“I undertake not to breathe a word to anybody,” replied Harold.
“To nobody,” repeated the Professor emphatically. “Not even to Hanslet, however urgent the need may seem. I am going away for a time; how long that time may be I cannot tell. I do not wish my whereabouts to be known, as that would possibly place me in considerable danger.”
“You’re not surely going alone, sir!” exclaimed Harold. “You’ll let me come with you, especially as you say there is danger attached to your journey?”
But the Professor shook his head. “The danger may exist in London equally,” he replied. “It is essential that someone I can trust should remain here. Otherwise, my boy, I should be more than pleased to take you with me. Now, listen very carefully to these instructions. Do not leave the house for long at a time, especially in the evening. Open all my correspondence, and deal with it to the best of your ability. Should there be among it any letter of a startling character, put a message in the personal column of The Times, ‘The asp has struck,’ and sign it ‘Cleopatra.’ Do you follow this so far?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Harold simply, but gazing at his employer in bewilderment. There was something theatrical about these extraordinary precautions utterly foreign to the Professor’s usual methods of procedure.
“Very well,” continued the Professor. “If I find it necessary to communicate with you it will be by letter. The contents of the letter you may neglect. It may be typewritten, or in a disguised hand. You will know the letter is from me by the fact that it will be addressed in the first place to Westbourne Grove. The word Grove will be ruled through, and the correct word Terrace substituted for it. The envelope will in fact, convey the message. If the contents of the letter are to be read, which will only be if any unexpected developments take place, the envelope will be stamped with a three-halfpenny stamp. If, on the other hand, it is stamped with a penny and a halfpenny stamp, you will immediately proceed to the Post Office from which it was sent, which you will discover from the postmark, where you will wait till I join you. If the envelope is stamped with three separate halfpenny stamps, you will go to Inspector Hanslet, explain what I am now telling you, and persuade him to come with you at once to the place indicated by the postmark. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, sir,” replied Harold. “I’ll just make a note of that code, if you don’t mind, sir.”
“No, make no notes!” commanded the Professor. “I have purposely contrived the code so simply that you can carry it in your head. You must realize that our actions will very probably be watched, in fact, I should not be surprised to learn that they have been under observation for some considerable time. Now, the next thing I want you to do is to type out a few copies of this paragraph and distribute them to the news agencies.”
He held out a scrap of paper as he spoke, and Harold took it from him. It ran as follows: “Dr. Priestley, whose scientific writings have rendered his name familiar to the British public, has received a cablegram begging him to deliver a series of lectures at a number of the Australian Universities. Dr. Priestley, who has just completed the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Some Aspects of Modern Thought, has accepted the invitation. Since he is anxious to return to England before the end of the year, he has left London hurriedly via Southampton and Havre, in order to catch the Celestial liner Oporto at Marseilles. He will travel by the Oporto to Sydney.”
In spite of several attempts upon Harold’s part, he could elicit no further information from the Professor. He typed out the paragraph, and took it round to the agencies himself. When he returned, he found the Professor upstairs busily engaged in piling a quantity of clothes, which he was never likely to wear, into three or four large trunks.
“You aren’t really going to Australia, are you, sir?” he ventured.
“It would be quite useless for me to announce the fact unless I were to make every appearance of so doing,” replied the Professor tartly. “The boat train for Havre leaves Waterloo at half-past nine, I understand. You will arrange for two taxis to be here at a quarter to nine. I always like to give myself plenty of time to catch the train.”
The Professor was normally one of those people who travel without any fuss. But on this occasion it seemed that he could not accept anything unless he had seen it done with his own eyes. He stood on the steps of the house for at least five minutes, directing the taxi-drivers where and how to distribute his trunks. When he and Harold arrived at Waterloo, he insisted upon interviewing innumerable officials, to each of whom he gave his name, asking endless and apparently irrelevant questions. Finally, having secured his seat, he walked up and down the platform several times the whole length of the train, instructing Harold as to the disposition of his household in his absence. It was not until the train was on the point of starting that he took his seat.
“Remember what I told you, my boy,” were his last words as the train moved off.
The Professor had booked to Paris, where he arrived before noon on Friday. He fussed about the Gare St. Lazare for some little time, and finally put his trunks in the cloakroom. He then went to one of the smaller hotels in the Quartier de l’Europe, booked a room, for which he paid
