I did not wait to be called, but rose about seven, dressed, and went downstairs. I heard the sound of a car on the gravel of the drive, and to my delight saw that Stagg had arrived I wanted to get away from the house as soon as possible, and I had no desire to meet its master again in this world.
The grim housekeeper, who answered my summons, received my explanation in silence. Breakfast would be ready in twenty minutes: eight was Mr Lumley’s hour for it.
“Mr Andrew Lumley?” I asked with a start.
“Mr Andrew Lumley,” she said.
So that was my host’s name. I sat down at a bureau in the hall and did a wildly foolish thing.
I wrote a letter, beginning “Dear Mr Lumley,” thanking him for his kindness and explaining the reason of my early departure. It was imperative, I said, that I should be in London by mid-day. Then I added: “I wish I had known who you were last night, for I think you know an old friend of mine, Charles Pitt-Heron.”
Breakfastless I joined Stagg in the car, and soon we were swinging down from the uplands to the shallow vale of the Wey. My thoughts were very little on my new toy or on the midsummer beauties of Surrey. The friend of Pitt-Heron, who knew about his going to Bokhara, was the maniac who dreamed of the “Power-House.” There were going to be dark scenes in the drama before it was played out.
IV.
I FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF THE SUPER-BUTLER
My first thought, as I journeyed towards London, was that I was horribly alone in this business.
Whatever was to be done I must do it myself, for the truth was I had no evidence which any authority would recognise. Pitt-Heron was the friend of a strange being who collected objects of art, probably passed under an alias in South London, and had absurd visions of the end of civilisation. That, in cold black and white, was all my story came to. If I went to the police they would laugh at me, and they would be right.
Now I am a sober and practical person, but, slender though my evidence was, it brought to my mind the most absolute conviction. I seemed to know Pitt-Heron’s story as if I had heard it from his own lips—his first meeting with Lumley and their growing friendship; his initiation into secret and forbidden things; the revolt of the decent man, appalled that his freakishness had led him so far; the realisation that he could not break so easily with his past and that Lumley held him in his power; and last, the mad flight under the pressure of overwhelming terror.
I could read, too, the purpose of that flight. He knew the Indian frontier as few men know it, and in the wild tangle of the Pamirs he hoped to baffle his enemy. Then from some far refuge he would send for his wife, and spend the rest of his days in exile. It must have been an omnipotent terror to drive such a man, young, brilliant rich, successful, to the fate of an absconding felon.
But Lumley was on his trail. So I read the telegram I had picked up on the floor of the Blackheath house, and my business was to frustrate the pursuit. Someone must have gone to Bokhara, some creature of Lumley’s, perhaps the super-butler I had met in the County Court. The telegram, for I had noted the date, had been received on the 27th day of May. It was now the 15th of June, so if someone had started immediately on its receipt, in all probability he would by now be in Bokhara.
I must find out who had gone, and endeavour to warn Tommy. I calculated that it would have taken him seven or eight days to get from Moscow by the Transcaspian probably he would find Pitt-Heron gone, but inquiries would set him on the track. I might be able to get in touch with him through the Russian officials. In any case, if Lumley were stalking Pitt-Heron, I, unknown and unsuspected, would be stalking Lumley.
And then in a flash I realised my folly.
The wretched letter I had written that morning had given the whole show away. Lumley knew that I was a friend of Pitt-Heron, and that I knew that he was a friend of Pitt-Heron. If my guess was right, friendship with Lumley was not a thing Charles was likely to confess to, and he would argue that my knowledge of it meant that I was in Charles’s confidence. I would therefore know of his disappearance and its cause, and alone in London would connect it with the decorous bachelor of the Albany. My letter was a warning to him that he could not play the game unobserved, and I, too, would be suspect in his eyes.
It was no good crying over spilt milk, and Lumley’s suspicions must be accepted. But I confess that the thought gave me the shivers. The man had a curious terror for me, a terror I cannot hope to analyse and reproduce for you. My bald words can give no idea of the magnetic force of his talk, the sense of brooking and unholy craft. I was proposing to match my wits against a master’s—one, too, who must have at his command an organisation far beyond my puny efforts. I have said that my first feeling was that of loneliness and isolation; my second was one of hopeless insignificance. It was a boy’s mechanical toy arrayed against a Power-House with its shining wheels and monstrous dynamos.
My first business was to get into touch with Tommy.
At that time I had a friend in one of the Embassies, whose acquaintance I had made on a dry-fly stream in Hampshire. I will not tell you his name, for he has since become a great figure in the world’s diplomacy, and I am by no means certain that the part he played in this tale was strictly in accordance with official etiquette. I had assisted him on the legal side in some of the international worries that beset all Embassies, and we had reached the point of intimacy which is marked by the use of Christian names and by dining frequently together. Let us call him Monsieur Felix. He was a grave young man, slightly my senior, learned, discreet, and ambitious, but with an engaging boyishness cropping up now and then under the official gold lace. It occurred to me that in him I might find an ally. I reached London about eleven in the morning, and went straight to Belgrave Square. Felix I found in the little library off the big secretaries’ room, a sunburnt sportsman fresh from a Norwegian salmon river. I asked him if he had half an hour to spare, and was told that the day was at my service.
“You know Tommy Deloraine?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And Charles Pitt-Heron?”
“I have heard of him.”
“Well, here is my trouble. I have reason to believe that Tommy has joined Pitt-Heron in Bokhara. If he has, my mind will be greatly relieved, for, though I can’t tell you the story, I can tell you that Pitt-Heron is in very considerable danger. Can you help me?”
Felix reflected. “That should be simple enough. I can wire in cypher to the Military Governor. The police there are pretty efficient, as you may imagine, and travellers don’t come and go without being remarked. I should be able to give you an answer within twenty-four hours. But I must describe Tommy. How does one do that in telegraphese?”
“I want you to tell me another thing,” I said. “You remember that Pitt- Heron has some reputation as a Central Asian traveller. Tommy, as you know, is as mad as a hatter. Suppose these two fellows at Bokhara, wanting to make a long trek into wild country—how would they go? You’ve been there, and know the lie of the land.”
Felix got down a big German atlas, and for half an hour we pored over it. From Bokhara, he said, the only routes for madmen ran to the south. East and north you got into Siberia; west lay the Transcaspian desert; but southward you might go through the Hissar range by Pamirski Post to Gilgit and Kashmir, or you might follow up the Oxus and enter the north of Afghanistan, or you might go by Merv into north-eastern Persia. The first he thought the likeliest route, if a man wanted to travel fast.
I asked him to put in his cable a suggestion about watching