“Who are you?” he said. “I don’t know you.”
“Don’t you know me, Robin?” I said gently. “John Stockton.”
For a while he stared at me: then he shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” I went on. “Tell us why your poison is pumped up into the airship.”
“To stop the war,” he said instantly. “It flies over the place where they are fighting and sprays the poison down. And everyone touched by the poison dies.”
“It sounds fearfully jolly,” remarked Drummond. “And what happens if a shell bursts in the airship; or an incendiary bullet?”
A sudden look of cunning came on Robin’s face.
“That would not matter,” he answered. “Not one: nor even two. And an incendiary bullet is useless. Just death. Instantaneous, universal death.”
He stared out over the sea, and Drummond shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.
“Or better still, as I have told them all,” went on Robin dreamily, “is a big city. The rain of death. Think of it! Think of it in London. …”
“Good God!” With a sudden gasp Drummond got to his feet. “What are you saying, man? What do you mean?”
“The rain of death coming down from the sky. That would stop the war.”
“But there isn’t a war,” shouted Drummond, and Robin cringed back in terror.
“Steady, Drummond,” I said. “Don’t frighten him. What do you mean, Robin? Is that airship going to spray your poison on London?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps if the war doesn’t stop he will do it. I have asked him to.”
He wandered away a few paces, and Jerningham shook his head.
“Part of the delusion,” he said. “Why, damn it, Wilmot is trying to float a company.”
“I know that,” said Drummond. “But why has he got that poison on board?”
“It’s possible,” I remarked, “that he is taking the stuff over to some foreign Power to sell it.”
“Then why not make it over there and save bother?”
To which perfectly sound criticism there was no answer.
“Anyway,” said Drummond, “there is obviously only one thing to do. Get out of this, and notify the police. I should think they would like a little chat with Mr. Wilmot.” And then suddenly he stared at us thoughtfully. “Wilmot! Can it be possible that Wilmot himself is Peterson?”
He shook both his fists in the air suddenly.
“Oh! for a ray of light in this impenetrable fog. Who was down there last night? Whom did we see signalling from the sea? Why did they want the poison? Why does the airship want it? In fact, what the devil does it all mean? Hullo! What’s Ted got hold of?”
Jerningham was coming towards us waving some papers in his hand.
“Just been into another room,” he cried, “and found these. Haven’t examined them yet, but they might help.”
With a scream of rage Robin, who had been standing vacantly beside us, sprang at Jerningham and tried to snatch the papers away.
“They’re mine,” he shouted. “Give them to me.”
“Steady, old man,” said Drummond, though it taxed all his strength to hold the poor chap in his mad frenzy. “No one is going to hurt them.”
“It’s gibberish,” I said, peering over Jerningham’s shoulder. He was turning over the sheets, on which disconnected words and phrases were scrawled. They had been torn out of a cheap notebook and there seemed to be no semblance of order or meaning. Stray chemical formulæ were mixed up with sentences such as “Too much to the sea. I have told him.”
“Just mad gibberish,” I repeated. “What else can one expect?”
I turned away, and as I did so Jerningham gave a cry of triumph.
“Is it?” he said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It may not help us much, but this isn’t gibberish.”
In his hand he held a number of sheets of paper covered with Robin’s fine handwriting. He glanced rapidly over one or two, and gave an excited exclamation.
“Written before he lost his reason,” he cried. “It’s sense, you fellows—sense.”
And the man who had written sense before he lost his reason was crying weak tears of rage as he still struggled impotently in Drummond’s grip.
X
In Which We Read the Narrative of Robin Gaunt
Many times since then have I read that strange document, the original of which now lies in Scotland Yard. And whenever I do my mind goes back to that September morning, when, sitting in a circle on the short clipped turf two hundred feet above the Atlantic, we first learned the truth. For after a while Robin grew quiet, though I kept an eye on him lest he should try and snatch his precious papers away. But he didn’t: he just sat a little apart from us staring out to sea, and occasionally babbling out some foolish nonsense.
Before me as I write is an exact copy. Not a line will be altered: not a comma. But I would ask those who may read to visualise the circumstances under which we first read that poor madman’s closely guarded secret with the writer himself beside us, and the gulls screaming discordantly over our heads.
I am going mad.
[Thus it started without preamble.]
I, Robin Caxton Gaunt, believe that I shall shortly lose my reason. The wound inflicted on me in my rooms in London: the daily torture I am subjected to, and above all the final unbelievable atrocity which I saw committed with my own eyes, and for which, so help me God, I feel a terrible personal responsibility, are undermining my brain. I have some rudimentary medical knowledge: I know how tiny is the dividing line between sanity and madness. And I have been seeing things lately that are not there: and hearing things that do not exist.
It may be that I shall never complete this document. Perhaps my brain will go first: perhaps one of these devils will discover me writing. But I am making the attempt, and maybe in the future the result will fall into the hands of someone who will search out the arch monster responsible and kill him as one kills a mad dog.
