# The Strange Adventure of Joan Archer

Extracted from Pall Mall magazine, April 1897 pp. 510–526. Accompanying illustrations by Bernard Higham may be omitted.
THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OF JOAN ARCHER.
JOAN ARCHER was of an adventurous temperament. This she had inherited from her father, an African explorer of some fame, who had died of a jungle fever when his only child was ten years old. Joan’s mother, who in her turn had been the daughter of a sea captain, had died a few years later, and the orphan had taken up her residence in the dull and impoverished home of a maternal uncle.
Here she grew up in a monotonous seclusion, with no outlet for those seething and vigorous longings for movement and adventure save such as could be found in the perusal of books of travel and romance. Books were indeed the sole recreation of this fettered and repining spirit. Dreams had once been; but as Joan advanced toward twenty and then passed it, she began to realise the iron power that the conventionalities exercise over the destinies of handsome young females of orphaned condition, whom custom has ordained shall be neither navigators, explorers, nor pioneers.
Reading became Joan’s principal pleasure and occupation. Her uncle, a kindly man who was fond of her, gave her a ticket to a large library, and thither she constantly repaired, and spent many happy hours hunting out treasures of exciting travel, also novels of darkly intricate plot enlivened by an affluence of adventurous incident.
Joan Archer’s home was in an old and forgotten quarter of New York, far down town. To reach the library without unnecessary expenditure of time, she had studied out a series of short cuts which greatly diminished the distance, and led her through still, old streets, where many houses were to let, and the passers by were few. To the romance-gorged spirit of the young girl, girding for ever against the colourless monotony of her environment, these glimpses of the older city, with here and there the relief of a quaintly pillared portico or a narrow window, issuing in pointed abruptness from a sloping, shingled roof, were a source of meditative gratification. The least deviation in façade or roof from the city’s angular architecture set her mind at work in building round this nucleus a wondrous structure of romance.
There was one house in especial which attracted her. There was a secret, deserted air about this dwelling which immediately set her to work speculating.
The house was one of a street that, a block or two farther on, stopped short at a dreary little park given over to nursemaids and sparrows. The buildings on either side of it were vacant. The papers announcing this fact had been up ever since Joan had first passed that way. It was an ordinary, faded, wooden house, with a strip of dismantled, unkempt garden at one side. Midway across this garden, shutting out all view of the rear, ran a board fence, nearly seven feet high, with a door, always close shut, in the middle of it.
Most people passing this insignificant structure would have swept it with an indifferent glance, and, setting it down for an old house long vacant, have passed on. But the curious and investigating eye of the observant Joan was struck by the fact that, notwithstanding its air of dusty desertion, it was inhabited. She had once seen a woman enter it, and several times had noticed smoke issuing from the chimney. She had also remarked that twice an upper window had been open. But the lower windows were invariably close-veiled by dust-grimed shutters the hasps of which were rusty. Why should people so desire to make the house they occupied appear deserted? There was mystery about the place. Joan scented it, and grew all alert and deeply observant.
One of her keenest ambitions in relation to this secretive dwelling was to look into the garden behind the high fence, above which rose the branches of black, leafless trees. If the front of the house told no tales, in the garden she might catch a glimpse of the silent and surreptitious inhabitants who lived their hidden lives behind the impenetrable mask of those dreary walls.
But this it seemed was not to be realised. From the library, which, fronting on an adjacent street, ran up quite close to the rear boundaries of the garden, and should have commanded at least a part of it from some of its windows, there was nothing to be seen but a high brick wall, the coping covered with broken glass. It was evident that the dwellers in the close-shuttered and silent house desired to keep themselves secure from espial. The care, with which they preserved their invisibility was to Joan matter for much speculation. Like all people of active mind and energetic temperament who are insufficiently occupied, she had dwelt so continuously on the subject uppermost in her mind, that it assumed the proportions of a fixed idea.
It was toward the grey close of a February afternoon that Joan achieved the object of her ambitions. She was in a retired section of the library, an alcove at the far end. By the fading light, entering in feeble pallor through the long, narrow window, she saw on the top shelf a volume of La Perouse’s Reports. Hastily arranging the ladder, she mounted. The book was on the last shelf; to reach it she was forced to ascend to the highest step of the ladder. Here, turning to place her hand on the window-frame, she saw something that made her heart suddenly seem to contract and then beat high. On her lofty perch, lifted far above the floor, she could look through the fanlight above the window, over the angle of the brick wall, into the garden beyond.
She forgot her book, and, motionless in the exhilaration of the discovery, stood and gazed. The piece of ground, was, for a city house, quite large, and planted with several now leafless trees. The house had undoubtedly been once the home of people of wealth and pretension, for in this neglected and dismantled garden there were traces of old flower-beds and walks outlined by shells, and under one of the trees stood a rusty, broken-lipped fountain-basin. All was now overgrown by withered weeds and a tangle of sere wintry grass.
Here, safe from espial, the dwellers in the house no longer hid the signs of their habitation. In the lower window stood cooking utensils and pieces of crockery ware. A checked dishcloth, falling in stiff downward scoops, hung on a currant bush. And near the back door stood a pile of débris—several boxes and some packing-cases, roughly broken open, on which, among bits of tin, rolls of wire, glass jars, and a saucepan or two, lay what looked like a disembowelled clock.
The spy was gazing in the still unsatisfied ardour of her curiosity, when the door giving on the garden was opened, and two people emerged apparently engaged in earnest conversation. They were a man and a woman. Joan instantly recognised the latter as the woman she had seen enter the house some weeks before. She was a stout, middle-aged person, of a deeply rosy countenance and an exceedingly respectable appearance. Indeed, she resembled a sturdy Scotch cook who might be expected to make excellent Yorkshire pudding and delectable scones. This suggestion was further enhanced by the fact that she wore a voluminous blue checked apron, on which, as she talked, she absently wiped her large red hands.
Her companion, on the contrary, had quite the appearance of a person of condition, being a young man under thirty, of a slight and graceful figure, on which his loosely hanging clothes set with a sort of careless elegance. There was an air of irritated weariness in his manner, a look of veiled dejection in his glance, which lent to his appearance a suggestion of moody and imperious ennui. Yet in the interview silently passing under Joan’s eyes there was nothing to lead her to think that this was a master instructing a servant. Both the speakers seemed on an equality. The man listened with respectful and silent attention while the woman discoursed, her blunt red fingers resting on his arm. The conversation concluded, they re-entered the house; and Joan, large-eyed, and now with her adventurous spirit all agog, descended the ladder and hurried home.
After this stealthy survey of the garden and the interview that had passed there, Joan Archer fell entirely under the sway of her fixed idea. She was now positive that the house concealed a mystery. This thought possessed for her an unspeakable fascination, All her unemployed moments were given over to the enthralling occupation of speculating on the alluring theme. She dreamed of it at night. She kept the house under close and secret watch, but without further discoveries. To enter it, to unveil the mystery, to satisfy the curiosity that ravaged her inmost soul, became the dearest ambition of her life.
Her visits to the library were now undertaken solely for the purpose of surreptitiously surveying the garden. From her perch on the top of the ladder she eagerly scanned that dreary enclosure, studying every detail, seeking for some clue to the occupation and identity of the dwellers in this sedulously guarded seclusion. One day her ocular explorations were rewarded by the discovery of what was evidently a name written along the side of one of the broken packing-cases. The letters were too small to be deciphered from her post of observation. But on her next visit she brought her uncle’s field-glass, and through this managed to read them. They spelled “Agasthon Markewitz.” Even this name in its bizarre foreignness suggested mystery to Joan. It perpetually haunted her, still further inflaming her interest and curiosity.
Late one afternoon, as she returned from her customary walk to the library, this curiosity had reached a point of importunate persistence that was hardly to be resisted. The spirit of enterprise and exploration that had descended to her from her adventurous forebears asserted its sway with insistent demands for recognition. Joan felt that the sun must not set till she had pressed her investigations forward toward some solution of the mystery.
As she slowly, intensely pondering, wended her way through the sparsely peopled streets toward the object of her reverie, her meditations were suddenly clarified by a flash of illuminating light. Like most really good ideas, it was commendable for its absolute simplicity. She would ring the bell and demand if Agasthon Markewitz dwelt therein. By so doing she would at least raise some of the spirits of the dwelling, and would probably be vouchsafed a glimpse into the jealously guarded interior, with the possibility in the background that remarkable and unusual occurrences might always develop. As to the reason of her appearance, she could easily explain that by offering for sale some tickets for a church bazaar that her uncle had given her to dispose of to the librarian and his assistants.
As soon as this thought unfolded itself in her brain Joan experienced that delightful sensation of cool, high exhilaration which comes to daring spirits while engaged in dangerous and exciting exploits.
She quickened her pace, arranged her hat on her closely braided hair, and patted her thin veil into place over her charming face, to which suppressed excitement lent a faint and becoming colour. As she approached the house she could hardly help smiling as she thought of the audacity of her intrusion.
It was a late afternoon of a February day, grey, still, and sharpened with an edge of frost. As Joan walked smartly along the almost deserted sidewalk her breath rose before her in a little film of smoke and froze in a round moist patch on her veil. When she turned into the gate of the silent, shuttered house she was inwardly agitated by little thrills of expectation, but experienced no sensation of fear. With an unfaltering hand she pulled the small wrought-iron handle which protruded from the middle of the door.
The jangling note of the bell sounded weirdly within. There was a short period of silence, then she heard footsteps advancing, evidently down a hall. A bolt was shot, a key turned, and the door opened a hand’s breadth. Through this aperture the person who had responded to her summons was revealed—a gaunt, spare man with a yellow skin, long, unkempt hair and beard, and exceedingly brilliant brown eyes. He looked scowlingly but curiously at her. Joan had never seen him before; but, masking the sudden expanding sense of surprise that threatened to show itself in her face, she said politely:
“Does Mr. Agasthon Markewitz live here?”
For answer the aperture was suddenly widened, the man, laying a hand on her wrist, drew her in, shut the door, bolted and locked it, all with the most breathless and startling celerity. Then, turning in the dim light of the hall and fixing on her a deep and scrutinising gaze, he said abruptly, “You’re nearly three-quarters of an hour too early.”
The hall in which they stood was narrow, badly lit, and dirty. The walls, which had once been papered with a yellow-and-blue imitation of panelling, were stripped bare in places, and presented large, ragged sections of dirty white, like long leprous scars. The place smelt close and mouldy.
Still favouring her with a curious glance, which, while it was closely investigating, was yet not rude, her companion threw open a door to the right, and motioning her to enter called over her shoulder to some unseen person within,
“Here she is. She’s a good deal too early, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
The room into which Joan now entered had evidently once been the parlour of the residence, and showed traces of its fine beginnings in the white-and-gold paper on the walls, the carved marble mantel, and a long gilt chandelier that depended in tarnished glory from the ceiling. It was now neglected, dirty, and almost empty, giving one the impression that its occupation was of the most fleeting and temporary kind. There were a few chairs standing about, a packing-case and a trunk in a corner, an old sofa, its covering worn threadbare, and a table littered with papers, letters, and newspapers. Sitting at this table, a pen in his hand, was the man Joan had seen in the garden.
He turned in his chair as she entered, and glanced at her with a quick but penetrating look. Then rising, he said, in a tone of cold inquiry, “Aren't you a little too early?”
The rising inflection demanded a reply. Joan, who had realised immediately that she had been mistaken for somebody else, had also felt by some incomprehensible chill foreboding that her position was precarious. There was not a drop of coward blood in her veins, but some dim sense of danger warned her to be alert and careful, for by her own recklessness she had placed herself in a position which was at least singular and perhaps menacing. She experienced no terror or bewilderment: the sense of danger even gave her an accession of that still, high-strung self-command and penetrative clearness of brain which are alone possessed by the absolutely fearless.
Standing with her hand on the back of a chair, she said simply, “Yes, I am too early, but I thought it better to be on the safe side.”
As she completed the sentence her eyes fell on an ordinary nickel-plated clock on the mantel, which showed the hour to be a quarter before five. The person for whom she was mistaken was, then, due at half-past five. She must manage to quit the house before that time, or be more uncomfortably placed than she liked to contemplate.
Her companion, still standing and still eyeing her, moved backward a few steps, then called through an open doorway into a room beyond,—“Martha, she’s come.”
“I know it: Deacon’s just told me,” answered a female voice. “I’ll be there directly.”
There was a sound of heavy footsteps creaking over loose boards and a rattling of tin. Through the open doorway Joan could catch an oblique glimpse of a table, covered with a quantity of small tools and mechanical appliances, which looked like the work-table of a clock or watch-maker. At one side of it, standing on some tin cans and wide-mouthed glass jars, was a travelling bag of- dark alligator skin. Her glance was on this when the young man said, with an air of polite indifference, “Sit down. You don’t want to tire yourself. Martha and Deacon will be here in a minute.”—Then, as she obeyed,—“How is Alexander?”
“He’s very well,” answered Joan. “He looks quite himself.”
Her breath rose in a little quick gasp of relief, and then was caught again as two people entered from the room beyond. These were the man who had opened the door for her, and who she surmised was the Deacon just referred to, and the woman she had seen in the garden. They entered silently, without greetings, and, standing behind the chair into which the younger man had thrown himself, proceeded to eye Joan with an open scrutiny of singular earnestness and fixity. It was the woman who said at length, slowly, without envy or admiration, and as though stating a deleterious fact, “She’s pretty.”
“Yes,” said the younger man, with discontented emphasis: “she is pretty.”
“Alexander said something about that,” said the man designated as Deacon.
“It’s such an unfortunate defect in Alexander that he seems to be unable to see force and capabilities in women unless they happen to be good-looking. It’s his one defect,” said the younger man, speaking with languid bitterness.
“You are well dressed too,” said Deacon, now addressing Joan—“too well dressed. Did not Alexander tell you that it was necessary of all things to be inconspicuous? ”
“Yes,” assented Joan; “but I thought I was.”
The younger man clicked his tongue against his palate with an impatient sound, and rapped irritably on the table with the handle of a pen.
“But if I’m not,” said Joan, with unshaken composure, “I’ve brought a veil that I can tie over my head, and so render myself entirely inconspicuous.”
This seemed to somewhat allay the irritation and uneasiness of the trio. Only the younger man murmured, still chafing, “It would have been infinitely better if she had been ugly in the beginning.”
“Of course you understand,” said Deacon, “the full, the extreme importance of this mission?”
Joan lowered her head in silent assent.
“You know that Alexander, one of our most brilliant and highly trusted agents, has selected you, after months of search through all the branches of our order. You know that he has said that you possess nerve, courage, inflexible resolution, and immovable determination. He has said that you are heart and soul with us in our great work, that your enthusiasm for those noble reforms we hope to institute was white hot.”
“It is,” breathed Joan in a low voice, her eyes on the floor. A strange quietude, a sort of still, momentous suspension of motion seemed to pervade the watching trio. For a moment they seemed to suppress their breathing. Then the younger man said in a hushed voice, “You fully realise the gigantic importance of to-night’s work?”
Joan again made an inclination of assent with her head. Her throat felt dry.
“That it is the culmination of years of endeavour? That where we have failed before, we will to-night emblazon our meaning on the face of the world—furrow it deep for all posterity to see? That you are the instrument in the hands of fate to mould the destiny of unborn thousands? I would have been happy to have died afterward if I could have taken your place. But it was not to be. There are members of the force that know us all. The risk was too great.”
“She knows all that,” said the woman, interrupting with abrupt impatience. “Now, of course, Alexander gave you full instructions of how he thought you'd better go? I suggested a cab—walk to Union Square and take a cab, and just drive quietly up there.”
“Alexander’s plan was better,” said Deacon,—“to go by the Elevated Road. A lady with a bag in her hand enters the Grand Central Depot from the elevated train, loiters up the platform, and sets the bag down on a pile of baggage on one side of the platform; then loiters away again as though looking for some one. Give yourself from seven to five minutes to get down Fourth Avenue. If you leave the depot at eight minutes past six you will have plenty of time. The clockwork is set for a quarter past six. By twenty minutes past the work will be done—the work will be done!”
Again the peculiar breathless hush, the strained and expectant silence, fell on them. It was broken by the younger man saying in a low voice, “Yours is a great destiny! Your name is Vittoria. Let us hope it is typical of your success this evening.”
Joan murmured a consent with lips that she felt were paling.
“Would you like to see it?” asked Deacon. “It’s all ready. Take care of a concussion, that’s all. There is not the least danger of explosion by concussion. The dynamite is mixed with a small percentage of camphor, and is insensible to shock. It explodes by means of a detonating cap composed of mercury fulminate. But a blow may put the clock attachment out, so be careful how you carry it.”
He went into the inner room and returned with the bag Joan had seen on the table. It was the largest size usually carried by a lady, and was of a neat and modest make. He opened it and looked in. Joan stole a glance at the clock. It was now a few minutes past five. The woman whom she had supplanted would arrive within the next half-hour. The critical nature of her position added a crystal clearness of perception to her strained senses, and strung every nerve to tingling alertness.
As she made a forward movement to look at the bag, the woman, who had been leaning against a corner of the table, said suddenly, “You don’t look at all like an Italian.”
This remark, delivered with a note of discontent, was of so unexpected and disturbing a nature that Joan, for the first time, became flurried.
“I—I—always thought I did,” she stammered.
Deacon, who had been bending over the bag, turned and looked at her with an expression of arrested attention and apprehensive query. The younger man, again drumming impatiently with his pen handle, ejaculated wearily, “Oh, never mind, never mind. What does it matter whether she looks foreign or not, if she feels and understands? But I wish to Heaven,” he said moodily, staring at the young girl, “Alexander would not always select his emissaries from such young women, who look, who look——” He broke off impatiently, turned away his head with a sharp, annoyed movement, and renewed his tapping with the pen handle.
“If I am to be there before a quarter past six,” said Joan, speaking calmly in her desperation, “I think I had better get ready. I will render myself as inconspicuous as possible by tying a veil over my head. But,” she said, looking questioningly about the room, “I want a looking-glass.”
This simple request caused the seated man to throw back his head and burst into harsh, unpleasant laughter. The woman, with a gesture to Joan, crossed the room, opened the door, and indicating a flight of stairs in the dreary perspective of the hall, said, “At the top you'll find a room where there is a glass. Go up.”
Joan ascended, almost groping her way in the dim light, pushed open a door at the top of the flight, and found herself in a miserable bedroom. There was nothing in this sordid and impoverished apartment but a narrow iron bedstead, a chair, a table, and a washstand over which hung a cracked looking-glass. Opposite the door there was a window with one shutter closed.
To noiselessly unclasp this and look out was Joan’s first action. The dusk had already fallen, dark and heavy, and lights were yellowing the windows of houses in the rear. The evening was still and bitter cold. In the dismal garden below, through the limbs of the denuded trees, Joan could see the high brick walls with their glass-strewn copings.
There was not an inhabited building which commanded the garden, as isolated in its unviewed privacy as the grounds of a lonely country cottage. The vacant houses on either side gazed at it with their boarded windows, looking in their blank darkness like the sightless eyes of the blind. On the lot directly back of it stood the blackened scaffolding of a half-burnt house, a skeleton silhouette against the faint grey sky. On the wall below the window a rude ladder was nailed, offering a hasty mode of exit to the dwellers in this gruesome tenement. For Joan this was useless. Should escape from the house be possible, the lofty brick walls which surrounded the garden offered insurmountable obstacles to her safe and expeditious flight.
A glance at her watch showed her that the time had come when she must act promptly, and without wasting the valuable moments in reflection. The perils incident upon her freakish action were closing in upon her. It was now nearly ten minutes past five. Within the next twenty minutes her imposture would be discovered, and what the consequences of this would be she hardly dared to contemplate.
Tying her veil over her head, she stole to the stairs, and was nearly half way down when the voices of the three associates conversing in the unrestricted tones of perfect confidence, fell on her ears. She paused, her fingers on the stair rail, to listen. They were discussing the mission upon which she was bound, and the sentences that she overheard supplied the missing links in the chain. She had been mistaken for an Italian woman named Vittoria, chosen and sent by one of the heads of the order. The bag she was to bear to the Grand Central Depot was to carry death to hundreds, especially to some unnamed and exalted personage, who, together with a party of friends, was to arrive on a special train at the exact hour for which the clock of the infernal machine was set. Drawing her veil about her face with trembling hands, she rapidly descended the stairs, and entering the room, said abruptly, “Come, I must hurry. It is nearly a quarter past five, and I want to walk slowly, for if I hurry, carrying that heavy bag, I shall get out of breath and may attract attention.”
“Quite right,” said Deacon, handing her the bag: “take care not to bump it against anything. Remember, it will stop the clock.”
She seized the handle, and murmuring some incoherent words of farewell, moved toward the door. They followed her out to the hall. The two men were pale, but the woman’s face, illuminated by the little lamp she held in her hand, retained its ruddy colour and hard placidity of expression. As Deacon drew the bolt the younger man said, in a low and slightly roughened voice, “Good luck to you. Keep perfectly cool. If you give yourself six or eight minutes, it will be enough. Get down towards the reservoir, or a block down Fourth Avenue, and you will be perfectly safe.”
“Remember,” said Deacon, holding the door handle and speaking in a whisper, “the third platform. There will be two bags, a valise and a bird-cage. Put it on the cage. Everything is O.K., the special exactly on time. There will be no hitch this time.”
“All right. Let me go. I don’t want to hurry,” she whispered in return, thrust her fingers through the crack of the opening door, pulled it wide enough to slide through, and heard it snap and the key grate in the lock behind her.
It was almost dark now, and the air was still and clear with frost.
Down the length of the street a corner lamp cut into the darkness with its semicircle of golden radiance. From the long lines of houses that fronted so gloomily on the sidewalk only occasional shafts of light broke in splinters from between closely drawn blinds.
Joan, the bag partly hidden under her long military cape, passed down the street with a light and furtive step. Three people, two men and a woman, brushed by her before she reached the corner. But, engrossed with the perils of her own situation, she did not vouchsafe them a look. Her agony to escape from the house of the dynamiters had been so intense that it had crowded all other sensations into the background. Now, at liberty, hurrying along the lamplit street with her gruesome luggage in her hand, she was faced by the appalling nature of her position and the realisation of the necessity for immediate action.
She might appeal to the police. But this would involve her own arrest, possibly some difficulty in proving her own guiltlessness, newspaper notoriety, a scandal, a sensation with herself as heroine. That would be her last resource. A thousand times better, if possible, to rid herself of her horrible burden without assistance or consultation. If she could cross town, gain the North River, and from one of the docks on the water front drop the bag into the water, all would be well. She did not shrink before the hazard of such an excursion. The greater danger had banished all lesser ones from her bold and energetic mind. The main question was one of time. She would be able to make West Street and the docks in the next half-hour, and the clockwork being set for a quarter past six would have that fifteen minutes to offset against possible delays. As for the contents of the bag, she knew nothing of its workings or mechanism. Seeing that the street before her was deserted, she stopped under a lamp, raised the bag, and leaning her ear against it, heard a steady muffled ticking. As she lowered it her heart leaped up and stood still, for a hand, light but firm, was laid upon her shoulder.
She wheeled round with a broken gasp, and was confronted by a woman, who stared at her with fierce inquisitiveness. Under the yellow, wavering lamplight she appeared to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years of age, and was handsome in a bold, dramatic style, with a sallow skin, shadowy brown hair, and superb luminous eyes with dark circles below them and dark lids. Still keeping her hand on Joan’s shoulder, she said hoarsely, with an enunciation that was rendered striking by a slight foreign accent,—
“I’ve caught you! They told me you had gone. How are you and Alexander going to account to me for this?”
“Ask Alexander, not me,” said Joan boldly.
“‘Ask Alexander!’” repeated the other, in a deep voice shaken by emotion: “I will ask Alexander so much and so many times that Alexander will wish both he and I were dead. But I ask you too.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Joan. “It’s Alexander’s affair, not mine.”
“But it’s my affair too,” cried the other, who seemed to be labouring under some powerful excitement, which shook her voice and burned in her fierce eyes: “it’s very much my affair. Why did Alexander choose you to supplant me? Why did he select some one else for my work? This trust was mine. Alexander gave it to me with words and promises too sacred for any ears but his and mine; and I come to execute it, and find a stranger in my place, a raw recruit of our order, a girl with no experience, entrusted to do my work, the work I have pledged my life to, the solemn trust that I alone was supposed to be called for. I'll kill him for this.”
She put her fingers inside her collar and pulled it out from her neck with an angry wrench. She was livid and suffocating with rage and excitement.
“All this is not my fault,” said Joan, in scared defence, so dazed by this sudden vision of throttling passion that, for the moment, she forgot the bag and its contents.
“Would he have been false to his promise to me and to his mission if you had not beguiled him? Would he have dared to admit you to our order, to let you know its secrets, to tell you the whereabouts of Markewitz, to give you such work as this to do, if he had not been swayed by the wiles of the miserable coquetry practised by the empty creatures of your kind? Let me see you!” she cried, breaking off suddenly; and making a snatch at Joan’s veil, tore it off, took her by by the chin, and turning her face up to the light, gazed at her with lowering intentness.
At the first glance a sort of broken tremulousness passed over her face; then, dropping her hands, she said with passionate scorn: “You’re only a fool. And it’s for a fool like you that he breaks his word and his honour, and treats me in a way—in a way … Did you coax and cajole him to let you do this work of mine?”
“No, indeed I did not!” exclaimed Joan.
“He'll regret it,” cried the other savagely. “I am a Roman. My name is Vittoria. I don’t forget, and I can hate like a Roman.”
“But,” cried Joan, rousing from the sudden lethargy of fright that had, for a moment, benumbed her faculties, “the bag—the bag!”
The woman, glaring at her, did not seem to hear.
“And for such a soft-faced fool as you! I tell you,” she said, changing her tone, “I have no rancour against you. Fools and children are not held responsible for the harm they do. But Alexander, so high in our order, so great a figure, a man almost knelt to, chosen to sway the destinies of mankind—to choose you, that any child could see was unfitted for such a task, and to dupe me! Oh!” she uttered the sound through her closed teeth with the fury of a baffled animal.
“The bag!” cried Joan again. “Do you want us both to be killed? The bag!”
She lifted it up and shook it in the woman’s face. Her fierce dilated eyes fell upon it. She started sharply, gave Joan a piercing look, almost terrified in its keen intensity, and said, “You’re right. I was almost forgetting. I don’t know what I am doing. The cause first, everything else second. I have fallen almost as low as Alexander.” She put her hand to her head as if to try and concentrate her thoughts, then gave a little laugh and said, “You seem a better member of the order than I. How much time have we?”
As if in answer to this question, the single note of the half-hour boomed solemnly from a clock-tower near by.
“Give me the bag,” said Vittoria. Though her chest still heaved like a sea after storm, she had evidently power to force her own passion aside. For a moment she seemed to meditate in frowning abstraction, then, taking Joan’s arm, she said shortly, “Come on,” and moved forward at a rapid pace.
“Where are you going?” asked Joan, as they hastened down the darkling, deserted street.
“Where am I going?” repeated the other, giving her a side glance of sharp surprise. “To the Depot, of course.”
Joan breathed an incoherent monosyllable.
“We can take the Sixth Avenue Elevated two blocks below here. It will get us to Forty-second Street at about six. We can walk over in from five to eight minutes, leave the bag, and get a block down Fourth Avenue before the quarter. But we must hurry.”
She tightened her grasp on Joan’s wrist, and hurried onward with a long, swinging step.
And now, for the first time since the beginning of her strange adventure, a feeling of terror pervaded Joan. A sense of the futility of resistance, of helplessness, stupefied her hitherto alert and lively spirit.
Her companion, though evidently believing her a new recruit of the dynamiters’ band, seemed to have some intuition of this, for she held her arm with an iron grasp, and bore the young girl’s limp form onward with the force of her own resolute march.
A block was traversed in silence. At the next crossing they would emerge into more populous streets, where the glare of show windows illuminated the pavement with a searching light. Already the wayfarers had grown more numerous, and through the lamp-pierced darkness, so clear and thin, with its clarifying ingredient of frost, they could see the shadowy, flitting figures passing over the crossing at the end of the block.
A last expansion of desperate courage rose in Joan. Suddenly raising her voice, which seemed hoarse and hollow, she said, “I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to leave the bag. It is a crime, and I don’t want to be a criminal.”
The other, tightening her hold on Joan’s arm, said softly, ““So—so—I knew it! I saw it in your face at the first glance. Oh, Alexander—fool, fool, fool!”
“I was the fool,” cried Joan despairingly: ‘‘I was the fool, to ever consent to such a thing as this! To be a murderer, so young, so—so … Oh, what can I do to save them?”
“Go on,” said Vittoria, smiling; “you amuse me, and I shall take such pleasure in telling all this to Alexander, and showing him how true and sound his judgment is.”
“But to kill people who are innocent, who have never done you any harm—think of the horror of it! Think of the homes you leave desolate!”
“In such great causes as ours the individual is nothing. We survey humanity in the mass. We benefit it in the mass—with drastic measures, it is true. Come, hurry! We are nearly there.”
“But, oh, listen, listen!” implored Joan, speaking in a thick, breathless voice, and hanging heavily on her companion’s arm. “Don’t go! Don’t do it! Cross town with me, and let us throw the bag into the river. Come, we have time. Come, think of the crime we are about to commit. Oh, for Heaven’s sake, have some humanity in you, and come!”
They had turned the corner into the brightly-lit thoroughfare. The passers-by jostled against them on the pavement. A block farther on they saw the pagoda-like roof and winding stairs of the Elevated Station. Vittoria, turning as they walked, responded to the impassioned appeal of her companion by fixing upon her a glance menacing, icy, and almost hypnotic in its immovable penetration. Keeping her awesome eyes upon the young girl’s face, she said in an extremely low, inward voice, “My dear young woman, if you raise your voice like that again, or make the slightest noise, or attract attention in any way, I will kill you on this street in one moment without the slightest hesitation or compunction, and in the quietest way in the world.”
She kept her eyes on Joan for a moment or two, quelling the last spasms of her revolt. The young girl, her heart seeming to shrivel in her breast, her face whitened to an ashened pallor, shrank away, and, dragged forward by her fiery companion, reached the foot of the stairs to the station.
They ascended rapidly, Vittoria with one hand carrying the bag carefully in front of her, and with the other keeping an unflinching grip on Joan’s wrist, who stumbled up behind her. As they ascended, keeping to one side to avoid the stream of descending passengers, Joan experienced a sudden, weird sensation of unreality, of isolation in the midst of her surroundings. It was as if the fibres of communication that made her one with the rest of the world were disrupted. She appeared to be moving in a dream, her face upturned, watching the descending passengers as they crowded down the stairs with the light of the lamps on their down-looking, wearied faces. The feeling of the strong, muscular hand clinched about her wrist was even faintly unreal.
Then, at the top of the stairs, hustled by many passengers, dazed by the clashing of the gates, and the guards’ and gatemen’s harsh cries, bewildered by the dazzling burst of crude yellow light that flashed in her eyes from head lights and lamps backed by reflectors, she felt herself drawn forcibly onward and pressed in the crowd against Vittoria’s back. Here, her lips almost against the Italian’s ears, she breathed, with all her agonised soul in the words, ‘Oh, turn back, turn back! If you value your immortal soul, turn back!”
They were so closely crowded they could not move. Vittoria, her body motionless, turned her head, and let Joan, at a close view, look into the burning depths of her tigerish eyes. Her teeth were set, and she too was pale, but she said nothing.
With a surge of the impatient crowd they were almost carried on the train, and quickly secured two seats on the right-hand side. Here Vittoria, placing the bag carefully between them, and still keeping her hold on Joan, settled herself comfortably and looked about her with an appearance of languidly catholic interest. The train was densely crowded, and no one noticed them save one or two of the passengers standing directly in front of them, hanging limply to the straps. These, themselves tired out, regarded with only a passing interest the pallid your girl who leaned back against the window-frame with an air of flaccid exhaustion.
As the train drew out of the Thirty-third Street station, Vittoria leant forward and looked at the clock in the Dime Savings Bank. “Seven minutes to six,” she said into Joan’s ear: “we have no time to lose.”
Joan, roused by the remark, started uneasily like a disturbed sleeper. Then, her vacantly moving eyes falling on a rent in her skirt, she mechanically bent over it to study it closer. Her cheek almost touched the side of the bag, from which she again heard issuing the muffled, regular ticking.
The platform and stairs of the Forty-second Street station were almost deserted. Down below, silvery grey, spotted with opaque circles of lamplight, lay the little park sleeping in the shining frost, all its bare black trees stretching up their arms, etched against the sparklings of the frost, into the still starlight. The street, as they hastened down the stairs, looked grey and cold; and each hurrying wayfarer, the women with muffs raised to their faces, the men with upturned coat-collars, breathed forth a little cloud of smoke.
It was now six o’clock. In Joan’s dazed brain one thought—the uselessness of resistance—had been repeating itself with baleful insistence since she had boarded the train. There was no possible escape. In fifteen minutes the hour of Fate would be registered. There was not the slightest hope of averting the catastrophe. Some pleasant party, now just entering the outskirts of the city, laughing as they made ready for their exit from the train, were rushing on to their doom, which two women, breathless and pallid, were carrying forward to meet them with the stealth and speed of assassins.
As this thought flashed through Joan’s overwrought brain, a sudden blind rush of fury swept over her—a despairing rage against the Fate that had thus made her an instrument of death; and, uttering a smothered, inarticulate cry, she turned, and with her one free hand made a grasping lunge across Vittoria’s body for the bag. But the other seemed prepared for the attack. With the dexterous lightness of an athlete, she sprang back, thrusting the bag behind her. In the suddenness of the action one end of the receptacle struck sharply on the stone wall of the reservoir, in the shadow of which they had been walking. But in the momentary struggle neither noticed this; Joan, under the grip of that iron hand and the compelling power of those mesmeric eyes, being only sensible of the cowering subsidence of her brief outbreak of revolt.
They crossed Fifth Avenue in panting silence, and walked rapidly down Forty-Second Street toward the great bulk of the Depot. As they approached, both, by a common impulse, raised their eyes to the clock tower. The hands marked five minutes past six.
Vittoria quickened her pace a trifle, and cast a sidelong glance at her companion. Joan, numb in the horror of her torpid helplessness, seemed again to have lost all sense of reality. She felt sick and weak; and, as they entered the arch of the great building, was only hazily conscious of being jostled by the crowd, and heard with a dim instinctness that seemed to be tapering off to nothingness, the noises of the Depot—the scraping of many feet on the pavement, the crashes of falling luggage, the reverberant rolling of trunks, the cries of hack-drivers and expressmen, the thick, panting gasps of the engines uneasily backing and advancing, all seeming to roll about with a hollow resonance in the airy concave of the vast arched roof.
In the glare of the lights Vittoria, for a moment, seemed to hesitate, spying up and down with an air of mildly foolish indecision. Then she moved forward quickly, her arm linked in Joan’s, passed two of the long platforms branching out like fingers between the rails, and turned down the third. There were some baggage men and railway employés about, and a few scattered individuals lounging up and down, evidently waiting for the incoming special, now almost due. Midway up the length of the platform stood a little pile of hand luggage—two bags, a valise, and, surmounting these, a bird-cage. This part of the building was but faintly illuminated, and a long reach of the platform was void of occupants.
Vittoria paused in her loitering walk to bend down and peer at the bird fluttering in its gilded cage. Addressing it with some words of appropriate folly, she placed her own bag on the corner of the valise beside it. Then, straightening herself, she turned to Joan, and saying carelessly “Let’s go on,” turned and retraced her steps down the platform.
As they advanced, the round face of the clock stared at them with its ghastly announcement—ten minutes past six! The people about showed, by a sudden accession of movement and expectation in their figures and faces, that the special was due. From all parts of the Depot they began to hasten toward the platform that the two women were leaving.
A feeling almost of insensibility had now crept over Joan. She felt frozen, and was speechless. Forced onward by the resolutely propelling arm of Vittoria, she seemed to be flitting with dreamlike ease over the boarding and cement, and then felt the uneven cobbles under her feet, and the dry, icy air on her face. The one gleam of consciouness left to her was the realisation that the hard rhythmic beats that struck her arm were the pulsations of Vittoria’s heart, which seemed as if it would break its way through her side with its frantic throbbing.
They crossed the street under the noses of car horses and the wheels of carriages, gained the pavement, and then, with one backward look at the clock tower, Vittoria, clutching her companion’s arm, broke into a gait that was almost a run. This lasted hardly more than half a block, when, trembling and breathless they stopped, and clinging to the iron fence of a vacant house, turned and surveyed the Depot.
There was brilliancy and radiance of light about its base, and an endless movement and energy of life expressed in the tides of humanity that seemed to beat around its walls. Lifted above this seething existence, the white-trimmed towers stood out sharply against a star-spotted sky of electric blue. In one of them the clock turned its impassive face upon the fugitives, the black slender hands marking one minute before the quarter-hour.
Neither of the watchers spoke. Their eyes, glued to the clock, were glassy and rigidly staring. The minute hand could not be seen to move, yet rapidly advanced. It was only a fraction above the quarter now, there was but a thin knife-edge of light between its point and the figure. Then it closed over this, and the point lay level on the first figure of the III.
With the roar of the city around them, they noted only an awful and breathless silence. They seemed to be standing on a pinnacle in space. The hour had come. From Vittoria’s lips the breath issued in broken gasps. She held the fence with her free hand, and her eyes, fixed upon the clock, were awesome as the eyes of a sleep-walker.
The hand lying upon the figure III moved slowly across it, reluctantly left it. The same knife-edge of light broke out between the descending point and the last figure of the III. The quarter-hour was marked; had passed. The white trimmed tower stood tranquilly against the background of star-spotted sky.
The hand descended with lingering deliberation, slowly traversing the space between III and IIII. The roar of the city rose louder, suddenly augmented by the rattling of numerous hacks which clattered away in every direction from the entrance of the Depot.
The moving hand lay on the figure of IIII when a strange cry, the cry of a furious wild animal, broke from Vittoria. For the first time in that grim companionship she dropped Joan’s arm, and with her hands fallen clenched by her sides, turned her white face up to the stars. In that pale light it looked like the face of some savage goddess of the blood-red past, deprived of her human tribute. Staring up, she cried, through her closed teeth, “Failed! Failed! Failed! On the threshold of success, in the very moment of victory, and after years of endeavour and a lifetime of hope! Failed!”
In the turbulence of her passion she had completely forgotten Joan, who stood stupefied, gazing at this face graven in lines of horror and despair. The awfulness of it held her captive, and she looked like one of those who, seeing Medusa, become stone.
Then, into the circle of silence which encompassed them, a hack clattering with insistent noisiness over the cobbles, broke an abrupt, clamorous entrance. It turned a corner, and went jolting and lurching away. The spell was broken. Joan gave one stealthy look at her companion, seized her skirt in both hands, and, wheeling suddenly, ran—ran as she had never run before—ran as only one could run with such a memory at their heels and such a fear to speed their flying feet—ran down deserted byways and echoing thoroughfares, onward through the lamplit night to safety and home.
Geraldine Bonner
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 93 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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