The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

both of them striking out through the cold water toward the distant sloop, the nails in their bootheels prising themselves out. St. Ives fished out his clasp knife and offered it up to the machine in order that his trousers pocket might be saved. Finally, when they were well away from the snapping line and rollicking bag, they stopped swimming to watch.

For a moment their basket still tossed on the surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.

Within minutes the deflated canvas followed the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren’t for the sloop sending a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons, seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing through his beard.

“Quite a display,” he said to St. Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. “That was as profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took careful notes. There was a look on your face, man — I could see it even at such a distance as that — a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist I’d sketch it out for you…” He went on this way, Parsons did, laughing through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to Dover, after leaving the area encircled with red-painted buoys.

* * *

At the very moment that they were aloft over the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for Sterne Bay. The business of the icehouse had become clear to me while I lounged in Norway. Days had passed, though, since my confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.

At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St. Ives and Hasbro hadn’t yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons’s company would have been better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep — drink and sleep being a substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that last fateful knock on the door, though — reminded me that while I slept, no end of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door mightn’t swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn’t roll like a melon into the center of the floor…

A nap was out of the question. But what would I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no notion of my having returned to Sterne Bay.

Still, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks. I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty good yards or so before becoming a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no one about.

The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn, I’d confound them.

Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages, squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me up short.

I had never discovered whether my rubber elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I’m too easily put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn’t be. I angled toward the door, up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts, and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, “Hello again,” merely caused her to squint.

She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked at me over them. “Yes?” she said.

Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me, after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was through being pleasant. I can’t stand cheeky superiority in people, especially in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the inn; perhaps she didn’t. There was nothing in any of it that justified her putting on airs.

“See here,” I said, leaning on the counter. “I’m looking for a woman and her son. I believe they’re staying here or at any rate were staying here last week. They look remarkably alike, frighteningly so, if you take my meaning. The son, who might be as old as thirty, carries with him an India-rubber elephant that makes a noise.”

“A noise?” she said, apparently having digested nothing of the rest of my little speech. The notion of an elephant making a noise, of my having gone anatomical on her, had shattered her ability to understand the clearest sort of English, had obliterated reason and logic.

“Never mind the noise,” I said, losing my temper. “Disregard it.” I caught myself, remembering St. Ives’s dealings with the landlady at the Crown and Apple. Tread softly, I reminded myself, and I forced a smile. “That’s right. It’s the woman and her son that I wanted to ask you about. She’s my mother’s cousin, you see. I got a letter in the post, saying that she and her son — that would be, what? my cousin twice removed, little Billy, we used to call him, although that wasn’t his name, not actually — anyway, that she’s here on holiday, and I’m anxious to determine where she’s staying.”

The woman still looked down her nose at me, waiting for me to go on, as if what I had said so far hadn’t made half enough sense, couldn’t have begun to express what it was I wanted.

I winked at her and brassed right along. “I asked myself, ‘Where in all of Sterne Bay is my mother’s favorite cousin likely to stay? Why, in the prettiest inn that the town has to offer. That’s the ticket.’ And straightaway I came here, and I’m standing before you now to discover whether she is indeed lodged at this inn.”

That ought to have made it clear to the woman, and apparently it did, for the next thing she said was, “What is the lady’s name?” in a sort of schoolteacher’s voice, a tone that never fails to freeze my blood — doubly so this time because I hadn’t any earthly idea what the woman’s name was.

“She has several,” I said weakly, my brain stuttering. “In the Spanish tradition. She might be registered under Larson, with an o.”

I waited, drumming my fingers on the oak counter as she perused the register. Why had I picked Larson? I can’t tell you. It was the first name that came to mind, like Abner Benbow.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at me.

“Perhaps…,” I said, gesturing toward the book. She hesitated, but apparently couldn’t think of any good reason to keep it away from me; there was nothing in what I asked to make her suspicious, and she wouldn’t, I suppose, want to insult the favored cousin several times removed of one of her registered guests. So she pushed her glasses back up her nose, sniffed at me, and turned the book around on the counter.

Fat lot of good it would do me. I didn’t know what the woman’s name was. What sort of charade was I playing? The rubber elephant had been my only clue, and that hadn’t fetched any information out of her. If I brought it back into the conversation now, she’d call the constable and I’d find myself strapped to a bed in Colney Hatch. I was entirely at sea, groping for anything at all to keep me afloat.

I gave the list a perfunctory glance, ready to thank her and leave. One of the names nearly flew out at me: Pule, Leona Pule.

Suddenly I knew the identity of the madman in the coach. I knew who the mother was. I seemed to know a thousand things, and from that knowledge sprang two thousand fresh mysteries. It had been Willis Pule that had stolen my elephant. I should have seen it, but it had been years since he had contrived a wormlike desire for my wife Dorothy, my fiancee then. You wouldn’t call it love; not if you knew him. He went mad when he couldn’t possess her, and very nearly murdered any number of people. He was an apprentice of Dr. Narbondo at the time, but they fell out, and Pule was last seen insane, comatose in the back of Narbondo’s wagon, being driven away