Hugo, Arnold Bennett [the false prince TXT] 📗

suddenly shut and fastened in her face. The reason for the obstruction was plain. Those doors admitted to the blouse department, and the blouse department, as Lily could see through the diamond panes, was a surging sea of bargain-hunters, amid which shopwalkers stood up like light-houses, while the girls behind the counters trembled in fear of being washed away. Discipline, order, management, had ceased to exist at Hugo's.

Mrs. Shawn turned to seek another route, but already dozens of women were upon her, and she could not retire. The crowd of candidates for admission to the blouse department swelled till it filled the gallery between that department and its neighbour. Then someone cried out for air, and someone else protested that the doors at the other end of the short gallery had also been shut. Lily, whose manifold misfortunes had not quenched her interest in the 'Incroyable' corset, opened her parcel, and found that the corset was not an 'Incroyable' at all, but an inferior substitute, with no proper belted band, and of a shape to startle even a Brighton bathing-woman! The change must have been effected by the assistant in making up the parcel.

'Well!'

She could say no more, and think no more, than this 'Well!'

And, moreover, the condition of the packed gallery soon caused her to forget even the final swindle of the corset. The air had rapidly become exhausted. Women clutched at each other; women rapped frenziedly against the heavy, glazed doors; women screamed. It was the Black Hole of Calcutta over again, and yet no one in the blouse department seemed to notice the signals of distress. Lily felt the perspiration on her brow and chin, and then she knew that she, too, must scream and clutch; and she cried out, and the pressure which forced her against the door grew more and more terrible.... She had dropped the corset.... She murmured feebly 'Alb--'.... She began to dream queer dreams and to see strange lights.... And then something gave way with a crash, and she fell forward, and regiments of horses trampled over her, and at last all living things receded from her, and she was in the midst of a great silence. And then even the silence was gone, and there was nothing.

So ended the first part of Lily's adventures at Hugo's infamous annual sale.

* * * * *


When she recovered perfect consciousness, she was in the dome. She knew it was the dome because Albert had once, at her urgent request, taken her surreptitiously to see it. Simon was standing over her, as sympathetic as the most exigent sister-in-law could wish, and the great Shawn family feud had expired.

In two minutes she was her intensely practical self again. In five minutes she had acquainted Simon with all her experiences; they were but the complement of what he himself had witnessed.

The sense of a mysterious calamity over-hanging Hugo's, and the sense of the shame which had already disgraced Hugo's, pressed heavily on both of them. They knew that only one man could retrieve what had been lost and avert irreparable disaster. Their faith in that man was undiminished, and Simon at least was sure that he had been victimized by some immense conspiracy.

'Why don't you find Mr. Hugo?' Lily demanded.

'I've looked everywhere. A letter was brought up to him about an hour ago, and he went off instantly.'

'And where's the letter?'

'I expect it's in that drawer, where he throws all his private letters,' said Simon, pointing to a drawer in the big writing-table on the opposite side of the room from the piano.

'Is it locked--the drawer?'

'No.'

'Then open it.'

'It's the governor's private drawer,' said Simon. 'I've never--'

'Stuff!' Lily exclaimed, and she opened the drawer and drew out the topmost letter.

It was on blue paper.

'Yes, that's it,' said Simon. 'The envelope was blue, I remember.'

'He must be in the Safe Deposit,' said Lily, perusing the letter with flying glance.

And Simon, at length sufficiently emboldened, seized the letter and read:

'SIR,

'Mr. Polycarp has just been here, and accidentally left behind him
keys of his vault, including safe of late Mr. Francis Tudor, etc.
In these peculiar circumstances I shall be glad to know what I am to
do.

'Yours respectfully,

'H. BROWN,

'Head Guardian,

'Hugo's Safe Deposit.'

'What on earth can Brown be thinking about?' muttered Simon. 'Hadn't he got enough gumption to send a messenger after Mr. Polycarp, without troubling the governor? He'll catch it.'

'Never mind that,' said Lily sharply. 'Run down to the Safe Deposit. Run, Simon.'

It was as though a delay of minutes might mean ruin. Who could say what was even then happening in the disorganized and masterless departments?


CHAPTER XII


SAFE DEPOSIT

The Safe Deposit at Hugo's was perhaps the most wonderful of all the departments. Until Hugo thought of it, and paid a trinity of European experts to design and devise it, there had existed no such thing as an absolutely impregnable asylum for valuables. In Dakota a strong-room alleged to be impregnable had been approached underground, tunnelled, mined, and emptied by thieves with imagination. In the North of England a safe, which its inventor had defied the whole universe of crime to open, had been rifled by the aid of so simple a dodge as duplicate keys. Even in Tottenham Court Road a couple of ingenious persons had burnt a hole in a guaranteed safe by means of common gas at three and threepence per thousand cubic feet. These surprises could not occur at Hugo's. His Safe Deposit really was what it pretended to be. All contingencies were provided for. It was the final retort of virtue to vice.

You approached it by a door of quite ordinary appearance (no one cares to be seen leaving what is obviously a safe deposit), and you signed your name before entering a lift. You descended forty feet below the surface of the earth, gave a password on emerging from the lift, traversed a corridor, and at length stood in front of the sole entrance to the Safe Deposit. A guardian, when you had signed your name again, unlocked three unpickable, incombustible, and gunpowder-proof locks in a massive steel door, and you were admitted, assuming always that the hour was between nine and six. Out of hours and on Saturday after-noons and on Sundays a time-lock rendered it utterly impossible for any person whatever to turn any key in the Safe Deposit. Once the lock was set, Hugo himself could not have entered, not even to save the British Empire from instant destruction, until the time-lock had run its course.

You found yourself in an electrically lighted world of passages built in flashing steel, with floors of steel and ceilings of steel--a world where the temperature was always 65 deg.. Every passage was separated from every other passage by steel grilles, and at intervals uniformed and gigantic officials wandered about with impassive, haughty faces--faces that indicated a sublime confidence in the safety of the multifarious riches committed to their care. You might have guessed yourself in the fell grip of the Inquisition. As a fact, you were in something far more fell. You were in a vast chamber of steel, and that chamber was itself enclosed on all sides by three feet of solid concrete. No thief could tunnel or mine you without first getting through the District Railway on the one hand, or the main drainage system of London on the other. No thief could rifle you by means of duplicate keys, for no vault and no safe could be opened except in the presence of the head guardian, who possessed a key without which the renter's key was useless. No tricks could be played with the gas, because there was no gas, and the electric light could only be turned off or on from the top of the lift-well.

Now, it was a singular thing that when Simon Shawn, having proved his identity and his mission at the lift, arrived at the entrance to the Safe Deposit, he discovered the great steel door ajar, and no door-guardian in the leather chair where a door-guardian always sat. This condition of affairs did not affect the essential impregnability of any individual vault or safe, but, nevertheless, it was singular.

Simon walked straight in.

'There's no one at the door,' he said to the patrol, whom he met in the main passage. 'I want to see Mr. Hugo at once. He's down here somewhere, or he's been here.'

'Yes, Mr. Shawn,' said the patrol politely; 'I did see Mr. Hugo here about an hour or so ago. I'll ask Mr. Brown. Will you step into the waiting-room?'

Half-way along the main corridor was a large room, whose steel walls were masked by tapestries, where renters could examine their treasures on marble tables. It was empty when Simon went in. The patrol carefully closed the door on him, and then in a moment came back to say that Mr. Brown was not in his office, and had probably gone out to lunch, the hour being noon.

'Where did you see Mr. Hugo?' Simon asked, hurrying out of the room in a state of considerable agitation.

'I saw him just here, sir,' said the patrol, turning down a short side corridor--the grille was unfastened--and stopping before a door numbered thirty-nine. 'He was talking to Mr. Brown, and the door of the vault was open.'

'That must be Mr. Polycarp's vault,' Simon observed; and then he started, and put his ear against the door. 'Listen!' he exclaimed to the patrol. 'Can't you hear anything inside?'

And the patrol also put his ear to the steel face of the door.

'I seem to hear a faint knocking, but it's that faint as you scarcely _can_ hear it. There! it's stopped.'

'He is inside,' Shawn whispered.

'Who's inside?'

'Mr. Hugo.'

'It's God help him, then,' said the patrol, 'if he's there long. There's no ventilation, Mr. Shawn. We'd better telephone for Mr. Polycarp. The other key will be in the key-safe. I can get it. But how do you make out, sir, that Mr. Hugo can be in there? The vault could only be locked by Mr. Polycarp and Mr. Brown together, and surely they couldn't both--'

'Mr. Polycarp left his keys behind by accident. He had gone before Mr. Hugo came down.'

'There's been no Mr. Polycarp here this morning,' said the patrol a minute later. 'I've looked at the signature-book. I thought it was queer I hadn't seen him. And, what's more, that isn't Mr. Polycarp's vault at all. Mr. Polycarp's vault is No. 37. This vault has been empty for several weeks.'

'Then you have both the keys?' Simon demanded quickly.

'No, sir. It's very strange. There's only one key of No. 39 in the key-safe, and it's the renter's key.'

'Then Mr. Brown must have the other.'

'I expect so. But he ought not to have. It's against rules,' said the patrol. 'I know where he takes his lunch. I'll send for him.'

Simon put his ear again to the face of the door. The faint knocking had ceased, but after a few seconds it recommenced.

'And suppose you don't find Mr. Brown?' he