himself.
At eight o’clock precisely Carpentaria faced the fifty thousand from his bandstand, and, after having bowed elaborately thrice, turned to the band, and lifted the sacred stick.
It was a dramatic moment, the real inauguration of the City of Pleasure.
Cheers and hurrahs rolled in terrific volumes of sound across the gardens, and they did not cease; and people not acquainted with the fame and renown of Carpentaria perceived what it was to be a favourite of capitals, a leading star in the galaxy of stars that the public salutes and recognizes.
Carpentaria preserved the immobility of carven stone until the plaudits had ceased; they lasted for exactly five and a half minutes. Consequently the concert was exactly five and a half minutes late in commencing. Carpentaria himself was never late, but his public had a habit of delaying him.
Suddenly he brought rown his baton with a surprising shock. The carven stone had started into life, and “God save the King” was under way.
Now to see Carpentaria conduct was one of the sights of the world. He conducted not merely with his hand and eye, but with the whole of his immortal frame and his uniform. It was said that he was capable of conducting the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven with his left foot—and who shall deny it? “God save the King” was child’s play to him. Moreover, he showed a certain reserve in handling it. He merely conducted it as though in conducting it he himself were literally saving the King. That was all. But with what snap, what dash, whatchic, what splash and what magnificent presence of mind did he save the King! The applause was wild and ample.
The next item was “The City of Pleasure March,” composed by Carpentaria. Indeed, Carpentaria conducted nothing but national hymns, his own compositions, and, as a superlative concession, Wagner and Beethoven. “The City of Pleasure” was in Carpentaria’s finest style, and it was planned to give him the fullest scope in conducting it. He had already made it famous in a triumphal tour through the United States in the previous year. It began with the utmost possible volume of sound. It had a contagious and infectious lilt to it, and both the lilt and the volume of sound were continued without the slightest respite during the whole composition. In the course of this masterpiece Carpentaria performed physical feats that would have astounded Cinquevalli and the Schaffer Troupe. In the frenzy of self-expression he all but stood on his head. The bandstand was too small for him; he needed a planet on which to circulate. By turns his baton was a sceptre, a pump-handle, a maypole, a crutch, a drumstick, a flag, a toothpick, a mop, a pendulum, a whip, a bottle of soothing-syrup, and a scorpion. By turns he whipped, tortured, encouraged, liberated, imprisoned, mopped up, measured, governed, diverted, pushed over, pulled back, and turned inside out his band, and whenever their enthusiasm seemed likely to lead them into indiscretions, he soothed them with the soothing-syrup. By turns the conducting of the piece was a march, a campaign, a house on fire, the race for the Derby, the forging of a hundred-ton gun, a display of fireworks, a mayoral banquet, and a mother scolding a numerous family.
It was colossal.
At the close, as sudden as the shutting of a door, there was a vast strange silence, and then the applause, as colossal as the piece, broke out like a conflagration.
Carpentaria bowed; the entire band bowed; Carpentaria bowed again. Lastly he indicated a flute-player with his baton, and the flute-player came forward and shared the glory of Carpentaria. Why a flute-player, no one could have guessed. Forty flutes could not have been heard in that terrific concourse of brass and drums. But Carpentaria was Carpentaria.
“Did any of you hear the sound of a shot?” Carpentaria said in a low voice to his band.
“Shot? No, sir. No, sir,” came from a dozen mouths. “Why, sir?”
“Because a bullet has just grazed my ear. It was in the fourth bar from the end.” He put his hand to his ear and showed blood on his finger. “It’s nothing, nothing,” he quieted them. “I shall expect you to behave as though nothing had occurred, as soldiers in fact.”
“Certainly, sir,” replied the intrepid band.
Carpentaria gazed at one of the iron supports of the roof of the bandstand. In a line with his head the surface of the pillar had been damaged and dented. He disturbed two trombone-players in order to search the floor, and in a few seconds he had found a flattened bullet, which he put in his pocket.
“Number two,” he said sharply, going to his desk and tapping it.
Number two was the lullaby. No more striking contrast to the march could have been found. It was so delicate, so softly stealing, that you could scarcely hear it; and yet you could hear it—you could hear it everywhere. Carpentaria drew sweetness out of his band with the gestures of a conjurer drawing an interminable roll of coloured paper from his mouth, previously shown to be empty. It was the daintiest thing, swaying in the air like gossamer. It brought tears to the orbs of mothers, and made strong men close their eyes. Such was the versatility of Carpentaria.
The applause amounted to a furore.
“I give you my word of honour, ladies and gentlemen,” said Carpentaria, coming to the rail of the stand and stilling the cheers with a gesture, “at halfpast three this afternoon not a note of the little piece was composed.”
His demeanour gave no sign of agitation. But at the close of the concert, no more bullets having arrived, he wiped his brow with relief. Most of the band did the same.
He walked about on the river terrace for over an hour, calming his spirit, which had been through so many excitements, artistic and otherwise, during the afternoon and evening. And he meditated, now on the bullet, and now on Ilam. He could scarcely realize how nearly he had escaped quarrelling with Ilam in the balloon; their relations hitherto had been invariably amicable, at any rate on the surface; and he had done so much for Ilam; he had put a second fortune in Ilam’s pocket. The dazzling success of the day of inauguration was the success of Carpentaria’s ideas. And yet Ilam hated him. He felt that Ilam hated him. He almost shuddered as he remembered the moment when he had sat on the dizzy edge of the balloon-car, and Ilam had threatened him, and then laughed.
The Oriental Gardens were empty and dark. The gay crowd had departed; the lights were extinguished. Only the light in Ilam’s drawing-room shone across the expanse as it had shone through all the evening. Carpentaria’s own bungalow was dark. He wondered what Juliette was doing.
At length he set off home through the gardens. And just as he was entering his front-door he recollected that he had given no instructions about the drunken man in the enclosure. He turned back down the steps, and went into the enclosure and struck a match. The man was lying on the ground, no doubt asleep.
“Well, this is a caution!” he muttered.
A notion occurred to him, one of his fanciful pranks. He picked up the unconscious man, who held himself stiff and did not even groan, and carried him, not with too much difficulty—for Carpentaria was extremely powerful—to the side-door of Ilam’s residence; he placed the form against the door. Every night for weeks past Ilam had come out by that door about midnight to take a final stroll of inspection. He felt that he owed Ilam a grudge. Then he retired into the shadow and waited.
Presently the door opened, and Ilam fell over the man, as Carpentaria hoped he would, and picked himself up with oaths and struck a match and gazed at the form.
At the same instant a woman’s figure passed Carpentaria in the dark. He was surprised to recognize Juliette. He touched her.
“Oh!” she cried softly, starting back.
“Why do you start like that?” he demanded.
“You—you—frightened me,” she said.
He escorted her into their house. When he came out again Ilam was descending the steps by the side door. Nothing lay near the door.
“Seen anything of a drunken man?” Carpentaria called out.
“No,” said Ilam, after a pause.
“Not near your door?”
“No. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. Only I thought I saw one.”
“Good night,” growled Ilam, but instead of taking the air he returned abruptly to the house.
Curious! Carpentaria meditated as he retired to his abode. “Having fallen over a man lying drunk on his steps, why should my friend and partner, Mr. Josephus Ilam, totally deny that he has seen a drunken man? With my own eyes I saw him tumble. Now this mishap must have made Mr. Josephus Ilam angry, because he is just the sort of person who does get angry upon the provocation of a pure accident. Yet, so far as I could judge in the gloom, there was no trace of anger in his demeanour when he answered my question. On the contrary, he appeared to be rather subdued.
“And further—what has become of my friend the drunken man? The drunken man must exist somewhere. Is he in Ilam’s house? And, if so, why is he in Ilam’s house? Neither Josephus nor his mother is precisely a type of the Good Samaritan. And if he is not in Ilam’s house, has he suddenly recovered and walked away on his legs unaided? Impossible! I was once drunk, and I say, impossible. Then, has Josephus carried him somewhere? And where has he carried him, and why?”
Carpentaria unlocked his front-door and entered the hall of his dwelling, and then locked and bolted the door. He was not in the habit of either locking or bolting his front-door; the idea of so securing a house which stood in the middle of half a square mile of private property, well guarded at all its gates, seemed ridiculous. Nevertheless he did it, and he could have given no reason for doing it. He imagined that he heard footsteps in the passage leading from the hall to the kitchen, and he quickly turned on the electric light and looked down the passage. But there was nothing. He decided that he was very nervous and impressionable that night. The servants had, doubtless, long since gone to bed. He extinguished the light and made his way upstairs to his study, and sat down in his chair—the famous chair in which he composed his famous melodies. The faint illumination of the May night made the principal objects in the room vaguely visible. He could discern the pale square of the framed autograph letter from President McKinley which hung on the opposite wall. He tried to collect his ideas and think in a logical sequence.
Then, again, he fancied that he heard footsteps, and that he saw a dim form near the door.
“Who’s that?” he cried sharply.
“It’s only me,” answered a woman’s voice, and the electricity was at the same instant switched on.
Juliette stood there.
“Why are you sitting in the dark, Carlos?” she demanded.
Carlos was her pet name for him.
“I don’t know,” he said lamely.
“My poor dear,” she smiled, approaching him. “I haven’t said good-night to you.”
She put her long and elegant hands on his shoulders, as was her wont each evening, and kissed him on both cheeks in her French fashion. The affection between Carlos and his half-French half-sister was real and profound. He liked her for her Parisian daintiness, and for the eminently practical qualities which she possessed in common with most Frenchwomen, and also because she regarded him as a genius. To-night he thought she was sweeter and more sisterly than ever.
“Good-night,” she said, and her voice trembled, and a slight humidity glistened in her eyes.
“Good-night,” he responded.
And she tripped off, swinging the perfect skirt of her blackmousselinedress round the edge of the door.
“She’s mightily excited to-night,” he murmured to himself; and he reflected, as all men reflect from time to time, that women are strange and incomprehensible, a device invented by Providence to keep the wit of man well sharpened by constant employment.
He passed into his bedroom, and went out on to the wooden balcony of the bedroom, which commanded a view of Ilam’s side-door. A light showed through the glass above the door, and Carpentaria noticed at length that the door was slightly ajar. He stepped back into the bedroom, extinguished all his own lights, and returned to the balcony to watch. He determined to watch as long as Ilam’s door remained ajar. He sat down in a cane chair provided for repose on the balcony, and his one regret was that the glow of a cigarette or a cigar would betray him.
He grew calmer. The frenzy into which music always threw him had quite worn itself away. He was able to think clearly. He did not, however, think so much upon the incident of the drunken man as upon the incident of the bullet; and this was perhaps natural. He was astounded now that he could have remained in the bandstand, so utterly careless of danger, after the arrival of the bullet. He was astounded, too, at the sang-froid of his musicians. But, then, their ears had not been grazed, and his had. He saw that he was at the mercy of any homicidal maniac who, on a dark night, with a good rifle and a sure aim, chose to secrete himself in some deserted alley of the vast Oriental Gardens, and shoot at him during a loud burst of music. And he said: “Well, if I am to die, I am to die, and there’s an end of it. Assuming that a given man A has really determined to kill another given man B, and A is obstinate, nothing will ultimately save B. I am B. Hence I must be philosophical.”
But who was A?
He thought of all the enemies he had made, all the rivals he had defeated, but the process of their enumeration was perfunctory. For out of the depths of his mind rose persistently one name, again, and again, and again, and yet again, like a succession of bubbles, all alike, rising to the surface of a pond and breaking there. And that name was the name of Ilam. He forbade the name to rise, but it rose. With the simplicity which marked some of his mental processes, he could not understand why Ilam should hate him murderously. But the episode of the balloon had magically and terribly cast a new and searching light on the recesses of Ham’s character. He felt that hitherto he had been mistaken in Ilam, and that Ilam was not a person with whom it was wise to have interests in common. And the unknown designs of Ilam seemed to surround him in the night like the web of a gigantic spider, and to bind him tighter and tighter.
Then his reflections were interrupted by a sound somewhere below the balcony.
It was the sound of his own side-door being very cautiously opened. He could hear it perfectly clearly in the still night; but whether the door was being opened from the outside or the inside he could not tell. He remembered that, though he had bolted and locked the front-door, he had utterly forgotten the side-door. He leaned over the balcony as far as he dared, but even so he could catch no glimpse of anything in the obscurity beneath.
And then there were steps on the gravel, and he saw a white blur moving on the top of a dark mass. In another moment he perceived that the apparition was Juliette, with a white shawl wrapped round her head. What was she doing there, and why had she opened the door so cautiously? Had she some secret? He decided to watch her. She moved to the middle of the avenue between the two houses and hesitated. And then the great clock in the tower of the Exposition Palace tolled the hour of twelve solemnly, as it were warningly, over the immense extent of the sleeping City of Pleasure.
The appeal of the clock seemed to Carpentaria to be almost dramatic. He felt strongly that he could not spy upon Juliette, that he could not be disloyal to this affectionate companion of his life, and honourably he called out to her:
“Juliette, what are you doing?”
His own voice startled him. It was so clear and penetrative in the gloom.
There was a slight pause. Then Juliette replied: “Carlos, you seem bent on frightening me tonight. I thought you were in bed and asleep. You’ll take cold on that balcony. I only came out to get a little air.”
The notion struck him that her head was turned directly to Ham’s house, and yet she made no comment on the light there and the door ajar.
“Go in, there’s a good girl,” said Carpentaria. “It’s you who’ll be taking cold.”
“I’m going in,” she answered.
And she went in.
He had yet another alarm. Something moved on the balcony itself, near a row of flower-pots. Then he felt a pressure against his leg.
“Ah, Beppo!” he whispered, suddenly relieved, smiling at his nervous timidity. A great Angora cat leaped on to his knees, and began clawing at the superb pile of his purple trousers. He stroked the animal, and Beppo purred with a volume of sound equal to that of many sawmills. “Don’t purr so loud, Bep,” he advised the cat; but the cat, under the impression that it was the centre of importance in the best of all possible worlds, purred with undiminished vigour.
Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour passed so, and then Carpentaria heard heavy footsteps in the avenue from the direction of the Central Way. He jumped up, shattering the illusions of Beppo, and listened intently. A man presently appeared, walking slowly. He wondered who it could be; but when the figure paused at Ilam’s steps, mounted them, and pushed open the unlatched door, he saw that it was Ilam himself, and that Ilam was holding in his arms a bundle of what looked like black cloth. The vision of him was but transient, for Ilam closed the door at once. Ilam, then, must have left his house before Carpentaria had come on to the balcony. The watcher on the balcony felt his heart beating rapidly. His calm had vanished. The frenzy of the music, the perturbation caused by the bullet, had passed, only to give way to another and perhaps a more dreadful excitation. What could these secret journeys of Ilam portend? He clutched fiercely the rail of the balcony in his apprehensive anxiety.
After a time—not a very long time—the door opened again, and for at least five seconds Josephus Ilam stood plainly silhouetted against a light within the house, and over his shoulders, which were bent, he carried an enormous limp burden, draped in black. He looked back into the house once, then turned awkwardly, because of his burden, to shut the door behind him, and with excessive deliberation descended the steps and came out into the avenue. The figure and its burden were now nothing but a shape in the gloom.
Carpentaria decided in the fraction of a second what he would do. He slipped into his bedroom, took off his boots, put on a pair of felt slippers, scurried downstairs, opened the side-door, and gently slipped out. Ilam, tramping slowly with clumsy footsteps, had reached the arch leading to the Central Way.
Carpentaria dogged him with all the precautions of silence as he turned to the right down the Central Way. The great thoroughfare of the City of Pleasure was, of course, absolutely deserted. Its fountains were stilled; its pretty cable-cars had disappeared; its flags had been hauled down. The meagre trees rustled chilly in the night-wind. Its vast and floriated white architecture seemed under the sombre sky to be the architecture of a dream. The one sign of human things was the illuminated face of the clock over the Exposition Palace, which showed twenty-five minutes past twelve. Of the two thousand souls employed in the City, more than half had gone to their homes in the other city, London, and several hundreds slept in the dormitories that had been built for them at the southern extremity of the Central Way. The remaining hundred or so were dispersed in various parts of the City, either watching or asleep. Some had the right to sleep at their posts. But the men of the highly-organized fire service would be awake and alert.
Yet there happened to be no living creature on the Way, except its two chiefs. Ilam crossed the Way, and turned off it through an avenue that lay between the lecture hall and the menagerie. Carpentaria followed at a safe distance, hiding in the thick shadows as he went. From the interior of the menagerie came the subdued growls and groans of the wild beasts therein, suffering from insomnia, and longing for the jungle. Among the treasures of the menagerie was a society of twenty-seven lions, who went through a performance twice a day under their trainer, Brant, the king of lion-tamers, as he was called on the City of Pleasure programmes, and as he, in fact, was. There were also a celebrated sanguinary tiger, that had killed three men in New York, and various other delicate attractions. The nocturnal noises of these fearsome animals were sufficiently appalling. And when Ilam stopped before a little door in the south façade of the menagerie building, a cold perspiration froze the forehead and the spirit of Carpentaria. Was the man going to yield his mysterious black-enveloped burden to the lions and the tigers, the jackals and the hyenas, of that inestimable collection of African and Asiatic fauna?
But Ilam struggled onwards. And next they passed the electricity works, which was in full activity, for the manufacture of light went on night and day in the City of Pleasure. Ilam slunk along the front of the workshops, increasing his pace. Fortunately for him, the windows were seven feet from the ground, so that he could not be observed from within. The whirr of the wheels revolving incessantly in front of gigantic magnets filled the air, and from the high windows shone a steely-blue radiance, chequered by the flying shadows of machinery.
Ilam turned again, and entered the Amusements Park, and, threading his way among chutes, switchbacks, slides, and ponds, he crossed it from end to end.
“Where is he going?” Carpentaria muttered.
And then, suddenly, it occurred to Carpentaria where Ilam was going.
Behind the Amusements Park, and abutting on the confines of the City territory, was a large waste piece of ground which had been used for excavations and for refuse. In the tremendous operation of levelling the site of the City, digging foundations, and gardening in the landscape manner, much earth had been needed in one spot, and much earth had had to be removed in another. The waste piece of ground was the clearing-house of this business. In certain parts it was humped like a camel’s back, and in others it was hollowed into pits. Immense quantities of soil lay loose, and there were, besides, barrows and spades in abundance.
Arrived in the midst of this sterile wilderness, Ilam unceremoniously dropped his burden near a miniature mountain, which raised itself by the side of a miniature pit. He then found a spade, and, having tested the looseness of the soil, took up the black mystery and slipped it carefully into the pit. Then he climbed with the spade on to the summit of the hillock, and began to push the soil from the hillock into the pit. It proved to be the simplest thing in the world. In five minutes the burden of Ilam lay under several feet of soil.
Carpentaria, favoured by the nature of the spot, had crept closer.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!” he heard Ilam reciting. Amazing phenomenon! But nothing can be more amazing than the behaviour of an utterly respectable man when he is committing a crime!
The affair finished, Ilam departed, passing within a few feet of Carpentaria, who stretched himself flat on the ground to avoid detection.
And when Ilam had vanished out of sight, Carpentaria jumped up feverishly, seized the spade, leapt into the pit and began to dig—to dig with a fury of haste. Fate helped him, for the black mass was uncovered in less time than had been taken to cover it. He dragged it slowly out of the pit, and slowly, almost reluctantly, unwrapped it. He had been sure at the first touch that it was the body of a man, and he was not mistaken. In the gloomy night he could see the white patches made by the face and the hands. The body was not yet stiff. He hesitated, and then struck a match. He hoped the wind would blow it out, but the wind spared it; it flared bravely, and lighted the face of the corpse, and the corpse was that of the mysterious drunken man.
A thousand unanswerable questions fought together for solution in Carpentaria’s brain.
He knew himself to be in the presence of a crime, of a murder. His legal duty, therefore, was to fetch justice in the shape of a policeman. But he reflected that no battalion of policemen and judges could undo the crime, bring the dead to life, make innocent the guilty. He reflected also upon the clumsiness of State justice, and the inconveniences attaching to it, and upon the immeasurable harm its advent might do to the opening season of the City of Pleasure. Moreover, he had a horror of capital punishment, and he was a bold and original man, though an artist. He settled rapidly in his mind that he himself would probe the matter to its root, and that the justice involved should be the private justice of Carpentaria, not the public justice of the realm.
And a few minutes later he had discovered a long, flat barrow, and was wheeling away the burden that had bent the back of Josephus Ilam. He brought it circuitously and gently by way of the Sports Fields round again to the Central Way, and so to the neighbourhood of his own house. The night had now grown darker than ever, and a few drops of rain began to fall.
Suddenly, as he was approaching the two bungalows, he stopped and listened. He thought he heard footsteps; but no sound met his ear, and he raised the handles of the barrow again. By this time he was midway between the bungalows and about to turn to the side-entrance of his own. Once more he stopped; he distinctly did hear footsteps crushing the gravel.
“What is that? Anyone there?” cried a voice.
And it was Ilam’s voice, full of fear. Carpentaria crept away to the shelter of his own wall, leaving the barrow that had become a bier in the midst of the path. Vaguely and dimly he saw the form of Ilam coming down the avenue, saw it stop uncertainly before the barrow, saw it bend down, and then he heard a shriek—a shriek of terror—loud, violent, and echoing, and Ilam fled away. Carpentaria heard him mount the steps of his house and fumble with the door, and then he heard the bang of the door.
With all possible speed he rushed to the barrow, wheeled it into his garden, and thence to an outhouse, of which he carefully fastened the padlock.
He stood some time hesitant in the avenue, wondering whether any further singular phenomenon would proceed from the Ilam house that night. His curiosity was rewarded. A most strange procession emerged presently from the bungalow. First came old Mrs. Ilam, dressed in a crimson dressing-gown, a white nightcap on her head, and carrying a lamp with an elaborate drawing-room shade. Carpentaria could see that the lamp shook in her trembling hand. Her hands always trembled, but her head never. She came down the steps with the deliberation of extreme old age, peering in front of her, and she was followed, timorously, by her son. The lamp threw a large circle of yellow light on the ground, and at intervals Mrs. Ilam held it up high so that it illuminated the faces of mother and son. They came into the middle of the avenue. It was now seriously raining.
“I knew it wouldn’t be there,” Ilam whispered, in an awed tone. “It isn’t the sort of thing that stays. But I saw it—I saw the cloth and I saw a bit of its face.”
Mrs. Ilam looked about her.
“Nonsense, Jos,” she upbraided him, fixing her eyes on him in a sort of reproof. “It’s your imagination.”
“It isn’t,” said Josephus. “I saw it; and what’s more, it was on a bier. That’s the worst—it was on a bier. Mother, he will haunt me all my life!”
“Don’t talk so loud, child,” put in Mrs. Ilam. “You’d better go to bed.”
“What’s the good of going to bed?” he inquired. “What! I took him and I buried him as safe as houses. I left him there, and I came straight back here, except that I was stopped by a watchman at the stables, who told me the horses seemed to be all frightened. And I had a talk to the fellow; and I finditon a bier here, right in my path. And now it’s gone again.”
“Come in,” said Mrs. Ilam.
“And why were the horses frightened? That shows——”
“Come in,” Mrs. Ilam repeated. “I’ll get you some hot milk, and you must try to sleep.”
“Sleep!” he murmured. “Mother, you mustn’t leave me.”
And the procession re-entered the house, and the door was closed, but a light burned upstairs through the remainder of the night.
Carpentaria himself had little sleep; he scarcely tried to sleep. He arose at seven o’clock, and dressed and went out on to the balcony. The rain had ceased, and the Sunday morning was exquisitely calm and sunny. The whole scene was so bright and clear that the events of six hours ago appeared fantastic and impossible. Yet Carpentaria knew only too well that the unidentified corpse lay in the outhouse. He meant first to examine the corpse himself, and then to confide in a certain official of the city whom he knew that he could trust. What he should do after that he could not imagine. Decidely some process of burial would be speedily imperative.
All the blinds of the Ilam bungalow were drawn. He guessed that at least the upper ones would remain so, and he was somewhat taken aback when Mrs. Ilam herself appeared at a window and opened it. He was still more taken aback to see Mrs. Ilam a moment later open the door, and with much stateliness cross the avenue to his own dwelling. He knew that she was friendly with Juliette, and that Juliette liked her. He, too, had admired her, but only because she was so old and so masterful, such a surprising relic. That she should be accessory to a crime did not seem strange to him. He esteemed her to be a woman capable of anything. He would have to warn Juliette.
At eight o’clock a servant brought up the French breakfast with which, under Juliette’s influence, he compromised with hunger till lunch-time; and with the breakfast came, as usual, the cat Beppo. The breakfast consisted of a two-handled bowl of milk and a fresh roll and a pat of butter. Beppo seemed determined to share the breakfast without delay. Carpentaria, as was his frequent practice, took the roll off its plate and poured on the plate as much milk as it would hold. And Beppo, to whom milk was the answer to the riddle of the universe, leapt on to the table and began to lap in his gluttonous masculine way. He had taken exactly four laps when he ceased to lap. He looked up at his master, and there was a disturbed and pained expression in his amber eyes. This expression changed in an instant to one of positive fright. He was evidently breathing with difficulty, and he was rather at sea, for he groped about on the table and put both his forepaws into the bowl, splashing the milk in all directions. He then gave a fearful shriek; his pupils dilated horribly in spite of the strong sunshine, and he went into convulsions. His breath came quick and short. Finally, he fell off the table.
He was dead.
Less than three minutes previously he had been a cat full of power, of romance, and of the joy of life, with comfortable views on most things.