Such a blade would go right through me, spitting me like a lark on a skewer. I did not propose to let him do that if I could help it. I stepped back, picked up an old wooden chair, swung it over my shoulders, and brought it down upon that small gentleman. It was the only weapon of defence I could find. The tumult which ensued! I doubt if I did the little scoundrel with his horrible knife much harm he moved aside so swiftly that the side of the chair but grazed his shoulder. Judging by the behaviour of his friends and companions one might have thought that I had killed him, without the slightest provocation. They rushed at me with uplifted knives and pointed revolvers. The girl shouted half-a-dozen words which undoubtedly conveyed a command. Knives and revolvers were lowered in an instant. I still held the chair, prepared to defend myself with it somehow. Before I guessed his intention, the huge man wrenched it away, gripping my wrists in his two great hands. In spite of me he drew them behind my back and held them there. The fat fellow with a beard produced from somewhere what looked to me like a piece of clothes-line. While the monster squeezed my elbows so cruelly with his iron fingers all the sense seemed to go out of my arms with the clothesline his colleague tied my wrists together, so that I stood before them with my hands pinioned behind my back. It was nothing short of a cowardly outrage. I started to tell them so. I did not fear them; I began with the most perfect frankness to let them know it; but I had not uttered a dozen syllables before again the girl said something. The big man clapped his filthy hand across my mouth. The little man left the room, returning almost instantly with what looked to me like a dirty duster. He tore a strip off one side. Although I shouted and raved and did my best to stop them they forced the foul rag into my mouth and kept it in its place by passing the strip of material across the gag and tying it at the back of my head.
Just as the knot was tied the door was opened and still another man came in an elderly man with a long black beard, and coarse black hair, which he wore in greasy ringlets. I had a feeling that his was the head of which I had caught a glimpse as it was being drawn back through the window of the upper room that probably he was the man who had dropped the canvas bag. The instant he entered he broke into what seemed to me to be noisy ejaculations. I had not a notion what he was talking about, but whatever it was its utterance seemed to fill his listeners with what looked very like panic fear. I thought that they were going to make a general stampede, but the girl stopped them. Acting, as I took it, upon her instructions, the big man and the fat man seized me on either side and ran me from the room, almost pitching me down a narrow, rickety flight of stairs, and pushed me through a door into pitch black darkness. I heard the door locked and bolted on the other side, and knew that in the very heart of London, for no reason at all that I could understand, I was a prisoner indeed.
CHAPTER III
CRASH! CAME THE KNOCKER
I do not know how long it was before I realised, even in the faintest degree, what had happened; they had thrust me through the door with such unnecessary violence that, stumbling over some unseen obstacle, I had fallen flat on my face. The fall shook me. It was some moments before I was sufficiently recovered to endeavour to raise myself from where I had fallen. Then, gagged and pinioned as I was, I got on to my feet. Let a person unaccustomed to such exercises lie flat on his stomach and raise himself without the use of his hands; it will quickly be found that the thing is not to be done in an instant. I first of all rolled over on my back doing that with difficulty; then, after a series of jerks, I raised myself to a sitting posture; then, with a lop-sided, crab-like motion, on to my knees: finally, somehow, I gained my feet.
When I had done that I was no better off. My turnings and twistings had taught me not only that the ground was uneven, but also that there were objects on it of all sorts and shapes and sizes, which, in the darkness, it was not easy to avoid. For instance, I sat upon what I believed to be a broken bottle; possibly only the thickness of the skin coat I was wearing prevented its doing me an injury. I had no wish to stumble over something which I could not see, and possibly fall on something worse than a broken bottle.
My sensations during the first few minutes which I passed in that gloomy place I am not able to describe. I think what I felt chiefly was anger; I was half beside myself with rage. My inclination was to seek for something anything which would explain what had occurred. Who were the people who occupied the house? What had I done, or what did they imagine I had done, which had caused them to subject me to such treatment? That they were afraid of something was obvious but what? I realised before I had been in that filthy room a couple of minutes that they were all in what struck me as a state of almost panic terror. Their nerves were all on end: they were suffering from what, when I was a youngster, we used to call the "jumps." They were afraid of everything.
Who did they suppose had knocked at the door? They were afraid of him, whoever it was; but they feared still more when they saw it was not the person they expected. In their terror they would have murdered me. The English-speaking ruffian's inquiry as to whether I was connected with the police suggested a possible explanation. Probably the occupants of the house were criminals, hiding from justice, in continual alarm that vengeance was upon them. Of what crime had they been guilty? They were not Englishmen. Since I was wearing the costume of the St. Petersburg equivalent to our cab-drivers, possibly they were Russian.
I had no personal knowledge of Russia or the Russians, but I had read things which caused me to feel that in that part of the world people were constantly guilty of all sorts of crimes of violence. Those men had been guilty of some dreadful deed in their own country; to avoid the consequences they had fled for their lives; so conscious were they that the pursuit was probably still hot-foot after them that every trivial event put them in a tremor of fear that the avenger of blood was upon them.
Lately ill-luck seemed to have dogged my footsteps. That morning, at a moment's notice, I had lost a situation which I had held for nearly four years, I vow and protest for no fault of my own. Messrs. Hunter & Barnett, of Commercial Buildings, Southwark, had presented me with the key of the street for no other reason than that the junior partner had probably had a row with his wife I believe he was always having them and wanted to get even with someone. So he fired me. Hunter was away; possibly when he returned he would ask Barnett a question or two. But he would not return for two or three weeks, and meanwhile what redress had I? There had been talk of my marrying Catherine in three or four months. It looked like it! situations are easier to lose than find. On the top of that trouble had come this! I had been robbed of my clothes, put into filthy garments which had once adorned a cab-driver; and now, gagged and pinioned, I was locked up in some sort of cellar in which the darkness was Egyptian. Heaven only knew how long I should be kept there. And it had all come upon me because I had had the ill-luck to be passing along the pavement in an unknown street at a moment when someone had chanced to be dropping something from a window which had fallen upon my hat and broken it, and I had knocked at the door of the house to return the something to its proper owner.
In other words, I had done nothing to deserve the plight which I was in. Had I had the dimmest suspicion what the occupants of the house were like I would have walked miles and miles to avoid the street which it was in. What made me so mad was the consciousness that all those things had come upon me because, with the best intentions in the world, I had raised a knocker.
But while I raged I knew that anger would not mend the situation. What I wanted was a cool head and a clear one; presence of mind; to make the best use of such wits as I had. Frenzy was no use I was not going to get through the door that way.
When I had realised that much I began to grow calmer. After what seemed to me to be a long interval of waiting I moved gingerly in the direction in which I believed the door was to be brought up suddenly by a wall; whether it was of brick or stone I could not tell. When I fell I lost all sense of direction before I gained my feet; I groped my way along that wall for quite a distance before I came upon the door. It was not at all where I had supposed it to be.
When
