old Devil, his master.’
‘If that’s how you feel, I can trust you to back me up,’ I said. ‘And the first thing I want you to do is to come and stay at my flat. God knows what may happen next, and two men are better than one. I tell you frankly, I’m nervous, and I would like to have you with me.’
Chapman had no objection. I accompanied him to his Bloomsbury lodgings, where he packed a bag, and we returned to the Down Street flat. The sight of his burly figure and sagacious face was relief to me in the mysterious darkness where I now found myself walking.
Thus began my housekeeping with Chapman, one of the queerest episodes in my life. He was the best fellow in the world, but I found that I had misjudged his character. To see him in the House you would have thought him a piece of granite, with his Yorkshire bluntness and hard, downright, north-country sense. He had all that somewhere inside him, but he was also as romantic as a boy. The new situation delighted him. He was quite clear that it was another case of the strife between Capital and Labour – Tommy and I standing for Labour, though he used to refer to Tommy in public as a ‘gilded popinjay,’ and only a month before had described me in the House as a ‘viperous lackey of Capitalism.’ It was the best kind of strife in which you had not to meet your adversary with long-winded speeches, but might any moment get a chance to pummel him with your fists. He made me ache with laughter. The spying business used to rouse him to fury. I don’t think he was tracked as I was, but he chose to fancy he was, and was guilty of assault and battery on one butcher’s boy, two cabbies, and a gentleman who turned out to be a bookmaker’s assistant. This side of him got to be an infernal nuisance, and I had many rows with him. Among other things, he chose to suspect my man Waters of treachery – Waters, who was the son of a gardener at home, and hadn’t wits enough to put up an umbrella when it rained.
‘You’re not taking this business rightly,’ he maintained one night. ‘What’s the good of waiting for these devils to down you? Let’s go out and down them.’ And he announced his intention, from which no words of mine could dissuade him, of keeping watch on Mr Andrew Lumley at the Albany.
His resolution led to a complete disregard of his Parliamentary duties. Deputations of constituents waited for him in vain. Of course he never got a sight of Lumley. All that happened was that he was very nearly given in charge more than once for molesting peaceable citizens in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly and Regent Street.
One night on my way home from the Temple I saw in the bills of the evening papers the announcement of the arrest of a Labour Member. It was Chapman, sure enough. At first I feared that he had got himself into serious trouble, and was much relieved to find him in the flat in a state of blazing anger. It seemed that he had found somebody whom he thought was Lumley, for he only knew him from my descriptions. The man was in a shop in Jermyn Street, with a car waiting outside, and Chapman had – politely, as he swore – asked the chauffeur his master’s name. The chauffeur had replied abusively, upon which Chapman had hailed him from the driver’s seat and shaken him till his teeth rattled. The owner came out, and Chapman was arrested and taken off to the nearest police-court. He had been compelled to apologise, and had been fined five pounds and costs.
By the mercy of Heaven the chauffeur’s master was a money-lender of evil repute, so the affair did Chapman no harm. But I was forced to talk to him seriously. I knew it was no use explaining that for him to spy on the Power-House was like an elephant stalking a gazelle. The only way was to appeal to his incurable romanticism.
‘Don’t you see,’ I told him, ‘that you are playing Lumley’s game? He will trap you sooner or later into some escapade which will land you in jail, and where will I be then? That is what he and his friends are out for. We have got to meet cunning with cunning, and lie low till we get our chance.’
He allowed himself to be convinced and handed over to me the pistol he had bought, which had been the terror of my life.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll keep quiet. But you promise to let me into the big scrap when it comes off.’
I promised. Chapman’s notion of the grand finale was a Homeric combat in which he would get his fill of fisticuffs.
He was an anxiety, but all the same he was an enormous comfort. His imperturbable cheerfulness and his racy talk were the tonics I wanted. He had plenty of wisdom, too. My nerves were getting bad those days, and, whereas I had rarely touched the things before, I now found myself smoking cigarettes from morning till night. I am pretty abstemious, as you know, but I discovered to my horror that I was drinking far too many whiskies-and-sodas. Chapman knocked me off all that, and got me back to a pipe and a modest nightcap. He did more, for he undertook to put me in training. His notion was that we should win in the end by superior muscles. He was a square, thick-set fellow, who had been a good middle-weight boxer. I could box a bit myself, but I improved mightily under his tuition. We got some gloves, and used to hammer each other for half an hour every morning. Then might have been seen the shameful spectacle of a rising barrister with a swollen lip and a black eye arguing in court and proceeding of an evening to his country’s legislature, where he was confronted from the opposite benches by the sight of a Leader of the People in the same vulgar condition.
In those days I wanted all the relief I could get, for it was a beastly time. I knew I was in grave danger, so I made my will and went through the other doleful performances consequent on the expectation of a speedy decease. You see I had nothing to grip on, no clear job to tackle, only to wait on the off-chance, with an atmosphere of suspicion thickening around me. The spying went on – there was no mistake about that – but I soon ceased to mind it, though I did my best to give my watchers little satisfaction. There was a hint of bullying about the spying. It is disconcerting at night to have a man bump against you and look you greedily in the face.
I did not go again to Scotland Yard, but one night I ran across Macgillivray in the club.
He had something of profound interest to tell me. I had asked about the phrase, the ‘Power-House’. Well, he had come across it, in the letter of a German friend, a private letter, in which the writer gave the results of his inquiries into a curious affair which a year before had excited Europe.
I have forgotten the details, but it had something to do with the Slav States of Austria and an Italian Students’ Union, and it threatened at one time to be dangerous. Macgillivray’s correspondent said that in some documents which were seized he found constant allusion to a thing called the Krafthaus, evidently the headquarters staff of the plot. And this same word Krafthaus had appeared elsewhere in a sonnet of a poet-anarchist who shot himself in the slums of Antwerp, in the last ravings of more than one criminal, in the extraordinary testament of Professor M of Jena, who, at the age of thirty-seven, took his life after writing a strange mystical message to his fellow-citizens.
Macgillivray’s correspondent concluded by saying that, in his opinion, if this Krafthaus could be found, the key would be discovered to the most dangerous secret organisation in the world. He added that he had some reason to believe that the motive power of the concern was English.
‘Macgillivray,’ I said, ‘you have known me for some time, and I fancy you think me a sober and discreet person. Well, I believe I am on the edge of discovering the secret of your Krafthaus. I want you to promise me that if in the next week I send you an urgent message you will act on it, however fantastic it seems. I can’t tell you more. I ask you to take me on trust, and believe that for anything I do I have tremendous reasons.’
He knit his shaggy grey eyebrows and looked curiously at me. ‘Yes, I’ll go bail for your sanity. It’s a good deal to promise, but if you make an appeal to me, I will see that it is met.’
Next day I had news from Felix. Tuke and the man called Saronov had been identified. If you are making inquiries about anybody it is fairly easy to find those who are seeking for the same person, and the Russian police, in tracking Tommy and Pitt-Heron, had easily come on the two gentlemen who were following the same trail. The two had gone by Samarkand, evidently intending to strike into the hills by a shorter route than the main road from Bokhara. The frontier posts had been warned, and the stalkers had become the stalked.