The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

too. They would arrest me along with Godall, is what they would do, as an accomplice. My word is nothing to the constabulary. And I was certain that they wouldn’t keep him two minutes anyway, once they knew who he was.

The rain fell harder, if that were possible, and the flames died away almost as fast as they’d risen, and the fire brigade, when it clanged up, had nothing at all to do but wait. The smoke boiled away, too, on the instant. Just like that. You would have thought there’d be a fresh billow, what with the sudden rain and all, but there wasn’t; it was simply gone, leaving some whitish smoke tumbling up out of the embers of the dwindling fire.

It struck me as funny at the time, the fire and blast so quick and fierce, and then the smoke just dying like that. It’s a consequence of hanging about with men like St. Ives and Godall, I guess, that you jump to conclusions about things; you want everything to be a mystery. No, that’s not quite it: you suspect everything of being a mystery; what you want is a different story, which is to say, no story at all. There was a story in this, though. It took about thirty seconds of thought to conclude that it had been an incendiary bomb and a lot of chemical smoke, which had fairly quickly used itself up. The explosion had to have been manufactured.

My biscuits, it turned out — the tin I’d dropped in the road — had been trampled, and I left for Jermyn Street empty-handed. It’s a good walk in the rain — by that I mean a long one — but it gave me time to think about two things: whether the tragedy that afternoon had anything to do with Lord Kelvin’s machine (the presence of Godall rather argued that it had) and what I would tell Dorothy about it all. Dorothy, if you don’t already know, is my wife, and at the moment she was a wife who wouldn’t be keen on my getting caught up in another of St. Ives’s adventures when the last one hadn’t quite got cold yet. I had the unsettling notion that “caught up” was just the right verb, even if a little on the passive side; this had all the earmarks of that sort of thing.

St. Ives wasn’t in Harrogate, at his laboratory. He was in London paying a visit to my father-in-law — Mr. William Keeble of Jermyn Street, the toy maker and inventor — consulting him on the building of an apparatus that doesn’t concern us here, and is too wild and unlikely for me to mention without throwing a cloud of suspicion and doubt over the whole story. But it was fortuitous, St. Ives’s being in London, because if he hadn’t been I would have had to send a message up to Harrogate, and he would have come quick enough, maybe to find nothing at all and have wasted a trip.

As it was, I ran him down that night in an oyster bar near Leicester Square. The rain had given off, but the clouds hadn’t, and it felt like snow. St. Ives sat reading a Standard that wasn’t long off the presses. News of the explosion, however, didn’t appear on the front page, which was fairly bursting with an extravagant story of another sort altogether. And here my own story digresses for a bit.

I wish I could quote it to you, this second story, but I haven’t got it anymore; so I’ll tell it to you straight out, although I warn you that I can’t do it justice, and that you wouldn’t half believe me if I could. Any good library, though, can afford you a copy of a London newspaper from the day in question, if you’re the sort of Thomas in the popular phrase.

And note that I haven’t tried to sandbag you with the notion that I’d seen this second tragedy as well as the explosion up in Holborn: what I’m telling you now is neither art nor journalism, but a sort of lager and lime mix-up of both, and maybe nearer the truth for that.

* * *

It was what the Standard referred to as an “imbroglio,” although that, I’m afraid, is a small word, and this was no small matter. A lorry had very nearly overturned on Whitefriars Street. It had been running along south, heavily laden, toward the Embankment, its load covered in canvas, several layers, and lashed down against the wind and possible rain. Some few witnesses claimed that there was a man beneath the canvas, too, peering out at the day, although no one saw him so clearly as to identify him beyond their generally agreeing that he ran to tall and thin, and was hatless and nearly bald.

The lorry, angling round across Tudor Street and onto Carmelite, caught a bit of stone curb with its wheel. There was a shifting of cargo and a horrible shout from the half-hidden man on board, and the wagon, as if it were a great fish on the end of a played-out line, shuddered almost to a stop, the horses stumbling and their shoes throwing sparks on the pavement. A terrible mechanical howling set in, as if an engine had just that minute been started up.

The driver — an enormous man with a beard — cursed and slammed at the reins and whipped the poor beasts nearest him as if to take the hide off their flanks. They tried to drive on, too — desperately, to hear the witnesses tell of it — but the lorry, or rather the cargo, seemed to compel the horses back, and for the space of a long minute it looked as if time had stopped dead, except for the suddenly falling rain and the cursing and the flailing of the driver. Then there was the snap of a stay chain coming loose and the lorry lurched forward, the chain swinging round into the spokes, and there was such a groaning and screeching and banging that it seemed sure the wagon would go to pieces on the road and the horses plummet down Carmelite and into the river.

It wasn’t the lorry, though, that was tearing itself apart. The air suddenly was full of flying debris, shooting out of the buildings along the street: nails and screws pried themselves out of door casings and clapboards; an iron pot flew from an open window as if it had been thrown; door knockers clanked and clattered and hammered in the hands of a dozen anxious ghosts and then tore away from their doorfronts with a screech of overstrained steel. Even the two iron hitching posts in front of the Temple Inn lurched out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stone fragments, and all of it shot away in the direction of that impossible lorry, a sort of horizontal hailstorm of hardware clanging and banging against the mysterious cargo and clamping tight to it as if glued there.

A man on the street, the paper said, was struck down by one of the posts, and wasn’t expected to recover his senses, and two or three others had to be attended to by the surgeon, who removed “shrapnel and all manner of iron debris.” Shopwindows were shattered by stuff inside flying out through them, and the wagon itself, as if possessed, rocked up and down on its hounds like a spring pole.

During the melee there sounded an awful screaming and scrabbling from under the canvas, where the unfortunate passenger (fortunate, actually, that he was padded by several folds of heavy canvas) fought to clamber farther around behind the cargo. His cries attested to his partial failure to accomplish this feat, and if the strange business had gone on a moment longer he would have been beaten dead, and half a dozen houses along Tudor and Carmelite dismantled nail by nail and left in a heap.

The howling noise stopped, though, just like that. The horses jerked forward and away, hauling the lorry with its broken stay chain and spokes, and disappearing around onto the Embankment as the rush of iron debris fell straight to the roadway in a shower, clanking along in the wake of the wagon until it all tired out and lay still.

The street lay deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute and a half. Rain began to pour down (I’ve already described it; it was the same rain that saved the baker’s shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean, no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal Academy — a machine works — had been broken into and a complicated piece of machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited…It was thought at first (by anyone who wasn’t certifiable) that this business of the flying iron might be connected to the theft of the machine.

The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman from the Royal Academy — the secretary, Mr. Parsons — denied it flat out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by nightfall. There wasn’t any connection, he said. Couldn’t be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn’t hold with flying door knockers.

Tell that to the man laid out by the iron post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the oyster bar, too — he and Hasbro, St. Ives’s gentleman’s gentleman.

But this is where art leans in and covers the page with her hand — she being leery of making things plain when the story would be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. “All in good time” has ever been the way of art.

* * *

And anyway it wasn’t until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain — absolutely certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives from the scientific. I wasn’t certain of anything yet.

I was sitting on one of Godall’s sofas, I remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already — indolence being one of them — when a man