Four Faultless Felons/The Loyal Traitor

The Loyal Traitor

I: The Menace of the Word

IT will be best, both for the reader and the writer, not to bother about what particular country was the scene of this extraordinary incident. It may well be left vague, so long as it is firmly stipulated that it was not in the Balkans, where so many romancers have rushed to stake out claims ever since Mr. Anthony Hope effected his coup d'etat in Ruritania. The Balkan kingdom is convenient because kings are killed and despotic governments overthrown with pleasing swiftness and frequency, and the crown may fall to any adventurer, good or bad. But meanwhile, in the same Balkan State, the farms remain in the same families, the plot of land, the orchard or the vineyard, descends from father to son; the rude equality of peasant proprietorship has never been greatly disturbed by large financial operations. In short, in the Balkan kingdom-there is some safety and continuity for the Family, so long as it is not the Royal Family.

But with the kingdom in question here, how different! Whatever name we may give it, it was at least a highly-civilized and well-ordered society, in which the Royal Family continued serene and safe under police protection and constitutional limitations; in which all the public services were conducted with a regularity verging on tedium, and in which nobody was ever ruined or overthrown except the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick-maker and the various types of tradesmen and common citizens who might happen to cross the path of large commercial operations. The country might well be one of the smaller German States that have been industrialized by dependence on mines and factories, or one of the former dependencies of the Austrian Empire. It does not matter; it is enough to secure the reader's respect and interest to know that it was a thoroughly modern and enlightened community, which had advanced in every science and perfected every social convenience until it was within reasonable distance of revolution; not a potty little palace revolution, in which a few princes are murdered, but a real, international, universal social revolution; probably beginning with a General Strike and probably ending with bankruptcy and famine.

It was all the more possible, because breezy events of this sort had already broken out in a neighbouring industrial state, and after some months of very bewildering civil war, had ended in the victory of one out of the six revolutionary generals fighting each other in the field; the victor being a certain General Case, an able soldier who had originally come with the Colonial troops garrisoned in the neighbourhood, and who was credited in local gossip with being partly a negro, a fact which considerably consoled those who had been defeated by him. For our own territory, which we will call Pavonia, he was only of importance-as an unluckily lucky example.

The public crisis became acute in Pavonia with the appearance of the rather mysterious agitation about "The Word". To this day there are disputes about the nature of the movement. Some of the government agents and inquirers swore the ignorant populace did really believe that, with the discovery of a new Word, everything in the world would be explained. A wild pamphlet did actually appear, in which the writer argued with insane ingenuity that, as all modern publicity and popularization consist of concentrating a book into a paragraph, or a chapter into a sentence, so at last the whole truth about the present problem would be concentrated into a word. Crowds of impatient malcontents were adjured to Wait for the Word; and apocalyptic visions were provided, of the scenes of world-change that would follow, when once The Word was spoken. The Word would contain in itself, it was gravely asserted, a complete plan of operations and an explanation of the whole organized strategy of the revolt. Some said the whole fancy had originated with one Bohemian poet, who signed his poems, "Sebastian", and had certainly composed a lyric invocation full of allusions to The Word. Many repeated the lines which ran:

As Aaron's serpent swallowed snakes and rods, As God alone is greater than the gods, As all stars shrivel in the single sun, The words are many, but The Word is one.

But nobody in office ever saw the revolutionary poet who tossed these little trifles at the Government and the public; until he was identified one day in the street by the very last person who was likely to meet him.

The Princess Aurelia Augusta Augustina, etc. etc. (who had embedded somewhere in her stratified Christian names the name of Mary, by which she was called for convenience by her family), was the niece of the reigning monarch, and, having only just left school, did not as yet fully appreciate the difference between reigning and ruling. She was a vigorous young woman with red hair and a Roman nose, and having as yet learned more about Royalties in history than in politics, took their position with a certain simplicity and could even imagine (just as if she had really been in the Balkans) that they might be worth murdering or worth obeying. She had come back into the life of the Court and the capital, which she had left as a mere child, full of that irrepressible desire to be useful, which is so normal in women and so dangerous in great ladies, and she was at present making herself a nuisance by asking questions of everybody about everything. She naturally asked questions about the popular political riddle of The Word, and generally, as Mr. Edmund Burke would say, about the cause of the present discontents. She was all the more intrigued when nobody could tell her what The Word was and very few, in her world, what the row was all about. It was therefore with a considerable glow of superiority that she returned to her family one afternoon and announced that she had actually seen the seditious minstrel, who was apparently responsible for the somewhat obscure revolutionary rhyme and the somewhat mysterious revolutionary movement.

Her car was moving slowly down a quiet street, because she was on the look-out for a curio shop she had known in childhood and could not immediately locate. Just beyond the curio shop was a cafe, with a few tables outside it in the continental manner, and at one of these tables was seated in front of a green liqueur an odd-looking person with very long hair and a very high stock or cravat. I have said that historical and geographical identification matter little in this case; and the reader may, if he likes, clothe this queer episode in any outlandish or antiquated fashion of fantasies of costume, for indeed the most recent fashion is full of quaint revivals and modes that might be either very old or very new. The man with the stock might have been some eccentric contemporary or creation of Balzac; he might equally well have been an art student of today, with the most Futurist views but the most Early Victorian whiskers. His mane of long hair was of an incredible dark auburn that looked like dim crimson rather than ordinary red; his forked or cloven beard was of the same unnatural colour and was shown up by the high cravat which was of a vivid sort of peacock-green. The colour of the cravat varied, however, from day to day; sometimes it was of a brighter green when the spirit of spring inspired his songs; sometimes of purple when he was lamenting the rich tragedy of his loves; sometimes completely black when he had decided that the time had really come to destroy the universe. He would explain to his friends that he followed without faltering the clue of the mood and the sky of morning, but they never recommended a necktie that did not contrast effectively with his beard. For this was no other than the poet Sebastian, whose verses counted for so much in the revolutionary movement of the moment.

The Princess, of course, was quite unaware of his identity, and would have passed him with no particular comment beyond a disapproval of his necktie. But he returned to her attention and remained in it because of the curiously different conditions in which she saw him only an hour or two later, when the shops and factories had shut their doors and poured forth their populations. When she came back again through the quiet street, it was no longer quiet. It was especially the reverse of quiet in the neighbourhood of the cafe where the stranger had been drinking the green liqueur, and if the car moved slowly now, it was because of the difficulty of making its way through an ever-thickening crowd. For the longhaired person in the cravat was now standing on the cafe table and declaiming what appeared to be alternate fragments of prose and verse, with some modern intermediate types difficult to define. She came just in time, however, to hear the end of the now familiar jingle or rhymed motto: "As God alone is greater than the gods, As all stars shrivel in the single sun, The words are many, but The Word is one.

"But The Word will not pass my lips, nor those of the Four Wardens of The Word who already know it, until the first part of the work has been accomplished. When the powerless have risen against the powerful, when the poor have risen above the rich, when the weak have risen and proved stronger than the strong, when--"

At this moment he and his hearers suddenly became conscious of the sober but elegant vehicle which was pushing its prow like a boat above the popular waves, and the somewhat haughty countenance that appeared above it, just behind the wooden countenance of the chauffeur. Most people present recognized the lady and there was a sudden stir and stoppage, as of embarrassment, but the poet standing on the table struck a new attitude of sublime impudence and cried aloud: "But how hard it is for ugliness to rise against beauty. And we are an ugly lot!"

And the Princess drove on in a condition of towering rage.

II: The Procession of the Plotters

IT has already been explained that Pavonia was governed on enlightened modern principles. That is to say, the King was popular and powerless; the popularly elected Premier was unpopular and moderately powerful; the head of the Secret Police was much more powerful, and the quiet and intelligent little banker, to whom they all owed money, was most powerful of all. But all four of them were moderate in their respective roles; none of them had ever pushed matters to a rupture and all four of them were often in the habit of discussing, at an informal Privy Council, the growing problems of the State.

The King, whose historical title was Clovis the Third, was a lank and rather melancholy man with yellow moustaches and imperial and rather hollow eyes; well-bred enough to make his weariness appear impersonal rather than personal in its application, but not otherwise exciting company. The Prime Minister was short and stout, and very vivacious for his stoutness; though a Pavonian of bourgeois origin he was rather like a French politician, which is by no means the same as being like an ordinary Frenchman. He had pince-nez and a short beard and spoke to individuals in a guarded, but to large crowds in a confidential tone of voice. His name was Valence and he had been considered rather a Radical, until the new revolutionary movement had suddenly revealed him as a rather obstinate capitalist, turning, as it were, his sturdy figure black against the red glare. The Chief of Police was a big, bilious soldier named Grimm, whose yellow face told of fevers in many countries and whose tight mouth told very little of anything. He was the only person present who looked as if he would be in any way formidable in an hour of national peril, and he was always the most pessimistic of the four about his own hopes of dealing with it. The last was a slight, refined little figure with straight, grey hair and a hooked nose rather large for his attenuated features. He was dressed in dark grey so that his streaks of limbs seemed to repeat his streaks of hair, and only when he carefully fitted on a pair of tortoise-shell goggles, did his eyes seem suddenly to stand out and come to life, as if he were a monster who put his eyes on and off like a mask. This was Isidor Simon, the banker, and he had never taken any title though many had been offered to him. The occasion of their special meeting was that the wild and hitherto rather vague movement called the Brotherhood of The Word had suddenly received support from a very unexpected quarter. The poet Sebastian was only a poor Bohemian freelance, of obscure origin and apparently illegitimate birth. Even his surname was doubtful: it was easy for the newspapers to make fun of his real affectations and to underrate his real influence. But when it was actually announced that a man like Professor Phocus had declared himself a friend and follower of the poet, everybody felt that the whole social situation had changed. Phocus was quite another matter; he was the scientific world: the world of colleges and committees. He was a name; he was not indeed very well known personally, being much of a recluse, but his quaint figure with high and narrow top-hat, more like a pipe than a hat, and the green spectacles which he wore to protect his dim eyes from ordinary daylight, was a familiar enough object in certain places, especially the great National Museum, where he not only specialized in certain Palaeo-Pavonian antiquities, but conducted select groups of students round to inspect the relics and sculptures which illustrated that branch of study. He was universally recognized as a man of vast learning and laborious accuracy, and when it was stated in cold print that he, Professor Phocus, had found prophecies concerning The Word in the prehistoric hieroglyphics of Pavonia, only two explanations seemed possible, both equally catastrophic. Either the great Phocus had suddenly gone mad, or there was really something in it.

For some time the banker had succeeded in allaying the fears of the Council, by what might seem a professional, but is in these days a practical argument. A popular poet might set all the crowds in the streets singing his songs, and a learned man of European reputation might induce all the dons in the world to read his book. But the salary of the learned man, for taking the tourists a tour of the hieroglyphics, was a little more than five guineas a week, and the salary of the poet was an unknown quantity that was frequently a minus quantity. You cannot make a modern revolution, or anything modern, without money. It was difficult to see how the poet and the professor managed to pay for the occasional leaflets they circulated or the printing of the poem about The Word; let alone for munitions or commissariat or soldiers' pay or anything that is necessary for the higher purposes of civil war. Mr. Simon, the financial adviser, therefore, had advised the King to disregard the movement until its backing was a little more financial. But to this Council the Chief of Police had brought news which seemed to alter everything.

"Of course," he said in his slow fashion, "I'd often seen the poet going into the pawnbroker's."

"The natural resort of poets, I suppose," said the Prime Minister, and rather missed the schoolgirl giggle with which his joke would have been greeted at a public meeting, for the King's face was blank and sad and the banker's careless and inattentive. No change ever appeared on Grimm's face, even on public platforms, and he went on steadily: "Of course, any number of people go to the pawnbroker's-especially this pawnbroker; he is little Loeb, who calls himself Lobb and lives at the corner of the Old Market, in the poorest part of the town. He's a Jew, of course, but not so much disliked as some Jews of his trade, and such thousands of people do business with him that we were rather led to look into the matter. The result of our inquiries points to the man being quite incredibly rich, all the more because he lives like a poor man. The general belief is that he is a miser."

The banker had put on the goggles that made his eyes look twice as big, and as they peered across the table they were like gimlets.

"He isn't a miser," said Simon, "and if he's a millionaire, then my question is answered."

"Do you know him?" asked the King, speaking for the first time. "Why do you say he isn't a miser?"

"Because no Jew was ever a miser," answered the banker. "Avarice is not a Jewish vice; it's a peasant's vice, a vice of people who want to protect themselves with personal possessions in perpetuity. Greed is the Jewish vice: greed for luxury; greed for vulgarity; greed for gambling; greed for throwing away other people's money and their own on a harem or a theatre or a grand hotel or some harlotry-or possibly on a grand revolution. But not hoarding it. That is the madness of sane men; of men who have a soil."

"How do you know?" asked the King with mild curiosity. "How did you come to make a study of Jews?"

"Only by being one myself," replied the banker.

There was a short silence, and then the King went on with a reassuring smile: "And so you think he may be spending his millions on financing a revolution."

"It would have to be that or a super-cinema or something," assented Simon, "and that would explain the pamphlets and printed songs, and may explain other things yet."

"The most difficult thing to explain," observed the King thoughtfully, "seems to be where any of these people actually are at any given moment. Professor Phocus is fairly regular in his round at the Museum, but I doubt if we any of us know his private address. My niece tells me that she has actually seen Sebastian, the poet, orating in the public streets, but I've never seen him, and nobody I know seems to have any idea of where he lives. And, from what I can gather, though any number of people go to Lobb's pawnshop, very few of them ever see Lobb. I was told he was dead: but that may be part of the plot, of course."

"It is exactly upon that point," said the Chief of Police gravely, "that I have a very important piece of further information to place before Your Majesty. Through a course of long and rather difficult inquiries, I have discovered that Lobb, the pawnbroker, did, about two years, ago, purchase, under another name, a small but comfortable house in Peacock Crescent. I have set some of my men to watch it, and, according to their report, there is every reason to suppose that it is used, not regularly but intermittently, as a meeting-place for three or four persons who arrive very privately and generally after dark, dine there in comfort, but considerable secrecy, and do not appear to revisit it until the next little dinner of the kind. There seems to be no regular staff of servants, and the house is commonly shuttered and deserted, but a servant of one or other of these people generally goes out about an hour before dinner and gets in wine and provisions and presumably remains to wait at table. The tradesmen in the neighbourhood report that he appears to be catering for three or four people, but beyond that they profess to know nothing. The detective, one of my best men, whom I have set to watch the house, says that the guests always arrive about dusk and very much muffled up in cloaks and coats, but he says he could swear to three of them."

"Look here," said the banker after a grave silence, "the fewer people who know about this the better. I think it would be well if one or two of us went down personally, and posted ourselves in that particular street on one of these festive evenings. I don't mind going there myself, if you will give me the protection of your presence, Colonel Grimm. I know the professor and the pawnbroker by sight, and I dare say we might make a guess at the poet."

King Clovis, in a dry and rather reluctant voice, gave the details of the poet's purple and peacock-green appearance, as conveyed to him by his indignant niece.

"Well, that may be a guide, too, sir," said the banker briskly. And that was how it came about that the most powerful financier in Pavonia, and the officer in charge of the whole police system of that country, kicked their heels patiently or impatiently for several hours, a little way beyond the circle of light thrown by the last lamp-post in the silent and deserted Crescent.

Peacock Crescent was so called, not because its pallid and classical facade had ever been brightened by any peacocks, but out of compliment to the bird which was the royal cognizance of Pavonia, and presumably the origin of its name, and which was represented in very flat relief, with tail outspread, on a medallion at one end of the semicircle of houses. Round the whole semicircle there ran a row of classical pillars, in the manner of many terraces in Bath or old Brighton; the whole classic curve looked very cold and marmoreal in the moon which was rising over the clump of trees opposite, and it seemed to the watchers that every sound they made echoed and re-echoed as through a hollow, silver shell.

Their vigil had already been a long one. They had seen, from about the time of twilight and onward, the routine of the preliminaries which the police had already noted as marking the rare re-awakenings of the house; the servant in his sober livery going out at the regular hour and returning with a basket containing bottles of wine and other provisions; the sudden lighting-up of the dark house from within, or rather of the one room in it presumably reserved for the feast; the drawing down of the blind that the feast might be the more private; but none of the guests had as yet arrived. Closer inquiries of the local tradesmen had verified the fact that the servant had been making preparations for four diners; the actual number had slipped out in the course of his curt requests. The two distinguished spies in the street were not, of course, so completely isolated as they seemed. Other secret service men were within hail and the Chief of Police could without much difficulty put the constabulary machinery in action. Immediately in front of the crescent of houses was one of those picturesque but unmeaning scraps of ornamental shrubbery, with a railing round it, which are to be found in many city squares and secluded terraces. This clump of bushes threw a big shadow in the moonlight, and at one corner of the railing there lurked a plain-clothes officer with a motor-cycle, ready to start on any errand.

Suddenly, and in utter stillness, a small shadow seemed to detach itself from the big shadow and seemed to skim across the road as lightly as a dry leaf. Indeed it had something of the look of a dried leaf, for though the figure was not abnormally small, it was curled up as if shrunk or withered; the head was sunk so deep in high shoulders and a shabby waterproof that only a few hairy wisps wandered in the air, that might be beard or whiskers or even, as a wilder fancy prompted, eyebrows; the legs were rather long than otherwise but moving in a bent and crooked fashion like a grasshopper's. His passage across the road was so swift and surprising that the door of the house had opened to him and closed on him again before the watchers had fully recovered from their first surprise. Then Simon looked at Grimm and said, with a faint smile: "The hurry is hospitality. That is the owner of the house."

"Yes, I suppose that is the pawnbroker."

"That is the Revolution," observed the banker. "At least, that is the real basis of every revolution. They could do nothing without his money. They talk about a rising of the poor, but they cannot even rise so long as they are poor. Why, these four men would have nowhere to meet like this, if Lobb had not bought the house for them."

"I should be the last to deny that money is useful," answered Grimm, "but money alone won't make either a revolution or a realm."

"My dear Grimm," said Simon, "I know you are an officer and a gentleman; you can't help that, but really you are becoming romantic."

"Do I look romantic?" asked the bilious officer and gentleman. "No soldier is ever romantic-not about soldiering, anyhow. But what I say is horse-sense, for all that. There is no soldiering without soldiers, and money doesn't make soldiers. You can give a mob a mountain of munitions, and it's no good if they won't use them or can't use them."

"Well, I should say. . . . Look out, here's somebody else."

The other had already become conscious of a dull clang of sound for which he could not immediately account, and the next moment another shadow had passed across the scene of that shadow pantomime. This shadow had a sharply outlined and very high black hat like an elongated chimney-pot, and the moon gleamed for a moment on the green spectacles of Professor Phocus of the National Museum. He also disappeared rapidly into the hospitable house.

"That's the Professor," said Simon. "Perhaps, as he is so learned, he will lecture to them on munitions."

"Yes," replied Grimm, "I saw who it was. . . . But I'm bothered about something else. Did you hear a sort of iron creak and clang just before he appeared? It must have been the gate in that railing over there. I believe they must both have come out of that dingy little garden. What could they be doing there?"

"Nesting in the trees, perhaps; they look queer enough birds for anything," answered the other.

"Well, the railing isn't high," said the police chief at last. "They may simply have clambered in and out again to confuse the scent, but it's rum that my man over there didn't see them."

A long interval followed, and the two companions pacing up and down to pass the time, fell again into their discussion. "What I mean," said Grimm, "is that it's a bad blunder to reckon on material without moral. Money doesn't fight. Men fight. If the time comes when men won't fight, even money won't make them. And somebody has got to teach them how. How are your revolutionary armies going to be drilled? Will Mr. Sebastian drill them to recite poems? Will Mr. Lobb drill them to fill in pawn-tickets?"

"Well," said Simon, making a sign of warning, "here is Mr. Sebastian; so you had better ask him."

This time it was unmistakable that the newcomer threw open the gate of the little garden and crossed the road to the house. For Sebastian of the purple beard and peacock scarf walked with a certain swagger, even when a conspirator apparently alone under the moon; the gate closed behind him with a ringing clash and even the door of the house seemed to open and shut again with a shade of greater pomposity.

"Those are all we know of," said Simon thoughtfully.

"The man said there were four," answered Grimm.

The intervals between these flitting appearances seemed to grow longer and wearier, and as the last was especially extended, the banker, having less of the professional patience of a policeman, began to grow more and more sceptical of the unknown guest, and to express a frank readiness for his own bed. But Grimm remained fixed in his theory of the quadrilateral council, and after a long interval, so long that they almost looked for dawn in the east, they heard the gate move once more and a tall figure approached the house. He was clad in a cape or cloak of grey that looked silvery in the moonshine; and as it fell apart showed a gleam, and almost a blaze, of more brilliant silver; for it seemed to be some sort of white and dazzling uniform, with stars and clasps. Then the man turned his face for a moment upwards to the moon, and the face was the final shock; for it was darker than the glittering garments. Under the moon it looked almost blue, or at least took on those varied tints of grey and violet that are the highlights on the African complexion, and Grimm knew that the man was General Case, the Dictator from beyond the frontier.

III: The Princess Intervenes

THE moment that Colonel Grimm of the Pavonian Police saw that black face turned like a blue mask to the moon, he knew that the whole machinery of the State must act together like one mantrap to catch one man. He wanted to catch the other three men who were his fellow-conspirators, of course, and he thanked his stars for the chance of catching them all together in one room, but it was the fourth man whose presence made the huge and staggering difference. Before his companion could even speak, or do anything but stare, Grimm had sent his motor-cyclist down the street like a stone from a sling, and knew that police and soldiers were closing round and stopping the mouths of all the streets.

For Grimm had a special score to settle with the great General Case. He had suspected months before that there might be movements on the frontier and attempts of the revolutionary foreign government to make signals to the discontented classes in Pavonia. He had repeatedly pressed diplomatic inquiries and demands through the Prime Minister and other accredited representatives of Pavonian interests, and the answer had always been soothing and had always been the same. General Case gave his word of honour that he had not the faintest intention of meddling with the internal affairs of Pavonia. General Case was a plain soldier and no politician. General Case was getting on in years, and had every intention of retiring from the Presidency and from all public affairs. General Case was seriously ill, and had practically already retired. All these diplomatic reassurances had been dispatched one after another, lulling to a large extent the listless amiability of the King, favourably impressing the fussy self-importance of the Prime Minister, and leaving only a very vague and dying doubt even in the more cynical mind of the Chief of Police. And now this was the sequel, and the secret of what was really going on. This was how the aged and more or less dying African retired into private life. General Case was dangerously ill, but well enough to go out to dinner. By a curious coincidence, he was dining with the three men vowed to destroy the Government with which he professed to be at peace. The Chief of Police ground his teeth and looked down the street eagerly for the two or three files of gendarmes already advancing down it.

It was likely enough that there was little time to lose. The presence of the foreign military leader might mean all sorts of things. It might mean tons of dynamite under the street where they stood; it might at least mean dumps of munitions in every dark corner of the city, accessible to the leaders of the mob. At the worst, there was one thing that might save them yet. And that was the instant, sudden and simultaneous arrest of all the four men in that house, leaving the whole revolution without leaders. Grimm waited till his little troop of armed men had drawn up before the house and then cautiously advanced up the steps to the door. He had already made certain that similar groups were posted behind and on all sides of the row of houses, so that there could be no escape unless there was a subterranean exit. He had even put men with ladders farther along the Crescent, in case there should be a stampede along the roof. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he struck once and heavily upon the door, and the light in the lighted dining-room instantly went out.

For some time there was no other response; then he hammered on the door again, calling out in his strong voice in the King's name and threatening that the door would be forced immediately. Then at last the door was opened by the pale servant in livery, who had evidently received orders to delay the entrance of the police by every exhibition of stupidity and helplessness. With almost inconceivable absence of humour, he said that his master and the company were engaged and could not see any visitors. But Grimm paid no attention to what he guessed to be an order repeated by rote. Without further ceremony he pushed the servant aside, merely saying to his subordinate behind, "Keep hold of this fellow; we may as well bag him with the rest." Then he thrust his way down the dark passage and threw open the door of the dining-room.

It was undoubtedly the dining-room, for it offered a convincing picture of unfinished, or barely finished dinner. Of the four places laid, one at least was occupied by the paraphernalia of coffee, while others seemed to mark various stages of trifling with savouries and sweets. Beside the black coffee was a small and now empty bottle of champagne; opposite to it was a large and half-empty bottle of Burgundy; to the left of that, an even more formidable object, was a large and by no means untouched bottle of brandy, and opposite that, by a sort of meek fantasy of contrast, stood an untasted glass of milk.

Cigars and cigarettes of the best quality were placed on a small side table, so as to be immediately at hand, and there was every sign of a successful dinner-party, which had evidently been luxurious without being altogether conventional. At least, there was every sign of the successful dinner-party except the diners. Their chairs stood about the table, some of them thrust back a little way as if the occupants had risen in a natural and unhurried style; one at least was still drawn up to the table as if the diner was not so easily to be detached from his dinner. But he and all the rest had vanished; suddenly, silently and completely, as the light had vanished from the window with the first blow upon the door.

"Pretty quick work," said the Chief of Police, "but I suppose they're bolting for some other exit. Send the men down to the basement at once, and see that Hart is watching the house at the back. They can't be far off yet; this coffee is still quite hot and I think he was just going to help himself to sugar."

"Who was?" inquired Simon a little hazily. "Do you think they were all here?"

"Obviously they were," replied Grimm. "One doesn't need to be much of a detective to pick out the separate places of all four. Their very plates are like portraits; you can almost see them all sitting there. Look at that glass of milk; you don't suppose that mad poet or that nigger General drink milk, do you? But that's Professor Phocus to the life, if you can call it life. He's one of those dried-up old dyspeptics who talk about nothing but health and get unhealthier every day by doing so. He's full of all sorts of food fads, and must be a most dismal person to dine with. However, the others have fortified themselves pretty well against dismalness. Our romantic Sebastian, who colours everything crimson and purple, even his hair-what else should he drink but Burgundy? But that hard-headed old savage Case has gone one better, you see. Brandy for heroes, as Dr. Johnson said. And yet the last is the most typical of all. How absolutely characteristic of the little Jew to have a little champagne, but very expensive, and to have black coffee, the proper digestive, after it. Ah, he understands health better than the health faddist does! But there's something blood-curdling about these cultured Jews, with their delicate and cautious art of pleasure. Some say it's because they don't believe in a future life."

While he was talking thus, apparently at random, he was thoroughly ransacking the room, leaving to his subordinates the ransacking of the house, and his frown was heavy though his tone was light.

The ransacking of the room could for the present be only superficial, but so far as it went it was hardly hopeful. There were no curtains or cupboards, no bookcases; there was certainly no other door and it was preposterous to suppose that, under the eyes of all the gendarmes, four men could have escaped by the window. Grimm made a preliminary examination of the floor, which seemed quite solid, a sort of concrete, coloured with a dull, wavering pattern of an old-fashioned type. Of course, the four men might have gone out by the door of the room before their servant had opened the door of the house, but even so, it was not easy to say where they had gone to. For indeed the ransacking of the house had proved even more barren than the ransacking of the room; and they were considerably surprised to find that there was so little of the house to ransack. There was no basement; there was only one narrow back door; there was only one other small room, like a smoking-room, at the back of the dining-room and looking through open windows on to the street behind; there was a large and small bedroom of corresponding size on the floor above, and that was all. Grimm was somewhat surprised at this exiguous accommodation, as compared with the aristocratic stateliness of the facade. It sharpened a certain sense of the whole Crescent having something hollow about it; like a stone mask of some cold, classical comedy. Perhaps the moon also made it look a little spectral, but he could not help entertaining for a flash of that pale light the absurd fancy that the street itself had been staged as a part of the plot or comedy, and that it was like a pasteboard palace in a pantomime. His common sense, returning, told him that the imposture was of an older and more ordinary sort, and bore witness only to the normal snobbishness of men who are content with small quarters so long as it is in a fashionable quarter. That row of showy and shallow mansions, with pillars and bow-windows, was probably only a row of men who liked to look richer than they were. Nevertheless, there was something queer about it considered as the headquarters of a vast conspiracy and the meeting-place of the four tribunes of a revolution. There was not much room to store dynamite or dump munitions here, anyhow. But another incongruous fancy flitted across his mind; they might well have been storing an entirely new sort of chemical gas, that made solid human bodies vanish like smoke or turn transparent like glass.

A searching and scientific examination, covering days and weeks, brought them no farther than those first few observations of the first few moments. If there was any crack in the concrete floor, it followed no line or direction that they could discover; if anybody had escaped to anywhere, except into the bowels of the earth, he must have done it under a hundred staring eyes and the staring moon. The giant man-trap had closed with the most scientific precision and perfection; only the trap was empty. It was with this gloomy and even alarmist news that the Chief of Police and the financier, playing the amateur detective, went back to report to the Prime Minister and the King.

Despite the swiftness with which Colonel Grimm had darted out of the rear of the house after the fugitives, he was brought up all standing at the corner of the next street, by an exhibition that affected him like an explosion. The whole of the blank wall was plastered with new placards; so new that they might almost have been put there since the raid on the house; conceivably even flung behind as a last gesture of insolence by the runaway rebels, like the paper scattered by the hares in a paper-chase. He put one finger to the paper-covered wall and found the paste on it still wet.

But it was the proclamations themselves that were most arresting. They were mostly scrawled in red paint or ink, which had even run here and there, perhaps with a melodramatic suggestion of blood. They all began with the word "Now" in gigantic letters, followed by the assertion "The Word will be spoken to-night". The brief paragraphs that followed were to the effect that all was now ready for the blow at the Government which had failed in its last desperate effort to capture the men who would tomorrow be the rulers of the city. It was notable that the people were adjured especially to "Look to the Frontiers" and it was not only implied that the mysterious "Word" was now to be spoken, but hinted that the thick and thunderous lips of the sinister African would speak it.

Passing up the Poplar Avenue towards the red-brick Georgian palace, they found the King of Pavonia in another room, in another suit of clothes and in another frame of mind. He was no longer in uniform, but in a light-grey lounge suit and very obviously lounging. King Clovis was a paradox in many ways; he hated formality and yet he was very formal, on formal occasions; in spite of the paradox, we might say that he hated formal occasions because they made him very formal. But in this more comfortable apartment, with tea-things on the table, he was in the bosom of his family, so far as the presence of a niece sitting on a sofa and staring out of a window constituted a bosom in the traditional sense. The Princess, whom the works of reference called Aurelia and whom her uncle called Mary, was rather distrait and silent, but the King had no objection to silence. The Prime Minister was not present; he always imparted a nameless nuance of fussiness, and the King had a great objection to fuss.

The Chief of Police told the story of his dramatic disappointment and the King listened to it with mild wonder but without any appearance of irritation.

"I suppose," he said, "that if that old Jew really bought the house specially for them, he must have fixed up some sort of trick in it."

"So I had supposed, sir," assented Grimm. "But we cannot as yet come on the faintest trace of the trick. And I can't help being a little troubled about what these four rascals may be doing. Their proclamations make it quite plain that they are preparing a big move."

"If you can't catch them," put in Simon, "can't you arrest anybody else? Surely the Party must have some other leaders."

The Chief of Police shook his head. "That is the queerest thing about it," he said. "This is the most extraordinary movement I ever heard of, in the way in which it is disciplined and organized and, above all, silenced. There must be hundreds of them in it, but to hear them talk, or rather decline to talk, you would think there was nobody in it. It's called the Brotherhood of The Word, but it seems to me more like the Brotherhood of The Silence. They all stare you blindly in the face, and smile, or say a word about the weather, and there's no catching them by any cross-examination. That's evidently the policy of the whole business. The crowd is more invisible than the conspirators, so to speak. Only these four famous conspirators are paraded before us. Their private meetings are comparatively public, but the mind of the mob is still private and it melts at a touch. We can convict nobody but these four, and the only people we can convict are the only people we can't catch."

"Then we have actually nobody in custody," said Simon.

Grimm made a wry face. "We hung on to one stupid footman who opened the door to us," he said. "Not a very glorious bag to boast of when you are out gunning for General Case."

"We must be thankful for small things," said the King. "What does the stupid footman say?"

"He doesn't say anything. It's possible he doesn't know anything. Indeed I think it's more than possible that the man is too stupid to know anything, a big lump of a fellow, probably chosen for his long legs; they say people choose flunkeys for their calves. Or he may have some dull idea of being loyal to his master."

The Princess turned her head for the first time and said: "Has anybody suggested the rather brighter idea of being loyal to his King?"

"I'm afraid," said Clovis, in a nervous and uneasy manner, "that the time has gone by for cavaliers and gallant courtiers, Mary. You can't solve modern political problems by telling people to be loyal to the King."

"Why do they tell them to be loyal to everything else except the King?" asked the young lady, with some warmth. "When there's a strike or something at the soap works, your newspaper tells them to be loyal to the soap-boilers, who are accused of being sweaters. The journalists tell them to be loyal to their Party and to their Trusted Leaders and all the rest. But if I talk of a leader who isn't a Party Leader, who's at least supposed to stand for the whole nation and all patriotic people, then you tell me I'm old-fashioned. Or else you tell me I'm young. It seems to be considered the same thing."

His Majesty the King of Pavonia stared at his niece with a sort of vague alarm, as if a kitten had turned into a tiger-cat on the hearth-rug. But she went on like one who is resolved to release an accumulation of impatience.

"Why must the King be the only private gentleman in Pavonia? All the others are extremely public gentlemen or public parodies of gentlemen. Why may any man talk to the mob except ourselves? Do you know what I really felt when I saw that purple-whiskered poet posturing on a table in the street? Of course, to start with, I had a sense of something horribly artificial; he was like some painted and gilded doll or mummy dancing. But what annoyed me most was that peacock-coloured scarf flapping round his neck, and making me remember the old peacock flag of the Pavonians, and how they say that the peacock fans were carried before the King even in battle. What business has he got to wear such colours, if we mayn't? We have got to be dull and genteel and die of good taste behind the drawn blinds of the palace. But the conspirators may be flamboyant. The republicans may be royal. That's why they appeal to the people; because they do exactly what kings used to do, when kings had any sense. Your papers and politicians talk about the dreadful growth of Red propaganda and wonder how it can be popular. Why, because it's Red, of course. Kings and cardinals and peers and judges used to be Red, when we weren't ashamed of having a little colour in our lives."

The constitutional monarch seemed more and more embarrassed. "Perhaps," he said, "we have wandered a little from the point. It was a small point we were mentioning at the moment, about the questioning of the footman and--"

"I have every intention of sticking to the point," said the Princess firmly. "I have every intention of sticking to the footman, too, and preventing any fool from letting him go. Don't you see he is just the sort of thing I mean? All the nonsense they talk against patriotism and militarism has just let the ordinary poor man slide and sink to be the servant of any rascally adventurer. He is put into a livery to be loyal to a conspirator, because we were afraid to put him into a uniform and ask him to be loyal to a king."

"Personally," said Grimm, "I have a great deal of sympathy with Your Royal Highness's view. But I'm afraid it's too late to do that now."

"How do you know?" demanded the lady with some heat. "Have you ever put the real point to a man like that? Have you ever asked him what he feels about his loyalties and his country and the king he heard about when he was a child? Not you; you've just badgered him like a barrister about details of time and place that no healthy human being ever remembers, and he's reduced to looking like the village idiot, and I don't wonder. I should like to talk to him myself."

"My dear Mary--" began her uncle, now thrown thoroughly into disarray, and at the same moment he caught sight of the face that flashed on him over her shoulder, and his voice seemed to die away. Mr. Simon, the banker, had also begun to talk, after a tactful cough, and was saying: "If Your Royal Highness will allow me to say so, we ought surely to preserve a sense of proportion. The footman is only a common fellow and, I imagine, quite illiterate; in that sense, as Her Royal Highness says, a man of the people-but only one man out of a very large people. As an experiment in social science, it might be very interesting to try these theories upon him, but he is only a sample of the social material all round. Meanwhile, we should surely lose no time in concentrating on the really great and dangerous public characters whom we are pursuing. The Professor is a man of world-wide reputation; the General is a military hero at the head of armies, and really to stand quarrelling over the ignorance of a chance lackey--"

As he spoke he found himself wavering between the door and the advancing Princess, and in his throat also the words seemed to dry up. For both men had suddenly seen the face of something that is intolerant and innocent and not altogether of this world; the completeness of that conviction in youth that as yet cannot believe in the complexity of living, and they fell back before her as the great princess demanded audience with a flunkey, as if there were something in her of that great peasant girl from Domremy when she demanded audience of a King.

IV: The Unreasonableness of Woman

WHEN the great police raid on Peacock Crescent had a conclusion pour rire in the bursting open of empty rooms and the pinching of a bewildered footman, the functionary was trailed along with the few other sticks of furniture that seemed faintly redolent of clues, and in the impersonal manner of men removing chairs and tables with a van. There was certainly nothing about him to indicate any significance beyond that of furniture. He was of the usual size and shape of fairly imposing flunkeys. His face had the sort of solid good looks, at once wooden and waxen, which went well with the powder of the old regime of flunkeydom; there was nothing notable except perhaps that, while his blank, blue eyes expressed something more than even the fatuity required by his profession, the depressing regularity of his features was rather relieved by a length of chin that suggested some sort of obscure obstinacy. And, indeed, the police who had questioned and cross-questioned him came to the conclusion that they had to deal with a case of stubbornness as well as stupidity.

He had, of course, been bullied and badgered, and threatened with all sorts of entirely illegal things, according to the method which the police of all modern and civilized countries apply on principle to all servants, cabmen, costers and other persons supposed by their poverty to be an outlying province of the criminal classes; though every now and then those methods startle all Europe and are held up in flaming headlines of horror to the whole civilized world, when they happen to have been applied, by some fool or other, to a wealthy Jew or a heavily financed journalist. But the police had got nothing out of him that threw the least light on the meaning of his master's meetings and projects, and the weary investigators were beginning to attribute his silence to ignorance or idiocy. Only the Chief of Police himself, a man not altogether without sympathy and subtlety, still suspected that the taciturnity was tinged with fidelity.

Anyhow, the servant in his capacity of prisoner was drearily accustomed by this time to see the door of his cell open and some uniformed official come in with a notebook or a menacing forefinger, trying to collect more facts from the barren soil of his speech. He was quite prepared for it to happen again and again, any number of times, but he was not prepared to see the same door open and introduce, not a policeman in uniform, but a beautiful lady in jewels and flaming fashionable colour scheme, who entered his prison as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Only dimly did he perceive the lowering and lumpish visage of a policeman in the shadows behind, and the lady herself seemed quite resolved that the policeman should be left in the shade. She shut the door behind her with a resolute clang and faced the astounded lackey with an equally resolute smile.

He knew who she was, of course; he had seen her in the illustrated papers and even driving about the city in her car. In reply to her first question he attempted some stumbling expressions of respect, but she waved them on one side with a direct familiarity that paralysed him even more.

"Don't let us worry about all that," she said. "We are both subjects of the King and patriots of Pavonia. At least I'm sure you must be really a patriot and I want to know why you don't behave like one."

There was a long silence, and then he said, looking at the floor and in a rather hang-dog fashion: "I don't want any misunderstandings, Your Highness. I don't set up to be much of a patriot, and these people were always good to me."

"Why, what did they do for you?" she demanded. "Gave you tips from time to time, I suppose. Paid you some sort of salary, probably much too small. What is that compared with what the country has done for us all? You can't eat bread without eating the corn of Pavonia; you can't drink water without drinking it from the rivers of your own land; you can't walk down the street in safety or liberty, without relying on the law that defends the citizens of the State."

He suddenly threw up his head, and the very blank emptiness of his blue eyes affected her with something dizzy and even dazzling.

"You see," he said, without a smile, "I am not walking in liberty down the street just now."

"I know," she said obstinately, "but it's your own fault, isn't it? I'm sure you know of something these men are doing, something that's hanging over all of us like a thundercloud, and you won't say a word to save us, by telling us where the bolt will fall."

He continued to stare in a vacant manner, and then repeated like an automaton: "The men were always good to me."

She wrung one hand with a gesture of exasperation, and said rather unreasonably: "I don't believe they did anything at all. I expect they treated you rottenly, really."

He seemed to meditate in his heavy way, and then said haltingly, but with an increasing suggestion of more instructed speech-as it were, working to the surface through the professional primness of his upper-servant intonation: "You see, these things go a bit by comparison. At the only school I was ever sent to they had hardly any meals at all; my family never had any money and I was often hungry all night, and out in the cold as well. You see, it's all very well to talk about the State and patriotism and the rest. Suppose when I was freezing in the gutter I had gone down on my knees to the great statue of Pavonia Victrix in the Fountain Square and said, 'Pavonia, give me food', I suppose the great statue would have stepped down from its pedestal at once and brought me a tray of hot cakes or a pile of ham sandwiches. Suppose it began to snow when I had hardly a rag on my back; I suppose the Flag of Pavonia, flying on the top of the palace, would have come down off its pole to wrap me up like a blanket. At least, I suppose some people think it would. You have to have rather rum experiences to find out that it doesn't."

His figure remained heavy and motionless, but his voice took a new and rather indescribable turn or change.

"But I did get food at Peacock Crescent. Those horrible revolutionists, who you say are destroying the whole city, at least prevented me from being destroyed. Suppose, if you like that they treated me like a dog; still, I was a stray dog and a starving dog, and they fed and sheltered me like a dog. You know what a dog would feel about turning on them or deserting them. Is thy servant less than a dog, that he should do this thing?"

Something in the lift of his voice on the Scriptural phrase startled her and made her stare at him with a new curiosity.

"What is your name?" she said.

"My name is John Conrad," he said quite readily. "I have no family now to speak of, but we were once rather better off in the world than we are at present. But I assure Your Royal Highness there's no particular mystery about that. Coming down in the world is common enough in these days. Commoner than coming up in the world, which is even worse."

She spoke in a lowered voice. "If you are really an educated man and a gentleman, you ought to be all the more ashamed to work with this gang of wreckers. It's all very well to talk about a dog, but it's not fair. A dog has only got a master, and naturally he sticks to the only duty required of him. A dog hasn't got a country or a cause or a religion or any general sense of right. But can you, as an educated man, reconcile it with any general sense of right to say you are a dog, and on that excuse fill the whole town with mad dogs?"

He gazed at her with a painful intensity; in some strange fashion the staring and startling social disparity between them had really faded away on the heat of intellectual incompatibility, just as she had tried to wave it away with a gesture when she first made her amazing entry to the prison. As he looked at her a slow and singular change seemed to pass over his face and he seemed to realize some meaning to the situation he had as yet been too stunned to see.

"It's beyond all possible goodness that you should trouble to talk to me like this," he said. "You, at least, are more generous to me than the men who only gave me food. You, I admit, have done more than they could ever have done for a man like me. But I don't recognize it about poor old Pavonia with its peacocks and palaces and police courts, and I wouldn't give up an inch of my own scruples for them."

"If you like to put it so," she said quite steadily, "do it for me."

"I certainly wouldn't do it for the others," he said, "but you see, that's just where my difficulty comes in. To obey you would be a pleasure, but I don't believe a bit of what you say about it being a duty. And what sort of a dog is it that won't do it for duty, but will do it for pleasure."

"Oh, I hate that obstinate expression you've got!" she cried with a curious uncontrollable petulance. "I don't mind dogs, but I hate bulldogs. They're always so ugly." Then, suddenly altering her tone, the Princess added: "I don't see why you should be kept kicking your heels in this prison, all for your silly prejudices. They're bound to give you a long sentence for treason, if they do nothing else, if you will protect these devils who want to blow us all up tomorrow."

"Very well," he said in a hard voice. "Then I must make up my mind to be punished for treason because I will not be a traitor."

Something compact in his curt epigram seemed to savour almost of contempt, and her self-control suddenly gave way before a blaze of really royal anger.

"Very well, then," she cried, turning furiously towards the door, "you can lie and rot there for treason, because you won't listen to reason; it's all one to us, of course, except that your mad, sulky obstinacy may smash us all to smithereens in twenty-four hours. God knows, and I suppose you know, what these blasphemous brutes are going to do to us all. And perhaps God cares, but you don't. You don't care for anything or anybody but your own chin and your own brutal pride. I've done with you."

And she flung open the door, incongruously giving another glimpse of the pudding-faced policeman outside; then she vanished through the opening and the door clanged again and the prisoner was left alone in his cell.

He sat down on the plank-bed and put his head in his hands, remaining in this rigid ruminating posture for a long time. Then he rose with a sigh and approached the door once more, for he heard outside it the heavy movements to which he was already and too fully accustomed, and he knew that some other visitor, who would by no means be a beautiful lady, was coming to bother him once more. But on this occasion the official interview was somewhat longer than usual, and of a somewhat different character.

A few hours afterwards, when the Princess was declining, and the King accepting, a glass of Italian vermouth from a tray handed by a footman of a far less disturbing character, the Prime Minister, who was seated opposite in that private apartment of the palace, observed quite casually: "So it looks as if they may be frustrated after all. I was jolly nervous up to an hour ago, for I swear they had got something big that was just going to burst; all their last proclamations were like the cocking of a rifle before the bang comes. But since this silly footman is going to tell us where they're hidden, I expect we shall be too quick for them after all. Grimm says--"

The Princess Aurelia Augusta, otherwise Mary, had risen to her feet as if she had received a personal insult.

"What's all this mean?" she cried. "The footman hasn't spoken. He refuses absolutely to speak."

"Your Royal Highness will pardon me," said the Prime Minister stiffly. "I have the news straight from the Chief of Police. The footman has certainly confessed the facts."

"It's not true!" said Her Royal Highness obstinately. "I don't believe it for a minute."

She seemed quite indignant about it, and indeed those who retain any capacity for surprise at the mystery of feminine psychology may be surprised to learn that, at her next interview with the prisoner, in the prison, she was very harsh and scornful towards him for having decided upon betraying all that she had told him to betray.

"So that's the end of all your heroics and stubbornness and sticking out your chin," she said. "You're going to save yourself after all, and give up all these poor deluded creatures that are in hiding."

He threw up his head in the rather startling fashion he had and stared at her with the blank but blazing blue eyes, that had always something about them of vertigo and the empty air, making the spectator dizzy.

"Well," he said, "I certainly didn't suppose you regarded them with so much sympathy."

"I regard them with great sympathy for having to do with you," she said, in a somewhat vicious manner. "Of course, I don't agree with them, but I'm quite sorry for them, being hunted and having to trust such people to hide them. I expect it was you who led them into mischief."

The last clause was perhaps an afterthought. She said it on those sound general feminine principles, which some masculine minds, in moments of annoyance, have thought slightly unprincipled. But she was never more surprised in her life than when he smiled and said: "Yes, perhaps you are right. It was I who led them into mischief."

As she looked at him with a painful curiosity, he added: "But remember what you said. If I did them wrong, I did it for you."

An instant afterwards he burst out in a new and volcanic voice, that she had never heard before from him or from any man.

"Do you suppose I don't know that it's all utterly unfair? Why should you have that power, as well as all the other kinds? Why should you have the only unanswerable thing, the face that is unanswerable like God on the Judgement Day? We can call up ignorance against science and impotence against power, but who is going to raise up ugliness against beauty? Who--?"

He had taken a stride forward, but, what was much stranger, she had herself started and moved forward in response. She was staring into his face as if it had been blasted by a lightning-flash.

"Oh, my God!" she cried. "It can't be that!"

For she had in that instant become aware of an amazing possibility, and the rest of their interview was too wonderful to be believed.

V: The Terms of a Traitor

ONE single thought like a thundercloud brooded over Pavonia, its palace and principal city; the sort of concentration that commonly only possesses some ignorant village where a prophet or fanatic has predicted the instant end of the world. The last proclamations had had their effect; even the most careless were now convinced that at any moment a huge invasion on all the frontiers, or a horrible explosion in the heart of the city, would come at some signal they did not know, and by some gesture they could not arrest. The foreign invasion was felt perhaps as the more maddening of the two but they were all the more bewildered because there had hung over all this mysterious movement the shadow or savour of something foreign. It was admitted that the reputation of Professor Phocus was even greater in other countries than in his own; men began to ask with some irritation where the wealthy pawnbroker had come from, and, with slightly greater hesitation, how he had made his wealth. But nobody doubted that these men had constructed some engine that was about to act with hideous energy. It was in the midst of all this tossing insecurity that the message came that the captive footman would speak. He had actually signed a grave document, which ran: "I can say The Word and stop the work of the Four Destroyers for ever and put them henceforth in your power. But I must name my conditions."

Whatever may have been the historical facts about the decayed family of John Conrad, there is no doubt that he entered on the scene of a Committee of the State, which was also an audience with the King, with the sort of dignity which does not generally appear in the pomposity of footmen. He approached the small table in the palace, round which were seated the four chief rulers of Pavonia, with a proper gesture of respect but without the least appearance of embarrassment or servility. He bowed to the King and accepted the chair in which the King asked him to be seated, and it was the King who was more embarrassed than the subject. Clovis of Pavonia cleared his throat, looked down his nose reflectively for a moment and then said: "I hope it is unnecessary for me to add my personal word to any arrangements that may have been made. But I am quite prepared to add it, to avoid any misunderstanding. It is quite understood that you have consented on certain conditions only to reveal what you know, and I shall certainly see that those conditions are fulfilled. It is only reasonable, in consideration of what you regard yourself as sacrificing, that you should receive a really handsome equivalent."

"May I respectfully ask," inquired Conrad, "who is to decide exactly what is an equivalent?"

"Your Majesty," interposed Colonel Grimm, "I do not believe in beating about the bush. We have very little time to spare, if these plotters are really about to spring a mine. I don't see how it can be denied that the prisoner must be the judge of the equivalent. I have tried to get the truth out of him by other methods which he may or may not think he has a right to resent; in plain words, by intimidation. It is only just to say that they have failed. It is also only just to say that when intimidation fails, there is nothing else but bribery. And the plain common sense of it is that he can name the bribe."

The Prime Minister coughed and said a little huskily: "That is rather a sweeping statement, but if Mr. Conrad would give us some idea of what he would regard as a reasonable settlement. ..."

"I shall require," said John Conrad, "nothing less than ten thousand a year."

"Really," said the Prime Minister, in his rather flustered fashion, "this sort of thing seems to me quite extravagant. You could do anything you wanted to do, in your class of life, on much less."

"You are wrong," replied Conrad calmly. "My class of life is much more exacting than you suppose. I do not see how I could keep up the position of a Grand Duke of Pavonia on less."

"Of a Grand . . ." began Mr. Valence, and his voice seemed to fail and fade away.

"Obviously," said Conrad in a reasonable tone. "It would be a gross disrespect to His Majesty, and to the lineage of one of the most ancient Royal Houses of Europe, to ask His Majesty to allow his own niece to be married to anybody under the rank of a Grand Duke of Pavonia."

The rest of the company regarded the affable footman much as the King and Court may have regarded Perseus when he turned them all to stone. But Grimm recovered his voice first with a good gross military oath, followed by a demand to know what the devil it was all about.

"I shall not ask for any formal political office in the government of the State," went on the footman thoughtfully. "But it is only reasonable to expect that a Grand Duke of Pavonia married to a Royal Princess will have a certain amount of influence on the policy of the country. I shall certainly insist on a number of essential reforms, especially directed to a juster treatment of the poor of this city. Your Majesty and gentlemen, if you are at this moment threatened by a thunderbolt from you know not where, and perhaps with the overthrow of your whole nation by foreign invasion and internal revolt, you have very largely yourselves to thank. I will give up to you these revolutionary leaders of whom you talk so much. I will help you to capture Dr. Phocus and Sebastian and Loeb and, if possible, even General Case. I will give up my companions, but I will not give up my convictions. And when I come to occupy the high national position with which you will shortly honour me, I can promise you that though there will be no revolution, there will be a very drastic reform."

The Prime Minister rose to his feet in uncontrollable agitation, for professional reformers do not like to hear about drastic reform.

"These suggestions are intolerable," he cried. "They are fantastic. They are not to be listened to for a moment."

"They are my terms," said Conrad gravely. "I am quite ready to go back to prison if you will not accept them. I may say, in so far as I may touch upon such things, that the Lady chiefly involved has already accepted them. But I am quite ready for you to reject them, and I will go back and wait in my prison, and you will sit here and wait in your palace, for you know not what."

There was a long silence and then Colonel Grimm said very softly: "Oh, ten million howling devils in hell!"

The twilight was settling slowly over the long tapestried apartment, of which the ancient gold was sufficiently faded to have lost the mere glare of vainglory and to take on the grandeur of a rich but reflected flame, as if reflected from mirror to mirror down the endless memories of men. In the great sprawling tapestry covered with giants, which made the little group of modern men look so small at their feet, could be traced the mighty figure of Clovis the First going to his last great victory with the peacock fans carried before him and the Grand Dukes of Pavonia lifting behind him a forest of swords. There was nothing in that room that did not in some way recall the unreplaceable achievement of a special civilization; the busts of Pavonian poets, who could have written only in the Pavonian tongue, filled the niches and corners of the room; the dark glimmer of the bookcases told of a national literature not to be lightly lost or possibly replaced, and here and there a picture like a little window gave a glimpse of the distant but beloved landscapes of their native land. Even the dog that lay before the fire was of the breed of their own mountains, and there was not a man there so mean-no, not even the politician-as not to know that by all these things he lived and with all these things he would die. And under all these things, they fancied they could hear something like the steady ticking of a bomb and they waited for the catch that comes before the deafening death.

At length, in that silence as of the ages, Clovis the Third spoke for Pavonia and all his people, as it was in the days of old. He knew not whether it should be called a surrender or a stroke of victory, but he knew it was necessary and he spoke with a fullness and firmness of voice which had long been rare in him.

"The time is short," he said, "and there is no other course, I think, but to accept your terms. In return, I understand that you do seriously propose and promise to stop the activities of the man called Sebastian, of Professor Phocus, of Case and Loeb, as enemies of this State, and to deliver them up to us, to deal with them as we will."

"I promise," said John Conrad, and the King rose suddenly to his feet, like one who dissolves an audience.

Nevertheless, most of the company that had formed the Council broke up in a curious condition of mystification and ill-ease. Oddly enough, perhaps, it had no reference to the elements in the case that were really extravagant and even absurd. The incredible parts of the story seemed to have stunned them all into a sort of sobriety, so that they could no longer feel them as incredible. It was not the notion of a lackey out of a villa in Peacock Crescent becoming a Grand Duke of Pavonia or marrying a Pavonian princess. It was not concerned with the contrast between his figure and his fate. Curiously enough, it was concerned with the very contrary. After sitting at the same table with the mysterious Mr. Conrad, none of them felt any longer any particular incongruity between him and such high ambitions. He gave rather the impression of a man familiar, not only with high ambitions, but with high aspirations.

He moved with the indescribable poise of those who have never really lost their own social self-respect, and his manners seemed quite as fitted to a Court as those of the rough police officer or the rather prosaic politician. He had given his word very much as the King had given it, as if it were a word of some worth. And it was exactly there that the sediment of mystification remained in the mind of many of the company, and it was the same sort of doubt that had more deeply disturbed the mind of the Princess. It was not that the man did not seem like a Grand Duke, but that he did not seem like an informer. However conventional their ideas might be about the duties of a citizen, they could not, somehow, understand a man of this sort not retaining the darker virtues of a conspirator, or, in more popular phrase, the honour that is supposed to exist among thieves. Colonel Grimm was a policeman, but he was also a soldier, and there were elements in him that did not easily adapt themselves to a gentleman-especially when he was a gentleman-who turned King's Evidence. As he looked at the grave face and rather graceful figure of the ex-flunkey, he, who fancied himself a judge of men, thought that he could imagine Conrad more easily as a man blowing up the town with dynamite than as a man betraying his accomplices.

Nevertheless, the man's word was given, and Grimm felt certain that he would keep it, and heaved a huge sigh of relief on reflecting that they had probably seen the last of the power of Case and Phocus and Sebastian over the people of that land. And though the worthy Colonel was in one sense wildly wrong about all his calculations in the case, he was, in fact, perfectly right in that one.

He joined John Conrad outside the palace and said to him with military brevity: "Well, I suppose we had better leave the next step to you."

The next step led them together down the long poplar avenue, past the outer gates of the palace, across the Fountain Square where stood (now somewhat symbolically) the statue of Pavonia the Victorious, down a number of genteel by-streets striking outward from the square, and finally into the familiar and stately curve of Peacock Crescent. By a coincidence, it was once more a night of broad moonshine and the pale facade of that terrace struck once more into him a certain chill of mystery, as of one looking at a marble mask. But it was not to the line of the familiar houses, or to the door of the familiar house, that Colonel Grimm was conducted by his guide. It was across the road to the little plot or shrubbery, with the railing round it; and, passing through the gate in the railing, they walked in the deep, dim grass and under the shadow of the large shrubs. In a place where the grass was shorter and smoother, immediately under the shadow of one of the bushes, Conrad stooped down and seemed to be moving his finger like one writing in the dust.

"Perhaps you do not know," he said, without lifting his head, "that most of the proclamations and phrases in this revolution are jokes. Almost what you might call practical jokes; certainly private jokes. There is a sort of trap-door or lid that lifts in this place, and that nobody ever found, because ordinary openings are roughly round or square or oblong or triangular, or some such calculable shape. But you cannot lift this until you have traced every curve in an extremely complicated outline. Only it ought to be a familiar outline. Only it isn't."

As he spoke, he appeared to jerk up a certain section of the turf, which seemed to be in reality a board with grass growing on top of it, like a large flat cap covered with green feathers. But when he held up the green lid so that it was black against the moon, the other could perceive that it was of a very elaborate outline, indented and diversified as if with capes and bays.

"You ought to know that," he said. "You must have studied it often enough in the Atlas, especially the military Atlas. That is the map of Pavonia. And that, if you will excuse our little joke, is what we meant when we said that we should look for safety to the frontiers."

Before the Chief of Police could reply, his informant had abruptly disappeared with a sort of dive. The earth seemed to have swallowed him up. But Grimm heard his reassuring voice coming out of the newly-uncovered abyss, and saying cheerily: "Come along down. There's quite an easy ladder. Just follow me, and you shall see the last of the men you fear."

Colonel Grimm stood for a moment like a statue in the moonlight. Then he plunged into the black well before him. And indeed, in doing so, he rather deserved to have a statue, not merely in the moonlight, but in the sun and the sight of men; like the statue of Pavonia Victrix. For he had seldom done a braver thing in a life and profession of no little courage. He was unarmed; he was alone; he had really very inadequate reasons, when reasonably reviewed, for trusting this mysterious mountebank and adventurer, or supposing that such a man would keep his promise. But even if he did keep his promise, what after all, was his promise? That through this dark entry the solitary officer should be led into the very lair of the lion; into the presence of the invincible Case, with his triumvirate of anarchs and the devil knew what array of military violence; all apparently established in a subterranean empire under the earth. It was hardly a metaphor to say that it was like descending into hell; and Grimm, though not given to sentiment, could hardly help feeling something sad and symbolic in the fact that the aperture above his head, growing smaller and smaller with distance, traced upon the dark the glimmering outline of his own country. The last dim light out of the sky looked down on him in the shape of Pavonia and then grew dark. It was almost as if he were falling through all-annihilating space, and Pavonia were a distant star. And indeed, when he came to look back on the unnatural wanderings of that night, he was haunted by a sort of contradiction in time and especially in space; by a sense that he had in fact travelled thousands of miles and covered continents and even worlds; combined with a logical certainty, like that of some mathematical fact apparently evaded in a mathematical puzzle, that he had really been operating over a comparatively small area and close to places that he knew, or (as he told himself somewhat bitterly) that he ought to have known. It was doubtless largely the result of his fatigue and the final perplexity with which he faced the final mystery; but it must be allowed for if we are to understand the dazed and almost drugged spirit of discipline in which he took the final phases of the affair. He had left something behind him in the upper air of the little garden, and he sometimes fancied afterwards that it was the power to laugh.

The light like a distant star above him disappeared, and he continued to descend the ladder, rung by rung, only very vaguely imagining what sort of perils or horrors might be below. But whatever he thought of it, it was nothing so extraordinary as what he found.

VI: The Speaking of the Word

COLONEL GRIMM of the Pavonian Police was very exactly described as a hard-headed man, and one not easily divorced from reality. It was perhaps all the more strongly that he remembered that night as a nightmare. It really had the indescribable qualities of a dream; the repetitions and the inconsistencies; the scraps of past experience appearing like sudden pictures amid the chaos of the formless and unfamiliar; the general sense of having a double mind, one sane and the other mad. It was all the more so when his subterranean wanderings, beginning in the sunken shaft in the garden, did bring him back into what would normally have been called normal scenes. He did indeed revisit the glimpses of the moon, but it made him feel all the more like Hamlet's father's ghost. He could not help feeling that he was revisiting the glimpses of the other side of the moon and had come out on the other side of the world. He could not be certain that he had not found an outlet under some strange sky, with stars, and moons of its own, and yet presenting objects of a mocking familiarity. His first revelation, or rather menace of things yet unrevealed, came to him when, after groping through a level tunnel, he began to ascend what seemed to be a corresponding ladder in a corresponding chimney on the other side. When he was half-way up this vertical tunnel, the man ahead of him turned and said in a low and hoarse tone: "Stay where you are a moment. I will go on and look round; they won't be alarmed at me."

He remained hanging on the ladder and looking up at a pale disc of light like the moon itself, which showed the opening of the well. A moment after the disc was darkened, blotted out as by the cap that had covered the corresponding hole, but peering up through the dusk, he fancied there was something curious about this particular stopper. He flashed on his electric torch and nearly fell off the ladder. For the aperture was filled with a face peering down at him and grinning like a goblin; a turnip of a face with green spectacles which he recognized instantly as that of Professor Phocus. And Professor Phocus said, with the horrible distinctness with which things are sometimes said in a dream: "You won't catch us so easily. We've only to say The Word and the world will be destroyed."

Then the grotesque stopper was taken out of the strange bottle; the disc of dull light reappeared; and after a few moments of bewildered waiting, he heard the voice of his guide whispering over the brink.

"He's gone," said Conrad. "You can come up now." When he came up, it was to find himself once more in the moonlight and apparently somewhere in the back premises of Peacock Crescent. It expresses the dazed detachment from daily life which these experiences had somehow produced in him, that he was quite surprised to see the police, whom he had himself stationed to watch the place, standing round and composedly answering the rather conspiratorial signals of Conrad.

"You can go into the house in a minute," said Conrad in the same low voice. "I'll just nip in and see that everything's all right, but I'm sure they're all boxed up in there. Bring your men with you, of course."

He darted into the back of a house, which Grimm fancied was the house next door to the original scene of the raid, and for some little time the police and their Chief waited patiently outside. They had just begun to consider the advisability of following their solitary leader into the den of criminals, when they caught their breath and stood still, staring up at the house.

One of the window blinds was jerked up and there appeared at the window the unmistakable face and form which the Princess had beheld upon the cafe table. The poet, Sebastian, stood staring at the moon, in what is supposed to be the manner of poets, looking more than usually florid with his flaming red moustache and whiskers and a necktie of yet another glowing and romantic shade. Then he stretched out his arm to the moon, with a theatrical gesture, and seemed to begin to sing, or at least to speak in a sing-song fashion. It was impossible to conceive anything more operatic; in the sense in which that word is almost synonymous with idiotic. But the words he was chanting were familiar: "As Aaron's serpent swallowed snakes and rods, As God alone is greater than the gods, As all stars shrivel in the single sun, The words are many, but The Word is one."

Then he suddenly snapped the blind down and vanished, the room behind him turning dark. They could hardly believe that the incident, especially so senseless an incident, had really happened at all.

The next moment they were conscious that their creepy friend the conspirator had come close to them again in complete silence and was whispering: "You can go in now and nab them all."

Grimm, at the head of his stolid policemen, stumped up some stairs and along one or two passages and arrived eventually in a large, empty room. It was rather a curious room, having one table in the middle, with four chairs and four pads of blotting paper, as if arranged for a regular committee. But what was much more curious was this: that in each of the four walls of the room there was let in a door, with an old brass knocker, as if they were the four front doors of separate houses. Each of them bore a notice in large letters; one being inscribed "Professor Phocus", another "General Case", a third "Mr. Loeb", and a fourth simply "Sebastian", as with that magnificent flourish with which foreign poets sign a single name. "This is where they live," said John Conrad, "and I promise you they shall not escape."

Then after a pause he added: "But before we seek them out in their separate suites of apartments, I want to talk to you about something. I want to talk to you about The Word."

"I suppose," said the official grimly, "that we are to be allowed to hear The Word also, though somebody has just told me that it will destroy the world."

"I do not think it will destroy the world," answered Conrad gravely. "I hope it will rather recreate it."

"Then," said Grimm, "I may take it that when we do know The Word, we shan't find that is a joke too."

"In one sense it's a joke," answered the other. "In one sense when you know it, you will know it's a joke. But the joke is that you know it already."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean by saying so," said the other.

"You have heard The Word twenty times," said Conrad.

"You heard it only ten minutes ago. We have shouted and bellowed The Word at you all the time, and made it as plain as a placard on the wall. The whole secret of this conspiracy is really in one word; only that we've never kept it a secret."

Grimm was looking at him with gleaming eyes under his heavy brows, and something like a suspicion was creeping into his face. Conrad repeated very seriously, with a slow and heavy enunciation the words: "As all stars shrivel in the single sun . . ."

Grimm leapt to his feet with an oath and suddenly made a dash at the door labelled "Sebastian".

"Yes, you've got it," said Conrad with a smile. "It's only a question of which word you italicize. Or, if you like, of which word you begin with a big letter."

"The words are many," muttered Grimm, fumbling at the door.

"Yes," answered the other, "but the word is One." Colonel Grimm flung open the door of the poet's suite of apartments and found it was a cupboard. It was quite an ordinary shallow cupboard with a few hat-pegs, and from these were hanging a red wig, a red artificial beard, a scarf of peacock colours and all the externals of the popular poet.

"All the history of the great revolution," went on John Conrad, in the calm tone of a lecturer, "the whole method by which it was enabled to spread and menace the great State of Pavonia is and always was to be summed up in a single word: a word I constantly repeated, but a word that you never guessed. It is the word One."

He stepped from the table to the door at right angles to the open one; the door inscribed with the name of the Professor, and throwing it open, revealed another cupboard, with a hat-peg supporting an unnaturally narrow, tall hat, a dilapidated waterproof and a bulbous mask bridged by a pair of green spectacles.

"These are the luxurious apartments of the celebrated Professor Phocus," he said. "Need I explain to you that there never was any Professor Phocus?-except myself, of course, who professed to be the Professor. In the case of Loeb and Case I ran rather a greater risk, for they were, or had been, real people."

He paused a moment, rubbing his long chin, and then said: "But it's odd how you shrewd policemen blunder by not simply believing what you are told. You said that the Pavonian people must all be drilled in a wonderful conspiracy; simply because they denied that there was a conspiracy. They all agreed in that; so you thought that was conspiracy in itself. As a matter of fact they knew nothing, because there was nothing to know. It was the same with your international relations. Old General Case told you again and again that he was old, and he was ill and in retirement. And so he is. He's in such complete retirement that he hasn't even heard that he is walking about the streets of the Pavonian capital in full uniform. But you wouldn't believe him, because you wouldn't believe anybody. The Princess herself said the poet looked all painted and artificial in his purple whiskers. And that would have told you the whole story, if you'd only listened to her. Then everybody said, even the King himself, that old Loeb the pawnbroker was dead, and so he was. He died years before I began to impersonate him with these trifling adornments."

And he threw open another cupboard, displaying a dusty interior festooned as if with cobwebs with the grey whiskers and shabby grey garments attributed to the miser. "That was the beginning of the whole business. Old Loeb really did take this house privately, but for very private reasons; not exactly out of pure public spirit; no. I really was his servant, having come down to that sort of service, and the only thing I inherited from the old rascal's regime, the only thing I didn't invent myself, was the underground passage, which he had constructed for himself. As I say, there were no political ideals involved in that; odd sort of ladies used it and so on. He was not a nice old gentleman. Well, I don't know whether you will enter into the fine shade of my feelings, but, although I was starving and ready to be a scavenger, yet three years in the service of a sensual usurer left me in a rather revolutionary state of mind. It seemed to me that the world, as seen from that particular sewer, by that particular scavenger, was rather an ugly place. So I decided to have a revolution. Or rather, I decided to be a revolution. It was all very easy, really, if one did it slowly and with a little tact and imagination. I built up the characters of four quite different public men, two of them quite imaginary. You never saw any two of them at the same moment, and you never noticed it. When they were supposed to gather for their periodical dinner, I had only to put on one disguise after the other and go round behind the scenes, so to speak, in the underground passage, so that they only seemed to turn up one after another in a leisurely fashion. For the rest, you've no notion how easy it is to bamboozle a really enlightened, educated modern town, used to newspapers and all that. It was only necessary for each person to have a vast, vague reputation, more or less foreign. When Professor Phocus wrote learned letters to the papers, with half the alphabet after his name, nobody was going to admit they had never heard of the famous Professor Phocus. When Sebastian said he was the greatest poet in modern Europe, everybody felt that he ought to know. And if you get three or four names of that sort nowadays, you have got everything. There never was a time in history when the few counted for so much, and the many for so little. When the newspapers say 'The nation is behind Mr. Binks', it means that about three newspaper proprietors are behind him. When the professors say 'The opinion of Europe has now accepted the Gollywog theory', it means that about four professors in Germany have accepted it. The moment I'd got my millionaire and my man of science, I knew I was pretty safe; but the poet was a pleasing ornament and I knew the threat of the foreign general would throw you all into fits. By the way," he added apologetically, "I have not shown you the magnificent apartments of General Case, but it's only the uniform. The rest consists chiefly of blacking,"

"Quite so," said Colonel Grimm, politely. "I will excuse you from exhibiting the blacking. And now, what is to happen?"

The chief conspirator seemed to be still sunken in a sort of reverie. At last he said: "I felt that all revolutions had failed through treason or disunion among the revolutionists. I resolved that the others should not betray me. I did not foresee that I might betray the others. But after all, this rebellion has also ended in betrayal. Colonel Grimm, I give up my confederates. The great poet Sebastian is captured and hanged; the great soldier Case is captured and hanged; Phocus and Loeb are captured and hanged. You can see them hanging-on hat-pegs."

Then he added, with a bow of profound modesty: "But their humble tool, John Conrad, has the pardon of the King."

Grimm once more sprang erect with a ringing curse which cracked and turned to a laugh. Then he said: "John Conrad, you are a devil, but I shouldn't wonder if you brought it off after all. Clovis the Third may have forgotten that he is still a king, but somewhere in his stale memories he remembers that he is still a gentleman. Go on your way, Grand Duke of Pavonia; it is possible that you know the way to go! After all, you have done what you said you would do, and kept your own word in your own way."

"Yes," said Conrad, with a new sobriety, "it is the only thing worth calling The Word."

It has been already explained that Pavonia possessed a modern and enlightened Government; and in the light of this fact it may seem a strain on the reader's credulity to say that it did actually keep its word to the eccentric footman. The politicians and the financiers made some difficulties, feeling that the keeping of promises must not become a habit. But for once the King put his foot down, not without a faint and far-off jingle of the ancient spurs and sword. He said it was a point of purely personal honour, but there was a rumour that his niece had a good deal to do with it.