By the mercy of Heaven, the chauffeur’s master was a moneylender 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 Powerhouse 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 whiskeys-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, thickset fellow, who had been a good middleweight 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 “Powerhouse.” 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
