# Everybody's/'Nastasia

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, 1924 March, pp. 37-62. Accompanying illustrations by Stockton Mulford omitted. The Discussion page has some personal tidbits of the author, who was, incidentally, "editor of a high-school paper with Jack London working for him."
'Nastasia
Soviet Plotters Match Wits with Celtic Blood and Newspaper Trainings and Stirring Adventure Follows
By Robert Welles Ritchie
HARD by Victoria Station, between the station and the Embankment in the district called Pimlico, lies Green Arbor Walk. Even though you were a born Londoner you never could find this street without a guide nor, finding it, recognize a crooked cobble lane between palsied walls as Green Arbor Walk. For there is no green; there is no arbor. Just the leprous fronts of ancient houses ranged in two close-set ranks like battered dominoes whereof the windows are the spots. Behind the street is a wilderness of railroad yards and coal dumps. Before Green Arbor Walk, over beyond a battery of chimneypots, is the Thames, oily-black, flowing with a sucking noise of the tides.
The coal smoke from Victoria yards and the mists from the Thames have mingled over years to paint the fronts of houses on the Walk a uniform smeary gray-green—the color of stones in a root cellar. This gray-green seems to epitomize the tone and temper of the life that is the Walk's. Its few children who play at a noiseless hopscotch on the pavements carry the color in their cheeks. At nights its men returning from their office stools reflect the pallor of the walls from their faces under the gas lamps. Life here is but a thin wafer removed from the desperation of the slums; Green Arbor Walk folk cling to the thread-respectability they fancy to be theirs with the grip of a drowning man to a spar.
A little sinister, too, is the atmosphere of the Walk. Respectability there has worn through on occasions. There have been such things as cries in the night; sound of beatings.
At the far end of the Walk, where it turns into the Embankment under the black spans of Chelsea Bridge, stands a ramshackle building with a peeled front. Across its dingy façade the dim letters spelling “Empress Theater” still stand out against an allegorical frieze of painted muses. Theater it might have been in its heyday; probably it declined first to a music hall of the third order, then down another step to the questionable status of a dance hall. After that the battered gas lamp before its entrance flared no more, and orange peel and windblown bits of newspaper collected behind the iron screen before its locked doors.
This tale I am telling you has to do at this juncture with the Empress Theater in Green Arbor Walk. The time is the winter after the Armistice, when all Europe was lighted by a glare from Red Russia and everywhere was fear.
When watery twilight of a February afternoon was closing in on the Walk and the mists from the Thames already were blanketing chimneypots to drive their smoke down to the ground level, the dusty windows of the theater glimmered light from within. The padlock which for years had rusted on the hasp closing a stage door down a side alley hung open on the staple. The stage door was ajar.
Source of light which speared through cobwebbed windows arose from a row of pallid gas jets, three or four of them, set in a tin trough about the half-circle of a stage. So dim they were that the blackness of the interior was pushed back only a few yards. Forward of the lights was a hint of stalls, of tom chair backs and horsehair gushing out of wounds in upholstered settees; behind them the tatters of what once had been a forest set dribbled down from the supreme darkness of the drops. For the rest, beyond this grudging circle of light, naught but pitchy blackness. There was a mingled odor of mildew, of ancient liquor slops, and sachet; it seemed to make heavy the stale air like laundry steam.
Eyes growing accustomed to the darkness could pick out several figures beyond the light-well. Three in the shallow musicians' cubby below stage level; two men with violins and a third with a strange instrument of percussion, lyre-shaped and hung with metal discs to be struck. Three other men sat as spectators several stalls back from the stage edge; they were just rounded black humps above the general mean of the stalls' shallow level.
Silence. A man stepped out from the wings into the circle of light. A trick of the flickering gas jets made it appear that he was afire at the top, like a tree stump. For the whole head of him burned red. Flame of red for hair standing up in a great brush; red embers of a beard encircling his chin from ear to ear. His body was squat, grotesquely puffed, almost dwarfish.
The red man shouted something back into the wings, then turned to signal the musicians. They struck up a barbaric tune sounding like the neighing of mares and punctuated by heavy smiting of the tinkling metal of the tambourine. The red man leaped lightly down into the pit and groped a way to a seat with the three spectators.
OUT from the mildewed forest of the wings came leaping a dryad such as the Empress Theater, or all London for that matter, never had seen. The body of her was almost bare; only some shaggy gray skin was caught over one shoulder, and flying arms were ghostly in the gas flicker. Her head, thrown far back in wild abandon, dropped a swirling cloud of black hair over the wolf skin. Her two hands were slipped into thongs of classic cymbals hardly larger than halves of oranges and cupped like a halved orange; these she clashed together over her head with sharp cries.
The two fiddles whinnied and screamed. The tambourine player madly whipped his stick over the shivering rows of silver discs. And on that half-lit stage the frenzy of a bacchanal rose to fury.
Now, body bent far back and white limbs strutting out, the dancer approached a shrine of Dionysos visioned in her madness. There she postured in obeisance, gently clinking her cymbals, only to rise again to the tips of her toes and whirl in an abandon which was the giving of her lithe body to the joy of living. Grace and vitality were hers; that vitality of youth which is a poem without words. In the springing of her thin legs, the weaving of her arms around and through the night of her hair, lay all that poets of a golden age visioned—invitation to life, to pagan worship of the body in its perfection.
Suddenly the man with the burning head leaped from his seat and clambered over the footlights onto the stage. At sight of the bloated dwarf wabbling like some great beetle toward her, the little dancer suddenly broke her step, halted and stood with arms crossed over half-naked breast. Her attitude was one of cringing fear. The music jangled to a stop.
“'Nastasia, great clumsy she-calf!” The red man was on her with a bound. One ham-like hand swung back. The sound of the slap on bare shoulder was like the cracking of heavy glass. The girl staggered and lifted one hand to the splayed red mark on her flesh.
“This is the way that measure goes, imbecile!” His Russian speech crackled with spleen. He signaled to the orchestra, and when the measure was resumed the balloon-like body of the man dipped and undulated to the stridings of his stumpy legs—for all the world a comic satyr in this shadow grove of the Empress Theater's mysterious dark.
The girl called 'Nastasia watched her savage mentor through tear-dimmed eyes. The blow he had given her there before others' eyes, the sudden interruption of her dance, left her trembling and distrait. As if in this humiliation her semi-nakedness, forgotten in the passion of the dance, had become a shameful thing, one hand strayed down to tug the wolf pelt lower over bare thighs; a pitifully cowering nymph there in the shabby glade of the gods.
“Leave the girl alone, Smirnoff,” called a Russian voice from the dark pit. “She does very well.”
“Well enough for the fool Popondrov, perhaps,” the red man called Smirnoff bellowed back across the frontier of the dark. “But not for Admiral Andrevieff.” Again he turned toward the shrinking girl in the wolf skin. “Now, little heifer, the whole dance once again. And, mind you, if you destroy the beauty of that fourth measure once more I'll take a whip to your thin legs!”
The fiddles chuttered. The multiple tambourine filled the dark with its musical tinklings. And the girl 'Nastasia came on again from the wings, a timorous little dryad fleeing from a monster.
Meanwhile, back in the dark stalls the three spectators, joined now and again by the tyrant Smirnoff, conferred in muffled whispers. Their speech was a dialect of Great Russia, barbarous in its exploding aspirants.
Well might Green Arbor Walk, shivering in its night mists, have recalled sinister happenings on the street had it been privy to this conversation in the dark stalls of the Empress; in truth, well might certain secure citadels of the mighty in a much more favored section of London have looked to their moats and portcullises. For these men—Smirnoff, the red one, and the others—were come to see that a pitiful pawn in a big game had been well drilled to her part; now the first move was in their hands. This night was appointed for the making of their move.
TWO o'clock of a morning in Fleet Street, London's street of adventure. Rain snivels in the drains and hiccoughs from the gutters. A graveyard wind from the Thames slaps wet winding sheets against the blue arc-lights before the New Temple and aslant the blocks of lighted windows high above the pavement where news writers still potter over gossip of the world. In all this dead heart of London, which is, too, the heart of the world's news, not a sound; not so much as a footfall above the dull monotone of the rain, the ceaseless rain.
Jim Hagan of the American National Press let himself onto the street from a dim hallway of the building housing his office. He was finished with the late trick; last to go of the three correspondents whose job it was to build each day a news bridge be tween London and Red Bird, North Dakota, Sioux Falls and Dallas. Jim Hagan was dog-tired. His mind was blurred with over tones of the cables that had passed under his fingers; the stutter of the news tickers was still in his ears.
He walked up Fleet Street toward the Griffin and, arriving at a heavy gate set into the solid masonry of an arch, he rat-tatted a knocker. A night porter swung back the gate from within, sleepily exchanged a lighted lantern for a shilling tip and watched the figure in the raincoat stride down into a cave of echoes.
The Old Temple, unchanged by so much as a new door knocker since Charles and Mary Lamb starved genteelly in Pump Court, since Dickens peopled its flagged walks with romance, is a labyrinth bewildering enough in London's pale sunlight—quite impossible of conning in the night. Its ancient rookeries house barristers, journalists, decayed gentlemen, retired officers of the Indian Army. Its shy, lovely gardens occasionally are the retreat for lovers; more often shuffling old men in carpet slippers and with books under their arms dodder over their paths. With the roaring tide of Fleet Street not a hundred yards away, the Old Temple yet is buried a thousand leagues deep in its own mystery.
From the Fleet Street gate two turns to the left, one to the right and, beyond the wigmaker's in Lemon Court, the first door; so the solitary prowler turned his steps. He groped his way two flights up from the court entrance. As his head came to the level of the landing Hagan got a surprise. A dim flicker of firelight showed under the crack of his door. Hagan quickly turned his key in the latch and let himself in.
The room he entered—his lounge and library—showed dimly in the dying glow of coals which should not have been burning. Cautiously Hagan took two steps on tiptoe with nerves set against an encounter. Everything as it should be. His big wing chair, like a bishop in chintz vestments giving benediction, stood in its usual place before the grate. The littered table with its reading lamp, tobacco jar, magazines, was in accustomed disorder.
Hagan felt a relaxing of the prick of vigilance as he tossed his hat into a corner and stripped off his dripping ulster. As he started to circle the big wing chair to poke up the fire his foot caught some obstruction and he pitched forward. One hand caught at the chair back, slipped over the peak and upon a tumble of floss.
A muffled shriek. Hagan reared back as if stung. He shot a quick look down into the valley of the chair and saw something to give him a heart-skip.
Eyes! Two eyes wide in terror. Almost like the eyes of some animal caught in a trap, so large the circle of white about the pupils. After the eyes the outlines of a face, the features of a girl, pushed in upon the man's fuddled perception. Firelight could not make ruddy the pallor of that face, paper-white under fallen loops of hair appearing inky in contrast. Double slashes of red marked the lips, very full and parted.
A single swift movement in the depths of the chair. Hagan caught a flash of bare legs drawn up under the dark fluff of skirts. Then he saw a pair of stockings limp against the fire screen. Slippers with ridiculously high heels perched like beetles on the hearthstone.
For a long minute the stares of these two were locked.
“Well?” Hagan finally put the word crisply. “Well!”
The girl in the chair did not move. Her ruddy lips, so grotesquely ruddy against the pallor of her cheeks, remained parted to frame a cry.
“Of course you know this is my room—and I don't think we've met before.” There was an edge of irony on Hagan's speech. A thin white hand with an oriental bangle about the wrist stole out toward the stockings on the fire screen as if to retrieve them for flight. Hagan noted the girlish slenderness of the arm and then for the first time he saw the gleam of an uncovered throat, a dull shimmer of skin and beadwork below.
The groping hand found the stockings and snatched them, but the wide eyes never left his.
“Guess we'll have a little light on the subject, with your permission.” Hagan bowed stiffly and turned to the student lamp on the table.
He had the shade off and was just lifting a match to the mantle when a sibilant rustling brought his head around with a jerk. A shadowy sprite was bounding for the door. Instantly Hagan dropped the shade and lunged at her. He caught at a hand that was fumbling the lock, roughly whirled the girl about on the axis of her outstretched arm and put his own back against the door.
“No,” he denied icily. “We must get better acquainted before you go, and besides——”
He threw the spring lock so that only the key in his pocket could turn it. Then he stepped over to light the lamp. That accomplished, he turned with sour satire in his smile to face the figure standing irresolutely midway between door and fireplace.
IN THE harsh white light of the unshaded lamp the girl was mercilessly revealed. Grotesque might be the word to describe the figure she made, but that was not the word Hagan found to sum his swift appraisal. In a sweep of the eye he took her in; slight body tensed in terror—or was it desperation?—one hand at her side holding the slippers and a knot of silk stockings, the other pressing against her lips to still a cry. Beneath the short skirt of an evening gown of Nile green silken stuff showed slim ankles and bare feet, ridiculously childlike in their plumpness over the arch.
Her hair had fallen into a black gossamer over her shoulders; it was raven-black, shot with blue lights, very Gipsy-like. Under this vivid web, like a Spanish woman's mantilla, the girl's face was elfin. It had not beauty so much as an arresting quality of the exotic, a hint of Kurdish blood in upturning corners of the eyes, lustrously black, and the ivory pallor of the brow. Her lips were anything but English—so full and ripe and pomegranate-red; made for gardens in Bagdad rather than for dour nights in London.
The whole of her was as alien, as foreign to London as the fifteenth wife of the Sultan would have been, could she by luck have been translated from the Golden Horn to Jim Hagan's chambers in the Old Temple.
Had the girl looked upon Jim Hagan with less troubled eyes she would have seen nothing much to be thrilled over. Just a chap of medium height, around thirty; eyes disconcertingly steady in their gaze; thinning red hair; his whole personality vital with that air of poised pugnacity that is the heritage of the Celt. Jim Hagan was Chicago Irish and proud of it. Also he was a cracking good newspaper man and proud of that, too.
Hagan spoke. “Now, young lady, if you will make yourself as thoroughly at home as you were before I intruded perhaps we can talk of this and that. I have a feeling we have much to say to each other.” He waved to the chair, and as earnest of his hospitality he poked up the fire and added fresh lumps of coal.
Something in his tone—the irony in the words seem lost to her—appeared to palliate for a moment the outrage of the locked door. Either that or the trespasser, finding herself in a tight place, was willing to play the game to the next move. She took the wing chair as she was bidden. Hagan put out a hand to touch the stockings she still held knotted in a small fist. They were wet. Gently he disengaged them and draped them again over the fire screen. Her slippers, very soggy, he set back on the hearth. For the first time he saw an evening wrap of some heavy stuff thrown over a chair; its fringe was dank with moisture. He moved a chair to the fire and hung the cloak over its back to dry. Afterthought of courtesy prompted him to place a footstool as an invitation for hidden bare feet to come down and be warmed. They remained hidden under silk.
Hagan filled and lighted a pipe. The situation pleased him. He'd read stories and seen plays wherein strange young women came unbidden to men's rooms—I admit the artifice is hoary as Boccaccio—but this was his first experience in the life. Moreover, his first gross suspicions concerning larceny had been dissipated. Barefooted young ladies in evening dress do not go out in a London rain to steal.
“And now”—Hagan waved a deferential pipe-stem toward his visitor—“we will listen with proper respect to the heartbreaking tale of a misunderstood lady—or is it the misunderstood tale of a heartbreaking lady?”
Hagan sent a fine Irish smile into the depths of the chintz bishop's protecting arms. Black eyes there bore upon him with spaniel-like fixity. He saw tears in them and was quick to intrench himself against this threatening feminine assault upon his sympathies.
“Speak up, fair one! Let Mr. James Hagan, simple American newspaper man hear all the revolting details.”
Her lips trembled, then opened like flood gates to let speech come tumbling out. It was tumultuous, that flood of words. It was assisted by two graphic hands which fluttered like great white moths, now to point to the wet mystery of the night beyond the shaded windows, now to embrace the locked door in their sweep. Rapidly and still more rapidly words crowded on themselves. Her white shoulders lifted in a sudden mute gesture of appeal, then dropped in helplessness. She talked desperately against the ache in her eyes.
And Jim Hagan understood not a word.
IF THE sense of the strange girl's words failed to carry to the American newspaper man, something of the spirit of desperation behind them bridged the gulf between the two. In her eyes, in the excited fluttering of her hands and the strain that registered in her voice lay a half-revealed tale to prick a trained news sense; more than that, to touch the chivalry that lay very close to the heart of Jim Hagan. His first cynical conjectures concerning an explanation for the girl's presence had sped; now he was all sympathy and yearning to come to the core of a mystery whose only tangible clue was the presence here in his chambers of a wild young thing with a barbarous tongue.
Barbarous indeed, it sounded. Hagan knew it was not German. None of the French elision and sparkling verb sounds. What then? He pawed through the attic of high-school memories for his scanty relics of French:
“Parlez-vous Français?”
“Mais oui—un peu,” replied the girl after an instant's knitting of her black brows.
Hagan leaped at the tenuous bridge between them, racking his brain for idiom. Finally, like a child picking out scales on a piano he achieved something:
“What is your—what is your—nation?”
“Gruzia,” she answered. Then she gave the English form, “Georgia.”
For an instant the American thought the girl was trifling with him. Georgia—huh! Then he remembered how dispatches from the Caucasus recently had told of Bolshevism's red wash sweeping over one of the innumerable little republics spawned by the break-up of imperial Russia. Georgia, yes; somewhere down around Batum where the oi1 came from. Circassian beauties came, too, from Georgia. Here was one of them, outside a circus side-show.
A beauty she surely was! Through eddies of pipe smoke—they might have been lazily curling up from braziers of cassia and sandalwood—Hagan let his eyes wander over the cloud of raven hair against the pattern of the chair back, over the blurred mask of tiny features out of which the surprising redness of lips burned so vividly. This peri—if that was the right Arabian Nights word for a beautiful maiden summoned out of thin air by rubbing a ring—this peri from the burning heart of Russia here in Jim Hagan's chambers after midnight of a night of storm! Why, it just didn't make sense! There must be a catch in it somewhere.
“You—have come here—why?” he managed to achieve. The answer she gave him was in French perhaps bad as his own even though rendered more glibly. Desperately he tried to noose a significant word here and there, but he failed. Russian or French was Greek to him.
To cover his embarrassment he got up and went to the kitchen, returning with a kettle, a tea canister, a wedge of cheddar cheese and muffins. Black eyes followed every move as he snuggled the kettle among the coals to heat, dragged a tea wagon with a broken wheel over to a place beside the girl's chair and disposed on it materials for a snack. The while he talked volubly. He'd have her know that back in Chicago he'd never drunk tea. It was only when he came to London that he'd learned to like the stuff and to eat jam on these do-funny cakes they call muffins. Had she ever eaten pancakes, now? Well, there was a dish for real folks! He'd give a month's salary for a stack of pancakes here in this man's town.
In Hagan's voice hidden laughter always bubbled. It was that quality of robust spirits which now spoke to his peri in the Esperanto of youth. Little by little the girl's restraint was dissipated. She forgot, even as had he, the locked door and the hint of blunt force the turning of the key had given. She laughed—a full-throated contralto laugh— when Hagan abstractedly used a quilted plate-lifter to pick up a cold muffin. When the water was boiling she usurped the duties of brewing and pouring and of spreading the marmalade.
Hagan thought it time for introductions. He bowed low from the hassock where he sat at the flank of the bishop chair, tapped himself solemnly and intoned a single syllable: “Jim.”
“Djim,” the girl acknowledged with childish gravity. In turn she bobbed her tousled head: “'Nastasia.”
He brought out a professional card from his wallet with the number of his Fleet Street office on it and wrote “Jim Hagan” under the superscription. This she tucked into her bodice and after a moment's indecision she stretched out her hand for the pencil. Hagan gave her a fresh card. She rapidly scribbled something. That would be her full name, Hagan guessed. Then the lead tip hung poised, began a line of script, stopped. A swoop carried it back over this second line in heavy marks of erasure. With a shamed little moue of red lips the girl handed the card back to Hagan.
The name he had hoped to read was in the Russian script, unintelligible. Below, where afterthought had scored across the beginnings of an address, was the single word, “Hotel.”
“Put the rest of it down.” Hagan sternly pushed card and pencil into resisting hands. “After to-night I think I have the right to know.”
He took her hand, fixed the pencil between her fingers and placed the tip significantly after that word, “Hotel,” on the card. But the fingers would not move. Then Hagan, looking up impatiently, saw something to bring him up standing. Gone was the light of mischief from her elfin face. Bleak terror sat in her eyes. Her whole face seemed to have withered and grown haggard under the spell of fear that gripped her. Her French faltered brokenly:
“No—no, monsieur! They—they would—kill!”
KNOCKING at the door became impatient. Hagan was flung into the broad awake with, a jerk that racked every sleep-drenched fiber of him; he stumbled to his feet automatically.
Dead coals in the grate; dead light from the student lamp; through the windows a bleared murk meaning daylight of a sort. And the big wing chair with its chintz vestments dropping to a deep swale—empty! Yes, empty. Gone was the tiny figure in Nile green that should have been embraced by the grandfatherly arms; on the hearth no slippers perched like strange beetles. Why—why, in just the minute he had been dozing——
Bang—bang—bang! A shrill complaint emphasized the blows of knuckles on the oak. Still in a doze Hagan blundered to the door and threw back the catch. In doing so he had a half-prompting that he should have used his key; that he could not have opened the door without his key since he had thrown on the spring latch that minute when a girl——
The charwoman of Lemon Court with a tray stood in the hall. She wore her usual appearance of having just been delivered by a collector of old rags and sacks—dumped at Hagan's door without having been tied into a very neat parcel.
“You're a bit 'ard to knock up this morning, sir,” simpered the creature from below-stairs. “I wuz almost minded to report to th' crowner there's a corp for 'im to come an' sit on.”
Hagan mumbled something defensively, and while the charwoman spread his breakfast on the table he covertly cast an eye through half-opened doors into the kitchen, into the bedroom. He was sure 'Nastasia must be somewhere in his chambers, and of course while this impossible charwoman was about it would not be at all regular——
“What's the idea—rushing breakfast up here so early?” he growled.
The mistress of the dreadful kipper leered significantly at the American gentleman. “You night workers!” she cackled. “So early—my eyes! 'Asn't the New Temple clock just finished striking noon?”
The harpy was about to withdraw when an idea came to Hagan: “Tell me, Mrs. Sarsford, who occupied these chambers before I moved in three weeks ago?”
“Now, Mr. 'Agan, if that weren't puffickly remarkable, you arskin' that question this morning w'en only an hour ago me an' Mr. 'Ackley—which's the day porter at the Fleet Street gate, y'know—was makin' mention of this 'ere same Mr. Popoff you're inquirin' of?”
“Popoff?” Hagan echoed.
“Well, Mr. 'Agan, sir, that's what we calls it, we plain English folks wot carn't twist our tongues round these 'ere foring nymes. It wuz Pop-something—a most ongordly nyme! 'E must 'a' been a Greek or a Eyetalian. But my I myke so bold as to arsk, sir, wot is your interest in this cove Popoff?”
HAGAN ignored the charwoman's question and plumped one of his own at her: “He didn't have a daughter, this Popoff?”
The charwoman swelled visibly; if the American gentleman wanted gossip he had come to the right quarter.
“Well, Mr. 'Agan, sir, none of us folks in Leming Court—us honest folks—myde so bold as to call 'em darters. There's a uglier 'word nor that which plain-spoken English folks mykes use of, sir. At all hours, Mr. 'Agan! An' foring-looking toffs with whiskers most outlandish 'anging all over their evening wescuts accompanyin' of the same. An' late parties, sir—lawk! With my own 'ands I've swept up so much as a dozing champagne bottles right in this room the morning arter.
“It got so scand'lous, Mr. 'Agan, sir”—the worthy Mrs. Sarsford gave Hagan a whiff of her brandied breath in deepest confidence—“so scand'lous Mr. Tippenny, the wig-myker, mykes the complaint an' the landlord arsks this 'ere Popoff for his keys. But my I myke so bold, Mr. 'Agan, as to arsk——”
“Asked for his keys, eh?” Hagan suddenly interrupted. “Well, did he get them?”
“That 'e did not, sir. Not only did this Popoff willun myke off with some of the landlord's furniture, an' him not giving any of us Leming Court folks so much as a stiver for a tip, but 'e tykes all the keys wiv 'im so's we 'as to get a locksmith up 'ere to myke some more. All foringers—except Amurican gentlemen—are blackleg, sir. Them keys, now; nobody's been a-tamperin'?”
Hagan answered her burning curiosity with a shilling pressed into her palm, and the loquacious Mrs. Sarsford bowed her way out.
The instant the door clicked behind her Hagan was making a soft-footed tour of his chambers. He hardly dared admit to himself how deep the disappointment each opened door brought him. Yes, she had fled, this midnight sprite from some pomegranate garden in the Levant, slipped out into the fog while he slept like any longshoreman, head on arms on the hassock at her feet
What a goat he'd been! Hagan built up a very unflattering picture of himself—snoring—oh, undoubtedly snoring—while a black-headed witch on tiptoe leaned over him with a pitying smile of farewell. When it happened, this flitting of hers out into the mazes of the fog-choked courts, Hagan could not guess; he prayed it was some time after Fleet Street gate had been opened to the day—some hour when no one of Mrs. Sarsford's nasty ilk would be on duty there to grin knowingly at a little creature wrapped in an evening cloak.
IN AN evening cloak! Another angle of the situation drenched Hagan with chilling possibilities. He visioned the girl 'Nastasia, bareheaded, her silken ankles screaming incongruity below the hem of her mantle—'Nastasia groping her way through the fog to Fleet Street. Street of menace and confusion, with careering buses following nose to tail like shadowy elephants, with drays and newspaper wagons, sidewalks filled with clerks footing it down to Ludgate and the City beyond, with drunken navvy staggering homeward after a night of debauch. On Fleet Street a girl in evening gown and wrap in the morning's ghostly gray—a girl who spoke no English, yet who must find her way to that hotel, presumably somewhere in London, whose name she dared not write down on the card.
The alert mind of the man—his news-trained mind—now fully aroused, set itself to picking up a trail and following a thread of mystery. Already a single ray of light had been let in by the gossipy charwoman; it illumined the sinister figure of a man named Popoff, or Pop-something, foreigner, giver of wine parties, squire of women. Popoff, dispossessed of these chambers, now for three weeks the abode of Hagan, had walked off with the keys. 'Nastasia could not have let herself into Hagan's rooms without one of those keys; could not have escaped while Hagan slept without a key to turn the lock he had sprung against her vain dash for liberty the moment of their first encounter. It was not his key she had used. If not his—whose?
Hagan saw again the leer on the rummy features of the charwoman as she mouthed details of Popoff's revels. For a minute he felt a little sick.
Though the hour demanded Hagan's presence at his office, upon quitting his chambers he turned into the establishment of the wig-maker whom Mrs. Sarsford had cited as the chief protestant against the revels of Popoff. Stephen Tippenny, wig-maker to the banisters of Lincoln's Inn and the Old Temple, carried as a side line to his curled and powdered periwigs, renting agencies for a dozen or more of the chambers in Lemon Court, among them Hagan's. Stephen Tippenny was as dry as the lifeless horsehair he fashioned, as communicative as a Dover oyster.
Though the American drove at his armor of secretiveness from every angle, though he allowed the glimmer of a half-crown to promise reward for information given, Tippenny was canny.
“In point of fact the party you refer to as Popoff carries the name Alexis Popondrov,” the wig-maker finally volunteered. “I believe he is a refugee of the old régime from Russia and by his speech I should say he knew more of Oxford than of his native country. Quite English, you know—Oxford English, I may say.”
“And do you happen to know where he went after he quit the chambers in Number Forty-six without giving up the keys?” Hagan tried to suppress the eagerness in his voice.
Mr. Tippenny gave him a cold eye over a ringlet of horsehair he was nursing on his finger.
“I assure you I had no interest in any circumstance except that of his giving up his chambers.”
Hagan, baffled, went out into Fleet Street and turned down toward his office. What had he to help him in his search for a witch-girl named 'Nastasia? Only this: the name of a Russian roisterer, Alexis Popondrov, and confirmation of the charwoman's salty story. Yes, and the beginnings of light upon the mystery of 'Nastasia's presence in his chambers. Popondrov had quit Lemon Court with a key to the chambers on the third-floor front of Number Forty-six. Whether 'Nastasia alone let herself into those chambers sometime before Hagan's return the night before or whether another accompanied her there, 'Nastasia possessed the key, else she could not have turned the spring latch and escaped while Hagan dozed. Find Popondrov and he'd discover the girl.
But did he want to discover her now that the day had brought ugly revelations; a girl who for some reason had returned to the scene of recent revels so shocking to the sensibilities of Lemon Court? Again that flicker of ugly surmise which had leaped to the fore the moment he saw a tiny figurine in Nile green buried in the depths of the bishop chair. But only for an instant. Potent to overweigh suspicion was the vision of the little features stamped with terror, echo of words given in halting French: “No—no, monsieur! They would kill!”
In the roar of Fleet Street Jim Hagan dedicated himself to a St. George quest. Somewhere in this mighty whirlpool of life about him he would find and rescue a maiden whose laughter was like the chime of bazaar bells in Novgorod!
The office that afternoon was a torture chamber. Eternal chat-chatter of the news tickers dribbling a Lloyd George speech in Commons was like the boring of a dentist's drill. There was he, chained to cables, bound round with ticker tape, when somewhere beyond his grimy windows and the near-by jungle of chimneypots was a girl with eyes like starlit pools—a girl mightily in need of Jim Hagan.
Twice he had his hand on the telephone to send in a call to a certain private cubicle in Scotland Yard's old pile. In that little cell sat an Irishman who knew much and who was Hagan's friend. A word to this red little ferret and all the devious warrens of London's foreign quarters would be under surveillance. Yet did Hagan hesitate; should the little Irishman of Scotland Yard start inquiries at his behest some subordinate flat-foot might blunder, and the terror that had flamed in 'Nastasia's eyes become a very real thing.
To add to Hagan's misery, the Big Boss over in New York chose this day to roar under a thousand miles of ocean orders which shot the head of the London office off to Edinburgh.
TWO days away from London, and on the second night—or post-midnight, rather—a sore and weary Hagan clumped up Fleet Street with the night's moil of cables behind him. Just as he was passing the Golden Cock with the postern gate to the Old Temple ahead he heard the Cockney whine of a voice lifted in anger. Two figures stood before the gate; in one he recognized the night porter.
“An' I sye agyne, such as you 'as no rights in Leming Court. On your wye afore I calls a bobby to tyke you in charge fer the 'ousebreaker an' scallyrwag wot you are!” The night porter held his lantern menacingly over a somewhat rumpled shirt bosom; its beam cut into high light a smiling satyr's mouth and pointed chin. Just the hint of a silk hat cocked far back somewhere above.
“You fail to grasp my allusion.” The voice of the stranger rippled and purled in the affected Oxford manner. “The line runs something like this: 'I do not like you, Dr. Fell. The reason why I cannot tell.' I mean to say, of course, you are not that Dr. Fell of the classic, though I da' say you and he would hit it off together top-hole. Quite a rotter, this doctor, one gathers from reading about him. Now, fellow, stand aside!”
Hagan, grinning with relish, stepped up to the postern. The night porter, recognizing him, made his appeal for alliance. “Mr. 'Agan, sir, carn't you persuade this himpossible person 'e 'as no rights 'ere—much less to your chambers, which syme 'e was recently dispossessed of an'——”
“My chambers!” A sharp prick of interest was Hagan's. The stranger in evening dress favored him with a drawled, “Really!” followed by a polite swaying.
“Yuss, your chambers, Mr. 'Agan. This person's nyme is Popoff an' 'e——”
“A rose by any other name,” murmured the silk-hatted one, “—say Popondrov—is just as sweet.” Something hit Hagan's heart a double flick. When he could catch his breath he turned to the night porter.
“Mr. Popondrov is quite right in wanting admittance. He is my guest.” One of Popondrov's slim gloved hands made a wave to indicate that was that. He tucked an arm under Hagan's and cut a little dance step through the gate. The night porter could only stare after the two, convinced that Amuricans were as bad as any other foringers.
As for Hagan, he kept a tight grip on the arm of Popondrov as if this young man haply flung at him by fate might by some magic dissolve into the shadows of court and alley; a tight grip, too, was essential, for Popondrov's gait was erratic. No less the monologue with which he regaled his guide all the way down the echoing flags and up the two flights of Number Forty-six, Lemon Court, something about an impudent bobby in Piccadilly; something in French which sounded like a song; Oxford jargon as blank to Hagan as the French. They came up to the door of Hagan's chambers.
“Permit me, old egg!” Popondrov threw back the cape of his Inverness with a flourish and produced a key with which he sketched a weaving pattern all about the keyhole. Second shock for Hagan! This was the key that had last been in possession of 'Nastasia when she turned the spring lock in the dawn three days back. No doubt of it! That meant Popondrov had seen the girl since!
An odd sense of possession seemed to have seized upon Popondrov the instant the door was closed behind them. By some twist of fancy he conceived himself the host of his own quarters and Hagan a friend to be entertained. When the latter had the fire burning and the light on, he found Popondrov rummaging behind glass doors of the highboy for liquor glasses. Two he daintily dusted with a silk handkerchief and set on the table. He filled the glasses from a silver cognac flask.
Hagan drank with him, giving his visitor swift appraisal over the rim of his glass. A youngish fellow, blond as a Fleming; features patrician almost to the point of decadence, with a mouth weak and womanish and eyes wherein no hardihood lurked. A pretty man! How handle such a one? Properly approached, he might reveal what the newspaper correspondent was burning to know; a blunder on Hagan's and that mysterious terror which had flickered so vividly over 'Nastasia's face might be made a very pressing danger.
Popondrov swallowed another horn of brandy after Hagan affected not to see the proffered glass. This last drink cut the underpinning completely away from the young man's reason and let it down the ways to oblivion. He began a barbaric song which might have been in the Russian, wavered on his legs for a minute, then dropped like a bundle of wet wash into the big wing chair before the fire. A flute-like snore came thence.
Hagan bent over the recumbent figure and explored the waistcoat pockets. His fingers found the key with which Popondrov had opened the door. Pocketing this, Hagan drew a couch to bar egress through that door and lay down to await the dawn. This second visitor to the rookery chambers was not going to escape as the first one had.
DMITRI ANDREVIEFF, late Admiral in command of the Imperial Russian Black Sea Fleet and more recently darling of all the émigrés of the old régime fleeing their homeland before the Red terror, was having his third and most important conference with a most Exalted Personage in the Government of his Majesty George V. Many reasons of caution prompted that this meeting should not be under the eyes of press and public; one of them was that the Admiral's presence in London was supposed to be strictly incognito; another, equally cogent, was that the big man in his Majesty's Government could scarcely afford to be caught openly trafficking with a representative of the Imperial Russian cause. Even from this short distance of years you and I know that one such minister did get caught in just this situation, with great resultant embarrassment to the whole of his Majesty's Government.
So the meeting between the Russian and the Englishman was held in a white and gold room of a private residence in Kensington—a most discreet residence, whose mistress enjoyed playing politics for the English minister. It was after midnight; the House had just risen from an arduous session devoted to a defense of the Government's military policy in the Archangel sector, and the minister had posted at once to his appointment with Admiral Andrevieff.
A word to photograph the Admiral—no need to court embarrassment by lifting the mask from the English minister. Tall above the average and seeming even taller in his black and white of evening dress with the glitter of a jeweled star below the bow tie; pallor of features sharply brought out by the well glossed black of a short beard; thin nose of a patrician; tired eyes of a sensualist; hands like a woman's—Dmitri Andrevieff was pure type of a race now scattered and brought to the husks of degradation after centuries of privilege.
How the Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet escaped shooting by his own revolting sailors is no part of this story. How he managed to become the darling of the French Bourse—desperately avid of pulling something from the wreck of Russian bonds—and of the British military caste—as Junker as Ludendorff—can be dismissed with the simple statement that he did so contrive and succeed. To-night he stood as the first of a succession of adventurers to follow; men who tried to piece together a house for privilege in Russia from the dust of the explosion.
The representative of his Majesty's Government quaffed a ceremonial highball and then proceeded with British directness to the business of the evening.
“Your Excellency, you are quite sure your presence in London has been well guarded—no agents of the Soviet to nose you out and carry the news to the extreme right of our Laborites? Wretched beggars! They and their radical papers are giving us a fine harrying over our expeditionary forces in Archangel.”
The Russian spread fine hands. “Positively incognito, my dear sir. Until the first of my meetings with you my whole liaison with the big people of your Government was maintained by young Popondrov, my very competent aide. He is more English than an Englishman. No agent of the Bolsheviki in London would recognize an imperialist in him. As for myself, I have scarcely left my hotel.”
“Right!” The Englishman vented gusty relief. “Under cover is the word, my dear Admiral. You may well appreciate that with the attitude of Labor what it is—the secret sympathies of its extremists for the Soviet and all that—the Gov—those who are in accord with your aspirations, I mean to say, must move with extreme caution. Now to come down to concrete things, the War Office——”
The Exalted Personage moved a heavy brief case onto the table, brought therefrom thick canvas-backed sheets which unfolded into military maps of Siberia, of the Caucasus and frozen wastes of Archangel. All these maps were scored across with heavy red lines—hypothetical armies of liberation converging upon Moscow to crush the life out of a new monster in the world called the Soviet. More documents from the brief case; lists of international bankers who either might be or already had been cajoled into minting reluctant francs and guineas into machine guns, airplanes, barbed wire, steel-jacketed bullets.
Dmitri Andrevieff, one-time patrician idler, now turned adventurer for high stakes, was beguiled by a dream picture woven about the glorified figure of Dmitri Andrevieff, deliverer. The one-time commander of a fleet under the blue cross of St. Michael, who knew more about the personnel of the Imperial Ballet at Petrograd than he did of maneuvers in echelon, fancied himself already secure in the saddle of a dictator.
In many ways the ex-Admiral was wrong; particularly in his confidently voiced assurance of his incognito in London. For when his Majesty's minister finally left the house in Kensington and Andrevieff followed through the door to his own limousine a few minutes after, patient eyes witnessed the circumstance from the thorny depths of a hedge across the road. No patience is comparable to the Russian's. Since Andrevieff debarked from a British destroyer at Folkestone and motored up to London a month prior to this night of meeting, squads and platoons of patient eyes had marked his every move. His incognito was as complete as that of Billy Sunday.
CHANCE had it that the night of Andrevieff's secret meeting with an important arm of the government was the same that witnessed the beginnings of embarrassment for his aide, Alexis Popondrov, gentleman reveler. For while two men in a discreet white and gold room in Kensington were advancing red lines of armies over far-flung Russia young Popondrov was sleeping off his indiscretions behind the locked door of Jim Hagan's chambers over Lemon Court. It was the American newspaper man who was biding his time in the matter of supplying embarrassment for his self-invited guest. Determined was Hagan that this blond and ladylike young Russian not see out-of-doors until he had revealed all he knew about the girl named 'Nastasia.
When the blear eye of morning looked through the windows, Hagan roused himself from his fitful doze at guard before the door and made shift to brew tea and toast muffins for himself and the flute-like snorer in the wing chair. Preparations finished, he awoke Popondrov without ceremony. The disheveled young man whimpered fretfully to be let alone; but Hagan was inexorable, even to the point of dragging the dandy to a bowl and dousing cold water over his head.
“Now we'll have a little tea and a lot of talk,” he announced as a rumpled head lifted above the towel.
Popondrov gave his tormentor an unrecognizing stare but appeared to take it as no great matter that he awoke to find himself with a strange companion.
“My name's Hagan,” the newspaper man announced as he passed a cup of tea. “These are my chambers. You let yourself into them last night with a key from your own pocket.”
“Quite so!” murmured Popondrov and sipped the tea with relish.
His cool acceptance of an anomalous situation angered the American who, thoroughly aroused, broke out in good Chicagoese:
“Come, now, cut out the up-stage stuff! Technically you are a house-breaker. It's not up to you to put on any frills. I want to know a few things from you. One of them is, how do you come to have a key to my chambers—and use it?”
“You are making a wretched ass of yourself, if I may be permitted the comment,” was Popondrov's drawled reply. “Perhaps a mere matter of forgetfulness on my part—a fancy, let us say, born of conviviality, prompted me to return to the old home nest. I lived here once, you know.”
He set down his cup with great dignity, arose, dusted a crumb from the knee of his trousers, gathered his topper and cape from a near-by chair and stalked to the door. Hagan watched him with a sardonic eye as he attempted to turn the spring latch to open it.
“What's your rush?” he purred. “It's locked, you see. Locked it last night with the key from your pocket.”
“What a rotter!” Popondrov sniffed. “Do you want me to raise a row and have a bobby in here?”
“Do you want to do that?” was Hagan's counter. “Why, man, a cop is the last person you want to see.”
With a rush Hagan suddenly changed his tactics: “Why not sit down here quietly, finish your tea and tell me all about 'Nastasia?”
The name 'Nastasia dropped like a shrapnel-burst upon the Russian. He whirled from the door and in two strides was back and glowering down into Hagan's, impudently smiling features.
“Where did you get that name? What does it mean to you?” The queries were shot between tensed lips. Gone now was all the man's assumption of foppish displeasure, his Oxford pose; sincerity spoke from his eyes. Hagan, quick to realize his advantage, sparred for time to learn how best to use it.
“What does that name mean to me?” he echoed. “Well, a girl in a green dress and with bare legs; a girl whose eyes are black as the blackest in Gruzia and with lips like——”
“Gruzia, you say! 'Nastasia—'tis she!” Popondrov babbled. “Tell me, man, where did you last see her?”
“In that very chair where you spent part of last night.” Hagan drove home his answer cruelly. “She was bare-legged because her stockings were drying on the fire screen, you see. And she was laughing and drinking tea—with me.”
HAGAN'S head jerked aside just in time to miss the smash of a fist. As he slipped sideways from his chair he caught the toppling body of the Russian following the spent blow and spilled it into the depths of the wing chair.
“Don't be an idiot!” Hagan snapped. “Who should know better than you that 'Nastasia was here three nights ago? It was the key you have that let her in, wasn't it? You brought her here, didn't you?”
The head of the blond young man in the bishop chair wagged dazedly. Tears of womanish weakness stood in his eyes.
“I bring her here? 'Nastasia, one girl in a thousand, here to this wretched place, and at night? Be careful what you say! I have not seen 'Nastasia for a fortnight. She has disappeared—been swallowed up! I have searched. I have eaten out my heart. Last night—my grief—I had to forget all!”
Popondrov suddenly heaved up from the chair and faced Hagan menacingly. “I say now, what have you done with the girl? Where did you hide her that night you say she was here? Why did she come here, and with whom? Come—come, my man; you cannot trifle with me!”
{[dhr]} THE American read a little scornfully the bristling menace in the Russian exquisite's mien, yet was he convinced of the young man's sincerity. No play-acting there. Why not try a little himself, Hagan thought.
“See here, Mr. Popondrov, you are in no position to play the heroic defender of defenseless womanhood. No, not with your record established while you were occupying these chambers. I've taken the opportunity to look up that record, and it's not chemically pure. What's more”—this was a shot into the dark—“I gather from what Miss 'Nastasia said that she hasn't the greatest confidence in the world to impose in you.”
The blond young man threw an arm over his eyes and moaned. “My habits! The dear girl does not know my drinking is in line with my duty. We expatriates from Russia, it is necessary we come together often, and when we do the old Russian custom—” His unfinished sentence told much.
“Sit down, Mr. Popondrov, and listen to all I know about a mysterious beauty named 'Nastasia.” Hagan's nimble wits had taken the other's full measure and come to a decision: Here was some one who could be made an ally in the search for a peri from Georgia—perhaps not a very competent ally but better than none. Better play the cards to the end that Popondrov's confidence be gained, then use him, so long as that use achieved something. Hagan began measuredly:
“I never saw Miss 'Nastasia until sometime around two o'clock three mornings ago. I have not seen her since. I am an American correspondent over here and my business is to get news. There's a whale of a story woven about this girl 'Nastasia—I can feel it!—and I am after that story. Incidentally, I hope to help a young lady out of danger. Now——”
He proceeded with the whole story. He showed the Russian the card whereon she had scribbled her name and the unfinished address. Popondrov listened breathlessly. The card with the Russian script on its face he pressed dramatically to his lips.
“There you are!” Hagan finished. “Now here's a question: Who are the people who 'Nastasia says would kill her if she revealed where she is living? And why? What is the terror hanging over her?”
“Her uncle is a devil!” Popondrov exploded. “Smirnoff, who taught her to dance, first in Odessa and then in the ballet at Moscow; he's a red fiend from the Pit!”
“But,” Hagan objected, “'Nastasia used the word 'they.' 'They would kill me,' was the way she put it. There must be more than one she is afraid of.”
Popondrov sat with his eyes on the fire for a long minute as if weighing a decision. Then he turned to Hagan.
“Sir, you have been fair with me; I can but repay with equal fairness. Listen:
“'Nastasia is a gently born girl of Gruzia, or Georgia, as the English has it. Her father, a colonel of artillery in the old army, was killed at Tannenberg in 1914. The mother was destitute. 'Nastasia was put under the charge of her uncle, Smirnoff, had the school of the dance at Odessa. I first saw her in the ballet at Moscow during the Kerensky revolution—my regiment had fallen apart in the troubled times and I was planning to return to England, which I love.
“Sir, I was mad when I saw 'Nastasia dance. Just to be near one who had bewitched me! And my queen was so cruel to me! Without her, life was not worth living, yet I could not have her. Then came the Soviet—and terror.”
Hagan heard a tale now common to the world; one little recitative in the great tragic epic of the Flight from Russia. How this blond dandy had fended for a dancing girl and her mother; how death overtook the mother in the night and, with a seaport and safety in sight, guns of mad peasants had separated the champion from his charge. Imprisonment for Popondrov, sentence of death, escape. In Naples one fleeting glimpse of his divinity under jealous charge of the uncle, Smirnoff. Another glimpse and a hastily exchanged word in Paris.
“And so, sir, I found her in London just month ago. I saw her face in the window of a wretched hotel in Chelsea—it was a chance given of God!—and thus we met, that devil Smirnoff all smiles of welcome for me. From her I heard the story of her escape from Russia after being parted from me; it was this man Smirnoff who wrought it; he had some influence with the Commissariat of Justice.
“Of our meetings from that time up to a fortnight ago I need tell you only this: Nastasia was changed. She suffered under a terrible dread which her lips refused to reveal, no matter how I pleaded to be told. Then one day I went to the hotel where they lived and found them gone. The brutish Belgian who was manager there professed to know nothing of their whereabouts or why they had moved. Since that day I have raged over half of London to no purpose.”
With a fierce access of anger he suddenly blurted: “I'll tell you why 'Nastasia lives under the terror. That Uncle Smirnoff, that red-headed dog of hell, he's gone bad—Bolshevik! Else he and 'Nastasia never could have left Odessa alive.”
Hagan turned over in his mind the dramatic episodes of the Terror he had listened to, young Popondrov's confession of a fair, clean passion—all the more surprising in contrast with the report of a rake's dissipation that had attached to his name in Lemon Court. In the light of these revelations the shadowy and unsubstantial figure of a midnight visitor to these chambers—a barefoot sprite who spread a web of romance over the place for a magical hour and then was gone—this gossamer shape began to take form and substance. He saw 'Nastasia as a creature of flesh and blood, something that could warm to the glow of love, be subject to the ardors of a lover. More than that, he caught a glimpse of the girl's present plight—an outcast under cruel dominion of some inhuman guardian who would not hesitate to take a whip to her.
With this filling in of the picture Hagan had carried behind his eyes these past days, all the more did the girl with the laughter of deep bells become desirable. He must find her! But Popondrov?
WITH the cool self-assurance of his breed Hagan made a quick resolution that if the young Russian was to be treated in the light of a rival that circumstance would but give zest to the search for the lost 'Nastasia.
Hagan took up the other's story after the cross-questioning manner of the newspaper man.
“You say you think this Uncle Smirnoff has turned Bolshevik. What is he doing in London, then?”
“Watching us, the émigrés of the old regime, I haven't a doubt,” was Popondrov's ready answer; “plotting with the Reds in Britain to spread Sovietism; acting as agent of Moscow to report any moves at counter-revolution that might originate here.”
“Another question”—Hagan's quick intelligence was picking up all the loose ends of the other's narrative. “You walked away from Lemon Court a couple of weeks ago with the key to the door—probably just an oversight; but did you give the key to 'Nastasia?”
Popondrov flushed angrily. “Decidedly not! I tell you, sir, if 'Nastasia let herself out of this room with a key to the spring lock on that door, it was not my key.”
“Whose was it if not yours—the one you took with you when you gave up these chambers?”
“I cannot answer that question.” The blond head was shaken dazedly. “I saw 'Nastasia just once after I quit these chambers. While I was with her I happened to discover I'd gone off with the key—found it in the pocket of my greatcoat. She was a little distressed with me—thought that wretched key but another evidence of my—my forgetfulness, shall I say? I promised to return it immediately and never gave it another thought.”
“You don't think the girl could have taken the key without your knowledge?”
“See here!” Again the Russian flared up, but Hagan stopped him with an abrupt gesture.
“If we're to get anywhere in this business you must take my questions as they're meant. Granted, 'Nastasia did not take the key; was that uncle of hers present when you discovered it in your overcoat?”
Popondrov tried to concentrate. “Ye-es, I believe he was. We were all three in that wretched hotel room of theirs and——”
“Good! Now we're getting somewhere,” was Hagan's interruption. “Did Uncle Smirnoff know you had been living in Lemon Court?”
“Yes. Foolishly I told him.”
“Then he heard you explain to 'Nastasia that you had quit these chambers, and inadvertently carried away the key?”
“Why—why—By Jove, now I have it! No; that wretched Smirnoff came into the room only after I had explained to 'Nastasia. He saw the key in my hand and made a nasty innuendo. But I do not get the point of ail these questions. Why——”
“Don't you see, man! Now we know why 'Nastasia was here before my fire at two o'clock in the morning. That precious uncle of hers stole your key that day when you last saw the girl. Then he and 'Nastasia disappeared. He believed you were still living in Lemon Court. For some devilish reason we can't guess he decided he would throw 'Nastasia at you out of the dark, and three nights ago he brought her here and forced her to await your coming alone here in these chambers. Don't you see?”
The pale features against the chair back were knotted in an effort to follow a tangled thread. “But 'Nastasia knew all the time I was no longer here,” Popondrov finally objected.
“Surely,” Hagan agreed. “That makes the girl all the more a wonder". Perhaps to protect you—to keep Smirnoff from knowing you could not be made a tool for some Red plot of his, she came to this old jungle of ruins in the night, in the storm. Get the picture, Popondrov! That little girl, knowing not a word of English, allowing herself to play bait for a trap—waiting here in strange chambers for a man she'd never seen to come in and find her——
“Oh, man, you said it; one woman in a thousand—in ten thousand!”
ON THE bend of Green Arbor Walk, where it turns just beyond the abandoned Empress Theater to plunge under the arches of Chelsea Bridge, stands the Hôtel de Flandres, a three-story rookery favored by foreigners who for one reason or another do not care to advertise their presence in London. Its proprietor was a Fleming who had narrowly escaped hanging as a spy during the war and was happy still to be having the use of his neck even in such dreary surroundings as those of the Walk. Several of the guests under the Fleming's sagging roof were destined to hang sometime, yet during the commutation of their fate they were unobtrusive, soft-footed, seeking only to avoid crossing tangent to the affairs of all men.
Not so with Uncle Smirnoff, who occupied one of the second floor front rooms. The red man, far from retiring from a risky world, was avid of driving a pin into the world's soft flank. He wished to keep in touch with the world, or that part of it which chiefly concerned him, and by his own devious measures he did so. By an artless arrangement of mirrors, taking advantage of the curve in Green Arbor Walk whereon the hotel stood. Uncle Smirnoff could sit in his stocking feet well away from the window and scan the face and figure of every passer-by on either sidewalk. The mechanical aid to anticipating the visit of a friend or evading a call from one who might not be friendly pleasured Uncle Smirnoff mightily.
For during long days the man with the flame head rarely stirred outside the odorous walls of the Hôtel de Flandres, however wide might be his night range.
And in an adjoining room, a frowsy, fusty chamber smelling of mold under the carpet and onions below-stairs, the girl 'Nastasia spent the days and the nights a prisoner under key. A prisoner she had been since that dripping morning she returned afoot with her mantle reeking moisture to confess to her uncle that the man she had waited to find in Lemon Court was not Popondrov but a stranger—under cross questioning and pinching fingers on her arm 'Nastasia had admitted, too, her knowledge before the fact of the fruitlessness of her enforced visit to the Old Temple. The terrors of her escape from the Temple, her clambering over an iron fence bounding the gardens on the Embankment side and that long, long journey afoot down the Embankment to Chelsea Bridge under the questioning eyes of policemen and early-morning market carters: these nightmare memories disturbed the girl's solitude.
But one solace was hers. Waking and sleeping she kept in her bosom a bit of pasteboard with English script across its face and underneath this a bold scrawl, “Jim Hagan.” Countless were the times 'Nastasia brought this card from its hiding-place to study again what was written there. For by doing so she could conjecture the better the bold features, the sound of an alien voice with hidden laughter in it. Occasionally the prisoner of Uncle Smirnoff would range beside the face of this gallant unknown the lineaments of Popondrov, assiduous lover and once savior of her life. Then would the girl contrast lines of weakness and sensuality with the bold hardihood of blue eyes and a self-assurance registered in mouth and chin.
This setting of one against the other of two men, one well known and greatly her creditor in terms of service, the other but the dominant figure in a dream experience, always left the girl behind the locked door of the Hôtel de Flandres distrait, filled with self-reproach. Great was her debt to a Russian exquisite named Popondrov, but greater the tug of her heart toward one Jim Hagan, a man who could be so gentle under the strange circumstances of a first meeting.
As for more immediate circumstances of her life—that terrible rehearsal in the dark theater, followed by the sally in the storm to a strange room and now imprisonment: these things were tabs to an unsolved riddle. 'Nastasia, alone in a strange city, helpless under the tyranny of Uncle Smirnoff, guessed vaguely she was a pawn to be pushed onto the chessboard of weighty events. But when and in what manner, she could not venture a hazard.
Deep in her heart she nursed a hope, absolutely groundless. It was that before the supreme trial was hers, the man Jim Hagan would come to snatch her away.
A week had passed since that night of her encounter with Hagan—a dreadful week in the miasma of the rookery on the Walk—when 'Nastasia learned something of what the future held. It was near midnight. She was in her bed but not asleep when the key turned in the door and candle-light showed the circlet of flame about the face of her uncle.
“Quick, little she-calf! Dress and come into my room. You are wanted.”
TREMBLING, 'Nastasia hurried into some clothes and with her hair still tumbled from the pillow she joined the waiting Smirnoff in the hall. He preceded her into his room, before the window of which a blanket had been nailed to insure against spying from across the street. The single gas jet was but a pale shell in a sea of tobacco smoke. Three men were there, the same—though 'Nastasia could not know this—who had been spectators of her dance in the Empress Theater. At sight of them the girl shrank back against the door. Smirnoff had his back against it and was grinning over his beard.
“Brothers, this little minnow for our sturgeon trap,” he announced. Three pairs of eyes roved impudently over her little figure. Smirnoff turned to a sallow man who was roosting on the bed:
“Andres, you tell her. I have not the heart.” This with a righteous smirk.
The fellow called Andres spit upon the tip of his cigarette and ground the stub into the carpet. “You have heard of Admiral Andrevieff?” he demanded.
'Nastasia nodded dazedly.
“You know he is an enemy of the Soviet in Moscow?”
The girl denied by a shake of her head.
“Such he is, and he is now in London conferring with the money lords to prepare a counter-revolution in Russia—a foreign-financed uprising of the few bourgeoisie who have not yet starved; folk like your sweet self, little dove.”
'Nastasia, in whose crowded life of the past year there had been no room for knowledge of politics or intrigue within or without the bloody machine which had snatched at her fleeing skirts, wondered dully what might be coming.
“This Andrevieff must be destroyed before he quits London,” the spokesman continued. “And your good Uncle Smirnoff agrees with us three that you are the one to do the destroying.”
“No! No!” 'Nastasia's cry was that of a frightened child in the dark.
“But yes! Yes!” her torturer insisted imperturbably. “The good God has given you trim legs to dance with, a pretty face to snare such dogs as Andrevieff. He'd sell all Russia for a pair of pretty legs and a pretty face.”
The sallow face thrust itself out to leer at her. “Why do you think Uncle Smirnoff invited us to watch you dance in that home of cobwebs if it was not that we should judge of your legs and your face? You are the one Russian in the world who can get near enough to this Andrevieff to sink a knife in his heart. He'll come to you, arms open!”
'Nastasia, sick with horror, turned to break for the door. Smirnoff, standing there, pushed her back with fat hands. “Gently—gently, little child of a swine father!”
“So now it has all been arranged,” came a droning voice through the tobacco haze. “One of our brave women—a clever wretch!—who was spy for Germany in high society here before the Armistice and now is spying for the Soviet, she has arranged a quiet entertainment at her home in St. John's Wood. She has discovered you, my dear, a great Russian dancer in hiding here through fear of the dreadful Soviet; so she gives this little entertainment, very select, for the Admiral and a few English guests. And there you dance before Andrevieff to-morrow night as you danced before us. Do you hear! Wildly—with abandon. You offer him the sweets of youth—all! He will arrange to take these things. Then—this!”
The sallow-faced man lifted one trouser leg and from the top of a concealed boot he drew out a knife with a blade scarcely wider than a shoemaker's awl.
THE days of 'Nastasia's imprisonment in a charnel room on the Walk had been days of feverish energy for Jim Hagan: at least those following his conversation with Popondrov in the small hours at Lemon Court. They had parted, these oddly matched champions, under promise of Hagan to report to the Russian in his new lodgings on Jeremy Street whatever progress he might make in his search for a hidden girl. Then the American newspaper man commenced his burrowing into the dark.
All he had to begin work on was the name and address of the cheap hotel in Chelsea where Popondrov had discovered his sweetheart and whence Uncle Smirnoff had removed her “without trace.” Just that and unflagging patience. The method of his beginning was the same which in his younger days had won Hagan advancement in Chicago newspaperdom. This was to seize upon any possible circumstance promising ever so vaguely to strike tangent to the unknown and with infinite patience to work down that tangent.
Wherefore the morning whose earlier hours had seen Hagan and a suddenly sobered Popondrov exchanging confidences, later witnessed the former speeding by taxi along the Embankment, past Westminster and into the dreary borough of Chelsea. He dismissed his car a few minutes' walk from the expected destination and proceeded on foot to a seedy-looking hotel in a backwater off King's Road. In a gas-lit cubby marked “Office” he encountered a man with a sheep's forehead and shifty eyes who professed a scanty knowledge of English under questioning.
Did he know a Russian named Smirnoff? Mais non.
But Smirnoff was a guest there, was he not? Subtle craft of Hagan's to draw a denial which would admit the man had once been under the roof. The Belgian spread his hands in profession of ignorance. Hagan, quick to the the measure of a stupid craft he had to deal with, decided upon a trick which he would not have dared try upon an Englishman. He loosed the top buttons of his waistcoat and turned back one hem to show a badge pinned in the lining: a gold and glittering emblem of police authority—in Chicago. A grateful department in the city by the lake once had bestowed this honor to signalize Hagan's saving a police squad from death by a bomb.
The pale eyes of the man behind the desk flickered apprehensively at sight of the badge. Instantly his demeanor changed. Marvelously his English improved. Yes—yes; now he did recollect a guest named Smirnoff—a man with red hair all over his face-beautiful daughter with him. But—he consulted the register—they had quit the hotel two weeks ago.
“Where did they go?” Hagan demanded.
“Alas, monsieur, I know not. On my honor!”
Hagan gave the nervous manager a long look. “Letters!” he snapped. “Smirnoff left some forwarding address.”
“Of a surety not. The Russian paid his bill—vanished.”
“How did his baggage go out? Did he have a van from the neighborhood carry it away?” Hagan was playing the part the other invested him with for all the kudos there was in it.
The Belgian made a terrific effort to remember. His best was that Smirnoff had summoned a four-wheeler from a cabstand on King's Road, and his trunk had gone off on the driver's seat with himself and his so-beautiful daughter. Yes, he could show the gentleman from Scotland Yard where the cabstand was; but by the Mother of All Mercies, he could not point out the veritable cabman who had taken Smirnoff away. His only recollection of the cabman was that he was drunk when he came for his fares.
HIS business at the cabstand drew upon all of Hagan's finesse. He knew at of all the unlicked churls in the world the London cabman is king. He picked out the churliest Bill Sykes of the lot of waiting ruffians and gave him a hypothetical address in Holborn where he wanted to be taken. Then, as if in afterthought: “'Tis a long, dry ride, Bill. How about a pot of 'arf-an' before we start?”
A reciprocal gleam in bloated eyes answered the invitation, and Hagan led the way to a near-by pub. After three mugs of varnish-colored liquid had disappeared down the cabby's gullet Hagan plumped his little fairy tale. He was a solicitor's clerk come all the way from New York to find a red-headed man whose testimony could clear up the disposition of an estate worth £50,000. He'd traced him right up to this King's Road cabstand and there the trail ended. Rotten luck—what!
Now if he could only find the cabby from this stand who on such and such a night had been summoned to take this red-headed man and his beautiful daughter from the Hôtel Anvers to other lodgings, why, there'd be a bit o' plush in it for all hands round.
A rheumy eye fell upon the large silver coin a hand carelessly spun on the bar. Here was a real toff, even though his speech betrayed him as Amurican. The cabby lumbered to the pub's door.
“Yeu, 'Grace—'Umpy—Skivvers, pad the 'oof 'ere an' look lively! 'Ere's a toff to stand drinks an' arsk questions.”
Inside of a minute the cabstand was deserted and five mugs went under the barmaid's tap handles. The Amurican toff did himself proud. He didn't ask a question until the tap had worked again.
Upshot of ten minutes' maundering and quarreling was that 'Umpy remembered as how Lumpy-Jawr 'Ighston said a for'night ago he'd given Beauty and the Beast out of the Covent Garden Pantomime a ride into Pimlico; man all afire with red whiskers; girl scairt-like but a ravin' whinner fer looks. Hagan's ears pricked.
“And where can I find this Highston? Is he on your stand now?”
“That 'e's not,” growled the leader of the 'arf-an'-'arf addicts. “'E's in 'Olborn jail 'long of scarfin' up 'is old woman wiv a chair. She's like to die, they says.”
Hagan's heart sank. The one man in London who could lead him to 'Nastasia, in jail under a possible charge of homicide! Oh the devious track he must follow!
He dropped a half-crown on the bar to round out the cabbies' morning and hurried out to catch a bus bound for Fleet Street and his office. Back he must go to have his hands tied with cable slips and ticker tape; to get from Vienna and Danzig and Berlin silly chatter of the world's distress. This when his feet were fairly set on a trail which, albeit by twists and turns, must surely lead to 'Nastasia.
Nothing in life was more to be desired; that Hagan knew in his heart. The romantic background behind a black head had snared the Irish heart of the man even as the haunting fear in deep eyes had added a delicious sympathy to the touch of love. That harm threatened—might even now be working torture on 'Nastasia—made every delay in his efforts to reach her side maddening.
Yet four thousand miles away breakfast papers must be waiting to be laid against egg cups that John Smith in Zanesville and Thomas Jones of Little Rock might hear what Jim Hagan had to tell them while coffee cooled by their elbows.
TO INTRODUCE a new character of any major importance into this story at its present stage of development would be indefensible infraction of the somewhat rigid rules of tale-writing. It is no part of my intention to overload the stage with a new twelfth-hour actor; but may I be permitted a digression touching upon characterless a thing as a window—a plain four-pane window, and dirty to boot?
This window was in Green Arbor Walk; in point of fact it one of the lights of a second floor directly across the dingy street from the Hôtel de Flandres and the room wherein 'Nastasia was kept prisoner. Surely nothing distinguishing about this window. Like its three fellows on the second floor front, its dull eyes were veiled from within by flimsy curtains of scrim; one in the Hôtel de Flandres opposite could look ever so intently at this and see nothing an inch behind the panes unless a light flared up at night in the rooms to which they pertained. The window I have chosen to describe never was so lighted; its tenant either never went to bed or, if he did, preferred to do so in the dark.
Now for days and days after the hasty removal from the hotel in Chelsea to this noisome hostelry in the Walk 'Nastasia had furtively watched all the windows in the house across the street. Particularly had she done so after Uncle Smirnoff had turned the key upon her following her deception practiced upon him in the matter of the sally into Lemon Court. Studying the windows of houses opposite might have been one of the few diversions permitted the girl by her lonely and prescribed life in a strange city. Even while they were residents of a front room in the dubious Hôtel Anvers, in Chelsea, 'Nastasia had indulged this harmless pastime.
Parenthetically, Uncle Smirnoff was so canny a man that when he made his niece a prisoner he drove heavy nails into the sashes of the single window giving light to her wretched cell to prevent their being opened. He even saw to it that no pen, pencil or paper remained in 'Nastasia's room wherewith she could write a note to be smuggled surreptitiously out from under his watchful eyes. His caution stopped just short of boarding up the window itself.
It was early morning following the night when 'Nastasia had been brought face to face with the three unlovely conspirators and been told she must assassinate Admiral Andrevieff. The girl was frantic with fear, for in blunt words she had been told her failure to carry out the will of her niters would mean her own death. The night when she should dance before Andrevieff and lure him within reach of a dagger stroke was now less than ten hours away.
For the twentieth time since daylight 'Nastasia threw herself into a chair before the window and let her eyes range over the grimy batteries of glass across the way. She started and a hand went swiftly to her lips to stop a gasp.
A pot of pink geraniums stood on the window sill of the second of the four windows directly over the way and fairly opposite her own. Masking curtains dropped behind the blossoms.
During all the time of her stay in the Hôtel Anvers a pot of pink geraniums had graced the sill of a window opposite.
'Nastasia stood up, pulling aside the dirty curtains which screened her window, and gazed as if absorbed, not at the bit of fresh color at her level in the opposite window but down into the street.
The pot of pink geraniums moved—with no hand visible—from one end of the window sill to the other. 'Nastasia caught the movement out of the tail of her eye and nodded her head just perceptibly. Then she hurried to her closet and snatched up a black skirt. She seated herself close to her window with a drawn-back curtain concealing her face and the skirt propped high on her knee. Against this background dead black one slim hand moved for a pink geranium to see.
It traced capital letters, very slowly, very meticulously—letters with a sweep of line a foot long. First a C; then a large E; double twist of an S; a stroke of one slim finger down with a cross-stroke for a T.
In French a message to the pink geranium began to be spelled out: “It is arranged. To-night at ten. At home of——”
A key rattled in the lock. 'Nastasia's tracing hand dropped. Uncle Smirnoff bustled in to find his niece stitching a tear in a black skirt.
“Aha, my pet! Preparing grave clothes for your own sweet self, I see. Make them roomy, little dumb sheep—roomy. For when they find you in the Thames you will have grown.”
'Nastasia looked up at the grinning face, flame-wreathed, with a clear gaze. “You will have no need to cast me in the Thames,” she said. “I shall kill Andrevieff to-night.”
ROUND smears of light punched holes through the creeping night fog in the circle of Piccadilly when Jim Hagan stepped out of a taxi into the near-by lane called Jeremy Street. The hour was near eight when all the night world of London is astream theater-ward.
The newspaper man was admitted to Popondrov's rooms. Restlessly he paced before the fire, waiting the coming of the Russian, who was in his bath. After an eternity of ten minutes the blond young man came striding in, wrapped about in a bathrobe of dizzy Persian design.
“A thousand pardons, dear fellow! I am frightfully late. But tell me! What news?”
“I've found out where 'Nastasia lives and I'm on my way down there now to see her.”
“No, man, you don't say!” Popondrov's face was alight with joy which was speedily clouded over by an afterthought. “But, hang it all—my chief—a very imperative engagement—late in keeping it already, you see. I simply can't go with you.”
“Your chief?” Hagan's news instinct, which was a sixth sense, pushed to the surface for the instant. He had not attributed any responsibility whatever to Popondrov—no subordination to a superior.
“The Admiral—I mean to say, a certain very good friend absolutely expects me to accompany him to a function to-night.” The man's confusion was manifest. “You must know, dear fellow, nothing but positive orders would keep me from going with you to 'Nastasia. But, I say, pop into my dressing-room and tell me all about it while I dive into my clothes.”
Hagan suffered no disappointment over the other's inability to go with him to the address he had obtained not two hours before. He would greatly have preferred playing his lone hand to the end; only his pledged word to Popondrov the morning of the exchange of confidences in Lemon Court that he would report any news of the girl's discovery had brought Hagan here. Yes, and one other circumstance which had baffled him beyond measure; there was just a chance the Russian could throw light upon a fresh cross-current of mystery.
While the dandy fussed at studs and softly swore at the intricacies of settling a dress tie in its place, Hagan detailed for him the steps of his search which now, after the third day, gave promise of reward. He came to the circumstance of the imprisoned cabby, Highston.
“When I finally managed to see Highston two hours ago,” Hagan burst out, “the man at first wouldn't talk. Said somebody else had come to him in jail only yesterday asking the same questions about the trip he took with fares from the Hôtel Anvers. Somebody else, mind you! Now what do you make of that?”
Popondrov's head came around with a jerk. Blank surprise was written on his face. “Why—why, who could be doing that? I don't believe anybody in England aside from myself—and you, of course—knows 'Nastasia. Somebody from Russia who knew her there—no, that is unbelievable; her friends there are all dead.
“Er—do you think it's possible Scotland Yard may have got wind of Smirnoff and—”
“I have a friend there,” Hagan interrupted. “Just came from an interview with him. He denies any knowledge; and he would give me the straight of it if he knew.”
“What then?” Popondrov's far from nimble imagination was leaning heavily on Hagan's.
“Just this possibility left,” was the American's surmise; “Smirnoff may be suspected by the head guns of the Soviet back in Moscow, if he is the Bolshevik agent you credit him with being, and they have set trailers to check up on him.”
He arose to go. Now that Popondrov could give him no clue to the mystery of the crossed trail of search, Hagan's impatience to push it to the end was mounting. “I'll hop down to the Hôtel de Flandres,” he said, “and look over the ground. If things are right I'll take the girl away. I think I can handle any situation that bobs up,”
“TAKE 'Nastasia away!” Evidently this highly essential corollary to the achievement of finding 'Nastasia had not yet engaged Popondrov's speculation. “But, man, where will you take her?”
“I'll tell you that after I've done it,” was Hagan's farewell, and in less than a minute he was in his taxi, leaving a very distraught lover behind him.
The fog closed down tighter as he was carried deeper into a strange wilderness bound for the address in Pimlico which a near-murderer had given him.
His machine gained the twisted byways of Pimlico, and the driver with muttered curses stopped now and again to turn his spotlight on a street sign. Groping thus, they came to Green Arbor Walk. The taxi was slowly following one curb line when two eyes of light suddenly winked out of the fog ahead. With a grind of brakes the two cars halted, fenders touching. Their drivers searched vocabularies for words to frame their feelings. By a trick of chance the spotlight on Hagan's car, left glowing from the last street sign in inspection, fell full into the black cavern of the other tonneau.
It showed the face of 'Nastasia, clear-cut as a marble bust before black velvet.
Hagan, half risen from his seat, blinked and looked again. Yes, there was the face he had carried in memory since last he had seen it framed by the benevolent chintz of the bishop chair—great black eyes, warm full lips, childish curve of chin to throat. And as a baleful penumbra to this vision of beauty, right beside the clean round of one dusky cheek was a hint of fiery whisker, the bulk of a black shoulder.
The two cars were backing away from each other. Hagan softly let down the window before him and spoke low to his driver.
“Follow that car as far as it goes. A pound besides the fare in it for you if you don't lose it.”
“Ur-r!” was the grudging acceptance of orders. The taxi man already had begun to turn before the tonneau of the opposing car was opposite Hagan's window. When he had completed his maneuver the red star of the other's tail light was blinking to extinction in the fog.
The chase would not have lasted long had the fog not mercifully shredded thin when the two cars were threading through Hyde Park. On the long stretch of Edgeware Road the gray murk thickened again and Hagan, on the edge of his seat and with every fiber of him strained to breaking, watched a red star ahead disappear and swing back to vision half a dozen times. Regent's Park was skirted—a bulk of forest heavy in gloom. Silent streets were come to: streets lined with high walls hedging off from an unreal world mysteries of mansions unseen.
At the end of eons of anxiety Hagan's car began to slow. He leaned out of his opened window and saw the lights of cars parked along a curb. Just ahead the red dot that had been so elusive over miles of streets was slowing to a stop beneath a murky light set in the masonry of a high garden gate. Hagan quickly shoved two pound notes into the hand of his chauffeur and leaped to the darkness of the walk.
Just in time to hear the creak of hinges and to catch a glimpse of a black uncovered head as it passed by the side of a man with red whiskers under the arch of the gate. A harsh click marked the closing of the iron grille behind them.
Three minutes later Hagan was over that garden wall—a friendly tree limb had given him vantage for a high leap—and he felt the mold of a garden under his feet. Blackness impenetrable pressed upon him.
ANDREVIEFF, one-time admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, was in a mellow mood. Above the banks of roses and dazzle of silver on the table his thin, bearded face—the face of a jaded satyr—showed a play of lively animation. He was charmed with his hostess, a woman whose manner possessed just that requisite touch of provocative boldness to flick the dulled sensibilities of one such as Andrevieff. The company of fifteen pleased him: most of them refugees from the imperial régime in Russia; a scattering of lively Englishwomen of the set since made notorious by the memoirs of one of their number. This little dinner intime, so discreetly arranged to protect from the social world the incognito of the guest of honor, was Andrevieff's first relaxation since coming to London on his mission of importance; he was making the most of it.
Hardly so with his aide and confidential courier Popondrov. That young man was as miserable as a man could be without making a spectacle of himself. Saddled with a dinner partner who essayed roguish love-making and rippled light ribaldries off her tongue, Popondrov was hard put to it to maintain the rôle he had established for himself in the swift circle of the émigrés here in London. The wretched man's inner mind was in a fever of speculation concerning what might be going on in a low street of Pimlico; how fared the mission of a certain forthright American fellow on rescue bent. This Hagan: after all, was it only what he called ridiculously his news sense that was prompting him to all this exertion in the matter of a lost 'Nastasia? Did this clear-eyed chap with the devilish faculty for going to the root of things wish to find the girl only to build a newspaper column out of his success?
“And now, my dear Admiral”—it was the charming hostess who included all the white shirt-fronts in her gesture—“instead of the ladies withdrawing to leave you men free to discuss our frailties, you will pay us the honor of accompanying us to the music room. Perhaps there I may be able to show you a paragon of feminine beauty by which all of us unfortunate women may be most cruelly held in comparison.”
She led the way through tapestried halls to a large room on the ground floor which once might have been a conservatory looking out on the park of trees, but which had been converted into a miniature theater. Tapestries hung across the walls of glass, screening them. At the far end of the room a small stage was raised a few feet above the floor and made to seem remote by a trick of massed palms at either end of the proscenium. Curtains of black velvet dropped behind these.
When her guests had been seated at little tables and periwigged servants had passed coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes Madame the hostess summoned to her a pallid young man with musician's hair and put a question or two. He nodded and disappeared behind the curtains, soon to reappear with three musicians. Two of them carried violins under their arms; a third held a strange lyre shape with little discs of silver suspend in ranks thereon. They took their seats before the masking palms at the stage front. There was a scraping of strings. The lights flickered out.
Suddenly the room was clamorous with a wild strain of strings like the neighing of mares; that and a furious drubbing of metal discs in harmony. The shadowy curtains parted. Light beyond them, at first impalpable as beginning glimmerings of dawn, slowly waxed to reveal the stage a fairy glade of greenery. It was a sacred grove on old Lesbos; in the deep center stood a single marble shaft surmounted by a bust of Astarte, pagan goddess of love and life.
The bacchanalia of the violins swept into frenzy. Then out into the sacred grove darted a lithe figure. She was all white flesh and shaggy wolf skin. Her night-black hair tumbled madly down over one white shoulder from a head thrown far back in ecstasy. Arms like white reeds wove vivid patterns over her head to bring cup-shaped cymbals to clash. Sharp votive cries sprang from parted lips.
“'Nastasia!” The cry out of the dark where sat the audience was half a gasp. Young Popondrov was on his feet.
The dancer wavered, missed a step, then recovered. Her head did not turn to the direction of the cry. Popondrov sank into his seat. Habit of repression, which was his code, was again master of him. The stir about the tables in the dark which Popondrov's exclamation had caused quickly subsided before the magic lure on the stage.
Now the little votary was kneeling before the bust of Astarte, and her straightened arms were swinging in wide arcs to the sharp clap of the cymbals. Now up and striding stiff-legged, she exemplified unconscious pride of youth in the springtime of the world. The stride dissolve into a run, a gallop. Frenzy seized her. She whirled; she dipped. Her bared legs twinkled mazily against the green of the forest glade. Her tireless arms seemed pale serpents lancing at the air.
The dark beyond the stage was breathless with suspense. Jaded guests to whom sensuous novelties were strangers found themselves enthralled. Andrevieff, unheeding the whispered pleading for commendation from the woman by his side, filled his eyes, filled his whole cindered soul with the glory of youth exultant.
With a final pirouette on stiffened toes before the goddess Astarte the little dancer sank exhausted at the foot of the marble. Curtains rustled softly across the sacred grove to shut it from sight.
From behind the curtains a scream—sound of a pistol shot—a coughing bellow which died in a groan.
MEANWHILE—starveling word at the behest of the writer incompetent to report all three rings of a circus simultaneously—what of Jim Hagan, come as prowler in the outer dark? Sufficiently diverting his adventures in a shadowed garden of St. John's Wood and immediately elsewhere.
After his drop from the wall he found himself in a copse of thorny broom distinctly hostile. Making his way carefully and groping out of the thicket, he perceived parallel slits of lights at a distance through the trees; these would mark the house which had swallowed up 'Nastasia and the slaver Smirnoff. Dodging from tree trunk to box hedge, Hagan made devious advance upon the lighted windows.
He had not taken twenty steps when he got the shock of his life. Lifting one leg high to clear a small hedgerow, he planted his foot on something that moved. Instantly his leg jerked back. A dark head and shoulder lifted cautiously above the hedge.
“That you, Hunter?” came the challenge in a low whisper.
“Hum,” Hagan ventured, his heart hammering.
“Well, bear around to the right of the house,” came the order. “You'll find the chief stationed somewhere near the conservatory.”
Hagan lost no time making off before further exchange of conversation with a mysterious shape in the fog might be necessary. He was dumfounded. What could this mean—“the chief”—men who spoke clear English taking up stations here about a mansion in St. John's Wood?
A raid? The earmarks of such an event were recognizable. But a raid by whom and against whom? Was this house in the dark park a Red headquarters against which Scotland Yard might be moving? If so, what particular event—what circumstance wherein 'Nastasia might be playing even an unwilling part—was going forward to precipitate action by the sleuths from Whitehall? Hagan felt his skin prickling as, stealthily, he made a detour.
He settled himself in the safe shadow of a great syringa bush perhaps fifty feet away from where a faint glimmer of glass marked a bowed wing of the house for a conservatory. None could find him here unless the searcher actually laid a hand on him. He needed respite and security in order to do some thinking.
Absolutely nothing for him to do but bide his time and when action came to join in it as best he could, trusting to the darkness to cover his identity until he was haply behind those blurs of light showing through the trees.
The minutes dragged. Once he saw, or thought he saw, the head of a man outlined for an instant against dull radiance which seemed to be escaping from a faultily screened window of the conservatory. Again, after an eternity of waiting, a whistle somewhere away over by the gate shrilled a single thin pipe. This was followed a minute later by the noise of some heavy gas vehicle creaking to a stop in the street beyond.
Then a sound of music—a wild, dissonant skirl of fiddles coming faintly from behind the conservatory glass. The barbaric bray of it chilled Hagan.
When the music was at its wildest the watcher in the syringa bush was brought up standing at sight of figures running crouched across the brief strip of lawn between the nearest shadow of hedges and the conservatory wing. Three—four—six of them for an instant were visible, then melted into the shadowy bulk of the glassed extension. Impulse pushed Hagan out of his hiding and across the open zone. He, too, dissolved into the uniform blackness beneath a low balcony. His was one of several bodies packed there; pitchy darkness prevented a count of the number by any of them.
“Now, men, when we go through look out for Smirnoff,” a voice whispered. “He probably will shoot. Kill him if you have to, Hunter, you and Gates round up the woman.”
The wild music within ceased. “Now!” came the command.
Hagan found himself clambering over the balustrade. A sharp snap and a glass door opened. Silently a file of men pushed through into a dimly lighted passage between stage scenery and the conservatory's outer wall. Caution prompted Hagan to permit the others to pass ahead of him.
NOT three paces had he taken when he heard a girl scream, then the sound of a revolver shot. He leaped forward. The passage opened into a small space behind scenes, brilliantly lighted.
There was the end of the night's drama: The toad-like figure of Smirnoff, the red man, asprawl upon the floor, an automatic clutched in his fingers; his beard burned like living flame against the chalk white of his flabby cheeks. A negro maid with apron over head shivering in hysteria. Men clustered round the narrow space—those men whom Hagan had followed in from the dark.
But what held Hagan's eye was a cowering figure half fallen against the prop of a stage piece away from the strong light. Her little body was partly clad in a wolf skin. Thin white arms were laced around her black head to shut out an odious sight. She sobbed convulsively.
Before Hagan could reach her the raiders were hurrying out onto the sylvan stage set. A light went up out there. An authoritative voice was saying, “Everybody keep seated!”
“'Nastasia!” Hagan leaned over a pelted shoulder to whisper. “'Nastasia, I'm here.”
Swiftly a little face framed in tumbling hair was turned to his. For a long instant black eyes, tear-flooded, were his to read the dawning wonder there. Then she murmured a little sigh and leaned heavily against him.
“Come! We'll get out of here,” was his command. He snatched up from a chair an evening coat of velvet and threw it round the girl's half naked shoulders. She suffered herself to be led down the passage and out onto the balcony overhanging the garden. There Hagan stopped, gathered a light weight into his arms, mounted the balustrade and jumped.
Swiftly he ran through the garden toward the gate. His way was unopposed until he had passed through the opening in the wall onto the road outside. A man in civilian's clothes stopped him.
“Chief's orders,” Hagan said shortly, and he pushed by to choose one of the waiting guests' cars at random. The chauffeur and footman, awed by the presence at the curb of a police van and waiting bobbies, offered no demur when Hagan commandeered a car. He lifted his light burden into the upholstered snugness.
“Where shall we drive to, sir?” the footman ventured.
“Anywhere you please until I give you further orders,” was Hagan's surprising answer, and he took his seat beside the little bundle of wolf pelt and velvet in the dark tonneau. He put one comforting arm about that bundle and drew it close; no cavalier liberty this; the whole pitiful aspect of a tiny shadow mound there in the perfumed dark cried for that comforting arm.
And—wonder of wonders!—a bare arm crept hesitantly up to find his neck and there clung while cold fingers patted it. A child afraid of the dark was finding delicious protection from bogies.
So they trundled through the dark and the light-splashed fog, a mystified man at the wheel taking turns at random. Hagan was silent, for what could he say with such a gulf between her tongue and his?
Finally in a tired murmur: “I am glad. I knew you would come—sometime.”
Hagan's start almost lost him his seat. “English!” he exclaimed. “You speak English, then?”
“A little—Djim Hagan,” whispered 'Nastasia.
“But—but that night—in my chambers you——”
“Yes—yes, Djim Hagan, then I must not speak it. For you would ask questions—and I could not answer. I am——”
“Yes, you are—what? What's the answer to all this riddle?” The man's impatience would not be denied.
“INTELLIGENCE,” 'Nastasia sighed as if this single word lifted a great weight of duplicity from her. “Agent of English Intelligence—in Russia, then here in London. Now I tell you, for my work is done and—and no more—never——”
The word “Intelligence” stiffened Hagan's spine. Most potent cog in Britain's war machine; tirelessly working engine of espionage and contre-espionage in all the subcellars of enemy chancelleries: This mite of a creature one of that engine's gears! Incredible!
As if to forestal him the girl went on in her drained voice: “That night in your chambers—Uncle Smirnoff sent me there to search Popondrov's papers for report of Admiral Andrevieff, his affairs in London. I slept, knowing Popondrov would not come, caring not who came. The constant fear—it made me a madwoman, Djim Hagan: one with no care for what happens. But to-night Smirnoff, he is gone; she, the Prussian woman, most dangerous spy in England, she is now with Intelligence—safe. And so——”
“And so now you begin to care what happens?” Even sudden boldness in Hagan's voice could not hide its trembling. He felt fingers tighten about his neck—a yielding of the wolf pelt under his arm.
“Now again—now again I begin to care, my Djim——” His lips denied the use a period to that sentence.
The End
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 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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