The Council of Justice, Edgar Wallace [english novels to read .txt] 📗

>With this laudable object it had been opened with great pomp and the

singing of anthems and the enthusiastic proselytizer had spoken on that

occasion two hours and forty minutes by the clock.

 

After twelve months’ labour the Christian gentleman discovered that

the advantages of Christianity only appeal to very rich Jews indeed, to

the Cohens who become Cowans, to the Isaacs who become Grahames, and to

the curious low-down Jews who stand in the same relation to their

brethren as White Kaffirs to a European community.

 

So the hall passed from hand to hand, and, failing to obtain a music

and dancing licence, went back to the mission-hall stage.

 

Successive generations of small boys had destroyed its windows and

beplastered its walls. Successive fly-posters had touched its blank

face with colour. Tonight there was nothing to suggest that there was

any business of extraordinary importance being transacted within its

walls. A Russian or a Yiddish or any kind of reunion does not greatly

excite Middlesex Street, and had little Peter boldly announced that the

congress of the Red Hundred were to meet in full session there would

have been no local excitement and—if the truth be told—he might still

have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.

 

To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his

breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Soudan Campaigns,

the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed

through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end

stood a thin man with a straggling beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and

weak, he wore long narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking

his head forwards and sideways like an inquisitive hen.

 

‘You have the word, brothers?’ he asked, speaking German like one

unaccustomed to the language.

 

The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel

that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to

his flamboyant watch-chain. Then he answered in Italian:

 

‘Nothing!’

 

The face of the guardian flushed with pleasure at the familiar

tongue.

 

‘Pass, brother; it is very good to hear that language.’

 

The air of the crowded hall struck the two men in the face like the

blast from a destructor. It was unclean; unhealthy—the scent of an

early-morning doss-house.

 

The hall was packed, the windows were closed and curtained, and as a

precautionary measure, little Peter had placed thick blankets before

the ventilators.

 

At one end of the hall was a platform on which stood a semicircle of

chairs and in the centre was a table draped with red. On the wall

behind the chairs—every one of which was occupied—was a huge red flag

bearing in the centre a great white ‘C’. It had been tacked to the

wall, but one corner had broken away revealing a part of the painted

scroll of the mission workers:

 

‘…are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’

 

The two intruders pushed their way through a group that were

gathered at the door. Three aisles ran the length of the building, and

they made their way along the central gangway and found seats near the

platform.

 

A brother was speaking. He was a good and zealous worker but a bad

orator. He spoke in German and enunciated commonplaces with hoarse

emphasis. He said all the things that other men had said and forgotten.

‘This is the time to strike’ was his most notable sentence, and notable

only because it evoked a faint buzz of applause.

 

The audience stirred impatiently. The good Bentvitch had spoken

beyond his allotted time; and there were other people to speak—and

prosy at that. And it would be ten o’clock before the Woman of Gratz

would rise.

 

The babble was greatest in the corner of the hall, where little

Peter, all eyes and startled eyebrows, was talking to an audience of

his own.

 

‘It is impossible, it is absurd, it is most foolish!’ his thin voice

rose almost to a scream. ‘I should laugh at it—we should all laugh,

but the Woman of Gratz has taken the matter seriously, and she is

afraid!’

 

‘Afraid!’

 

‘Nonsense!’

 

‘Oh, Peter, the fool!’

 

There were other things said because everybody in the vicinity

expressed an opinion. Peter was distressed, but not by the epithets. He

was crushed, humiliated, beaten by his tremendous tidings. He was

nearly crying at the horrible thought. The Woman of Gratz was afraid!

The Woman of Gratz who…It was unthinkable.

 

He turned his eyes toward the platform, but she was not there.

 

‘Tell us about it, Peter,’ pleaded a dozen voices; but the little

man with the tears twinkling on his fair eyelashes waved them off.

 

So far from his incoherent outburst they had learnt only this—that

the Woman of Gratz was afraid.

 

And that was bad enough.

 

For this woman—she was a girl really, a slip of a child who should

have been finishing her education somewhere in Germany—this same woman

had once risen and electrified the world.

 

There had been a meeting in a small Hungarian town to discuss ways

and means. And when the men had finished their denunciation of Austria,

she rose and talked. A short-skirted little girl with two long flaxen

braids of hair, thin-legged, flat-chested, angular, hipless—that is

what the men of Gratz noticed as they smiled behind their hands and

wondered why her father had brought her to the meeting.

 

But her speech…two hours she spoke and no man stirred. A little

flat-chested girl full of sonorous phrases—mostly she had collected

them from the talk in Old Joseph’s kitchen. But with some power of her

own, she had spun them together, these inconsiderable truisms, and had

endowed them with a wondrous vitality.

 

They were old, old platitudes, if the truth be told, but at some

time in the history of revolution, some long dead genius had coined

them, and newly fashioned in the furnace of his soul they had shaped

men’s minds and directed their great and dreadful deeds.

 

So the Woman of Gratz arrived, and they talked about her and

circulated her speeches in every language. And she grew. The hollow

face of this lank girl filled, and the flat bosom rounded and there

came softer lines and curves to her angular figure, and, almost before

they realized the fact, she was beautiful.

 

So her fame had grown until her father died and she went to Russia.

Then came a series of outrages which may be categorically and briefly

set forth:—

 

1: General Maloff shot dead by an unknown woman in his private room

at the Police Bureau, Moscow.

 

2: Prince Hazallarkoff shot dead by an unknown woman in the streets

of Petrograd.

 

3: Colonel Kaverdavskov killed by a bomb thrown by a woman who made

her escape.

 

And the Woman of Gratz leapt to a greater fame. She had been

arrested half a dozen times, and whipped twice, but they could prove

nothing against her and elicit nothing from her—and she was very

beautiful.

 

Now to the thundering applause of the waiting delegates, she stepped

upon the platform and took the last speaker’s place by the side of the

red-covered table.

 

She raised her hand and absolute and complete silence fell on the

hall, so much so that her first words sounded strident and shrill, for

she had attuned her voice to the din. She recovered her pitch and

dropped her voice to a conversational tone.

 

She stood easily with her hands clasped behind her and made no

gesture. The emotion that was within her she conveyed through her

wonderful voice. Indeed, the power of the speech lay rather in its

delivery than in its substance, for only now and then did she depart

from the unwritten text of Anarchism: the right of the oppressed to

overthrow the oppressor; the divinity of violence; the sacredness of

sacrifice and martyrdom in the cause of enlightenment. One phrase alone

stood apart from the commonplace of her oratory. She was speaking of

the Theorists who counsel reform and condemn violence, ‘These Christs

who deputize their Calvaries,’ she called them with fine scorn, and the

hall roared its approval of the imagery.

 

It was the fury of the applause that disconcerted her; the taller of

the two men who sat watching her realized that much. For when the

shouting had died down and she strove to resume, she faltered and

stammered and then was silent. Then abruptly and with surprising

vehemence she began again. But she had changed the direction of her

oratory, and it was upon another subject that she now spoke. A subject

nearer to her at that moment than any other, for her pale cheeks

flushed and a feverish light came to her eyes as she spoke.

 

‘…and now, with all our perfect organization, with the world

almost within our grasp—there comes somebody who says “Stop!”—and

we who by our acts have terrorized kings and dominated the councils

of empires, are ourselves threatened!’

 

The audience grew deadly silent. They were silent before, but now

the silence was painful.

 

The two men who watched her stirred a little uneasily, as though

something in her speech had jarred. Indeed, the suggestion of

braggadocio in her assertion of the Red Hundred’s power had struck a

discordant note.

 

The girl continued speaking rapidly.

 

‘We have heard—you have heard—we know of these men who have

written to us. They say’—her voice rose—‘that we shall not do what we

do. They threaten us—they threaten me—that we must change our

methods, or they will punish as—as we—punish; kill as we kill—’

 

There was a murmuring in the audience and men looked at one another

in amazement. For terror unmistakable and undisguised was written on

her pale face and shone from those wondrous eyes of hers.

 

‘But we will defy—’

 

Loud voices and the sound of scuffling in the little anteroom

interrupted her, and a warning word shouted brought the audience to its

feet.

 

‘The police!’

 

A hundred stealthy hands reached for cunning pockets, but somebody

leapt upon a bench, near the entrance, and held up an authoritative

hand.

 

‘Gentlemen, there is no occasion for alarm—I am

Detective-Superintendent Falmouth from Scotland Yard, and I have no

quarrel with the Red Hundred.’

 

Little Peter, transfixed for the moment, pushed his way towards

the detective.

 

‘Who do you want—what do you want?’ he asked.

 

The detective stood with his back to the door and answered.

 

‘I want two men who were seen to enter this hall: two members of an

organization that is outside the Red Hundred. They—’

 

‘Ha!’ The woman who still stood upon the platform leant forward with

blazing eyes.

 

‘I know—I know!’ she cried breathlessly; ‘the men who threatened

us—who threatened me—The Four Just Men!’

 

CHAPTER II. The Fourth Man

 

The tall man’s hand was in his pocket when the detective spoke.

 

When he had entered the hall he had thrown a swift glance round the

place and taken in every detail. He had seen the beaded strip of

unpainted wood which guarded the electric light cables, and had

improved the opportunity whilst the prosy brother was speaking to make

a further reconnaissance. There was a white porcelain switchboard with

half a dozen switches at the left-hand side of the platform. He judged

the distance and threw up the hand that held the pistol.

 

Bang! Bang!

 

A crash of broken glass, a quick flash of blue flame from the

shattered fuses—and the hall was in darkness. It happened before the

detective could spring from his form into the yelling, screaming