The Complete Four Just Men Read online

  Heavens! He must destroy that. He thrust his hand into the inner pocket of his coat. It was empty. The thin leather case was gone! His face went grey, for the Red Hundred is no fanciful secret society but a bloody-minded organization with less mercy for bungling brethren than for its sworn enemies. In the thick darkness of the car his nervous fingers groped through all his pockets. There was no doubt at all – the papers had gone.

  In the midst of his search the car stopped. He slipped the flat pistol from his pocket. His position was desperate and he was not the kind of man to shirk a risk.

  Once there was a brother of the Red Hundred who sold a password to the Secret Police. And the brother escaped from Russia. There was a woman in it, and the story is a mean little story that is hardly worth the telling. Only, the man and the woman escaped, and went to Baden, and Smidt recognized them from the portraits he had received from headquarters, and one night . . . You understand that there was nothing clever or neat about it. English news-papers would have described it as a ‘revolting murder’, because the details of the crime were rather shocking. The thing that stood to Smidt’s credit in the books of the Society was that the murderer was undiscovered.

  The memory of this episode came back to the anarchist as the car stopped – perhaps this was the thing the police had discovered? Out of the dark corners of his mind came the scene again, and the voice of the man . . . ‘Don’t! don’t! O Christ! don’t!’ and Smidt sweated . . .

  The door of the car opened and he slipped back the cover of his pistol.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ said a quiet voice in the gloom outside, ‘here are some friends of yours.’

  He lowered his pistol, for his quick ears detected a wheezing cough.

  ‘Von Dunop!’ he cried in astonishment.

  ‘And Herr Bleaumeau,’ said the same voice. ‘Get in, you two.’

  Two men stumbled into the car, one dumbfounded and silent – save for the wheezing cough – the other blasphemous and voluble.

  ‘Wait, my friend!’ raved the bulk of Bleaumeau; ‘wait! I will make you sorry.’

  The door shut and the car moved on.

  The two men outside watched the vehicle with its unhappy passengers disappear round a corner and then walked slowly away.

  ‘Extraordinary men,’ said the taller.

  ‘Most,’ replied the other, and then, ‘Von Dunop – isn’t he – ?’

  ‘The man who threw the bomb at the Swiss President – yes.’

  The shorter man smiled in the darkness.

  ‘Given a conscience, he is enduring his hour,’ he said.

  The pair walked on in silence and turned into Oxford Street as the clock of a church struck eight.

  The tall man lifted his walking-stick and a sauntering taxi pulled up at the curb.

  ‘Aldgate,’ he said, and the two men took their seats.

  Not until the taxi was spinning along Newgate Street did either of the men speak, and then the shorter asked: ‘You are thinking about the woman?’

  The other nodded and his companion relapsed into silence; then he spoke again.

  ‘She is a problem and a difficulty, in a way – yet she is the most dangerous of the lot. And the curious thing about it is that if she were not beautiful and young she would not be a problem at all. We’re very human, George. God made us illogical that the minor businesses of life should not interfere with the great scheme. And the great scheme is that animal men should select animal women for the mothers of their children.’

  ‘Venenum in auro bibitur,’ the other quoted, which shows that he was an extraordinary detective, ‘and so far as I am concerned it matters little to me whether an irresponsible homicide is a beautiful woman or a misshapen negro.’

  They dismissed the taxi at Aldgate Station and turned into Middlesex Street.

  The meeting-place of the great congress was a hall which was originally erected by an enthusiastic Christian gentleman with a weakness for the conversion of Jews to the New Presbyterian Church, With this laudable object it had been opened with great pomp and the singing of anthems and the enthusiastic proselytizer had spoken on that occasion two hours and forty minutes by the clock.

  After twelve months’ labour the Christian gentleman discovered that the advantages of Christianity only appeal to very rich Jews indeed, to the Cohens who become Cowans, to the Isaacs who become Grahames, and to the curious low-down Jews who stand in the same relation to their brethren as White Kaffirs to a European community.

  So the hall passed from hand to hand, and, failing to obtain a music and dancing licence, went back to the mission-hall stage.

  Successive generations of small boys had destroyed its windows and beplastered its walls. Successive fly-posters had touched its blank face with colour. Tonight there was nothing to suggest that there was any business of extraordinary importance being transacted within its walls. A Russian or a Yiddish or any kind of reunion does not greatly excite Middlesex Street, and had little Peter boldly announced that the congress of the Red Hundred were to meet in full session there would have been no local excitement and – if the truth be told – he might still have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.

  To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Soudan Campaigns, the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end stood a thin man with a straggling beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and weak, he wore long narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking his head forwards and sideways like an inquisitive hen.

  ‘You have the word, brothers?’ he asked, speaking German like one unaccustomed to the language.

  The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to his flamboyant watch-chain. Then he answered in Italian.

  ‘Nothing!’

  The face of the guardian flushed with pleasure at the familiar tongue.

  ‘Pass, brother; it is very good to hear that language.’

  The air of the crowded hall struck the two men in the face like the blast from a destructor. It was unclean; unhealthy – the scent of an early-morning doss-house.

  The hall was packed, the windows were closed and curtained, and as a precautionary measure, little Peter had placed thick blankets before the ventilators.

  At one end of the hall was a platform on which stood a semicircle of chairs and in the centre was a table draped with red. On the wall behind the chairs – every one of which was occupied – was a huge red flag bearing in the centre a great white ‘C’. It had been tacked to the wall, but one corner had broken away revealing a part of the painted scroll of the mission workers.

  ‘ . . . are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’

  The two intruders pushed their way through a group that were gathered at the door. Three aisles ran the length of the building, and they made their way along the central gangway and found seats near the platform.

  A brother was speaking. He was a good and zealous worker but a bad orator. He spoke in German and enunciated commonplaces with hoarse emphasis. He said all the things that other men had said and forgotten. ‘This is the time to strike’ was his most notable sentence, and notable only because it evoked a faint buzz of applause.

  The audience stirred impatiently. The good Bentvitch had spoken beyond his allotted time; and there were other people to speak – and prosy at that. And it would be ten o’clock before the Woman of Gratz would rise.

  The babble was greatest in the corner of the hall, where little Peter, all eyes and startled eyebrows, was talking to an audience of his own.

  ‘It is impossible, it is absurd, it is most foolish!’ his thin voice rose almost to a scream. ‘I sh
ould laugh at it – we should all laugh, but the Woman of Gratz has taken the matter seriously, and she is afraid!’

  ‘Afraid!’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘Oh, Peter, the fool!’

  There were other things said because everybody in the vicinity expressed an opinion. Peter was distressed, but not by the epithets. He was crushed, humiliated, beaten by his tremendous tidings. He was nearly crying at the horrible thought. The Woman of Gratz was afraid! The Woman of Gratz who . . . It was unthinkable.

  He turned his eyes toward the platform, but she was not there.

  ‘Tell us about it, Peter,’ pleaded a dozen voices; but the little man with the tears twinkling on his fair eyelashes waved them off.

  So far from his incoherent outburst they had learnt only this – that the Woman of Gratz was afraid.

  And that was bad enough.

  For this woman – she was a girl really, a slip of a child who should have been finishing her education somewhere in Germany – this same woman had once risen and electrified the world.

  There had been a meeting in a small Hungarian town to discuss ways and means. And when the men had finished their denunciation of Austria, she rose and talked. A short-skirted little girl with two long flaxen braids of hair, thin-legged, flat-chested, angular, hipless – that is what the men of Gratz noticed as they smiled behind their hands and wondered why her father had brought her to the meeting.

  But her speech . . . two hours she spoke and no man stirred. A little flat-chested girl full of sonorous phrases – mostly she had collected them from the talk in Old Joseph’s kitchen. But with some power of her own, she had spun them together, these inconsiderable truisms, and had endowed them with a wondrous vitality.

  They were old, old platitudes, if the truth be told, but at some time in the history of revolution, some long-dead genius had coined them, and newly fashioned in the furnace of his soul they had shaped men’s minds and directed their great and dreadful deeds.

  So the Woman of Gratz arrived, and they talked about her and circulated her speeches in every language. And she grew. The hollow face of this lank girl filled, and the flat bosom rounded and there came softer lines and curves to her angular figure, and, almost before they realized the fact, she was beautiful.

  So her fame had grown until her father died and she went to Russia. Then came a series of outrages which may be categorically and briefly set forth –

  1: General Maloff shot dead by an unknown woman in his private room at the Police Bureau, Moscow.

  2: Prince Hazallarkoff shot dead by an unknown woman in the streets of Petrograd.

  3: Colonel Kaverdavskov killed by a bomb thrown by a woman who made her escape.

  And the Woman of Gratz leapt to a greater fame. She had been arrested half a dozen times, and whipped twice, but they could prove nothing against her and elicit nothing from her – and she was very beautiful.

  Now to the thundering applause of the waiting delegates, she stepped upon the platform and took the last speaker’s place by the side of the red-covered table.

  She raised her hand and absolute and complete silence fell on the hall, so much so that her first words sounded strident and shrill, for she had attuned her voice to the din. She recovered her pitch and dropped her voice to a conversational tone.

  She stood easily with her hands clasped behind her and made no gesture. The emotion that was within her she conveyed through her wonderful voice. Indeed, the power of the speech lay rather in its delivery than in its substance, for only now and then did she depart from the unwritten text of Anarchism: the right of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor; the divinity of violence; the sacredness of sacrifice and martyrdom in the cause of enlightenment. One phrase alone stood apart from the commonplace of her oratory. She was speaking of the Theorists who counsel reform and condemn violence, ‘These Christs who deputize their Calvaries’, she called them with fine scorn, and the hall roared its approval of the imagery.

  It was the fury of the applause that disconcerted her; the taller of the two men who sat watching her realized that much. For when the shouting had died down and she strove to resume, she faltered and stammered and then was silent. Then abruptly and with surprising vehemence she began again. But she had changed the direction of her oratory, and it was upon another subject that she now spoke. A subject nearer to her at that moment than any other, for her pale cheeks flushed and a feverish light came to her eyes as she spoke.

  ‘ . . . and now, with all our perfect organization, with the world almost within our grasp – there comes somebody who says “Stop!” – and we who by our acts have terrorized kings and dominated the councils of empires, are ourselves threatened!’

  The audience grew deadly silent. They were silent before, but now the silence was painful.

  The two men who watched her stirred a little uneasily, as though something in her speech had jarred. Indeed, the suggestion of braggadocio in her assertion of the Red Hundred’s power had struck a discordant note.

  The girl continued speaking rapidly.

  ‘We have heard – you have heard – we know of these men who have written to us. They say – ’ her voice rose – ‘that we shall not do what we do. They threaten us – they threaten me – that we must change our methods, or they will punish as – as we – punish; kill as we kill – ’

  There was a murmuring in the audience and men looked at one another in amazement. For terror unmistakable and undisguised was written on her pale face and shone from those wondrous eyes of hers.

  ‘But we will defy – ’

  Loud voices and the sound of scuffling in the little anteroom interrupted her, and a warning word shouted brought the audience to its feet.

  ‘The police!’

  A hundred stealthy hands reached for cunning pockets, but somebody leapt upon a bench, near the entrance, and held up an authoritative hand.

  ‘Gentlemen, there is no occasion for alarm – I am Detective-Superintendent Falmouth from Scotland Yard, and I have no quarrel with the Red Hundred.’

  Little Peter, transfixed for the moment, pushed his way towards the detective.

  ‘Who do you want – what do you want?’ he asked.

  The detective stood with his back to the door and answered.

  ‘I want two men who were seen to enter this hall: two members of an organization that is outside the Red Hundred. They – ’

  ‘Ha!’ The woman who still stood upon the platform leant forward with blazing eyes.

  ‘I know – I know!’ she cried breathlessly; ‘the men who threatened us – who threatened me – The Four Just Men!’

  Chapter 2

  The fourth man

  The tall man’s hand was in his pocket when the detective spoke.

  When he had entered the hall he had thrown a swift glance round the place and taken in every detail. He had seen the beaded strip of unpainted wood which guarded the electric light cables, and had improved the opportunity whilst the prosy brother was speaking to make a further reconnaissance. There was a white porcelain switchboard with half a dozen switches at the left-hand side of the platform. He judged the distance and threw up the hand that held the pistol.

  Bang! Bang!

  A crash of broken glass, a quick flash of blue flame from the shattered fuses – and the hall was in darkness. It happened before the detective could spring from his form into the yelling, screaming crowd – before the police officer could get a glance at the man who fired the shots.

  In an instant the place was a pandemonium.

  ‘Silence!’ Falmouth roared above the din; ‘silence! Keep quiet, you miserable cowards – show a light here, Brown, Curtis – Inspector, where are your men’s lanterns?’

  The rays of a dozen bull’s-eye lamps waved over the struggling throng.

  ‘Open your
lanterns – ’ and to the seething mob, ‘Silence!’ Then a bright young officer remembered that he had seen gas-brackets in the room, and struggled through the howling mob till he came to the wall and found the gas-fitting with his lantern. He struck a match and lit the gas, and the panic subsided as suddenly as it had begun.

  Falmouth, choked with rage, threw his eye round the hall. ‘Guard the door,’ he said briefly; ‘the hall is surrounded and they cannot possibly escape.’ He strode swiftly along the central aisle, followed by two of his men, and with an agile leap, sprang on to the platform and faced the audience. The Woman of Gratz, with a white set face, stood motionless, one hand resting on the little table, the other at her throat. Falmouth raised his hand to enjoin silence and the law-breakers obeyed.

  ‘I have no quarrel with the Red Hundred,’ he said. ‘By the law of this country it is permissible to hold opinions and propagate doctrines, however objectionable they be – I am here to arrest two men who have broken the laws of this country. Two persons who are part of the organization known as the Four Just Men.’

  All the time he was speaking his eyes searched the faces before him. He knew that one-half of the audience could not understand him and that the hum of talk that arose as he finished was his speech in course of translation.

  The faces he sought he could not discern. To be exact, he hoped that his scrutiny would induce two men, of whose identity he was ignorant, to betray themselves.

  There are little events, unimportant in themselves, which occasionally lead to tremendous issues. A skidding motor-bus that crashed into a private car in Piccadilly had led to the discovery that there were three vociferous foreign gentlemen imprisoned in the overturned vehicle. It led to the further discovery that the chauffeur had disappeared in the confusion of the collision. In the darkness, comparing notes, the three prisoners had arrived at a conclusion – to wit, that their abduction was a sequel to a mysterious letter each had received, which bore the signature ‘The Four Just Men’.

  So in the panic occasioned by the accident, they were sufficiently indiscreet to curse the Four Just Men by name, and, the Four Just Men being a sore topic with the police, they were questioned further, and the end of it was that Superintendent Falmouth motored eastward in great haste and was met in Middlesex Street by a reserve of police specially summoned.